[kcplate]

Doesn’t matter. The best way to guarantee that the final 28% probably won’t get vaccinated is to mandate it. The best way to get the final 28% vaccinated is to fully FDA approve it, get Fauci and Biden to ease up on the vax shaming and then simply expect that 10-15% still won’t do it. You write them off and let the chips fall.

It’s remarkable to me that our government hasn’t figured out that you don’t get people who are already distrustful of the government to magically become trustful of the government by doing the same shit over and over that caused the distrust.

[howinteresting]

That's fine, they should get shut out of public life then. That's what fully internalizing the externalities looks like.

[kcplate]

Ya know…I seem to recall a bunch of people once thought that same exact thing about some other people about 60+ years ago. They thought they were better than the others, that the others were inferior, dirty, diseased, and less intelligent. Those powerful folks did all they could to keep the others out of stores, restaurants, front seats of buses, off water fountains, etc. and just kind of hoped those folks they hated and didn’t want in their society would just go away too.

[howinteresting]

The difference is that discrimination based on race is unjust, while discrimination based on vaccination status is just. I'll let you work out why.

[mdp2021]

Have you worked out the formula to correctly balance personal and collective risk, computationally? I would not dismiss the matter as trivial - I see it more as Nobel prize worth.

[howinteresting]

Plenty of gray areas, of course, where the decision is legitimately hard. The Vietnam draft was clearly immoral but was the World War 2 draft just? I'm really not sure.

Vaccine mandates are nowhere close to that, though—the individual risk is virtually nonexistent while the collective risk is massive. The general problem does not need to be solved fully for us to move forward with public policy in clear-cut cases.

[mdp2021]

In the specific case, you write about a «virtually nonexistent individual risk» while many¹ are yet to find such reassurance. If that statement were evidently true, one would agree with your conclusion save some details.

¹(including the brightest people I know - statement disincorporated from the above since anecdotal)

[kcplate]

Yes, perhaps today. People who discriminate are always confident in the moral justifications behind their prejudices.

All I see is just another group of folk devils that people feel the need to create to separate out people they don’t like.

[howinteresting]

I'm really not interested in meta-level arguments. In general I find them to be tiring and unenlightening.

[kcplate]

And I’m not interested in people who advocate discrimination as a solution to anything.

So there, our positions are set.