Vaccine PassportsVaccine Passports Are Coming. But Are They Ethical?
It is the foundational ethical principle of any liberal society that the state should only restrict liberty if people represent a threat of harm to others. Ethics is about weighing different values. Decisions about vaccination should be fundamentally ethical, not political or purely medical.
The main way to control the pandemic, as we have all painfully found out, has been to restrict the movement of people. This stops people getting infected and infecting others. It is the justified basis for lockdowns, isolation, vaccine passports, and quarantining people who have been in high-risk areas.
It is the foundational ethical principle of any liberal society like Australia that the state should only restrict liberty if people represent a threat of harm to others, as John Stuart Mill famously articulated. This harm can take two forms.
Firstly, it can be direct harm to other people. Imagine you are about to board a plane. Authorities have reason to believe you are carrying a loaded gun. They are entitled to detain you. But they are obliged to investigate whether you actually have a gun and if you do not, they are obliged to free you and allow you to board your plane. To continue to detain you without just cause would be false imprisonment.
Having COVID is like carrying a loaded gun that can accidentally go off at any time. But if vaccines remove the bullets from the gun, the carriers are not a risk to other people and should be free.
In perfect conditions, vaccine passports are therefore a human rights issue under conditions of lockdown like Melbourne and Sydney are experiencing. Perfect conditions mean vaccines reduce transmission to other people sufficiently.
This means it is not discrimination to continue to restrict the liberty of the unvaccinated – it is just like quarantining those who have entered from high-risk countries overseas. Their liberty is restricted because they are a threat to others.
Discrimination occurs when people are treated differently on morally irrelevant grounds. But differential treatment on the basis of differential threat is morally relevant. That is why I can be quarantined if I have come into contact with a positive case: there is a relevant reason to treat me differently.
For example, some countries require travelers must be vaccinated against yellow fever and receive a card as a vaccine passport. No card, no travel. Infected travelers can bring yellow fever to the local mosquito population when they are bitten and thereby start an endemic infection.
