All correct. But also, disturbingly Utilitarian. Release vaccines before they are tested, and withdraw those that cause more deaths than they save? Trading lives for lives, coldly.
There are costs to calculated Utilitarianism. The damage to public confidence in vaccines springs to mind. If a vaccine is provably killing 1% of those receiving it, yet saving the lives of 2% (and more once herd immunity is reached) it may raise some alarmist criticism (to say the least) over the safety and advisability of getting vaccinated. Making it harder to convince the public to get vaccinated at all.
Other costs are, mis-estimating the ultimate death toll may lead to killing more up front than was strictly necessary. Or the vaccine may have side effects down the road, shortening lives or diminishing quality of life (sterilization? memory loss? immune system compromises?).
Unless all the costs are factored in, Utilitarianism become a guess, and can be used to serve profit or social agendas. The law of unintended consequences will loom large.
> There are costs to calculated Utilitarianism. The damage to public confidence in vaccines springs to mind. If a vaccine is provably killing 1% of those receiving it, yet saving the lives of 2% (and more once herd immunity is reached) it may raise some alarmist criticism (to say the least) over the safety and advisability of getting vaccinated. Making it harder to convince the public to get vaccinated at all.
If that can already be calculated, calculated utilitarianism could take it into account.
2 main comments:
1) your example of 1% death rate would be detected very early in a rollout, and would represent something akin to a 10000x worse vaccine outcome that has ever been experienced. The worst vaccine ever is generally regarded as causing 1 in 10,000 narcolepsy.
2) the word "approved" is misleading. Of you change this to say "banned" or "not banned", this reads very differently. The requirement to ban everyone from taking a vaccine in order to mitigate some extreme long tail event and maintain public confidence is hard to justify on utilitarian grounds, but pretty much any other ethical framework.
There are costs to calculated Utilitarianism. The damage to public confidence in vaccines springs to mind. If a vaccine is provably killing 1% of those receiving it, yet saving the lives of 2% (and more once herd immunity is reached) it may raise some alarmist criticism (to say the least) over the safety and advisability of getting vaccinated. Making it harder to convince the public to get vaccinated at all.
Other costs are, mis-estimating the ultimate death toll may lead to killing more up front than was strictly necessary. Or the vaccine may have side effects down the road, shortening lives or diminishing quality of life (sterilization? memory loss? immune system compromises?).
Unless all the costs are factored in, Utilitarianism become a guess, and can be used to serve profit or social agendas. The law of unintended consequences will loom large.
We have a vaccine protocol for a reason.