[naasking]

As I said, the US is not the only place that's discussing or implementing mandates, and other places are less flexible in how they're applying them.

Secondly, the very notion that you can have an expectation of not getting infected from someone else is intrinsically untenable. Just try to define what characteristics a pathogen must have before vaccines are mandatory. Why set the bar at COVID's fatality rate, why not the flu? Why not the common cold? Is fatality rate really the right metric? What about number of post infection complications?

Furthermore, what if we say the COVID rate is the cutoff, what if you have comorbidities that increase your chances of death, does that increase the obligation of your workmates to get vaccinated or is that your problem? I think you know which way the rhetoric is going, but these answers are far from obvious.

[SigmundA]

So which places are you talking about so I know what I can agree or disagree with?

This whole thing seems like continuum fallacy [1]. Just like everything we must all agree on a cutoff because the real world doesn't have neat black and white thresholds, covid is different from the flu that much is obvious and reaches my threshold for requiring vaccination / testing mandates at least in its current form. Do agree that a disease can be deadly enough to require it? If so what is your threshold before the mandate should be allowed?

I am willing to discuss what metrics would help come to consensus as a society, buts its not like requiring vaccines or other preventative measures for certain activities is some foreign concept.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox

[naasking]

> This whole thing seems like continuum fallacy [1]. Just like everything we must all agree on a cutoff because the real world doesn't have neat black and white thresholds

No we don't. This assumes moral obligations are decided by an evaluation of their consequences, aka consequentialism. This is far from the only type of ethics, and permits problematic inferences (see the "Repugnant conclusion").

For instance, a Kantian would reject entirely the notion that such a cutoff is coherent. People who are trying to compel vaccines are merely using other people for their own ends (herd immunity to get back to normal), rather than treating them as ends in themselves. We should strongly encourage and persuade vaccination, but never compel them by coercive means under this ethics. Universalizing "no vaccination" does not result in a paradox, therefore it is not a moral duty under Kantianism.

There are equally compelling formulations of deontology and virtue ethics under which your sort of consequentialist argument also fails, so I'm just not convinced that it's some kind of inevitability.

[SigmundA]

>We should strongly encourage and persuade vaccination, but never compel them by coercive means under this ethics.

So you don't believe a person should be compelled to be vaccinated or otherwise stay away from other people unless tested for infection no matter how contagious and deadly the disease? That is, forced quarantine should never be allowed under any circumstance regardless of disease?

Why should a person be free to infect others through their unabridged freedom yet one should not have the freedom to drive while drunk? People compelling others to travel sober is also using them as a means to their own ends (not being killed by drunk driver) even though they can take their own precautions (seat belts, air bags, safer cars, avoiding certain areas, they themselves not being drunk). No one is forcing anyone to be sober (in the US) just not to drive on public roads. You are not free to do whatever you want in a society with others there are limits put on your personal freedom so as not to endanger others, there is always a valid debate about what those limits should be, no different here, but there have to be agreed limits or nothing works.

[naasking]

> So you don't believe a person should be compelled to be vaccinated or otherwise stay away from other people unless tested for infection no matter how contagious and deadly the disease?

What I believe is that the truth is far from obvious, and I'm describing how different ethics reach different conclusions for what is true. Thus, it's far from obvious that the choices you describe are the truth or "moral", so much as convenient and expedient. These are not the same thing.

> Why should a person be free to infect others through their unabridged freedom

Freedom is not unabridged, it simply has different limits under different ethics.

> yet one should not have the freedom to drive while drunk?

I already addressed this in my very first reply to you.