The technocratic class has not yet abandoned its dream of establishing international rule by experts.
One would have thought that bioethicists and technocrats would learn from the COVID debacle that coerced public health policies can easily become exploding cigars when misapplied, and indeed, ultimately harm the very community cohesion these autocrats claim to champion. But no. A new article in the prestigious Journal of Medical Ethics urges that we prepare now for more mandates to prevent epidemics due to AMRs (for antimicrobial resistance, such as bacteria evolving, rendering antibiotics less effective) and to fight climate change.
The authors identify various means of persuading the public to comply with favored public health policies. The first is simple suasion, or “normative compliance.
From “Making the Public Protect Public Health: The Ethics of Promoting Collective Action in Emergencies” (citations omitted):
Normative compliance and moral involvement/commitment: This strategy is to convince people of the importance of assuming responsibility and acting accordingly. When congruent, the commitment of lower-level actors to comply is high. Participants with moral involvement/commitment are loyal to the aims and internalise the goals of the governing authority.
The second is “utilitarian compliance”:
Utilitarian compliance and calculative involvement/commitment: This strategy is to pay or reward people for doing what needs to be done. Commitment levels are lower than seen in other compliance relationships. The relationship is one of exchange as people respond to incentives to obtain benefits.
Finally, coercion:
Coercive compliance and alienative involvement/commitment: This strategy is to force actors to do what needs to be done through punitive responses to non-compliance. The commitment of lower-level actors can be negative in orientation such that people are alienated from the governing authority because they are being forced to do something by environmental pressures, experiences of a lack of alternatives, and therefore, a loss of control
Yes, coercion has its place. But it should be a matter of very last resort to prevent significant public harm. When state power is abused, it destroys trust and breeds resistance. Indeed, the lowering vaccination level is a direct result (at least in part) of the abusive COVID vaccine mandates.
The authors seem to understand that lesson:
Coercive mechanisms support the maintenance of aggregative common good where force is used to increase the number of community members taking collective action. But unlike the neutrality that characterises the calculative commitment of utilitarian compliance, the alienation caused by coercion may also drive the formation of groups that have a strong moral commitment to opposing goals and agendas. Coercion can therefore also drive the expression of values such as solidarity but directed against, rather than for, the goals of the governing authority.
But in their conclusion, they backslide by urging officials to prepare the population for soon-to-be-needed coercion around climate change and AMRs:
The collective action problems of climate change and AMR are becoming more and more pressing—even as they have both previously been characterised as slow-motion disasters. For both of these increasingly important public and global health concerns, moral arguments and local and global incentives do not appear to be driving a sufficiently large and rapid collective response. Even though we are not yet in an acute AMR or climate emergency with decision-making conditions of dynamic uncertainty, it seems likely that more coercive measures will be necessary soon…Preparatory work to change norms must be undertaken now because without it efforts to sustain these public and common goods through coercion will further undermine public trust in governments and experts.
What kind of coercive policies might they be considering? The article brought back to mind Anthony Fauci writing in Cell that the WHO must be empowered to rebuild “the infrastructures of human existence”:
Living in greater harmony with nature will require changes in human behavior as well as other radical changes that may take decades to achieve: rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence, from cities to homes to workplaces, to water and sewer systems, to recreational and gatherings venues. In such a transformation we will need to prioritize changes in those human behaviors that constitute risks for the emergence of infectious diseases. Chief among them are reducing crowding at home, work, and in public places as well as minimizing environmental perturbations such as deforestation, intense urbanization, and intensive animal farming. Equally important are ending global poverty, improving sanitation and hygiene, and reducing unsafe exposure to animals, so that humans and potential human pathogens have limited opportunities for contact.
Imagine the tyrannical coercion that would take to accomplish.
Despite their COVID failures, it seems to me that the technocratic class has not yet abandoned its dream of establishing an international rule by experts. The good news — as the article implicitly acknowledges — is that deep inside they know that people are unlikely to yield.