There’s a lot in this NYT oped about Notre Dame (U’s) insistence to re-open in person. Colleges are adjudicating many goods and risks at present. But this argument: YIKES. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/26/opinion/notre-dame-university-coronavirus.html

(Full disclosure: As a professor with a bioethics background who teaches classes on theology and science, the logical and moral myopias actually make my head hurt. I’m getting another cup of tea.)

The framing device of Fauci-Jenkins as two sides of a Catholic education, with ND as the purveyor of practical wisdom, is effective rhetorically but also problematic.

“There are, however, questions that a scientists, speaking strictly as a scientist, cannot answer for us.”

Epistemologically true.

But Fauci’s role here is not to develop a vaccine himself, it is to educate/advise on epidemiology, including implications for institutions.

The principles of ND’s exercise in “practical wisdom” are fine. They are limited, myopic. Most telling is what is NOT there:

- how vulnerable populations will be protected
- whether ND is going to make in-person teaching and working compulsory
- who is responsible for deaths?

Rhetorically/morally, I am irked at the slippery slope fallacy here:

Bc pandemics may be a new normal, “we” are justified in reopening now, else how would students be educated?

This does not justify a social experiment for mortal disease on a global, active-interchange campus.

Another slippage: “We” regularly take or impose “lethal risks” for social good.
- war
- medical providers
- driving is dangerous

Responsible moral discernment would engage the GAPS in those examples vis-a-vis #covid19. It would ask how the context of higher ed differs.

Real moral discernment would specify not just principles, but also what method of moral reasoning is being used.

Here, Notre Dame is tacitly consequentialist (net outcome is focus; value is w group benefit, not individual cost).

It’s not very Catholic. They should own it.

“I’d hope for wide agreement that the education of young people … is worth risking a good deal.”

Who risks? Who benefits? Who bears the burdens? You can’t talk about risk without this, or you perpetuate extant inequities/vulnerabilities, glossed by the pablum of euphemism.

And finally, Jenkins invokes the virtue of courage, a shout out to Aristotle’s golden mean (avoiding extremes of bravado or cowardice).

But moral discernment not finished. It must be ongoing, responsive to changing data + contexts, specific about risk…

Sadly, this is not.

Honestly, if you want a pandemic comparandum on “lethal risk” for higher ed context, it should be not soldiers and doctors but

- teachers and students who go to work in a gun-obsessed mass-shooting society

- living as a black man in racist society

End of rejoinders, for now.

(Also, forgive the typos. I’m not fully caffeinated, and my internal copyeditor hasn’t reported for work in months.)

In conclusion: I salute the work of higher ed admin in discerning ways forward in this complicated time. But as so many factors go into this, and the reasoning IS deeply moral, it’s incumbent on us to model it well and acknowledge what is being excluded from consideration.