Surging Solidarity: Reorienting Ethics for Pandemics,

Public discourse on ethics during the COVID-19 pandemic has tended to focus on resource scarcity and the protection of civil liberties. We show how these concerns reflect an entrenched imagination of catastrophe that guides response ethics. In this article, we argue that pandemic ethics should be oriented towards a relational framing of individuals as vulnerable vectors, embedded in existing networks of care. We develop a framework for pandemic ethics rooted in an ethics of care that makes visible the underlying multidimensional structural inequalities of pandemics, addressing issues of resource scarcity and inequalities in mortality, while insisting on a response that intensifies existing and emerging forms of solidarity.