((HSG IMPACT AWARDS 2022)) (("From insight to impact"))
How are freedom and responsibility related to each other?
During the pandemic, it became clear to us relatively quickly
that it was not just about issues of epidemiology, medicine and economics.
It was also about the ethical question of
how we as a society wanted to deal with this challenge.
((Ethics of the Covid-19 Pandemic))
I brought a small example with me: a situation that is a moral dilemma.
We have the opportunity to get the train moving.
And we can see what happens.
Here, there are five poor people who will be run over.
Or: you shift the lever,
the train goes this way and one person gets run over.
Cost vs. benefits:
If I can save five lives, I will save five lives instead of one life.
Maybe there is a larger context with a plan behind it.
What is the value of one human life?
And can you really compare five human lives to one?
That’s the question that comes to my mind.
In ethics, it is basically about giving reasons for your actions and motives.
And then as a society we can learn altogether in the area of ethics,
including when it comes to setting standards,
and thus also manage conflicts.
When the pandemic hit, none of us knew how to deal with it.
So, it was also about giving a sense of orientation.
And as a researcher,
you not only make a contribution to basic research or teaching
but also to this kind of orientation
if it is in the area of your own expertise.
We actually commented on the topic of corona at a very early stage:
namely, in March 2020.
The whole thing then intensified when the matter of vaccines arose.
And in this context, we wrote an article for "Zeit Online"
that was read more than 500,000 times.
It was discussed in great length on social media
and was also meant to be a signal for policy makers.
Terms such as moral responsibility and civic responsibility
can be found in policy makers' vocabulary as well.
What we did in the media was the tip of the iceberg.
It was all based on years of fundamental interdisciplinary research
where Thomas Beschorner, as a business ethicist, and I, as an economist,
attempted to more systematically clarify certain questions about responsibility
and at what level of society the responsibility could and should be addressed.
I have the impression that the concept of freedom has never been discussed so much.
And that was the case everywhere, through all of society,
at restaurant tables, at family meals, with friends, with family, etc.
I think people saw that this was a difficult concept.
Often we just had a gut feeling of what the concept meant
and maybe approximated it to the idea of self-interest,
which is wrong.
I also think that we made something of a contribution in saying:
What does freedom really mean?
Freedom and responsibility are two sides of one and the same coin.
Let's take liberal ethics like those of John Stuart Mill:
several hundred years ago it was clearly recognised
that a society based on principles of freedom
can be more free
the more responsibility each individual is willing to take.
So, we have the interaction of individual responsibility and societal freedom.
For the basic research project, we used our expertise as researchers
to attempt to get the most complete picture possible.
For the specific applications relating to the pandemic,
we also learned about all the relevant research,
such as medical research, pandemic research
and research about the issue of whether there is a conflict of aims
between medicine and healthcare on one hand and business on the other,
to then give a sense of orientation on the basis of an understanding that is as complete as possible.
The important thing is to avoid simply returning to the events of the day;
instead, we tried to systematically understand
how to make rational decisions in these situations
and how to gather information in good time so that we would know early on
that these kinds of situations are approaching,
and how to assure ourselves of what values to use to orient our actions
so that in the future we are quickly able to deal with these kinds of challenges,
hopefully without wide-scale societal conflicts.