What would it take for mandates to be justified?

How bad does it have to get before I get all authoritarian on your ass?

A social media friend asked me the following question; my reply follows.

At what point would you agree a vaccine mandate (for any disease) is warranted. How broad and how serious would the risk to the public need to be?

Well, if I were a utilitarian, necessary (but not necessarily sufficient) conditions would clearly be things like….

• that the virus is super seriously dangerous

• the vax dramatically lowers risk of the virus

• the vax has low risks of its own

• asymptomatics spread it

• it doesn’t lead to the evolution of worse strains, and

• is sterilizing.

A utilitarian might then be able to justify mandates just to reduce overall deaths.

I’m not a utilitarian, so my constraints are much more severe, and concern appeals to self defense of some kind.

One might imagine justifying it from a libertarian perspective. …that it’s so deadly and transmits so asymptomatically that walking about without having been vaccinated (with one described by the bullets above) amounts to putting others at risk. (I don’t necessarily ascribe to that argument, but it might be possible to make a reasonable libertarian argument from this angle.)

But, note that IF all that I suggested above about the vaccine were true, then there wouldn’t even be a self-defense justification for mandatory vaccinations.

…because the vaccine protects folks!