Samuel Fitoussi is a student, founder and writer of the satirical blog La Gazette de l'Étudiant.
Since the end of World War II in the West, public policies seemed to be able to be exercised only with respect for a certain number of fundamental principles and freedoms. Torture at Guantanamo Bay, since it violated the principles of the presumption of innocence and non-use of corporal punishment, was unanimously condemned: the end (the number of lives saved by the terrorist attacks avoided) should not be a criterion to assess the legitimacy of the means. Likewise, it was recognized that any discussion of the effectiveness of the death penalty - which could, through its deterrent effect, save more lives than it condemns - was irrelevant since the immorality of the process in question. himself disqualified him. Finally, we thought, with Voltaire, thatit was better to ten criminals at large than an innocent in prison - even if ten criminals at large could harm more than one innocent. The end did not justify the means.
In March 2020, we abandoned all our principles to switch to a strictly utilitarian approach. Suddenly, the effectiveness of a measure has become a sufficient condition to legitimize it. Prohibit 67 million French people from moving away more than a kilometer from their homes? Effective to fight against the saturation of resuscitations, therefore legitimate. Eliminate the possibility of going to the bedside of hospitalized parents? Acceptable since it limits contamination. Prevent the French from burying their loved ones with dignity? Logically, this prevents the creation of
clusters
.
Move the curfew from 8 p.m. to 6 p.m.?
A big yes: it helps to better fight against the aperitif effect.
Wearing a mask from CP, even in the yard?
Children are contaminated and contaminated - end of discussion.
Forbid the French to drink water in transport or to walk without a mask?
Obviously, the Omicron variant appears to be very contagious.
Prohibit citizens who do not break any law to sit on the terrace or take the train?
The measure encourages vaccination;
she is applauded.
If the legitimacy of a measure depends only on its ability to promote collective well-being, how can we protect ourselves from the tyranny of the majority?
Samuel Fitoussi
The great ideologies of the twentieth century, which blithely sacrificed individual freedoms on the altar of the general interest, seemed to have vaccinated us against utilitarian thought. If the legitimacy of a measure depends only on its ability to promote collective well-being, how can we protect ourselves from the tyranny of the majority? The persecution of a minority, since it can make it possible to satisfy the impulses of the greatest number, is often legitimate in utilitarian logic. More serious still: how to define
a priori
the general interest, an eminently subjective concept and observable only (and still)
a posteriori
? History teaches us that mistakes may have been made by crowds believing to promote collective well-being.
Read also "Covid-19: political disease"
One could even defend the idea that utilitarianism, since it is incompatible with the preservation of the individual as a political construction, necessarily leads to totalitarianism.
When we seek to maximize "
the greatest happiness of the greatest number
" (Bentham), we stop worrying about the particular: only statistics count.
Today, we have our eyes riveted on the number of daily cases, the number of admissions to the hospital, the tension in critical care, the vaccination coverage two doses, three doses, the number of daily deaths, the average of deaths smoothed over one week.
As for the measurements, they relate to
specimens -
the grandpa or the granny in the kitchen, the masked and distanced schoolboy, the teleworker, the irresponsible non-vaccinated (nasty), the tired caregiver (nice) ... There are only groups with interchangeable members, expendable since without singularity . But if the collective public health objective justifies infringing on individual rights, where to draw the line? Will it become moral to sacrifice a person to recover their organs and save five patients? This would unclog hospitals and save four lives (net, after deducting the sacrificed). Utilitarianism is always a slippery slope.
To the dangers of a utilitarian morality, Kant opposes the categorical imperative. The validity of an action should not depend on its consequences (because it is in the
calculation
that subjectivity resides) but on the nature of the action itself. Any action which we can wish to become, like gravity, a law of nature which we cannot contravene, is moral. Since we would not like theft and lying to become the norm, we should neither lie nor steal.
(Since we would not like containment to become a public policy tool like any other, we should never contain)
. Benjamin Constant objects: this philosophy is unsatisfactory because applied rigorously, it requires to reveal to an assassin the hiding place ofinnocent people that we protect
(it imposes
to accept the saturation of resuscitations
). Kant: if we were to lie to this murderer (
if we were to confine
), it would not be a few innocent people who would suffer but all humanity, because we would undermine the universality of the imperative of honesty (
the inalienable nature of the right to leaving home
) and would open the way to other deviations: a principle can only remain a principle if it does not tolerate any exceptions.
If exceptional circumstances could justify the suppression of a fundamental freedom, any suppression of freedom could be justified by the invocation of exceptional circumstances - assessed subjectively.
Hospital tension today, tomorrow everything that power will define as a collective emergency: ecology, terrorist threat, overpopulation, religion, flu, fight against inequalities ...
The lasting change in our relationship to fundamental freedoms could well represent the heaviest cost of this pandemic.
Samuel Fitoussi
If the West was neither completely Kantian nor completely utilitarian, we can nevertheless postulate the existence of a spectrum between these two notions and of a fragile balance between the two forces - the wisdom of utilitarianism allowing a dose of pragmatism, the philosophy of rights protecting us from authoritarianism.
Forgetting that individual rights are above all safeguards against ourselves, against the outburst of a society wishing to put the collective objective defined by the conformism of the moment before respect for individuals, we revoked Kant and annihilated this balance.
The lasting change in our relationship to fundamental freedoms could well represent the heaviest cost of this pandemic.
