Everyday Ethics

While the global SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is anything but ordinary, the ongoing experience illustrates the valuable role that an ethics framework can play with regard to extraordinary circumstances as well as everyday values and behaviors.

While the global SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has raised an astonishing number of classic bioethical issues, it has also highlighted the myriad adjacent, interconnected, and underlying ethical issues that are just as - if not more - important as questions about who gets the last ventilator. The topics that warrant consideration span numerous domains: questions about justice and allocation of scarce resources; the balance of efforts to stem viral transmission versus the impact of wide-scale economic and societal disruption; professional roles and obligations, including occupational safety concerns and the role of medical trainees; and broad health equity and social justice concerns.

Within health care, bioethics is often thought of as being relevant primarily in the setting of high-stakes decisions about life-or-death situations, the use of emerging complex technologies, and other “hot button” issues. The current pandemic highlights the ways in which ethics is a much broader perspective on the world, encompassing nearly every facet of decision-making. In other words, we live and practice ethics every day, often without realizing it.

Ethics is, in many ways, a framework for asking difficult questions about why we think and behave the way we do; if we should think or behave differently; and why. Ethics asks us to examine the values and moral principles that underlie our actions, and brings together not only formal ethical theory, philosophy, and medicine, but also the humanities, public policy, history, economics, and more. An ethics framework encourages probing and challenging comfortably held beliefs and viewpoints, and trying others on for size. And ethics is as relevant for the big-picture issues as it is for the small-scale scenarios and conundrums we encounter on a daily basis, such as how to respond to a family member who chooses not to wear a face mask, or whether and when it’s reasonable for grandparents to interact closely with grandchildren.

The goal of this website is to offer a curated and adaptable set of resources that can be used to help facilitate consideration, analysis, and education about ethical issues during the era of Covid-19. We welcome any and all feedback regarding this project, how you are using it for yourself or your students and trainees, and whether there are additional topics or resources that you would find helpful. We also welcome collaboration and contributions. No matter what your role is at Michigan Medicine or the University of Michigan, if you have a case, an article commentary, or another contribution you’d like to offer, please contact us and we’d be glad to work with you.