Laboratories of Democracy

will respond to changing laws, Gaffney et al 1 show that under reasonable assumptions, these decisions will result in avoidable deaths. That most accrue from the OSHA decision reflects the high incidence of COVID-19 in pandemic conditions. Their work challenges us to make explicit 2 often implicit and critical questions: Assuming that the Supreme Court is (newly) right about a constitutional question, when are the social gains (in greater liberty, better-ordered democracy, etc) worth the social costs, including morbidity and mortality? And are those gains and costs fairly distributed? Although the second question may be amenable to collecting data, the first question requires us to confront the fundamental and sometimes conflicting values we place on both health and nonhealth affordances.