Did Jacinda Ardern Orchestrate the Perfect Response to Covid-19?

For many people, the justification for the draconian lockdown in New Zealand is that it worked. Not only that, the rest of the world is hailing our government for its Covid-19 strategy, so it must have been the right thing to do. Of course what people mean by “the rest of the world” is that left-wing journalists in publications such as the New York Times approve of our handling of the crisis. I suppose as a New Zealander I should feel good about that. But then I recall that in the US this is election year, the presumed Democrat candidate can hardly remember his name let alone run a country, and so the (sole) Democrat policy of “Orange Man Bad” has to be ramped up and everything used as ammunition against him, including the performance of other leaders internationally.

Of course our cringing media also like to refer to experts, excitedly quoting “an internationally renowned virologist”, Dr Robert Webster, who described New Zealand’s response to Covid-19 as "perfect", and “probably the best example worldwide”. How can you argue with that? How can you argue with a virologist when this is a viral pandemic? I’ll tell you how.

Dr Webster’s statement is a perfect example of what I’ll call a tacit hypothetical imperative. I’ll explain what I mean. If I tell you to drive down Highway 75 for 20 minutes, you’ll probably tell me to get stuffed. I have instructed you to do something (issued an imperative) and given you no reason for it, so you resent being told what to do. But if I say, “If you want to go the quickest way to the wedding on Saturday, then drive down Highway 75 for 20 minutes”, you may well thank me profusely. I have given you a reason by presenting a hypothetical imperative (sometimes called an “if … then statement”).

Hypothetical imperatives are useful things. Some have even argued you can base a whole moral system on them. For example, rather than telling someone they ought not to lie, you might say, “If you want to gain the trust and respect of the people around you, then you ought not to lie.” This has the advantage of providing a reason to do the morally right thing, and avoids referring to God, or “just what is right and that’s all there is to it”. Of course it does instrumentalise morality, in the sense of getting people to be morally good by appealing to what is useful for them. The problem with this is that someone working with a purely instrumental morality will always be maximising their own advantage, so don’t expect any help in a lifeboat. Maximising advantage may well be a description of how many people behave, but it’s difficult to see how it counts as what most of us think of as morality.

Let’s get back to Dr Webster. In his position as a Memphis-based virologist with no real knowledge of what is happening in New Zealand, there is a hypothetical imperative in there, but it is unstated, or tacit. Probably what he meant was something like, “If the only thing you are concerned about is controlling the spread of SARS-Cov-2, which causes Covid-19 disease, then New Zealand’s is a perfect example”. His area of expertise is virology so it should not be surprising that he take this stance. But rather than being chuffed by his praise, New Zealanders should find it very scary. Because it assumes that the disease is the only factor being considered, and that other factors, such as the virulence of Covid-19 compared to the annual influenza, the economy, social factors, and the over-reach of surveillance and monitoring powers, are simply not weighed.   

How you assess a strategy depends on the factors you take onto consideration. New Zealand has only just moved from Alert Level 4 plus State of Emergency, which combined to shut down all tourism and the hospitality industry in a tourism-oriented country, made government payments to employees but not to employers, made it possible for tenants to not pay rent and impossible for landlords to evict them, and gave police discretionary powers to (among other thigs) stop people at road-blocks and demand to know where they were going. The New Zealand government also misled the population: it argued that all of these draconian measures were necessary because we had to “flatten the curve” – in other words, spread the case load so that our health system did not get overwhelmed at the peak of the pandemic. But once we had flattened the curve, the government’s goal changed to eliminating Covid-19, so that we don’t have to “yoyo” between alert levels if there is a second wave.  

A perfect response? I think the jury is still out on that one.

Harry Wiren