The cost of coronavirus obligations: Respecting the letter and spirit of lockdown regulations

We all now know that the novel coronavirus is not a common cold. The pandemic has created many new obligations for all of us, many which come with serious costs to our quality of life. But in some cases the guidance and the law is open to a degree of nterpretation, leaving us to decide what is the ethical (or unethical but desired) course of action. Because of the high cost of some of the obligations, a conflict of interest can arise between what we want to do and what it is right to do. And so some people choose to respect only the letter of the law, but not the spirit, or not to respect even the spirit of the guidelines. In this paper I identify and describe the new obligations imposed on us all by the pandemic, consider their costs in terms of the good life, and provide an ethical analysis of two personal and two public cases in terms of the letter and spirit of the guidance and legislation.