Just an off the wall thought: For just a moment, let's set aside the absurd religious objections that people seem to have with vaccinating children against HPV. I suspect that there's an other mechanism at work here as well.
You're familiar with the ethical thought experiment about a runaway train about to plow into a group of people standing on the railroad tracks- most people would be willing to flip a switch to divert the train to a side track, even if that means killing a single person on the track, but very few would push a large person onto the track even if they knew that doing so would save the entire group. Do you think that the people resisting Gardasil are exhibiting the same ethical "quirk", in that they consider many deaths resulting from their inaction to be morally superior to a single death resulting from their direct intervention?
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Date: 8/24/09 07:59 pm (UTC)From:You're familiar with the ethical thought experiment about a runaway train about to plow into a group of people standing on the railroad tracks- most people would be willing to flip a switch to divert the train to a side track, even if that means killing a single person on the track, but very few would push a large person onto the track even if they knew that doing so would save the entire group. Do you think that the people resisting Gardasil are exhibiting the same ethical "quirk", in that they consider many deaths resulting from their inaction to be morally superior to a single death resulting from their direct intervention?
Just a thought.