This paper examines the robustness of the optimal lockdown strategy to the postulated social welfare criterion. We show that utilitarianism can, under some conditions, imply a COVID-19 variant of Parfit’s (1984) Repugnant Conclusion: for any (interior) lockdown with life periods of low quality, there must be a stricter lockdown that is regarded as better, even though this reduces the quality of life periods even more. On the contrary, the ex post egalitarian criterion (giving priority to the worst-off ex post) implies zero lockdown. Varying between its minimal and its maximal levels, the optimal lockdown is not robust to the postulated ethical criterion. We also identify a general ethical dilemma between the goal of saving lives (modeled by the Survivors Number Count axiom) and the goal of giving priority to the worst-off (Hammond Equity).

本文检验了最优锁定策略对假定的社会福利标准的稳健性。我们表明，在某些情况下，功利主义可能暗示 Parfit (1984) 令人反感的结论的 COVID-19 变体：对于任何生命周期质量低下的（内部）封锁，必须有更严格的封锁，被认为更好，甚至尽管这会进一步降低生命周期的质量。相反，事后平等主义标准（事后优先考虑最坏的情况）意味着零封锁。在其最小和最大水平之间变化，最佳锁定对假定的道德标准并不稳健。我们还确定了拯救生命的目标（由幸存者人数公理建模）和优先考虑最坏情况的目标（哈蒙德公平）之间的一般道德困境。