Peter Singer on Why Vaccines Should be Compulsory … and Why He is Wrong

Animal ethics philosopher Peter Singer, who apparently is not a pop singer, argued last year that the Covid vaxxes should be compulsory. As with much of modern philosophy, the argument was based upon common world analogies, rather than consideration of the cold hard statistics about adverse effects. Here is his “seat belt argument”:

https://archive.ph/Svoyj#selection-2665.130-2665.157

“I’m writing from Victoria, the Australian state that became, in 1970, the first jurisdiction in the world to make it compulsory to wear a seat belt in a car.

The legislation was attacked as a violation of individual freedom, but Victorians accepted it because it saved lives. Now most of the world has similar legislation. I can’t recall when I last heard someone demanding the freedom to drive without wearing a seat belt.

Instead, we are now hearing demands for the freedom to be unvaccinated against the virus that causes COVID-19.

Brady Ellison, a member of the United States Olympic archery team, says his decision not to get vaccinated was “100 per cent a personal choice”, insisting that “anyone that says otherwise is taking away people’s freedoms”.

The oddity here is that laws requiring us to wear seat belts really are quite straightforwardly infringing on freedom, whereas laws requiring people to be vaccinated if they are going to be in places where they could infect other people are restricting one kind of freedom in order to protect the freedom of others to go about their business safely.

Don’t misunderstand me. I strongly support laws requiring drivers and passengers in cars to wear seat belts. In the US, such laws are estimated to have saved about 370,000 lives and to have prevented many more serious injuries.

Nevertheless, these laws are paternalistic. They coerce us to do something for our own good. They violate John Stuart Mill’s famous principle, “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others”. …

Nevertheless, given the negligible cost of wearing a belt, a reasonable calculation of one’s own interests shows that it is irrational not to wear one. Car crash survivors who were injured because they were not wearing seat belts recognise and regret their irrationality – but only when it is too late, as it always is for those who were killed after sitting on their belts.

We are now seeing a very similar situation with vaccination. Brytney Cobia recently posted on Facebook the following account of her experiences working as a doctor in Birmingham, Alabama:

“I’m admitting young healthy people to the hospital with very serious COVID infections. One of the last things they do before they’re intubated is beg me for the vaccine. I hold their hand and tell them that I’m sorry, but it’s too late. A few days later when I call time of death, I hug their family members and I tell them the best way to honour their loved one is to go get vaccinated and encourage everyone they know to do the same.

“They cry. And they tell me they didn’t know. They thought it was a hoax. They thought it was political. They thought because they had a certain blood type or a certain skin colour they wouldn’t get as sick. They thought it was ‘just the flu’. But they were wrong. And they wish they could go back. But they can’t.”

The same reason justifies making vaccination against COVID-19 compulsory: otherwise, too many people make decisions that they later regret. One would have to be monstrously callous to say: “It’s their own fault, let them die.”

In any case, in the COVID era, making vaccination compulsory doesn’t violate Mill’s “harm to others” principle. Unvaccinated Olympic athletes impose risks on others, just as speeding down a busy street does.”

Like much of modern analytic philosophy, the argument implicitly embodies the standard narrative of the system, in this case that the vaxxes are lifesaving measure, just like seat belts, so paternalism is justified. Notice, no statistics about mortality, just the citation of anecdotes. And, that key assumption of the lifesaving vaxxes is quite open to challenge, as this blog has been doing. And, Singer does not address the question of whether the Victorian mandates were justified, in the light of evidence that they simply did not work, and had greater costs than benefits. Here is such a response to Singer:

https://rebekahbarnett.substack.com/p/the-problem-with-comparing-seatbelts

“Despite the glaring logical fallacies underpinning the seatbelt/Covid vaccine analogy, it has been a major talking point for those in favour of coercive vaccination policies.

Now that we have empirical evidence of mRNA spike protein lodged in a deceased man’s brain and heart, I’m hoping we can put this silly analogy to bed.

To recap, the seatbelt argument basically goes, ‘no one wanted seatbelts when they were introduced, but they were enforced nonetheless, and now they save lives and no one minds them anymore.’ Ergo, vaccine mandates are the same kind of thing as seatbelt laws. Let the anti-vaxxers kick and scream, but they will get used to it in the end, and lives will be saved. See: Peter Singer (Professor of Bioethics, Princeton).

Ok, but can seatbelts create spike proteins that travel to the brain and heart, damage your cells, cause inflammation and, ultimately, encephalitis?

A new peer-reviewed report shows that that’s exactly what happened to a 76-year-old man who died 3 weeks after receiving his mRNA booster. He died with spike-related myocarditis (mild) and encephalitis (may have contributed to his death). He had no known history of Covid infection, and the spike protein found in his heart and brain during the autopsy was absent the accompanying nucleocapsid proteins (indicating that it was mRNA vaccine spike, not wild Covid spike).

The point is not that the man died, although he did, and it is possible that the booster contributed to his death. The point is that the vaccination changed his biology. Seatbelts don’t lodge themselves in your brain and heart. At least not without a major car crash or major surgery.

So are vaccines and seatbelts the same kind of thing?

One is removable. The other is an irreversible medical procedure that alters the recipient’s biology.

Ergo, are coercive vaccination policies comparable to seat belt laws? …

We do not require valid consent for seatbelt use. Why? Because they’re not the same thing.

They cannot be. It’s kind of ridiculous that smart people entertained the idea at all.

There is much more to say on the subject of Australia’s coercive vaccination policies and the ethical questions that are raised, but I will save this for another day.

Comparing seatbelt laws to (Covid) vaccine mandates is silly. Stop doing it. If you hear someone doing it, ask them to stop. Let’s be smarter, together.”

I wonder how Singer would respond to the material delivered by say Naomi Wolf, or whether he would care to debate her?