“What’s true of all the evils in the world is true of the plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves. All the same, when you see the misery it brings, you’d need to be a madman, or a coward, or stone blind, to give in tamely to the plague.” – Albert Camus, The Plague.
In seven earlier posts1 I addressed some of the philosophical issues attendant to the Covid-19 pandemic just then starting and since dominating 18 months of our lives as a species. Starting in late December of 2020 the first of four vaccines was approved for emergency use by the United States FDA and by similar agencies in most other Western countries (Russia and China have also developed their own vaccines). Without getting into the details of the amazing effectiveness and remarkably limited danger of these vaccines, as a physician who has thoroughly reviewed the clinical trials and FDA panel review and monitored the continuously reported data, I can assure readers that these vaccines are every bit as safe and perhaps more effective than any of the other vaccines they have received during their lifetimes. The mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna are, in my opinion, scientific advances that will lead to Nobel Prize awards within ten years.
Our emphasis today however is on the ethics of a decision to receive or to decline vaccination. Before we address that, a little review is in order. Covid-19 is a member of the coronavirus group which includes some minor longstanding cold viruses. In 2002 a dangerous form, SARS or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome appeared in China, infected about 8000 persons and caused 774 deaths. In 2012 MERS or Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome appeared in Saudi Arabia and infected about 2500 patients causing 886 deaths.2 
Covid-19 which appeared in China in late 2019 was thus the third of these mutated coronaviruses, but this time was much more infectious striking over 178 million people and killing nearly 4 million worldwide. This translates into about a 2.1% mortality, though it is likely lower due to underreporting of mild and asymptomatic cases. However the mortality rate varies dramatically by age from less than one in ten thousand for children to perhaps 10-15% in octogenarians. Full vaccination reduces the number of identifiable cases by 95-99% and essentially prevents all deaths. Minor side effects from the vaccines are common, but serious harm or death are less than one in one million, and to my knowledge, no vaccine related deaths have been attributed to the mRNA vaccines.
So what is the ethical calculus on receiving the vaccine or having your child vaccinated? We have seen virtue in general applies to four levels of reality – internal, proximate, societal, and cosmic – of which the first three pertain here. We will explore these next time.
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1See Suffering – The COVID-19 Pandemic – Parts I-V on this site 4/8/20, 4/10/20, 4/13/20, 4/15/20, 4/17/20, 4/20/20, and 4/22/20.
2See SARS Basic Fact Sheet and MERS Basic Fact Sheet at www.CDC.gov.
At the end of the day, I would like to ask the reader to entertain the notion that there may be something beyond the physical and mental realm experienced by human beings that fits into what is traditionally called the spiritual realm. Now this should not be an artificial reclassification of a portion of the material world or mental activity, but a genuinely distinct dimension of reality. For theists this dimension includes God, perhaps other divine entities, spirits, mystical experience, miracles, and so forth. Skeptics and physicalists call this superstition, imagination, delusion, suggestion, and even scientifically explainable. For the disbeliever, the leap to deny or discount ultimate reality risks the danger of possibly missing out on the most powerful level of a meaningful life. Thus I suggest we bracket its actuality while we think through what makes for excellence in our conduct with regards to it.
Should one recognize its distinction from the cosmos itself, ultimate reality differs from the others in that virtue, purpose, and contentment coalesce in finding meaning therein. Further details will make up the chapter that follows the next two: Purpose and Contentment. Before we start on them, next time I will present a synopsis on virtue as the first ingredient of the meaningful life.
Continuing with conclusions on virtue regarding nature beyond animals brings us to ‘land ethics’ with its fundamental tenets: (1) treat Nature as a series of interconnected ecosystems, (2) use evidence-based decision making, (3) balance human needs treating individuals as ends not means, (4) seek natural or organic sources of food (5) learn from Nature by direct observation and scientific means, and (6) recognize the value of myth, symbols, and the lore of elder native peoples. From these we outlined a virtuous course of behavior regarding the environment. Limit human impacts on atmospheric degradation and climate change. Avoid overfishing or consuming overfished species and conserve fresh water by simple practical methods. Preserve soil, recycle non-fuel minerals, and expand renewable energy. Expand or protect nonhuman spaces for animals and future people.
The final dimension is the cosmos itself where virtue is based on having, in the words of Neil de Grasse Tyson, a ‘cosmic perspective.’ While the philosopher may contemplate metaphysical features of existence, he or she must still acknowledge the truths of astronomy and astrophysics in the pursuit of cosmic virtue and construct an ethical program based thereon. Externally directed or active virtue is study of the universe including perhaps participation as amateur scientist, searching for extra-terrestrial life as a means to expanding our understanding of the cosmos, and space exploration and future colonization appropriately funded preferably as an international effort.
But we have a choice; we can also align ourselves with its direction and so hitch a ride on its unimaginable majesty and future. As Laozi tells us, “If you stay at the center [of the Tao] and embrace death with your whole heart, you will endure forever.”
The virtuous attitude or approach to cosmic reality seems to me to be (1) recognizing that we are fundamentally attached to Nature and should have reverence for it, (2) committing to the understanding, study, and love of science, and (3) having such awe of the universe that we wish to live in harmony with nature and align our lives with the course of the universe.
“I feel it is important to draw attention to the fact that the work which Jane Goodall has done…has been so important as to necessitate a complete review of scientific thought about how to define man himself.” – L.S.B. Leakey1.
Her signature work on chimpanzees done at the Gombe Stream Game Reserve in modern Tanzania was unprecedented. Living in the wild at incredible personal sacrifice and with painstaking patience, she was eventually accepted by a troop of chimpanzees where she learned previously unknown secrets about their behavior, especially their making of tools, a characteristic previously thought to define the human species. Over the next decade she wrote over a dozen books on chimps and other wild species while earning a PhD in Ethology at Cambridge University. Her funder, National Geographic, sought to focus on a somewhat different narrative – Jane herself – in their words: “a modern scientific zoologist” and “a charming young Englishwoman.”2 p 47
Following Galileo’s failure to persuade the Pope on the Copernican system, he promised submission to the Church, but persisted in his publication of the facts of his scientific observations on the heavens. With the publication of Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems in 1629 with its blatant contempt for theological arguments against his interpretations of the evidence, he became a victim of the Inquisition in 1633 and his books were banned from Catholic countries. While he eventually abjured in his beliefs out of fear for his life, he was confined to house arrest for the remainder of his life, during which time he restricted his research to the safer field of physics rather than astronomy until blindness, deafness, and eventually death intervened.
The significance of Galileo’s heroism cannot be overstated. He was a first-rate scientist who single-handedly initiated telescopic study of the cosmos, proved the Copernican model to be correct, and made contributions to physics in many areas, some of which displaced the entrenched 2000 year old Aristotelian understanding of reality and anticipated Newton’s laws of inertia and motion. In a larger sense he devised the scientific method of reliance on reproducible observations and experiments premised on the consistency of the natural world. He was one of the first to write in his native language (rather than Latin) in order to bring science to the layman. He risked and lost everything including his own liberty not only for scientific truth, but for freedom of speech. It would be 150 years before the United States would become first nation to adopt that freedom as an inviolable right.
Returning now to cosmic virtue in its extraordinary form, we come upon the great hero scientist, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). He grew up in Renaissance Italy which was still shaking off the intellectual inertia of the Middle Ages and still subjugated to Roman Catholic dogma itself inexplicably shackled to ancient Greek knowledge (especially Aristotle and Ptomely). Intended for medicine by his father, he switched to mathematics while at the University of Pisa writing his first essay on hydrostatic balance at age 22 and being made professor of mathematics there at age 25. At about this time he showed his contempt of unquestioned authority, challenging the teaching of Aristotle that the speed of falling objects varies according to their mass, by reportedly dropping two balls of different weights off the leaning tower of Pisa.
In in a letter to the Grand Duchess of Tuscany published in 1615 his virtuous attitude regarding cosmic reality is fully revealed, “Nature is inexorable and immutable; she never transgresses the laws imposed upon her, or cares a whit whether her abstruse reasons and methods of operation are understandable to men. For that reason it appears that nothing physical which sense-experience sets before our eyes, or which necessary demonstrations prove to us, ought to be called into question (much less condemned) upon the testimony of Biblical passages which may have some different meaning beneath their words.”2
