A few of you have asked me to comment on the various scientific arguments made about COVID-19 on my weekly @talkRADIO spots with @Iromg. With very occasional exceptions ("Cancer Research UK are worried about missed screenings"), I'm not going to do that.

Thread [1]

I'm a lawyer with decent expertise in constitutional law - I tutored it at Oxford, and practised it "in real life" in two jurisdictions.

I last did maths at A-level and biology at O-level. [2]

I'm numerate and generally understand statistical arguments when they are made to me. I simply do not have the skill to make them de novo. [3]

However, personal knowledge aside, I'm what's known as an ethical pluralist. I think civil liberties & rule of law arguments are often incommensurable with scientific arguments; sometimes they're incompatible. [4]

When I make them, I want you to weigh the legal arguments separately from the scientific arguments. This is because neither civil liberties nor saving lives can be reduced to a single "super value" like, say, utility. [5]

Those who believe that human values can ultimately be reduced to one super-value – often something like utility, or happiness – are known as ethical monists. [6]

The dominance of numbers over the way we talk about COVID-19, and the way this has played into so-called "evidence based policy", has meant that public debate is often, de facto, a form of ethical monism. [7]

Monism is attractive to the tidy-minded because it promises to make comparisons between apparently different things easier, assigning each some common and comparable value. [8]

Because monism promises that moral decision-making is a relatively straightforward calculation between comparable goods, the idea that values clash rather than blend - which is my position, ethical pluralism - can seem discombobulating at first. [9]

Moral decision-making is not easy. There is no right answer. People in a free society value different things differently. For me, I don't wish to live in an unfree country. Others don't wish to live in an unsafe country. And that's all right. [10]