An excellent representation of why ‘utilitarian ethics’ is wrong. Source: https://news.1rj.ru/str/jamiemcintyre/4965

My email to Senator Rennick, dated 23 NOV 2021.

Dear Senator,

I am a philosopher of ethics with my current research-focus on vaccine mandates. I have recently published an academic paper on this topic: https://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2021/02/25/medethics-2020-107026.

I have contacted several regulatory agencies (SIRA, Australian Government Department of Health, Mr Gavrielatos at SafeWork NSW, Australian Medical Association, and today Safe Work Australia) with some basic, ethically and legally relevant questions about a possible conflict between Covid-19 vaccine mandates and workplace safety. I have received only generic responses; not one agency or person contacted has explicitly answered my two questions, which were formulated as follows:

1. Do you acknowledge that Covid vaccination occasionally causes death of healthy people, even if the overall outcome benefits most people?

2. If yes, do you acknowledge that when an employee is required to receive Covid vaccination as a condition of employment, that employee is in effect required to participate in an activity where some percentage of employees are expected to die as a result of their mandatory participation?

I find it extremely concerning that the agencies responsible for workplace safety and health of Australian people are tacitly refusing to answer such fundamental and legally critical questions about workplace safety. Would you be willing to apply some pressure to get these questions explicitly addressed by the Commonwealth government?

Can you assist in this matter?



I also want to take this opportunity to share with you a summary of the key ethical issues associated with vaccine mandates in general.

1. Vaccine mandates imply that all humans are born in a defective, inherently harmful state that must be biotechnologically augmented to allow their unrestricted participation in society, and this constitutes discrimination on the basis of healthy, innate characteristics of the human race.

2. Covid vaccines are known to occasionally cause deaths of healthy people. When an employee is required to receive Covid vaccination as a condition of employment, that employee is being economically coerced to participate in an activity where some percentage of employees are expected to die ‘in the course of employment’ as a direct result of their mandatory participation. This goes against the fundamental principles of medical ethics and workplace safety. It may be objected that Covid-19 also kills people, but these two categories of deaths are not ethically equivalent. Infection with SARS-CoV-2 is not mandated, whereas deaths resulting from mandatory vaccination are mandated deaths, a legalised killing of some people for the alleged benefit of the majority.

3. Medical consent must be free - not coerced - in order to be valid. Any discrimination against the unvaccinated is economic or social opportunity coercion, precluding the possibility of a valid medical consent. The right to free, uncoerced medical consent is not negotiable, because without it we have no rights at all; every other right can be subverted by medical coercion.

I also object to the assertion made by several state premiers and other politicians that the people who are discriminated against are “unvaccinated by choice”. Apart from the fact that social and economic opportunity coercion removes our free choice in this matter, being unvaccinated is fundamentally not a choice; we were born that way. The premise of being “unvaccinated by choice” is as absurd as “having two hands by choice”. The right to preserve our innate characteristics without being discriminated against is paramount.

Regards,

Michael Kowalik

My Letter to Senator Malcolm Roberts (04.08.2022)

Dear Senator Roberts,

I am a philosopher of ethics and the leading voice in the academic debate questioning the ethical permissibility of vaccine mandates. I recently published a paper on this topic in the BMJ Journal of Medical Ethics: https://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2021/02/25/medethics-2020-107026.

I have contacted several regulatory agencies (SIRA, Australian Government Department of Health, Mr Gavrielatos at Safe Work NSW, Australian Medical Association, and Safe Work Australia) with questions relating to a possible conflict between Covid-19 vaccine mandates and workplace safety. I have received only generic responses; not one agency or person contacted has explicitly answered my two questions, which were formulated as follows:

1. Do you acknowledge that Covid vaccination occasionally causes death of healthy people, even if the overall outcome benefits most people?

2. If yes, do you acknowledge that when an employee is required to receive Covid vaccination as a condition of employment, that employee is in effect required to participate in an activity where some percentage of employees are expected to die as a result of their mandatory participation?

Would you be willing to present these questions during the parliamentary debate or via a suitable committee to the Commonwealth health minister?

If the minister would answer YES to point 1 (an officially acknowledged fact), then YES to point 2 necessarily follows, and this implies an acknowledgment that by mandating vaccination the minister ‘intends to violate the right to life of some people in the course of employment’.

In case the minister objected that Covid-19 also kills people (therefore the mandates are necessary to ‘save lives’), the logical response would be that these two categories of deaths are not legally and ethically equivalent. Infection with a pathogen for which there exists a vaccine is not mandated, whereas deaths resulting from mandatory vaccination are mandated deaths, a legalised killing of some people for the prospective benefit of the majority. The latter category amounts to a violation of the right to life, because a small percentage of the targeted population are expected to die as a direct result of this coercive treatment.

The above questions are intended as a strategy of political persuasion, by publicly identifying, in uncontroversial terms, the intent to violate the right to life and the associated liability.

Best wishes,

Michael Kowalik

If you want this👆to be actioned, feel free to send Malcolm Roberts (and Gerard Rennick) a message that you support my proposal. Let us make a group effort for once and see whether it will yield a meaningful outcome.

Despite several MPs like Craig Kelly, Malcolm Roberts, Gerard Rennick, Alex Antic making dissenting speeches in parliament, nothing has changed. All state governments still have emergency powers at their disposal (martial law on demand, unlimited term) and vaccine mandates (both government and privately imposed) are still enforced. Evidently, it is not enough to take the high moral ground but one must say exactly the right things to get the desired legal and political outcomes. This has not happened yet. Their utilitarian, piecemeal strategy has failed. Even if it will eventually succeed for Covid there will be new ‘plagues’ and new vaccines to deal with, and then all the current effort will be worth exactly nothing. The only way to win is to fight on the basis of fundamental principles.

If there is demand for anxiety-validating narratives, someone will provide this product.

My follow up email to senator Antic (05.08.2022)
alex @ alexantic . com . au

Subject: Vaccine mandates violate the right to life

Dear Senator Antic,

I am a philosopher of ethics and the leading voice in the academic debate questioning the ethical permissibility of vaccine mandates. I recently published a paper on this topic in the BMJ Journal of Medical Ethics.

I have contacted several regulatory agencies (SIRA, Australian Government Department of Health, Mr Gavrielatos at Safe Work NSW, Australian Medical Association, and Safe Work Australia) with two questions relating to a possible conflict between Covid-19 vaccine mandates and workplace safety. I have received only generic responses; not one agency or person contacted has explicitly answered my two questions, which were formulated as follows:

1. Do you acknowledge that Covid vaccination occasionally causes death of healthy people, even if the overall outcome benefits most people?

2. If yes, do you acknowledge that when an employee is required to receive Covid vaccination as a condition of employment, that employee is in effect required to participate in an activity where some percentage of employees are expected to die as a result of their mandatory participation?

Would you be willing to present these questions during the parliamentary debate or via a suitable committee to the Commonwealth health minister?

If the minister would answer YES to point 1 (an officially acknowledged fact), then YES to point 2 necessarily follows, and this implies an acknowledgment that by mandating vaccination the minister ‘intends to violate the right to life of some people in the course of employment’.

If the minister would object that Covid-19 also kills people, the logical response would be that these two categories of deaths are not legally and ethically equivalent. Infection with a pathogen for which there exists a vaccine is not mandated, whereas deaths resulting from mandatory vaccination are mandated deaths, a legalised killing of some people for the prospective benefit of the majority. The latter category amounts to a violation of the right to life, because a small percentage of the targeted population are expected to die as a direct result of this coercive treatment.

The above questions are intended as a strategy of political persuasion, by publicly identifying, in uncontroversial terms, the intent to violate the right to life and to cause the government to reflect on the associated liability.

Best wishes,

Michael Kowalik

Letter to Dr William Bay (08.08.2022)
qldpeoplesprotest @ gmail . com

Subject: Anti-Mandate Protest - Ethical Defence

Dear Dr Bay,

I am a philosopher/ethicist and the leading voice in the academic debate against the ethical permissibility of vaccine mandates. I recently published a paper on this topic in the BMJ Journal of Medical Ethics.

I am aware of your situation and may be able to assist you in strengthening your defence strategy in the confrontation with AHPRA, by furnishing some powerful ethical objections to vaccine mandates. While some of your empirical claims may be strongly contested by AHPRA (on the basis of the opinion of ‘experts’), fundamental ethical arguments are not vulnerable to disagreements about empirical facts.

Summary of the three strongest arguments against the ethical permissibility of vaccine mandates and why any medical procedure imposed by coercion must be refused.

1. Vaccine mandates imply that all humans are born in a defective, inherently harmful state that must be biotechnologically augmented to allow their unrestricted participation in society, and this constitutes discrimination on the basis of healthy, innate characteristics of the human race. By refusing to acquiesce to vaccine mandates we take an ethical stance against discrimination on the basis of innate characteristics of the human race. (This point derives from my paper published here: https://jme.bmj.com/content/48/4/240).

2. Medical consent must be free – not coerced – in order to be valid. Any discrimination against the unvaccinated is economic or social opportunity coercion, precluding the possibility of valid medical consent. The right to free, uncoerced medical consent is not negotiable, under any circumstances, because without it we have no rights at all; every other right can be subverted by medical coercion. Crucially, by accepting any mandated medical treatment imposed by coercion we would be acquiescing to the taking away of the right to free medical consent not just from ourselves but from our children and from future generations, and we do not have the right to do this. Acquiescence to medical coercion is always unethical, even if the mandated intervention were a placebo.

3. Vaccines are known to occasionally cause deaths of healthy people. When an employee is required to receive vaccination as a condition of employment, that employee is economically coerced to participate in an activity where some percentage of employees are expected to die ‘in the course of employment’ as a direct result of the mandated activity. This goes against the fundamental principles of medical ethics and workplace safety. It may be objected that infectious pathogens also kill people, but these two categories of deaths are not ethically equivalent. Infection with a pathogen for which there exists a vaccine is not mandated, whereas deaths resulting from mandatory vaccination are mandated deaths, a legalised killing of some people for the prospective benefit of the majority. Critically, any discrimination against the unvaccinated (or a privileged treatment of the vaccinated) amounts to a violation of the right to life, because a small percentage of the targeted population are expected to die as a result of this coercive treatment. By refusing to accept mandated vaccines we take an ethical stance in defence of the right to life.

An earlier version of these arguments were formally submitted to the Inquiry into Public Health Amendment Bill 2021 (No 2) ACT and subsequently published here: https://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2022/04/26/medethics-2022-108229.responses#fundamental-values-are-not-defeated-by-utilitarian-calculus

If you think this would be helpful to your case, I am happy to assist.

Best wishes,

Michael Kowalik
Academic: https://philpeople.org/profiles/michael-kowalik
My Telegram channel: https://news.1rj.ru/str/NormalParty

Good news. The office of Senator Antic has responded that he “may be able to raise these questions at the next Senate Estimates hearing”. See here for the details: https://news.1rj.ru/str/NormalParty/1747

The Vaccine Lottery

Vaccine mandates are like coercing people to participate in a lottery, where some innocent individuals are expected to die on the basis of bad luck (arbitrary selection) for the benefit of others.

There is evidence that a percentage of people died from Covid vaccines. This fact is officially accepted, therefore any further mandating of the vaccines amounts to mandating a number of deaths. There is incriminating knowledge among the legislators that the ‘mechanism’ of the mandate causes deaths.

When the killing of some innocent people is mandated for the benefit of the majority, because individual lives do not have absolute value vis-a-vis the interest of others, then the lives of the majority also do not have absolute value vis-a-vis the interest of the innocent people in question, who therefore have an equal right to kill the majority for their own benefit, but this is absurd. An absurd law is not law but nonsense; it dictates nothing. (Longer version: https://michaelkowalik.substack.com/p/the-vaccine-lottery)

Your "lottery" point is weighty. It hadn't before occurred to me. It's weighty in a legal sense. If it is, and can be known, by positive evidence, that x number of non-consensual vaccinees (a number produced by reference to a statistically-significant population cohort), are statistically likely to die or suffer "grievous" harm as a result of mandated "vaccination", then an authority which mandates such "vaccination" is knowingly reckless as to whether any particular non-consenting person will or won't die or be severely harmed. A policy which mandates such an act irrespective of such known scope for recklessness is arguably "arbitrary and capricious", and thus legally vitiated.

By reducing humans from rational agents, whose capacity to bestow worth on things and actions by virtue of rationally choosing them is the source of all value, to the status of beneficiaries of interests dictated by others, without regard for the individual being the source of the value of those interests, the entire edifice of utilitarian ethics commits to a contradiction. It negates the normative source of its own value judgement, and is therefore a priori false. Without absolute values there is no objective measure of benefits and costs, therefore no rational basis for the judgement of proportionality. https://news.1rj.ru/str/NormalParty/1717

I have started a free Newsletter on Substack: https://michaelkowalik.substack.com

The Face of Society

Modern political systems, in particular democracy and socialism, are based on the premise that all humans within the systemic jurisdiction are qualitatively the same, value the same fundamental things and have the same fundamental needs. The problem with this assumption is that individuals can disagree about what values and needs are fundamental. While we are all limited by qualitatively the same physical needs, we generally do not derive meaning from the satisfaction of those needs. Unlike the animal world, the needs and values that sustain the society are always qualitatively different from the existential minimum. For example, an individual who values safety above all else (apart from the bare existential needs) may forgo all creative freedom for the sake of safety, but the order of preferences may be opposite for another individual, who is willing to forgo all guarantees of safety for the sake of creative freedom. Disagreements about preferences and values are inescapable even in groups centred on the same ideology, which ultimately result in a schism. We must therefore understand society as something non-homogenous in the socially-relevant qualities. The only qualitatively universal property in any society is the capacity for rational thought, for making sense and communicating this sense to others, which in turn generates common meaning. This and this alone is the basis of society, the glue that holds us together. Any political system or government that limits the freedom to communicate and therefore the capacity to generate meaning, is on the path of self-destruction.

In addition to verbal and written communication, facial expression is the most intuitive mode of meaning-exchange. It allows for mutual recognition as sensible beings and making sense of one another as one-who-is-alike, which is in turn the phenomenological foundation of moral equivalence. Without this equivalence all the higher, more abstract modes of communication lose their sense, their justification, because there is no one ‘like-me’ left to talk to. This kind of silencing, of defacement - the censorship of facial expression, is therefore the most inhuman and destructive. https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3840787

A simple, intuitively appealing ethical argument is terrifying to the deceivers because they cannot dismiss it as ‘fake news’.

Mass media love when people make claims about medical facts. They can just call in the ‘experts’ to ‘debunk’ your claims, or just call it ‘fake news’. The general public only needs reassurance to continue believing the experts, they don't care about evidence. On the other hand, a simple, intuitively appealing ethical argument is terrifying to the experts because they cannot dismiss it as ‘fake news’. Ethics is not a question of empirical facts but something we all already know, it is part of the collective unconscious, which cannot be deceived.

What kind of disinformation is a problem

National governments and the mass media assert, without argument, that online misinformation and disinformation by citizens is a ‘problem’ that ought to be fixed. I do not think it is a problem; little people always believed a lot of nonsense, and they still do, but they do not have sufficient control over the flow of information to have a meaningful propaganda effect, not unless WEF and our governments want to promote a specific, false point of view for propaganda purposes. On the other hand, governments and their media outlets have an effective monopoly on the flow of information, so the only misinformation and disinformation that troubles me is when it comes from these ‘authoritative’ sources, from government ‘experts’ and the mass media. The only disinformation that is ever a problem is state propaganda, which includes the idea that little people speaking nonsense requires state censorship.

I have substantially re-written my article on face masks to integrate some new ideas. https://michaelkowalik.substack.com/p/the-face-of-humanity