Ethical challenges of a world crisis: latent crisis, its manifestation (COVID-19) and questioning based on Catholic social ethics

• Autor(a) principal: Martins, Alexandre A.
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.34632/ephata.2021.9709

COVID-19 pandemic raises numerous ethical and bioethical challenges. A pandemic impacts all, but not in the same way, revealing structural injustices and inequalities. The public health crisis created by COVID-19 exposes a latent crisis that questions the structures supporting the dominant model of socioeconomic relations. This essay seeks to understand the ethical challenge of a world crisis, in which the pandemic is a manifestation of something deeper. It argues that the global public health crisis of COVID-19 and its extension for socioeconomic issues is a manifestation of a latent crisis that humanity has ignored in order to save the current economic system. The author examines two concepts of crisis: out-crisis, a pandemic as a symptom of something deeper; and in-crisis, a latent crisis of the neoliberal system that allowed a devastating pandemic to happen. This essay is divided into two parts: the first maps the main ethical challenges of the pandemic as an out-crisis; then, the second analyzes the in-crisis and how it manifested in the pandemic from Pope Francis’ perspective. The conclusion is that the COVID-19 pandemic can be understood as an opportunity for a process of conscientization towards an ongoing movement of confronting the out-crisis and the in-crisis.