This strange academic year, marked by coronavirus, is to end with the secondary school exams known in Catalonia as the Selectivitat, which year after year hundreds of future university students sit, and which this year are delayed for a month. One of the subjects to be examined, these days limited to those doing Humanities and Social Sciences courses in their final secondary school years and not compulsory as it once was, is Philosophy, in which students are regularly asked to write about the views of some of the great historical thinkers of the world. The University of Girona professor and philosophical communicator Ramon Alcoberro has asked himself a fascinating question on his website - a reference point in terms of thought: how would each of the philosophers who are part of the final year high school curriculum respond with regard to the Covid-19 pandemic?
Starting with the most ancient of them all - Plato - Alcoberro recalls that the Greek philosopher wrote The Republic - his treatise on the perfect city - with the still-fresh memory of the plague that had struck Athens in the second year of the Peloponnesian War. For Plato, bad government is the cause of conflicts and diseases, plagues and mortality. A just city is a city with health and hygiene. That is why a body of judges and a body of doctors who take care of the health of the citizens become essential, and their task is to "take care of the citizens of good spiritual and corporal nature, but to let die those who have some deficiency in their bodies and put to death to those who have a naturally evil and incorrigible soul." Doctors, said the wise Athenian, had to be intelligent people "because without a doubt it is not with the body that bodies are taken care of - because in such a case it would not be admissible for doctors to be or to fall ill - but with the soul, which, if bad, or if it goes bad, will not be in a position to take good care of anything." For Plato, moreover, a good politician had to be like a good doctor and treat the wounds of the city in the same way.
Portrait of René Descartes/Frans Hals
As for René Descartes, Alcoberro makes it clear to us that the French philosopher is the father of method in modern science, and that, therefore, the first thing he would tell us is that scientific method based on the rule of evidence is needed to combat coronavirus. According to this rule, we should not accept any supposed truth until we have evidence that it is indeed true. As Alcoberro tells us, this also has an application to politics: many of the decisions that have been made during the management of the pandemic have not been based on evidence. Moreover, as a sound thinker and man of science, the Frenchman would not have accepted rumours either about treatments or about the origin of the disease without solid evidence.
The English empiricist John Locke, explains Alcoberro, was a physician and, as such, his thinking was derived from his practice of medicine. As a doctor, he would accumulate irrefutable and demonstrable observations, hypotheses and experiences, he would not reflect on the ultimate causes or intimate mechanisms of events but rather their detectable expression and he would be skeptical about the possibilities of a definitive solution to the disease. At the same time, as a good liberal, he would demand that governments not monitor our lives without consent but treat us as adults and responsible people.
Immanuel Kant / Johann Gottlieb Becker
For Alcoberro, Immanuel Kant is one of the thinkers who is most useful right at the moment. According to the concept of the categorical imperative defined by the German, a rational and universally valid norm, backed by a universal requirement for justification, would be the best tool to deal with the coronavirus. For Kant, the categorical imperative meant things had to be reasoned: they should not be done because everyone does them or because we are commanded to do so, but because it is rational to do them; others cannot be forced to do irrational and stupid things, because that would be an insult to their dignity as rational beings, and it is not acceptable for moral privilege to be allowed for anyone. Therefore, as Alcoberro reminds us, under the Kantian categorical imperative, there would have been no panic-buying or queues in the supermarkets, nor would it have been permitted to put individual interest above the collective, and nor would people have accepted the restrictions on their liberties without an argument for it.
Following this line, John Stuart Mill, as Alcoberro tells us, would use rationality, to identify useful actions that produce the maximum good for the maximum number of all those people involved concerned in this situation. But the utilitarian Mill held that Kant was profoundly mistaken and that it is not always possible to treat everyone equally, either because the number of good things is limited, or because not everyone deserves them in the same way. For Alcoberro, the Englishman would consider whether the decision to lock society down and completely confine the population has irreparably harmed certain people, whether these decisions will perhaps have long-term consequences and, in particular, he would be interested in how we distribute limited resources, such as hospital beds, respirators or tests, without privileges, such as those that politicians and athletes have had.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Quite different from the philosophers who want to structure society, Friedrich Nietzsche, as Alcoberro evokes, would assert that we must be lords and masters of our own lives and act as creators, with a will to power and aserting our will to live. For the German, the pandemic would be an opportunity for self-realization, without falling into nihilism, pessimism, or gregarianism, and for understanding the true value of life because, as he wrote, "that which does not kill me makes me stronger."