One narrative presently being distributed in support of vaccine requireds is that unvaccinated people will cause an unnecessary pressure on the health care system because they are most likely to contract covid-19 and take up hospital beds that could be used for other people. Probably, by “other people” they imply those who took the vaccine like they were informed to do.
This belief seems to be behind declarations like the one in a recent Washington Post viewpoint article that “ [t] he unvaccinated are killing people in methods they most likely never thought of.” It also seems to be behind the choice of about seventy-five medical professionals in Florida to stage a “symbolic walkout” to “protest a surge in unvaccinated COVID-19 patients.” A look through any social media platform will likely turn up more of this narrative that unvaccinated people will cripple the US healthcare system.
This story is eventually being utilized by fans of vaccine mandates to paint anyone who declines to fall in line with their dreams relating to vaccination as not just unsafe, but unethical.
The Implied Presumption That Health Care Is a Common Resource
Those who oppose requireds appear to have a strong argument that, if the vaccines work, the vaccinated should have no need to require others to be immunized as well. The burdens of being unvaccinated will fall on the shoulders of the unvaccinated, so no reason exists to require them to do in a different way.
In reaction, much of those seeking to enforce vaccine requireds have actually used up the argument that the unvaccinated will still harm society merely by putting undue strain on the health care system when they inevitably fall ill in droves. This group claims that failure to be immunized represents a needless fatigue of scarce healthcare resources and is for that reason a dishonest option.
Even if true, and there are reasons to be skeptical of it, this is merely an utilitarian argument, but in some way it has handled to transform into a moral one in many people’s eyes. How has this happened?
We generally do not see somebody purchasing a service as hurting others even if he leaves a little less of it behind for everybody else, as all human activity would be unethical by that requirement. Many people would only see this as dishonest if it involved consuming resources coming from someone else. For this factor, in order to cast the act of being unvaccinated as dishonest, health care resources need to be considered as a common great, i.e., as resources that belong to society jointly instead of to the people who produce or purchase them. Individuals who get ill do not merely buy medicine, they use up medicine that belongs to everybody else.
That our political elites already hold something like this cumulative attitude towards health care is clear, the United States president recently scolding that “our perseverance is wearing thin” with the unvaccinated and their personal medical options.
Common Mindsets to Healthcare Foster False Moral Claims about Its Use
If the average individual can be habituated to adopt this common attitude towards healthcare resources, it can then be wielded as a moral bludgeon versus anybody dissenting from the requireds of the community’s leaders. This supposed cumulative ownership of healthcare resources indicates the right of society to manage how individuals utilize those resources. Those found squandering the community’s resources are to be disdained as its opponents.
The strength of emotion around the subject of healthcare throughout a pandemic can only push this tendency further. Worried members of society can be more easily encouraged that others are ethically obliged to maintain those common health care resources at the cost of all other factors to consider.
Therefore members of society pertained to vilify an individual’s basic act of considering alternatives and weighing the expenses and benefits to himself. It is not acceptable that an individual utilize his own judgment to determine what strategy will remain in his own interest; he is required to yield to the collective judgment and adopt whatever medical interventions society considers finest– not what society deems finest for his personal health, but what it deems finest for society as a collective whole.
The primary issue with this characterization is that it simply isn’t real that healthcare is a “common resource” in this sense. Healthcare resources are merely those medical materials and services people want to supply to buyers who want to spend for them (artificial state programs like Medicare notwithstanding).
Thousands of people make healthcare decisions and purchase medical services for themselves like this every day. However the typical individual does not see each individual doing these things for himself. He sees only the net result of those countless actions going on day after day, resulting in the “health care system” as we understand it. It is something similar to a mass misconception that this collection of interconnected specific actions is conflated in the minds of lots of as a cumulative entity.
Ludwig von Mises handled the idea of collective social systems adroitly in Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis. Mises addressed the long history of intellectual thought in which it was assumed some external purpose imbued society with something like a personhood of its own. However early thinkers were naïve to the reality that the existence of interconnected societies is just enabled once individuals begin to take part in a department of labor. It is this action by people, explainable entirely by their desires to serve their own private ends, that is responsible for the advancement of societies. Mises states that “the primitive thinker constantly sees things as having actually been arranged from outside, never ever as having actually grown themselves, organically” (p. 296).
Rather, Mises teaches that society is the result of numerous people acting separately and willingly for their own interests. Cooperation is therefore required, not by force, but because this cooperation is the ways by which one male may trigger another to do something willingly that advantages him. “Society exists only where willing becomes a co-willing and action co-action. To aim jointly towards objectives which alone people might not reach at all, or not with equal efficiency– that is society.” (p. 297)
The collective view stands opposed to this understanding of society:
The collectivist motion of the present day obtains its strength not from an inner desire on the part of contemporary clinical idea but from the political will of a date which yearns after Romanticism and Mysticism. Spiritual motions are revolts of believed versus inertia, of the couple of against the lots of; of those who due to the fact that they are strong in spirit are strongest alone versus those who can reveal themselves just in the mass and the mob, and who are considerable just due to the fact that they are many. Collectivism is the opposite of all this, the weapon of those who want to kill mind and thought. (p. 64)
Almost one a century after this writing, the collectivist components in our societies appear even more excited to squash mind and idea than previously. Today, the threat of ethical condemnation for anybody bold to question their instructions on vaccination is simply one more instrument they have actually adapted for this function.