The World is Failing at Morality

Would you endure nausea to save a life? Would you endure pain to save a life? Unless you’re a sociopath, you would answer “yes” to these questions. Why then are people unwilling to endure moral discomfort to save a life? There are many moral situations where the right choice from a utilitarian perspective feels “yucky” to some people, but I don’t think there is any real difference between enduring moral discomfort to do the right thing and enduring other sorts of discomforts to achieve good outcomes.

Suppose there were a group of 9 fundamentalist Christians and one atheist in the arctic and because of some accident there were only nine pure wool coats and one coat of mixed fabric. If the mixed fabric coat was unused, one person would freeze to death. Should the group allow the atheist to wear the mixed fabric coat? The Christians would likely feel moral discomfort about being in the presence of someone wearing mixed fabric, but if doing so saved a life, I would argue it is worth doing.

Right now, our society is facing that dilemma with children and covid vaccines. Instead of Christian fundamentalists, we’re dealing with timid FDA bureaucrats. They aren’t really risk averse, since the riskiest option is to allow schools to reopen with unvaccinated children without protection. The riskiest option was to wait a year before approving effective and safe vaccines, which is the option they chose despite it causing massive losses of institutional trust in them. Tens, if not hundreds of thousands of Americans will die if no action is taken. Hundreds of thousands have already died. It’s one thing to say that parents should not be forced to give their children a vaccine, it’s quite another to say they should not be allowed to protect their children.

There is no evidence that the vaccine will cause side effects even in the same order of magnitude as getting covid. With the delta variant, we’re not choosing between getting a vaccine or getting nothing, it’s between getting covid with the vaccine or without. Delta is contagious enough that everyone will get it sooner or later. Even if children themselves don’t die of the disease, they will spread it to others who will die. It seems to me that this wave will be even worse than the winter wave of December 2020/ January 2021.

Giving children experimental vaccines is only one area where “risk aversion” is actually the riskiest choice from a society’s perspective. Challenge trials are another. Let healthy volunteers infect themselves with the virus to actually remove all the ambiguity of the effectiveness of the vaccine. Yes, some may suffer serious consequences, but as a society, we will save lives. People had no qualms about sacrificing thousands of lives in needless wars, but somehow getting a thousand people sick to save millions is beyond the pale?

The FDA be far more bold. Allow anyone who wants to try a drug for themselves do so after signing a waiver. Do safety only testing and let the self experimenters provide data on effectiveness themselves. Use data from foreign countries to determine safety. There’s no reason to disregard an experiment just because it took place across a political border. Imagine if each state had to do their own safety testing and we pretended like a test in Virginia was somehow completely inapplicable in Wisconsin. We literally do the exact same thing with tests in Canada or Germany. Lastly, the level of resources spent on prevention/vaccines are tiny relative to other societal goals – there are more dead from covid than all military deaths in the history of America combined, yet the government has spent less on covid than military even in a single year. We should have dumped hundreds of billions out the door to get every vaccine maker into overdrive to vaccinate the world instead of dithering over a million here or there.

This past year and a half has been frustrating, stressful, and difficult for almost everyone. I am thankful no one I know personally has died of covid, but even so, hundreds of thousands of Americans died needlessly. There’s been so much selfishness and carelessness on display, but also much bravery and sacrifice. I hope that we will learn some difficult lessons from this tragedy.