“I wanna go home where I belong
‘Cause now I’m just a lonely teenager

When I was sixteen, ran away all alone on a stray
What can I do, what can I say
I’m a lonely teenager

Now I’m seventeen, still alone
Wondering if I should go home
Or maybe stay out of my own
I’m a lonely teenager”

Sing Dion and the Belmonts in 1999. A teenager feels lonely after running away from home. This is sad, no doubt. Question is: is this an ethical problem? By an “ethical problem” I mean: is it something that third-party individuals (who are not related) should be concerned and do something about? A related question is whether this is a public health problem, meaning—should public health agencies or governments do something about it?

These questions encapsulate, in essence, the ethics of loneliness. Surprisingly, while philosophers of mind, social scientists, neuroscientists, and public health experts have studied and highlighted loneliness as a significant concern for roughly six decades, the ethics of loneliness has largely been neglected as an area of philosophical inquiry. Often, it is either assumed that loneliness is a personal problem that requires personal efforts, or that it is a public health problem that requires systematic solutions, but no normative argument to support either assumptions is provided.

As in every ethical issue, the problem should be clearly defined. Social scientists have defined loneliness as a distressing mismatch between one’s expectations of the quantity and/or quality of social relations and one’s perception of one’s quantity and/or quality of social relations. Loneliness is not synonymous with social isolation but the two are positively correlated. Solitude, in turn, describes the positive, constructive, and pleasant experience of being alone. After once again tiring from human kind, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is optimistically said to have “returned again to the mountains and to the solitude of his cave and withdrew from mankind, waiting like a sower who has cast his seeds.” (63) Is solitude an ethical issue as well? Meaning, are we as individuals and/or society obligated to enable moments of solitude for fellow humans? This is a question for another day.

Both loneliness and social isolation are extremely common. The recent Surgeon General Advisory suggests that one in every two Americans are lonely. In Australia, China, and Hong Kong the prevalence of loneliness is roughly 30%. Loneliness (and social isolation) becomes a clear public health problem once you couple these numbers with the fact that loneliness is associated with adverse health effects—in fact, 60 years of empirical research prove that loneliness increases your risk of cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes, obesity, increased blood pressure, depression, suicide, and premature mortality overall. And this is also where perhaps the most readily available ethical argument against loneliness lies: loneliness is a (negative) social determinant of health, and as such individuals and society have an obligation to prevent and mitigate it. Why? Because humans have a right to health or healthcare.

But this argument only applies to certain cases. Consider the lonely teenager—is his loneliness really going to affect his health? And what about the college student who returns home from a study abroad and can no longer connect with her familiar social network even as she is still being loved and cared for? Indeed, there seems to be a huge difference between this sort of cases and cases of individuals losing their romantic partners after many years, consequently falling into what I shall call a lonely life. A lonely life is the all-encompassing distressful experience of living life alone—you go to sleep lonely and you wake up lonely. You define your life as a lonely one. Arguably, the former cases may more accurately be characterized as life stained by instances of loneliness. Potentially, a lonely life is much worse for your health than a life that is stained by some instances of loneliness while being fulfilling overall.

Having a right against loneliness as a derivative of the right to health entails entitlements for something. In the case of loneliness, this “something” often means social prescribing, or the linking of medical care to social services provided in the community, and the (very controversial) use of technology such as social robots. Specifically from a public health perspective, these require resource allocation. But—similarly to other needs that require resource allocation—how do we decide who receives what? Should a lonely Bill Gates be allocated the same resources as lonely persons in rural communities? Put differently, what should we target in allocating resources to fight loneliness and how should we measure success: health outcomes? Loneliness reduction? Socioeconomic status?

Several philosophers have gone beyond treating loneliness as a public health issue. Framed as social deprivation, they theoretically justify and elaborate the idea of social rights, or rights to be included in any sort of social relations. These rights mean that we as individuals should make some effort to include lonely people in social interactions even if we do not enjoy their presence; indeed, even if they abuse our relationship. Individuals are owed social rights not because these are derivatives of the right to health. Rather, social rights derive from a more fundamental right to well-being, or even a more fundamental right to equal respect.

So now we have sketched what loneliness is, why we as individuals and societies should do something about it, and what this ‘something’ might entail—right?

Wrong.

Authors have articulated novel forms of loneliness that may affect different individuals in specific contexts and that may co-exist simultaneously: ethical loneliness affects the victims of injustices who come forth to give testimony but are not listened to and listened well. Loneliness as lack of solidarity similarly arises in situations of epistemic injustice and/or lacking others who would be willing to carry a burden to assist you. Political loneliness in turn describes the experience of individuals being unable to politically associate with others in the context of totalitarian regimes, liberal regimes without appropriate public spheres to engage with other citizens, or neoliberal regimes that prioritize monetary gains over communitarian values. These various kinds of loneliness, as well as others, might have different mechanisms, etiologies, and effects compared to the more common understandings of loneliness. They might also require different normative arguments to explain why they pose an ethical problem. And, perhaps more importantly, they may call for different kinds of systematic solutions.

So, there are no answers in this short essay. It is rather an invitation, a call to help those whose voices often go unheard.

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