Pandemic Without Judgement: Public Acceptability as Structural Substitute in Ethical Collapse

This paper analyzes the ethical breakdowns witnessed during the COVID-19 pandemic through the structural lens of Judgemental Philosophy. We argue that many high-stakes decisions—lockdowns, vaccine mandates, contact tracing—were made in contexts where one or more axes of the Judgemental Triad (Constructivity, Coherence, Resonance) collapsed, rendering individual moral judgement impossible. In response, governments often appealed to public acceptability as a functional substitute. We explore when such substitution is structurally justifiable, and when it merely masks ethical voids. This framework reframes pandemic-era ethics not as failed choices, but as decisions made in structurally unjudgeable fields.