“Contagion: Nothing spreads like fear”. Narration and deliberation about a pandemic

Authors

Abstract

Films are a cultural experience to understand reality. But reality is complex and multidimensional; incomprehensible without the moral dimension of the facts that we have in front of our eyes. Narrative ethics allows us to imagine the moral background of all the processes that accompany health and disease in the individual and in the collective, in the biological and in the social. The film Contagion (Sodelberg, 2011) is a disturbing reflection on the global consequences of an infectious disease in terms of the uncertainty it produces and the fear and lack of control it arouses. More than its predictive value on the COVID-19 pandemic, its greatest success is to exemplify the behavior of pandemics in an interconnected and globalized world. The narration of this film invites us to reflect on how to manage, from a public morality, great health crises. Only the search for the common good can hinder individual freedom, only autonomy understood as relational can weave a fabric of shared responsibilities, only public deliberation can be translated into trust towards institutions.

Keywords

ethics, narrative ethics, pandemic, COVID-19, ethics conflict, public health, film

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Author Biographies

Miguel Melguizo Jiménez, Servicio Andaluz de Salud

Miguel Melguizo Jiménez is a specialist in family and community medicine and works at the Almanjáyar Health Center of Granada. He holds a Master of Clinical Bioethics from the Complutense University of Madrid and is adjunct professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Granada.

Maite Cruz Piqueras, Escuela Andaluza de Salud Pública

Maite Cruz Piqueras is a sociologist in Health Services and Health Professionals Management at the Andalusian School of Public Health (EASP). She has participated in the coordination of various strategic planning projects and the evaluation of health programs of the Ministry of Health and Families of the Regional Government of Andalusia, among them the Bioethics Strategy of the Andalusian Public Health System, the implementation and updating of the Catalog of Informed Consents, as well as the development of the Healthcare Ethics Committees Network. In the field of global health, she has served as a technical consultant for projects in Uruguay and Chile for the design of integrated network models in Health Services (RISS). She is the director of the Diploma in Bioethics Specialization of the University of Granada and a teacher in various master’s degrees, diplomas, and ethics courses. She is a member of the Andalusian End of Life network (EOL), the Research in Organ Donation and Transplantation Ethics network (INEDyTO) and the Ethics for Public Health, Action, Care and Social Observation network (ESPACyOS). She has published articles on qualitative health research, ethics of qualitative research, and the use of audiovisual methods for the dissemination of results. More recently, her research has focused on parental discourses regarding the decision and reluctance to vaccinate children. She has also produced several videos on the end of life (“At the end you decide”, “We are all dead”) and another one to promote dialogue on vaccination #dialogavacunas. She belongs to the EASP Research Commission and is vice-president of the Institutional Committee of EASP ethics. At times she is @maiteazules.

María Isabel Tamayo Velázquez, Escuela Andaluza de Salud Pública

María Isabel Tamayo Velázquez holds a Licentiate of Psychology and a PhD from the University of Granada. She currently works at the Andalusian School of Public Health where she participates in and coordinates various research, consulting and teaching projects. Her main field of interest is bioethics, in which she has carried out multiple projects related to ethics committees, end-of-life decision making and mental health, among others. She has published in national and international journals. She is currently participating in international projects financed by the European Commission related to intersex people or rare diseases. Before joining the team at the Andalusian School of Public Health, she worked at Intervention Services, Phoenix Inc. in Florida from 2002 to 2004, first with people with special needs and later in an intervention program with minors.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.5565/rev/enrahonar.1308

Published

2020-10-30

How to Cite

Melguizo Jiménez, M., Cruz Piqueras, M., & Tamayo Velázquez, M. I. (2020). “Contagion: Nothing spreads like fear”. Narration and deliberation about a pandemic. Enrahonar. An International Journal of Theoretical and Practical Reason, 65, 141–155. https://doi.org/10.5565/rev/enrahonar.1308

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Copyright (c) 2020 Miguel Melguizo Jiménez, Maite Cruz Piqueras, María Isabel Tamayo Velázquez

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