(First posted on social media 4th November 2020)
Informed consent.
..is a request.
You are asked if you consent to a medical intervention.
It is a fundamental guideline to ethical medical practice.
Its my understanding that a medical procedure that is practiced without informed consent is illegal.
Informed consent reflects 2 of philosopher John Locke's 3 fundamental natural rights upon which liberalism rests:
the right to liberty (of eg thought, choice, action), and
the right to property (eg its your body, you can do what you want with it).
Lockdown is, in medicinal terms, a non pharmaceutical intervention. It is an intervention made in the interests of public health. It is applied by the state through law and law enforcement, meaning you must consent to the intervention under threat of force and imprisonment (if you can't/won't pay fine). Even if it is informed, this is not a request. This is coercion. Compliance through force. On the individual this is unambiguously unethical, politically it is definitively authoritarian and anti liberal.
Although it's no pleasure cruise and lockdown is a struggle for me, I dont have the scale of problem as many others have, and dealing with this lockdown is perhaps not in fact my greatest fear. I am cautious, not fearful, of all winter bugs and advise others to be cautious too. What gives me a hollow feeling every morning is that this monumental exertion of power is authoritarianism on a scale I've never seen in our country. It is an exercise that tends towards total social control. 'Total' being the first five letters of totalitarianism. It is anti liberal at its core, every step of its application demonstrably runs in the face of the principles that bind our liberal democratic society together. From the police threatening to raid family Christmas gatherings to the army being deployed to Liverpool to assist a bio op on its entire population, the outcomes of its application are plainly disturbing to anyone with their eyes open.
It seems however that most are somewhat blinded by a fear that the government, corporate media and (perhaps most disturbingly) academics in positions of power have all had a hand in perpetuating to a disproportionate degree. And this is to say nothing of the devastating unseen outcomes presently occurring and to come. When (if) these measures subside, the acclimatisation to state coersion, total social control and the minimisation of basic liberties will echo into the months and years ahead.
You can't eliminate risk, but you can destroy a civilization trying.
Of course it is reasonable to take measures in response to a health scare, but to a philosophically liberal mind, the principled and ethical strategy would be to deploy resources and measures to treat and protect the most vulnerable as a priority (particularly as we now know exactly who they are) and intelligently deploy public education, advise, and guidelines for behavioral changes. This reflects ethical informed consent. It is the moral strategy. We are adults. We can work out what is best for our family, our community in the light of such a strategy. Of course a tiny minority will always behave against the advise either out of malice or otherwise. Almost incidentally, we already have laws for most of the infractions that might occur; we don't really need new laws or for the police to enforce laws that dont even exist as they have done over the course of this health scare. But crucially, the principles that our civilisation rest on are more important to preserve than an Ill advised panic driven strategy in response to a scare. To coerce all so that the anti social tiny minority conform is to impose punitive measures on those behaving responsibly. This is effectively presumption of guilt, the inhumane principle that every extreme authoritarian ideology lands upon, an inversion of another liberal principle, the presumption of innocence.
I feel regret for not having gathered my thoughts on informed consent and expressed how this informs my objection to lockdown enforced by law and statute by decree. That said, I wonder what difference it would have made at this stage
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