The Pandemic Doesn’t Run on Trolley Tracks: A Comment on Eyal's Essay "Beware the Trolley Zealots"

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic raises various ethical questions, one of which is the question of when and how countries should move from lockdown to reopening. In his paper “Beware the Trolley Zealots” (2020), Gil Eyal looks at this question, arguing against a trolley problem approach and utilitarian reasoning. In this commentary, I show that his position suffers from misunderstanding the proposed policies and the trolley problem and asserting moral conclusions without moral justifications.

Keywords

• coronavirus
• covid-19
• health policy
• population-level bioethics
• trolley problem
• utilitarianism