Section I

1. Rationality and the Moral Psychology of the Pandemic Agent.

Anneli Jefferson & Lisa Bortolotti

Extreme events such as pandemics bring out the best and the worst in people. There have been outpourings of help as well as mad scrambles to secure the last roll of toilet paper for oneself. However, one particular challenge the Covid 19 pandemic has posed both to individual agents and to political decision makers is that of decision making under uncertainty. Governments have had to decide whether and when to lock down, and individual agents have had to decide what risks are acceptable to take. We have in this context seen a significant amount of unusual risk-taking behaviour which was subsequently justified as being acceptable under the circumstances. There are a number of facets of human psychology which make it particularly difficult for agents to make morally good decisions in situations of uncertainty. First of all, there is the optimism bias, which means that people underestimate risks to themselves. Arguably, this sense of personal invulnerability has knock-on effects on the risks people impose on others. If we think we are unlikely to get infected, we will also think that we are unlikely to infect others. Moreover, given high levels of uncertainty about the possible effects of behaviour, people are not well placed to make consequence-based calculations regarding acceptable risk even if they do not exhibit an optimism bias. A further contributing factor to problems with risk assessment and moral decision making is that the risks of certain behaviours in the context of a pandemic are abstract for many and the consequences of ignoring safety recommendations are time delayed. Human agents are not very good at processing statistical information and seeing it as relevant for themselves (as shown in the identifiable victim effect), but are often swayed and influenced by personal stories. Stories make the consequences of getting infected with Covid vivid to them in a way that growing numbers of deaths on a graph cannot. This means that the perception of risk diverges depending on what personal stories agents are confronted with. A result of these biases and psychological quirks is that agents have not been able to rely on their own abilities to do a risk benefit analysis of the pandemic situation in the same way as they can in more ordinary circumstances. This suggests that reliance on rule-based norms is the best way forward in cases of uncertainty. If people cannot gauge the riskiness of their own behaviour, then they should follow rules that work if observed more generally. One problem with this is that the more general rules are often laid down by national governments. The willingness to follow rules laid down by others will depend on people’s level of trust in the competence of the government to come up with a sensible set of rules.

3. Delving into Denialism: Rationality, Emotion, and Value in Social Context.

Leonardo Ribeiro

What kinds of epistemological and practical processes lead people to adhere to Covid denialism in spite of evidence to the contrary? We live in a world of increasing and pervasive distrust among social peers (on a global scale). This phenomenon can be partly explained as the result (or reinforcement) of ongoing multifarious social processes in our modern times: multiple ways of transmitting information, media fragmentation, technological advances with huge impact on daily life and on forms of social organization, high-level of specialization of scientific knowledge which affects science communication and its public reception, economic and ideological disputes which give rise to polarization among political groups, etc. This rather complex social scenario has substantial implications for the way human beings gather and weigh evidence to justify their beliefs and actions. A current phenomenon which may be considered an outcome of this scenario is a form of denialism regarding the official and prevailing scientific discourse on the Covid-19 pandemic. This phenomenon invites us to ask: what kinds of epistemological and practical processes lead people to adhere to denialism in spite of evidence to the contrary? May it be said that denialism is irrational? The aim of this paper is to argue that it would be too fast to say that denialism is completely irrational. According to a common social meaning of ‘rationality’, some expressions of denialism might be considered rational. This is so because the way we gather information, weigh evidence and identify reasons to believe and act is part of a social process shaped by evaluative judgements and emotional reactions. The apprehension of reality is always socially contextualized, spatiotemporally situated, modulated by emotional reactions and based on evaluative and epistemic theoretical assumptions (no matter how rudimentary these may be). In all this, trust as an attitude involving both an epistemic assessment and an emotional-evaluative reaction plays a crucial role in the relation between individual and society. Thus, it is a mistake to assume that all denialists are irrational.  What distinguishes the epistemological and practical processes of denialists is arguably the way that reality is contextually apprehended by them, in particular through the sources they take as trustworthy. Denialism poses a social epistemological challenge to contemporary societies, but one which cannot be fully explained without recognizing the role of trust (and its emotional and evaluative dimensions) in mediating epistemological processes in society.