The Covid-19 pandemic is and has been quite brutal, especially in hospitals. But it is not only the direct effects of the Covid-19 pandemic which have been tough in 2020. What’s also hit us hard are the lockdowns imposed by governments across the world. As we are writing these lines a second lockdown has been established in our home country of Belgium. People’s responses to these lockdowns have been very varied: from anxious citizens who strictly adopted the rules to wide protest marches uniting people from both sides of the political spectrum in the streets of Berlin.

My brother and I thought it would be interesting to examine the question of the lockdown’s legitimacy in depth, by appealing to ethical arguments and theories. For means of simplicity we shall consider the “lockdown” to refer to a very strict set of rules imposed by the government which limit people’s movements, contacts, and force the closure of “non-essential” shops and activities which usually involve the gathering of people, comparable to Tier 4 restrictions in the UK. 

There are three main approaches which we believe are most important to legitimise a lockdown. We definitely recognise that they are not exhaustive, and that there are many other approaches which could be adopted. These are the three approaches: 

1. Cost-Benefit Approach: The predicted net benefit of lockdown for everyone is higher than the predicted benefit of no lockdown for everyone. 
2. Contractualist Approach: A lockdown would be legitimate if justified by any set of principles for the general organisation of behaviour that “no one could reasonably reject as a basis for informed, unforced, general agreement.” (Scanlon, 2000)
3. Democratic Approach: a lockdown is legitimate if the procedure used to come to its decision is deliberatively democratic.

We acknowledge that these principles are very broad and would ideally merit an article each, but for the purpose of this discussion we want to keep it accessible and succinct. We should also note that we have a preference for the second and third approaches because the first one relies on significant uncertainty, and on the top-down determination of a set of values. We shall discuss the lockdown’s legitimacy by looking at the most salient objections against lockdown we have found relevant to each approach, and examine how they are holding up in light of the objections raised.

The first dimension: A Cost-Benefit Approach 

Cost-Benefit Approach: The predicted net benefit of lockdown for everyone is higher than the predicted benefit of no lockdown for everyone. 

This would mean that the lockdown is justified based on an aggregation of individual costs and benefits on a national level. This approach is therefore highly flexible, depending on the nature of costs and benefits, and enables one to capture a wide range of aspects in the picture. For example, for the first and second lockdowns, government officials judged that the quantity of lives lost without a lockdown would be too great. They based themselves on models that estimated, for instance, that without the first lockdown more than 500,00 lives would be lost in the UK (Bostock, 2020). Though many have questioned the model and the inflation of the estimates, it does seem prima facie that the lockdown saves thousands of lives around the world.

A relevant question then arises: “alright, how do you measure those costs?” We should look around for the most widely used definition of the common currency which underlines this approach: wellbeing. Indeed, one of the difficulties regarding this discussion relates to the fact that we cannot directly compare lives saved by the lockdown to the economic damage incurred.

One suggestion which has been made by some moral philosophers is to use as a common unit an estimate of the years of healthy life we are likely to gain now through the lockdown (saved lives) minus compared to the years we may lose later from a smaller economy, more mental health problems, the delay in certain medical procedures coming from the lockdown, domestic violence, etc. This “quality-adjusted life years” (QALY) unit is one frequently used by policy makers and NGOs around the world. 

‘How can you rightly determine what the currency of comparison should be?

It is very difficult to estimate the currency used in a cost-benefit analysis. One possibility is a top-down approach using a number as value. To evaluate the effectiveness of lockdown, Peter Singer and Michael Plant proposed a QALY method of £25,000 i.e. each year of life gained or lost is worth £25,000, as used by the NHS (Singer & Plant, 2020). However, this number is there to evaluate whether a drug should receive funding based on a limited budget, and not a metric to determine the value of a human life! (Stephen, 2020). £25,000 might be a reasonable number, but it is up for discussion, and there is no clearly justifiable number. How then do we determine these numbers? 

Letting some academics decide wellbeing for the general population is very reductionist and thus more difficult to justify. It does not allow for a measure of wellbeing which is centered around individuals’ reports of how happy and how satisfied they are with their lives. As such, a personal-reflection method may be required as well in order to more adequately integrate the different effects of the lockdown on our lives and societies. This could take many forms, such as a posteriori analysis looking at people’s personal perception of happiness or relying on forecasts of the changes in people’s personal happiness.  It thus may be important to ask people their own opinion rather than coming with a top-down framework to measure the numerical value of their lives.

In general, justifying a numerical value for a human life is difficult, and it seems like we need to bring in broader ethical concerns, which the next two approaches will delve into. 

‘What about all the unmeasured costs?’

Even if we were to agree on a measure for wellbeing, there would still be countless costs which are missing in the current calculation. In practice, most government conferences tend to solely focus on data about the virus. However, what about the number of deaths due to unemployment and the associated decline in mental health? As John Steinbeck (1962) once wrote in Travels with Charley: In Search of America, “a sad soul can kill you quicker, far quicker, than a germ”. Various studies have shown that economic recession correlates with increased suicide and mental disorders (Frasquilho et al. 2015); the world economy is on track for the worst recession since World War II. (World Bank, 2020). Additionally, general medical procedures were halted during the first lockdown: in the UK, millions were not able to get tested for cancer, leading to thousands of undiagnosed and thus untreated cancers(Roberts, 2020); WHO estimated that 94 million children missed out on a vaccine (Press Trust of India, 2020). This is dramatic since measles has a mortality rate of 3 to 6%, far superior to Covid-19 and killed 140,000 in 2018 (World Health Organisation, 2019). Unfortunately, this is only the tip of the iceberg, with other hidden costs such as partner violence not taken into account. 

In psychology, the “identified victim effect” describes how we are far more likely to help one specific, identified victim we can picture rather than one part of a larger, vaguer group (Zaluski, 2018). NGOs regularly use this effect by putting images of individual people in their calls for donations, rather than general statistics. Maybe we are falling into a similar trap with regards to Covid-19. All the media coverage is focusing on people being sent to the hospital. We are not looking at the other, less sensational facts, such as the slow decline in mental health of millions of unemployed. Though it is unclear how much taking these factors into account will affect the result of the cost-benefit analysis, it is clear that they cannot be left on the sideline. Their absence renders the current calculus uncertain and inconclusive.

Moreover, even if we were to include all these hidden costs in our analysis, modelling the pros and cons of a lockdown remains inherently uncertain. We don’t know with complete confidence which measures work and which don’t, how the virus is likely to evolve, etc… This makes it difficult to put all our faith in one model, which further questions how heavily governments have  relied on one, Imperial College London model, considered inflated by many.

Overall, though a cost-benefit analysis seems to objectively determine the legitimacy of a lockdown, because of the difficulty of determining values for wellbeing, the tunnel vision of focusing on lives saved from Covid-19 and the uncertainty, it is not conclusive in justifying a lockdown. Justification will require bringing in broader ethical concerns to surpass the uncertainty.

Now that we have identified the intuitive attraction as well as the pitfalls of a cost-benefit justification for the lockdown, we should delve into the discussion from a different perspective. The first approach is rather utilitarian and consequentialist since it  takes a person’s moral status to be solely grounded on their capacity for well-being and suffering. In contrast, the subsequent contractualist approach does not allow for the interpersonal aggregation of complaints, and relies on the individual’s capacity to reason with regards to policy decisions. For instance, an individual who is sacrificed to save five lives can protest under a contractualist but not a narrow cost-benefit approach. As such, the contractualist approach will pay much more attention to social justice and equity

The second dimension: The Contractualist Approach 

Contractualist Approach: A lockdown would be legitimate if justified by any set of principles for the general organisation of behaviour that “no one could reasonably reject as a basis for informed, unforced, general agreement.”  (Scanlon, 2000)

The second approach derives from Scanlon’s writings, and highlights the fact that a public policy should be based on whether people would or should consent to it, i.e. whether it is justifiable to each. This is based on the view that humans have the capacity to assess reasons and justifications, and that these are uniquely important in the realm of ethical questions. It also relies on the assessment of the strength of the reasons individuals may have for rejecting general principles, and does not allow for the interpersonal aggregation of complaints. Indeed, the former cost-benefit approach looks at the policy from a macro aggregation perspective, and ignores what Rawls (1971) calls “the separateness of persons”. The appeal of the contractualist approach therefore originates in the rejection of utilitarian means through which we could trample with the rights of certain minorities in order to provide the greater aggregate good. In our case, this would therefore require that the lockdown must not be reasonably rejected by each person as being unjustified based on the current overall circumstances. 

One may immediately see the difficulty in identifying what a “reasonable rejection” may actually mean. Though this is indeed up to debate, there seem to be ways through which we can make sense of it. Indeed, according to this contractualist approach, it is not sufficient that I am facing direct harm from a principle to reject it. Instead, I should also ask how this principle affects others. This contractualist approach thus focuses on the idea of living with others in terms of mutual respect. Let’s take the example of a case where to safeguard a pitch, we need 90% of a group to not walk on the grass, but letting 10% do so has no negative impact. One could reasonably object to letting members of a racial minority of 10% walk on the grass, even above letting no one enjoy the grass, because it would disrespectfully use race as a criterion for access. (Ashford & Mulgan, 2018).

In the context of the lockdown, this means that each citizen should not reasonably reject the imposition of such restrictions. Now, empirically, we have seen many people reject the measures being implemented. Were these rejections reasonable? Or could we claim that overall, in light of the circumstances, this lockdown would not be reasonably rejected by anybody? We shall look at the strongest objections (to our knowledge) to the idea that the lockdown would not be reasonably rejected by all in order to decide.

‘The government has no right to restrict my freedom’

Freedom is the objection that seems to motivate countless protests around the world, or rather  the unjustifiable restriction of freedom of movement by the government. 

A useful framework to examine and develop this objection is Isaiah Berlin’s conception of positive and negative freedom (1969). Negative freedom refers to not being prevented from acting by other people. Freedom of expression is a characteristic example emblematic of liberal democracies around the world. Positive freedom, on the other hand, refers to being able to act following your interests. For example, a drug addict might be able to say and buy what he/she wants but cannot prevent himself from consuming drugs and so lacks positive but not negative freedom. These two dimensions look at the right to act freely versus the ability to act freely.

Berlin contends that to maintain a threshold of negative freedom, the state cannot restrict certain rights, and thus that those restrictions can then be reasonably rejected. A lockdown protester will argue that the state is crossing a boundary and coercing us into believing a story about saving lives to limit our negative freedom beyond what is acceptable and thus justified. Following a contractualist approach, a lockdown could thus be said to be unjustified if the principle of absolute minimal negative freedom cannot be reasonably rejected.

However, the line of when a limitation of negative freedom becomes too far is blurry. In any society, we accept certain restrictions on our negative freedom for practical purposes. I have to get a driving license, so that the roads remain safe. We even accept coercion to help our positive freedom, such as with mandatory vaccination or education. Everyone has to be vaccinated, because we think it is in their best interest. Not vaccinating children would be considered careless, and so the state seems to sometimes have a responsibility to coerce us for our own good. With lockdown, the state could be said to follow its duty to save as many lives as possible, and so any restriction is justified.

Additionally, many traditional political philosophers agree on the justified limitation of freedom in specific cases. J.S. Mill (1859) famously developed the Harm Principle: freedom ends where it hurts others. In this case, being free to move means you could infect and thus harm others. Hence, your freedom could justifiably be restricted. Locke (1690), in his Second Treatise on Government, similarly believed that as long as decisions have the “consent of society“, freedom is not under attack, and so limitations on freedom can be justified.

There thus appear to be contractual ways to justify lockdown against the freedom objection. However, these justifications will have to overcome the fact that individual freedom is restricted regardless of the fact that it inflicts a differential harm on people.

‘A lockdown has an unequal distribution of costs and benefits’

In our eyes, the strongest objection to the lockdown from a contractualist approach is not freedom but rather the unequal distribution of costs and benefits for different classes of people.  Unlike what government communication often seems to suggest, a lockdown policy does not only have winners. This means that many different parts of the population may reasonably reject a lockdown. While this feature would be disregarded under most cost-benefit analyses, it is significant for the contractualist justification of lockdown (Stephen, 2020). The most obvious discrepancy is for age. While the young and the old face the similar burden of staying at home, the benefits for younger generations are much lower: the mortality rates for Covid-19 are below 0.5% for ages under 65, and below 0.1% for ages under 45 (Berezow, 2020). The rights of a majority (the general population below 65!) could be perceived to be unjustifiably trampled on in favour of the elderly minority. Thus, the majority could try to make the claim that this lockdown should be rejected due to this inequality of burden. 

This inequality becomes even starker in countries with a higher proportion of young people. In Niger, for instance, the median age is 15.2 years old (Myers, 2019), as compared to around 45 in Italy (World Population Review, 2020). In those countries, it becomes more difficult to justify lockdown as a principle to protect a small minority (at risk people) at a very large cost to the rest of the population (the younger generations) could be reasonably rejected.  Broadbent (2020) goes on to suggest lockdowns have been imposed because the Covid-19 virus poses dangers to the ruling class i.e. politicians and businessmen, as opposed to preventable diseases such as diarrhea which (kills over a million every year) (Dadonaite, 2019).

A second, major unfair distribution is the costs on the most socially and economically vulnerable (minorities). The pandemic has been devastating to countless jobs, be that artists, independent shop owners or service workers, while wealthier classes can rely on a safety net. This is especially worrisome when it reinforces historic patterns of oppression (race in the USA), in countries without social security, and in communities in the Global South relying on remittances (World Bank, 2020).

The most damning and significant aspect of this unequal distribution of costs and benefits is that most costs are uncompensated. The younger generations for example are asked to forsake their current economic welfare (and part of their future as the government incurs large debts to maintain the economy afloat), which calls for intergenerational justice to even be able to justify a lockdown. This could take the form of wealth taxes, as proposed by various economists such as Zucman (2020). A wealth tax would transfer the burden of the government’s reconstruction debt from future generations to the wealthy who have easily weathered the crisis. And since age is correlated with wealth, such a wealth tax may also contribute to mitigating the intergenerational injustice caused by the lockdown, while also helping poorer communities.

We may also ask the question: should the younger generations not be willing to accept sacrifices simply for the greater good? Scanlon (2000) himself for example defends exposing specific minorities to additional costs in the example of Hazardous Waste:  The government needs to get rid of dangerous waste in a city. Disposing the waste will release chemicals but poses less risk than leaving the waste. Anyone directly in contact with the chemicals during the disposal will experience lung damage, but only minor for anyone inside or away from the location of the waste. As long as the government warns people of the danger and because all the alternatives (such as leaving the waste) are worse, the government is justified in discarding the waste. Scanlon thus argues that putting some at risk for the sake of public health cannot be reasonably rejected. Similarly, it could be said that the alternatives to lockdown are worse because of the sheer number of lives lost. Thus, permitting some (in this case the younger generations) to bear large costs to maintain public health is a principle that cannot be reasonably rejected. Hence, the younger generations could not reject a lockdown if there are no justified alternatives. 

But are there really no alternatives to lockdown? Might not a more limited lockdown be possible?

‘Less restrictive measures are equally effective’

Recently, thinkers such as Alberto Giubilini and Julian Savulescu (2020) have argued for less restrictive measures. These could take many forms such as the english tiering system but most revolve around even less restrictive measures: only locking down those most in danger (the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions) while retaining other provisions such as contact tracing or quarantine following Covid-19 exposure. The measures would overall attempt to both maximize lives saved and minimize freedom limitations. The idea is that the least stringent option on freedom that achieves desirable results is the most justified from a contractualist approach. 

By allowing most to retain their freedom and perform their job, society benefits. While locking down specific groups of the population seems unfair, in reality it could be justified because those groups stand to gain significantly (by surviving!). Not locking them down would amount to putting them all at risk of death, and this could be reasonably rejected because of the inherent value of a human life. 

Though letting everyone who is not at risk retain their freedom seems like a magic solution to save most people’s jobs and thus livelihoods, it is not. As put forth by Paul De Grauwe (2020), the trade-off between public health and the economy is a false one. The short term fear of catching the virus leads to significantly less travel and going out, while the long term economic uncertainty makes people delay large purchases. Though Sweden never enforced lockdown measures (as we define it), it faced similar economic hardship as other countries. Regardless of their political feasibility (or rather lack thereof), limited measures retaining most people’s freedom, from a contractualist approach, would thus seem to mostly help for concerns beyond (economic and/or intergenerational) justice.

Though limited measures are not perfect, they retain the lion’s share of the benefits of a lockdown while keeping most of our freedom intact; one could thus reasonably reject lockdown in favour of limited measures such as Tier 1, 2 or 3 in the UK.

It is worth considering the legitimacy of the lockdown based on the procedure which leads to its decision, beyond its substantive content, especially in a world where democracy is being threatened from many sides, and in which true authentic democracy has rarely been achieved, This is therefore a more procedural analysis rather than a substantive one, meaning that the debate actually goes beyond the discussion of the lockdown itself and launches an exploration of the general procedural legitimacy of our current political systems. Considering the high chance of recurrence of a pandemic, and the vast challenges we are facing as humans, spending some time on institutional decision-making structures also appears particularly important.

The third dimension: A Democratic Approach and procedural legitimacy

Democratic Approach: a lockdown is legitimate if the procedure used to come to its decision is deliberatively democratic.

In our interpretation, the third approach is based on the idea that each subject to a decision must be provided the ability or opportunity to engage in effective deliberation prior to decision-making in order for it to be legitimate.  This takes political equality and deliberation as the source of democratic legitimacy of public decisions.

This may be perceived as a narrow interpretation of the term “democratic”. Indeed, at first sight, we may be appealed by ‘thin conceptions’ of democracy, such as the one proposed by Philippe Van Parijs: democracy is “a form of collective decision-making that combines three elements: free voting, universal suffrage, and majority rule” (Van Parijs, 2011). This  ‘thin conception’ is therefore very clear, does not include too many subconcepts, and enables one to have an easier time when evaluating whether or not a decision/system is democratic. In our case for example, it would justify the lockdown on the basis that the governments and parliaments who have established the lockdowns in many countries around the world are “democratic” in the sense that they satisfy the three criteria of this definition.

However, this ‘thin’ conception of democracy appears to rely on a rather outdated view of what democracy is. Robert Dahl (2003), and later David Van Reybrouck (2016), show that the current forms of electoral democracies were often not intended to be truly democratic, and fall short of the principle of political equality. In many countries the intention was to create a system which enabled a ruling class to “represent” the people, and not for the people to rule themselves. James Madison’s statements regarding democracy and the creation of the United States are quite explicit in that regard: 

“A pure democracy (…) can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction”, 

“A republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect, and promises the cure for which we are seeking.” 

He appeared to favour a system in which decisions are made by “a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country”, (Federalist Papers, No. 10, Madison)

If we take democracy  to more abstractly refer to the commonly used: “government of the people, for the people, and by the people”, as popularised by president Lincoln in his Gettysburg address, then we can quite convincingly show that the current models of electoral representation are far from enabling equal access and ensuring the “by the people” component of the definition.

Though over time we have decided to call current electoral systems to be “democracies”, their current form does not seem to truly legitimise such a label. There are many regimes which we call “democratic” but which are in reality very far from the Greek ideal of “ruling and being ruled in turn”. Indeed, when we look at the composition of representative assemblies, they are often mostly formed by charismatic, connected, and rich people, who spend their lives in politics despite their abysmally low satisfaction rates. (Carnes, 2013) The system of democratic participation through periodical elections does not really enable each citizen to equally participate/influence the decision-making in a given country. It de facto ends up abiding by a more Platonic idea of government whereby more “qualified” people should be in power. Additionally, many studies also show that the content of the laws established by many of such regimes are in fact correlated with the preferences of the richest people in a given country. For instance, Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page (2014) showed that a suggested policy change with low support by the American economic elite (one-out-of-five in favour) is adopted only about 18% of the time, whilst a suggested change with high support (four-out-of-five in favour) is adopted about 45% of the time.

We could thus make the claim that our “democracies” are not really for the people since they are not really by the people. As expressed in the words of W.E.B. Dubois (1920), “in the people we have the source of that endless life and unbounded wisdom which the rulers of men must have.” Hélène Landemore (2020) and others more elaborately and convincingly argue that even if elected people have good intentions, cognitive biases will lead to their own vision of society permeating legislative proposals. We thus appear to also be faced with an epistemic justification (i.e. a more inclusive system will lead to better laws for the people since it benefits from collective wisdom and intelligence when the power is shared by the people) for the reform of our current systems through further democratisation. In the current context of strong disapproval and rejection of established political systems as seen in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France, such arguments gain in salience and strengthen the appeal of further democratisation.

You might ask: what alternatives exist? Well in fact, there are many proposals out there. It falls beyond the scope of this article to explain them, but we may point the reader to Van Reybrouck’s (2016) “Against elections”, in which he provides numerous different ideas for the democratisation of countries. More recent, Landemore’s (2020) latest book: “Open Democracy”, convincingly shows that more democracy is desirable and feasible, without having to stick to an impossible model of direct participation of all citizens in all decisions.

As such, coming back to our main topic at hand, we hope to have shown that the current procedures in place are far from achieving “realistic utopias” (Van Parijs, 2018) of authentic democratic systems. We should thus conclude that the lockdowns imposed in almost all countries fail miserably under the prism of this Democratic approach. Though definitely implemented with the best intentions of public health and saving lives, based on daily recommendations by epidemiologists, they were generally decided in quite technocratic ways, at best debated in (virtual) assemblies, and rarely enabling the common citizen to participate in the decision-making. Even though the lockdown may have been widely supported by public approval, this does not lead to the claim that it is procedurally democratically legitimate.

‘A system of citizen participation is ineffective and unfeasible’

We must explore an important objection which potentially undermines the argument for an ‘open democracy’ based on ‘equal access’: decision-making structures which involve all citizens are highly inefficient, not feasible at a large scale, and would not be able to provide adequate legislative proposals in a high-stakes context such as the Covid-19 pandemic. It is clear that swift legislative work is an important aspect when a country is dealing with a crisis like today’s. 

Though this may be appealing, and may be the main fuel of apprehension towards more ‘open democracy’ models of decision-making, we find that the arguments and evidence presented by Van Reybrouck (2016) and Landemore (2020) are effective in dispelling those fears. They adopt an approach of inductive political theory which is based on empirical cases, showing that it can really work. There are numerous examples which suggest that citizen participation in complex legislative proposals is both effective and qualitative: the 2010 drafting of a new Icelandic constitution by 25 randomly selected citizens in 4 months, though rejected by the parliament, was considered by experts to be of a high-quality; the local parliament in the German-speaking community of Ost-Belgiën recently developed a randomly-selected body of citizens who make policy-recommendations; even more convincingly, the French Convention on Climate unites 150 citizens who have been asked to make legislative proposals on how to reduce French Carbon Emissions by 2030, and has already gotten 50 legislative proposals which were integrated into law by the French Parliament. The OECD’s recent report (2020), “Innovative Citizen Participation and New Democratic Institutions, Catching the Deliberative Wave”, expounds on up to 289 examples of citizen participation, showing that new forms of democratic organisation are emerging around the globe. We are therefore quite convinced that our societies should follow and support this trend in order to make our decision-making mechanisms more democratic and thus more procedurally legitimate.

‘A lottery does not guarantee representativeness’

Worries were expressed against the real representativeness of ‘lottery assemblies’, as shown by examples in Belgium where the G1000 initiative ended up consisting of mostly white, middle-class educated citizens. Though very pertinent and important, we believe that such issues would be overcome once open democracy structures are institutionalised and supported through adequate infrastructure and financial means. Indeed, when open democracy initiatives happen on weekends, in contexts where people have to take time off and are not paid, the barriers are too high to enable equal political access. We thus support the elaboration of formal structures of assemblies organised in the same way current parliaments are organised.

‘Your argument’s conclusion is determined a priori’

Finally, one may also claim that bringing this third approach in this debate is a bit intellectually flawed, in the sense that, with our argument in mind, we already know from the start that the lockdown would not satisfy the Democratic approach due to the nature of our current political systems.  

The only answer we can come up with here is that “yes indeed, it is a bit easy to use this argument in the context of a discussion on the lockdown”. However, we are convinced that if we are really serious about designing systems which are truly democratic and just in the long run, the procedural legitimacy of decisions should constantly be on the table. This is notably the case because there is more and more research showing that, even according to an instrumental approach towards decision-making structures, more democracy is desirable. Indeed, even if we were to consider that the structure of a political system should be justified as a means to the end of providing the best possible policies, arguments highlighting the advantage of democracy in terms of collective wisdom are quite compelling. As such, acknowledging that the structure of political entities across history has changed dramatically, we should support movements to continue changing them to strive towards more justice. We shine light on it now when addressing the question of the lockdown’s legitimacy, but it is relevant way beyond this discussion.

Conclusion

We have tried to unpick the justifications of a lockdown. A cost-benefit analysis, though intuitively appealing, faces significant obstacles with regards to the determination of the common currency, the uncertainty in its measurements, and the top-down technocratic process. By contrast, a contractualist approach enables a more equitable discussion which takes individual and minority considerations into account. It may thus justify some form of (limited, parsimonious and targeted) lockdown in light of the differing impact of restrictions on people in a given society. Finally, the lockdown would clearly be much more procedurally legitimate if it were implemented in a more authentic democracy.

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