What COVID-19 can teach us about the failure of rule utilitarianism

People: are they good or bad? It’s a difficult question to answer, and that’s because it involves the less-than-straightforward job of defining what “good” and “bad” mean. You might think you know what those words mean, but you don’t. The answer to the question of what those words mean has been raging for literal millennia. In double fact, the area of study devoted to answering that question has its own name: ETHICS.

And as someone who can barely remember an ounce of the eight weeks or so they did on ethics to scrape a 2.1 at university, let me tell you something. I don’t know either!

Well, that’s not entirely true. I subscribe to a widely unpopular meta-ethical view called emotivism. Emotivism basically says that ethical statements are just expressions of how we feel about things. So “murder is wrong” is just us saying “ewww murder!” in different language. I like emotivism because it is simple. It doesn’t get caught up in knots or impossible dilemmas. And it allows you to deny moral realism (that ethical statements are talking about some real features of the world).

I haven’t thought about ethics for a long time. But with everything going on in the world right now, I thought it could be an interesting exercise to apply some ethical analysis. My conclusion (spoiler alert) — there’s a fundamental flaw in the moral systems that seem to underpin our society. Namely, selfishness arising from individualism. And this flaw is severe enough to threaten…