During the COVID-19 pandemic, focused protection strategies including selective lockdowns of the elderly were proposed as alternatives to general lockdowns. These selective restrictions would consist of isolating only those most at risk of COVID-19 hospitalization and subsequent use of healthcare resources. The proposal seems to have troubling implications, including the permissibility of selective lockdown on the basis of characteristics such as ethnicity, sex, disability, or BMI. Like age, these factors also correlated with an increased risk of hospitalization from COVID-19. In this paper, we argue that age has meaningful differences as a morally relevant characteristic in the justification for selective restrictions of liberty. Thus, it might justify selective freedom restrictions in a way in which other factors might not. We offer four moral domains that separate age from other proxies: empiricism, operationality, discrimination, and disparity.

在 COVID-19 大流行期间，提出了包括选择性封锁老年人在内的重点保护策略，作为一般封锁的替代方案。这些选择性限制包括仅隔离那些最有可能因 COVID-19 住院并随后使用医疗资源的人。该提案似乎具有令人不安的影响，包括允许根据种族、性别、残疾或体重指数等特征进行选择性封锁。与年龄一样，这些因素也与 COVID-19 住院风险增加相关。在本文中，我们认为年龄作为选择性限制自由的正当性的道德相关特征具有有意义的差异。因此，它可能以其他因素可能无法证明的方式证明选择性自由限制的合理性。我们提供了四个将年龄与其他指标区分开来的道德领域：经验主义、可操作性、歧视和差异。