Being apparently older than I feel, I’ve just had a Covid vaccination. I would like to say that I had it because I’m altruistic, and wanted to ensure that I pose no danger to vulnerable people. But that’s not true. Nor did I have it because I'm frightened of getting the virus: I’m not. I've had Covid, and so probably have some immunity anyway.
No; I had the vaccination purely and simply because I’m fed up of the sight of my four walls and our wretched neighbourhood, and desperate to get on a plane. If I could get on a plane without having been vaccinated, I'd be perfectly happy to do so. But vaccine passports of some sort look inevitable for international travel, and I want one.
I’m embarrassed by the absence of reflection in these assertions. So I’ll reflect now on the philosophical issues involved, and see where it gets me.
Let’s assume that vaccination is reasonably effective in preventing the contraction and transmission of Covid-19, and that the immunity it confers is reasonably persistent. Let’s assume too that vaccination is reasonably safe—by which I mean that the benefits clearly outweigh any dangers.
On that basis, is there anything not to like about vaccine passports? They get vaccinated patients moving again. They get money flowing. They preserve jobs, for instance in the travel industry. They diminish—for the vaccinated—the personal costs of incarceration. Staying at home is physically, psychiatrically, and economically disastrous.
We’ve got used to seeing ethical debates framed primarily in terms of individual autonomy. Even when an appeal is made to those long-unfashionable communitarian values (dusted off and wheeled out by Covid we’re-all-in-this-togetherness), the appeal tends to be made in the voice of autonomy, along the lines of: “Help society to stay afloat, and you will benefit: it will maximise your capacity for self-realisation.”
That sort of thinking is commonly deployed in conjunction with a more or less crude utilitarianism, which says that before you decide how to act, you should consider, for each person affected by the proposed act, whether their autonomy would be increased or diminished. Then you do a simple summation. If the action would result in a net increase of autonomy in the world, it is ethically justified and probably mandatory. If it would result in a net decrease, the action is wrong.
This sounds philosophically ham-fisted. It is. It fails to do justice to the complexity of humans. Humans are not atomistic billiard balls with discrete bundles of interests. We are porous creatures. It’s impossible to know where my boundaries are. I bleed into the world, and the world bleeds into me. You can’t describe me except by describing the nexus of relationships in which I exist and of which, to a large extent, I consist.
But let’s put these communitarian quibbles to one side for the moment. If the traditional model is right, vaccine passports are, on first blush, great. They get out of the house people who would otherwise stay there. The autonomy of those people is hugely increased, isn’t it? Those who stay behind are in the same situation as they’d be in anyway. Hasn’t the total amount of autonomy in the world increased?
I don’t think so. The passports would be wrong even on this model.
Think about the people who can’t travel because they’ve not had the vaccine. There might be many reasons why they haven’t had it. It might be medically dangerous for them to do so. They might be in a country which can’t afford to vaccinate, or has been incompetent in arranging a vaccination programme. They might have genuine fears—whether medically justified or not—about the vaccine, or some ideological objection to vaccination per se. They might see the prohibition on travel without a vaccine passport as totalitarian coercion to comply with a governmental vaccination policy which, even if medically supportable, should not be compulsory. They might be fundamentalist Christians who note that the book of Revelation foresaw the time when people could not buy or sell without being marked with the number of the Beast, and see the number on a vaccination passport as precisely that.
The autonomy of all these people of course won’t be increased by the vaccine passports they don’t have. In fact I want to suggest that their autonomy is significantly outraged because of the passports held by others—outraged so brutally that the utilitarian balance tips decisively against passports. Passports reduce the net amount of autonomy in the nation. This is because the autonomy of the incarcerated is truncated all the more if they are forced to witness the joy of the free. Autonomy is not a straightforward commodity. Its value—since we are necessarily social animals—is determined by the context.
There are, though, better terms than "absence of autonomy" with which to describe the plight of innocent prisoners watching their vaccinated neighbours heading to Heathrow. It is undignified to make the prisoners stay at home when others travel. It is unfair. It is unkind. It is well outside the scope of any conceivable social contract the prisoners may be deemed to have signed as a condition of being a member of society. And so the dignity, the fairness, and the kindness of everyone in society is impugned. The blithe holidaymakers’ dignity is diminished. It is an offence against them to allow passports. The social contract on which the holidaymakers themselves depend has been redrafted—and who knows where that will take us? We trot out sanctimonious clichés about our respect for the rights of minorities. Can those clichés survive the introduction of vaccine passports?
I have identified some of those whose interests—however one labels those interests—will be affected negatively by passports. But there is one overwhelmingly large and significant constituency: the young. They have been wholly disproportionately affected by Covid. They are relatively invulnerable to the virus, and have been locked up, impoverished, deprived of their education, and catapulted into mental illness in order to make the old safer. Yet in most jurisdictions they are right at the end of the queue for Covid vaccination, and hence for travel passports. They typically have less money than their elders to pay for the extortionate PCR virus testing that may be an alternative way to cross international borders. Their summers are unlikely to be salvaged by the passports. We couldn’t blame them if they were to complain that they’re the victims of a callous, self-serving gerontocracy. Passports create division, primarily between the old and the young. It's not the first time in recent years that the young of the UK have been shafted by the old. The successive insults and cumulative injustices are morally insupportable and politically explosive.
There may be ways to mitigate the unfairness to the young of vaccine passports. Free PCR testing would be one example. But to mitigate is not to exculpate. I can see no real defence.
This won’t stop me waving my passport and heading off this summer, leaving the poor benighted young in their cells. I can’t take much more of this country. I am a hypocrite, and it appals me. Please do as I say, not as I do.
