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Exploring the ethics of swine flu
By Lauren | November 11, 2009
Remember the old disaster movies? Whenever ships sank, natural disasters loomed or ravaging hordes were assaulting the city gate, some hero would shout “women and children first!” as a small mob of extras stampeded toward the nearest exit. No one ever stopped to explain the underlying premise, namely, that the people who were most important to the continued existence of the human race should have first dibs on life jackets, seats in rafts and other scarce commodities. No one had to - there was an implicit social contract to that effect, and everybody watching the movie pretty much knew what it was.
That premise continues today, and we’ve seen it most recently in the choices made about who got the earliest access to the swine flu vaccine. The good news is that there was nothing “implicit” about it. Public officials and medical experts thought long and hard about how to distribute the vaccine to do the most social good. They developed an explicit plan to ensure that the vaccine went first to health care workers (to keep them going in case of a pandemic), then to those most likely to suffer serious harm if they came down with the flu, then to the rest of us. The plan made good medical and ethical sense.
Unfortunately, the ethics of medicine rarely take economics into account. Adults who weren’t pregnant, elderly or otherwise at risk didn’t make the first cut because getting sick with swine flu wasn’t likely to do them serious medical harm. However, swine flu can put an otherwise healthy adult in bed for a week. Being out of work that long can cost people their jobs, leaving them with the unenviable choice of staying home and maybe getting fired, or going to work sick and maybe infecting everyone around them.
The answer may be for employers to stop expecting workers to come in when they’re seriously ill with a contagious disease. Unfortunately, the American work ethic (a marvelous thing in many respects) is so strong that any employee who misses more than a day or two risks being permanently branded as a slacker. That attitude needs to change. If diseases like swine flu can’t be prevented, then workers shouldn’t be punished for coming down with them.
Topics: Business Ethics, corporate responsibility, ethics |
December 17th, 2009 at 2:25 pm
[...] presents Exploring the ethics of swine flu posted at The Business Ethics Blog, saying, “The American work ethic is a wonderful thing for [...]