Arguing for vaccine mandates

Readers of this blog know Kyle and I took turns in 2020 dancing with reason on COVID-19. 

 

Recently, Todd Zywicki (George Mason University) and Aaron Kheriaty (University of California-Irvine) filed separate lawsuits  against their respective universities for not adequately recognizing naturally acquired COVID-19 immunity from prior infection in their vaccine mandates. 

 

Zywicki had a substantial win last month; Kheriaty has his first court date set for later this month.

 

One of the philosophical issues raised by their cases and their Twitter feeds (yes, Virginia, there is sometimes sanity on Twitter), might be put as follows: 

 

What are the best ways of understanding the arguments for a given vaccine mandate?

 

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Consider four distinct claims:

 

1.     It is morally permissible that you get the vaccine.

2.     It is morally required that you get the vaccine.

3.     It is morally permissible for me to mandate that you get the vaccine.

4.     It is morally required for me to mandate that you get the vaccine.

 

Three quick observations:

 

First, these claims are phrased using “you” and “me” rather than A and B, Smith and Jones, state and citizen. If you think this is cheating (perhaps because it places you, dear reader, in the cross-hairs of a mandate from me), I invite you to adjust accordingly in what follows.

 

Second, these claims have interesting connections: arguably, 2-4 each assume 1, 4 assumes 3, and none of the earlier ones, taken separately or together, entail any of the later ones.

 

Third, a funny true story illustrates what I mean by a mandate.

 

During playground recess my first day of first grade, I watched wide-eyed and listened open-mouthed as two sixth grade bullies squared off to shout things I’d never heard before:

 

Bully 1 (Grog?): “Aw, shut up!”

Bully 2 (Goliath?): “You wanna come over here and make me?!”

 

So, that afternoon, I cautiously and curiously tried an innocent experiment in imitation:

 

Mom: “Honey, please bring your jacket over here to hang up.”

Me: “You…wanna…come…over…here…and…make…me?”

 

The next thing I remember from that day is me laying on my back in my top bunk, staring at my ceiling, thinking “I should never say that again…”

 

Point: mandates are attempts to “come over here and make me” do something; they may vary by context in countless ways while still being mandates. 

 

So even though “Joe Biden Is Not Our National Dad,” mandates can come from presidents or parents. 

 

And even when a University aspires to be a “family” in some sense, mandates from employers are typically different from mandates from family members. 

 

Or bullies.

 

*

 

So, then. Let’s consider two arguments for 3, starting with this one:

 

5.     If something is more likely than not to prevent future harm to you, then it is morally permissible for me to mandate that you do it. 

6.     You getting the vaccine is more likely than not to prevent future harm to you.

Therefore, 

(3) It is morally permissible for me to mandate that you get the vaccine.

 

5 is a statement of a controversial view called “paternalism.”  Some actually seem to endorse it if you listen to them closely when they talk about COVID-19. But most realize 5 is appropriate for parent-child relations but not for adult relations. So a better defense of mandates rejects 5, and thus treats 6 as irrelevant. 

 

A different argument for 3 says this:

 

7.     If something is more likely than not to prevent future harm to others, then it is morally permissible for me to mandate that you do it.

8.     You getting the vaccine is more likely than not to prevent future harm to others.

Therefore, 

(3) It is morally permissible for me to mandate that you get the vaccine.

 

8 is a locus of controversy, for the plaintiffs above and others today, because they argue that 8 is often simply false, especially when spoken to the millions who have already acquired and maintain a robust natural immunity to COVID-19 and its variants from prior COVID-19 infection. 

 

Even if 8 were able to be stated more carefully so that it quantified the likelihood of future harm prevention as “between high number H and low number L,” it is not clear that L would be both true and relevant to the argument.

 

It would of course be cleaner for the argument if our world had just two humans, one C19 vaccine, and one C19 virus. But our world has nearly eight billion humans, far more than the few C19 vaccines with an FDA Emergency Use Authorization (including the one with full FDA approval), and hundreds of C19 variants (e.g. the CDC uses today’s “Delta” as shorthand for what scientists label “B.1.617.2”).

 

7 is also a locus of controversy, and in ways that I think are worth inspecting.  When plaintiffs (Zywicki and Kheriaty) discuss studies showing 8 false for many, they also point out what is true for many:

 

9.     You getting natural immunity from the virus is more likely than not to prevent future harm to others.

 

And 9 would deliver a very different conclusion than (3) when combined with 7:

 

7.     If something is more likely than not to prevent future harm to others, then it is morally permissible for me to mandate that you do it.

(9)   You getting natural immunity from the virus is more likely than not to prevent future harm to others.

Therefore, 

(10) It is morally permissible for me to mandate that you get natural immunity from the virus.

 

Defendants in these cases might argue “we and plaintiffs agree on 7 being true, but we just disagree on 8.” But this would be mistaken. 

 

Plaintiffs deny 7, which explains why they reject an argument from 7 and 9 to 10. Plaintiffs have no interest in mandating that other people acquire natural immunity from getting infected.

 

This suggests defendants do not really believe 7 either. They are not about to argue from 7 and 9 to 10 for anyone.

 

Russell DiSilvestro

Philosophy Department

Sacramento State

The Meaning of the Confederate Flag

To the indignation of many, the storming of the Capitol building has seen a Trump supporter bring the Confederate flag into the building, taking it deeper than it has ever gone in the Civil War.  This symbol has meaning, but a major contention is what the meaning is.  Advocates claim it means Southern pride with no negative racist connotations.  Opponents claim it represents slavery and racism.  Political scientists today have run studies finding the above two meanings as being predominant (Huffmon et al. 2017).  I criticize one theory of meaning to flags and endorse my own view of it.  

Schedler (1998) relies heavily on the original historical intentions involved when one adopts or raises the Confederate flag in a particular case.  The flag’s meaning is dependent on the original semantic intentions of those who put up the flag in a scenario at a dubbing ceremony.  He says that a symbol S has meaning M if and only if those originally responsible for displaying S intended S to have M.  

 

For Schedler, when states like Georgia incorporated the Confederate flag into their state flag, the original intention was as a racist backlash to stand against the Civil Rights Movement.  Therefore, those representations do have a racist meaning, and they should have never been established as state symbols.  However, states like Mississippi incorporated the Confederate flag into their state flag in the 19^th century before the Civil Rights Movement.  Schedler claims that these original semantic intentions were not racist but were about nonracist aspects of the Confederacy, such as of state rights, agrarianism, and an honor culture.  Hence, the relevant flags aren’t racist.

Alter (2000) criticizes Schedler’s Kripkean-like view with counterexamples:

1.   Racist politicians mistakenly believe that a neutral Microsoft symbol is a racist one.  With racist intentions, they vote to have it be incorporated in their flag, and they are happy when the relevant bill passes.  However, this doesn’t make the Microsoft symbol and their state flag racist despite their original intentions.

2.  A German politician not familiar with Nazi history chances upon the Nazi swastika symbol and likes the way it looks.  She decides to incorporate it in the country’s new flag and intends to use it in a non-racist way.  However, it’s still a racist symbol in Germany and shouldn’t be used.

 

I believe these counterexamples are correct, but let me add my own objection that theories of meaning for flags need to account for a degree of subjective personal meaning.  For instance, the U.S. flag means lots of things, but for a particular citizen, it also can mean her father serving in the military and playing with her cousins on the Fourth of July national holiday, etc.  For another, it can mean being subjected to discriminatory laws or having your father be killed by state actors like the police.  This is an interesting phenomenon for flags in that they are symbols that also can carry very deep subjective meaning for people.  Schedler is incapable of fully taking into account subjective meaning.

 

Novel in the literature on the semantics of flags, I endorse a descriptivist-type view for flags only, where the meaning of a flag is in part the descriptions one has in mind of the flag.  This accounts for the subjective meaning of flags.  For instance, possible descriptions of the Confederate Flag are things like slavery, racism, rebellion against the U.S., honor culture, agrarianism, and Southern pride.  

 

There is an objection to descriptivism in the linguistic case: Kripke’s ignorance and error objection (1972).  Kripke claimed that an individual may be in ignorance of any distinguishing descriptions for a concept like RICHARD FEYNMAN.  One may only know that he was a physicist, but this doesn’t distinguish him from the many other physicists.  Yet, the concept still refers to and means Feynman.  Also, one may have erroneous descriptions of Einstein such as that he invented the atomic bomb, but one’s EINSTEIN concept still refers to and means Einstein.  The problem of ignorance and error also can apply to flags.  For example, the German politician may be in ignorance that the Nazi flag has racist and bigoted meanings.  However, the Nazi flag still stands for bigotry.  One may have erroneous beliefs that the Microsoft symbol on a flag stands for racism, however, it really doesn’t.

 

My response to this problem is to rely on a constraint that brings in all the relevant historical facts of a flag into people’s sets of descriptions while adjusting for coherence in the sets of descriptions.  Such historical facts are necessary conditions of the meaning of a flag that apply to everyone in a particular culture. When including all the relevant historical descriptions that apply to a flag and then making the set of descriptions coherent, the ignorant set of descriptions of the Nazi flag from the German politician becomes flooded with true information regarding racist Nazi history.  Thus, it’s a racist flag that shouldn’t be used.  The false beliefs in the Microsoft flag case will be corrected when bringing in the constraint such that the accurate descriptions show that this flag really isn’t a racist one.  

Given my justification of my theory, let’s apply it to the Confederate flag.  We need to take into account all of the relevant and true historical facts of how slavery was a major impetus in the cause of the Civil War and the formation of the Confederacy which led to the flag’s creation.  There is consensus among professors of Civil War history that one of the main causes of the Civil War was slavery (Martinez 2017).  Such descriptions that need to be included lead to the conclusion that the Confederate flag is a racist symbol despite possible ignorance and error in the minds of some people regarding such descriptions.  They’re necessary components to the meaning of the flag that apply to everyone in the U.S. Therefore, it’s a racist symbol given its historical descriptions, and it morally shouldn’t be promoted.  

John Park

Philosophy Department

Sacramento State

 

Death, Taxes, and Coronavirus

 “I am inevitable.”

 

Thus spake Thanos, near the end of Avengers: Endgame.

 

“And I am Iron Man,” replied Tony Stark, in a fitting phrase pregnant with many movie meanings.

 

For the record, I’m with Iron Man—both in general, and in confronting Covid-19.

 

That is, I think we should each continue to use the best of our wit, wisdom, innovation, and technology to push back against the virus, with a major goal being the saving of as many lives as we can, even if it means great sacrifices for ourselves as individuals.

 

And yet.

 

And yet, to do what I think we should, we have to reckon with…inevitability.  

 

Or rather, many particular inevitabilities.

 

But which ones? And how?

 

Well, two standard so-called inevitabilities are death and taxes. 

 

And coronavirus has not eliminated them, but it has reminded us how inevitable they are, and how deeply people disagree with one another about how to deal with them.

 

Still, my post here is not a “the sky is falling!” piece, but a “take a deep breath since there is common ground here” piece.

 

Reckoning with inevitabilities typically involves two steps: 

 

Step 1, identify the inevitabilities. 

 

Step 2, deal with them.

 

Easier said than done, of course.  Even Doctor Strange, who eventually reckoned with inevitability when confronting possible futures (“…there was no other way”), began with utter cluelessness (when warned “Thanos is coming!” Strange asked “…who?”).  

 

But I mention the steps because I think them distinct, but inter-related.

 

And  I think we constantly engage in both of these steps with any number of so-called “inevitabilities” at any given moment, whether deliberating individually or with others.

 

And this partly explains some of our tension, and even angst, as individuals and groups: we do not know which step we should be working on at a given moment on a given issue.

 

For example (to take just one example dealing with death): you may know exactly how you want to “deal with” the upcoming death of a beloved relative in a certain way (namely “be sure you try to see them and hug them one last time, or at least talk to them virtually!”) but you may not know whether it’s inevitable that they are going to die this month. Step 2 is in place, but Step 1 is not.

 

For another example (to take just one example dealing with taxes): you may know that it’s inevitable that the tax revenues this year are going to be far less than they were expected to be, but you may not know how you are going to “deal with it”. Step 1 is in place, but Step 2 is not.

 

I suppose each of us can pick plenty of examples with this coronavirus, depending on what month (or day) it is, and depending on what role (or roles) we are focusing on—here is just one picked from a headline I saw back in June:

 

Fauci says second wave is 'not inevitable' as coronavirus cases climb in some states

 

At this point some of you may be asking, why again is this not a “the sky is falling” piece?

 

Here’s why: forget about coronavirus for a second, and assume step 1 identifies the inevitabilities of death and taxes from the title of this post. 

 

Maybe death and taxes are inevitable in simple ways: everyone dies, and everyone pays taxes; or at least death and taxes will always be with us as a species.

 

Still, step 2 asks us to “deal with” these.  How?

 

I think we all can agree that an awful, callous way to deal with these as inevitabilities is the way of King Herod’s tax collectors in the script for The Nativity Story:

[Collector]: Take this man's animal...

and one-third of his land

to be seized...

for the continued good

of Herod's kingdom.

[Villager]: Please, if I don't have enough land, my...

[Collector:] What? What,

you and your family will die?

All of us must die.

Some sooner than others. Move.

 

Here we have a fictional portrayal of an all-too-factual way that we humans have treated each other, and, sadly, are tempted to treat each other still today.

 

As readers of this blog may recall, I’m not a big fan of Herod. But you don’t have to be named Herod to be tempted towards a callous attitude towards others, as 2020 has reminded us once or twice.

 

Fortunately, there are also ways of remaining decent, and even virtuous, towards one another, even in difficult situations--like Joseph and Mary were in the rest of The Nativity Story.  

 

Again, it’s a fictional portrayal, but it reflects a fact that, to echo Stephen Pinker, we are capable of responding to the better angels of our nature.

 

As readers of this blog may remember, I’m a pretty big fan of Mary and Joseph. But you don’t have to be named Mary or Joe in order to (here echoing Bill and Ted) be excellent to each other.

 

So, then: a common ground approach we have here, whether with death, taxes, or Covid-19, is that it remains possible—indeed, inevitable—that individuals still have some degree of choice in whether we will be excellent to each other.

 

Sure, death is inevitable. But each of us can be like Iron Man.

Russell DiSilvestro

Philosophy Department

Sacramento State

Politics makes us stupid: COVID-19 edition

An essay by Ezra Klein at Vox from 2014 says politics makes us stupid. He’s reporting on a study by Harvard Law Professor Dan Kahan. Kahan and his coauthors first present a mildly tricky problem about whether, based on the data presented, an intervention made a problem better or worse. In this problem, the subject’s facility with math or statistics predicts whether they get the problem right.

But in a politically charged version of the test, using exactly the same numbers, numeracy stopped being a good predictor of who would get the problem right. Instead, the person’s ideology predicted how they would answer the question. Higher-than-average math skills didn’t help participants when the data showed a result out of line with their political tribe (and if you think that numeracy is a trait exclusive to a particular political view, then you might already be too far gone in your tribalism).

Here’s Klein:

Being better at math didn’t just fail to help partisans converge on the right answer. It actually drove them further apart. Partisans with weak math skills were 25 percentage points likelier to get the answer right when it fit their ideology. Partisans with strong math skills were 45 percentage points likelier to get the answer right when it fit their ideology. The smarter the person is, the dumber politics can make them.

This story might suggest that people have a more or less stable and consistent ideology (gun control: bad) that they take great pains to avoid betraying. Motivated numeracy bias is a way to preserve stable ideological commitments that define their identity. 

But it turns out that even this is too optimistic a view about people.

Most people don’t really even have stable political beliefs. In Neither Liberal Nor Conservative, political scientists Kinder and Kalmoe present studies showing that the number that do is, at most, 17% of Americans (also, “stable” here refers to over the course of only about a year). Rather, most people are political innocents. They don’t support political leaders or parties because their beliefs line up with those leaders’ policies. Instead, their political beliefs line up with those leaders’ and parties’ policies because they support those leaders or parties. 

This is significant because we very quickly saw in 2020 the politicization of COVID-19. Whether or not you support locking down, opening up, wearing masks, shaking hands, etc. is better predicted by your political affiliation than anything else (and probably least of all by how familiar you are with epidemiological models or data).

By now, of course, we know that lockdown is a "liberal" position and back to normal is a "conservative" position. Is there any way we could have confidently predicted this ex ante? Maybe. But imagine a Twin Covid America thought experiment where Trump came out decisively in favor of strong lockdowns. Then, of course, Republicans there would be mustering arguments about negative externalities to justify mask mandates, restrictions on movement and curfews to promote public health, safety and order. And Democrats in Twin Covid America, of course, would be mostly against these policies because, among other things, wealthy Americans have a much easier time staying in place at home than poorer working class people with low levels of savings. Having a high-paying job tends to correlate with being able to work from home and having people with low-paying jobs deliver their Grubhub orders and groceries. Wealthy families are more likely to have a parent who can work fewer or more flexible hours or leave their job to help with their children’s distance education. Meanwhile, children in lower-income households are much more likely to face challenges that make distance education ineffective (indeed, here in the non-twin US we are beginning to see evidence of a widening learning gap). Good progressives in Twin Covid America would want to keep things as open as possible, rather than impose a general lockdown, in the name of social justice, and would write op-eds (like this one) about the likely unintended consequences of mask mandates.

The fact that the opposite happened here, and different considerations featured in the two sides’ positions, is actually pretty arbitrary. It probably doesn’t reflect a genuine, hard-won, intellectually honest working out of how to apply underlying values and principles to a particular social problem. Again, only a small minority of people even have a coherent ideology that determines their political views. And so-called “liberal” or “conservative” values are so generic and indeterminate that someone can always offer a post hoc “rationalization” of why the positions shook out the way they did. 

Kyle Swan

Philosophy Department

Sacramento State