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Conferences & lectures

Pierce Randall | Public Health, Surveillance, and Privacy | Philosophy Speaker Series


Date & time
Friday, November 5, 2021
3 p.m. – 5 p.m.
Speaker(s)

Pierce Randall, Clinical Ethics Fellow, Albany Medical College

Cost

This event is free.

Contact

514-848-2424 ext. 2500

Where

J.W. McConnell Building
1400 De Maisonneuve Blvd. W.
R. Howard Webster Library

Room LB-362

Wheel chair accessible

Yes

Surveillance is an important tool in the arsenal of public health agencies to manage pandemics. Public health surveillance also raises important concerns regarding individual privacy and autonomy. During the COVID-19 pandemic, countries with strong traditions of protecting privacy and other civil liberties were slow to develop techniques such as digital contact tracing or travel restrictions. This has led some to question whether societies that have, historically, been less open to subordinating civil liberties to the common good can deal effectively with the pandemic. While significant attention has been paid to surveillance overreach by police, intelligence agencies, and large technology firms, relatively less has been devoted to the normative justifications for, and limits of, public health surveillance.

Much of the public debate regarding privacy and public health was shaped by the failings of governments like the United States to respond to civil liberties concerns during the AIDS pandemic. In this talk, I give reasons to think that the experience with the AIDS pandemic will not generalize to other future pandemics, and that the lessons we should draw from that experience are not as straightforward as they are sometimes presented. I then explore three competing normative frameworks for understanding public health policy, and explore what they say about surveillance: the transaction framework, which conceives of the public role of public health authorities as correcting for market failures in health; the common good framework, which conceives of public health interventions as correcting for moral failures of markets to promote our shared interests in population health; and the security interest framework, which draws on the contractualist tradition in political philosophy to evaluate public health interventions in light of the fundamental security interests members of society have and what policies they would accept to promote those interests. I highlight some limitations for the transaction and common good frameworks, and then outline how the security interest framework can draw on resources from surveillance ethics to help provide guidance regarding how to weigh privacy interests against the need to prevent the spread of disease.

Pierce Randall is a clinical ethics fellow at Albany Medical College. He earned his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania in 2019 and is a former Stockdale Fellow for Ethical Leadership at the United States Naval Academy. His research focuses on political philosophy and applied ethics. He has published in The Journal of Social Philosophy, Public Health Ethics, and Philosophy & Public Issues.

This event is free and open to all.

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