Jessica Flanigan

Vaccine refusal harms and risks harming innocent bystanders. People are not entitled to harm innocents or to impose deadly risks on others, so in these cases there is nothing to be said for the right to refuse vaccination. Compulsory vaccination is therefore justified because non-vaccination can rightly be prohibited, just as other kinds of harmful and risky conduct are rightly prohibited. I develop an analogy to random gunfire to illustrate this point. Vaccine refusal, I argue, is morally similar to firing a weapon into the air and endangering innocent bystanders. By re-framing vaccine refusal as harmful and reckless conduct my aim is to shift the focus of the vaccine debate from non-vaccinators’ religious and refusal rights to everyone else’s rights against being infected with contagious illnesses. Religious freedom and rights of informed consent do not entitle non-vaccinators to harm innocent bystanders, and so coercive vaccination requirements are permissible for the sake of the potential victims of the anti-vaccine movement

In this essay, I argue that prescription drug laws violate patients' rights to self-medication. Patients have rights to self-medication for the same reasons they have rights to refuse medical treatment according to the doctrine of informed consent (DIC). Since we should accept the DIC, we ought to reject paternalistic prohibitions of prescription drugs and respect the right of self-medication. In section 1, I frame the puzzle of self-medication; why don't the same considerations that tell in favour of informed consent also justify a right of self-medication? In section 2, I show that the prescription drug system was historically motivated by paternalism. In section 3, I outline the justifications for the DIC in more detail. I show that consequentialist, epistemic, and deontic considerations justify the DIC. In sections 4–6, I argue that these considerations also justify rights of self-medication. I then propose that rights of self-medication require non-prohibitive prescription policies in section 7. I consider two objections in sections 8 and 9: that patients ought not to make medically risky or deadly decisions, and that unrestricted access to prescription-grade pharmaceuticals would result in widespread misuse and abuse. Section 10 concludes