Imagining Life after Covid: Ethics of Tolerance in The Madness of Crowds

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Imagining Life after Covid: Ethics of Tolerance in The Madness of Crowds

Bildiriler > Özet Bildiri · 2023

BACLS-What Happens Now 2023 Conference, İngiltere, Birmingham, Uluslararası, Sözlü Sunum, Özet Bildiri, 2023-2023, ss 32-33

Özet

Imagining Life after Covid: Ethics of Tolerance in The Madness of CrowdsThe Madness of Crowds (2021) by the Canadian author Louis Penny can be categorized as a pandemic novel, which imagines life after the official end of the Covid-19 pandemic. The novel’s core subject and dilemma revolve around a statistician, Abigail Robinson, who has a radical claim to refrain from experiencing similar horrors if any other pandemic or catastrophe ever occurs in the future. As a consequence of her statistical research, she claims the world can use its resources fairly and effectively only by letting go of its vulnerable members; a process which she defines as “mercy killing.” As a type of euthanasia, her proposal also bears an insinuation of eugenics and is thus rejected by several people and government officials, however, also attracts some defenders despite its morally ambiguous nature, which the author considers to be a” madness of crowds.” This ethical position and dilemma presented by the novel are followed by another, the right of free speech and the limits of tolerance to such atrocities. The idea of protecting Robinson’s right to address her ideas and research freely constitutes the ethics of tolerance that the novel presents. This idea is reinforced by further instances, but not just by Robinson’s case, which demonstrates a postmodern relativistic ethical outlook of tolerance and understanding “the other.” In this regard, this presentation aims to examine and discuss how Penny pursues to employ an ethics of tolerance in a fictional post-Covid period in The Madness of Crowds and advocates how such an ethical attitude may help people to live in a safer world. Keywords: The Madness of Crowds, Covid-19 pandemic, ethics of tolerance, freedom of speech, understanding “the other”

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