Coping with Coronavirus – A Moral Response

What is the moral response to the Covid - 19 pandemic for organisations and individuals?

The Challenge

The coronavirus pandemic of 2019/2020 presents contemporary society with a unique challenge. It directly attacks the links which make society cohere: social interaction; people working together to get things done; the unimpeded movement of goods; the timely and unhindered provision of services.

Suddenly we are instructed by our governments to keep our distance. Visiting offices, shops, factories, farms, or anywhere where we normally work closely with one another is abruptly ‘out of bounds’.

This is a shocking and unpredicted disruption to everyday life. Not only are we faced with the threat of ill-health and a potentially lethal illness; our livelihoods are also endangered.

How are we to react?

A common response for both businesses and individuals is to go on the defensive – to seek to protect ourselves and our own, at no matter what cost to others.

Individuals hoard, with fights breaking out in shops and markets over limited supplies.

Businesses ‘cut costs’, sacking employees, reducing overheads and postponing payment of what they owe. 

With these reactions we risk a free-for-all: everyone out for themselves. So how are we to maintain our moral compass in the face of such disruption and adversity?

Our Moral Compass

In my book Intelligent Ethics I identify three simple moral objectives, which I base on a commitment to life – to the very essence of what we are – and to the living world. They are:

 To nurture others

 To nurture our species as a whole 

 To nurture all life

These are simple and uncontroversial moral aims and reflect the core elements of many of the great ethical traditions of the past. More than this, their simplicity makes them an ideal tool for addressing the moral dilemmas of the modern world – and of the coronavirus crisis in particular.

An Individual Response

All the great ethical systems demand of us an element of selflessness – of putting those around us on an equal footing with ourselves. This is particularly important when it comes to health and healthcare. The clear moral implication of the imperative ‘to nurture those around us’ in the face of this pandemic is that each of us, as individuals, must take every possible precaution in regard to the safety and health of others.

A best practice response to Coronavirus is gaining traction amongst the scientific and political communities of the world. It suggests that if there is coronavirus in your community you should:

• Avoid mingling with others outside of your household
• Keep a two metre distance between yourself and others when outside your home
• Wear a facemask or scarf over your nose and mouth whenever in public (this is less for your own protection than to ensure you do not act as a carrier and transmitter yourself)
• Regularly wash your hands with warm water and detergent
• Do not travel between communities or localities: every journey we make is potentially a journey for the virus also.

It is important that you take these measures even if you think you are healthy and strong, for others may not be so fortunate…

All the elements of this advice comply with the moral objective to protect and nurture others, but they do have a singular weakness. What of more communal or crowded communities, or communities with desperately limited resources? What happens if you live hand to mouth and the disruption being asked of you presents you with a stark alternative: complying with the coronavirus advice versus jeopardising the food on your own and your family’s plates?

This is where we as individuals must raise our game. We must use our maximum creativity and imagination to combine compromise with innovative solutions: striving to restrict transmission amongst those in our family and community while also protecting the livelihoods of ourselves and those around us. A difficult balancing act.

This is a great deal to ask of us, and we will often need help. Communities, organisation and governments must provide assistance (as we are seeing them do in many countries across the world). After all, what is the point of these social structures (e.g. local authorities, town councils and business committees) if they cannot look after their own? We must ask for help, and we must help each other.

Governments and local authorities need to provide safe locations for self-isolation; support for families facing hardship; food parcels and medical assistance where needed; the provision of face masks and (hopefully before too long) testing kits. The elderly and the frail must be protected and supported.

Yet there remains a brutal hierarchy of need, where food, water and shelter come before precautionary actions to protect health. We must inevitably prioritise these needs and then take the measures outlined above if we possibly can.

An Organisational Response

What of organisations and businesses? What does the moral response look like for them?

Even here a fine balance must be achieved between preserving and protecting livelihoods and protecting health.

Businesses must demand assistance from the state in order to protect jobs – while remembering that the priority is preservation of employee wellbeing rather than protection of cash reserves or profit. Health must always come before wealth – despite the free-market ethos that has prevailed in much of the world for the last forty years. The coronavirus crisis presents us with an urgent reminder: people must be the primary objective of any organisation.

So businesses across the world must ask themselves some profoundly moral questions: 

• How are we to protect and sustain our employees?
• How are we to protect our customers, our stakeholders, and the communities within which we operate?

Governments, too, have a key role to play. They need to ensure the integrity of the statistical evidence that they use for decision-making purposes. The use of faulty models and algorithms may well result in overkill measures or inadequate responses. And it is critical that governments do not impose control and compliance measures that are questionable in terms of necessity and may directly impose on the freedoms and rights of citizens.

Coronavirus presents us with a powerfully disruptive challenge – but it is important to remember the incredible successes of which businesses are capable. No process, practice or procedure need be set in stone. Now is the time for lateral thinking, for imaginative and even radical solutions. Are there ways our businesses can continue operating but with dramatically altered methods or objectives? Are there new methods of contagion-free delivery that we can explore? Are there new demands from the pandemic to which our business can be partly and/or temporarily repurposed? Can our organisation or business help provide solutions rather than merely adopt a reactive or defensive stance?

If, for at least this short period, profit-seeking can be relegated to second place – this exposes a raft of possibilities… In this pause to ordinary business, can we open ourselves up to new horizons and perhaps achieve long-lasting change which may benefit us all?

If, briefly, money ceases to be our primary objective, then perhaps we can gain a firmer grip on better and more moral objectives, such as the nurturing of others, the nurturing of communities all across the Earth, and the protection of the biological world.

There will be loss and tragedy arising from this pandemic, but let us at least use this to learn lessons which may be of benefit to us all.

Note

A useful tool for moral decision-making and leadership in times of crisis can be found
here: https://culturescan.biz/the-practice-of-ethics/

Luke Andreski Based in Bristol U.K. BA (Hons), is a certified, widely experienced programme and project leader. 

He is the author of Ethical Intelligence and Intelligent Ethics, both available from Amazon. 

They offer a valuable 

toolkit for ethical survival in our tumultuous times.  Andreski Solutions: la[at]andresksolutions[dot]co[dot]uk