Choosing: Consciously and With Conscience
On Freedom, Vaccines, and an Ethics of Being in the World
We’re in a line for a Covid-19 booster shot. Dozen or so before us. A good sign. People are getting their shots. Building and maintaining immunity. // Numbers matter. It’s not about me. It’s about a “building a wall of immunity,” says Dr. Elie Berbari, chair of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Mayo Clinic, that “could prevent transmission and prevent us from these repeated peaks that we've been dealing with over the last year and a half during this pandemic.” //
Delta complicated things. Omicron creates more uncertainty. There are questions about whether the vaccine will stem spread of new variants. But we that’s no excuse. // The vaccine mitigates illness. Lessens the likelihood of infection. Prevents the immunized “from becoming seriously ill or dying of COVID-19.” This is what the Mayo Clinic says. The vaccine contains the spread. Safeguards neighbors, family, friends. Makes spread less likely, lessening the chance of replication, “which allows it to mutate and possibly become more resistant to vaccines.” // Stemming transmission is key to limiting variants. To controlling them and dimming their power. The vaccine, as one science writer writes, the vaccine creates immunities that starve the virus of opportunities to mutate and create new variations. //
I get all this, a colleague tells me. He is vaccinated. Will get the booster. But he is not getting his kids vaccinated and questions government vaccine mandates. // He believes in personal responsibility. Tells me that he’s worried the vaccine will mask symptoms among some. Allow for surreptitious spread. Believes it is a choice. He’s not a right-winger. Not a libertarian or vaccine skeptic. His concerns, he says, are practical. //
Others make similar claims. What goes into our bodies should be our choice, they say. We can’t ignore their concerns, but they display a narrow conception of freedom that parallels the arguments on the right about choice. // Yes, freedom is about making choices. But not in a vacuum. It requires that we make choices consciously and with conscience. // “Making them consciously” means being fully aware. Understanding the choices at their core. “Making them with conscience” means making choices that acknowledge our humanity. Our connections. Our responsibilities to ensure that others have the same freedoms we desire. //
Simone DeBeauvoir, the French existentialist, argues that we can only achieve freedom by understanding our facticity. Our being in the world. That we take account of others. Respect others. That we not deny that we exist among men and women, among others. We are not solitary beings. Not purely individual. Freedom, she says, may begin with the individual, but individualism is not enough. Freedom means little if there is no one to share it with. If others are prevented from accessing it. If our freedom makes others less free. //
The right declares “my body, my choice.” Co-opts and distorts a pro-choice slogan. Vaccination, they say, is an individual choice. Whether to be vaccinated can only be determined at the individual level. The only thing that matters in this debate is whether the vaccine is right for me. Whether it will benefit me. // Individual freedom and choice, in this case, equates with disregard for others. For those among whom we live and work, and with whom we share this Earth. // Framing this as purely a personal choice erases the “good,” breaks our bonds with others, and declares that others’ freedoms are less valued than our own. The social good, the broad civilizational good, is demeaned. Any sense of equality is lost, and we are forced into a libertarian minefield in which power determines whose freedoms matter. // Power, in this case, is economic. The individuals with the means to isolate, to protect themselves from exposure, will do so, whether they get vaccinated or not. The individuals who cannot, whose jobs are deemed essential, who work in healthcare or education, have no choice but to risk exposure, to go to work, to aid those who are ill or to deliver the packages and stock the shelves to keep our economy running. // Science is not religion. Should not be dogmatic. Needs to be part of a fluid and ever evolving sense of knowledge. Skepticism is a valuable part of the scientific process. Of the philosophical debate. Of politics. But we know vaccines mitigate against spread. They minimize illness. You may catch the virus, but it likely will be less severe. Less transmissible. //
Ethically, says Kriszta Sajber, assistant professor of philosophy at University of Michigan-Dearborn, this creates an imperative to act. “When someone medically eligible with access to vaccinations does not accept a vaccine, they reserve to themselves the right to harm others,” she says. But there is no “right to harm others” and, therefore ethically, “no one has a ‘right’ to refuse a vaccine.” //
This ethics ties to the larger ethics of democratic governance. Christopher Beem, managing Director of the McCourtney Institute of Democracy at Penn. State University, sees the construction of the American government as designed to unite individuals. To get past “mere selfishness.” // Humans, he says, tend toward the selfish. Toward a self-interest that places the self above others. This, he says, “can often be correct,” but it also is “still deeply inadequate.” //
Labor organizing may begin with the demands of individual workers at individual work places, but it can only succeed when these individuals come together. When they begin to see themselves and their fellow workers as part of a larger fabric. At individual workplaces and among the society writ large. It’s why the most effective labor unions organize beyond their members and look to the community. //
Beem does not focus on labor writes, but his conception of a “free society” as one that “demands more of its citizens than mere selfishness. “Political institutions” — unions, guilds, representative governments — “can help direct and mitigate the effects of this natural human inclination to selfishness.” // The vaccine choice, he says, must reach beyond the narrow, “my body, my choice” argument we are hearing from right-wing vaccine opponents. “Throughout history, America’s leaders have recognized that without concern for others, without the highest tradition of cooperative national action, democracy is in peril.” And what is democracy but a system that ensures individual freedoms while also situating each of us within a larger community. // It’s why he declares those “who decide not to get vaccinated” that “their actions are not just selfish, they are un-American.” //
This may seem extreme. It may seem to violate the common notion of freedom we have erected across our history. I am sensitive to this. We should not ignore that mandates raise difficult questions. Raise issues of coercion. Of state power over the individual. But we need to be careful not to prop up a caricature of the state in place of democratic government. Been makes this clear. //
In the United States, in other democratic and republican nations, the state is composed of the people. It is the people. It is only when the state violates assumes power above and beyond what is granted to it by the populace, when it engages in force, when to borrow the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr’s argument, it “degrades human personality” and relegates individuals to the “status of things.” // Mandates, some would argue, do this. They erase the possibility of choice and force individuals to submit to outside demands. //
This reading, however, ignores the communitarian aspect of King’s definition. King writes that a “just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself,” and that can be seen as in the best interest of all. // “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny,” King writes, defending the right to protest, to insert himself in the affairs of Birmingham despite not being from Birmingham. “Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” //
King’s philosophy occupies the space between the individual and the community. Serves as a link. He presents an argument in favor of disobedience and protest that, instead of opposing the individual and the collective, demonstrates how they are intertwined. // Freedom, in King’s view, is expansive and can only exist in a world where all is free. Where the well-being of all is paramount. Freedom and justice are connected. //
King was Baptist. Devout. Like Thomas Merton, who describes himself as a Christian Existentialist. DeBeauvoir, Sartre, Camus — all atheists. All shared a sense of “being in the world.” Of placing individual freedom within the context of humanity itself. To be free is to be alive. To be aware. To be part of something larger than one’s self. //
Viewed this way, as Dr. Sajber might argue, places the self above all others. “If we know the conditions under which we can create herd immunity, what actions are ethical to take for each of us individually?” she asks. “When people approach this from their individual perspective, they tend to forget that the ‘herd’ can also come together to protect the individual.” //
In this way, vaccination is not a matter of individual freedom, but of collective freedom, with each of us having a responsibility to protect others by becoming vaccinated, and by demanding vaccine programs that do a better job of reaching into underserved communities and by making sure that every nation has an adequate supply of vaccines. // All of us have a responsibility to work together to create “herd” immunity, to ensure that we build the metaphorical wall that can ensure safety and freedom for all. //