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.
We reviewed the outpatient medical records of 265 homeless children less than 5 years of age in New York City and compared them with children of similar low socioeconomic status (SES) attending the same pediatric clinic. The frequency of health problems among the homeless children, including delayed immunizations, elevated blood lead levels, the rate of admission to hospital, and the rate of child abuse and neglect reports, exceeded those for the comparison groups. (Am J Public Health 1988; 78:1232-1233
Many leadership researchers aim to advise organizations about how to select and develop ethical leaders, to tell business educators how to teach people to be ethical, or to describe ethical leadership. Yet for these tasks, empirical approaches that address questions about ethics with surveys, experiments, and case studies are insufficient on their own in answering the question, ''what should a leader do?'' I first argue that descriptive approaches to leadership ethics, such as conceptual analysis, case studies, survey research, and lab experiments, cannot on their own tell us what a leader ought to do when he or she faces a morally difficult circumstance. I then show that the question ''what should a leader do?'' can be addressed through philosophical analysis. Though philosophers disagree about the nature of morality, most agree that there are truths about morality and that we can make progress in learning about how to live and lead ethically. To close, I consider and respond to the objection that philosophical approaches to leadership ethics are intolerant or authoritarian. I conclude that philosophical approaches to leadership ethics are essential to our evolving understanding of what a leader ought to do.
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