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Enabling Ethical Analysis, Public Engagement and Public Justification in State-Level Pandemic Responses in the United States

在美国州级流行病应对中实现伦理分析、公众参与和公众辩护

基本信息

批准号：
2122574
负责人：
Anne Barnhill
金额：
$ 45.55万
依托单位：
Johns Hopkins University
依托单位国家：
美国
项目类别：
Continuing Grant
财政年份：
2021
资助国家：
美国
起止时间：
2021-09-01 至 2024-08-31
项目状态：
已结题

来源：
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2122574&HistoricalAwards=false
关键词：
Enabling Ethical Analysis Public Engagement

项目摘要

In an effort to reduce the health toll of the COVID-19 pandemic, state governments adopted numerous policies that profoundly affected personal and public life. Many of these policies involved difficult ethical trade-offs, as they imposed significant costs on individuals, curtailed individual freedoms and may have exacerbated social inequities. There is broad agreement that these kinds of high-stakes policies should be ethically assessed, should take into account the public’s values and perspectives, and should be clearly explained and justified to the public; these processes serve multiple purposes. Successful ethical analysis of policies helps decisionmakers to recognize the ways in which those policies involve trade-offs and tensions between important values, and to make those trade-offs thoughtfully. Engaging the public in policymaking can lead to better policy decisions, and communicating with the public about the rationale for policies may increase the perceived legitimacy of policies; some argue that when policies affect people’s lives, policymakers owe it to them to provide a justification of these policies. In short, when ethical analysis, engagement with the public, and justification of policies to the public are engaged in successfully, this can help to produce policies that are more effective, more legitimate, and more widely accepted. This project examines whether and how ethical analysis, engagement with the public, and justification of policies to the public occurred in state level COVID-19 policy responses, and then creates guidance and tools to encourage these processes in the future. To do this, the project team will first examine documents from state websites and media representations, focusing on several COVID-19 policies in 15 states, and will then interview state-level policymakers and staff in four states. Interviewees will be asked about COVID-19 policymaking processes, how ethical issues and public perspectives were addressed, how policies were explained to the public, and what were the factors that enabled or limited these processes. In tandem with this empirical research, the project team will consider differing views about the forms of ethical analysis, legal analysis, engagement with the public and justification of policies that should occur in state-level pandemic policymaking; this will involve synthesizing existing scholarship and considering recent constitutional challenges to COVID-19 policies. Finally, the project will bring together the project’s empirical research on what policymakers faced during the COVID-19 pandemic with the project’s account of the policymaking processes that are seen as appropriate, and will create practical guidance, tools, and recommendations to help policymakers incorporate appropriate forms of ethical analysis, legal analysis, public engagement and public justification into state-level pandemic policymaking in the future.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

为减少COVID-19大流行对健康造成的影响，州政府采取了多项政策，对个人及公共生活产生深远影响。其中许多政策涉及艰难的道德权衡，因为它们给个人带来了巨大的代价，限制了个人自由，并可能加剧了社会不平等。人们普遍认为，这类高风险政策应进行道德评估，应考虑到公众的价值观和观点，并应向公众作出明确解释和说明理由;这些过程有多种目的。对政策进行成功的道德分析有助于决策者认识到这些政策涉及重要价值观之间的权衡和紧张关系的方式，并对这些权衡进行深思熟虑。让公众参与决策可导致更好的政策决定，与公众沟通政策的理由可能会增加政策的合法性;有人认为，当政策影响到人们的生活时，决策者有责任为这些政策提供理由。简而言之，当道德分析、与公众的接触以及向公众证明政策的合理性都得到成功的实施时，这有助于制定更有效、更合法、更广泛接受的政策。该项目研究了在州一级的COVID-19政策应对中是否以及如何进行道德分析、与公众的接触以及向公众解释政策的合理性，然后创建指导和工具，以鼓励未来的这些过程。为此，项目团队将首先审查来自州网站和媒体代表的文件，重点关注15个州的几项COVID-19政策，然后将采访4个州的州级政策制定者和工作人员。受访者将被问及COVID-19政策制定过程，如何处理道德问题和公众观点，如何向公众解释政策，以及促成或限制这些过程的因素是什么。在进行这项实证研究的同时，项目团队将考虑有关伦理分析、法律的分析、公众参与形式的不同观点，以及在州一级流行病政策制定中应该出现的政策合理性;这将涉及综合现有的学术研究，并考虑最近对COVID-19政策的宪法挑战。最后，该项目将把该项目关于政策制定者在COVID-19大流行期间面临的问题的实证研究与该项目对被视为适当的政策制定过程的描述结合起来，并将创建实用的指导、工具和建议，以帮助政策制定者将适当形式的伦理分析、法律的分析、公共参与和公共辩护该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。