In A Pandemic, We Need Philosophers Too | Education - Forbes

Four months into the Covid-19 crisis, America still doesn't have adequate testing, consistent messaging on face masks, or sufficient PPE for medical workers, reports Emily Chamlee-Wright, President and CEO of the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS).

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But our failures are not limited to failures of disaster policy and preparedness. The challenges Covid-19 presents have been exacerbated by our inability to have productive, good-faith discourse about how to respond to the pandemic. 

Grandstanding: 
The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk

This column is part of a series in which I examine how the humanities can help unlock our most urgent social problems, even problems rooted in science and medicine. I spoke with philosophers Justin Tosi (Texas Tech University) and Brandon Warmke (Bowling Green State University) about their new book, Grandstanding: The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk, to understand why Covid-19 discourse has been so polarizing...

This divisiveness is making it harder for Americans to trust one another, which in turn, makes it harder to get things done together. As Tosi and Warmke write in Grandstanding, the abuse of moral talk “makes it harder for members of opposing groups to put aside their differences and make deals to solve problems on terms that enough people can accept.” When we use hyperbolic moral language to discuss pressing social problems, we begin believing everyone who disagrees with us is immoral. We dig our heels in, and we lose the ability to cooperate. We lose, in other words, a defining feature of a functional civil society.
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Source: Forbes