I was referring to people (especially in the US, but the slogan has escaped its American cage and crossed the Atlantic) who utter it when referring to abortion, but then supported mandatory vaccination/vaccine mandates during the pandemic.
Those two beliefs are incommensurable. If you hold both at the same time, you are a dingbat.
Oct 23, 2022·edited Oct 23, 2022Liked by Helen Dale
Thank you -- this is the anti-lockdown argument I've always waited for someone to make. Far too many have focused on opposing the interventions based on utilitarian calculus as opposed to on fundamental values. As far as the lockdowns were concerned, there are good utilitarian arguments against (Maxim Lott has done the maths and it didn't come out great https://maximumtruth.substack.com/p/the-covid-fudge-factor ), but they aren't worth swallowing the implicit assumption that freedom of movement is to be bought and sold for some number of micromorts, some difference in life expectancy, or any other value that came out of someone's calculator. On the topic of vaccine mandates, however, the purely scientific arguments failed almost entirely (the risk-reward calculus still comes out pretty good for vaccines if you don't do stupid things like boosting 10-year-olds), and the only real question was whether we're a state that does things like this or one that doesn't. This is a meaning-of-life question, and most of our media and internet philosophers didn't even notice it's there, let alone tried to answer it.
The saddest thing is that I feel many people have *wanted* to make these fundamental-value points, but for some reason shied away from them in public and chose to fight on the utilitarian battlefield instead. And as the topic changed from lockdowns to vaccines, the fight turned into a rout, while also causing serious collateral damage as far as vaccine intake was concerned. Needless to say, both sides are responsible for the latter (without heavy-handed lockdowns, anti-vax sentiment would probably have stayed much more marginal), but I have rarely seen so much destruction wrought by the unwillingness of people to communicate clearly where they stand and what they want.
I'm sorry I didn't think to make this argument earlier, to be fair, because I learnt about both Stephen & Berlin at law school, albeit in different periods (Stephen is taught at undergraduate level in Commonwealth countries, while I encountered the Berlin version of the argument at Oxford for my BCL).
That said, I basically retired from the covid field in mid-2021 because no-one seemed to care about civil liberties (in a way that counted) apart from lawyers, and it was better for us to try to get those enormous fixed penalty notices reduced, or to illustrate via judicial review that large parts of the guidance just didn't make sense.
Well, neither did anyone else :) Zeynep Tufekci came close a few times.
I'm curious, how did the penalties pan out? Did they end up bankrupting people, or were they silently slowrolled till the statute of limitations, or something in between? What little journalists have been writing about these issues back in 2020/1, no one had the stamina to wait and follow up as the cases made it through the systems (not in Britain, not in Germany, nowhere).
As I say in the piece, the huge fixed penalty notices were contested (as part of a campaign organised by the two barristers I mention) and reduced (in court) to fines. The reduction was often from £10K to £50. Unfortunately, the transition from FPN to fine means a conviction is recorded.
In my view, a large FPN is simply a shakedown designed to make someone pay for a clean Disclosure & Barring Record (which you need for quite a lot of jobs in the UK).
Quite enjoyed the civil liberties issue. Such concerns have been raised, often, but were shouted down by those who preferred safety. Stoked by the press who were mostly interested in clicks, the masses were in mortal fear. They were told of an appalling IFR, conflating cases to deaths. Evidence was arriving to show a 1000X IFR difference by age (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.11.22280963v1), yet the press and authorities refused to promote that to reduce fear. The masses desired that safety forget about liberty as Dr Ben Franklin lamented many years ago.
The promise of vaccines helped reduce fear and it did help to restore some degree of normalcy and allowed an ability to examine what happened. Yet now we see the vaccines not delivering freedom from the illness but still thanked for not making the illness worse. In fact, we are learning, many need not to have feared the illness particularly if they had a robust immune system. The new fear might be with the vaccine interfering with a previously robust immune system.
But again we watched as segments of society demonized those who did not take the vaccine. They demanded mandates to get the unvaccinated to submit claiming a social benefit was greater than a civil liberty. The loss of jobs and public shunning was the result. Still as the vaccine proved also ineffective at ending the spread, no apologies, no restoration of jobs.
We aren't past the third act of this play. Some remain captured by fear. Others are trying to justify their actions. Little accountability because the entire world was lost to propaganda. The world seems to have gotten a lot smaller despite considerable differences in cultural values. Our recovery remains to be seen.
I've come to the same conclusion; liberal society cannot justify "lockdowns." Liberty must win.
I was referring to people (especially in the US, but the slogan has escaped its American cage and crossed the Atlantic) who utter it when referring to abortion, but then supported mandatory vaccination/vaccine mandates during the pandemic.
Those two beliefs are incommensurable. If you hold both at the same time, you are a dingbat.
Thank you -- this is the anti-lockdown argument I've always waited for someone to make. Far too many have focused on opposing the interventions based on utilitarian calculus as opposed to on fundamental values. As far as the lockdowns were concerned, there are good utilitarian arguments against (Maxim Lott has done the maths and it didn't come out great https://maximumtruth.substack.com/p/the-covid-fudge-factor ), but they aren't worth swallowing the implicit assumption that freedom of movement is to be bought and sold for some number of micromorts, some difference in life expectancy, or any other value that came out of someone's calculator. On the topic of vaccine mandates, however, the purely scientific arguments failed almost entirely (the risk-reward calculus still comes out pretty good for vaccines if you don't do stupid things like boosting 10-year-olds), and the only real question was whether we're a state that does things like this or one that doesn't. This is a meaning-of-life question, and most of our media and internet philosophers didn't even notice it's there, let alone tried to answer it.
The saddest thing is that I feel many people have *wanted* to make these fundamental-value points, but for some reason shied away from them in public and chose to fight on the utilitarian battlefield instead. And as the topic changed from lockdowns to vaccines, the fight turned into a rout, while also causing serious collateral damage as far as vaccine intake was concerned. Needless to say, both sides are responsible for the latter (without heavy-handed lockdowns, anti-vax sentiment would probably have stayed much more marginal), but I have rarely seen so much destruction wrought by the unwillingness of people to communicate clearly where they stand and what they want.
I'm sorry I didn't think to make this argument earlier, to be fair, because I learnt about both Stephen & Berlin at law school, albeit in different periods (Stephen is taught at undergraduate level in Commonwealth countries, while I encountered the Berlin version of the argument at Oxford for my BCL).
That said, I basically retired from the covid field in mid-2021 because no-one seemed to care about civil liberties (in a way that counted) apart from lawyers, and it was better for us to try to get those enormous fixed penalty notices reduced, or to illustrate via judicial review that large parts of the guidance just didn't make sense.
Well, neither did anyone else :) Zeynep Tufekci came close a few times.
I'm curious, how did the penalties pan out? Did they end up bankrupting people, or were they silently slowrolled till the statute of limitations, or something in between? What little journalists have been writing about these issues back in 2020/1, no one had the stamina to wait and follow up as the cases made it through the systems (not in Britain, not in Germany, nowhere).
As I say in the piece, the huge fixed penalty notices were contested (as part of a campaign organised by the two barristers I mention) and reduced (in court) to fines. The reduction was often from £10K to £50. Unfortunately, the transition from FPN to fine means a conviction is recorded.
In my view, a large FPN is simply a shakedown designed to make someone pay for a clean Disclosure & Barring Record (which you need for quite a lot of jobs in the UK).
Oh wow, that's one devious catch-22. And I thought American plea bargains were a shakedown...
A bit surprised the Tories aren't campaigning on getting these scarlet letters removed.
They are (or were), until the government blew itself up. There has also been litigation around the issue (judicial review and the like).
Quite enjoyed the civil liberties issue. Such concerns have been raised, often, but were shouted down by those who preferred safety. Stoked by the press who were mostly interested in clicks, the masses were in mortal fear. They were told of an appalling IFR, conflating cases to deaths. Evidence was arriving to show a 1000X IFR difference by age (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.11.22280963v1), yet the press and authorities refused to promote that to reduce fear. The masses desired that safety forget about liberty as Dr Ben Franklin lamented many years ago.
The promise of vaccines helped reduce fear and it did help to restore some degree of normalcy and allowed an ability to examine what happened. Yet now we see the vaccines not delivering freedom from the illness but still thanked for not making the illness worse. In fact, we are learning, many need not to have feared the illness particularly if they had a robust immune system. The new fear might be with the vaccine interfering with a previously robust immune system.
But again we watched as segments of society demonized those who did not take the vaccine. They demanded mandates to get the unvaccinated to submit claiming a social benefit was greater than a civil liberty. The loss of jobs and public shunning was the result. Still as the vaccine proved also ineffective at ending the spread, no apologies, no restoration of jobs.
We aren't past the third act of this play. Some remain captured by fear. Others are trying to justify their actions. Little accountability because the entire world was lost to propaganda. The world seems to have gotten a lot smaller despite considerable differences in cultural values. Our recovery remains to be seen.