THE MORAL ROOTS OF QUARANTINE
A comparative study of the moral and cultural dimension of quarantine in COVID-19 pandemic across East and West.
Overview
The Moral Roots of Quarantine sets out to investigate from a comparative perspective the moral and cultural dimensions of anti-pandemic mandated restrictions across East and West.
The COVID-19 pandemic is affecting countries all over the world, thus forcing governments to take action to contain and prevent the spread of the infectious disease.
Among these actions, quarantine measures seems to be playing a major role. Although large-scale quarantines have rarely occurred in the past, during the current pandemic communities of various countries have been ordered to not leave their home for weeks with the aim of protecting public health.
While quarantine and isolation are proved to be very effective in protecting public health, they are controversial forms of coercion and compulsion, which may be regarded as plausibly wrong in absence of defeating terms. The enforcement and public acceptance of such measures require strong moral justification. Thus, the success of cohercive anti-pandemic measures seems to be dependant upon shared moral value. Consequently, the efficacy of public discourse varies in accordance to the deployed moral justifications.
This is the first time, at least in our age, that states had to impose large-scale limitations to widely recognized rights. The current context provides us with the unique opportunity to investigate a) the moral justifications actually provided by the legislators for large-scale coercion, as well as b) citizens’ reactions to such restrictions in relation to the deployed moral justifications.
Given the global scale of the current pandemic, it also provides us with a real-life scenario for the detection and analysis of cross-cultural variations in public communication, moral justifications, and public reception of restrictive measures.
Goals
To investigate diverse measures taken by legislators in different countries in response to the same emergency, and the moral justifications explicitly and/or implicitly provided in their support in public discourse.
To investigate the extent to which moral public justification is a culturally relative concept, and how cultural variations affect the kind of justifications that are provided for public measures, as well as their reception as it is, for example, reflected in the arts.
To explore the moral dimension of government-mandated quarantine by identifying the ‘sentiment’, deeply rooted in a more or less shared moral sense, guiding the individual and collective behavioral response to restrictions.
To identify cultural-dependant relational patterns between public communication, shared moral sense, and behavioral responses in the matter of anti-pandemic restrictions across East and West.
This two-year project benefits from the Macau S.A.R Government Higher Education Fund in the Area of Research in Humanities and Social Sciences (61/DCCT/DSES/2020; HSS-UMAC-2020-13) awarded to Professor Nevia Dolcini, and it is generously supported by the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Faculty of Arts and Humanities the University of Macau. The project, featuring four research assistants and the participation of Professor Mario Wenning, got started in September 2020.