Authors:

  • Paul Tucker

Excerpt

2024, Book Chapter: "Allen Buchanan’s Tanner Lectures address how political-ethical issues bear on policy choices and the design of institutions for avoiding and containing pandemics, understood as epidemics that rapidly spread across borders, showing no respect for the territorial organisation of political communities. Some will be roused to reasoned fury by the position he takes on the policies adopted during COVID-19 by many Western nations, and on the performance of various U.S. agencies. Others may applaud. I do not engage with that, partly because many of Buchanan’s views on recent events are, to my mind, rthogonal to the important questions he raises about how to think about crisis management practices and institutions. Better justifications were needed for domestic emergency policies, he says, and institutional reform is needed both at home and internationally. Both are hard to quarrel with. More important, I agree with Buchanan that it is useful to frame the issues in terms of legitimacy and legitimation. But if my observations have a common theme, it is that the pre-political morality deployed by Buchanan—the language of general moral duties of justice—is not necessary to reach conclusions similar to his. That matters because, if so, it means it might be useful to frame some of the arguments in terms more likely to make sense to the concerns and circumstances of those—policymakers and citizens—who need to be persuaded for any meaningful reforms to stand a chance. The point is not that morality does not matter but that there is value in exploring, in the spirit of Bernard Williams’s late-in-life political philosophy, whether it can be found within the practices and circumstances of politics itself, viewed as collective actions aimed at achieving and sustaining basic order and conditions for cooperation without excessive coercion and conflict.1 Seen thus, Buchanan’s prescriptions for a new international health regime face another hurdle: geopolitics."