Learning from COVID-19: public justification and the ontology of everyday life

Liberal democracies across the world have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by implementing measures that significantly curtail the rights and liberties of individual citizens. These measures must receive public justification in order to be politically legitimate (Rawls 2005; Quong 2011). By combining analytical political philosophy with ontology in an original way, in this paper we argue that liberal democratic governments have so far failed to adequately justify these measures, since they have not systematically targeted the scholarly study of
COVID-19 in everyday environments, consequently implementing rules that are epistemically unsound and publicly unjustifiable.