Conflicting Goods & the COVID-19 Crisis in Reopening US Schools
In Paul A. Cantor’s insightful introduction to the Cambridge University Press Hamlet (2004, 2012) , he notes a number of things that made me think of the current conflicts in the US over whether students should return to school in the fall. Cantor notes the definition of tragedy in Hegel's Aesthetics , not as a conflict of good and evil, but as a conflict of two goods. Cantor notes, "A straightforward confrontation of good and evil is a fundamentally melodramatic situation. If good triumphs we rejoice, and if evil triumphs we lament, and in either case our sympathies are clear-cut and there is nothing in the outcome to perplex us. But in a dramatic situation in which both sides have a legitimate claim on our sympathies, no outcome can provide a simple resolution of our feelings. No matter which side wins, we feel that something good has been defeated or destroyed." (12) This may oversimplify, because in Hamlet , we have more than two characters, and more than two t...