4 ms·

Perhaps forced vaccination, as it has little interference with your everyday life.

duaneb 11y ago
Some vaccinations are riskier than others. While it's fairly clear they don't cause autism after that whole braindead debate, they aren't exactly risk free EITHER, though complications are vaccine specific, rare, and not very well understood because of the rarity. It's very easy to violate someone's self determination rights with the best intentions and still hurt them. In the virus parallel the vector is an unknown quantity. It doesn't entirely seal the router, and doing it without permission may in fact increase the vulnerability of the router (or brick it, if things go wrong). I find this really interesting, but it's very hard to back from a moral or ethical point of view.
- logfromblammo 11y ago
  It is hard to accept and hard to condemn. I find it to be tolerable. The end result benefits me slightly, yet the means does not entirely justify it. If I lived in the tropics, I'm not certain how I would feel if I returned home to find that a band of rogues had broken into my house, installed new insecticidal bed nets in all bedrooms, and locked up after themselves on their way out, without touching anything else. On the one hand, hey, free bed nets. On the other hand, no one bothered to ask my permission. Or knock. But then maybe I hear about a terrifying disease currently spreading via the saliva of the oogeyboogeyfly, who will chew through untreated bednets, or insecticidal nets older than 6 months, to bite sleeping people, and only new ones treated with skellingtol will work to stop them. In that case, there was - an overriding concern for public safety, from an actual threat - some urgency, such that voluntary compliance might be too slow - a risk that some might not take effective preventative measures - no malicious intent toward me, specifically The target of the action was actually the oogeyboogeyfly, which I was unknowingly providing with a safe platform for spreading disease. So it comes down to the old Star Trek 3 dilemma: if you could save a thousand lives by letting just one person die, would it be ethical to do it? Would it still be ethical if that one person wasn't you?
  - duaneb 11y ago
    Yea, but you're ignoring the fact that people might want to get malaria. Not everyone likes being taken care of; some want to live life the way they want to (e.g. short and fast, but without bug nets).
    - logfromblammo 11y ago
      People might also want to walk into my living room and remove my television set from it. I can't stop them wanting it, but I can stop them doing it. If you threaten my life, liberty, or property, it is ethical for me to defend those things, regardless of whether your threat is the product of malice, ignorance, or negligence. If you intentionally get yourself infected with a zoonotic pathogen and start cavorting with one of the carrier species, at minimum, you're going to get a severe beating when the town finds out about it. If you don't take care of yourself as a person, someone else might take care of you as their problem.
AnimalMuppet 11y ago
And when (other than in the military) has forced vaccination been considered moral or ethical?
- logfromblammo 11y ago
  There has never been clear consensus over the ethical acceptability of acts hostile to specific individuals while also being beneficial to public safety. My opinion is that forced vaccination is acceptable when everyone receives uniform compensation for their loss of self-determination, with prepaid care for all side effects and complications. That means whomever is doing the forcing has to weigh the benefits of universal vaccination against the massive additional cost for compensation and insurance. So you're not going to force vaccinations for rhinovirus. You might for smallpox, or polio, or ebola, or something else that costs a hell of a lot to control by other means.
  - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
    And when duly constituted authority orders it. Random teams of doctors don't get to decide to order it, even if they're willing to take on the cost of compensation and insurance. And, in the actual situation we're talking about, those doing it did not take on the cost of compensation and insurance.
    - logfromblammo 11y ago
      There is no such thing as duly constituted authority when you are forcing people to do things against their will. There is only the ability to enforce your edict, and possibly also the ability to offer reasonable compensation to your victims. The concept of authority is simply a synonym for overwhelming force in my ethical reasoning, wherein any reasonable person would flee it or surrender to it rather than openly resist it. So when you say duly constituted authority that just tells me that the teams of doctors have enough men with guns behind them that they don't have to bother with explaining their actions or chasing down stragglers. In the situation under discussion, the cost of compensation would certainly be little more than pocket change, especially given that the victims may not have even noticed the intrusion, or even the more invasive prior compromises. And we don't know the actual cost of damages to the victims. The grey-hats' failing was in not allocating resources for those things, however small they may be, before launching the program. Did they sit down and ask themselves, "What will we do for the people who don't think we're doing the right thing?" and "How will we fix anything we might screw up with this?" If not, they probably should have, but now that the deed is done, I won't get worked up over it.

Some vaccinations are riskier than others. While it's fairly clear they don't cause autism after that whole braindead debate, they aren't exactly risk free EITHER, though complications are vaccine specific, rare, and not very well understood because of the rarity. It's very easy to violate someone's self determination rights with the best intentions and still hurt them. In the virus parallel the vector is an unknown quantity. It doesn't entirely seal the router, and doing it without permission may in fact increase the vulnerability of the router (or brick it, if things go wrong). I find this really interesting, but it's very hard to back from a moral or ethical point of view.

logfromblammo 11y ago
It is hard to accept and hard to condemn. I find it to be tolerable. The end result benefits me slightly, yet the means does not entirely justify it. If I lived in the tropics, I'm not certain how I would feel if I returned home to find that a band of rogues had broken into my house, installed new insecticidal bed nets in all bedrooms, and locked up after themselves on their way out, without touching anything else. On the one hand, hey, free bed nets. On the other hand, no one bothered to ask my permission. Or knock. But then maybe I hear about a terrifying disease currently spreading via the saliva of the oogeyboogeyfly, who will chew through untreated bednets, or insecticidal nets older than 6 months, to bite sleeping people, and only new ones treated with skellingtol will work to stop them. In that case, there was - an overriding concern for public safety, from an actual threat - some urgency, such that voluntary compliance might be too slow - a risk that some might not take effective preventative measures - no malicious intent toward me, specifically The target of the action was actually the oogeyboogeyfly, which I was unknowingly providing with a safe platform for spreading disease. So it comes down to the old Star Trek 3 dilemma: if you could save a thousand lives by letting just one person die, would it be ethical to do it? Would it still be ethical if that one person wasn't you?
- duaneb 11y ago
  Yea, but you're ignoring the fact that people might want to get malaria. Not everyone likes being taken care of; some want to live life the way they want to (e.g. short and fast, but without bug nets).
  - logfromblammo 11y ago
    People might also want to walk into my living room and remove my television set from it. I can't stop them wanting it, but I can stop them doing it. If you threaten my life, liberty, or property, it is ethical for me to defend those things, regardless of whether your threat is the product of malice, ignorance, or negligence. If you intentionally get yourself infected with a zoonotic pathogen and start cavorting with one of the carrier species, at minimum, you're going to get a severe beating when the town finds out about it. If you don't take care of yourself as a person, someone else might take care of you as their problem.

AnimalMuppet 11y ago

And when (other than in the military) has forced vaccination been considered moral or ethical?

logfromblammo 11y ago
There has never been clear consensus over the ethical acceptability of acts hostile to specific individuals while also being beneficial to public safety. My opinion is that forced vaccination is acceptable when everyone receives uniform compensation for their loss of self-determination, with prepaid care for all side effects and complications. That means whomever is doing the forcing has to weigh the benefits of universal vaccination against the massive additional cost for compensation and insurance. So you're not going to force vaccinations for rhinovirus. You might for smallpox, or polio, or ebola, or something else that costs a hell of a lot to control by other means.
- AnimalMuppet 11y ago
  And when duly constituted authority orders it. Random teams of doctors don't get to decide to order it, even if they're willing to take on the cost of compensation and insurance. And, in the actual situation we're talking about, those doing it did not take on the cost of compensation and insurance.
  - logfromblammo 11y ago
    There is no such thing as duly constituted authority when you are forcing people to do things against their will. There is only the ability to enforce your edict, and possibly also the ability to offer reasonable compensation to your victims. The concept of authority is simply a synonym for overwhelming force in my ethical reasoning, wherein any reasonable person would flee it or surrender to it rather than openly resist it. So when you say duly constituted authority that just tells me that the teams of doctors have enough men with guns behind them that they don't have to bother with explaining their actions or chasing down stragglers. In the situation under discussion, the cost of compensation would certainly be little more than pocket change, especially given that the victims may not have even noticed the intrusion, or even the more invasive prior compromises. And we don't know the actual cost of damages to the victims. The grey-hats' failing was in not allocating resources for those things, however small they may be, before launching the program. Did they sit down and ask themselves, "What will we do for the people who don't think we're doing the right thing?" and "How will we fix anything we might screw up with this?" If not, they probably should have, but now that the deed is done, I won't get worked up over it.