Virginia Sapiro: Rights extend as far as the rights of the next person

To The Daily Sun, 

I've been seeing lots of folks talking about how we should respect the choices of others with regard to whether to be vaccinated against COVID. But this argument is based on ideas about private rights — in a civil society we respect the rights of others, including their privacy and private choices.

There are long-standing basic and relevant issues about the limitations of private rights that we have to think about, illustrated by this famous anecdote, well-illustrated in 1919 by the legal philosopher Zechariah Chafee Jr. a great advocate of First Amendment rights: A man was arrested for swinging his arms and hitting another in the nose. He asked the judge if he did not have a right to swing his arms in a free country. “Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man’s nose begins.” Otherwise said, your rights and liberty end where the next person's begin. We are not individuals on our own islands; we live in society together.

The point relevant to our choice about being vaccinated against COVID is that choosing to enhance our resistance to COVID is not just a private health choice. It is also a public health choice. Refusing to be an easy mark for an often lethal virus reduces the likelihood that it can find a welcome resting place to multiply, replicate, and sometimes mutate, creating a new version that may be even more lethal.

The refusal to risk becoming a victim of the virus means reducing the likelihood that we will expose other vulnerable people to the virus. It means being less likely to take up hospital beds and equipment and endanger hospital staff because of our "private choice." In places with low vaccination rates the hospitals are filling with COVID patients, meaning that people who need hospital beds for other reasons — say, heart conditions, cancer, or other diseases — can't get them because of these "private choices" that resulted in avoidable serious disease.

So this decision is not just about private health choices. It's about public health choices. Questions of private rights are more complicated than just saying "I get to do what I want." Our rights extend as far as the rights of the next person. A free society requires thoughtful balances among rights. That thoughtfulness about multiple, interdependent rights is a different way of thinking about respect.

Virginia Sapiro

Gilmanton