Have you worked out the formula to correctly balance personal and collective risk, computationally? I would not dismiss the matter as trivial - I see it more as Nobel prize worth.

Plenty of gray areas, of course, where the decision is legitimately hard. The Vietnam draft was clearly immoral but was the World War 2 draft just? I'm really not sure.

Vaccine mandates are nowhere close to that, though—the individual risk is virtually nonexistent while the collective risk is massive. The general problem does not need to be solved fully for us to move forward with public policy in clear-cut cases.

In the specific case, you write about a «virtually nonexistent individual risk» while many¹ are yet to find such reassurance. If that statement were evidently true, one would agree with your conclusion save some details.

¹(including the brightest people I know - statement disincorporated from the above since anecdotal)

Those people are much less bright than you think they are.

There are zero people in my own social circles who didn't get vaccinated the moment they could (some live in countries where they still don't have access to vaccines). The difference might be that my social circle is mostly queer people like myself, and we know how bad pandemics can be.

Again, I have very little sympathy for anti-vax people. The correct thing to do for society as a whole is to follow New York's and San Francisco's lead and exclude them from public life until they get vaccinated. Public policy can't be based on fringe pseudoscience.

I believe may still be a good idea for me to disambiguate and rephrase:

the set of population I mentioned would not agree with your statement «virtually nonexistent individual risk». They may have taken the vaccine, but e.g. would consider it a non-easy choice to decide whether their infant children should be vaccinated (with Pfz/Mod/OAZ/JnJ) - whether the health risk for a child is higher (and how much) after infection vs after vaccine. (I insist: there's no limit towards the top, but they are the smartest I know.)

In fact, by the way, to help solving these theoretical doubts, the source of the damages should be properly defined. I am not informed of a clear, reliable, strong theory about the cause of damages in either (vaccine vs infection) - I have seen different ideas.

I do not know the NY and SF measures, but in general yes, if the unvaccinated represent a somehow higher risk of contagion they should remain proportionally isolated. But not even this proportion of risk seems to me well defined. Recently I found an article stating "The transmission rate for the vaccinated is 30% the normal". That value was the n-th of many other found in these months (and of course, that very statement is sketchy). But only yesterday I met an article that complicated the matter (and the numbers) for a(/the) dominant strain.

Surely, I find it perverse that ideas are spread like: "Health care is part of the social package, so you do as we impose". At this stage, it makes more sense to go along the lines "If you want to drink soda, you will not be treated for diabetes" (example is stretched) - one's freedom of judgement is respected, and there is no weird blackmailing based on terms and conditions imposed. I much prefer the other idea of "Non-vaccinated shall compensate the proportional part (95%?) of the cost of the treatments".

You give the idea of mixing different sets, with «anti-vax people» and «fringe pseudoscience»: you seem to be focussing on the unreasonable positions, disregarding reasonable doubts. Again: you wrote of «virtually nonexistent individual risk», and it that were evident, the set of the reasonable doubts would not exist. Especially as people receive information of adverse events post-vaccine, they have all right to demand clarity on the scope and measure, what and how much - the opposite would be irrational. And this has nothing to do with pseudoscience - on the contrary.

> Those people are much less bright than you think they are

You should very probably note you used a dismissive unsubstantiated statement.

Yes, perhaps today. People who discriminate are always confident in the moral justifications behind their prejudices.

All I see is just another group of folk devils that people feel the need to create to separate out people they don’t like.

I'm really not interested in meta-level arguments. In general I find them to be tiring and unenlightening.

And I’m not interested in people who advocate discrimination as a solution to anything.

So there, our positions are set.

Not doing any discrimination at all is a genuinely absurd position to hold. Discrimination is a necessary part of life without which society would collapse.

The question always is on which bases discrimination is good and on which bases it is bad. Discrimination based on race, ethnicity, gender, nationality, and other inherent characteristics of people is generally bad. Discrimination based on things like vaccination status is good.

Like I said, people who choose to discriminate against other people always have some subjectively moral justification for why they do it.

And it is our job as human beings to ascertain which justifications are valid and which aren't.

You can't run away from object-level moral arguments. You just can't.

I am very much a moral realist. There are correct and incorrect moral stances.

Any human response that can be considered evil by simply who it is applied to…is an evil response all the time. People may justify that evil by their feeling they have the “correct” moral stance, but it’s still evil and shitty to the target group. Personally, I am not willing to participate in an intentional evil to any group even if I disagree with them r are different from them. If that makes me immoral, so be it.