Jab Morality: Finding Virtue in Unprecedented Times
Having a heart attack usually isn’t on anyone’s to-do list, but if you’re going to have one, already being on a hospital bed is probably the best time for it to happen. Dad, feeling unwell, drove himself home from work. My parent’s house is a thirty-second drive from the local hospital in Hawera, a small town in Taranaki. The proximity of medical professionals and my dad’s conservative attitude towards his health made getting checked in a pretty easy decision. Thirty minutes later, while getting his vitals assessed, dad felt a shooting pain down his left arm. He told the nurse. “Looks like you’re having a heart attack,” the nurse replied as she rushed to get help. They stabilised his vitals before flying him to Hamilton airport.
Four years and one triple bypass surgery later, Dad is relatively healthy. One thing he’ll have to live with is angina, a symptom of coronary heart disease, which restricts blood flow into the heart. And in the COVID climate, this is something I think about more than I’d like to admit. With Aotearoa and the world opening up and COVID going on a summer roadie with the rest of New Zealand, it may visit my dad. Fortunately, he’s vaccinated, and so is the rest of my family, but there’s always a risk.
I was largely indifferent about the jab. Understanding the science, I knew the probability of COVID affecting me, a healthy and active 26-year-old, was minimal. I knew the vaccine decreased that probability further, with a minuscule probability of the vaccine itself affecting me negatively. It wasn’t about me. It’s about protecting those who are more susceptible to the effects of COVID and those who, for medical reasons, can’t take the vaccine. But when I saw COVID anti-vaxxers—in all their forms beyond the extremists on social media—I automatically assumed stupidity and moral deficiency. If they don’t understand the science, why don’t they trust the people who do? And if they do understand the science, why are they not willing to protect others?
“Fuck the unvaccinated!” I told a friend, feeling justified with moral outrage and hate towards the un-jabbed. “They are putting my dad at risk,” I continued. “Why are they so selfish? Why can’t they do the right thing?” My moral imperative is to protect my family and others who are more susceptible to the effects of COVID. But the longer I thought about my moral values, the more I wondered where they came from; how did I come to decide what was right and wrong—good and evil? Did humanity have a kumbaya moment where we scriptured the sacred morality for all?
The historian Thomas Dixon said, “Religions certainly do provide a framework within which people can learn the difference between right and wrong.” Want to go to heaven and stay out of hell? Easy! Do the right things. What are the right things, you ask? And plonk, a book big enough to injure a baby with the right and wrong ways to be, bestowed upon us by God, Allah, the universe, whatever you want to call your ostensibly omnipotent higher power. There are also over ten thousand different religions, including Jedissm, which is based on Star Wars. Assuming each religion has different moral hierarchies—with some based on men flying spaceships and wielding laser swords—suggests that I won’t find the moral value system for all people there.
Fredrick Nietzsche, the 19th-century philosopher, pursued the origins of morals in his magnum opus: On The Genealogy of Morality. His pursuit preceded the birth of religion. He claimed that the virtues of society before religion were not predetermined scriptures. Instead, they were the by-product of the social class one belonged to. For example, the warrior types valued courage and bravery. The poor valued generosity and humility. The powerful valued power and riches. Each social class valued virtues that supported their way of living. And due to the hierarchical nature of social classes, especially predating religion, the oppressed who couldn’t do much about their oppression adopted virtues to justify it. Self-sacrifice for one another, being grateful for what one has, and not wanting more because, well, they couldn’t have more anyway.
One’s moral virtuousness depended on their social class. For the powerful and rich, the more assertive one could be with their power, the more virtuous they were. If the powerful showed humility and generosity, virtues of the oppressed, they wouldn’t be seen as virtuous people among the rich and powerful. That’s just what you did, assuming you wanted to stay rich. Virtues had no absolute moral value within themselves—it wasn’t right or wrong to want power and riches. Virtues were relative to the class they belonged to. Over time, however, the oppressed came to hate the oppressors and their virtues because they only served their higher social class. The rich basically told the oppressed “Don’t hate the player, hate the game.”
The oppressed responded with “Alright, we’ll change the game.” Fuelled by bitterness for their oppressors, the oppressed did the only thing they could do; they morphed a categorical segregation of virtues—a new moral concept was born: good and evil. With the help of the emerging Judeo-Christian religion, all the virtues the powerful embodied that undermined the wellbeing and needs of others for their own gain was now viewed as evil. And the virtues of the oppressed became the gold standard of goodness. Welcome to the new binary order of morality.
For Nietzsche, the evolution of morality was similar to Darwin’s theory of natural selection in that our physical traits that survived were the ones that could best adapt to the environment. Similarly, the moral virtues that were deemed as good were the ones that helped the oppressed give meaning to their oppression and help them survive it. And since the oppressed far outnumbered the oppressors, their virtues were more likely to survive as good.
Now we have seemingly found objectivity for morality through a pseudo chef’s blend of different religious ideologies underneath a mix of diverse cultures stirred in a wok called Earth. When psychologists studied the development and justification of morals in children across different cultures, they found that children will state the facts of what is right or wrong, instead of the rule. For example, five-year-old Sally told her friend Sarah that Dave stole, without saying that Dave should not have stolen. Even children as young as five understand the binary model of morality and assume they share a universal morality with their peers. Combining this with most humans cementing how they think and feel about morality from adolescents and into adulthood shows you that people’s minds rarely change.
Born a Muslim, I was regularly reminded of the right and wrong ways to live and, subsequently, believed morality was impartial for most of my life. Help thy brother, don’t harm thy brother, give to charity, don’t lie and other moral virtues. But when my New Zealand residency lay on the foundation of lies—when comparing the privileged life I’ve lived through my binary lens of morality relative to those who couldn’t get their residency on truthful grounds—I became the face of guilt.
Avoiding the internal conflict of realising the ambiguity of morality, I blinded myself to the central ambiguity of being human. In her seminal book, The Ethics of Ambiguity, Simone De Beauvoir said, “Man must not attempt to dispel the ambiguity of his being but, on the contrary, accept the task of realising it.” This includes the ambiguity of morality, “To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.”
The pandemic reminded everyone about the challenge of living with ambiguity. Will I keep my business, or will I go bankrupt? Will schools open, or will I end up in an asylum trying to work and parent simultaneously? Will the virus stay within a cluster, or will it spread and reach my grandmother, who lives in a neighbouring suburb? Ambiguity forced me to think critically and compassionately, be undecided, consider multiple perspectives, and sit on the proverbial fence long enough that my butt felt numb.
Perched on the proverbial fence—with a cushion this time—I thought about Nietzsche’s conclusion on the subjective nature of morality, based on its origins. I questioned whether I have grounds to judge those whose moral decisions are based on disinformation. Or whether I can judge those who weren’t fortunate enough to receive the education I did, allowing me to understand and trust in the scientific method to discover the truth. Reflecting on my past low socioeconomic life, I feel empathy towards those in lower-classes who don’t trust the government that seemingly failed to support them while throwing millions at corporations—understanding their frustrated defiance against mandates. And I can’t convincingly judge those who are still unsure but will converge into their group’s consensus because the fear of social rejection is stronger than the fear of the virus. Not to mention the compassion towards those who felt immense psychological and financial suffering because of lockdowns—pleading for them to end. In a way, my belief in the vaccine is a by-product of luck. The luck of having parents who value education. The luck of receiving a sound education. The luck of being surrounded by people who also believe in the vaccine, instead of the many conspiracies, some of which have seeped into the intelligent and educated.
Even if someone understands the dangers of COVID, protecting others from a virus may still be low on their moral hierarchy of values. Despite the assholery of their hierarchy, is it actually objectively evil? Just because I want to protect my dad and others like him doesn’t make protecting others a universal moral value. It’d be cool if it were, though. But I can’t hate or judge someone just because they choose not to. Well, I can, and sometimes still do. But then I’m the asshole for not letting someone choose their moral values, instead of imposing mine onto them.
I feel paralyzed at times thinking about the worst-case scenario— “what if dad gets it and gets really sick?” Still, I no longer hate those who choose to remain unvaccinated or believe in a COVID conspiracy. Their moral decisions—even if held up by weak reasons—are theirs. And paradoxically, it’s through respecting their moral values and trying to understand their perspective that I have a chance at changing their mind and protecting my dad.
Works Cited
De Beauvoir, S. (1962). The ethics of ambiguity, tr. Citadel Press.
Dixon, T. (2008). Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 115.
Mammen, M., Köymen, B., & Tomasello, M. (2018). The reasons young children give to peers when explaining their judgments of moral and conventional rules. Developmental Psychology, 54(2), 254–262.
Nietzsche, F., Clark, M., & Swensen, A. J. (1998). On the genealogy of morality. Hackett Publishing.
