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Moral Maze

Conditions on living in a post-vaccine world

Moral Maze

BBC

Society & Culture, Religion & Spirituality

4.4623 Ratings

🗓️ 4 March 2021

⏱️ 43 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Covid vaccine has given us a ‘roadmap’ out of the lockdown but it also provides us with a whole new set of moral conundrums. The virus will likely be with us forever, so the question becomes: how will we live with it in the medium and long-term? We’ve all accepted conditions on our daily lives, with the view that they would be temporary, but should we have to get used to them? Downing Street says the idea of a "Covid passport" app is still under review. Should we make the ability to travel, socialise in public or even go to school and work conditional on having been vaccinated? Those in favour, say it’s a pragmatic route to normal life in a world of vaccine hesitancy. Others base their argument on the principles of safety and fairness: there is a good reason to treat people with immunity differently if they are not a risk to others. The 200,000+ people who signed a recent online petition urging the government not to introduce vaccine passports are worried about their impact on civil liberties and social cohesion. Sam Grant from the human rights organisation Liberty said they would, "create a two-tier society where some people can access support and freedoms, while others are shut out - with the most marginalised among us hardest hit." For many, conditionality is an issue of trust, fairness and proportionality; it is part of the give and take of the responsibilities and rights of citizens. In welfare, for example, they believe people should demonstrate their commitment to finding work in order to receive benefit payments. For others, conditionality undermines social cohesion, because it comes with an implicit sense of blaming victims. Rather than further stigmatising people by attaching conditions to their daily lives, they believe we need to understand better why they are not pursuing a particular course of action. What, if any, conditions should be applied to living in a post-vaccine world? With Silkie Carlo, Matthew Oakley, Prof Julian Savulescu and Dr Beth Watts.

Producer: Dan Tierney.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Good evening. Edward Jenner, who pioneered vaccination and could justifiably claim to have saved more lives than any other human being,

0:07.0

would never have got past a modern ethics committee.

0:10.0

To prove his theories about smallpox, he cut open an eight-year-old boy's arm and rubbed in pus taken from a milkmaid's blisters.

0:18.0

Three centuries on, with smallpox totally eradicated, incidentally, the COVID vaccine

0:22.7

has created its own moral dilemmas, principally about whether we should carry proof of immunity,

0:27.8

to do certain kinds of work to get into pubs and cinemas to travel on public transport.

0:32.8

Some see this as a slippery slope to totalitarianism. In response, others cite John Stuart Mill,

0:39.2

Jenner's near contemporary, and his doctrine that the one constraint on liberty should be

0:43.5

the avoidance of harm to others. Liberty, the campaigning group, reckons so-called COVID passports,

0:49.8

would create a two-tier society, in which the disadvantage to further marginalised and excluded.

0:55.5

200,000 people agree and have signed a petition to have it debated in Parliament.

0:59.7

Not so, say their opponents, for surely all but a small minority with medical complications

1:04.3

have free and equal access to the vaccine. Not to have it is a choice with consequences

1:09.9

for the rest of us. There's a wider argument here, not just have it, is a choice with consequences for the rest of us.

1:11.7

There's a wider argument here, not just balancing liberty and harm, but rights with

1:16.1

responsibilities, an argument about conditionality and whether the support and benefits of

1:21.3

society should be restricted to those prepared to accept reciprocal obligations.

1:26.4

For example, unemployment payments being made conditional

1:29.5

on the recipient's willingness to work. So, COVID passports and more. The moral maze tonight.

1:35.8

The panel, Melanie Phillips, social commentator at the Times. Mona Siddiqui, professor of Islamic

1:40.4

and intra-religious studies at Edinburgh University. The chief executive of the RSA,

1:45.4

Matthew Taylor, and the comedian Andrew Doyle. Melanie Phillips, are you in two minds about this?

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