My name is Sam, and I am vaccinated. I'm vaccinated with Pfizer. I took my second shot in June, so I'm still relatively protected.
The question is, should you be vaccinated? And I'd like to help you make up your mind one way or another by introducing you to some concepts in ethics.
Ethics is a branch of philosophy that helps you make decisions to improve your life, helps you make the right decisions and avoid the wrong decisions.
I would like to analyze the vaccine or the vaccines, because there's quite a few of them by now.
I would like to help you analyze the vaccines using a variety of arguments, some of which are medical, but most of which are actually about what the ancient Greeks called the good life.
Will the vaccine make your life better? Will it make you better people?
Phronesis is the concept in ancient Greek thinking. So is taking a vaccine phronetic? Does it improve your life? Does it make you better people?
And if you do take the vaccine, what next? What does it say about you as people? What does it say about the society you're a part of?
Does taking the vaccine imply that you're sacrificing other equally important or even more important values such as, for example, free will, free speech, free choice?
We're going to tackle all this in today's video. It's a primer and I encourage you to go online afterwards and search for additional answers from reputable sources, mind you.
The tsunami of disinformation, misinformation and sheer nonsense, as usual. As I said, I'm vaccinated and I decided to get vaccinated after I had used something called utilitarian calculus.
Utilitarian calculus is a concept in a school of philosophy. It equates or it calculates obligations and rights.
Now this is a very important point. Every obligation you have is because someone has a right. Obligations reflect other people's rights. When they have a right, you have an obligation. When you have a right, they have an obligation.
So the first question we are faced with, do you have an obligation to be vaccinated? Does anyone have a right? Does anyone have a right to tell you, to force you, to coerce you into getting vaccinated?
Before we proceed, I want to make clear, I am 100% pro-vaccination, but my personal opinion about vaccines informed by my medical education is not going to influence this video.
I'm going to present both sides with at least attempted objectivity.
So where there's an obligation, there's a right.
Let's, before we proceed, review the features of most vaccines, not all of them, most of them.
First of all, vaccines reduce the rate of infections. There's no debate about this. The protection against infection wanes over time.
And many people, including shockingly medical doctors who should know better, misinterpret the vaccine's protection against infection. They say that vaccines reduce infections by 88% or 70% after 6 months. That is not true, of course. That's not what vaccines do. What vaccines do, they prevent infections in a cohort of people. In other words, when I say a certain vaccine, AstraZeneca in this case reduces the rate of infection by 70% after 6 months, what I mean to say is 7 out of 10 people who would have been infected had they not taken the AstraZeneca vaccine are now not infected. So 70% simply means that 7 out of 10 people avoid infection, which they otherwise would have gotten had they not taken the vaccine.
Now that's an entirely different proposition. It doesn't translate into a reduction of 70% in overall infections. It translates into a reduction within infections.
Still, there's no debate that vaccines reduce infections by a lot less than they are reputed to do, but they still reduce infections.
Bear this fact in mind as we proceed.
If vaccines reduce infections, it means that we are less contagious. If I am vaccinated and consequently I don't get infected, then I'm unable to infect other people. In other words, there's less chance that I would be a carrier.
If I do not take a vaccine, my chances to be infected are higher.
And consequently, I'm much more likely to infect other people.
And this raises the first ethical question. Do I have an obligation to protect other people from infection?
The answer is unequivocally yes. You do have an obligation to protect other people from infection. You do have an obligation to protect other people from harm inflicted by you. You have an obligation, in other words, to not harm people intentionally or to take every possible step to avoid harming people.
For example, you should not drive while you're under the influence. You should not drive when you drink alcohol. If you drive under the influence, you're likely to spend a very unpleasant night in the county jail and you're likely to pay a very high fine or maybe even to lose your license if things went awry.
Not driving while you're drunk, not driving while you're intoxicated and inebriated is an example of your obligation to not harm other people.
And there are many other examples, of course.
So let's finish this first segment.
Vaccines reduce infections. Your chance to be infected if you're vaccinated is lower than your chance to be infected if you're not vaccinated. Your chance to infect people if you are infected, the contagion coefficient, the R coefficient, your chance to infect other people if you're infected is quite high, especially with the Delta variant.
So you have an obligation to not infect others. You have an obligation to protect others. You have an obligation to not inflict harm on others. You should not drive while you're drunk and you should get vaccinated so as to not get infected, so as to not infect other people.
This raises the next question.
If other people do get infected what is the harm? What is the damage?
Well, it crucially depends on multiple factors. For example, age, underlying conditions such as diabetes, prior exposure, etc. There are quite a few interacting factors.
The majority of cases the disease is likely to be either asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic. So not much harm is done.
Actually, by acquiring COVID, by getting sick with COVID, one acquires immunity, which we are now discovering is even stronger than the vaccine.
So you could say that you're doing people a service. By infecting people, you're actually inoculating them. You're vaccinating them by infecting people.
And majority of them would be much better protected than had they taken a vaccine.
So it's a public service. To not take a vaccine, to get infected, to infect other people is a public service because the overwhelming vast majority of them will recover. And having recovered will have acquired immunity against COVID. That's a very fascinating argument. And it has merit, although it sounds inane. It does have merit. And of course, it's taboo. Deliberate infection of people with COVID is taboo even in clinical trials.
But here's the thing. You can't be sure who you may end up infecting. You may end up infecting one person who would die from COVID.
And there is this principle that you're never allowed to kill anyone. Whatever the reason may be, there are even schools in philosophy which say that you're not allowed to kill another person to save a few other people. Killing is wrong, period, should never be done.
If you don't get vaccinated, consequently get infected, consequently infect other people, some of them, or at least one of them, may die. People die of COVID. Do you want that on your conscience? It's also wrong ethically.
And because you can't control who you would be infecting, this is not a laboratory setting. You infect randomly people you don't know.
Because you can't control the settings of the infection that you are spreading, you should actually avoid infecting people, even if in the majority of cases it is to their own benefit because of the one or two or three or 30 who may end up dying because of you.
We also know that vaccines reduce hospitalization. Now, hospitalization costs money. It costs taxpayers money. It consumes scarce resources which are better leveraged or used elsewhere.
By not taking a vaccine, you impose yourself on the community if you get sick. If you don't take a vaccine and then you get infected and then you end up in a hospital, other people have to pay for your stay there. You are consuming other people's resources.
Is there an obligation to not exploit other people? There's a debate about this and we'll come to it a bit later.
But on the face of it, it sounds like a highly ethical argument. You should not impose yourself on other people. You should not consume other people's resources. Definitely, you should not coerce them into giving you these resources, into sharing these resources with you.
Arguably, if you don't get vaccinated and then you get sick and then you end up in a hospital, you're forcing other people to give you their money, their hard-earned money. You're forcing other people to share their resources with you via the hospital system and you're denying people access to the healthcare facilities which they may desperately need, for example, if they have cancer.
So, there's an ethical issue here. So, if this is true, maybe the solution is to allow people to remain unvaccinated but at their own peril. If they do get sick, they don't get treated.
It's like I would come to you and say, listen, you don't want to get vaccinated, don't get vaccinated. But if you're sick, if you get sick with COVID, you're on your own. It was your own decision to not get vaccinated and gamble and take a risk.
Now that you have taken a risk, bear the consequences. I'm not going to treat you. I'm not going to put you in a hospital. I'm not going to splurge and I'm going to spend scarce expensive resources on you because you had it coming. You did it to yourself.
So, maybe the solution is to allow people to decide whether they want to get vaccinated or not, but to inform the unvaccinated that they will not get treated if they acquire or get infected with COVID-19.
Isn't this a perfect solution?
The thing is we treat smokers. Smokers are people who knowingly gamble with their pulmonary and cardiovascular health. If you smoke, your chances to get lung cancer are much higher. Your chances to have heart attacks and strokes are much higher.
So, smoking is an imposition on the resources of the community because ultimately many smokers, about one third by the way, end up in hospitals and end up consuming healthcare resources.
So, should we not treat smokers?
We do treat smokers. How about drug addicts? Should we not treat them if they overdose? How about athletes who engage in extreme sports and then get injured? Should we not treat them? How about skiers? On a ski slope, so many accidents happen. Should we not treat these people?
And what about victims of accidents?
Victims of accidents, car accidents, plane accidents. After all, boarding an airplane, when you're boarding an airplane, you know the risks. You're taking risks by boarding an airplane. You're taking risks by entering a car or any moving vehicle.
So, should we not treat people who assume risks? That's not the way society is structured because we all, one way or another, assume risks.
For example, women get pregnant. That's a very risky proposition. We want to encourage risk taking because risk taking furthers science. Risk taking is attendant upon sports. Risk taking allows women to become pregnant. Risk taking is at the core, at the heart of numerous human activities, for example, soldiering in the army. We want to encourage people to take risks.
So, someone who smokes, that's a price we pay for encouraging risk taking behaviors. Someone who refuses to get vaccinated with COVID, with a COVID-19 vaccine. That's another way of taking risks. These are dysfunctional ways of taking risks. Smoking, not getting vaccinated. These are dysfunctional, self-destructive ways of not taking risks, but they're still within the realm of risk taking, which society accepts as a reasonable price.
So, we treat people who take risks and we cannot say, because you didn't get vaccinated, you got yourself sick, it's your problem, go away. We simply can't do this. Vaccines reduce death.
But do we have an obligation to stay alive? We have a right to stay alive if we choose to, but do we have an obligation to stay alive? That's a very debatable proposition. And the answer is probably not, we do not have an obligation to stay alive.
Let's break all this synoptic overview. Let's break it into specific arguments.
Let's start with the argument that one has a right to have one's life maintained. You have a right to have your life maintained.
It leads to a more general quandary. To what extent can you use other people's bodies, their property, their time, their health, their resources? To what extent you can use all these to deprive them of pleasure, comfort, material positions, income, any other thing? To what extent can you do all this, just in order to maintain your own life? Even if it were possible in reality, it is indefensible to maintain that I have the right to sustain, improve or prolong my life at someone else's expense.
I cannot demand, though I can morally expect, even a trivial and minimal sacrifice from any other person in order to prolong my life. I have no right to do so.
Of course, the existence of an implicit, let alone explicit, contract, let's say even social contract, between myself and another party could change the picture. The right to demand sacrifices commensurate with the provisions of this contract would then crystallize and create corresponding duties and obligations.
Consider, for example, an embryo, a fetus. No embryo, no fetus, has a right to sustain its life, to maintain its life, to prolong its life at its mother's expense. This is true regardless of how insignificant the sacrifice required of her is. The embryo has no right to ask his or her mother for a sacrifice of any kind, to any extent. That is not entirely true because the mother had chosen to create the embryo, so she has a creator's responsibilities.
But we're not going to eat right now. That's a different argument against abortion. We're not going to eat right now.
We are focusing on the issue. Can anyone ask anyone to sacrifice anything to maintain his or her life?
In other words, can I ask you to sacrifice something to maintain my life, to preserve my life, to prolong my life, to improve my life? Can I demand that you act in a certain way so that I remain alive? Can I force you and coerce you to behave in specific ways to make certain decisions, to adopt certain choices, because otherwise I would die? Do I have this right? And do you have the corresponding obligation?
In the case of a woman with an embryo, by knowingly and intentionally conceiving the embryo, the fetus, the mother can be said to have signed a contract with the fetus. The contract causes the right of the embryo to demand such sacrifices from his mother to crystallize. It also creates corresponding duties and obligations of the mother towards the embryo.
But I don't have such a contract with you. You don't owe me anything. You did not create me. You did not make decisions on my behalf that I had not been a party to. You are just managing your life. You're making decisions on your behalf. You're making choices that you consider reasonable, or even not reasonable, irrational.
Do I have a right to alter your behavior, to constrain it, to dictate to you, just because your decisions and your choices may endanger my life?
We often find ourselves in a situation where we do not have a given right against other individuals, but we do possess this very same right against society. Society owes us what non-constituent individuals do. And so we all have a right to sustain our lives, maintain our lives, prolong our lives, or even improve our lives at society's expense, no matter how major and significant the resources required.
Public hospitals, state pension schemes, police forces, prisons, they may all be needed in order to fulfill society's obligations to prolong, maintain, and improve our lives. And society must fulfill these obligations.
And still each one of us can sign a contract with society implicitly or explicitly, a contract that abrogates this right. One can volunteer to join the army, for example. Such an act constitutes a contract in which the individual assumes the duty or obligation to give up on his or her life.
So let me summarize this section.
Do I have a right to demand from you to behave in a certain way in order to prolong my life, in order to protect my life, in order to not kill me?
The surprising answer, perhaps, is no. I do not have such a right.
And you do not have a corresponding obligation to do so.
However, do I have a right to demand from society the same, to preserve my life, to protect my life, to maintain my life, to prolong my life?
Yes, I do. I do have such a right to demand from society to do everything in its power to accomplish this. And society has a corresponding obligation.
It is true society that I can force you to get vaccinated, because you don't owe me anything. Society does, and you're a member of society. As long as you agree to take, to consume services, to participate in society in any way, society owes me and you owe society.
So society is the vehicle, is the tool of coercion. Society is my way of forcing you to fulfill this implicit contract to not kill me. That's why we have police forces. That's why we suppress crime.
You have an obligation to not harm me, but you have an obligation to not harm me via the institutions of society, such as courts, prisons, law enforcement, in the case of crime, such as health care, public health care, in the case of a pandemic. You don't have an obligation to me. You have an obligation to society, and society has an obligation to me. It is an obligation by proxy, vicariously.
Okay. Do I have a right to not be killed by you?
It is commonly agreed that every person has a right to not be killed unjustly. Admittedly, what is just and what is unjust is determined by an ethical calculus or a social contract, and both of these are constantly in flux.
But leave it aside. Even if we assume an Archimedean immutable point of moral reference, does A's right to not be killed mean the third parties are to refrain from enforcing the rights of other people against A?
Let me repeat this. Does your right to not be killed, does it mean that third parties should refrain from enforcing the rights of other people against you? If you have a right to not be killed and other people have rights that can get you killed, is there any obligation to not enforce the rights of these other people?
Let's translate it into the vaccine situation.
You have a right to not be killed by COVID. You have a right to not get infected by other people. These people have a right to not be vaccinated, to not get vaccinated.
But the right of these people to not get vaccinated means that they may well kill you. So is there an obligation to not enforce the rights of these other people? They have a right to not get vaccinated. Is there an obligation to delete this right, to negate it, to suppress it, just because it might get you killed?
If these people don't get vaccinated, you may end up being dead. Do you have a right just because you may end up being dead? Do you have a right to suppress the rights of third parties just because exercising these rights may make you very, very dead?
What if the only way to right wrongs committed by you against others was to kill you, for example? The moral obligation to right wrongs is about restoring the rights of the wronged.
So if you killed someone, you would get capital punishment.
In other words, the rights of other people to kill you, they are not universally proscribed. In other words, there are situations where other people have a right to kill you.
There are situations where the rights of other people are stronger, more powerful than your right to exist. There are situations in the moral calculus of duties and obligations. There are situations where certain rights of other people are more important, more sizable, substantial and considerable.
The rights of other people are such that your right to not be killed by these other people is of lesser standing, of lesser importance.
So, for example, the right to free speech, the right to free will, the right to free choice, are these rights more important than your right to not die of COVID?
I'm not sure what the answer is, honestly. These are very weighty, substantial and important rights. Are we justified in sacrificing them just in order to protect you from dying?
You could say, yeah, I don't want to die. I don't want to die. All these guys have to do is get a vaccine. That's all.
And then I'll go on leaving. I want to go on leaving.
They have no right to kill me.
But that's the wrong way of looking at it. Getting a vaccine against one's will is not about a vaccine. It's not about a vaccine. It's about free will. It's about free choice.
In other words, it's about freedom.
Many people, millions, tens of millions, had died for freedom, had sacrificed themselves for freedom. And here you are saying, my right to not get infected with COVID outweighs your right to exercise free choice, free will, and free speech.
Could anyone justify this calculus?
If your continued existence is predicated on the repeated and continuous violation of the rights of others, and these other people object to it, then maybe you must be killed if that is the only way to right the wrong and reassert the right of these other people.
Let me repeat this because it's very counterintuitive. If your continued existence, if your health, if not getting infected with COVID, is predicated on the repeated and continuous violation of the rights of others to not get vaccinated, and these other people object to the imposition of your right upon them.
In other words, these other people contest that they have an obligation to you, then maybe you should assume the risk of dying with COVID. If that is the only way to guarantee these other people's rights, why is your right to not get infected more important than their right to free will and free choice and free speech?
Freedom. Why their right to freedom is less important, less weighty, less substantial than your right to not get infected with COVID, or even to die of COVID? It's an open question.
Do you have a right to be saved? Does one have a right to have one's life saved?
The answer is there is no such a right. There is no moral obligation and no moral duty to save a life. If you stand on the beach and there's someone drowning right in front of your eyes, you do not have a moral or legal obligation or duty to save that person in the majority of jurisdictions.
Now, you may be considered an evil person, a disgusting person, a weak person, a coward. Yeah, you will be judged by society, no question about it. But you have no moral or ethical duty or obligation to save a life. That people believe otherwise demonstrates the model between the morally condemnable, the morally commendable, the morally desirable, and the morally decent.
In other words, people confuse ought with should. Ought is absolute, something you must do. End of story. Someone else has a right. You have an obligation. You cannot argue. It's not disputable. Should is something else.
There's a difference between the morally obligatory. There's a difference between the results of other people's rights, must, ought, and should. Would be nice if you were to behave this way, but it's not obligatory.
In some countries, the obligation to save a life is codified by the law of the land. But legal rights and obligations do not always correspond to moral rights and obligations, do not even give rise to them in many cases.
What about the right to save your own life? Do you have the right to save your own life?
Now, that sounds like a totally insane question, but bear with me. It actually is not.
One has a right to save one's life by exercising self-defense.
Now, we all agree. Someone is threatening your life. You have a right to self-defense.
Otherwise, by taking certain actions or by avoiding certain actions. So, there's a panoply of things you can do to save your life. You can strike back, can avoid doing some things, you can choose to do some things, etc.
Judaism, as well as other religious moral and legal systems, Judaism accepts that one has a right to kill a pursuer, a predator who knowingly and intentionally is bent on taking one's life. So, if someone comes at you with a knife, you have a right to kill him.
Hunting down Osama bin Laden in the wilds of Afghanistan and Pakistan was therefore morally acceptable, although not morally mandatory, by the way.
But does one have a right, does one have the right to kill an innocent person who unknowingly and unintentionally threatens to take one's life? Do you have a right to do anything let alone to kill someone who is threatening your life but doesn't know that he is threatening your life or doesn't believe that he is threatening your life? Do you have a right to go to such a person and stick a needle in his arm willy-nilly and without his consent? Do you have any right to violate the body of a person who unknowingly, unwittingly, unintentionally is threatening your life, however indirectly, for example, by infecting you with COVID?
An embryo sometimes threatens the life of the mother. Does she have a right to take the embryo's life? Does she has a right, does she have a right to terminate the pregnancy, to kill the fetus which is threatening her life? What about an unwitting carrier of a virus? Do we have the right to terminate her life?
Now vaccines are perceived by many people as life threatening. They are not. This is idiotic misinformation. Vaccines are not life threatening except in extremely, extremely rare cases. So extremely rare that they are hardly documented. Very few. A few hundred cases out of hundreds of millions of doses.
Everything bears a risk, crossing in the street is much more dangerous than getting a vaccine, by the way, statistically speaking. So, but people believe that vaccines are life threatening. So they believe that getting a vaccine is the equivalent of killing them.
Do you have a right to take someone's life because that person may carry a virus that may threaten your life? Is the question, probability A multiplied by probability B multiplied by probability C, etc.
Now we know that vaccines are not life threatening. So if you have this privilege information that vaccines are not life threatening, can you then violate the bodily integrity of another person because that other person unwittingly is threatening your life?
For that matter, do we have the right to terminate someone's life, even if there were nothing she could have done about it, had she known about her condition? Tie for it, marry.
So what if there is a carrier of COVID and that carrier can do nothing about it? Do we have the right to lock her down? Do we have the right to impose a vaccine on her? What rights do we have? What rights do we have against someone if that someone threatens our lives however indirectly?
Now, there's no clear answer. There is a big debate whether if someone threatens your life, you have a right to terminate that person's life. Some people say yes, some people say no, some philosophers say yes, some philosophers say no. Some jurisdictions do terminate the lives of people who threaten other people's lives. Some jurisdictions don't.
But vaccines are very far from terminating life. Vaccines are medication. Do you have the right to impose a medication on someone who harms other people, threatens to harm other people, harms other people unknowingly and unwittingly, or refuses to do anything about harming other people? Do you have a right to impose a medication upon such a person?
The answer is unequivocally yes. For example, we chemically castrate pedophiles. If someone has AIDS, active AIDS, and infects other people, they go to prison. And there they receive compulsory treatment. We force people to take medication when not taking medication can cause harm to third parties.
And so some people who refuse to take vaccines, they say I have a right to my life and I have a right to my body and I have a right to terminate my life and destroy my body. There are many ways to terminate one's life.
Self-sacrifice, avoidable martyrdom, engaging in life-risking activities, refusal to prolong one's life through medical treatment, euthanasia, overdosing, self-inflicted death that is a result of coercion, etc.
Like suicide, in all these activities, a foreknowledge of the risk of death is present, coupled with the acceptance of death. So does one have the right to take one's life? Does one have a right to say, I know that COVID is going to kill me because I'm 70 and I have diabetes, but I'm not going to take the vaccine. I'm willing to take on the risk. I'm willing to welcome death, to embrace it. Does one have a right to do this?
The answer is not as clear as it looks. The answer actually is it depends.
Certain cultures and societies encourage suicide. Both Japanese kamikaze and Jewish martyrs and Muslim, of course, Shaheen, they were extolled for their suicidal actions. Certain professionals, unknowingly life-threatening, soldiers, firemen, policemen, even medical doctors. Certain industries like the manufacture of armaments, cigarettes and alcohol, boost overall mortality rates. These are death industries.
In general, suicide is commended when it serves social ends, when it enhances the cohesion of the group, when it upholds its values, multiplies its wealth or defends the group from external and internal threats.
Social structures and human collectives, empires, countries, firms, bands, institutions, they often commit suicide. And this is considered to be a healthy pruning process.
So suicide came to be perceived as a social act.
The flip side of this perception is that life is communal property. It's not your property. It's a property of the community. Society has appropriated the right to foster suicide or to prevent it. Society condemns individual suicidal entrepreneurship. If you threaten to commit suicide, you will be committed. You will be confined to a mental asylum in a straitjacket. Society will do anything in its power to prevent you from committing suicide and even revive you and resuscitate you if you do succeed.
Suicide, according to Thomas Aquinas, is unnatural. It harms the community. It violates God's property rights.
In Judeo-Christian tradition, God is the owner of all souls. The soul is on deposit with you. The very right to use your soul for however short a period of time is a divine gift.
Suicide, therefore, amounts to an abuse of God's position, a rejection of God.
Blackstone, the venerable codifier of British law, concurred with this, the state according to Blackstone has a right to prevent and to punish suicide and attempted suicide.
Suicide is self-murder, he wrote, and therefore, a grave felony.
And in certain but analogistic cultures, this still is the case. You could go to prison for trying to commit suicide.
So what about the West, the Hollywood West? Do you have a right to commit suicide by refusing to get vaccine and taking on the risk of COVID, which may end up your life in about 3% of the cases? Do you have a right to gamble with your life by not getting vaccinated?
In short, the answer seems to be yes.
There's a big difference between gambling with your life and giving away your life, sacrificing your life. There's a minority of people who contract COVID, except in very old people, like above age 75. A minority of people die. A bigger minority end up in hospital and recover.
So not getting vaccinated is not the same like suicide. Suicide is a very high probability of ending one's life. Not getting vaccinated is gambling with one's life.
And we do it all the time. We cross streets. We take public transport. We fly in airplanes. We travel. We do many, many things, which may end badly. We go to bad neighborhoods or with bad people. We do drugs. We drink alcohol. We gamble with our lives all the time.
And no one would prohibit many of these activities. Actually, many of them are encouraged.
So gambling with your life is not the same as suicide.
What about the right to kind of maintain your life, maintain your free will and free choice, even at the expense of others?
In other words, does your right to free choice and free will, free decision making freedom, does your right to freedom come unbridled?
Never mind the cost to yourself and never mind the cost to others. There's a big debate about this.
This freedom is by far the founding value of everything. Absolutely everything you see around you in modern Western civilization and now global civilization is based on freedom. Where freedom is denied, life and property are gone. Freedom is the principle of life. It's more fundamental than even life itself in many ways.
So freedom warrants sacrifices.
But do you have the right to sacrifice others?
Well, depends. If what is asked of you is an undertaking or a sacrifice that challenges your essence, who you are, your identity, then maybe you have a right to sacrifice others. If what is asked of you is to take a medicine, even if this medicine were to have side effects, even if this medicine in exceedingly rare cases were to endanger your life, you do not have such a right to harm other people.
Your right to freedom goes hand in hand with the application of the right to freedom. Freedom is a big word and should be reserved for big issues.
Freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of the press. Not the freedom to not take aspirin or the freedom to not get vaccinated. This is to attach the word freedom to getting vaccinated. That is to reduce freedom. That is to abase and debase freedom. That is not about freedom. That's about defiance.
We should not confuse freedom and defiance. Defiance is a psychopathic trait.
So defiance, contumaciousness, rejection of authority, recklessness, these are all psychopathic behaviors.
And yes, refusing to get vaccinated with a track record of the vaccines that we have now with full knowledge, with hundreds of millions vaccinated already with no consequences now refusing to get vaccinated is nothing short of psychopathic.
And if you're a psychopath, there are ways to deal with you, for example, by taking away your freedom or by limiting your freedom or by constricting it to the point that would make life unbearable.
As a psychopath, you should be punished.
A year ago, you may have been justified as a vaccine skeptic because there was not enough information. Today, if you refuse to take a vaccine, you're a psychopath and you are endangering everyone's life and you're harming everyone because you're a psychopath and you should be treated as we do treat psychopaths everywhere.
And yes, I would escalate it to the maximum. I would not allow you if you're not vaccinated, I would not allow you to use public toilets. I would take away all your other freedoms and I would confine you to prison if need be.
As simple as that, because you're a public menace for no good reason.
The right to life supersedes in Western moral and legal systems, all other rights. It overrules the right to one's body, to comfort, to the avoidance of pain or to ownership of property.
Given such lack of equivocation, the number of dilemmas and controversies around the right to life is therefore surprising, including the controversy about vaccines.
When there is a clash between equally potent rights, for instance, the conflicting rights to life of two people, we can decide among them randomly by flipping a coin or casting dice. Alternatively, we can add and subtract rights in a somewhat macabre arithmetic or calculus.
And so, if the continued life of someone threatens someone else's life, assuming controversially that both of them have an equal right to life, we can decide to kill one of them.
By adding one right to another right, we can outweigh someone's right to life.
This is all part of the calculus.
Counterintuitively, there is a moral gulf between killing, taking a life and letting die, not saving a life. Not getting vaccinated is taking a life.
The right to not be killed is undisputed. There is no right to have one's life saved, but there is a right for you to not kill me. Where there is a right, and only when there is a right, there is an obligation, and so you have an obligation to get vaccinated. This is an obligation to not kill me. You don't have an obligation to save my life, but you have an obligation to not kill me.
And so, while there is an obligation to not kill, there is an obligation to save a life, don'ta life.
Don't confuse the two. There is a question of collateral damage. What should prevail?
The imperative to spare the lives of innocent civilians or the need to safeguard the lives of, for example, fighter pilots. Precision bombing puts such pilots at great risk.
Avoiding this risk usually results in civilian casualties, collateral damage, and yet we engage in precision bombing. We knowingly risk the lives of fighter pilots to avoid civilian casualties.
So, you are a fighter pilot. You need to get vaccinated, because otherwise you are risking the lives of civilians, innocent civilians, who could be your family members, your friends, your colleagues.
This moral dilemma is often solved, quote unquote, by applying, implicitly or explicitly, the principle of overriding affiliation.
We find the two faces of this principle in Jewish sacred texts.
One is close to oneself, the Talmud says, and your city's poor denizens come first with regards to charity.
Some moral obligations are universal. Some moral obligations have nothing to do with family, clan, tribe, friends, a football club. Some moral obligations are universal. Thou shalt not kill. They are related to one's position as a human being.
Other moral values and obligations arise from one's affiliations.
Yet there is a hierarchy of moral values and obligations. The ones related to one's position as a human being are there.
Now, sometimes we overrule these obligations by moral values and obligations related to one's affiliation.
So, when we say thou shalt not kill another human being, this is overruled by the moral obligation to kill for one's country or to kill one's enemies.
And the imperative thou shalt not steal is superseded by one's moral obligation to spy, for example, for one's nation.
Yes, all this exists, but on a societal level.
For societal goods, you have no right to kill other people or to harm other people or to risk other people as an individual. You have a right to do so for your society, nation, country, or collective, but not as an individual.
There is no such thing as self-consistent moral system, admittedly. Moral values and obligations often contradict each other and almost always conflict with universal moral values and obligations.
So, in the example above, killing for one's country and stealing for one's nation are moral obligations, yet they contradict the universal moral values of the sanctity of life and the universal moral obligation to not kill.
So, there is always a gray area and nothing is immutable and fundamental, but the right to life is almost as close as we get to an immutable moral principle.
You as an individual do not have a right to compromise the right to life. Only society does.
We have handed over, we have delegated violence, power, and the right to kill to our societies and nations.
As individuals, we don't have these rights anymore. Not getting vaccinated is re-assuming these rights, taking back the right to kill from the state and assuming it as an individual.
You have no right to kill. Never mind what mental gymnastics you are doing. Never mind what nonsensical arguments you are using.
You are, by refusing to get vaccinated, defiant, reckless, contumacious. You are a psychopath. End of story.
Is life a kind of property? It is not treated as such. Possessive pronouns aside, one is not permitted by law or by faith to dispose of one's life at will, let alone other people's life. One is not allowed to get rid of another person's life. Even when one is that other person's custodian or guardian, in many places, even when the party to be deprived is an embryo, life is treated more as a deposit than a gift. It is bestowed upon us, unbidden, and should terminate only unexpectedly, naturally, involuntarily.
Indeed, many believe that life never truly ends, that it merely changes form and reverts to whence it came.
I'm not one of these people.
I don't adhere to these delusional beliefs.
But one thing is for sure. I'm asking you for very little when I'm asking you to get vaccinated. Very, very little indeed.
Your refusal to do so may take away my life, so that makes you my enemy and pursuer and in psychological terms makes you a psychopath. And I am totally entitled to use any tool at my disposal as an individual in a society to make your life hell and coerce you into getting vaccinated.
You had been warned.