Been thinking about the vaccine and mask mandates these days, as many others have, I’m sure.
Was trying to come up with a good way to explain why they’re essential to folks who are against them, on the basis of individual liberties. For many of us it might seem obvious, but it’s important as much as possible to be able to offer an account for a claim like that—especially when it regards something as serious as requiring that people inject stuff into their bodies.
Here’s my stab at it.
Most of my more conservative buddies would insist that one of the foremost purposes of government is to protect individual liberties. To some degree this means there are significant limits on what the governments can do—I can’t be jailed for publicizing my criticisms of the government, and I can’t be forced to make oaths or enroll in a certain kind of school or relinquish all my religious commitments.
But it also requires the government to actively DO certain things.
Would it improve or undermine individual liberty if our roads were unregulated? If no one ever needed a license, if there were no speed limits or traffic lights, would that make us more free? I know it wouldn’t. I certainly would never be willing to get in a car—I would be terrified of getting run over. It’s the traffic lights and the speed limits and the licensing requirements that make me able to get in a car and go wherever I want. The rules are the very thing that make our liberty possible. The freedom of driving REQUIRES that there be some limits on what I and others can do on the roads. It requires that someone keeps the traffic lights working, ensures people are driving at a reasonable speed, and grants licenses. It requires that we all submit to those rules, too.
It’s the same with masks and vaccines. Without knowing that I (and perhaps more importantly these days, my kids) will be safe when we go out and about, we are not free. We should not be thinking about freedom as the ability to go wherever you want whenever you want without thinking about the consequences of your behavior on others—just like driving in a completely unregulated world would not be really free.
(For the academics among us, this notion is best described in Brandom’s “Freedom and Constraint by Norms.”)