Why are we really in lockdown? (opens in new tab)

I didn't perceive it to be an argument for anything specific. I did not get the sense the author is suggesting either lifting restrictions or not. I saw it as more of a piece trying to get us all to think harder and better and expose the difficult trade-offs and the conundrum we face as humans of the morality vs utility argument of saving someone hurting in front of us at any cost versus saving more people at a lower cost potentially at the risk of not saving the person in front of us. I appreciated the author's parable of the river.

My own thoughts go in the direction of maybe the right thing to do is different at different "scales". The right thing to do in my family is different than the right thing to do in my job which is probably different than the right thing to do at the city level, the county level, the state level, the nation level, and the world level (to use labels appropriate for the USA). Leaders at each level have a different decision to make and things work better the more people we have making "good" decisions at each level. The process of figuring out what "good" decisions at each level is the really hard part that is not easily wrapped up with platitudes, memes, or other projections into a single one-dimensional axis (i.e. left vs. right) of a high-dimensional, multi-attribute space.

It makes that case but addresses a number of emotional issues as well. It’s a more sophisticated and insightful discussion than a blunt utilitarian argument.

Note that such decisions are routinely made every day. In the US, the DoT, HHS, and DHS put a price on the benefit of saving a human life differently (e.g. if the cost of upgrading this section of road is more than $X and historical fatality rate has been Y, then don’t bother). Ditto environmental laws.

On a more microeconomic scale we do so through pricing of treatments (Or its equivalent under different systems, queuing), deciding how much excess hospital capacity to invest in, etc. Whether to tax tobacco or not. Et al.

This "right-wing trolley-problem exercise" is something that we do all the time. Work at a union job and in your first week they'll give you a spreadsheet telling how much your arms, your legs, and your life are worth. When people decide to work in dangerous jobs like logging and petroleum extraction, they're putting a value on their own lives. If we ever institute government-run healthcare we'll also have to put a value on life. How much money will the government spend on the elderly for expensive medication? At what age do we let cancer patients forego therapy and instead get palliative care? This isn't social Darwinism, putting a value on life is something we do every day.

Some countries are engaging in social isolation. Others, like South Korea, Japan, and Sweden are not - or at least conducting much less restrictive isolation. In time, we'll see how well those countries fare as compared to the ones that did isolate and then we can get a sense of whether shutting down much of the economy was worth it.

Quite the opposite it seams to enumerate the arguments of both sides (while admitting the authors bias) and doesn't seem to make conclusions either way.