Vaccination and Common Good(s)

In light of the threat posed by vaccine-preventable diseases, political theologies have an urgent obligation to develop robust theological conceptions of the kinds of communities and practices Christians need to form and pursue with their fellow citizens in order to achieve those goods that lead to human flourishing. A significant amount of Christian political rhetoric is still caught in the presumed opposition between individualism and collectivism, where the former holds out the promise of “religious freedom” while the latter is seen as a bureaucratic form of altruism. As such, any consideration of the good of the whole is framed in utilitarian terms—terms that stand at odds with core elements of Christian beliefs. Therefore, it seems to me that the recovery of robust theological frameworks for ethics and politics plays a vital role in enabling Christians to engage constructively in the secular politics of Western liberalism. Not only must our theology be political, but our politics must be theological in order to move Christian communities to action. And yet, if it is genuinely Christian, a political theology will unavoidably engage Christians in the pursuit of a secular account of the common good, because part of the theological definition of concepts such as justice and human flourishing is that they are not restricted to the purview of divine revelation. The solution to reductive fideism is not less theology, but more.

MacIntyre (1988, 115) writes that “[i]t is a presupposition of the practitioners of [modern Morality] that to act for the good of others as Morality enjoins will often be to act contrary to one’s own interests and desires.” When collective action is characteristically framed in terms of sacrificing one’s wellbeing for the good of the majority, it is easy for publics to interpret any pursuit of the common good as a bureaucratic impingement on their rights—especially when they feel excluded from the majority public, as many religious communities do. Theological responses to vaccine hesitancy have frequently reinforced rather than challenged this perception, calling on Christians to follow Jesus’s example and make sacrifices for the good of others. (Here, feminist theology offers a helpful corrective regarding the relative place of self-sacrifice in Christian discipleship more generally (Daly 1973, 77).) Largely missing in all of this is any conception of human flourishing, of the individual goods that can only be achieved in and through the pursuit of common goods, of what justice requires of members of human communities, and of the place of virtue in this pursuit of human flourishing. When Aristotle says the common good of the polis is greater than the good of any individual, he does not mean that the good of individuals should be sacrificed for the sake of the majority. He means that individuals only reach their good through the pursuit of the common good. To speak of the common good, properly understood, is not to ask people to act altruistically.

MacIntyre contends that we all recognize a distinction between the different kinds of goods to which we order our lives. Individual goods are those I can both achieve and enjoy as an individual. To enjoy a glass of whiskey or a plate of fish and chips is to appreciate this kind of good. These goods may require incidental cooperation mediated by the market, but this cooperation will be primarily transactional. Public goods are those I enjoy as an individual but only achieve through cooperation with others. Because we as individuals are not capable of providing roads, clean water, sewer systems, law and order, or national security, local and national governments intervene as a mechanism by which we cooperate (primarily through taxation) to achieve goods from which we each benefit individually. Common goods, finally, are those I both achieve and enjoy through cooperation with others — goods that only accrue to me as a member of a certain group or participant in a certain activity. A choir is an excellent example of this. The good of each singer qua choral singer is only realized in and through their cooperation for the good of the whole. The same goes for families and workplaces: I only flourish as a husband or as an employee through the flourishing of my family or company. Thus, it is uniquely the case for common goods that the good of the whole is greater than that of any individual, insofar as the good of each individual member qua member is only realized in and through the good of the whole. These different goods support one another in various ways: families and choirs rely on public goods in order to achieve their common good, and it is in and through the pursuit of common goods that individuals achieve their individual good (note here the difference between public, common, and club goods).

When it comes to vaccination and infectious disease, there is a complex combination of goods in view. Vaccines are public goods that serve the common good of herd immunity, through which the good of individual immunity is secured. Vaccines are typically debated exclusively in the terms of individual goods, which obscures the nature of the issues at stake. Once we have identified the nature of these goods, the question then becomes: What do we owe others by way of cooperation toward promoting and achieving these goods? We must enter into prolonged practices of cooperative enquiry. As Thomas Aquinas (ST I-II.14.3) notes, the shortcomings in our own deliberation have to be corrected by the judgments of others who have a stake in the goods we hold in common. Due in part to the dangers of in-person gatherings, the few forums for such practices were quickly curtailed during the pandemic. As Blakely (2023) notes, “one of the gravest errors of governance during the pandemic was that ordinary people were not heard. Instead, they were informed of the scientifically rational policy and, if they protested, lectured into compliance.” The dialogue at the heart of such practices of cooperative reasoning is the lifeblood of democracy, and it is unlikely to yield the same policy in every community. Rather, individual communities need the ability to rank order goods according to their values and demographics, making decisions informed by the relevant scientific data but not reductively determined by it. Furthermore, it is reasonable to suppose that people who have a hand in the process of decision-making will be more likely to comply with the resulting policy decisions than those who feel it was imposed on them from outside. These practices of collective reasoning must also involve a consideration of the extent of others impacted by and invested in the achievement of the goods in question. A global pandemic is similar to climate change in that the common goods in view often accrue to us not only as members of a particular family, workplace, or community but as humans. So, for example, a community taking less precautions locally may implement greater precautions for those travelling to and from other areas.

Seeing something as a common good brings a range of otherwise invisible issues to the cost-benefit analysis of typical political decision-making. Also, certain common goods are only open to certain kinds of political community, which means our pursuit of them will also challenge our own forms of social and political life in a way that the pursuit of individual and public goods does not. As MacIntyre (2017) notes, with few exceptions, modern states are not suited to a kind of political society structured according to a conception of its common good, “if only because almost all modern states are too large and heterogeneous, are oligarchies ruled by agenda-setting elites, and are bureaucratically structured so that the relationship between those who govern to the governed is too often that of patron to client, rather than that of citizen to citizen.” This does not, however, preclude the emergence of local communities with a shared understanding of their needs and resources who deliberate together as to their common good. Insofar as modern states are structured in ways that undermine our capacity to pursue common goods, they create barriers to vaccine uptake and bear some responsibility for vaccine hesitancy and refusal. The urgent need for pandemic preparedness and the growing threat of vaccine-preventable diseases will, if we are wise, be a catalyst for reflection on the nature of our political institutions.

Prudence and other Virtues

Cooperative enquiry requires and supports the development of virtues: justice between neighbors, temperateness in the expression of our individual desires, courage in the face of uncertainty, prudence in our shared decision-making. This leads us to another area where the logic of contemporary political discourse falls short compared to its theological counterpart. In his book on the cardinal virtues, Josef Pieper (1965) notes that people tend to confuse prudence (what Aristotle called phronesis) with utilitarianism. Here, the perfected habit of deciding rightly so that one’s actions are conformed to reality is transformed into deciding in favor of the happiness of the greatest number. But prudence is not about “happiness” but about being, and it does not conform to the majority but to truth.

Pieper (1965, 10) writes that “the pre-eminence of prudence means that realization of the good presupposes knowledge of reality. He alone can do good who knows what things are like and what their situation is.” One major disconnect with vaccine hesitancy is a misapprehension of the reality of the safety and efficacy of vaccines. This is a lack of prudence, but it also points to the ways the prudent rely on communal and institutional knowledge to grasp reality. This expands Aristotle’s point that certain forms of political life are necessary for the development of the virtues, and that these institutions bear some responsibility for the failure of communities to exhibit prudence in these contexts.

Falling victim to misinformation and conspiracy thinking undermines the development of prudence, instead propagating epistemic vices like gullibility, dogmatism, prejudice, closed-mindedness, and negligence. These acquired intellectual character traits are disastrous for both individual and cooperative enquiry. Prudence is the mother of all the virtues, and Aquinas argues therefore that none but the prudent can be just, brave, and temperate, and that a person is only good insofar as they are prudent.

From a theological perspective, taking care not to fall victim to misinformation is not only important for how it impacts one’s decision-making, but also for how it impacts one’s personhood. The development of virtue is central to human flourishing, and prudence is the foremost of the virtues, which means disinformation poses a grave danger not only to our policymaking but to our individual flourishing as rational agents. As Pieper (1965, 10) argues, “the pre-eminence of prudence means that so-called ‘good intention’ and so-called ‘meaning well’ by no means suffice.” It is not rationalism that should encourage Christians to pursue an accurate grasp of the data on vaccine safety and efficacy but prudence. However just someone’s goal may be, if they rely on misinformation to pursue or disseminate it, they are thereby rendered vicious. It seems to me that a central piece of any Christian political theology will be the recognition that our forms of political engagement are a primary means by which we develop virtue or vice, that the development of virtue contributes more to the flourishing of rational agents than material goods, and that therefore the mode of our politics is at least as important as its content—and again, not for the sake of moralism or altruism.

Christian Theology and Religions Exemptions

In light of this vision of political theology, I would like to suggest that Christians invested in the common good will not pursue religious exemptions from vaccination. Liberal governments have important and complex reasons for allowing religious exemption from certain policies, but that does not mean there are Christian theological grounds for making use of them. If vaccines were dangerous, then they would be bad for everyone, and Christian opposition to them would necessarily be on behalf of everyone. (It is worth noting that vaccine mandates are sometimes implemented due to political rather than functional challenges or without first attempting alternative approaches (see Atwell and Hannah 2022; Attwell, Rizzi et al. 2022; Attwell and Navin 2019).) It is perverse for those who believe vaccines to be dangerous to suggest that Christians should be uniquely shielded from bodily harm because of their personal religious beliefs.

The most common biblical passages used as justification for religious exemption are badly twisted and misinterpreted. Take, for example, 1 Corinthians 3:16, “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?” Here, Paul’s exhortation to keep ourselves free from sin is twisted into a slogan of natural wellness concerned with the physical “pollution” of our bodies. But, of course, scripture never suggests that the Holy Spirit cannot dwell in bodies “contaminated” by chemicals or debilitated by physical injury. As Jesus says, “Out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person” (Matthew 15:19–20). God’s temple is defiled by sin, not adjuvants.

Christian objections to vaccines often cite the use of immortalized cell lines derived from an aborted fetus. For this reason, a broad range of religious leaders, including the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, have clearly determined that the use of such cell lines is morally acceptable from a “pro-life” Christian perspective. Much has been written on the various aspects of this issue (see esp. Eberl 2022), but the basic logic comes from foundational theological principles. The relevant immortalized cell lines, such as PER.C6 and HEK 293, made use of tissue from a fetus forty to fifty years ago, but this use was not the reason the abortion was performed. From a pro-life perspective, to create life-saving medicines using these cell lines is to bring good from something evil without causing or approving of the evil. To take an evil action, event, or situation and bring good from it without participating in what is evil about it is how Christians understand divine providence (ST I.49.2). Christians are called to imitate and participate in this divine work (Philippians 2:13). It is also worth noting that those who object to vaccines on this basis often make use of a broad range of consumer products developed using these same cell lines. This suggests that ethical objections, like scientific ones, frequently arise as post hoc justifications for vaccine hesitancy.

Christians frequently confuse their civic and religious identities, citing “freedom” as a fundamental Christian value that justifies exemption from all government mandates. In scripture, freedom is primarily about liberation from the bondage of sin and death so that we might pursue God’s vision of justice (see, e.g., 1 Corinthians 6:12 and Galatians 5). Freedom is a secondary and relative good, while justice is foundational and primary. Justice is also the proper basis for governmental uses of coercion and constraint, such as vaccine mandates (see MacIntyre 2015). Christian theology does not offer an opposition to the idea of mandates in principle, though it is of course always possible for a specific government mandate to be unjust. My point is simply that Christian opposition to such injustice, when it does arise, should not be to exempt Christians due to their private beliefs but to seek justice on behalf of the broader community, engaging together in practices of cooperative enquiry in pursuit of their common good.

Conclusion

To speak of prudence and common goods is to give just two examples of how a theological framework both connects to the values of faith communities and disrupts the typical structure of vaccine debates. From the perspective of a Christian vision of human flourishing, justice, and virtue, the pursuit of common goods has little to do with sacrificing one’s own interests or rights for the happiness of the majority. Rather, it stems from a richly theological vision of the inextricably communal goods that stand at the center of the Christian vision of human flourishing. At the same time, misinformation and conspiracy thinking should not be evaluated in terms of the policies it supports but rather in terms of its impact on human flourishing through the development of virtue or vice. This is not about moralism but about a theological vision of human flourishing.