From a 2020 interview:
Jennifer Grossman [40:19]: A question from Phil [C.] on the lockdowns and the proposition that more lives and futures are going to be destroyed by the mandatory lockdowns and closings of businesses than could or will be by the virus itself? I know you’re not an epidemiologist, but you’re probably looking at some numbers.
Stephen Hicks: Yes. Well, I think the point of the question, the most important part of that question, is to first to recognize that there are trade-offs. One of the problems we had early on was people saying, Here’s a health threat—and that just blocked out all other considerations and led to a knee-jerk reaction to do whatever it takes to deal with the health threat—and not to worry at all about civil liberties, not to worry at all about economic consequences, and so on.
So the point of the question, then, is to say that the threat to civil liberties and the threat to people’s economic livelihoods are real. And there are particularly people who are more vulnerable. We have to tally those costs. If we’re going to do good public policy, we always should be doing cost-benefit calculations. And as better data comes in, and we’re a little calmer, we should be basing our public policy on much better cost-benefit calculations.
But you’re right, I’m not an epidemiologist, so I’m not going to do a crystal-ball gazing here. Yet it strikes me that more than just epidemiology, we will need political scientists to tally up the civil liberties costs, and we need a lot of economists to tally up the economic costs. I think we’re going to need also a lot of sociologists and psychologists because there are a lot of psychological-depression costs, increased number of suicides, increased number of domestic battery—things that happen when you coop people up for extended periods of times—and all of those are real costs. So what the final numbers are going to turn out to be, I have no idea, but that’s an important project.
The full interview is here:
Related: in the Philosophers Explained series.