America’s Covid-19 hot spots shed a light on our moral failures

It’s no accident that prisons and meatpacking plants are hotbeds of Covid-19.

In 2010, the moral philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah made a list of practices that he believed people in the distant future will condemn our generation of humanity for, much as people in the 21st century almost universally condemn slavery or the denial of women’s suffrage.

His four candidates were the American prison system, which cages about 2.3 million Americans at any given time; the exploitation of animals in factory farms; the abandonment of America’s elderly (and the elderly...