Missed this one --

So if we follow Sir Andrew Pollard and ditch herd immunity as a goal, then we'd want to know what he thinks the utility of vaccinations is, and whether there is anything about them he considers a unique benefit. If not, and other measures are just as good for achieving what he thinks is the right goal, then you'd be home free. Maybe.

But moral imperatives don't normally carry a means. "You should help the poor" doesn't include in it which charity to donate to. Even something seemingly specific like "you should not disturb your neighbours with load music" does not detail whether to turn the music down or soundproof your walls. I can't really think of a moral imperative which contains within it the means by which you must meet the ends being prescribed (or avoid those being proscribed).

So "you ought to take the vaccine" doesn't seem to be the sort of thing can stand as a moral imperative. It's "you should not overburden your health services", "you should not put others at risk of illness",.. — Isaac

If you can only soundproof your walls to a certain level, because of technical or financial limitations, beyond that level turning down the music is your only option.

Getting vaccinated has effects that masking, social distancing, and so on, do not. The question is whether you are obligated to attempt to achieve something you can only achieve by getting vaccinated (or exposed to the virus, I suppose).

The discussion we had before was about your support for the goal of reaching herd immunity. Masking and social distancing do not increase the prevalence of the right antibodies in your community. If you support that goal, but think only other people need take steps to reach it, you are free-riding, as I said before. I don't even know what the counter-argument there could be.

Is herd immunity itself a "moral goal" -- meaning, a goal we are morally obligated to attempt to reach, like fighting hunger and suffering and so on? Is it a goal at all, or simply a means to an end, maybe something much more general like "limit unnecessary disease and death"?

Sure, but then we're back to whether there are certain goals for which achieving herd immunity is the only means we have. Maybe even determining that it is the best of the available means is enough.

Honestly, I don't think it's that hard to get there, but I'm not an epidemiologist (neither are you), and this is fundamentally a technical question. Epidemiologists seem to think herd immunity is pretty damn important and were kinda pissed to see measles outbreaks again, as I recall.

what I'm arguing is an opposition to the moral case for vaccination in all cases (the idea that a moral finger can be wagged simply because someone says "I'm not getting vaccinated" (outside of any medical reason). — Isaac

Then I was on the right track before...

I think I'm starting to get a sense of what's going on here, so I'm going to throw this out there before it's entirely clear to me:

Suppose you see someone fall into the river you're walking along, and your moral code says if you can save them you should, what do you do?

I'm going to halt the proceedings here, because we need to backtrack already.

"Save" is a success verb; you cannot choose to save someone, or not; you can only choose to make the attempt, or not. So what's a useful version of our moral rule here? Is it "If you can save them, you should try to"?

But "save" is still in there causing trouble. How do you know whether you can save them?

How about "If you think you could save them, you should try to"? That's not bad, but "could" masks a pretty big range of likely outcomes, from "I stand a damn good chance of saving them to" to "it's just barely possible for me to save them", so we have to consider your confidence in success, right?

Even leaving out considerations of risk to yourself, we've already noticeably complicated our rule, and it's not quite clear where we're headed. Here's why: this is just typical decision theory nonsense, making choices under uncertainty, blah blah blah, but we're trying to construct a normative rule.

If we end up with something like "If you're pretty sure you can save them, you should try", that's not so bad, I guess. But if we shift things around a little, we might end up saying, "If you're pretty sure you can save them, you should probably try", and that doesn't sound like the kind of rule we wanted. It's more a description than a rule.

As it happens, the situation we've been discussing here comes with a bunch of probabilities already on display, and some known gaps where we don't have probabilities we want, all of which can readily be made to add up to a summary description like, "If you can get vaccinated, you probably should." But "probably" doesn't mean everyone always, so the "should" just doesn't carry the force we expect it to. That's a descriptive summary, not a moral imperative.

Here's what I'm thinking: once you've gotten to "you probably should get vaccinated", you still haven't actually touched the moral question. It looks kinda like you have, but this is still just description. What we need to look at is statements like, "If you're pretty sure you can help stop the pandemic, you should try to" and its close relatives.

There's not enough x for everyone who needs it. Taking a x when others need it more is wrong. — Isaac

Hmmm. This is not what I understood you to be arguing.

If I'm to take you at your word here, your claim is not just that you're under no moral obligation to get vaccinated, but all of us in richer countries are under a moral obligation not to, you, me, basically everyone on this forum, I'd guess.

(I'm assuming there's some geographical grouping going on, that you don't mean the world's population can be ranked individually from 1 to 7 billion whatever in order of need.)

I'm a little confused now and will have a rethink.

Not selfish, but meaningful to you, something that makes sense to you, is reasonable to you. You're the one making the choice, what else could your reasons be?

As near as I can tell, the most you can claim so far is that you're doing your part to keep too many people in the UK (yes?) from getting vaccinated. If the UK has already reached herd immunity, then good for you. If not, then you're advancing the wrong goal, aren't you?

Well it must be more something you don't like, or you'd just do it, right?

But it's not a dangerous mission is it? — Isaac

Good lord, Isaac, that's not the point. I need six guys to move some furniture; you volunteer to be one of the guys who doesn't. The point is that counting doing nothing as "each of us doing their part" is sophistry.

I don't eat excess because it's wring, not because I actually think my saved food will get to the starving. — Isaac

No one is asking you to gorge yourself on the vaccine, just to get the minimum.

We've two goals. 1. vaccinate 70%, and 2. minimize inequality in vaccine distribution.

To achieve both we want 70% of people to be vaccinated but no more. Any more would interfere with equitable distribution. — Isaac

Well, in a rationing situation, volunteering to go without is generally considered praiseworthy, within limits. You've got that part covered.

But say I have a group of twenty men and I need six volunteers for a dangerous mission. Do you expect praise for throwing up your hand and volunteering to be one of the 14 who stay behind? Your math is fine, but it's no use saying, some of us will stay and some of us will go to, we're each doing our part. They're not equivalent.

So I could just say here that, sure, your abstaining advances one goal but not the other, and leave it at that.

But even the goals are not on the same footing. Conserving vaccine is only a useful sub-goal insofar as it helps advance the goal of getting the human race, and each community within it, to herd immunity. If we work too hard at conserving vaccine, we work counter to our goal of actually administering vaccinations. There is no parity here.

There is hunger in the world. Do you help the hungry by refusing food they would love to get their hands on? What would they think of your refusal?

Another question: leaving aside the ickiness with boosters for a moment, if every county in the United States was over 70%, how many doses would public health officials feel they need to stockpile, rather than letting them get sent elsewhere? What if slow uptake here is one of the reasons we're not sending more abroad?

it would be more concerning if medical based PhDs were highly represented among the skeptics, but we just don't have that information. — Hanover

Dimes to donuts it isn't epidemiologists. My money's on physicists, but really any hard science outside the actual field at issue. You know how those guys are.

It's not obvious to me yet that the argument could be strengthened to require specifically that you get vaccinated, but it's not out of the question. I'll mull it over some more. — Srap Tasmaner

Hmmmm.

Trouble is, you really do need some people, a lot as a matter of fact, specifically to get vaccinated. It wouldn't do for everyone to make alternative contributions -- say, everyone vocally encouraging everyone else to get the jab but no one doing it themselves. So that looks like we've only pushed the asymmetry back a step.

To make this clear: suppose you didn't want to get vaccinated because you thought the chances it's not safe were too high for your taste -- doesn't matter what, even 5% or something, just enough that it's not a risk you're comfortable taking. Would it be okay for you to encourage others to get vaccinated? That doesn't look quite right, does it? Encouraging others to take a risk you wouldn't, if you would benefit should they be successful -- that's not likely to find approval among college sophomores.


BONUS section!

Similarly, I don't want to support Big Pharma or Big Government but I want others to, also not cool.

I'm not gaining anything at all from doing any of this. — Isaac

Sorry, yes, there's been a misunderstanding. I'm not interested in what you gain by posting here, etc.

I'm also not making the case that you benefit by your community, local or global, reaching herd immunity; I think that's true but it would only be relevant here if that's why you support it as a goal, and even then, whatever.

The point is that herd immunity is a goal of yours, for whatever reason, whether you derive any benefit from it, whether you know you derive any benefit from it. It's a goal of yours; if something you want to happen happens, well, then you're getting what you want, and is the simplest possible way of judging success.

You have decided that to reach this goal, of yours, lots of other people should do something, just not you. Hence you are free-riding. Or you're going down with the ship, if the goal is not reached, whatever. The point is only that you have a goal you believe other people should take steps to reach.

I could be a complete hypocrite and my argument's qualities remain undented. — Isaac

Yes, of course. We can treat this all hypothetically. It's of no interest that you haven't gotten vaccinated. For all I know you have and this is all "for the sake of argument". I believe I understand the question you wanted to raise -- are individuals obligated to get vaccinated, and if so is that a specifically moral obligation? -- and while it does streamline the conversation for you to take the part of Vaccine Refuser, it's not actually relevant.

For comparison, you could defend conscientious objectors by saying something like: there are other ways to contribute to defeating the Nazis than shooting them -- running your neighborhood watch, collecting steel and rubber scraps, working in a hospital, and so on.

In this case, it's not perfectly clear what that might be. I suppose you could volunteer to drive the transportationally-challenged to a clinic -- hell, I suppose there are lots of things besides the obvious that you could do. (Oh yeah, and didn't mean to suggest you share details about your work -- but it should be clear now where something like that might slot in, as an alternative contribution.)

At any rate, that's the shape of my intended answer to your specific question: expecting others to take steps to reach a goal of yours while taking no steps yourself is not okay, and I don't think you'd have any trouble digging up studies to confirm that people generally frown upon free-riding. College sophomores everywhere agree.

On the other hand, are you under an obligation specifically to get vaccinated? This argument says no; you're only obligated to chip in somehow, not necessarily in the obvious way.

It's not obvious to me yet that the argument could be strengthened to require specifically that you get vaccinated, but it's not out of the question. I'll mull it over some more.

I didn't think the point was all that subtle: you explicitly support your community's goal of reaching herd immunity; you just aren't willing to help -- at least not in the way you've been asked to.

Of course, I suppose you could help in other ways besides getting vaccinated; you mentioned somewhere that you've done some consulting work that's related...

We know what you've done not to help -- not gotten your jab and spent time here justifying that choice -- maybe you could tell us what you've done to help advance the goal you've said you support.

If your answer is that the data suggest we'll reach herd immunity, and SARS-CoV-2 will join the other coronaviruses as endemic, without you ever getting vaccinated, that's a textbook case of the tragedy of the commons: your choice is for lots of other people to do their bit and for you to free-ride.

I only finally got vaccinated recently -- no excuse for the delay, really, just that daily life is a little complicated and the days I planned for doing it kept falling through. But even though I've gone this long without getting sick or even knowing anyone who got sick, despite the fact that I work in retail, it never occurred to me to refuse or just not bother, anymore than I would consider refusing or just not bothering to vote.

Broadly, yes. I fully support the goal of getting 70% of the population vaccinated (I'd prefer to check natural immunity further first, but it's not a big deal). I think whipping up moral hysteria, exaggerating threats, underplaying risks (such as with children), and allowing rampant profiteering all the way, is so much the wrong way to do it that I think it's possibly more harmful than the end goal. — Isaac

I've emphasized the word I take to indicate uncertainty, and I endorse your uncertainty. None of us can be certain.

But, as you might expect from me, here's the problem: getting kinda vaccinated, or vaccinated to a degree that matches your subjective confidence, is not an option , any more than kinda placing a bet.

The whole point of betting is choosing (i.e., acting) under uncertainty: you behave as if your confidence in the outcome you bet on is 100%. The bet of the man who believes with all his heart pays out the same as the bet of the man who closed his eyes and pointed.

You have chosen, and your choice matches a confidence level of 0 in the vaccine and the goals of getting vaccinated. Those of us who have gotten vaccinated may not have, and I'd guess mostly do not have, a certainty of 1 that getting vaccinated is the right thing to do, but we behave as if we have perfect certainty. That's how betting works, that's how acting under uncertainty works, and that's how honoring the social contract works. If you want your community, through exposure and through vaccination, to reach herd immunity, but you have not been exposed and refuse to get vaccinated, you are not doing your part while expecting others to do theirs. That's just the tragedy of the commons and you should know better.

Roughly 0.2%, no? — Tzeentch

And 0.2% of the world's population would be roughly 15.4 million dead.

0.2% of a large number is a large number.

It matters a lot which of the contributory factors we try to eliminate. Could you really say that an efficient way of handling public health is to maintain a population with a very high level of completely preventable life threatening diseases and then have to commit to mass vaccinations of every novel virus to keep them alive? Or is it more efficient to invest in community healthcare, sporting facilities, restrict sales of unhealthy foods etc and next decade not have such a vulnerable population in the first place? — Isaac

What position is this argument in support of? "We should have behaved differently in the past" is not a policy, not even a public health policy. Whether we should do something about other issues plaguing the health of Americans is not a question -- it's what public health officials spent their time doing before the novel coronavirus came calling. What should they do now?

You're not arguing that "coronavirus isn't that bad", despite trotting out the co-morbidities.
You're not arguing that we should do nothing -- you mask and distance and so forth.
You're not arguing that vaccines are ineffective or worse, and in fact richer countries should be sending more to poorer countries, and so not arguing that no one should get vaccinated.
You're only arguing that not everyone needs to get vaccinated, is that right? Not even that no one needs to get vaccinated, only that not everyone needs to.

But I suppose we all more or less agree on that, right? Public Health officials have (mostly) been setting targets somewhat below 100%, informed I presume by what epidemiologists tell them, so what's the beef?

Anyone who gets vaccinated contributes to their community reaching the threshold set by the relevant public health agency. As far as I can see, the only question that interests you is whether that entails that:

(M) Individuals are morally obligated to get vaccinated

in order to help their community reach its vaccination goal, and leaving aside whether that moral obligation trumps other reasons an individual may have for not getting vaccinated.

A broader view might not look just at individuals but at communities, worldwide. For Peoria to go from 0% to 70%, it must pass through all the sub-goals in between. Perhaps we could say the same for American states or counties: the goal is not to get to, say, 70% overall, which could mean 100% in California and 20% in Arkansas, but first to 10% in every state, then 20% in every state, and so on. Similarly for the whole world: our goal is not to get Canada to 100% while Nigeria is at 10%.

That's reasonable. It's probably the right policy, I don't know. It's also not clear it connects to (M) up there. Are you only morally obligated to get the vaccine if your community has not yet hit the current all-communities target? Only if your community is behind the current average? What if you're ahead of the average in progress toward the goal but not there yet (almost everywhere, the United States, for instance)? Should whether you're obligated depend so much on time? That is, maybe your community doesn't need you to step up now, but they will in a few weeks; are you under no obligation currently but will be? now under a future obligation? what?

This all seems sliced a little thin. For an individual, getting vaccinated if you have the opportunity to do so unquestionably helps your community reach its goal, so the simplest thing to do, if you support that goal, is get vaccinated.

But

Is an individual under a moral obligation to take action to further goals they support?

People don't usually need much prodding, moral or otherwise, to do what they want, so there must be something else going on here. There's garden-variety hypocrisy, "talk is cheap", that sort of thing. You may say you want something or other to be different but you do nothing about it, and in fact behave in a way that props up the status quo. That doesn't look all that relevant here.

I think you might want to answer "no" there, but I don't know why, and I don't know why it's even a question. It feels like "no" is actually the answer to a different question, namely:

Are there circumstances in which an individual is under a moral obligation to take action to further goals they do not support?

Because in between there's a step:

I support this goal, but not this way of reaching it.

which is not so unusual.

"I support making our society more just, but not if the means of getting there is unjust" (so many ways to fill that one in, I'm punting)
"I support winning the war, but I do not support me fighting in it"
"I support worldwide herd immunity to SARS-CoV-2, but not me getting vaccinated"

Is any of this in the neighborhood of your thinking?

This data does not report cause of death, and as such represents all deaths in people with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19, not just those caused by COVID-19. — UK Government reporting on SARS-Cov-2 related deaths

"Caused" is a fun word.

Our world has people in it with conditions that, should they contract the virus, will kill them -- not the virus, but the "co-morbidity". Obesity. Diabetes. Respiratory illnesses.

Of course, if they don't get Covid, maybe those things don't kill them. Not this year, anyway.

Cause of death? In a vacuum? Or in the actual world where there are people for whom Covid is more dangerous than it is for others?

Excess mortality is excess mortality, whatever the mechanism between here and there.

Having read through your exchange with @Michael now, this is what bothers me:

Yes, there are other things people do that put their health at greater risk than going without the vaccine and getting infected. I finished a cigarette before typing that, for instance. They are comparable in the sense that such behaviors could lead to needing medical care, indirectly making it measurably (whether that number is large or small) harder for someone who did not engage in those behaviors to receive care they need.

But that is not the only potential impact. My smoking is not contagious. My eating bacon is not contagious. Going skiing is an interruption of my everyday life in which I absent myself from work, school, stores, etc. in my home town, where I have repeated and sometimes prolonged contact with people, sometimes in confined spaces. And it's not contagious.

It's not just your taking-up-a-bed that counts, but the fact that you also risk causing others to need a bed (and them causing others to need a bed, and them causing others ...), and the further fact that all you need to do to risk harm to others is go about your daily life.

What's more, no one else knows what choice you've made about the risks to yourself and to them. If you and I go hunting together, we accept that we are a danger to each other -- hunting accidents do actually happen. If we interact in daily life, your obesity and heart disease and lung cancer present so little risk to me that it's irrelevant. Your drinking too much at dinner presents little risk to me and others in the restaurant, and others between the restaurant and your home -- unless you choose to drive home.

It seems very straightforward to me, and @Michael has the right of it.

(And this is also why the abortion comparison is spurious: it is not only a choice about what you do with your body, but what you do with the bodies of everyone you interact with, both directly by potentially transmitting the virus and indirectly by requiring medical care. We are not discrete units, but organisms embedded in an environment, an environment that includes other organisms just like us.)

My interest was different: early on I had some hope this could be an inflection point.

The fundamental problem with climate change, for instance, is overcoming our hardwired discount on the future, and the inherent slowness of the process. And that climate modeling is inherently probabilistic. Thirty years now we've had good reason to believe we ought to do something, and we've done basically nothing.

But if science came through with the vaccines, and public health officials, who by definition juggle science and politics, came through with good policy, if these folks working 16-hour days for our good came through, there'd be something be something tangible to show people the value of science and of good government, and maybe some people would wonder if they'd been wrong. Maybe science and government are pretty good ideas.

But it turns out I can still be astonished by the willful ignorance and irrationality of people.

It's simplistic, I know, but I believe everyday all of us face a choice between the Star Trek future and the Mad Max future. Some people don't. They believe it's Mad Max, now and always. They don't believe in the project of civilization. And a lot of them believe their time on earth is just a prelude to their real life anyway. I keep hoping we can work around them, and get all of us, the skeptics included, to the promised land, but their imaginary lives keep having effects in the real world. By not believing in civilization, they make it harder. This, as they say, is why we can't have nice things.

I don't think infringement is the right idea here at all. The social contract is not a matter of what infringement of your rights you're willing to put up with, but of you anteing up: you throw in your lot with these people and commit to making it, or not, together. There are benefits to be had, and it's why people strike this bargain, but you have to give some things up too.

I believe it was Max Weber who defined the state as an institution possessing "a monopoly on the legitimate use of force". That's generally part of the bargain: we don't all go around keeping order and enforcing the law, only some of us. If you incline toward a natural rights view, you could say the rest of us transfer, as it were, our natural right to use force to those among us we deputize for the purpose, and then we demand that they meet our expectations in doing so. It's a sweet enough deal that almost everyone goes for it, or would love to if only they could get the chance.

Everyone except law-abiding American gun owners and criminals the world over.

I'll let you have the last word. Thanks for sharing your thoughts with me.

So your position is that there are things worse than guns, plus guns might or might not guarantee our liberty.

Why not be a little less cryptic? Go ahead and make your point. I'll listen.

It's just that, a belief is a bit like a wager: there are stakes and there are payouts.

Maybe our guns do stave off tyranny, or would if they had to. Maybe not. What stakes are we putting up here? Because it looks to me like we're betting a great number of lives a year on this theory, and it's not a bet any other country will take.

If you're convinced the Braves will win the pennant and the World Series, but no one else on earth is betting that way, maybe you'd hesitate before betting your life's savings on it.

At any rate, you'd probably want to find out if they know something you don't.

So no thoughts on how they've managed to avoid falling into tyranny without an armed population to prevent it?

I can link any sources — Isaac

No, no. Just nice to get a take from someone who's looked at some research. I've only dug into the culture war part of it, which ... <sigh>.

Thanks for humoring me.

Btw, what do you think about other developed countries that have not succumbed to tyranny despite not having high rates of gun ownership? How is it that we're not the only advanced democracy left? Have all these other countries just been lucky so far?

Is this argument important to you?

I mean, in theory you're explaining to me why your right to bear arms is enshrined in the Constitution. It shouldn't matter whether the little arsenals you and your friends have amassed would actually be of any use if the shit hit the fan. It would still be your right, even if it were pointless to exercise it.

I would just encourage you to spend as much time thinking about the people who deal everyday with the death and destruction brought about by real people using real guns as you've evidently spent thinking about the imaginary war you and your buddies would win against a possible enemy wielding potential guns, someday, maybe, or maybe not.

In the same exact place that I'd rather be a despot. — James Riley

Sure. But that's cold comfort to police officers for whom almost any interaction could turn fatal.

All of them had been marked for death by several trained-up former spec ops guys (counter-snipers and much further out), had they squeezed off a single round. — James Riley

Pardon my French, but big fucking deal. If Bundy's crowd were deemed to be involved in an actual insurrection, the US Army could just obliterate them, even if they took out a few ATF agents first.

If the military and the innumerable police forces in the United States were complicit with a tyrannical regime, all the gun clubs in America couldn't do a damn thing about it. That's a Red Dawn fantasy. In the meantime, guns are a real problem everyday for real people in the real world.

They might also reduce the extent to which an average person can transmit the virus, although that is less clear. — Isaac

There's a lot of work being done there by "can" right? (I'm asking because you're better with the science and have clearly done more research than I have )

What I mean is, a person must go from shedding (if that's the right term) no virus right before they're infected to quite a lot once the disease has taken hold. I don't expect a simple linear relationship between how sick you are and how dangerous you are to others (probably more sigmoid) but there's a positive relationship.

On the other hand, if you're sick enough, say, to be bedridden, you probably have fewer transmission opportunities. If sick but not too sick people take no precautions to protect others, being a little sick could be much worse for their community than being very sick. If that's true, vaccines alone would be a terrible public health policy.

But vaccines should also reduce the time it takes your body to clear the virus right? And that surely reduces the number of people you transmit to, for most people.

Another example is the armed occupation of the State House in Michigan. You know why those Republicans, and the Republicans who assaulted the Capital, and Cliven Bundy's dad, et al, were not mowed down by crew-served, belt-fed automatic weapons fire, like BLM and Antifa would have been? It's not just because they were white. It's because they are armed to the teeth. — James Riley

Perhaps it had something to do with the rule of law. Imperfectly though the law is applied, I don't recall groups of BLM or Antifa activists being mown-down either.

I heard an interview once with a former FBI sniper who told a story about some militia-type dude they arrested, and he's spouting all this anti-government nonsense. Our guy tells him, "I had your head in my sights for the last two hours. If we wanted you dead, you'd be dead. You may be at war with your government, but your government is not at war with you."

That's what the rule of law is supposed to look like, and often it does, just not often enough.

It seems to me that being armed makes it more likely law enforcement will think it necessary to shoot you, and what's more the uncertainty about whether you're armed, and the certainty that you might be armed, puts the fingers of far too many folks in uniform on their triggers. Where would you rather be a cop? In a country where guns are few and far between, or where almost anyone might be carrying? A cop shouldn't have to wonder if his life is in danger when he responds to a domestic, but that really angry guy might not welcome your interference and make his point with a Glock. (Before the modern era of tribal politics, this was a no-brainer and police chiefs everywhere favored gun control.)

My phone thought I had said enough there, but I could add: no idea.

Using this forum is not an effective way of broadcasting your opinions, though I admit not everyone seems to share that view.

Can I ask, in return, at whom do you think the pro-vaccine invective here is aimed? — Isaac

Ah

We don't need 100% vaccination and there's other countries need the vaccines far more urgently. — Isaac

Cool. That and the rest of your post makes sense.

I'm not here much anymore. Looked in and couldn't quite figure out what axe you were grinding.

There's no interest in persuasion here at all, nothing but pious flag-waiving - if people seriously wanted to convince others to vaccinate, they might want to consider carefully presenting the scientific evidence on risk, or addressing the moral arguments on responsibility, rather than chanting like a bunch of football hooligans. — Isaac

Is this what you're on about? Persuasion? (Btw, "flag-waiving" should totally be a thing.)

Why? There is a sliver of the population that is well-educated and has made an informed judgment of the risks; are you interested in convincing them they have overlooked a piece of evidence or made an error in reasoning? Or perhaps in agreeing that their choice is reasonable given their circumstances?

How would you talk to these folks? Arkansas Town Hall

I for one am not optimistic about the chances for success in "presenting the scientific evidence on risk, or addressing the moral arguments on responsibility" in Siloam Springs, Arkansas.

A third or so of the population of the United States wants a return to what we used to call the Dark Ages. Maybe with cellphones and cable TV, but otherwise, the Dark Ages. We have managed, so far, to keep them from turning the US into a Christian State, but sadly the Christian bubble they live in is not proof against viruses, so their behavior does affect the public health of the nation as a whole.

It wasn't supposed to be like this.

No one can make me. — Prishon

In the United States at least, yes we can. The Supreme Court ruled on that issue over a hundred years ago. It is vaguely within the doctrine usually referred to as "the US Constitution is not a suicide pact".

on bended knee — James Riley

Doubtful.

I'm wondering, does my behavior show what I do not doubt, or what I cannot doubt?

Take any of the usual examples you like -- object permanence seems an obvious choice. As I type here, it's clear that I do not doubt the continuing existence of my laptop, blah blah blah.

Is there some behavior I could engage in that would show that I cannot doubt such a thing? What does that look like, to behave as if I cannot doubt something? How does it differ from behaving as if I simply do not doubt it? -- That is to say, behaving as if I am content to accept it as so.

Yes.

Nice overview.

I want to say that there will be points where the science diverges from common sense, as it will, but also points where the science will be closer to what ordinary reflective people think than all that early modern philosophy whose terms we're still stuck with.

Because the child isn’t born yet? I don’t see that as an important difference. — khaled

In not drawing a sharp distinction there, you join both the pro-life movement and @schopenhauer1, who are comfortable extending concepts like "rights" and "dignity" to persons who not only don't exist but may never exist.

Right, that's the sort of thing we want to do. Point being, whatever analysis we find convincing, it's just not the same thing as logical analysis, and not just because we're interested in aspects of speech beyond truth-value, but because the analysis will include objects and actions, because circumstances will matter not just for disambiguating our words but for the choices available to us and the stakes.

Etc , etc. There's still structure to be found, and words and their meanings are still central, but there's more in play than semantics. Hence my reference to early research in robotics, for instance: how do you get a robot to figure out what steps it should take to accomplish a task? That's the domain of grammar rather than logic.

"Grammar" is a sort of generalization of logic, a bit like the operational logic of early AI and cybernetics research. For instance, in a logical or mathematical context, "if ... then ..." is intended to be truth-preserving; in an operational context, it's intended to be goal-achievement-advancing.

What's the logic of "Pass me the salt"? Do requests or commands even have truth values? Me passing you the salt when you say that doesn't follow logically, but it does follow grammatically, ceteris paribus.

((Sorry if I'm repeating you @Antony Nickles -- there's no percentage in reading MU, so I tend to skip over point-by-point responses to him too.))