Follow the Ethics

Has getting COVID shifted your thinking on vaccines?

No. The experience has not been a pleasant one, though the worst of it lasted only a week or so for me. Before contracting COVID and going back to the beginning of the pandemic I have been quick to boldly proclaim my ignorance on matters both scientific and statistical. I have, by His grace, managed to stay mostly above the fray.

There are however a few areas where I have some level of expertise that overlap the vaccine questions that divide us. I serve as a professor of ethics and for decades now have made a study of the legitimate role of the state. Both of which have made me not a rabid anti-vaxxer but a deeply committed anti-mandate man. It is precisely because I’m not an expert on medicine, contagious diseases, genetics, immunology that I feel no need whatever to try to reach a conclusion on the vaccine, nor to argue in defense of said conclusion. I’m more than willing to leave this to scientists to hash out.

I would ask, however, that both scientists and politicians, demanding that we all “follow the science,” recognize their own relative ignorance in my field. I’d ask them to “Follow the ethics.” When a scientist says “You ought to receive the vaccine” they have ceased to speak as scientists and have begun to speak as ethicists. They are, however, so utterly ethically ignorant that they don’t even know it. They are, in fact, guilty of misinformation. Science deals in is. Ethics deals in ought. I don’t mind if a scientist says, “If you don’t get the vaccine, you will get COVID and die” even though I don’t agree. I don’t mind if a scientist says, “If less than 95% of you don’t get vaccinated millions will die,” even though I don’t believe it. Both of these are hypotheses that can be tested.

“You ought to get the vaccine,” or worse still, “You should be punished for not getting the vaccine” is no longer science. It is not testable. No one ever looked in a microscope and saw an ought. Here is an ethical statement, “Most of us should not be arguing the health benefits or disadvantages of getting the shot, but instead all of us should recognize that scientists and politicians are ill-equipped to be laying down health imperatives. As a professional ethicist, I stand by that statement. I welcome all arguments.

Let me give this advance warning. Arguments built on “If you don’t do X then bad thing y will almost certainly happen” have no weight with me whatsoever. We don’t actually know the future. We don’t actually know what outcome would be best. We do know this. Forcing someone against his or her will to have injected into his or her body something they don’t want injected into their body is Mengele level evil. My unpleasant experience of having COVID has zero impact on that moral fact. If you want to get vaccinated, by all means, help yourself. Maybe it will spare you what I’ve been through. If you don’t want to get vaccinated, I pray you will be free of any state requirement to get one. In both circumstances I pray you can see the absolute wickedness of making people get the shot.