Are Vaccine Mandates a Matter of Conscience?

SoundEthics

SMU Associate Professor Alida Liberman, Ph.D., delivered the 2021 Maguire Public Scholar Lecture on Wednesday, November 17, 2021. Her lecture addresses whether exemptions to COVID-19 vaccine mandates (e.g., from an employer or university) should be accommodated as conscientious objections, understood as penalty-free exemptions to a law or policy based on moral or religious disagreement with the policy. Liberman develops a framework for assessing the legitimacy of conscientious objection claims by determining whether they violate the basic competencies needed to be a minimally decent member of a profession or community. In the case of vaccine mandates, these include epistemic competencies (such as avoiding relying on factual misunderstandings when making community-impacting decisions), relational competencies (such as avoiding free-riding and refraining from harming others in the exercise of your liberties), and normative competencies (which require having an accurate understanding of what you are responsible for and how your actions affect others). Liberman argues many vaccine refusals violate one or more of these competencies, and accordingly should not be permitted as a matter of conscientious objection.