Avoiding the trap of sacrificial math

People on social media want to have an ethical discussion about whether it is right to sacrifice the elderly for the economy, or to sacrifice the livelihood of the many for the relatively few victims of coronavirus. But we don't want to be stuck conceiving of the situation as one that necessarily opposes the vulnerable to the economy in a zero-sum game. This is a fluid situation with new data and new interpretations of data constantly coming up. Ideally, we should be flexible and interpret the data as it comes, adjusting our risk assessments and hedging our bets with strategies that account for all the different risks.

But if one faction becomes committed to "it's just the flu, let's go back to work next week" and the other becomes committed to "OMG you guys, this is like the end of the world," then there is going to be strategic and even ideologically loaded interpretation of the already tricky data. None of us should have any commitments beyond what the evidence and potential risks and our duties require.

Instead of allowing our thinking to harden into opposing one course to the other, we might imagine our response to coronavirus as plotting a path on a 2-dimensional plane with our duties to the vulnerable and economic health of the country as goal and negative constraint-analogous to how "virtue theorists" like Aristotle conceive of the relationship between the soldier seeking the positive goal of victory in battle while avoiding the negative goal of his own death and the role of courage in mediating between them.

The shelter-in-place orders were the right decisions made under the knowledge available. But we have a duty to gain more knowledge and to explore more complex and nuanced strategic responses. If we take both the economy and our duties to the vulnerable as constant and non-cancellable constraints, we will find solutions that break apart their apparent opposition or at least mitigate its effects. Plenty of evidence indicates this is already beginning-consider all the factories being retooled to make ventilators, personal protective equipment, and hand sanitizer. Drugs and vaccines are being tested and developed. Doctors improvising on the fly are coming up with solutions like this. These are ways of tending to the economy-and to grandma.