BY C.J. JANOVY
Kansas Reflector
Schools and universities are opening, regardless of whether students, teachers, employees and the communities around them feel safe. College sports, same drill.
What was a dilemma a few weeks ago is now an amateur science project with life-and-death consequences. This collective, eyes-wide-open disregard for what public health experts tell us doesn’t just feel stupid.
It seems immoral.
I’m no expert on morality, though, so I called someone who is.
Amelia Hicks is an assistant professor of philosophy at Kansas State University. Her research focuses on, as she put it, “how being uncertain about ethical issues can affect moral decision making.”
Hicks, who got her PhD at Notre Dame, has lived in Manhattan for seven years. Like everyone else who loves college-town life, she enjoys how sleepy summers are followed by the excitement of 20,000 students returning in the fall. This year, though, her two introductory ethics courses, her course in business ethics and an independent study in business ethics are all online.
Before we talked about morality, Hicks made the requisite disclaimer: Her views “are not necessarily the views of Kansas State University.”
I wasn’t asking about K-State anyway, because all institutions are struggling with decision-making processes.
The pandemic “really stretches people’s ability to reason morally,” Hicks said.
She drew distinctions between K-12 schools and colleges. But basically, when it comes to moral decision-making, she said there are three things to think about.
The first set of moral issues involves harms and benefits: For example, identifying all of the people who are potentially affected by a school’s options for reopening and coming up with a plan that “will bring about the best overall balance of benefits over harm.”
But there’s the second moral issue: consideration of justice.
“This is determined not just by harms and benefits,” Hick said, “but by how those harms and benefits are distributed: Is it in a way that’s fair, or are we burdening people who are already burdened?”
For example, keeping K-12 schools virtual might be best for public health, but it might disproportionately hurt students who don’t have enough resources at home. It might also disproportionately hurt women, who, Hicks said, “are statistically more likely to take up child care work, home schooling or supervising online learning.”
And if every child has the right to primary and secondary education, as Kansas believes, then the state has a duty to provide that education, Hicks said.
“But the community in which a school is located has a right not to be unnecessarily exposed to a dangerous virus,” she said. “You can just decide that one right is more important than another, but that’s very difficult to do in a responsible way.”
Which brings us to the third moral issue, what Hicks called procedural considerations: Leaders will come up with plans and policies, but people won’t think they’re legitimate unless everyone who’ll be affected has had input and buys into them.
“So the real danger now is that school districts might be tempted to just make simple top-down decisions,” she said. “That’s very efficient, but it’s also dangerous because when you’re making top-down decisions, you are likely to miss some important details and the plan might not be seen as legitimate by the people affected.”
These moral considerations apply to universities as well, but, Hicks noted, parents generally don’t rely on them for child care.
I asked whether it was moral to charge college students money to come back in person, knowing there’s a heightened risk that some will get sick and die.
“What’s crucial there is extremely transparent communication,” she said. “I tend to think it’s OK for people to take on risk as long as they really know what they’re getting into.”
She used a bungee jumping analogy: “You can pay to go bungee jumping, but you should know what the risks are. And the bungee jumping company should be very transparent about the risks involved.”
Now, though, a lot of us who would never go bungee jumping are flying through the air.
“It’s a terrifying situation that we’re in,” Hicks said.
But for a philosophy professor, it’s also interesting to watch how people are making decisions.
“It’s pretty easy to recognize that you shouldn’t just kill another person recklessly, that you shouldn’t endanger other people recklessly,” she said.
But the pandemic forces us to make sacrifices for the benefit of strangers we might never encounter.
“We are not good at reasoning,” she said, “about how to treat people we don’t know, who are far away from us.”
Happy back to school, Kansas.
C.J. Janovy is a veteran journalist with deep roots in the Midwest. Before joining the Kansas Reflector, she was an editor and reporter at Kansas City’s NPR affiliate, KCUR. Before that, she edited the city’s alt-weekly newspaper, The Pitch.