Month: September 2025

 

During the last pandemic, some organizations mandated vaccination against COVID-19. As another pandemic is inevitable, it is worth revisiting the moral issue of mandatory vaccination in response to a pandemic.

Schools have a well-established precedent for requiring students to be vaccinated, although there have been ways to opt out.  The moral justification is usually a utilitarian one: while there is a cost and possible harm arising from mandatory school vaccinations, this is outweighed by the harm these vaccinations prevent. Students are in close contact in closed spaces for long periods of time, putting them at risk. As such, allowing students (or, rather, their parents) to opt out of vaccines would put themselves and others at greater risk. Exemptions can, and should, be granted in cases where a person would be medically harmed by vaccination; but these are extremely rare cases. During a pandemic, the moral argument is even stronger as the risk and harm would be greater than in normal circumstances.

In terms of a moral objection to mandatory vaccinations at schools during a pandemic is that the long-term effects of a new vaccine on children and teens would not be known. As such, one could claim that possible harmful effects of the vaccine might outweigh the harms of being unvaccinated. While this is a legitimate concern, it is not unique: all past vaccines have raised the same concern. So far, the benefits have consistently outweighed the harms of vaccination. So unless there is evidence that a new vaccine presents a special problem, then it is as morally acceptable to require it during a pandemic as it was, for example, to require the polio vaccine when it was developed. This is not to deny that things can go wrong, but that we always must make such decisions without having certainty.

Employers requiring vaccination is more controversial. While some professions, such as healthcare workers and military personnel, are usually required to get vaccinated these are exceptions rather than the rule. Most professions, even those that involve working closely with other people, do not require vaccinations, even during a pandemic. There are also moral questions about what employers can compel their employees to do.

In general, the American right supports granting considerable power to employers over their employees. One example is at will employment which allows employers to fire employees at will. For example, if an employee refused to stop smoking (outside of the workplace) they could be fired. As another example, if an employee expresses political views on their own time that their boss dislikes, they can be fired. Given that the right generally supports employers having great power over their employers, one might think they  would accept that employers could mandate vaccination on the pain of being fired. While workers would be free to refuse, few can afford to quit their jobs and companies have great coercive power.

But the right has made vaccines part of their political war. While they would normally favor employers imposing what they wish on their employees, the anti-vaxxers on the right have opposed this mandate. They have shown that when corporations do not side with them in their manufactured culture war battles, they will turn against these businesses. This is presumably because they believe the political points they gain will outweigh a conflict with the corporations who help fund their re-elections.

While the right professes to be anti-vax because of their love of freedom, this is a bad faith claim. The right has been busy passing restrictive laws to “solve” problems that do not exist. For example, the right has been busy limiting access to voting based on their “big lie” about the 2020 election. If they cared about freedom, they would not be doing this. They have also been busy passing laws aimed at trans people, claiming that strict restrictions must be in place to protect people from (imaginary) dangers. Again, if they believed that freedom is so important, they would not be passing such laws. And if they really believed in protecting people from real harm, they would not be anti-vax.

The left generally favors workers’ rights and often seeks to at least slightly reduce the power disparity. As such, it would make sense for the left to generally hold that workers could refuse to be vaccinated without being fired. That said, the left also has concerns beyond the workplace, so some leftists might favor mandatory vaccination imposed by the state. This would typically be morally justified on utilitarian grounds: the state is supposed to use its coercive powers to protect citizens, and this could include requiring vaccination during the next pandemic.

My own view is, to state the obvious, that this issue is complicated. On the one hand, people have the moral right to control their bodies. This provides a moral foundation for arguing against vaccine mandates. On the other hand, all rights should be morally limited by the harm that might be done to others in exercising them. To use a silly example, I have the right to run as fast as I wish. But I do not have the right to charge into other people. This is because my actions could hurt them. As another example, while I do have the right to remove the brakes from my truck, I do not have the right to drive it on public roads after doing this. This is because I would hurt other people. In the case of the next pandemic, the harms would likely warrant mandatory vaccination just as people are required to have working brakes on their vehicles and forbidden from charging other people like deranged bulls.

While the rich have long enjoyed luxury cars, mansions and yachts, their newest luxury vehicle is the spaceship. Musk has the most useful rockets as his SpaceX vessels can put satellites into orbit and reach the International Space Station. While they do make some innovations, they are more of an evolution of existing rockets rather than a revolution in space travel.

Virgin Galactic has a spaceplane, which can be likened to a passenger version of the old X-15. While spaceplanes have potential, Virgin Galactic seems mostly focused on space tourism. Bezos has a conventional rocket that shot him and later, Katy Perry, into space. Because of its limited reach, it seems suitable mostly for space tourism.  As would be expected, critics see these billionaire space vessels as wasteful excesses: resources are being expended for ego trips to space that would be better used to address serious problems here on earth.

Bezos has acknowledged the validity of this criticism, saying “Well, I say they’re largely right. We have to do both. You know, we have lots of problems here and now on Earth and we need to work on those, and we always need to look to the future. We’ve always done that as a species, as a civilization. We have to do both.” He claimed that his mission is aimed at “building a road to space for the next generations to do amazing things there, and those amazing things will solve problems here on Earth.” Is Bezos right?

He is right that the critics are largely right: while Musk can claim his SpaceX ships put cargo into space, Branson and Bezos have been joyriding (just barely) into space. Vast resources were expended to for these joyrides, and, in the case of Bezos, it can be argued that his flight was enabled by his brutal exploitation of his workforce. As is well known, Amazon workers have been pushed so hard that they need to pee in bottles to meet the requirements of their job. Amazon’s leadership has also been busy crushing unions, thus enabling Bezos to expand his wealth to the point that he has his own rocket ship. This creates a powerful symbol for use in arguing about taxing the rich and increasing the minimum wage. In the glare of rocket engines, it seems absurd to argue the rich would be hurt by having to pay more taxes or that business like Amazon would be meaningfully harmed if they had to provide workers with better pay and benefits. After all, if a company is so well off that its owner has his own rocket ship, it is absurd to argue against treating employees better on the grounds that the company cannot afford to do so. Bezos could have forgone some of that rocket ship money and eased up on his employees so that they would not have needed to pee in bottles. Given his bountiful wealth, he could easily have done both. But he decided not to. He also could have used all those resources to address problems here on earth while still maintaining a lavish lifestyle including multiple yachts.  His counter is, as mentioned above, that he is building a road to space.

For sci-fi fans, it is obvious that Bezos is probably thinking of Heinlein’s novella The Man Who Sold the Moon. This novella recounts the machinations of Harriman, “the last of the robber barons”, to get to the moon. In the story, Harriman manipulates and schemes to get backing for his plan and uses the money to acquire talented people to solve the technical problems. The story includes a successful flight the moon and ends with the plans to establish a colony on the moon. But Harriman is never allowed to go to the moon: he is seen as too important to risk. Heinlein does present a plausible tale, and it is still well worth reading today. But, of course, the actual world turned out differently.

Like most other huge endeavors, the moon was reached as part of a collective effort by a state when the United States put the first person on the moon. This public development of technology laid the foundation of billionaire space flight, just as their businesses were built on public foundations.  For a while, it seemed like a version of Heinlein’s vision might come to pass. But a moon colony was never established and humanity’s expansion into space has been slow and limited for many reasons.

We do have the technology to create a moon base and plans have long existed to do just that. As such, Bezos and his fellows are not really in the business of overcoming technological hurdles for a moon base or space expansion. As noted above, Musk and Bezos have rockets and Branson has a spaceplane. They have offered some evolution of technology that, in Musk’s case, has been heavily subsidized by the taxpayers.

Also, while they are extremely wealthy, they do not have the resources to establish a significant moon base, let alone a Mars colony. But one could argue that they can shape public policy towards space. To use an obvious analogy, the United States government has heavily subsidized railroads, fossil fuels and interstate highways. This has usually been done at the behest of the wealthy. This public investment has provided infrastructure and, of course, vast fortunes for some. As such, the space billionaires might be planning something similar with space: a vast public investment gets them into a position where they can make private profit. Musk is already doing the best here; he has been getting contracts from the state to provide space vessels and services.  Bezos and Branson are behind here, but they seem to be aiming at space tourism. They, it seems, are adopting the model of selling their services to the wealthy.

In terms of billionaires building the road to space, the highway system and railroads provide good analogies: they were built by public funds and now the billionaires are cashing in. It is debatable whether paying billions to billionaires for space is superior to using those billions to fund public space operations. While there is the myth that the private sector is magically better than the public sector, there is the obvious question of how billionaires will make a profit while somehow also being cheaper and better than what could be done by NASA. The answer, as is usually the case, will probably be to simply lie.  

In terms of the road to space leading to amazing things that will solve problems here on earth, a case can be made for this. One example is asteroid mining. Asteroids contain resources and space mining would seem to avoid the usual environmental harms of mining on earth. However, there is the obvious concern about how those resources will be used and who they will benefit. If this just leads to space trillionaires while most people remain poor, then this will only solve the problem of not being a space trillionaire. One would need to go through and assess all the plausible benefits to make (or break) this claim, which is beyond the scope of this short essay.

In closing, an obvious critical consideration is what would be the best investment for problem solving. Sci-fi fans find the idea of space as the solution appealing. But we need to be realistic about this. For example, while a Mars colony sounds cool, those resources could be used to address problems on earth. For example, the failing infrastructure of the United States could be repaired and upgraded, and this would solve many problems. It would not be as cool as a Mars colony but would certainly solve more problems.

Because of my love of sci-fi, I want humanity to go into space. But moral considerations point to focusing more on solving problems here on earth. As Bezos said, we can do both. But this would require the billionaires to decide to use some of their billions to solve these problems. Many of which they themselves have created and thus could often easily fix by simply ceasing to cause harm.

While most states have hate crime statutes, only  about five include law enforcement officers as a protected category. Utah is one of these states. After a 2021 traffic stop for speeding, Lauren Gibson is alleged to have stomped on a “Back the Blue” sign while “smirking in an intimidating manner” at a deputy. She was charged with a hate crime for her actions. These leads to two issues. The first is a specific matter: did her actions constitute a hate crime? The second is a general matter: should law enforcement be a protected category in the context of hate crime?

While the legal debate is best left to legal experts, I can consider the text of the law and assess whether it seems reasonable to interpret her actions as a hate crime. According to the Utah law, a hate crime occurs when a person commits an offense “with the intent to intimidate or terrorize another person or with reason to believe that his action would intimidate or terrorize that person.” And, of course, the person must be in a protected category. So, for example, if I went to Utah and was recognized as a philosophy professor and a crowd attempted to terrorize or intimidate me because of this, it would not be a hate crime, since philosophy professors are not a protected category. If the same crowd did the same sort of thing to a police officer who was with me, then that would be a hate crime. That is how protected categories work.

Given that Gibson was a 19-year-old unarmed woman at the time of the incident, it seems unlikely she believed she could intimidate an armed deputy. While she probably did not know it at the time, the deputy is a veteran of the department and had seen combat duty while serving in the military. One could, of course, argue that she did think she could intimidate and terrorize him by stomping on a sign and smirking; but those would be rather odd ways to try to intimidate and terrorize an armed deputy.

Determining intent can be tricky since as this requires speculating on internal psychological states. Naturally, a person can make their alleged intent clear by words or deeds. But stomping on a sign and smirking in this context seem to be based on an intention to express anger and displeasure rather than expressing an intention to intimidate and terrorize. One can, of course, say that she exercised poor judgment in antagonizing the deputy, but she probably did not expect to be charged with committing a hate crime. Smirking, after all, is generally not a crime. In the case of the sign, it had apparently been found abandoned by the side of the road. Stomping on an abandoned sign is also usually not a crime. While ignorance of the law is not an excuse, unless she was aware of the statute, she would have no reason to think that her actions would constitute a hate crime. After all, her actions are not what a person would intuitively think of as falling under a hate crime. While the legal judgment was up to the judge, it would be absurd to convict her of a hate crime—even under the statute. This leads to the question of whether law enforcement should be considered a protected category in the context of hate crimes.

While people can and do hate the police, hate crimes are not defined based on the emotion. After all, if a mob in Utah tried to kill me because they hate my ontological commitments, then they would be acting from hate but not committing a hate crime. As noted above, a hate crime involves intimidation and terrorizing aimed at a protected category. From a moral standpoint, a reasonable justification for focusing on intimidation and terrorizing is to distinguish crimes that might be committed against a person who just so happens to be in a certain category and crimes aimed at a person because they are in that category. So, if Ted embezzles money from Sally because he hates her for being a cruel boss, and Sally is in a protected category, then that would generally not be a hate crime. After all, Ted is not trying to intimidate or terrorize her. He is trying to steal money and just happens to hate her. But if Ted attacks Sally because she is in a protected category and intends to intimidate or terrorize her because of that category, then that could be a hate crime. As far as why a hate crime would be worse than a normal crime, one moral factor is that a hate crime also harms other members of the category. This is because the hate crime is not aimed just at intimidating or terrorizing a person but also aimed at intimidation and terrorizing them because they are within that category. So, if Ted commits a crime against Sally aimed at intimidating and terrorizing her because she is a woman, then he is also acting against other women and thus the consequences are usually greater than for a “normal” crime. Or so one might argue.

In the case of law enforcement, it is true that a person can be targeted for a crime because of their profession. While it is fortunately a rare occurrence, there are cases where police are targeted for assassination. But this is also true of many other professions. For example, journalists are subject to attacks because they are journalists (sometimes by the police). Thanks to Trump and his fellows, these attacks increased and are still an ongoing concern. Speaking of Trump and his fellows, their lies also contributed to increased attacks on public health officials. As such, if law enforcement should be protected by hate crime laws, then the same protection should be extended to other professions as well, especially journalists and public health officials. In this case, one might see an interesting case in which a journalist commits a hate crime against a police officer by “intimidating” them by filming them committing a hate crime by intimidating and terrorizing the journalist by shooting them with “less than lethal” munition and whacking them in the face with a club. One could, of course, argue that professions should not be the basis for being in a protected category.

Also from a moral standpoint, hate crime definitions often tend to focus on intimidation and terrorizing because of ethical concerns about power disparities between categories of people and not just between individuals. While individuals do vary in power, certain categories enjoy relative power advantages over others. To use an obvious example, men as a category have more power than women as a category. I, as a man can run through the park in the dark with no fear; the same is not true for most women. While there are individual women who can physically intimidate and overpower individual men, men as a category have the advantage when it comes to terrorizing and intimidating.   As another example, white Americans as a category have more power than other Americans. This is not to deny that an individual white American can be intimidated or terrorized by, for example, an African American. But white Americans generally have the advantage here when it comes to inflicting terror and intimidation. For example, Amy Cooper seemed to know exactly what she was doing when she attempted to use the police to intimidate Christian Cooper. In this specific case, her efforts backfired, and she got in trouble, but this is because the encounter was recorded. In other cases, the intimidation works as intended.

While an individual law enforcement officer could be intimidated or terrorized by someone outside of the profession, as a category law enforcement has an absurd level of advantage over civilians. Police are armed, often with military grade equipment, they usually wear some form of armor, and they have at least basic training in combat. They also have the advantage of being able to call on the power of the state, both in the form of reinforcements and in inflicting punishment through the legal system. They also often get away with using excessive, even lethal violence. There have been, of course, some famous exceptions that show if the violence is recorded and witnessed by many people and the incident gains national and international attention during the right phase of public opinion, then an officer might be held accountable. As such, law enforcement as a category is unlikely to be intimidated or terrorized by civilians. The weight of terror and intimidation is entirely on their side. As such, there seems to be no moral need to single out law enforcement for special protection under hate crime laws. To pre-empt likely straw man attacks, I am obviously not claiming that police should not be protected by the law; a crime against a person who is in law enforcement is still a crime but would not be a hate crime. So, why are their such statutes?

The easy and obvious answer is that the intention is to, ironically, intimidate and terrorize people who might come into conflict with the police. This could be during an arrest or during a protest. On the face of it, one could argue that a person who resists arrest is committing a hate crime under this statute. If stomping on a sign and smirking count as threats or intimidation, then protesting the police would also fall under this category. Protesting anything while police are merely present could fall under this sort of statute. An officer might, for example, see a protestor smirking at them and decide that was an attempt to intimidate them.

I must, of course, grudgingly admit that the right is devilishly clever to repurpose hate crime laws intended to protect marginalized communities and vulnerable groups. They are weaponizing these laws against these communities and groups; just as they have weaponized free speech. In closing, while law enforcement does deserve the full protection of the law, making them a protected category is obviously intended to weaponize hate crime statutes and do so largely against the people they were originally intended to protect.

 

It might seem like woke madness to claim that medical devices can be biased. Are there white supremacist stethoscopes? Misogynistic MRI machines? Extremely racist X-Ray machines? Obviously not, medical devices do not have beliefs or ideologies (yet). But they can still be biased in their accuracy and effectiveness.

One example of a biased device is the pulse oximeter. This device measures blood oxygen by using light. You have probably had one clipped on your finger during a visit to your doctor. Or you might even own one. The bias in this device is that it is three times more likely to not reveal low oxygen levels in dark skinned patients than light skinned patients.  As would be expected, there are other devices that have problems with accuracy when used on people who have darker skins. These are essential sensor biases (or defects). In most cases, these can be addressed by improving the sensors or developing alternative devices. The problem is, to exaggerate a bit, is that most medical technology is made by white men for white men. This is not to claim such biased devices are all cases of intentional racism and misogyny. There is not, one assumes, a conspiracy against women and people of color in this area but there is a bias problem.  In addition to biased hardware, there is also biased software.

Many medical devices use software, and it is often used in medical diagnosis. People are often inclined to think software is unbiased, perhaps because of science fiction tropes about objective and unfeeling machines. While it is true that our current software does not feel or think, bias can make its way into the code. For example, software used to analyze chest x-rays would work less well on women than men if the software was “trained” only on X-rays of men. The movie Prometheus has an excellent fictional example of a gender-biased auto-doc that lacks the software to treat female patients.

These software issues can be addressed by using diverse training groups for software and taking steps to test software for bias by using a diverse testing group. Also, having a more diverse set of people working on such technology would probably also help.

Another factor is analogous to user error, which is user bias. People, unlike devices, do have biases and these can and do impact how they use medical devices and their data. Bias in healthcare is well documented. While overt and conscious racism and sexism are rare, sexism and subtle racism are still problems. Addressing this widespread problem is more challenging than addressing biases in hardware and software. But if we want fair and unbiased healthcare, it is a problem that must be addressed.

As to why these biases should be addressed, this is a matter of ethics. To allow bias to harm patients goes against the fundamental purpose of medicine, which is to heal people. From a utilitarian standpoint, addressing this bias would be the right thing to do: it would create more positive value than negative value. This is because there would be more accurate medical data and better treatment of patients.

In terms of a counterargument, one could contend that addressing bias would increase costs and thus should not be done. There are several easy and obvious replies. One is that the cost increase would be, at worst, minor. For example, testing devices on a more diverse population would not seem meaningfully more expensive than not doing that. Another is that patients and society pay a far greater price in terms of illness and its effects than it would cost to address medical bias. For those focused on the bottom line, workers who are not properly treated can cost corporations some of their profit and ongoing health issues can cost taxpayer money.

One can, of course, advance racist and sexist arguments by professing outrage at “wokeness” attempting to “ruin” medicine by “ramming diversity down throats” or however Fox news would put it. Such “arguments” would be aimed at preserving the harm done to women and people of color, which is an evil thing to do. One might hope that these folks would be hard pressed to turn, for example, pulse oximeters into a battlefront of the culture war. But these are the same folks who professed to lose their minds over Mr. Potato Head and went on a bizarre rampage against a grad school level theory that has been around since the 1970s. They are also the same folks who have gone anti-vax in during a pandemic, encouraging people to buy tickets in the death lottery. But the right thing to do is to choose life.

A few years ago, PragerU tried to push back on Twitter (now X) against arguments by young Americans about racism. In general, getting involved in social media battles is a bad idea. To use an AD&D analogy, these fights are like punching green slime: the more you attack, the more you hurt yourself. And you end up covered in slime. It is usually best to avoid rather than engage. 

In the case of PragerU, they fired off what they presumed would be a sick burn of the youth: “Young people are enamored with ‘anti-racist’ rhetoric because they think they are fighting racist systems in America.  The TRUTH is they are fighting America itself and the very values the country was founded on.” Ironically, PragerU could have used some schooling in clear writing.

Their intended meaning, given the ideology evident in their videos, is that the youth think they are fighting racism, but they are wrong about this. Instead, they are fighting America and its founding values. Which are supposedly not racist. However, the tweet as written states that the youth think they are fighting racist systems in America, but they do not realize that the racist systems are America itself and its founding values. That is, PragerU seems have tweeted openly what they were supposed to keep quiet: they believe that America was founded on racism and that the racist systems are America. Sometimes they are willing to acknowledge that there were a few racist things in America’s past, but quickly rush to explain that they were not so bad and, of course, have no meaningful consequences for the present day.

 These are the same people who defend “Civil War” statues on the grounds that history must be preserved. This is a bad faith argument for obvious reasons. While a statue can be an historical artifact, a statue is not history. As comedians have noted, we do not have statues of Bin Laden in New York City, even though he is historically significant to the city. We do not do this because such statues are political statements. There is also the obvious problem that the history presented by PragerU and its ilk generally try to whitewash the past and ignore the truth. Attacking Critical Race Theory has become a key part of this strategic attack on history and facts. This is a fight that the right is currently winning, a backlash from a time when Black Lives Mattered.

 Ironically, PragerU (and those who share their ideology) agree with key factual claims accepted by most Critical Race Theorists about racism. These include the fact that the United States political, economic, and social systems have been dominated by white Americans to their advantage.  The difference is that Critical Race Theorists generally see the racism (systematic and otherwise) as morally wrong and something that needs to be addressed. PragerU and their fellows see these systems as generally good, although they were reluctant to openly assert this claim. Instead, they have engaged in revisionist history and take great effort to block criticism of the existing system.

PragerU is (as is usually the case) is mistaken in its key claims. While the United States founding values include racist values (they are explicitly laid out in the Constitution, political philosophy, and laws) there are other professed values that are not racist and some are even anti-racist. As Dr. King noted, the Declaration of Independence makes promises to all Americans, whether those promises were sincere or not. While America is racist, it is also anti-racist as America is not monolithic, and we have a complicated moral history. There are those, like PragerU, who fight for racist elements of the system and those, like the young Americans they tried to attack, who are fighting racism. In the face of the backlash, anti-racism is fighting a defensive battle with open racism in the ascendence. But as the racism becomes more open and extreme, America will probably push back towards the center. Probably.

PragerU, like many other right-wing propaganda engines, is engaged in a project worthy of a comic book villain, but all too real. While they do admit America had some racism in the past, they contend that it was not that bad. They take special pains to present slavery in a positive light and present many Confederates as heroic figures. They refuse to accept that past racism has had any significant systematic effect on the present. While sometimes willing to admit that there might a racist bad apple or two, they refuse to accept that racism exists in a significant and systematic form. They do all this while defending and enhancing racism, even “cleverly” accusing those critical of racism of being “the real racists.” As always, I am unsure if ordinary citizens who profess to believe these things are unwitting victims or accomplices who know the lies are lies but pretend to believe. One must thus either think them ignorant or dishonest; neither of which is a pleasant. I prefer to think that many believe out of ignorance, if only because ignorance is easier to overcome than dishonesty.