Quarantine, isolation and the duty of easy rescue in public health

Giubilini, Alberto; Douglas, Thomas; Maslen, Hannah; Savulescu, Julian

However, consequentialism, as characterised above, also has some intuitively unpalatable implications. For example, it is intuitively not justifiable to isolate or quarantine people who have contracted or have been exposed to viral gastroenteritis, even if this is expected to have net beneficial consequences and to be the most cost‐effective measure of preventing contagion. This principle may thus need to be constrained in various ways, and indeed a range of possible constraints have been proposed. We call the resulting version “constrained consequentialism”. For example, requirements of proportionality are typically appealed to in order to limit the application of simple versions of consequentialism.21 Similar constraints are also commonly invoked by ethical guidelines regulating public health measures.22 In what follows, we will make what seem to us to be reasonable and intuitive assumptions regarding the constraints to which consequentialism should be subject to when applied to assess the morality of coercive or compulsory measures: we will assume that, in addition to bringing about more positive than negative value, morally permissible forms of coercion and compulsion in public health must satisfy three constraints, namely: