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

为了减少新冠肺炎疫情造成的健康损失，州政府采取了许多政策，这些政策深刻地影响了个人和公共生活。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，应对此类高风险政策进行道德评估，应考虑到公众的价值观和观点，并应向公众清楚地解释和证明其合理性；这些过程具有多重目的。对政策进行成功的伦理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，并深思熟虑地进行权衡。让公众参与决策可以带来更好的决策，与公众交流政策的理由可能会增加人们对政策合法性的看法；一些人认为，当政策影响到人们的生活时，政策制定者有义务为这些政策提供理由。简而言之，当成功地进行伦理分析、与公众接触并向公众解释政策时，这可以帮助制定更有效、更合法、更广泛接受的政策。该项目研究在国家层面的新冠肺炎政策回应中是否以及如何进行伦理分析、与公众接触以及向公众解释政策，然后创建指导意见和工具来鼓励未来的这些过程。为此，项目团队将首先审查来自国家网站和媒体陈述的文件，重点关注15个州的几项新冠肺炎政策，然后将采访4个州的州一级政策制定者和工作人员。受访者将被问及有关新冠肺炎的政策制定流程，伦理问题和公众视角是如何解决的，政策是如何向公众解释的，以及哪些因素促进或限制了这些流程。在这项实证研究的同时，项目组将考虑对国家一级大流行政策制定中应出现的伦理分析、法律分析、与公众接触和政策合理性的形式的不同意见；这将涉及综合现有学术和考虑最近宪法对新冠肺炎政策的挑战。最后，该项目将把该项目对政策制定者在新冠肺炎大流行期间面临的经验研究与该项目对被视为适当的决策过程的描述结合在一起，并将创建实用的指导、工具和建议，以帮助政策制定者在未来将适当形式的伦理分析、法律分析、公众参与和公共理由纳入州一级的大流行病决策。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并已通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.