Vistulange wrote:Galloism wrote:I mean, the problem is that this directly plays into the hands of the pro life crowd - that you can force women to carry a baby if doing so will prevent her from harming another (the fetus) by having it removed.
And while the first one (Ebola) is a bodily autonomy issue (and one we typically don't force, although we can isolate them from society until they recover or die), the fake medicine, steal, kill, rape, or pillage are not - those are all red herrings. These are about actions you take, not medical procedures within your own body.
A person carrying a contagious disease has become a threat to other individuals within his society by virtue of carrying a contagious disease. There are three ways to deal with this: Quarantine this individual until the disease has run its course, for good or for ill; or cure him by force. If he consents to either, then there's obviously no problem; but if he does not consent to either, there will be forcing involved one way or another. This is in spite of him being ill, and it being his own illness.
True - and for extreme extant threads to the population, we have allowed quarantine historically. It is not a violation of bodily autonomy, but a limitation on the right to travel. We do find right to travel to be important, but we generally deem it to be less important than bodily autonomy. After all, we can imprison people from crimes, but we can't medically experiment on them.
Well, anymore. We stopped that decades ago.
The third way is to pre-empt contagious diseases by vaccinating every member or at least a majority of a society, providing herd immunity and giving the disease a minimum of hosts on which it can proliferate and spread.
We could, but again, that's talking about a bodily autonomy violation based on a hypothetical future harm. That's a pretty extreme position. We could, after all, justify putting mind altering drugs in the water to pacify the population in the same vein - to prevent all of them from committing violent crimes against their neighbors. Statistically, some will, just as statistically some unvaccinated people will become a danger to others, but most won't, just as most unvaccinated won't.
It's a pretty terrifying prospect however - to say that the government can violate your body based on the statistical probability that you might become a threat in the future.
Sensible people do not make the same arguments for non-contagious diseases, no matter how serious they may be, as they literally cannot harm other members of the society. However, diseases such as measles, smallpox, etc. are serious public health issues and are by no means restricted to the individual. The question is, in what way would we want to compel individuals in order to protect public health - do we quarantine them after an infection is caught, do we cure them after an infection is caught, or do we vaccinate them for what I assume is a fraction of the cost, before an infection is caught, and moreover, prevent further infections?
From a principled standpoint, quarantining is the safest option in the interests of society.
EDIT: It occurred to me that there is a fourth option - "do nothing". This is also feasible, though unless a vast majority of a society's population is vaccinated, it will most likely lead to massive public health problems - the severity of which will depend on the disease at hand - and other interconnected problems which come due to, you know, a large segment of the population being sick.
I mean, if the percentage of vaccination drops to a level that it starts causing such things, we'll probably have to do
something, but I'm not sure if violating the bodily autonomy of everyone based on some notion of statistics is the thing. We'd have to be in true crisis for that to be an acceptable option. IE, facing the end of society if we don't.
Posted: Sat Jun 08, 2019 1:14 pm