ONLINE FIRST
published on February 16, 2021
Matteo Bonotti, Andrea Borghini, Nicola Piras, Beatrice Serini
Learning from COVID-19
Public Justification and the Ontology of Everyday Life
Liberal democracies across the world have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by implementing measures that significantly curtail the rights and liberties of individual citizens. These measures must receive public justification in order to be politically legitimate. By combining analytical political philosophy with ontology in an original way, in this article we argue that liberal democratic governments have so far failed to adequately justify these measures, since they have not systematically targeted the scholarly study of COVID-19 in everyday environments, consequently implementing rules that are epistemically unsound and not publicly justified, at least not fully.