A philosopher answers everyday moral dilemmas in a time of coronavirus

Lee McIntyre, Boston University

Like a lot of people, we here at The Conversation are facing ethical decisions about our daily life as a result of the coronavirus. Here ethicist Lee McIntyre answers some of our editors’ queries. If you have a question you’d like a philosopher to answer, send it to us at us-ethicalquestions@theconversation.com

1. I’m 65 years old. My son, who is 32, has offered to pick up the groceries. But he has asthma. I’m in a quandary as to who should go?

One of the leading ethical theories is “utilitarianism,” which says that moral decisions and actions should be made on the basis of their consequences.

Although this idea stretches back to antiquity, it was 19th-century philosophers Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill who articulated the most developed form of this theory, arguing that ethical judgments were a matter of assessing “the greatest good for the greatest number.”

In balancing risk, you are anticipating likely consequences, which is a very utilitarian thing to do. But, as an ethicist, I would urge you to be careful.

Please consider whether you have all of the relevant information. It has now been shown that although at a much lower risk, younger people too can become dangerously sick with COVID-19. And with asthma as an underlying condition, that raises the stakes for your son.

You must also take into account your own risk profile: age, underlying health and other factors.

But, according to the utilitarian, you’ve still got to deal with another issue. Your son may be younger than you, but that means he’s also got many more life years to enjoy. According to utilitarian theory, if something were to happen to him, it would be a greater tragedy than if it happened to you, because he has more overall “utility” at stake.

Perhaps you could hire Instacart and have someone else’s son or daughter, presumably without asthma, deliver your groceries? But here is where it gets tricky. According to the utilitarian, you cannot prefer your own or your son’s happiness over that of a stranger.

It’s all about the “greatest good” for all concerned. If you think the ethical thing is to maximize happiness, then it shouldn’t matter whose happiness we are talking about.

Utilitarianism offers a method for thinking through this problem, but not an answer. You’ll have to think through each outcome – taking everyone’s happiness, health, age and risk into consideration.

2. I have a renter in my house who isn’t obeying social distancing rules and goes out all the time. What should I do?

As the renter lives in the same house you do, his or her behavior is endangering your health, which warrants some action.

Ethical egoism – which says that the ethical thing is that which brings about the greatest happiness for oneself – is a relevant ethical theory in this situation. You might think that your renter is an egoist, because he or she is presumably only concerned with his or her own welfare.

But that might open the door for you to claim that you are an egoist too. If you believe that it’s ethical for someone to care only about himself or herself, then perhaps you are justified in evicting the renter. But first you might want to check why he or she is going out. Perhaps it’s to take care of someone else.

So, first I’d have a talk with the renter and point out that – in a communal environment, especially in times of a public health crisis – everyone’s actions affect everyone else.

If that doesn’t work, you might guiltlessly embrace egoism as your own moral philosophy and say to the renter “if you don’t stop endangering my health, there will be consequences … for you.”

3. I don’t have a car and I have flu-like symptoms. Should I take a cab or Uber to go to the hospital?

Absolutely not, unless you plan to tell the driver in advance what you are doing. Eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant said that the guiding principle behind ethical behavior was to follow the “categorical imperative.” This says that everyone should act as if their behavior could form the basis for a universal law of human conduct.

So just ask yourself: What would happen if everyone who likely had COVID-19 just thought of themselves and took a cab or Uber? The disease would likely spread, which would be disastrous for many people beyond just you. The utilitarian too would agree.

A better course of action might be to call the hospital and ask for their help in arranging how to get there. If that fails, you could always call an ambulance. You might balk at the expense, but the alternative is to pass that expense, in the form of a life threatening illness, on to others – without their consent. And according to Kant, that is not an ethical thing to do.

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Lee McIntyre, Research Fellow, Center for Philosophy and History of Science, Boston University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Lester Caudill, University of Richmond

Editor’s note: The question everyone in the world wants answered is how far the new coronavirus will spread and when the pandemic will begin to ebb. To know that, epidemiologists, public health authorities and policymakers rely on models.

Models are not meant to predict the future perfectly – yet they’re still useful. Biomedical mathematician Lester Caudill, who is currently teaching a class focused on COVID-19 and modeling, explains the limitations of models and how to better understand them.

What are infectious disease models?

Mathematical models of how infections spread are simplified versions of reality. They are designed to mimic the main features of real-world disease spread well enough to make predictions which can, at least partly, be trusted enough to make decisions. The COVID-19 model predictions reported in the media come from mathematical models that have been converted into computer simulations. For example, a model might use a variety of real world data to predict a date (or range of dates) for a city’s peak number of cases.

Why is modeling the spread of COVID-19 challenging?

In order for a model’s predictions to be trustworthy, the model must accurately reflect how the infection progresses in real life. To do this, modelers typically use data from prior outbreaks of the same infection, both to create their model, and to make sure its predictions match what people already know to be true.

This works well for infections like influenza, because scientists have decades of data that help them understand how flu outbreaks progress through different types of communities. Influenza models are used each year to make decisions regarding vaccine formulations and other flu-season preparations.

By contrast, modeling the current COVID-19 outbreak is much more challenging, simply because researchers know very little about the disease. What are all the different ways it can be transferred between people? How long does it live on door knobs or Amazon boxes? How much time passes from the moment the virus enters a person’s body until that person is able to transmit it to someone else? These, and many other questions, are important to incorporate into a reliable model of COVID-19 infections. Yet people simply do not know the answers yet, because the world is in the midst of the first appearance of this disease, ever.

Why do different models have different predictions?

The best modelers can do is assume some things about COVID-19, and create models that are based on these assumptions. Some current COVID-19 models assume that the virus behaves like influenza, so they use influenza data in their models. Other COVID-19 models assume that the virus behaves like SARS-CoV, the virus that caused the SARS epidemic in 2003.

Other models may make other assumptions about COVID-19, but they must all assume something, in order to make up for information that they need, but that simply does not yet exist. These different assumptions are likely to lead to very different COVID-19 model predictions.

How can people make sense of the different – sometimes conflicting – model predictions?

This question gets at, perhaps, the most important thing to know about mathematical model predictions: They are only useful if you understand the assumptions that the model is based on.

Ideally, model predictions like, “We expect 80,000 COVID-related deaths in the U.S.” would read more like, “Assuming that COVID-19 behaves similar to SARS, we expect 80,000 COVID-related deaths in the U.S.” This helps place the model’s prediction into context, and helps remind everyone that model predictions are not, necessarily, glimpses into an inevitable future.

It may also be useful to use predictions from different models to establish reasonable ranges, rather than exact numbers. For instance, a model that assumes COVID-19 behaves like influenza might predict 50,000 deaths in the U.S. Rather than trying to decide which prediction to believe – which is an impossible task – it may be more useful to conclude that there will be between 50,000 and 80,000 deaths in the U.S.

Why do the same models seem to predict different outcomes today than they did yesterday?

As COVID-19 data becomes available – and there are many good people working tirelessly to gather data and make it available – modelers are incorporating it so that, each day, their models are based a little more on actual COVID-19 information, and a little less on assumptions about the disease. You can see this process unfold in the news, where the major predictive COVID-19 models provide almost daily revisions to their prior estimates of case numbers and deaths.

Can a model that’s (probably) not accurate at predicting the future still be useful?

While models of infections can provide insights into what the future might hold, they are far more valuable when they help answer, “How can policies alter that future?”

For instance, a baseline model for predicting the future number of COVID-19 cases might be adapted to incorporate the effects of, say, a stay-at-home order. By running model simulations with the order, and comparing to model simulations without the order, public health authorities may learn something about how effective the order is expected to be. That can be especially useful when comparing the associated costs, not only in terms of disease burden, but in economic terms, as well.

One step further, this same model could be used to predict the consequences of ending the order on, say, June 10 – the current target date for the stay-at-home order in Virginia – and compare them to model predictions for ending the order on, say, May 31 or June 30. Here, as in many other settings, models prove to be most useful when they’re used to generate different scenarios which are compared to each other. This is different than comparing model predictions to reality.

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Lester Caudill, Professor of Mathematics, University of Richmond

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Congress gave the IRS the job of sending out coronavirus rescue checks. But the underfunded agency is struggling, while for-profit companies like Intuit have started circling, hoping to convert Americans in need into paying customers.

by Justin Elliott and Paul Kiel April 15, 5 a.m. EDT

Congress has approved billions of dollars of checks for Americans hard hit by the biggest round of layoffs in U.S. history. But millions of Americans will have to wait months for that money — and millions more may never get the money at all.

That’s because the rescue legislation left it to the IRS, an agency gutted by Congress, to organize the complex logistics of delivering the money to those entitled to it. As the IRS has struggled, for-profit tax preparation companies, notably Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, have stepped in with websites to help people get their checks.

But Intuit is not just acting as a conduit: It is also misleading unwary Americans by steering them to paid services that they could otherwise get for free.

The job Congress gave to the IRS in its $2 trillion CARES Act is seemingly straightforward: Identify the Americans who qualify and send them money. This turns out to be far more complicated than it sounds.

Tens of millions of Americans have not provided the IRS with their banking account information, if they have one. Some of these people have filed taxes, so they should eventually receive money but will have to wait weeks or even months for a check to come in the mail.

Another group of Americans did not file taxes because they make so little money. Getting stimulus checks to them, an estimated 6 million households, is challenging. They now must file a new form online notifying the IRS who they are, or the tax agency has to find them. If they don’t, these people will never get the checks of $1,200 and up.

The CARES Act, passed in late March, did not provide any mechanism to reach many of these low-income Americans. So far, the extent of the IRS’ public outreach has been the creation of what the agency calls “e-posters,” to be circulated online, describing the program and letters written by the commissioner to several nonprofits encouraging them to get involved.

Intuit has had a much more nimble approach. On April 4, the company rolled out a new “stimulus registration product” as part of its new Coronavirus Tax Center. But the site, marketed as “free,” sometimes steers customers into products that cost money, in the same way ProPublica hasdocumented over the past year. What’s more, customers who use it are signing away their personal data to the Silicon Valley firm, which the company can use to pitch third-party financial products to their customers.

The coronavirus rescue checks are yet another manifestation of a problem that has existed for decades. As ProPublica has documented, the IRS has long deferred to private industry instead of creating its own tax preparation and filing apparatus. The result has been that millions of Americans have paid billions of dollars to corporations for tax preparation they should have been able to get free of charge. This year, anyone who made under $69,000 does not need to pay to file; they are eligible to file taxes for free through an IRS program called Free File.

Now, Americans who desperately need checks to help cushion the coronavirus crash are being targeted by companies all over again.

“This vulnerable group of Americans might end up having to pay for tax prep that they could get for free,” said Dennis Ventry, a tax law professor at University of California, Davis. “And this is a treasure trove of data for Intuit. The company can harvest the personal data of people who previously made up a universe of Americans that the tax prep companies didn’t interact with.”

Intuit trumpeted its program as a user-friendly way for people to get their money. “In partnership with the IRS,” the company’s press release announced, “TurboTax volunteered to create an innovative solution to help this group easily get their stimulus payment.”

But the people coming to the site do not merely enter basic information that would be sent to the IRS in order to get their check processed.

Instead, the site invites users to try TurboTax’s paid tax preparation products with multiple buttons to “Start for Free” — even though the products may charge fees of $100 and up.

In recent days, people who used Intuit’s product to register for the stimulus were bombarded with a series of marketing emails with subject lines such as “E-file with direct deposit for your fastest refund and stimulus check.” The emails push users to TurboTax’s paid tax prep products.

Intuit said this was done in error. The company’s spokesman said, “When we realized those creating accounts specifically for the Stimulus Registration product were receiving this general new account email it was turned off.”

One thing missing from Intuit’s coronavirus page is a link to the IRS’ Free File program. To use it, taxpayers have to find the IRS’ Free File page, which then sends users through to special pages operated by the tax prep companies. The Free File site is a collaboration between the IRS and these companies, which, led by Intuit, conceived of the program as a way to keep the government from building its own system.

Asked why Intuit is steering people toward its paid products on its coronavirus site, a company spokesman said that those looking for the Free File option should go to IRS.gov. The spokesman also pointed to a press release that says: “TurboTax volunteered to create an innovative solution to help this group easily get their stimulus payment — the TurboTax Stimulus Registration product was designed to help millions easily file a minimum tax return with the IRS.” The IRS did not respond to questions.

Things got even more confusing on Friday, when, a week after the TurboTax site launched, the IRS announced a separate IRS.gov tool for people who don’t need to file their taxes to register to receive their checks.

Users reading the fine print on the IRS tool would find that it, too, was created by Intuit.

Even though the same company created both tools, they look very different. The TurboTax version created by Intuit offers a slick design and user-friendly Q&A to enter personal data, along with multiple digital off-ramps to paid TurboTax products.

The IRS.gov version, also created by Intuit, is a clunky PDF-style form filled with jargon and small type. It is titled, “Non-Filers: Enter Payment Info Here.”

An Intuit spokesman said the company “volunteered at no charge to deliver a solution” for the government. The spokesman did not respond to a question about why Intuit launched the TurboTax tool a week earlier than its IRS.gov tool.

“This crisis has highlighted the consequences of a decade of IRS budget cuts,” Sen. Ron Wyden, the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, said in a statement to ProPublica. “The IRS should be less dependent on private companies to distribute refund payments to millions of Americans. Over the long term we need to ensure that the IRS has the resources to more quickly respond especially in an economic downturn.”

Last year, ProPublica reported extensively on Intuit’s and other companies’ efforts to downplay the Free File program, including by blocking Google from indexing their Free File pages. The coverage led to a lot more focus on Free File by Congress, state attorneys general and the rest.

That additional publicity seems to have boosted Free File usage. Through late March, according to an internal IRS report obtained by ProPublica, Free File usage was up 26% compared with the prior year, a jump of about 400,000 people. It’s a significant increase, but, given that over 100 million Americans are eligible for the program and fewer than 3 million actually used it last year, not transformative.

The logistics of getting almost $300 billion in COVID-19 payments out to Americans were always going to be challenging and the details confusing. For that, thank the U.S.’s maddeningly complex tax system and the IRS’ limited capacity.

The easy part is sending money to people who have already given their bank account information to the IRS.

Many Americans file taxes but don’t give the IRS their bank account information and it’s a group that tends to earn less income. According to a ProPublica analysis of tax filing data, 20 million households in 2018 received a refund but didn’t use direct deposit, and most of them had income below $25,000. Many of these people don’t have a bank account at all.

If they take no action, those households will have to wait for the IRS to mail them a paper check. Taxpayers who have shared their bank information with the service started receiving money this week. Others could wait months for postal delivery. The process of sending checks will start in May and continue into August, according to Rep. Steven Horsford, D-Nev., who sits on the committee that oversees the IRS.

For those people, the IRS has promised a different solution: a portal that will allow taxpayers to provide the agency with updated bank account information. This tool, distinct from the non-filers portal already launched, will be up by this Friday, the IRS said in a press release.

And then there are people who didn’t file taxes. They fall into two broad groups. First, there’s those who should have filed but did not. That group numbers in the millions, but the exact number is hard to pin down. It has likely grown in recent years because of lax enforcement by the IRS, which has cut its investigations of nonfilers to a small fraction of what they were.

Tens of millions of poor Americans don’t have to file because they don’t have taxable income. Most of them, around 20 million, are on Social Security. They were a key focus in the CARES Act.

Because the Social Security Administration regularly channels money to these people, lawmakers specifically stated in the CARES Act that the government could send those people money the same way — without them having to file a tax form.

But a couple days after the bill passed, the IRS announced that these people would, in fact, have to file a tax return. The Social Security Administration is not in charge of the CARES payments. What this would mean then, is that the IRS would have to sort through Social Security data to identify people who had not already filed their taxes. After an outcry, however, the IRS reversed itself, saying that these people did not have to file after all.

Actually, the best advice is more complicated, experts say. If these people want to see their CARES money as fast as possible, they should file their taxes. They can do so through the IRS’ Free File program or via the new portal the IRS set up just for the CARES payments. If they don’t file, it will take the IRS a while to figure out how to send Social Security recipients money.

The final group of people who are owed CARES money is the hardest for the IRS to reach: those who didn’t file for taxes because they earned income, but too little to require filing (for a single person, that’s under $12,200; for a married couple, under $24,400). It’s a group that numbers in the neighborhood of 6 million, according to an estimate by the nonprofit New America.

These people will not receive a CARES payment at all unless they file something with the IRS. Maybe some will find their way to the IRS’ Free File page or the agency’s “Non-Filers: Enter Payment Info Here” site. And maybe some will find themselves on TurboTax’s Coronavirus Tax Center page.

Hannah Fresques and Will Young contributed reporting.

by Erica Hensley, Mississippi Today
April 14, 2020

Anna Wan has built a career out of making math come alive. The assistant professor and self-described tinkerer at University of Southern Mississippi has just pivoted from hands-on math labs for future teachers and students alike, to medical mask-making. The common thread: her 3D printer and duel “makers” hub-research lab in Hattiesburg. 

For the Inform[H]er newsletter, Mississippi Today spoke with Wan last week about her approach to getting creative during a pandemic that led to a new medical mask innovation, as she was driving around town delivering said new masks to Forrest General Hospital and the Hattiesburg Clinic. Like many innovations, her design was partly due to chance and a hunch at 2 in the morning. 

Upshot: She’s a “math licensure” faculty member at USM, meaning she teaches future math teachers. Her motto about teaching through making (and the perfect pivot to mask-making): “What other way to make it more real than to actually have the tools to make the precise thing that you want to make and make math come alive.”

Her team has made at least 1,600 masks in a few weeks (from initial concept to prototype to first product) that have been sent directly to health care workers on the front lines in Hattiesburg. Asked about full capacity production, she says the team is making one mask per two minutes per machine currently with three machines, adding, “You do the math.”

This piece was originally published in the Inform[H]er and updated with new information this week.

Q: What is your background that you were able to pivot so well and quickly to pandemic mask-making?

A: Part of my research is incorporating digital fabrication (laser cutting, 3D printing) into teaching mathematics, because what other way to make it more real than to actually have the tools to make the precise thing that you want to make and make math come alive. So, a lot of my work is to take some of the maker-constructivist activities into a formal education and tying it to the standard so that kids can learn creatively without loss of time, both teacher preparation and classroom time — we know that education doesn’t occur in isolation.

I’ve always done kind of crazy things. My husband is in a wheelchair and wheelchair attachments are pretty customized to the wheelchair user. I’ve also had a 3D printer since 2015, and I created an education makerspace (a workshop that encourages hands-on learning) at my previous institution at Columbus State in Columbus, Georgia. I’ve always done these tinkering kind of things — I was always fabricating something for somebody somewhere somehow.

Q: How did you end up pivoting to this mask? (Editor’s note: the mask is simply the device to attach medical-grade anti-viral filters to health care workers’ faces. The hospitals she has partnered with already have the actual filter with a nozzle. The idea to strap the filter to the face with a mask was a brainchild of a quick conversation with medical professionals. Hospitals are low on disposable N95 masks due to supply chain chokes across the country. She’s working with Mississippi Polymer Institute to source more scalable, sustainable plastics. They’re currently using the same soft plastic of Coke bottles.)

A:  We looked at thermoforming as a way to make a mold for something else — you heat up a sheet of plastic and you form it over your mold. (Also good for cookie and chocolate molds, she says). So I thought we would thermoform over this mask into a solid brick of this mask sheet and I’ll create plaster molds or something to pour silicone in.

That was the original intent — this was an intermediary step to make something harder to push plastic through. But, after I thermoformed it and cut the shape out, I put it to my face. I was testing it for the suction to my face — when you test a mask for suction you take a deep breath — it stuck me right away and I choked. It was that good of a suction to the face and I thought, ‘Wait, this could be a final product!”

We’ve also published it for people to recreate on their own, and local sewers have sewed and contributed straps for the masks.

Q: What does this moment mean to you as an innovator and what lessons can we take away from it?

A: I honestly hate the backdrop in which this is occurring because it’s really an exciting time in a sense that this is a global hackathon. It’s really cool and a really exciting time to create, if it weren’t for the virus. I’m seizing the moment to create things and, honestly, I feel like the N95 mask really needed to be rethought. (Editor’s note: The N95 mask is not made for all-day, repeat wear, unlike Wan’s. With N95s, breaths in and out are dispersed throughout the entirety of the mask, where as with hers, the breath in and out is channeled through that spout so you get a fuller breath in and a fuller breath out, and there’s not as much as the C02 build up.)

We have to rethink the way we’re using these N95s. Just by purely stating that 3M is going to ramp up production of these things, I don’t know that that is necessarily helpful (for the long-term), especially in this day and age of the fact that these are so disposable.

See more about the mask and Wan’s work here: https://www.eaglemakerhub.org/hubmask/

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

by Kayleigh Skinner, Mississippi Today
April 14, 2020

Mississippi students will not return to the classroom this semester.

On Tuesday, Gov. Tate Reeves announced that school buildings would remain closed for the rest of the year to prevent the spread of coronavirus. Reeves added that he had hoped to reopen schools but that data did not justify doing so.

Reeves’ decision follows those in other states to close schools for the rest of the semester or, in some cases, until further notice. Some of Mississippi’s contiguous states have already made the decision to keep school doors closed for the remainder of the year. Alabama and Arkansas announced in March that schools would close for the rest of the semester while Louisiana and Tennessee have both shuttered schools until late April.

Reeves said districts may turn to summer school or early fall classes if necessary, but doing so would not be required.

“We’re going to work with our local superintendents,” Reeves said. “It’s going to depend on how much distance learning actually occurred. In some districts… they may feel very comfortable with where the vast majority of their students are. We look at it not as a mandate but as an option. It’s something we ought to be thinking about.”

The closures come as the state is under a shelter in place order, and the number of confirmed cases continues to climb. To date, Mississippi has 3,087 confirmed cases and 111 deaths.

To most, the closures do not come as a surprise. Schools were already closed until at least April 17, and the state board of education took action in March to cancel end-of-year state testing. Students will still graduate and be promoted to the next grade, as State Superintendent Carey Wright recently referred to the 2019-20 school year as a “hold harmless year” due to the disruptions caused by the coronavirus and school closures.

Some educators question why the decision was not made sooner. Reeves announced on April 8 that he would make a decision about what to do with schools by April 14.

“Educators are concerned about that,” said Mississippi Association of Educators president Erica Jones, ahead of the governor’s announcement. “Why are we prolonging this? Why hasn’t there been leadership on when schools are returning? Arkansas made their decision, Georgia made their decision.”

“Here in our state we have teachers that are literally having panic attacks because we have a governor that has not made a decision on schools. Some groups of educators are preparing lessons to be taught in a classroom for a return date on April 20. And then others are thinking, ‘Should I be planning out some type of distance learning?’”

While there will be no state testing, seniors still need to meet their school district’s requirements and earn 24 Carnegie units, which are used to equate hours of class or contact time with an instructor over the course of a high school year. Districts will determine how to award credits for courses in the current school year, and the state board gave local school boards the authority to change their graduation policies as long as they still comply with state standards.

How schools provide instruction during the closures is up to each school district. Last month, the Mississippi Department of Education released guidance with resources to use during the pandemic and warned against immediately pivoting to online learning because of the challenges that come with access and equity.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.