[Presented at the 2021 Inaugural Meeting of the Society for Christian Bioethicists.]
Abstract
In Jacobson v. Massachusetts, a landmark 1905 Supreme Court case, the Court upheld the state’s authority to compel citizens’ vaccination. “There are manifold restraints,” Justice Harlan wrote in the decision, “to which every person is necessarily subject for the common good.”[i] Sometimes the social principle takes precedence, and individual liberty is restricted for everyone’s benefit.
Unsurprisingly, this case has garnered significant attention in recent months as lawmakers deliberate about compulsory vaccination during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some have insisted that individuals’ rights to refrain from receiving hypodermic injections override considerations about public safety. Others follow Justice Harlan, insisting that because government exists for the common good, it is the prerogative of government to mandate certain individual behaviors for the benefit of the common good.
There are dangers to this latter kind of reasoning, however. In fact, Jacobson was the singular precedent cited in Buck v. Bell, one of the most notorious cases in Supreme Court history. In their 1927 decision, the Court upheld a Virginia’s compulsory sterilization of the so-called unfit, for the “welfare of society.”[ii] Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing for the majority, cited Jacobson: “[t]he principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.”[iii]
In this paper, I present and critique two views which are evoked by these cases: what I call the “individualist view” and the “collectivist view.” According to the individualist view, individuals ought first to be respected as bearers of rights. This approach has the virtue of recognizing the discrete embodied experience and unique value of each human being. But it often obscures the fact that many of the material and immaterial goods we depend on are impossible apart from the social order. The collectivist view, on the other hand, grants normative primacy to the social body. This view boasts considerable advantages: it rightly situates individuals within a social system. But it risks a very real danger. Prioritizing the welfare of the collective can make it all too easy to subjugate some members for the greater good; as Isaiah Berlin put it, any number of eggs might be cracked for the sake of the perfect omelet.[iv] What is needed is a third alternative, which affirms the distinctive life of each individual while underscoring the interdependent nature of human living. In this paper I develop such a view by drawing on St. Paul’s use of the body of Christ metaphor in Romans, 1 Corinthians, and Ephesians.[v] Paul’s approach overcomes the dangers of both the individualist and collectivist views. First, Paul makes it clear that no part of the body can dispense with any other. “The eye cannot say to the hand: I have no need of you,” writes Paul. However, he is also explicit about the dangers of treating some members as means for the collective’s ends. Paul’s description of the body of Christ overcomes this worry, by insisting that each member deserves respect as an indispensable member of the greater body.
[i] Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 US at 26.
[ii] 274 U.S. at 204.
[iv] Berlin, The Power of Ideas, 17, 28. John Calhoun, it should be remembered, never argued that slavery was a good for enslaved people; for Calhoun, the individual was not the relevant unit of analysis. Instead, slavery was a positive good for society. Slaves were not their own, figuratively and literally. Of course, that this was so benefited people like Calhoun individually. But what is worth keeping in mind is that, at least rhetorically, Calhoun had the welfare of the collective in mind when he argued for the maintenance of slavery in the antebellum south.
[v] It deserves mention that there are, to be sure, analogies and disanalogies between the body of Christ and the body politic. The reflections Paul offers regarding the coordination among the members of the body of Christ are not wholly translatable to the context of the body politic. Yet upon consideration, they can prove to be quite valuable—or so I will argue.