Is vaccination a personal choice?

Like last year, I have a very front-loaded teaching schedule, so posts may be a bit more sporadic between now and Christmas. Still, I'll try to post the odd piece of interest when I get chance. Here is another that I may use in my classes this semester.

West Brom and Republic of Ireland footballer Callum Robinson hasn't been vaccinated. He is reported as saying "I think it's your personal choice and my choice at this moment in time, I haven't been vaccinated".

The Football Association of Ireland concur, saying that they "respect and accept the right of all individuals to make a personal choice on Covid-19 vaccination".

I'm not clear why this 'personal choice' is seemingly accepted here without question. While bodily integrity is at stake, the decision is not what might be called (in Millian terms) 'purely self-regarding' because someone who is not vaccinated may pose a greater risk to other people. This could justify intervention.

Jessica Flanigan makes this point in a 2014 article, where she argues that “Non-vaccination has been mistakenly characterized as a personal, self-regarding medical choice…. people are entitled to make self-regarding medically inadvisable decisions…. But religious and other reasons of conscience cannot justify practices that impose risks on the community”.

 

To be sure, Flanigan doesn't (so far as I'm aware) support forced vaccinations. So, there is indeed a sense in which she thinks people do have a right to refuse vaccination. But this is not a right to refuse vaccination without suffering consequences. She thinks they could (and should) be penalised through fines or certain restrictions on employment.

 

I think I'll be using some, if not all, of these quotations in my lecture slides, possibly in multiple modules.

Down's syndrome and abortion

I'll be covering both abortion and reproductive freedom/selection on my ethics of public policy module this coming semester, so this recent story about Heidi Crowter's High Court challenge is a useful case study.

I'm not a lawyer, but the idea that the law ought to permit abortion in Down's cases, but not others, does seem discriminatory. Of course, one way that could be avoided would be to allow abortion in all cases, rather than in none.

 

The judges not that "not every family would react the same way and the ability to provide for a disabled child would 'vary significantly'" but the same could be said about, for instance, having a girl or indeed having a child at all.

Pixabay

I've not updated for a while as we were away for a bit. I took quite a lot of photos during our travels, so I decided to upload some of them to Pixabay. This is a site that I've used for a while, because pictures can freely be used even for commercial purposes, without attribution, which is ideal for lecture slides. I figured that, having used pictures from this site, I should give something back by uploading some of my own.

 

I'm still figuring things out over there. I'm not a professional photographer, so my pictures aren't as good as many of the others on the site. Still, it may be a handy way for me to organise photos that I may want to use again, even if no one else does. If you're interested, my pictures can be found on my profile here.

Layne Staley Day

 Today marks the second anniversary of Layne Staley Day. (I use this phrasing because it seems the day was a one-off in 2019, rather than an annual thing.) In any case, here's a tribute:

Vaccine incentives

Long-term readers may recall my interest in incentive payments (click the label for more examples). I was interested to see the recent proposals from Australia to pay people (AU $300) to get Covid vaccines.

It's not an original proposal. Similar ideas have been mooted in the US and defended by academics such as Julian Savulescu. Still, while some think that this would be value for money, the Australian government seem sceptical of cash incentives, so we may never know how effective it would prove.

Slave labour?

According to Robert Nozick, income taxes are (on a par with) forced labour, since a portion of someone's work time is spent working for the benefit of others.

Now John Lydon - a.k.a. Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols - has gone a step further. He claims that an agreement between band members that allows a majority of them to licence is like slave labour.

I'm not sure exactly how this claim is supposed to stand up. He's not being forced to work, even if the results of his former work are being used in ways that he disagrees with.

In any case, it's interesting - from a decision theory perspective - to see him objecting to majority rule and insisting that agreements ought to be unanimous.

A unanimity rule would also give each band member equal power in the abstract. However, it is non-neutral, in that it favours non-licensing over licensing, which may be more in accordance with the preferences of some members than others.

Is self-isolation a political obligation?

Political obligation has often been characterised as an obligation to obey the laws of the state, but this understanding has been challenged by a number of theorists who have argued that it ought instead to be conceived of as something like an obligation to promote the common good of one's community - something that may, ordinarily, require obedience to the law but that might also require other things and even, in some cases, perhaps breaking the law.

I was just reading a BBC article about the 'pingdemic' - that is, the rising number of people being told to self-isolate. Like a number of other government 'guidelines', it seems that this is not a legal obligation:

So, according to the traditional understanding of political obligation - which focuses only on obeying the laws - complying with this instruction or request would have nothing to do with our political obligations.

 

However, I suspect that many people think that there would be reasons (not necessarily overriding ones) to isolate and that these would in some sense be political. Certainly, they could be justified by a number of traditional arguments for political obligations, such as a duty of fair play, associative obligations, or Samaritan duties.

 

Indeed, in this other piece, Mr Scully elaborates:

This looks like a political, if not a legal, obligation - and a useful example for my first-year module later in the year.

And freedom for all...?

Today, 19th July 2021, most of the pandemic-related legal restrictions in England are lifted. That is, we're finally out of lockdown, with work and shops returning to normal(ish) and masks a matter of 'personal responsibility' rather than government mandate. This has already come to be known as 'freedom day' - although even this terminology is another piece of propaganda. 

 

There are different views on whether or not it's wise to relax restrictions at this point, given rising numbers of cases. And Frances Ryan has pointed out, in the Guardian, that freedom for the majority may come at the expense of vulnerable groups. What particularly caught my eye though is this piece pointing out that allowing one person the freedom NOT to social distance can conflict with someone else's desire TO maintain social distance.

 

This, of course, is just a new example of conflicting rights. For instance, if I want to meditate quietly in my room, but my neighbour wants to practice drumming in hers, then we can't both get what we want. If she's allowed to play her drums, then my ability to meditate is frustrated. On the other hand, if I can somehow enforce silence, then her desires are frustrated.

I know that there are various treatments of this out there in the literature - I think Sen discusses such cases somewhere - though I don't know of any simple answers. 

 

The authors of the above piece claim that "We cannot be free to restrict the freedom of others" but, as my last example shows, this may be impossible. Given the conflicting preference, any law that we adopt will involve frustrating or restricting one of the individuals. This applies to the social distancing case, as well as the drumming one.

It seems that we cannot avoid some choice as to whose freedom should have priority. The authors suggest that we should protect the freedom to social distance, ending with the remark that "We should all hold dominion over our own bodies and our own health: no-one should have the power to choose what we are happy to subject our own bodies to or the risks we are willing to take with our own health."

 

Perhaps this is the right answer, but it doesn't seem to be the right reason. How close I am to you, or you are to me (the other side of the same coin), is not simply a choice over my own body. There's no obvious reason why I should be the one to make that choice, any more than you. 

 

Nor, of course, can we say that the choice should be whichever of us wants the most distance, since one of us may have an unreasonable aversion to social contact. Suppose I want you not to come within 100m of me. Absent some particular circumstances (for instance, justifying a restraining order) this would be too much of an imposition on your freedom.

Joint Sessions talks

The annual Joint Sessions conference is taking place this weekend. It's online, unsurprisingly, but also much of it - all the open sessions - is actually asynchronous, with talks pre-recorded and available for viewing and commenting at any time. No need to worry about parallel panels clashing but, on the other hand, I doubt that most will receive many comments in this format.

Still, my talk - on a democratic version of voter licensing - is on Youtube. I've tried embedding it below, but it looks weirdly cropped so it may not work. If it doesn't, follow this link to view the original.

This is a shorter version of the paper that I gave at Brave New World, but was actually recorded back at the end of May. I already have some idea of ways that I would like to change it, but I'm holding off on a re-write for now in case I get more comments or ideas.

I've been trying to watch several other people's videos and found some pretty interesting.

Coin tosses and penalties: Italy in Euro 1968

I was aware of some cases of club football matches being decided (pre-penalty shootouts) by coin tosses. I've blogged about some of these before (e.g. here and here).

Thanks to the BBC, I've just learned (I think this is new to me, unless I knew it and forgot) that Italy reached the final of Euro 1968 after beating the Soviet Union by coin toss.

Another example of a match being settled by a genuine lottery.

Accents and pronunciation

I meant to write a post a couple of weeks ago on this story about accent bias. It reports that Essex accents were judged 'less intelligent' than others in a survey - though it seems the study only looked at London and home counties accents and didn't include other accents, such as Brummie or various northern accents.

Accent bias can not only unfairly affect an individual's job prospects, but even democratic politics.

I didn't get round to a post at the time, largely because much of my time has been spent on marking lately, but I was reminded of that study by this column on mispronunciation. The author is professor of phonetics and has lots of interesting things to say about why certain mistakes come about (e.g. 'expresso' instead of 'espresso').

However, the last section of the column moves from how language changes to making normative claims about prejudice and discrimination. "Correcting pronunciation can actually be an act of linguistic prejudice." I suppose it could be, but it isn't clear that it has to be or even that this is the normal case. Though she acknowledges that correcting a language-learner may be different, it seems that how and why someone corrects someone else makes a big difference here.

She ends by remarking on 'accent prejudice' which is indeed alive and well, as demonstrated by the BBC story I mentioned earlier, but it's something of a non-sequitor. There's a difference between who someone pronounces a word differently, because of their accent (which they will share with a wider group), and idiosyncratic mispronunciations. You might think that there's something objectionably elitist about correcting even the latter, but that doesn't follow from the fact that it's wrong to correct the former. 

(For the record, I was born and raised in Essex, but I'm not sure I really have an Essex accent any more. On the other hand, I'm regularly unsure how to pronounce words that I'm more used to seeing in print.)

Regulating women's behaviour

 The World Health Organisation (WHO) has recently published a first draft 'global action plan' on alcohol. (The preceding link is to something like an online press release; the actual draft plan can currently be found here.)

One thing that has caused particular controversy - such as this report - is the following sentence from p. 17 (emphasis added):

"Appropriate attention should be given to prevention of the initiation of drinking among children and adolescents, prevention of drinking among pregnant women and women of childbearing age, and protection of people from pressures to drink, especially in societies with high levels of alcohol consumption where heavy drinkers are encouraged to drink even more."

Now, it isn't clear (at least on a brief look) exactly what this is supposed to mean. It certainly doesn't seem to propose anything like banning women of childbearing age from consuming alcohol. But, all the same, this is a sweeping statement, suggesting that most women shouldn't consume alcohol, even if they haven't had sex and therefore are not pregnant.

The Metro coverage quotes Matt Lambert (a remark apparently from the Telegraph, but behind a paywall) describing this as "being sexist and paternalistic, and potentially restricting the freedoms of most women".

I wouldn't agree that it's paternalistic, since paternalism usually refers (roughly) to preventing an agent from harming herself. In this case, the guideline isn't to protect the women themselves, but their children. That isn't really paternalism, even if it is unjustified.

Starg***e

I haven't been up to much of interest this month, largely due to a pile of marking and the fact that I'm still waiting for a vaccine appointment, but I did start painting the first bits of my Stargrave Nickstarter and some odd bits of loot and scenery, including this mysterious alien portal:

I was quite pleased with the composition here, though I had to borrow my partner's phone to take the photo as there's a problem with my camera and/or its memory card, so expect fewer pictures until I have that resolved.