"Je pense, donc je suis" which is French for "I think, so I am", comes from Rene Descartes' 1637 work, the "Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences"; and I think is the logical point of the beginning of The Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is that period of history where we begin to get our modern conception of the ideas of progress, liberty, the primacy of our senses as the sources of knowledge, the beginning of the modern notion of toleration and the rise of individual liberty and individual reason.
A series of bloody revolutions happened, which includes the decapitation of the English King by the Puritans, the Treaty Of Westphalia which gives us the idea of the modern nation state, and the initial violent separation of church and state which also includes the codification of the rules by which law is made; which results in the beginning of constitutional government.
As much as I think that science is a sensible ideal worth pursuing, I also think that placing individual liberty at the absolute centre of our philosophical kosmos has wreaked its own brand of havoc. It has set two giant ideas up in conflict with each other: being the rights of the individual and the obligations of the state. I tend to look at this through the lens of economics; which is why Keynes and Hayek, Von Mises and Marx, Smith and Say, and Piketty and Menger can all sit on my bookshelf quite happily.
What does any of this have to do with vaccination? Yet again we come down to the wishes of an individual with individual human rights and the obligations that the state has. There is also the issue of what kind of control each has. Clearly the Government has both the constitutional right and the legal ability to demand compulsory vaccination and it also has the imperative of responsibility to do so, even though as yet it has not, but where does the individual sit amidst this. If Government is itself populated by monsters, then aren't the products of said governance therefore going to be at least on some level, monstrous? If individuals are all monsters without exception, then aren't the products of their own individual liberty and freedoms expressed, also going to be monstrous?
"The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others."
- John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)
If Mad Jack McMad, the winner of last year's "Mr. Madman" competition is standing in the middle of the town square and swinging his fists around like a madman, then no actual battery occurs unless his fists come into contact with someone. The tort of battery doesn't actually need for contact to be made though, because the intent of causing harm is present. However, if Mad Jack McMad is genuinely mad and has no intention of causing injury, there still may be a case for him to answer and there is still the underlying responsibility of the sheriff to prevent injury.
The great uncountable general public has an interest in enforcing law upon someone if there may be injury caused by deliberate action or even failure to take action. People should not in general (except possibly by absolution of the state for military personnel in times of war) injure other people, nor through inaction allow others to come to harm.
The central lie of those people who want to find objections to being vaccinated is that because it is their body, they have an individual choice and are therefore not accountable to anyone else. This is a similar argument to the abortion debate but the two are not congruous because unlike whether or not someone is allowed to or not have an abortion, society isn't generally endangered through someone's individual choice or exercise of liberty. As far as I am aware, pregnancy is not a transmissible disease.
Society can not generally punish someone for failing to take proper care of themselves but where there is either definite damage or the risk of definite damage, to other individuals or the public, we move out of the realm of individual liberty and into the realm of both morality and the law, where society actually has a legitimate claim over an individual's body.
It is therefore just that where through the deliberate choice of inaction actually causes the risk of others coming to harm (when clearly an individual has made a choice to roll the dice and let themself come to harm), then where that deliberate choice of inaction is prejudicial to the interests of others, that the individual should be accountable, and may be should be subject either to social or to legal punishments, if society is of opinion that the one or the other is necessary for its protection.
The Enlightenment might have set us on a path towards progress, individual liberty and individual reason but it seems to have made the base assumption that people are intrinsically good and that their behavior can be changed and improved by appealing to those things.
Unfortunately, the centre of the universe is about 19mm behind people's corneas and people tend to notice what is immediate, over and above what is collectively good. If the first word of The Enlightenment is 'I' then an unfettered push towards individualism places the immediate concerns of the individual over the welfare of others. Vaccination which relies upon the network effect to be the most effective, actually forces us to directly arrive at that issue of whether our deliberate choice for inaction causes others to come to harm.
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