The carelessness and the inhospitable. inhabit times of pandemic

The pandemic has placed us in a situation of estrangement from ourselves. We have been acutely aware of our vulnerability and fragility. Through the stories of lived experiences, we have learned about and witnessed tragic circumstances in which inhospitality and neglect have become evident. We have been shocked by the awareness of the lack of recognition, accompaniment and welcome. Institutional decisions have prioritized public health, the good for all, but have forgotten the biographies of people, full of suffering. And this has produced a moral damage, a loss of trust, a feeling of injustice that we have not been able to fight against. This is why it is necessary to build hospitality, which can be achieved through care. Care with a political dimension that takes charge of reality and transforms society. The key is a responsibility in solidarity. Faced with the possibility of dehumanizing ourselves, we seek hospitality as an alternative way of narrating lives that have to be reconstructed, that have to relearn how to take care of each other amidst the multiple possibilities of estrangement that threaten us. Hospitality is at the heart of a narrative ethics at the height of our times.

Vulnerability and deliberation in times of epidemic

The COVID-19 epidemic has brought us face to face with an unprecedented situation in which we discover our vulnerability in varied and dramatic ways. Although protected by powerful technology, we now observe our enormous hardship in failing to respond to the threat to our health and survival. Our fragility is revealed in different ways: The vulnerability of our bodily and mortal condition, which forces us to take refuge in confinement, isolate ourselves from an environment that has become hostile and where we also discover our psychological vulnerability;the vulnerability of the most helpless situations, which highlight the weakness of the social and health systems to protect those who are in a more delicate condition;the vulnerability of resource management systems, which face complex decision-making processes to preserve justice;and what we could call a moral vulnerability, because our ability to manage deliberative environments to adequately resolve value conflicts is questioned. These vulnerable environments need to be examined to account for how the reality of the pandemic forces us to rethink and develop an ethic commensurate with the circumstances. © 2020 Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona and Universitat de Girona. All rights reserved.