Responses to a Pandemic

This book offers a unique collection of philosophers engaging in public philosophy, offering responses to, and reflections on, the moral, political, social, and medical dilemmas born of the COVID-19 pandemic.

What does it mean to be in the middle of a pandemic—for us, for our country, or for the world? How do our current inequalities and injustices become amplified by the demands of the pandemic and what, if anything, can be done? Who is most impacted—and why does it seem that so many of the same people are, once again, deemed expendable and "less-than"? How do we explain COVID-19 and its attendant traumas to our children, and what do we teach them about hope, justice, grief, and the role of imagination in survival? And once the worst has passed, how do we start again, and what should we care about as we contemplate individual and collective repair?

In this collection of public and political philosophy, philosophers come together to address these and other questions born of a devastating pandemic to which they are neither objective spectators nor external observers insulated by the passage of time. The contributors to this volume are both grounded in, and immediately affected by, their own lived realities as source material for the questions that move and motivate them.

Contributors: Alexios Alexander, J. S. Biehl, Eyja M. Brynjarsdóttir, Daniel Conway, Barrett Emerick, Anna Gotlib, Ruth Groenhout, Claire Katz, Eva Feder Kittay, Corey McCall, Jamie Lindemann Nelson, Jennifer Scuro, Kevin Timpe, Vanessa Wills

In Medias Res: Philosophers as Witnesses to Disaster, Anna Gotlib

PART I: Pandemic Selves

Chapter 1: The New Normals: Solidarity, Recognition, and Vulnerable Selves in the COVID-19 Pandemic, Vanessa Wills

Chapter 2: COVID-19 and the Politics of Home, Corey McCall

Chapter 3: Waiting to Say Goodbye, J. S. Biehl

PART II: Pandemic, Illness, and Disability

Chapter 4: Sometimes Life Gives You Way Too Many Lemons: An Observation in Nine Parts, Ruth Groenhout

Chapter 5: The Nightmare of Triage and Discrimination: Whose Benefit Is to be Maximized?, Eva Feder Kittay

Chapter 6: Disability and Disproportionate Disadvantage, Kevin Timpe

PART III: Pandemic, Precariousness, and Social Justice

Chapter 7: We Survived COVID-19! (Possibly), Jamie Lindemann Nelson

Chapter 8: New Labors, New Burdens: Care Work Re-narrated, Jennifer Scuro

Chapter 9: Boundaries of Democratic Life in a Time of Pandemic, Alexios Alexander

PART IV: Pandemic, Philosophy, and Meaning

Chapter 10: More than Mere Survival: Ethical Responsibility and the Intersubjectivity of the Humanities, Claire Katz

Chapter 11: Who Will I Be after All This Is Over?, Barrett Emerick

Chapter 12: The COVID-19 Guidebook for Living in an Alternate Universe, Eyja M. Brynjarsdóttir

Chapter 13: Viral Hope: When Quarantine Comes Home, Daniel Conway