An urgent message to those (presuming literacy and a minimal capacity for human agency) who refuse—sans any medical warrant, that is, a sufficient reason—to be vaccinated during the COVID-19 pandemic
The exercise of your liberties and freedom are constrained (justifiably or necessarily limited) at the point where they interfere with, block, or diminish the equivalent exercise of these same liberties and freedom by others (this falls under what the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes called the ‘reciprocity theorem’ of natural reason or rationality). In other words, liberty or freedom is not absolute, all liberties and freedom are limited by moral principles, legal rules, and democratic legislation, as well as those rules and norms that are unequivocally enshrined in the Constitution. Furthermore, we frequently hear, ad nauseam, that the decision as to whether or not one should get a vaccination against the various and virulent strains of the COVID -19 virus is “purely” a personal decision, as if one makes that decision in a solipsistic vacuum or within the bounds of narcissistic self-interest. In other words, as if such a decision affects oneself alone and thus nobody else, as if the consequences of that decision do not ramify outside one’s skin, beyond the boundaries one’s body. Your right to make such a decision is not without constraints or consideration of consequences. To believe otherwise is patently and painfully irresponsible to the point of moral and legal recklessness. In brief, exercise of rights take place within a moral and legal world of corresponding and sundry responsibilities, duties, and obligations. Any exercise of rights outside that world is irrational if not indicative of some species of madness or psychosis.
There is no justifiable or warranted or human, moral, legal or constitutional right to act, to make a decision, that arbitrarily and substantially increases the risk of substantial (physical and psychological in the first instance) harms to others (hence torts and criminal law)—with whom one comes in intentional or incidental or accidental contact—harms the nature of which can extend to the point of the possible and probable deaths of others. At this point in the global pandemic, one’s motivated or willful ignorance (owing, say, to wishful thinking, denial, self-deception, illusory or delusory thinking and phantasies, what have you) on the nature and scope of this medical and epidemiological risk and its possible and probable harmful effects on others on this score is utterly indefensible and inexcusable and, in a fairer if not more compassionate world, would bring legal liability and swift moral opprobrium.
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