"Fabricating ethics in times of pandemic crisis. Anticipation, trust, innovation " – COVID-ETHICS

This research proposal falls within the field of ethics, understood as a transversal and interdisciplinary reflection aimed at clarifying the "moral motives" of our actions (values, norms, purposes, consequences). The particularity of our approach is to place this reflection as close as possible to the field and practices, and to mobilize plural academic knowledge (philosophy, epistemology, medical ethics, sociology). Any major crisis, be it health, is an accelerator and a revealer of ethical dilemmas and a full-scale exercise in value hierarchy. At the heart of crises, ethics is produced precisely because they reveal the fragility and precariousness of our mental and practical structures, at all levels - personal, family, social and global. We start from the observation that an analytical and critical engagement with the current COVID-19 epidemic is indispensable to better understand its ethical dimensions and thus strengthen our capacities for anticipation and the relevance of interventions. The objective is to obtain concrete results to strengthen our analytical framework of ethical issues in the anticipation and management of pandemic situations, informed by previous crises and immersed in that of COVID-19. We will organize our work around four themes: monitoring, feedback and analysis of field experiences; building ethics in times of crisis; health crisis and ethics of anticipation; ethics of scientific reliability. The research will be based on the data collected by the COVID-19 Observatory, Ethics and Society, in order to monitor and analyse the issues, identify points of vigilance to be studied in greater depth from an ethical point of view, and make proposals within the framework of the networks that have been set up.