A Lost Idyll of Connection?

these high scores are related to people dying alone and limited funeral rites—in other words, it appears that, perhaps unsurprisingly, grief in this pandemic has been aggravated by limits to intimacy and connection, and that we can cope with almost anything with human solidarity and connection (Niemeyer 2021). An important positive feature of good connection is good behaviour towards others even in difficult circumstances, a sense of civility, good manners, and courtesy. The problem of bioethics as a discipline is that civility is so situation and culture dependent, maybe better understood by anthropology than philosophy. We can differ widely as to what we consider to be good manners, especially in a time of contagion and its fears. David Shaw (2021) looks at manners and the difficulty of speaking up for violations by other members of the public, or even within families, about mask wearing, social distancing etc. Are the bad manners in the feedback or the breach itself, thereby risking infecting others? That there has been at times arbitrary, rigid, and at times pointless enforcement, is probably true everywhere, and maybe some people welcome the opportunity to be enforcers with others who appear to threaten the collective well-being of the community. Or maybe with the threat of mortality, the impulse to conform and punish outliers is part of a broader defence of the culture and its legacy, as Terror Management Theory urges us to believe. In other words, we are more likely to deal harshly with others if our own mortality is in question