Voluntary Isolation, Economic vs Spiritual Trial

April 11, 2020 by David Nitkin | Categories: Public Engagement | Tags: Corporations, employment, Family, Healthcare, morale, Workers

The Issue:

How much power should authorities have to restrict our mobility in a public health crisis? In totalitarian regimes, people can be confined in their homes, with compliance behavior reinforced by police, the military, cellphone location tracking, and drones. In democracies, by contrast, there is much more attention paid to the free choice of individuals in deciding the degree to which they are prepared to restrict their physical freedom for the sake of the community. In times of national crisis, however, governments have invoked emergency preparedness acts.

For individuals, there are two aspects of dislocation at work here. The obvious one associated with home sheltering is economic– a person’s ability to pay his or her bills, the mortgage, get groceries, and make sure there is a job to return to in a time of seemingly permanent lock down.

Questions arise, like: will my workplace be shut down forever? Will my savings last if I have any? And will I get paid again? Sometimes that isolation choice is voluntary; other times, it is imposed on us because we’ve lost our job or our employer requires us to work from home.

What may tend to corrode deeply is the other element of isolation – the spiritual. These are questions of personal courage, morale and resilience. This raises questions like: can I provide answers for myself and family? Can I overcome loneliness and isolation? Can I survive not hugging those closest to me? We can die inside from despair, depression, self-doubt, anxiety and addiction that flow from having one’s established certain routines upset by enforced and seemingly unending isolation.

Ethical and Moral Dilemmas:

How far can and should the state go in enforcing voluntary isolation? Warnings? Curfews? Arrests? Denial of services? If the confinement is mandatory to flatten the curve, then sanctions of a different order such as physical and psychological punishment as well as financial penalties may not only be possible, but also necessary.

Each of us must recognize that our mental-health needs require careful, avid attention. How far should I press myself to discover and stretch the powers of my own resilience? Do I have what it takes to really focus on my partner’s needs? Is this a time to retrain and re-educate myself?

Am I a distracted news junkie? Should I restrict unremitting attention I devote to listening to or seeing non-stop news of death, destruction and gloom? Is there an opportunity to transform my habits—to find new, proactive and different ways to listen to and communicate with others—spouse, partner, child, parent, and neighbours?

In looking for answers, it might be instructive to look at two sub-groups where isolation choices are dramatically constrained. Prisons and cruise ships pose particular quarantine issues that merit attention.

Prison populations are breeding grounds of virus contamination, with solitary confinement the only terrible solution. Prisons are breeding grounds for violence, virus transmission, enforced boredom, mind-numbing routine, and volatile tempers on a continuous boil with no “off” switch. Totalitarian regimes like China and Iran are temporarily releasing tens of thousands of prisoners, often political prisoners denied due process of law in order to reduce pressure on emergency health-care providers. If and when prisons become inevitable, involuntary breeding grounds for rampant disease, is it unreasonable to expect that correctional services officers will be resigning en-masse?

Isolation on cruise ships poses a somewhat different problem, as the inmates or passengers were voluntary. The problem here is that many crew members are wholly untrained and ill-equipped to deal with catastrophic health crises or provisioning supplies when countries refuse to allow ships to dock or passengers to dis-embark. Protecting, feeding and supplying caregivers and their passengers with specialized equipment on floating cities is a particular challenge. If supplies of medicine, food, fresh water, and clean air are stretched, and people are confined to cabins, the chances of a passenger catching a virus in such enclosed spaces are greater the longer he or she is quarantined.

Legal and Values Dimensions:

To inhibit disease transmission, travel restrictions and bans have been put in place in over 70 countries, including Canada and the United States, which share the world’s longest border. Such bans can have negative consequences which can include:

(a) impeding cross-border passage of necessary commodities;
(b) separating family members from each other; and
(c) distancing people from a variety of support systems.

Negative consequences can outweigh positive ones—aid does not reach vulnerable populations in a timely fashion, food and medicine shortages damage health, and economies are thrown into turmoil.

Values are different from ethics, laws and morality. Values are personal, held for long periods of a person’s life, difficult to change, and do not necessarily involve right and wrong. For example, one can value music, nature or a twenty thousand square foot home.

Quarantining can have a direct impact on deeply held values, leading to drastic changes in personal esteem and fueling stigma or discrimination against others. It is hard not to form prejudices against the originators of a virus, in this case China, or its principal early transmitters, and persons in prisons and on cruise ships that are sources of contagion.

Is it sound for either personal conviction or national strategy or both to hope that voluntary social isolation and occasional drastic measures will slow the threat of the virus enough until we are able to find more viable and sustainable solutions?

David Nitkin

David Nitkin, founder of EthicScan, is a full-time organizational ethicist. David’s original writing, teaching, consulting and research focuses upon ethical decision making; enhancing corporate accountability and reporting; and developing corporate ethics assurance programs, including transparency, risk management, integrity management, and safe partnering.

David has provided ethics training, advice and research for over 200 clients both internationally and in Canada who collectively employ over 750,000 employees. He consults and trains widely with a variety of clients, including corporations, industry associations, public service sector organizations (integrity commissions, human rights commissions, and anti-corruption tribunals social agencies, professional ethics certification organizations, not-for-profits; and civil society organizations.

The Issue:

Ethical and Moral Dilemmas:

Legal and Values Dimensions:

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