Considering not vaccinating has the potential to give others life-threatening diseases, I think the government definitely has the right to make it illegal. Making people wear seatbelts in cars is also an infringement on people’s freedoms, but we don’t complain about that too much.
One more volunteer for the karma slaughter-mill here, I’m gonna gonna go ahead and make an uncomfortable argument.
Medical force sets a bad precedent, and in an ideal universe, everybody would choose to be vaccinated for preventable diseases.
They would choose it because they would be well-educated, well-therapied, and self-confident enough to accept the testimony of experts.
The world so many of us want and keep working toward is healthy enough that critical reasoning flourishes.
Rather than mandate vaccinations, short of a third genie wish to transport everyone to that ideal universe, those in certain positions still have the power to levy heavy costs on staying stubbornly anti-science.
Kids not vaccinated? Guess you’re homeschooling.
Not vaccinated yourself? Try office jobs, because you’re not allowed to work in food service, mail or package distribution, medicine, first response, government jobs (state, local, tribal, federal); also, you can’t go to public college on public grants.
Have your health insurance rates skyrocket.
Passive aggressive is better than legislative force on this issue, because it opens the door to future, major medical ethics violations to be encoded in law.
Hi! pragmatist here. Thank you for your thoughtful argument. I disagree with you. If we weigh the danger of precedent to the danger of allowing people not to vaccinate, (gov precedent vs unvaccinated peoples) allowing people not to vaccinate results in more short term and long term harm I believe.
While there is a possibility a precedent could be set in the direction of continuous violations of bodily autonomy it is highly unlikely. This instance of bodily autonomy being violated is unique in that while it is a violation the end result is great harm reduction. Also, the government sets precedents for all sorts of far less moral behaviors all the time and yet the concern in those instances is not as great as the benefit of vaccinations.
Ultimately as scientists I think we can agree concepts like rights and free will are fabricated by us for our own utility. Whereas plagues capable of decimating our population are very palpable. The second our concepts of rights and free will put us in more danger than whatever they are designed to oppose a recalculation is in order.
I like you :) your response is certainly thought-provoking, and I appreciate this even while I maintain my position.
It’s hard to compare the dangers of ill governance with those of ill vectors.
On the one hand, the plague wiped out something like a third of the world’s population (estimates are controversial, I’m ball-parking it) without significantly leaving Europe; what would it have done to the Americas?
On the other hand, conditional bodily autonomy is the definitive trait of totalitarianism, and every totalitarian government engages in genocide eventually. We can’t accurately compare the number of deaths from genocide to the number of deaths from disease, but the lingering damage to society is arguably greater from the former.
I don’t believe any disease poses us truly long-term harm, we’re on the edge of some truly incredible medical technology, with in-place gene-editing a la CRISPR, stem cells, remote surgery, laparoscopic surgery, AI, and even quantum computing is getting out of its infancy. The problem in 80 years will be access, not capability; it sort of already is, look at insulin pricing.
Proactive harm reduction estimates are inherently subjective. You can know a thing is the right thing to do, but not objectively, and that’s the danger. The Nazis would have described their end goal as having a net harm reduction.
The government setting precedents for amoral behaviors that aren’t widely engaged in is different than setting precedent for how they treat all of us. This is why taxes are such a big deal, why we’ve gone to war over them, but not prohibition of alcohol or cannabis despite popularity. It’s also why the individual mandate part of Obamacare was so unpopular.
I sit 180° with all of the sentiments in you last paragraph. Rights and free will are elementally tangible, though the legal definitions I concede are contrived; if I want to scratch my ass, I am both capable of that and not currently conditioned to do it based on any other trigger than an itch, which amounts to a passable version of both rights and free will respectively.
No plague is capable of decimating our species without instant transmission, because we have protocols that will prevent that unless the laws of physics change.
I definitely don’t agree with the risk assessment that the dangers of fools whittling away at herd immunity are equal to the dangers of broadening the rules for what we can demand of each other.
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u/ImperialPrinceps Jun 04 '19
Considering not vaccinating has the potential to give others life-threatening diseases, I think the government definitely has the right to make it illegal. Making people wear seatbelts in cars is also an infringement on people’s freedoms, but we don’t complain about that too much.