Human Rights, Public Health, and the Idea of Moral Plague
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Description
It is a distinctive feature of Western ethics and law that the best standards of argument in both areas are cultivated by self-critical methodologies of historiography, empirical science, and ethical reflection. We insistently reflect on the history of our ethics and law, and think of such reflection as part of a larger process of cultural self-criticism through which we identify those strands of our tradition worth preserving and elaborating (for example, respect for the essential liberties of free people committed to democratic processes under the rule of law) and those strands that we now reject (for example, slavery and the subjection of women). At the center of this self-critical enterprise is a creative tension between its affirmative and negative components, for we often best understand the point of our most enduring values when we see how they often flourished in uncritical tension with our gravest moral corruptions and political failures. We may better understand, for example, liberty of conscience as an ethical and legal value when we see how Augustine, on the one hand, offered a philosophical psychology supportive of freedom of conscience as an ultimate value and, on the other hand, defended a theory of persecution quite inconsistent with such freedom; our constitutional tradition’s rejections of Augustine’s theory of persecution is thus understood as a self-critical rejection of a corruptive moral argument that undermined a defensible ethical and legal ideal. Correspondingly, we may better grasp or own ethical and political responsibilities now if we can frame our central contemporary dilemmas by critical reflection that both constructively elaborates the central principles of ethics and law at stake and exposes our recurrent temptations to moral corruption for what they are. There is no more fruitful topic for such inquiry than the dilemmas surrounding the AIDS health crisis, including our very temptation to frame the discourse in the historical terms of the social response to plagues. I will, in the course of this essay, offer reasons to reject such terms of discourse precisely because its motivation, the idea of a moral plague, is not merely an outmoded myth but, in Susan Sontag’s sense, an obfuscating metaphor of illness false to fact and ideologically freighted with moral and political corruption; it is morally and politically irresponsible, so I shall argue, to give any weight to this pernicious conceptual anachronism in contemporary circumstances. There are genuine dilemmas that surround response to the AIDS health crisis, but the idea of moral plague is not one of them. Rather, the irrational political force that the idea enjoys conflicts with the principles that should govern these issues. It is fundamental to our dilemma that our legitimate public-health concerns for control of a deadly virus center in the United States on the populations at highest risk and that these populations, on independent ethical and/or legal grounds, increasingly call upon our concern against abusive state authority. I focus in my discussion here on homosexuals and their rights to both privacy and antidiscrimination because the level of ethical and constitutional argument I fairly well advance, albeit yet unsuccessful at the highest judicial level. But comparable arguments could fairly be developed both for IV drug users and the racial and ethnic minorities that constitute many of those users. We need a clear understanding of human rights and to what extent homosexuals’ claim to such rights are just in order to frame the corresponding issues of public health.
Source Publication
In Time Of Plague: The History and Social Consequences of Lethal Epidemic Disease
Source Editors/Authors
Arien Mack
Publication Date
1991
Recommended Citation
Richards, David A. J., "Human Rights, Public Health, and the Idea of Moral Plague" (1991). Faculty Chapters. 1920.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1920
