The Ethical Significance of Post-Vaccination COVID-19 Transmission Dynamics

Schematising COVID-19 pandemic responses: An ideal typical analysis

This article utilises ideal typical models, or sociological heuristics, when analysing COVID-19 pandemic responses in an international context. Axes of differentiation include Authoritarian-Libertarian and Left-Right tendencies, encapsulating four generic worldviews that potentially patterned societal responses to the novel coronavirus: (1) hierarchical, (2) dismissive or fatalistic, (3) individualistic, and (4) egalitarian. Taking the 'shock period' (circa 2020-2021) as the primary window of analysis, the article schematises contrasting orientations that have since left their mark in a context of COVID-19 endemicity. In conclusion, a case is made for an explicitly egalitarian and anti-authoritarian stance amidst countervailing, even fascistic, tendencies. The possibility of another politics of life is underscored given the spectre of ongoing crises in a global context.

A Scalar Approach to Vaccination Ethics

Should 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.