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A Realistic Framework for Traveling Ethically in a Late-Pandemic World
Get vaccinated, pandemic over. Oh, how innocent we once were (like three months ago).
Now, the majority of us — I presume — find ourselves at various phases of getting used to the idea of living with a pandemic. Emphasis on the ‘living.’ Which means going back to the activities that brought our lives meaning and joy, which we thought we’d have to wait until the pandemic’s end to experience, in the most responsible way we can muster.
We’re not just thinking about epidemiological risk here. It’s an ethical quagmire.
Fortunately, in the last few weeks I’ve been lucky enough to interview the bioethicist Kelly Hills of Rogue Bioethics on this very conundrum.
Hills introduced me to the concept of ‘moral injury.’ That’s the bioethical term for “the psychological damage that happens when you violate your own moral or ethical beliefs,” according to Hills.
The ethics of travel in this strange-ass phase of the pandemic requires a calculation of potential moral injury. Again, quoting Kelly Hills (per our interview for The Guardian):
You can ask yourself: Who is at risk by my travel, in where I am going and where I will return to? What is the risk to the hourly employees within an airport that will be serving me…
