Vaccination ethics #97

Can the state force us to get vaccinated?

Photo by CDC on Unsplash

Vaccination Ethics

Welcome back! Two days ago, I had my Covid-19 vaccination, and to celebrate the event, I thought I’d write up an overview of some of the philosophical issues related to vaccinations. So whether you’re debating these things with yourself or others, you will surely find something of interest in this post and the coming posts on the topic.

While I was writing this, the topic expanded under my hands, producing more and more questions that needed to be discussed and answered. This is why I didn’t post it last Wednesday, as I had announced, and why now I’m talking of a series of posts rather than a single one. So let us today first look at what the main issues with vaccination ethics are and how the state can justify forcing us to vaccinate. And in the coming posts, we will then, one by one, discuss other aspects of the problem.

The questions

You would think that the main issue with vaccines would be: can we force people to take them or not? But when you look a little into the literature on vaccine ethics, it turns out that it is a surprisingly rich field of philosophical inquiry, and it covers issues from all major moral theories, reaching into world politics, poverty, the role of the state and the morality of taxation and car seat belts.