Vaccination is NOT a "Personal Decision"

I have seen many times recently where someone posts an article, a comment, or whatever about how vaccination of children is the moral thing to do and then all sorts of people chime in with bad science and bad reasoning.  It drives me crazy and, frankly, makes me a bit angry at all the innocent people, especially kids, who will get horrible diseases as a result of the perpetuation of this latest bit of American gullibility, scientific ignorance and anti-intellectualism.  (So apologies if this post comes across more strongly worded than usual) But what irks me the most (well, one of the things at least) is when people trivialize or dismiss the issue by saying things like "it's a personal decision" or "every family must decide for themselves", etc. 

Now, let's back up for a second.  There are five basic groups (here's where I'll probably get in trouble!) of which I think most anti-vaccine folks fall into at least one (often more): 1) Charlatans; 2) quacks; 3) people with poor reasoning skills; 4) people who, as a result of poor reasoning skills (thus making this a subset of 3), think that faith in God is incompatible with modern medicine; 5) people who have been deceived by any or all of the above.  It's really a very similar phenomena to snake oil, superstitions, and all manner of popularly spread falsehoods that have polluted society from its very beginning.  It's really all in the same boat.

So when people say the sorts of things I listed at the end of the first paragraph, I can't stand it. Seriously, it's only a personal decision in the same sense in which it is a personal decision whether to fire a gun into a crowded room is a personal decision.  And every family must decide for themselves, yes, but in the same sense in which every family must decide for themselves whether to commit murder (thankfully, most choose not to).  These attempts to sidestep the issue or ward off the ethical duties associated with it are perilously close to a lapse into utter ethical or even factual relativism - the whole vaccine thing might be true for you, but not for me! Such attempts make it seem like it's a matter of taste whether we ought to vaccinate or how safe vaccines are, rather than a matter of objective fact.  They make it seem like the issue is unclear in some way or that reasonable people, reasoning well, with the same facts available, would disagree with each other.  But, of course, none of that is remotely true.  Nor is it true that it is strictly personal, since the effects of such decisions affect others and society as a whole.

I think it is telling that the issue is often spoken of in terms of "my beliefs" or "personal beliefs" and other language usually reserved for matters of taste, "philosophies of life", or weakly-held religious convictions, as opposed to the language of scientific fact, evidence, or objective ethical realities.  The latter kind of language is appropriate here, not the former.  Yet I think the former actually does capture how this opposition to vaccines actually functions in many people, even though it shouldn't.  It is a quasi-religious belief held dogmatically and immune to actual evidence or reasoning (and not based on any good evidence or reasoning and certainly anti-scientific authority).  Whereas I think religious beliefs can in fact be justified, being responsive to evidence and reasons, and, if true, can have adequate epistemic grounding, this anti-vaccine position does not have the benefit of being a central node in a foundational world view or being even supposedly divinely revealed. Whereas religious beliefs, for instance, can at least make claims to divine authority, anti-vaccine positions do not have anything close going for them - there is no real claim to authority here and hence no reason to treat it in the way it gets treated by its proponents.

Ultimately, there should not be "sides" as to whether most children should be vaccinated - any more than there should be sides over whether we should let toddlers play alone in a pool with a live handgrenade and a family of water moccasins.  And, what's more, these "sides" matter - lives, health, and economy are all on the line here - but people do not think properly about them; they do not actually look at the evidence objectively and without resorting to logical fallacy.  People should stop merely "feeling strongly" about the issue and start thinking strongly (and, more importantly, thinking well).  Perhaps critical thinking classes or classes on scientific reasoning would be useful, assuming people would pay attention or actually absorb what they were taught.  At the end of the day, I would make vaccinations mandatory for everyone for whom there was no special health risk associated with them.  That way, people can be ignorant, deluded, and so on all they want without it hurting others. But then, that's why, in America, I'd probably never be elected for office in the first place!

Christianity and Other Religions

More on the general topics of the previous post:

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The fact that Jesus Christ is God forms the beginning of my views on how Christ relates to religious plurality. Others such as John Hick may reject this idea, but it seems to me to be the consensus of biblical and traditional sources which I regard as having authority in such areas. To reject this idea as Hick does because it gives a consequence one does not want is clearly question-begging. Against people like Hick or Samartha, truth should not be sacrificed for the sake of supposed practical benefits. There is such thing as absolute truth (to deny this would be to undercut that very denial, since it itself would have to be an absolute truth) and religions make claims of absolute truth, hence the truth or falsity of the claims of various religions matters indeed. Christ being God, he speaks truth and hence to reject or relativize his truth for some other gain is foolhardy to the extreme. Every religion, then, cannot be on a par since they make conflicting truth claims and hence at most one religious figure making these conflicting claims can be correct. At most one can be the ultimate authority who should not be relativized or rejected.

Since Christ is God, though, to reject Christ is therefore to reject God. Contra Hick and some other pluralists, then, Christ the one true God in the flesh. A theocentric vision of world religions such as advocated by Panikkar or Knitter, then, does not do justice to the Trinity, for it leaves out the Second Person in favor of the First (other thinkers would leave out the Second in favor of the Third). But the Trinity cannot be so divided, for we have one God working in the world who is not only Father or Holy Spirit but also Jesus Christ, the Son.

As God, then, Christ is unique – every other revered human’s life or teaching is at odds with Christ’s at some point or admits to being no different from other humans (unless it is by degree). As God, Christ’s life and teaching are perfect and of divine authority. Hence, everything inconsistent with those is to be rejected – he is the unique way, truth, and life. To treat Christ as if he was on par with other human religious leaders, then, as some pluralists do, is simply wrong. Mohammed, Buddha, or whoever else there may be do not teach all things consistently with Christ and since Christ is God, they are not and he is ultimate revealer and mediator, not they. He is the measure by which they are to be measured and none of them meet the standard.

The religious systems organized by and around these other figures, then, since they are not endorsed by Christ and conflict with his authority (I am putting pre-Christian Judaism to the side for the moment), do not have God-given authority since they lack Christ’s authority. These other religious systems, then, contain much that may be false, harmful, or keeping people from accepting Christ. With those who see religions as God-instituted systems for salvation, we can say that there is some truth in them and remnants of or distortions of memories or interpretations of actual revelation from God, but against those same thinkers, we must also say that the religious system itself as a whole cannot be seen as instituted by God in the way that biblical religion has been since these systems clash with rather reside in the authority of Christ. Jesus approved of the Old Testament as authoritative and of God and himself as the culmination of rather than contradiction of that revelation. Christ and his church then are seen in the New Testament as the continuation and fulfillment of Old Testament promises, the church as the continuation of and enlargement of God’s same covenant people. While not everything was revealed immediately in the Old Testament and was fulfilled and broadened in the New, this, unlike in other religions, was a matter of partial understanding or incomplete revelation, not misunderstanding or distorted revelation.

Other religious systems, then, contrary to some Roman Catholic thought, are not fulfilled by Christ or his teachings. Rather, as agreed by thinkers such as Tiessen, we can acknowledge that there may be true aspects in other religions which, when removed their contexts in those other systems, understood rightly and stripped of errors and reinterpreted in the light of Christ, the rest rejected or given entirely different content, then we may have something useful which finds a home in the context of Christian proclamation of Christ. Christ, therefore, is not the fulfillment of other religions, even if they contain some pointers to him or material that may be true or useful when transported into a new context. Rather than having, as in the Old Testament, partial revelation which is then completed by Christ, these other systems have much that must be rejected, though they may have useful points of contact to be used in dialogue or evangelism.

Humans are sinful and in need of redemption, which Christ alone provides since God provides salvation and Christ is God. Christ, in part, saves in virtue of his role as representative of his covenant people, who he cures from the curse of the Law, sin and death by taking these onto himself on the cross. Some Jews, who naturally belong, are removed in virtue of unfaithfulness, while some Gentiles are added in virtue of being incorporated into that people, who are understood as the body of Christ, the sign of which is faith. It is in Christ, then, that the defeat of sin and death become a reality, not in some other religions. And rejection of Christ, far from being a mere choice of religious ways to God, is rejection of God himself and either a cutting off or staying out of Christ and hence out of the covenant people and hence outside of the scope of Christ’s saving work. Such a person, then, devout in their own religion though they may be, has hence put themselves outside of salvation since, as already stated, salvation is from Christ himself for he is himself the God who saves. Far from being a way to God or a way to salvation, Christ is the way to God, the way to salvation – one, unique, unequaled and unsurpassed, Savior of his people.

So Christ is God’s ultimate, final revelation since he is God himself. Even if someone is able somehow to respond in faith to God and be part of the covenant people, part of Christ, without outwardly or knowingly being so incorporated because they have yet to hear the gospel (responding to genuine revelation and the internal call of the Spirit, not some other religion), such a person would still need the gospel and the church’s proclamation of Christ as well as outward knowing participation in the body in order to develop properly as a saved person. Initial salvation does not abrogate the need for growth in sanctification and the becoming of who we were really and truly meant to be in Christ.

Because of this, then, leaving people without the gospel because God will “take care of them” (as I have heard some people with inclusivist or pluralist leanings sometimes state) or because we accept their own faith in their own religion is illegitimate. The human destiny, after all, only finds its culmination and fulfillment in Christ and Christ alone. A knowledge of the gospel is more beneficial for a saved person than being without it, assuming inclusivists are correct that some unevangelized persons might be saved, which would require a grafting into Christ, into the people of God, without explicitly knowing it. For in knowing the gospel, we come to Christ in a more intimate, more explicit way and hence, since Christ is that ultimate revelation of God, we come to know God in a more intimate, more explicit way as well. We come to know God and his ways in a more perfect manner in Christ.

We ought, then, to engage in dialogue with other religions both so we can be better informed as to the religious beliefs and commitments of others and hence be able to understand them and their situations better so that we can better serve and witness to them, and also so that we can come to understand our own faith better and understand the uniqueness and supremacy of Christ and his difference from all other teachers or religious figures throughout history. It will also help persons of other religions to know more about Christ and our own convictions concerning him and can help them to be clearer on what they think and how it relates to Christ and the proclamation of him. If the Spirit moves such a person, that person may even come to accept Christ through this process or at least be more open to some lesser forms of God’s revelation, though they might not be to the point of salvation yet.

Tolerant engagement in both dialogue and proclamation, then, should be how we are related to persons of other religions in light of both the supremacy of Christ and the plurality of religions around us. We must both make peace with others who disagree with us in order to get on in the world and yet also not shy away from the truth which is found in Christ and Christ alone, making disciples of all nations and bringing them into a saving knowledge of that same Christ who is the unique Savior and God over all.

Moral Indexicals, Or Why Judgment Internalism Is Not Evidence Against Objectivist Moral Realism

So one argument I've come across more than once is that Judgment Internalism - on the version I am here interested in, the view that, insofar as one is rational, moral judgments will be intrinsically motivating - provides evidence against moral realism or at least against objectivist versions thereof (could a subjectivist view count as moral realist? I'd have to think about that, but it's late so I won't). The reasoning here is that objective facts are not intrinsically motivating, so when one makes a moral judgment one can't be judging that some objective fact is the case. I have two main responses to this argument, either one of which would effectively defang it:

First, I would contend that in fact not all moral judgments do motivate on their own. Consider this one: 'Ian Spencer ought to A'. That's not going to motivate me to do anything unless I know that I am Ian Spencer. Andy Egan thinks that since self-locating beliefs such as 'I' beliefs are motivating and hence that moral judgments must be self-locating beliefs ascribing to oneself the property of being such that one's ideal rational self would prescribe or proscribe such and such. But notice that, as we just saw, the only moral judgments that are in fact motivating are the ones that contain an explicit first-person reference. This has nothing to do with the fact that it is a moral judgment - it only has to do with the fact that it contains a first-person indexical! So Egan is right to find the motivating factor in a motivating moral judgment to come from self-location but he is wrong to think that this has anything to do with the relativity of morality. After all, an moral realist objectivist could perfectly well agree that self-location is doing the work here but disagree with Egan's relativism - the non-motivating third-person judgment and the motivating first-person one express the same facts and these can perfectly well be objective, morally realist facts. Similarly, 'Ian Spencer is being chased by a bear' and 'I am being chased by a bear' express the same objective, realist fact even though the latter will motivate me all on its own whereas the former will not (that requires me to know that I am Ian Spencer). Note that this also shows that there may also be non-moral judgments that are also intrinsically motivating insofar as I'm rational!

Second, suppose I am wrong about the above. Notice that Judgment Internalism says that it is only if one is rational (or insofar as one is so) that one is motivated by moral judgments. But if we view morality as in the business of dealing with reasons for action, we can view moral judgments as embodying or expressing reasons for or against different actions. Now, insofar as one is rational, one will be motivated by one's reasons. So judgment internalism follows nearly-trivially from just these two conceptual points about morality and its connection with rationality. No need for relativism or emotivism or what-have-you. The nature of rationality and morality jointly do all that work for us. So whichever of these two arguments you choose to employ, it looks like the move from Judgment Internalism to relativism or anti-realism done for.

Further Notes on Moral Relativism

Here is a selection from some notes I made up for a talk I gave to some College Lifers three years ago (members of FBC's College Group, that is):

The Bad Things: Arrogance, ethnocentrism, racism, sexism, intolerance, forcing your own views/practices on others, imperialism, religious persecution, discrimination, etc.

Causes of Tolerance and Relativism:
*Avoid the Bad Things! Bad Things come from Objectivism – history.
*Respect others – don’t offend or say anyone is wrong. It is okay to be different. (plus no positive moral instruction)
*Different cultures do things differently. So moral practice purely cultural.
*Everyone has a right to their own beliefs, especially about what is right.
*Self-centered individualism. I have complete authority over my own life and no one else has a right to impose themselves on it. “Who are you to tell me what is right?” I want to do whatever I want – not told I am wrong. If others are wrong, then there’s a standard. If a standard, then I could be wrong. But I want to do whatever I want – I have a right to do it and no one can tell me what to do.

Why are each of these bad reasons to believe in relativism?
*Objectivism does not have to go with the Bad Things.
*Respecting others does not mean never offending anyone, nor does it mean that all differences are okay.
*If different cultures have different beliefs, that does not mean both are right – just because some differences between cultures are purely a matter of opinion does not mean all are.
*Having a right to a belief does not make the belief true.
*That something justifies what you do is not a good reason to believe in it.

Most people accept relativism without much thought – it sounds nice.
But their beliefs are confused. “Don’t do any of the Bad Things!” is a moral absolute. So is “Be tolerant”. Case of Hitler.

Lessons:
Distinguish absolute morals from their cultural manifestations.
Stand up for objective morality while avoiding the Bad Things.
Some will confuse this with the Bad Things (since some do the opposite) and accuse you of them. Learn to separate Bad Things from standing up for the truth so that any offense will be from the gospel and not your timing or way of presenting its truth.
Real tolerance – respecting and not persecuting those you disagree with. This doesn’t mean not expressing your opinion or disagreement – it means doing so in love.

Moral Relativism and Really Bad Papers

I'm in the middle of grading one of the worst batches of papers I've ever graded. Somehow, out of all the TAs I'm the one who ended up with most of the really bad ones - vast confusions and misunderstanding, gross failures to actually read the text they are writing on, neglect in actually following the directions given by the topic prompt, rambling and incoherent paragraphs (or pages) with little or no apparent point, incomprehensible prose, lack of critical thought, lack of arguing for their own opinions, use of obviously circular or question-begging arguments, treating this as a book report rather than a philosophy paper, ignoring what was actually said or argued in class, and so on. And all this on almost all my students' papers!

I was especially dissappointed with the papers on the first paper topic. The students were asked to take a look at the part of Russ Shafer-Landau's article on ethical subjectivism where he presents and then destroys arguments for NES - normative ethical subjectivism (the view that an action is right for me if and only if I approve of it/believe it is right). They were then supposed to turn one of the arguments for NES into an argument for Cultural Relativism (the view that an action is right for me if and only if my culture approves of it/believes it is right) and then see whether Shafer-Landau's objections to the analogous argument for NES work here as well and whether the argument for CR ends up showing CR is true. Over half of the students on this topic supported CR but half of them did not even take into account Shafer-Landau's devastating objections which would work against CR just as well as NES and the rest either misunderstood Shafer-Landau, made a reply to him that we explicitly showed in class did not actually work, or said basically that Shafer-Landau's replies don't work because CR is true. So basically these were awful papers. Unsurprisingly, those advocating CR didn't actually have any good reasons to believe CR and they basically said that it was true because CR is correct. Ugh!

It's awful that so many students buy into NES or CR when they have so many problems and there's really no good reason or argument in their favor. Here's one sort of argument against these kinds of moral relativism (MR):

(1) Morality is not arbitrary.

(2) If morality is not arbitrary then MR is false.

(3) Therefore, MR is false.

Evidence for 1: Morality is a fundamentally rational, reasoned thing. People reason and argue and deliberate about moral matters and there are certain patterns to moral reasoning and justification - it's not just willy-nilly or anything goes nor is it completely random. It has all the hallmarks of non-arbitrariness, unlike something like, say, norms of etiquette or whether one likes chocolate ice cream or not.

Evidence for 2: Since morality is based on patterns of reasons and reasoning and people and cultures do not simply arbitrarily approve or dissapprove of actions but do so for these very reasons, it seems that these reasons, which explain these patterns of approval and dissapproval are what make something right or wrong, not the approval or dissapproval itself. And so if approval and dissaproval are not what morality directly depends upon, then MR must be false since it claims the opposite. So good-bye, MR.

I'm quite fond of this sort of argument. Down with MR!