I hear her main concern as being about bodily autonomy, not concerns about the vaccine per se. Whether the vaccine was fine or not, we could still think people shouldn’t be forced to take it.

The reply to this always seems to be: yeah, but we require smallpox and polio, so that can’t be right. However, there’s little argument as to whether those are similar or different—there’s lots of relevant ways in which they’re different.

Particularly in feminist bioethics, there’s a lot of “my body, my choice”; I wonder why that’s not meant to generalize to instances like this as well?

Anti-vaxxers may argue that employer vaccine mandates infringe their autonomy. But there is an infringement of autonomy if an employer requires workers to share an indoor workspace without imposing a vaccine mandate. Such an employer forces workers to share a workspace with unvaccinated coworkers. That is a significant burden on vaccinated workers, since breakthrough infections are possible.

Faced with competing autonomy claims, employers should do what’s best for their workers’ health and safety. They should mandate vaccination.

I am reposting my exact same comment trying to fix the italics through the system’s menu, in case my original comment that awaits approval will not be recognized by the system as having italics in it (i have not commented here since long )

Hello everyone, hello Prof Hamilton
 
This is an attempt to contribute to the thread here:
 
https://dailynous.com/2021/09/09/philosophy-professor-claims-to-be-threatened-with-dismissal-for-refusing-covid-19-vaccine/#comment-426476Copied%20to%20clipboard!
 
 
I am not a philosopher, but I like analytic philosophy, and the issue of the mandatory vaccines is something that has defined my life the last 2 years (I was  anticipating it in horror from the beginning of Covid, I am a conscientious objector to vaccines). I found your analysis in response to the point of commenter (Dr? Prof?) Dennis Smith very useful conceptually and I was wondering whether we could improve upon it with a few considerations I have in mind. Everyone please keep in mind that, me not being a philosopher, my attempts at theorizing will necessarily be as analytically defective as your students’, so I am warning you in case you don’t feel like spending time on such writing. Commenter Dennis Smith said “<i>She [Prof Julie Ponesse]  is not forced to get vaccinated, she just can’t work there if she isn’t</i>. One of Mr Dennis Smith’s tacit points sounds like being that it is illegitimate to exploit the rhetorical force of the term “being forced” in the case of coerced vaccinations. You rightly, to my mind, point out that <i> “What we have here is others imposing non-natural and non-necessary consequences for choices. These can be accurately described using the language of coercion and force. When I am presented with the choice of “your wallet or your life,” it is (absent explicit stipulation) accurate to say that I am being forced to give up my wallet and (absent explicit stipulation) inaccurate to say that I am not forced to hand over my wallet, I simply have to incur some consequences if I choose to keep my wallet.”</i>.
 
 The jargon in the literature of vaccine ethics  seems to be drawing a distinction between various coercive policies by reserving the term “coercion” only when the State makes the omission of getting vaccinated a crime or something similarly punitive, and reserving the term “mandatory” for cases of more “moderate” interventions by the State –(“moderate” in the sense of being felt as less onerous by a reasonable person? that’s how I interpret the following paragraph from philosopher Daniel Haliday):
 
 https://www.publicethics.org/post/should-a-covid-19-vaccine-be-mandatory
 
   
<i> “We might first wonder exactly what is meant by “as mandatory as you can make it [the vaccine]”. Really there are a range of different ways in which governments can use their powers to get citizens to do things, including receive a vaccine. The most radical approach would be to make it a crime to not get vaccinated, backed by a threat of legal punishment. Some countries have gone so far as to issue fines to citizens found to have failed to get vaccinated against certain diseases. A more moderate approach, typically preferred by governments where existing vaccines are concerned, is to withhold certain benefits until evidence of vaccination can be provided. For example, a condition of getting one’s child placed in a state childcare facility in Australia is to provide evidence that they have been immunised against the various diseases for which there are established vaccines. In the literature on vaccine ethics, it is customary to talk of ‘coercive’ vaccine policy when the approach is of the more radical punitive sort. The term ‘mandatory’ is often used to refer to the more moderate practice of withholding benefits, though this still counts as coercion insofar as it involves the government attaching credible threats to vaccine refusal. (In saying “there are no compulsory vaccines in Australia” the Prime Minister’s remarks avoided explicitly ruling out this weaker approach.). Whether a radical or moderate approach is justified in the case of a COVID vaccine depends partly on what the status quo is like in the country in question … “</i>
 
 
By the way ,the (clearly mistaken, to my mind) tacit position of the Prime Minister of Australia, and the general idea that, as long as you have a way out of the bad consequences of the action threatened by the State, you do not count as being forced, is elucidated picturesquely by former Yale Professor of Preventive Medicine (and my favourite go-to source for evidence-based takes on healthful diet and Preventive Medicine) in an example with acquiring a driver’s license: you can choose to not acquire it, but you have to suffer the consequences of not being allowed to drive which were avoidable if you had chosen otherwise:
 
 
 https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/nature-vaccine-reticence-david-l-katz-md-mph-facpm-facp-faclm/
 
 
<i> “The closest thing to a cogent expression of the opposition [to getting vaccinated]  would seem to be a claim of violated civil liberties. That is a non sequitur, however. I am aware of no mandate, no proposal for a mandate, and no argument in favor of a proposal for a mandate- to vaccinate hermets. If you want to stay where you live, by your unvaccinated self, you are, so far as I know, at complete liberty to do so. All mandates pertain to public places, and communal interactions. I am aware of no mass opposition …  to driver’s licenses. You are not obligated to get a driver’s license. You can be both an unvaccinated and unlicensed hermet, and no one will object. You can even drive a car without a license- as long as you do so on your own property. The license requirement is part of a quid pro quo: if you want to use public roadways, then you must be licensed.”</i>
 
I think, Prof Hamilton, that your example with the thief who threatens “your wallet or your life” clearly defeats the idea that there can be no forcing once you have a way out of a threat. In fact, the Mafioso example of “an offer you cannot refuse” (1)  is a similar instance of being presented with an alternative whose consequences are so onerous that it is almost impossible to accept the alternative, thus making the feeling of having been forced very relevant. And I think we may be able to do better in countering this type of argument by making a thought experiment with the thief threatening to shoot one’s child in the knee – so that the harsh consequences are firstly experienced by someone other than the agent. We surely would want to talk about “being forced” in such cases (an analogous threat  being  Dr Fauci’s condemning the agent’s daughter to a life without formal education if the agent does not get the vaccine), even though we do have a way out (by getting vaccinated) and even though we are not the primary target of the threatened harm.
 
Now, there is a moral difference between making an omission to get vaccinated a crime, and making a benefit conditional on vaccination, but the differences seem to be a matter of degree, and some benefit retractions might be impermissible too.  This moral  difference most naturally comes to my mind as somehow dependent on/relevant to  a) how onerous the threat by the State is <i>felt</i> by the agent to be, and secondarily  b) how warranted the experience of coercion/forcing is (subjectively or objectively warranted, my analytic thinking here is hazy more than my usual).  
 
Dr Hamilton, you rightly cut through all this to go to the gist of the matter in a more general way, I quote you:
 
<i> “What actually matters isn’t whether she [Prof Ponesse] accurately frames her situation as one of coercion or force, but whether it is legitimate for those others to impose these consequences upon her for these specific choices. Imprisoning and torturing someone for criticizing the government is clearly an illegitimate consequence to impose on another for that particular choice.”</i>
 
It is here that I would like to ask you if you see something analytically useful in the following take of mine: as a vaccine recalcitrant I have been time and again finding myself exasperated at the daily verbal assaults by the media and officials (the Prime Minister of England, probably the country with the most old-fashionedly polite population in Europe, publicly called “antivaxxers” “nuts”. The Brits typically don’t talk in public in such aggressive ways, this was a clear signal by the British elites that those like me who are vaccine recalcitrant and who reside in the UK are fair game of verbal mobbing. In my country things are not that bad but they are bad, mainly in the form of casting us as free-riders (I am not attempting to free ride because I am offering to be deliberately infected even under State supervision so as to get the immunity sought for the sake of contributing to herd immunity) or as selfish in that we putatively do not care about the harm we may inflict upon others (but I threaten no one if I get deliberately infected and then self-quarantine). Seeing the absence of the position of people like me in public discourse I am consumed by a feeling of injustice and I instinctively find refugee in moral talk expressive of the idea “my body, my choice”, which by the way was a long-held, and publicly stated, principle of mine, I value bodily autonomy and, more generally, my liberty as an indispensable part/necessary condition of my well-being. I am not a market libertarian, I was always uneasy about libertarian views on taxes, but I had to tolerate their beliefs on what seems to me (maybe mistakenly, I haven’t read the relevant literature on egalitarianism) to be grounds of consistency: If I don’t’ want the State to prohibit my brother to marry his boyfriend or to prohibit my sister from having an abortion, or my trans daughter to get surgery whenever she wants it if she wants it, or to coerce me to get vaccinated, I felt I had to be consistent in calling for State non-interference in those issues that mattered to me (abortions, gay marriage, trans rights), a consistency that dictated, to my mind, maybe mistakenly,  that I not demand from the Sate too much taxation on the rich – leaving the whole thing vague in my head. But I am not a market libertarian at heart, I wouldn’t mind seeing USSR style redistribution tomorrow morning across the planet, my lifestyle is degrowth incarnate, return-to-Nature and all of that, and I was living it before I even knew that the term “degrowth” exists. So I guess I can’t count as a libertarian in the current usage of the term but I want to keep the bodily-autonomy libertarianism and along with it the term “Libertarianism”. After all, between property and body, the latter must definitely be normatively weightier in its pro tanto inviolability  even in the minds of the most fervent market libertarians – or so I thought. It’s sad that we live on a planet that the State feels comfortable with messing up with people’s bodies but not with their taxes. All this introduction, Prof Hamilton, was meant to give you a picture of the inner world of some of us vaccine recalcitrants – those who are into the Green parts of society, the pro-Nature parts (organic foods sites, environmentalism, wellness), usually systematically misinformed by their leaders with outright and extravagant vaccine misinformation (that vaccines are not effective is a standard mantra), but all the same disposed to this laissez faire mindset re their bodies; these people exist, they have Nature-based intuitions re natural lifestyles and re the right to bodily freedom but they are silent in the public discourse because they are marginalized by the mainstream as their  brains are full of extravagant anti-vaccine misinformation. Anyway, the idea of bodily autonomy keeps popping up in my mind, and keeps popping up under various verbal guises in everyday layman’s discourse I overhear re vaccines, and it popped up in Prof Ponnesse’s video, so it is something, I think, that should not be analytically ignored. I would also add, taking a page from commenter JTD’s excellent (to my mind) analysis of Prof Ponesse’s proferred principle of bodily autonomy, that here we have a particular instance of violation of bodily autonomy that cuts as deep as it gets: it is violation of bodily integrity via forced administering of potentially hazardous substances within the body – it being understood that forced tatoos are included because some ink gets “ingested” by the body, and it is bad for the body to have ink circulating in it. My tentative description of the harm excludes forced consumption of salad (as another commenter said) and it excludes forced injections with water – water and salads are not hazardous at all, they are certainly  violations, but are not as morally serious as the forced ingestion or incorporation of potentially harmful substances. The plastic denture in my mouth is indeed a harm because I will ingest particles of plastic, but if the employer provides me with a marble one, or a wooden one there is no bodily integrity violation of the specific type of interest to me in this discussion. Here is commenter JTD’s excellent additions to the required amendments of the bodily violation principle that Prof Ponesse offered, with whose final conclusion re the cost-benefit comparisons I disagree as it is stated:
 
 
https://dailynous.com/2021/09/09/philosophy-professor-claims-to-be-threatened-with-dismissal-for-refusing-covid-19-vaccine/#comment-426512Copied%20to%20clipboard!
 
 
So, Prof Hamilton,  I would frame your more general point in a bit more fine-grained fashion, here is how I would tentatively put it: what matters is not whether we frame the real violation of the vaccine recalcitrant’s bodily integrity with hazardous substances as an instance of her having been forced, which she indeed has been, but whether it is legitimate for those others to impose these consequences upon her as a response to these specific  antivaccine choices. Do you see it as adding to the discourse? A benefit of it that I see is that it allows me to ask those who call us foolish or conspiracy theorists to not allow their tacit dehumanization of us to drown in their minds the fact that the violation of anyone’s bodily integrity through forced ingestion of potentially hazardous substances warrants pro tanto regret, regret in proportion to the receiving agent’s perceived onerousness of the violation irrespective of whether the perceptions of the receiver are warranted, a fortiori so in case they are warranted. In other words, violations of bodily integrity of the specific sort  do not seem to me to be fungible (2):
 
https://www.philosophyetc.net/2012/02/separateness-of-persons.html
 
 
This does not mean the violations are always unjustified. But it means that they should be perpetrated, if appropriate, with the right state of mind, which means there must be a realization that you are seriously harming some of the vaccine recalcitrants, if only for the sake of the greater good. At the end of the day, the majority of the vaccine recalcitrant are people who are afraid. Fear, even the irrational fear of, say, an arachnophobe, should not be seen contemptuously. Now, why do I see this description of the harms (i.e. <i>ingestion</i> (or absorption) of potentially hazardous substances) as the most appropriate? Because it appeals to God knows what is ringing in my lizard brain when I see the threat of someone’s injecting my body with potentially hazardous substances. There must surely be something relevant to our evolutionary make up that makes us so touchy when we perceive a substance we have to “incorporate” in our bodies as dangerous (this is scientifically uninformed empirical speculation of mine). True, I am more sensitive to this harm than the average vaccine recalcitrant, but the others’ fear too must be tracking something similar to mine. By the way there are others who are far more sensitive than I am, and warrantedly so, albeit for different reasons – some Black vaccine recalcitrants, anyone? Terrell has (veridically) heard from an older relative that the US government had experimented on Black people, or something to that effect. He has also lived his whole life in abject poverty, with all the bitterness that such poverty inescapably brings into one’s heart. The result is an atavistic fear, much like mine albeit for different reasons,  of what the government wants to inject his body with. How can one justify vaccine coercion to him? And if in his attempt to make sense of what is lurking behind the sudden urge of the government  to vaccinate him he forms a theory that falls under the label “conspiracy theory”, is it really warranted to talk about him in the dismissive way of “oh, antivaxxer, I should have known he would be a conspiracy theorist too”? If anyone has an issue with conspiracy theorists, why not track in her statements this particular feature, i.e. the production of conspiracy theories, or the disposition to fall for them, instead of conflating it with vaccine recalcitrance? Anyway, Prof Hamilton, I was trying to paint a picture of some of the vaccine recalcitrant’s specific concerns in the hope of maybe adding something ameliorating to your initial take. My own take is that the fears of the vaccine recalcitrant, whether warranted or not, are worthy of concern simply on account of their phenomenal feel: fear feels equally bad, whether warranted or unwarranted, so long as it is sincere. A fortiori fears pertinent to something protected even by Human Rights Law (the pro tanto right not to be forced to bodily violation for medical reasons). This aspect is missing from all the public discussions about “antivaxxers”. Moving a step further, if the fears happen to be warranted they may be justifying the recalcitrance, I suggest. But I’d better stop here to wait for your take if you have the time to respond.
 
FOOTNOTES
1: “An offer he can’t refuse”: I sincerely hope this counterexample, a cultural depiction of Prof Hamilton’s point, puts an end to those attempts to cast us (vaccine recalcitrant) as not having been forced, and hence as not having been harmed.
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeldwfOwuL8
 
https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/an-offer-he-cant-refuse.html
 
 
2: I am quoting from Prof Richard Chappell’s excellent blog, which is a fantastic source of learning for non-philosophers like me interested in philosophical Ethics and thinking analytically about it, but I do not share the environmental positions he tacitly supports in this post (philosopher Travis Rieder, who Prof Chappell mentions, is my type of philosopher on environmental issues, judging from the abstracts of his philosophical papers.