Publications and Research
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
7-19-2025
Abstract
Some authors have argued that liberalism cannot support lockdowns because it cannot engage in collective welfare-type reasoning. Others have thought that liberalism can justify lockdown measures, but that legitimate lockdown measures must be based on pre-legal moral principles that set acceptable limits to the imposition of risk or forbid contributing to collective harm. In this essay, I assess the overall relationship between liberalism and lockdowns. Against the first interpretation of liberalism, I argue in favor of the idea that lockdowns can be justified by liberalism. Liberalism protects the liberty of each and so can presumably protect persons from some kinds of involuntary risks and collective harms. However, liberal governments need principles for determining when the imposition of risks or collective harms is unacceptable. Against the second interpretation of liberalism, I argue that these principles cannot be pre-legal moral duties but instead must be principles that are chosen through legal processes. I explain lockdown policies in terms of existing legal processes that set standards for the imposition of risk and the production of collective harms (negligence theory and cap and trade systems, respectively), but argue that these legal processes settle our moral duties only in the case we assume an authoritative state.
Comments
This is the author's accepted manuscript of an article originally published in HEC Forum, available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10730-025-09552-x