Ethics is conceived by most people as “the set of values or principles held by individuals or groups. Using those principles as yardsticks, each ethical cleavage evaluates human actions into classifications of “right or wrong, good or bad, desirable or undesirable, worthy or unworthy.” The first terms of the dualism’s express approval of certain human actions, while the second set express condemnation of other sets of actions. Those terms that express moral praise are acclaimed as promotive of ethics. Conversely, those that express moral blame promote unethicality, vitiate or violate ethics. However, there is no universally agreed standard for determining ethicality or unethicality; thus, the phenomena of prolonged conflicts between ethical groups, for example, between deontology and consequentialism. This was witnessed during the covid-19 pandemic when governments’ regulatory interventionist measures allegedly promoting deontological ethics were challenged by protesters upholding consequentialist ethics. The problem this paper seeks to resolve is to determine if the covid-19 interventionism promotes ethics. Rather than evaluate the praxis of the interventionist measures from the standpoint of consequentialism, this paper scrutinizes the measures vis-à-vis the norms of deontology to determine if there exist internal contradictions between theory and praxis. Adopting the expository, analytical and critical tools of research, the paper discovers sufficient internal contradictions between theory and praxis, which leads it to the inevitable conclusion that the covid-19 interventionism ultimately violates (the principles of its own purported deontological) ethics.
Covid-19 pandemic, interventionism, ethics, deontology, consequentialism
