DRAFT
This post is a continuation of a discussion from Facebook. The question we are debating here is:
Is it ever allowable for the government to mandate that a citizen submit to a medical procedure, such as vaccination? Or, on the contrary, does an unwanted medical procedure--something done to the body of the individual--always violate the personal integrity of the recipient, such that even if it would be for the common good of the nation, a government must respect the wishes of any individual refusing vaccination as inviolate?
1. Summary of the Argument So Far
Here are some of my key take-away points from the initial discussion:
1.1. We are here asking whether there is an intrinsic and necessary bar from the government enacting a vaccine mandate--whether it is permissible for the government to make such a law under any circumstance, or whether instead the nature of personal responsibility or the inviolateness of conscience or some such thing makes it this wrong for the government to do this under any circumstance.
1.2. It is admitted that if such an inviolate freedom exists, it might only apply to the innocent, and that there could be some crimes that would result in the forfeiture of this right to medical self-determination. This is not on-topic; we're talking about laws that apply to all or most citizens.
1.3. It is also established that there could be other, prudential, reasons for not wanting such mandates to be enacted. Some such reasons discussed were wanting to avoid the temptation of the government to intrude unnecessarily into the private life of citizens, and wanting to limit government's power to forestall the slide into tyranny. We are not discussing arguments of this sort now; this discussion is about the logically prior question of the intrinsic possible powers of government. If it is wrong per se for any government to make laws of this sort, the prudence of such laws for our current world situation is irrelevant.
1.4. The distinction has already been made between laws that impact the common good and laws that are directed solely to the private good of individuals, and it has already been conceded that laws should not be passed that only affect the private good of individuals. But it was also conceded that vaccination laws do affect the common good, so the claim which we are contesting is that the individual right to medical self determination pre-empts the responsibility of the government over things affecting the common good, in this case.
1.5. I'll point out here that most of the examples given so far as moral parallels haven't been very satisfactory. Most of the things pointed out as "you wouldn't expect the government to be able to mandate X, would you?" have been things that only affect the private good, whereas the things pointed out as "we already admit that the government can mandate Y, right?" have been things that are done to people's properties and not to their bodies. Vaccination might be a singular thing in that it is performed on individual's bodies, and yet also has a very clear impact on other people and on the common good. Or maybe we just haven't thought of other good parallels.
1.6. One parallel that was raised but hasn't been answered yet is the example of a suicidal mother with an unborn baby, starving herself to death. I think we would all agree the State would be right to force intravenous hydration in this case--but the point was mentioned and then the discussion moved on with anyone directly addressing it.
1.7. The attempt is being made to use the principle of the union of the soul and the body to claim that self-determination over the body is as inviolable as self-determination over the soul. So far, this is the heart of the current disagreement, I think.
2. On "Personal Bodily Integrity"
The claim is that government mandated vaccines would violate an unalienable right of citizens in some way: maybe you could call it the "right to medical self-determination". Another way this was put is that man's "moral stewardship" over his own body is absolute, at least insofar as decision making about it can't be compelled by the State.
So first off, I grant that there are certain aspects of the human person which are inviolate and about which the government should not legislate, even if they have a bearing upon the common good. After thinking about these aspects of human life that I would agree are out-of-bounds, I think there are three very closely related concepts here at play here: dignity, responsibility, and integrity. In none of these, however, do we see that absolute freedom from the State is accepted.
2.1. Dignity
I have two examples related to dignity:
2.1.1. The ability of man to choose his own individual life "path" and to choose his own way in life is a reflection of his being created in the image and likeness of God, and is hence a matter of high dignity. This is reflected in the fact that it is considered a sacred and inviolate right of people to choose whether or not they wish to marry and to whom. It would be a grievous overstepping of government authority to mandate marriages to its citizens.
Nevertheless, this doesn't mean that the choice of matrimony is entirely free from government regulation. The government validly makes laws to prohibit near relations from marrying, for example, to prevent inbreeding. The sovereign choice of whom to marry is thus still subject to laws, insofar as their choices have an impact on the common good.
2.1.2. There is no higher aspect of man's dignity than his relationship to God. Therefore, conscience provisions prohibiting governments from dictating man's beliefs are the hallmark of a good and free society.
Nevertheless, freedom of conscience and freedom of religion are not unbounded, and are still subject to limiting laws for the sake of the common good. In Thomistic thought, this fact is expressed in terms of whether or not the State has the right to punish heresy (it does). This sounds quaint, but is not so far off from American jurisprudence as you might think; the rationale by which Thomas justifies the right of the State to do this is the damage to the peace and well-being of society that heresy can cause. Likewise, freedom of religion in American thought does not give one license to preach any and every thing you want. Openly preaching sedition or openly calling for the assassination of politicians, for example, is illegal no matter how much you justify the talk with your religious beliefs. In both cases, the limiting factor on freedom of religion is the genuine common good.
Conclusion: If these two aspects of human life--self-determination in a family and freedom of religion--which are of the very highest human dignity, are not on that account free from all government regulations, then medical self-determination (which is clearly a lesser thing than those), is not therefore free from government regulation on account of dignity.
2.2 Responsibility
Aside from dignity, we also believe in that responsibility of rule follows the principle of subsidiarity: laws should be made by those responsible authorities who are closest to the subject matter of the law. Therefore it seems that decisions about one's body should most properly be taken by the person himself, who is obviously closer than anyone else possible to the body in question.
You can enumerate the reasons behind subsidiarity as follows:
- Those who are closest to the subject matter of a law know the most about the subject matter. They are therefore the best able to make good decisions about how that thing should be ruled.
- Those who are closest to the subject matter of a law are affected by the consequences of the law most directly. Therefore, they have a stake in the correctness of the law, and are incentivized to avoid capricious rule.
- Those who are closest to the subject matter of a law are often naturally fit to rule about said subject matter. For example, parents are the proper rulers of their children, as ordained by nature.
But do these reasons apply to laws regulating the body in all cases? We will see that they do not, and that when they do not apply, we do accept that the government can step in as the more appropriate lawmaker.
2.2.1 Knowledge
While individuals are usually the most well-informed about their own personal health, there are a number of things in which it is unreasonable to assume that the average person is best aware of, even regarding his own body. For example, controlling bacteria growth in the food chain is a complicated process that involves very specialized knowledge and experience. If you were to ask most people, "how do you ensure that you don't get botulism by eating the wrong foods?", they wouldn't have the first idea how to describe all the steps that need to be taken to do this. It is therefore unwise for a State to leave the health of the publicly available food chain to personal, individual responsibility only, even though the ultimate end of all activities being regulated is what individuals put into their own bodies. This is properly a State responsibility, not an individual one.
Likewise, individual citizens are often ignorant of even basic facts about immunology and epidemiology. They usually don't have a very good idea of the relative risk to either themselves or to others by vaccinating vs. not vaccinating. This is not a natural knowledge that just comes from being human and living a regular life; it is a specialized knowledge which previously didn't even exist in the world, and that only came about due to the long efforts of many scientists, and which is still increased regularly by a discipline carried out by specializing scientists who spend entire careers studying and improving this knowledge.
Just as the public health of the food and water chains are the responsibility of the State rather than the individual, then, so to should be the public health of citizens as regarding vaccinations.
2.2.2. Scope of Effect
You might expect that because a law has to do with the body of an individual, that for that reason no other person could be as affected by the law as the individual to whom the law directly applies. However, with vaccination this is not true.
Vaccinations work against infectious diseases, and these (by definition) spread. Infectious diseases spread by growing; in other words, in order for a disease to spread throughout a community, each infected person must in turn infect more than one person (on average). If the average person who catches the disease doesn't pass it on to more than one person, the disease will never grow and it will never be able to spread through a community.
Therefore, for any spreading infectious disease, the average individual who makes decisions that affect his susceptibility to disease is always in the minority of the people whom his actions will impact. His decisions will impact himself, and more than one other person who is likely to become infected as a result of his actions, plus all the people they may infect, and so forth.
This same principle is operational in the military, where we grant that government has the authority to override the natural instincts of self-preservation over the health of the body inherent in every human, and order soldiers to do dangerous or unhealthy things, or difficult but healthy things that they would rather not do, except that they are so ordered. This is because the actions and state of health of members of the military affect the lives of many more people than are in the army, because they are the guarding principle of the entire nation. Therefore whatever individual health preference they might have is "outvoted" by the greater needs of the common good.
In the same way, the impact that susceptibility to infection has on society is greater than the impact it has on the individual. And therefore the proper responsible body is society and the State and not the individual.
2.2.3. Natural Fittingness
It may seem that nobody is more naturally fit to make decisions about a body than the person for whom that body is an integral part of their whole being.
However, when God designed the human person, he did not give rule over all aspects of the body to the human person. Some operations of the body are independent of our own rule, exempted from that rule by God Himself: involuntary actions. Disease spread and vaccination involve entirely such involuntary human actions. We can't choose whether or not to breath; we can't decide how many water droplets we will expel in each breath. We can't tell our immune system to make this antibody or that antibody at will.
Furthermore, we cannot (in general) choose to change our social interactions so entirely as to preclude the possibility that we will become vectors of disease spread. Governments may temporarily impose harsh restrictions on social interaction, but since man is by nature a social animal, these things can never last for very long.
Vaccination therefore is directed towards a part of human life that involves the confluence of a completely involuntary action of the human body (susceptibility to infection) with an essential and necessary part of human nature (close-quarters physical interaction). While everyone participates in these things as individuals, they do not--as individuals--have the power to abrogate or essentially alter these things. Therefore they do not, de facto, have natural fittingness as rulers over these things.
Conclusion: While most decisions regarding an individual's body do belong to the individual, by virtue of the rules of subsidiarity, none of those usual rules apply specifically to the question of vaccination. In both knowledge, scope of effect, and natural fittingness, society or the State has a higher competency than the individual. Therefore responsibility for decision-making regarding vaccination is appropriately given to the State and not to the individual.
2.3 Integrity
A final aspect of the human body that might make it off-bounds of government regulation is its integration with the soul into the whole human.
2.3.1. While other laws might be validly written that affect the body accidentally, these only regulate how the body exist. It seems, on the other hand, that a medical procedure effects what the body is. By affecting the very nature of the body, such a law would touch on the identity of the human being itself.
Supposing, for example, in some small country there were a severe imbalance between men and women. Could the State mandate (given technology that doesn't really work this way yet) that a certain percentage of the population accept a sex change operation so that the common good of procreation could be better attained? Pretty clearly, no, the State does not have the right to do this, even for the sake of the common good.
2.3.2. Another way to see that vaccination is more intrusive into the human integrity than other laws concerning the body is to see that while other laws require men to do something "with" their bodies (go to here, do this thing) or prohibit men to do something "with" their bodies (don't go here, don't do that), mandatory vaccination is almost the only type of law that requires people to do something "to" their body.
However, these arguments are faulty in several respects.
2.3.3. First, the association between any bodily change and identity / personhood is faulty. While the soul is the form of the body, this does not imply that any bodily change therefore touches on the identity or soul of the person. In fact, the relationship goes in the other direction: the essence of a man comes from the soul and not from the body. Since the active principle is the soul and not the body, any modifications done to the body can only, at worst, hinder the actuation of the man's essence. They cannot add to it.
Mutilations, such as sex change operation, can hamper the soul's ability to completely properly inform the body with its due purpose. But nothing done to the body actually affects either the essence or the personhood of the subject of such a change. Amputating a limb, for example, does not make the amputee any less of a person, nor decreases in any way that person's soul.
Mere bodily changes, therefore, do not affect what a person is, as a body/soul composite. They can only affect how well the body/soul composite exists, if there is severe damage to the body. Bodily changes that are not also mutilations, then, cannot affect the essence of the person at all.
2.3.4. Second, the above arguments misunderstand the nature of the bodily change brought about by vaccination. Different types of bodily change affect different aspects of human life, and touch on different aspects of the human essence, because not only is the human being a composite of body and soul, but there soul itself is a composite of different levels and types of souls. The human essence is composed of sub-essences which are unified into one.
Aristotle, and Aquinas after him, clearly distinguished between those actions that followed from deliberate choice and involuntary actions. Only the first kind of actions were admitted to be properly human actions. A man is a rational animal, and it is in his nature to deliberate and choose actions. Those bodily functions that happen on their own without deliberate reason are called "actions of a man", or also, actions flowing from the vegetative soul of a man. These involuntary operations are clearly of lesser importance in defining the nature of a man, as they are excluded entirely from the consideration of ethics, as being not relevant to the proper activity by which a man follows his true nature.
Even within the involuntary operations of a man, we can see a distinction between different components, depending on how closely they are related to the essential nature of man. For example, the reproductive organs have a necessary link to procreation, and hence to the social and familial nature of man. There are therefore more restrictions on the physical modifications that are allowed to these organs compared to other organs which don't have a function so closely related to the essence of man. Or also the brain is the organ tied to the intellectual powers of the soul, and therefore must be treated with utmost respect and delicacy, given that reason is the very thing that is properly human.
The immunological functions of man are not in the same way tied to anything uniquely or specially human, but is a mere basic biological function of health which we share with all animals. Modifications done to it, therefore, do not have anything like the import that modifications to other body parts might.
2.3.5. Third, the above arguments are wrong to characterize the change caused by a vaccination as a change of what, even purely from the perspective of the immune system.
In fact, the immune system is a nearly infinitely malleable system that is designed to learn how to recognize invasive particles, to remember which antibodies render those particles inert, and to recall and produce those antibodies when those invasive particles are again detected.
With a vaccine, an antigen is presented to the immune system, but is then processed by the immune system and eliminated from the body. What is left over is not the vaccine, but the memory of the vaccine in the immune system. While the immune system after a vaccination is in a different state than what it was before the vaccination, it has not suffered a change of nature. Rather, it has simply operated in accordance with its nature and now has a bio-physiological memory of a previous experience.
When we learn something intellectually, we do acquire the forms of the new thing we learned as quasi-additions to our own essence. But it is never said that learning something changes the nature of our mind, or that by learning something new we now are something different than we once were. Rather, the mind is designed to learn an infinitude of possible forms, and after learning new ones, it has actuated its potency more perfectly than it previously did.
What happens to the immune system after a vaccination is exactly parallel, and is hence not a change of essence at all: it is an actuation of latent potency.
2.3.6. The argument that vaccination is a more intimate and invasive change because it is forcing us to actively do something "to" our bodies also fails.
Boethius, in the "Consolation of Philosophy", discusses the relative happiness of himself, suffering many privations to his body, to that of his captors, who were inflicting those privations on him. Considered rationally, he concludes that his happiness is the greater. For while many things were being done to his body against his will, none of those privations compared with the evil actions of his captors, who by their actions were distorting their very soul. The evil they were inflicting on him was only surface level, whereas the evil they were inflicting upon themselves went to the very root of their being.
In other words, things done to your body can never compare in significance to things you do which have serious moral implications.
But can the government legitimately compel us to do things which have serious moral implications? If it can, then the argument that compelling us to do something morally neutral to our bodies is too invasive fails.
And, in fact, it can. For example, the government has the right to compel regular citizens who might have knowledge of a crime to come forward, to swear an oath to God that they will tell the truth, and then to tell the truth about their knowledge of that crime. Or if a citizen happens to have special knowledge that would be of aid in the pursuit of justice in a court, he could be compelled to come forward and offer expert testimony for the sake of justice.
These are actions that all admit that the government can compel us to take, and which have serious moral consequences. By Boethius' principles, these compelled actions strike much more closely to the core of human nature than does the reception of a vaccine.
2.3.7. As a further example, I will again point out that the very closest analogy to vaccination that exists outside of the medical world is the act of learning, as becoming immune through vaccination is essentially forcing your body to learn a physical shape in a physical way.
But the mind is in all respects a superior and higher aspect of man than the body. If the government can mandate mental education for its citizens, which it does for the sake of the common good in order to have a more highly educated populace, then a fortiore, it must have the right to also mandate the physical education of the immune system, in this case for the sake of the physical common good of the population.
Conclusion: Vaccination involves no essential change to a person's body, imparts no change that has an import on functions of the body that are tied to essential characteristics of man-as-man, and is in every respect a less integral and fundamental part of human being and selfhood than other things which do admit of government control. Therefore, it is appropriate for the State to mandate vaccination, and this in no way represents violence to the makeup of the individual's personal humanity.
3. Overall Conclusion
Mandated vaccination is clearly in the just scope of government authority. There is no aspect of what vaccination does to a person, whatsoever, which is not matched or exceeded in significance by other things over which we all admit government does have legitimate authority. Therefore, the argument that the State is violating inviolable rights or transgressing its proper boundaries by mandating vaccination is false.
