Dilemmas in the corona crisis, healthcare and law
This talk concerns an investigation into the nature of value conflicts and their consequences for justified decision-making.
Value conflicts may cause significant decision problems, namely when neither of two important but conflicting valuable options definitely outweighs the other, while the choice requires a rational, public or ethical justification. Such cases represent ethical dilemmas.
The corona crisis has shown that value conflicts and ethical dilemmas are not merely discussed in classical tragedies, literature and philosophy, but actually occur in real life. The pandemic was characterized by tensions between different human values, caused by the spread of Covid-19 and overburdening of healthcare.
We will analyse a number of concrete value conflicts and dilemmas in the corona crisis, healthcare, and judicial decision-making.
Philosophers, ethicists, constitutional rights theorists, judges, politicians and public decision-makers generally regard weighing or balancing of conflicting values as an important aspect of rationally and ethically justified decisionmaking. We will analyse this procedure and show that it is often not able to resolve the relevant issues.
Finally, we will investigate the procedure of deliberative democratic decision-making to see whether it can offer a more fruitful approach to tackle the problems.
Speaker: Martijn Boot, DPhil (Oxon)
Date: 23/03/2023, 17:30 - 19:00 hrs
Location: city center. The exact location will be sent after registration.
This event is provided free of charge.
Registration is mandatory because there is a limited number of seats.
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