Unlocking Logic

"I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn't be? War, terror, disease. There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you, and in your panic you turned to the now high chancellor, Adam Sutler. He promised you order, he promised you peace, and all he demanded in return was your silent, obedient consent."
--V (V for Vendetta)

A former UK Supreme Court judge criticizes his government's lockdown, arguing that it is "without doubt the greatest interference with personal liberty in our history." He could just as easily be aiming his criticism at government in the United States, of course.

His observations and logic resonate, and I wanted to capture them here.

Even during wartime, he notes, government never tried to confine the entire population to their homes day and night. And, although governments have tried to confine sick people known to be carrying infectious diseases, "we live in a new world in which, if we are ill, the State will try to cure us. From this, it is said to follow that the State can take control of our lives against our will even if we are healthy, lest we fall ill and need its services too much."

Quite ironically, then, it becomes people's duty to save the health system from overburden, rather than the opposite.

Because it is now pointless to object to the imposition of a lockdown that has already occurred, he suggests that the essential question now involves how do we get out of it.

Unfortunately this is not a question that the government thoughtfully asked itself when it reacted in "blind panic" to initial statistical projections of COVID mortality by legislating a hurried lockdown order. Although ministers have now formulated five tests to be satisfied before the lockdown is lifted, these are narrowly focused measures, developed with counsel of so-called health 'experts' primarily to shield public officials from criticism.

However, while it is natural for politicians to evade political responsibility, the judge suggests that "there is no reason why the rest of us should help them do it."

Ending the lockdown, therefore, "is a political decision, not a scientific one." The single question to be answered is this. Is a lockdown worth it? The answer depends only partly on health science. "There are also moral judgments, constitutional values, and economic consequences involved."

The judge offers five categorical (although completely independent) issues to be considered to smartly decide on lifting compulsory lockdowns.

1) Medical issues. The initial Ferguson projection of millions dead that drove so much government action worldwide was grounded in questionable 'science.' It also ignored important health considerations, "such as adverse health consequences of the lockdown itself or the number of people who would have died anyway from underlying clinical conditions even without Covid-19, maybe a few months later." All that said, the judge concedes that the lockdown probably has saved lives, although far fewer than the Ferguson model has projected (I would not be so kind here).

2) Tradeoffs. "To say that life is priceless and nothing else counts is just empty rhetoric." People's behavior demonstrates that they believe otherwise. The judge observes that Britain "went to war in 1939 because lives were worth losing for liberty." We drive cars and fly airplanes that can kill because we value convenience. Axiomatic scarcity demands that we make tradeoffs. It is essential to consider the things we gain as well as the things we lose thru lockdown.

3) What is life? What sort of life are we protecting thru lockdown?. "Life is more than the avoidance of death." Social interaction is fundamental to human existence. Viruses and other infections never completely go away. Compulsory quarantines to protect the old and vulnerable to wait on collective immunity "makes a mockery of basic human values."

4) Economic and social cost. Although people decry attempts to measure mortality of Covid-19 vs the economic cost of doing so, this again is empty rhetoric. All of us depend on money that comes from production--production that has been forcibly shut down. It is a productive economy that is "the source of our security and the foundation of our children's future." He correctly observes that "poverty kills too. And when it does not kill, it maims mentally, physically and socially."

5) Limits of State power. To say that there are no limits to what states can legitimately do to people against the will is "the stuff of tyrants. Every despot who ever lived thought that he was coercing his subjects for their own good or that of society at large." The judge asks, "Do we really want to be the kind of society where basic freedoms are conditional on the decisions of politicians in thrall to scientists and statisticians?"

Our founding ancestors, of course, said no. So does this judge. "Guidance is fine. Voluntary self-isolation is fine, and strongly advisable for the more vulnerable. Most of them will do it by choice. But coercion is not fine. There is no moral or principled justification for it."

He concludes that these are the issues that require discussion by politicians (and their electorate) "without the kind of emotive evasions, propagandist slogans and generalized hype that have characterized their contribution thus far."