Anti-vaxxers
If you personally believe that it is the correct moral choice to elect[1] not to have the people you are responsible for vaccinated, this post will not make you very happy. I'm being a lot more charitable to you than most are, but I still end up being condescending and rude. I'm sorry -- I'd like to have a civil conversation sometime to try and change your mind without resorting to condescension -- but this article wasn't written for you; it was written about you, for people who already agree with me.
If you personally believe that electing to have the people you are responsible for (including yourself) vaccinated is the right thing to do, welcome! We agree on this point! If you think I'm writing an apologia excusing the anti-vax movement, I promise you that that's not my intention.
Ross Douthat (no relation) has a great piece in the New York Times yesterday, profiling (and stereotyping, yes) the three kinds of anti-vaxxers you meet (if, y'know, you're the sort of person who meets lots of anti-vaxxers):
So the philosophical issues are tangled: Just as the anti-vaxx idea cuts across the partisan divide, so do the reasons for its flourishing cut across ideological visions of how best to organize society, how people should relate to the local, the national, the corporate, what kinds of dissent are healthy and what forms we should prefer dissent to take. This is good news, in a way, because (to return to where I began) it makes the issue very unlikely to ever polarize along partisan lines. But it also makes it a hard phenomenon to wrestle into submission, because however misguided it’s