Due to limited supplies, Americans and residents of other rich countries will be vaccinated against Covid-19 and return to normal life more quickly if they share little vaccine with people in poorer countries. Should progressives and others who disapproved of President Trump’s America First policies make an exception for the distribution of vaccines which Trump has already prohibited selling outside the US?
The case for distributing vaccines equally around the globe rests on our common humanity and on America’s founding claim that all people are created equal. The Abrahamic religions to which most Americans are affiliated – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – also claim the equal worth of all human beings.
Another consideration favoring equal sharing is the utilitarian goal of promoting the most favorable outcomes over all. If, instead of sharing equally, residents of rich countries are given preferential access to vaccines, more people over all are likely to die of Covid-19 because healthcare in most poor countries is worse than ours.
On the other hand, we commonly acknowledge a greater duty of care to our friends than to strangers; to our families than to our friends; to our country than to the world community; and to human beings than to animals. In other words, we often think that our duty to help others reflects concentric circles. Each of us is at the center of these circles. Our obligations, in number and strength, are greatest to those in the circles closest to us. For most people, family is in the closest circle, but good friends may be in a closer circle than distant cousins. Our coworkers are generally in a closer circle than strangers; our neighbors than people living across town.
Placement in circles depends on past, present, and potential interactions. To say that spouse, parents, and children are usually in the closest circle is just another way of saying that we have depended on them most; or they depend on us most; or we are in a better position than most others to help them when they’re in need. This is why, if we can afford only one bicycle, we give it to our own child, rather than a needier stranger. But family isn’t everything. People voluntarily engaged in a joint project have committed themselves to be helpful to one another in the project’s realization. This puts each, perhaps only temporarily, in a closer circle to the others than they would have been without that commitment. Don’t carry a piano up a flight of stairs with anyone who disagrees.
Political units create systems of sharing. Nationally, we share the country’s defense. On the state and local levels, we share education. On the national, state, and local levels we share the creation and upkeep of roads, harbors, airports, and other infrastructure needed for transportation. We share the cost of police, prosecutors, and courts.
We share in these ways because we are inherently interdependent. Without education producing a literate population, we wouldn’t have the workers needed for general prosperity or the educated voters needed for democratic governance. Without police, prosecutors, and courts our lives and property wouldn’t be safe. Courts facilitate commerce by adjudicating financial disputes. Without transportation infrastructure we couldn’t get products to market, or from markets to end users. Collectively, we financed the development of computers and the Internet. In short, we are all part of joint ventures needed to maintain our way of life, so our fellow Americans exist for us on a concentric circle closer than people in other countries. That’s why our fellow Americans should get vaccines for Covid-19 before they are made available to people in other countries.
On the other hand, just because our obligations are fewer and weaker to people on more outlying concentric circles, such as those who live in other countries, it doesn’t follow that we have no obligations to them at all. The equal worth of all human beings gives us one reason to help people who, for no fault of their own, live in poor countries with inadequate healthcare.
A second reason is that we aren’t entirely innocent of abetting poverty in some other countries. Historically, some countries are poor because rich industrial countries, including our own, supported authoritarian regimes in those countries that gave our corporations access to cheap labor and materials. This kept those countries poor and caused some unemployment here, but most of us benefitted from low prices on consumer goods.
Finally, the virus is global. No one is safe until everyone is safe, because an unprotected population anywhere can harbor mutations of the virus that could evade the protections that the vaccines are designed to provide. We could mitigate this danger with some vaccine exports.
In sum, our government should prefer American access to Covid-19 vaccines, but the current policy forbidding all exports is not justified.
Comments