The role of the state is to protect its citizens

The argument

The argument rests on the least controversial claim available in political theory. Accounts of what makes a state differ profoundly — on its origins, its legitimate scope, the source of its authority, the obligations of citizens towards it — but the uniting element across those many theories is that the state exists to protect its citizens. Whatever else is contested, protection is the common core; it is the function by reference to which every tradition justifies the state's existence and its monopoly on coercion. If that is the state's constitutive purpose, then the question of how to allocate its resources during a pandemic is not a balance of comparable goods. Public health spending discharges the state's defining obligation directly: it keeps citizens alive. Economic stimulus serves purposes that matter, but they are purposes the state pursues in addition to its core function rather than as a discharge of it — and they are purposes that presuppose a living population to benefit from them. The asymmetry becomes decisive once the scale is specified. When millions of lives depend on a single action being taken, there is on this view no genuine debate about policy priorities, because the two options are not being weighed on the same scale at all. One is the thing the state is for; the other is something the state also does. A state that directed its resources towards economic activity while its citizens died in large numbers would not merely have chosen badly among competing goods. It would have failed at the task by which its own authority is justified. The conclusion is therefore stronger than a preference. Public health is not the better use of government resources in this situation because its benefits happen to outweigh those of stimulus, but because protecting citizens is the obligation from which the state's claim to govern them derives.

Context

The role of the state is to protect its citizens. Sacrificing their lives for the sake of profit violates this social contract.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The role of the state is unfixed. This is no clearer than now, as democratic countries have instituted emergency measures curbing freedoms to deal with the coronavirus. In China, for example, phones now log whether their owner is suitable to be outside and go about their daily business. In France the government can now control people's movements as well as ' manage prices and requisition goods...As the pandemic proceeds, it is also likely...[many will] exploit [their] unique power to monitor people using their data'. The role of the state is therefore dependent upon manifold contexts more than anything else. During an unprecedented global health pandemic therefore, we certainly cannot expect the state to conform to centuries old definitions.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1]The state does not have a fixed role