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

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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.