Is There a Trade-off Between Freedom and Safety?A Philosophical Contribution to a Covid-19 Related Discussion

The aim of the present paper is to critically discuss the common claim that in times of the Covid-19 pandemic there is a trade-off between freedom and safety when it comes to measures taken by authorities to ban the virus.In order to approach the question of whether or not this claim is justified a distinction is made between a more or less common economic view of reality and a philosophical interrogation of the assumptions underlying economic reality.Thus,the paper provides two insights.First,that the economic concept of trade-off is not appropriate for a reflection on freedom and human dignity.Second,in the light of classical philosophical notions of freedom,the implicit or explicit understanding of freedom in the economic domain turns out to be insufficient.This is why the paper argues that the perception of the mentioned trade-off as such is already a severe,albeit inconspicuous,threat of freedom.