Reelin’ In The Years: Age and Selective Restriction of Liberty in the COVID-19 Pandemic

During the COVID-19 pandemic, focused protection strategies including selective lockdowns of the elderly were proposed as alternatives to general lockdowns. These selective restrictions would consist of isolating only those most at risk of COVID-19 hospitalization and subsequent use of healthcare resources. The proposal seems to have troubling implications, including the permissibility of selective lockdown on the basis of characteristics such as ethnicity, sex, disability, or BMI. Like age, these factors also correlated with an increased risk of hospitalization from COVID-19. In this paper, we argue that age has meaningful differences as a morally relevant characteristic in the justification for selective restrictions of liberty. Thus, it might justify selective freedom restrictions in a way in which other factors might not. We offer four moral domains that separate age from other proxies: empiricism, operationality, discrimination, and disparity.