The COVID-19 Pandemic as a Severe Scarcity Condition: Testing the Tenacity of Ideal Theories of Justice

The shortage conditions created by the COVID-19 pandemic have been changing our ordinary way of life around the world since the beginning of 2020. Such conditions pose a challenge for shaping a cohesive theory of justice—one that takes non-ideal circumstances as necessary for the model. These conditions also interfere with agents’ moral capacity in ways that make it difficult for them to tell what is morally relevant, which impairs their ability to identify what actions are just. To shed light on these problems, I turn to David Hume’s theory of justice as a test case to portray how outer conditions shape an agent’s inner conditions and affect the foundation of our moral perception of what is just.