CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 140Ethics and bioethics in healthcareVaccine Coverage and HesitancyLegal, Health, Environmental and COVID-19 Challenges

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 38 of the 39 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

A Defense of Compulsory Vaccination

Flanigan, Jessica·2014·HEC Forum
DOI 10.1007/s10730-013-9221-5
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Vaccine refusal harms and risks harming innocent bystanders. People are not entitled to harm innocents or to impose deadly risks on others, so in these cases there is nothing to be said for the right to refuse vaccination. Compulsory vaccination is therefore justified because non-vaccination can rightly be prohibited, just as other kinds of harmful and risky conduct are rightly prohibited. I develop an analogy to random gunfire to illustrate this point. Vaccine refusal, I argue, is morally similar to firing a weapon into the air and endangering innocent bystanders. By re-framing vaccine refusal as harmful and reckless conduct my aim is to shift the focus of the vaccine debate from non-vaccinators' religious and refusal rights to everyone else's rights against being infected with contagious illnesses. Religious freedom and rights of informed consent do not entitle non-vaccinators to harm innocent bystanders, and so coercive vaccination requirements are permissible for the sake of the potential victims of the anti-vaccine movement.

Overview

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1007/s10730-013-9221-5

Cites

38 of 38 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

This paper’s full text isn’t openly available, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Citations

Cites

Show all 39 references

Research works printed but not linked: 4

  1. Feinberg, J. (1987). Harm to others (2nd Printing 9/79). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  2. Parfit, D. (1984). Reasons and persons. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  3. Rawls, J. (2005). Political liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press.
  4. Thomson, J. J. (1991). Self-defense. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 20(4), 283–310.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

See all

Metadata

Authors
Flanigan, J.
Affiliations
University of Richmond (US)
Corresponding author
Flanigan, Jessica
ORCID
Flanigan, Jessica
Venue
HEC Forum
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Published
2013-08-13
Volume
26
Issue
1
Pages
5-25
ISSN
  • 0956-2737 (ISSN-L)
  • 1572-8498
DOI
10.1007/s10730-013-9221-5
OpenAlex
W2056764397
Cited by
140
References
39
Citations by year
2026: 5 · 2025: 10 · 2024: 8 · 2023: 32 · 2022: 21 · 2021: 35 · 2020: 7 · 2019: 2 · 2018: 8 · 2017: 4 · 2016: 4 · 2015: 3 · 2014: 1
FWCI
2.73
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Licence
Locations
  • HEC Forum (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Health Sciences › Medicine › Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health › Ethics and bioethics in healthcare
  • Social Sciences › Health › Vaccine Coverage and Hesitancy
  • Health Sciences › Medicine › Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health › Legal, Health, Environmental and COVID-19 Challenges
Keywords
mandatory vaccination, vaccine refusal, anti-vaccine movement, religious freedom, informed consent, infectious diseases, coercion, moral permissibility, public health ethics
MeSH terms
Civil Rights, Humans, Informed Consent, Religion and Medicine, Risk Management, Social Responsibility, United States, Vaccination, Treatment Refusal, Immunization Programs, Mandatory Programs

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review