Abstract
AbstractShould people get vaccinated for the sake of others? What could ground—and limit—the normative claim that people ought to do so? In this paper, we propose a reasons-based consequentialist account of vaccination for the benefit of others. We outline eight harm-based and probabilistic factors that, we argue, give people moral reasons to get vaccinated. Instead of understanding other-directed vaccination in terms of binary moral duties (i.e., where people either have or do not have a moral duty to get vaccinated), we develop a scalar approach according to which people can have stronger or weaker moral reasons to get vaccinated in view of the moral good of vaccination. One advantage of our approach is that it can capture why a person might have strong moral reasons to get vaccinated with Vaccine A, but only weak moral reasons to get vaccinated with Vaccine B. We discuss theoretical strengths of our approach and provide a case study of vaccination against COVID-19 to demonstrate its practical significance.
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Reference70 articles.
1. Aronson, J.K., J. Brassey, and K.R. Mahtani. 2020. ‘When Will It Be Over?’: An Introduction to Viral Reproduction Numbers, R0 and Re. The Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, 14 April 2020. https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/when-will-it-be-over-an-introduction-to-viral-reproduction-numbers-r0-and-re/. Accessed 14 Oct 2021.
2. Bagcchi, S. 2021. The World’s Largest COVID-19 Vaccination Campaign. The Lancet Infectious Diseases 21(3): 323. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(21)00081-5.
3. Bambery, B., T. Douglas, M.J. Selgelid, H. Maslen, A. Giubilini, A.J. Pollard, and J. Savulescu. 2018. Influenza Vaccination Strategies Should Target Children. Public Health Ethics 11(2): 221–234.
4. Bayefsky, M.J. 2018. The Ethical Case for Mandating HPV Vaccination. The Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics 46: 501–510.
5. Bradley, B., A. Bryan, S.L. Fink, E.A. Goecker, P. Roychoudhury, M. Huang, et al. 2021. Anti-SARS-CoV-2 Antibody Levels are Concordant Across Multiple Platforms But are Not Fully Predictive of Sterilizing Immunity. medRxiv. https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.04.26.21256118.