Vaccine passports in the moral maze
Should society's benefits be conditional upon our obligations to the public interest?
On BBC Radio’s Moral Maze this week, we discussed yet more moral dilemmas being thrown up by the pandemic. With the British government now floating the idea of vaccine passports, we asked whether the advantages this might bring in opening up society would be countered by a decline in equality and fairness.
Would the easing of restrictions for those who had been vaccinated be justified by shutting others out of institutions and events? Should access to society’s benefits in general be conditional upon acting in the public interest? In the welfare system, should people be obliged to look for work as a condition of receiving benefit payments? Do rights always come with responsibilities? Or does conditionality undermine social cohesion because it implicitly blames the victims of circumstance?
My fellow panellists, under the chairmanship of Michael Buerk, were Matthew Taylor, Mona Siddiqui and Andrew Doyle. Our witnesses were Professor Julian Savulescu, director of the Oxford Centre for Practical Ethics; Silkie Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch; Matthew Oakley, director of the WPI Economics think-tank; and Dr Beth Watts, senior research fellow in social policy at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh.
You can listen to the programme on BBC iPlayer here.
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