Abstract
The role of bioethicists amidst crises like the COVID-19 pandemic is not well defined. As professionals in the field, they should respond, but how? The observation of the early days of pandemic confinement in Finland showed that moral philosophers with limited experience in bioethics tended to apply their favorite theories to public decisions, with varying results. Medical ethicists were more likely to lend support to the public authorities by soothing or descriptive accounts of the solutions assumed. These are approaches that Tuija Takala has called the firefighting and window dressing models of bioethics. Human rights lawyers drew attention to the flaws of the government's regulative thinking. Critical bioethicists offered analyses of the arguments presented and the moral and political theories that could be used as the basis of good and acceptable decisions.
Highlights
The role of bioethicists amidst crises like the COVID-19 pandemic is not well defined
The pandemic spread at different paces in different regions, and the first Finnish fatality was recorded on March 20 in Uusimaa province, where the number of documented infections was considerably higher than elsewhere
THL is a publicly funded “expert agency that provides ... information on health and welfare for decision-making and activities in the field.”[3]. It seems that at least well into April the intention was to slow down the spread of the pandemic so that intensive-care units in hospitals would not be overloaded and as many lives as possible could be saved
Summary
The run-of-the-mill bioethical discussion on the COVID-19 pandemic in Finland quickly reached its saturation point. Utilitarian and rights-based solutions were paraded, civic duties evoked, and the virtue of obedience stressed. In popular contributions by academic philosophers and jurisprudents, colleagues have risen up to the challenge and turned into the firefighters that Tuija Takala predicted in her 2005 article “Demagogues, firefighters, and window dressers: Who are we and what should we be?”4 Takala’s idea was that bioethics as an academic enterprise has been dead or dormant for decades and that the so-called bioethicists among us either preach their own ideology, run from crisis to crisis verbalizing popular concerns in their own pet language, or contribute to drawing attention away from wider economic and political issues by digging up and addressing solvable local concerns in medicine and healthcare. Firefighting, the middle approach, is a solution for exceptional times, and that is what Finnish bioethicists have chosen to do for
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