Aristotelian Ethics: Is it appropriate to inject mRNA vaccines?

Copenhagen, you are missing the whole problem.

The problem is not the vaccine and the intervention in nature. That is actually good. (Are you about to argue that reading text from the pixels of a computer screen is unnatural and therefore bad? )

The problem is that one day someone might, in good faith (or maliciously) make a vaccine that will cause cancer or other problems in all those vaccinated after a few years.

Then we get into the question of risk versus benefit of all the options.

The problem stems from the fact that genetic code can be beneficial and can be harmful and can do nothing.
And the order of occurrence is that it usually does nothing, and then it usually does harm. Only if it is carefully designed can it be beneficial. And it is very easy to make a mistake.

To the Rabbi,

I did not notice a relevant disagreement in your words here with Aristotle (or the Aristotelian analysis). For the sake of this matter, it would not be a bad thing if we called it a “meta-description” and as you probably noted, this is not what will change the essence of the argument. The goal is to show that good is nothing more than the proper fulfillment of the essence and evil is a defect in the fulfillment of the essence in a way that shows how the definitions of good and evil regarding some human act such as injecting mRNA arise from this.

The point is not that “inserting some component into our protein structure” is a bad action (this is not necessarily a bad action if it improves the function of cells or, alternatively, destroys cancer cells), but what is bad is the very *suppression* of the natural activity of the cells by mRNA coils engineered to perform something else that we choose to inject into them. The problem with the contradiction to human essence is only in the sense that it goes against our rational nature to choose an act that reason perceives as evil in itself. What lies at the root of the problem in fact is that there is currently a normal functioning of cells and we are deliberately damaging it as a means to achieve another good (training the immune system), which is inconsistent with the principle of double effect. The difference with glasses is that they themselves improve the visual function of the eyes, and moreover do not create a bad effect in any sense (except perhaps some laziness of the eyes – a by-product allowed according to the principle of double effect).

It is not correct to say as you claimed that the system “does not properly produce the proteins we need to survive” since the injection attacks perfectly normal cells that were never intended to produce such inhuman proteins, and forces them to produce them. The fact that cells are not the essence of man does not diminish the problem: intentional suppression of other organs or systems such as the heart, lungs, reproduction, etc. are also wrong, since they are included in the hierarchical system of essences on which the essence of man is built, unless they are a by-product of some good effect in accordance with the aforementioned double effect clauses.

I did not understand exactly what the parallel is regarding the matter that here the danger is posed to all people, including the vaccinated. What is the practical implication for our case?

The last umpire,

Reading text from pixels is not unnatural in the relevant sense. The very act of reading does not impair or suppress anything in human nature as an intelligent being or in one of his body systems (it is clear that you did not bother to go through the entire argument).

I agree that this is also a problem - someone will eventually program a vaccine that will cause problems. There is no need for malice, since this seems quite obvious in light of the fact that the vaccine is inherently designed to disrupt the activity of the body's cells.

Reading from computer pixels (for the more strict, even by candlelight) damages the eyes. The natural radiation that comes from the sun and the light from which the eyes developed contains a wider spectrum of radiation that is partly healthy for the eyes. And this does not exist on computer screens or in candlelight.

And in general, for some reason you took upon yourself some kind of authority to determine what is natural and what is unnatural, what is good and what is bad. And this is just arbitrary and does not stem from any binding principle, but simply because you feel like it. And the proof of this is simple, if your words were true, it would be enough to write them in 2-6 lines.

Honorable the last arbiter,

Again you haven't bothered to go through the entire argument. To argue that reading from computer fiscals is immoral, you would have to prove that Section 4 of the principle cited above does not hold:

“The good of the good effect must outweigh the bad of the bad effect, and there is no other reasonable way to achieve the good effect.”

Regarding the so-called “taking authority”, it can be seen from the argument that the determination of whether something is good or bad is as objective as the facts and does not vary from person to person.

Copenhagen, I'm trying to put myself in your shoes and ask from there. Where does the idea that there is a problem with using things contrary to their essence come from? Is it the nature of wood to be carved and turned into paper on which to write a grocery list? The body's systems are just as inanimate as wood. Does this idea mean that a person is forbidden to pull out a tooth in order to stick it in a dam and thus save himself from death? It seems as if this discussion was conducted without reference to the unimportant factor of suffering and pleasure.

And because you won't be disgusted, I also add my poor opinion that anyone who doesn't throw the oil off the bridge is a filthy murderer (just like someone who pulls a gun on the street and kills four innocent bystanders). In addition, you wrote “The unique achievements that characterize a human being, as distinct from other creatures, stem from being an intelligent organism with free will” – What do you mean by linking these three boxes “having free will” to achievements?

I definitely disagree with Aristotle, as I think it's just a play on words. Your description of him (I don't know his own words) ignores the fact that you are supposed to draw something complete before you judge. He seems to be claiming that it is enough for you to understand the essence of things to determine whether something is good or bad, instead of the alternative that you draw something complete and compare it to. And I claim that it is just a play on words. Therefore, the definition that good is the fulfillment of the essence in its entirety is just words. It's like saying that good is to do good. And this is exactly the point why good is not a description. It's like the words of Chaim Perlman (a Belgian Jewish philosopher of law) who says that saying that you should do X because X is good is simply saying the same thing twice. And you have to pepper it.
I didn't understand why introducing some component into the proteins that the body creates is bad. Is suppressing the desire to speak slander bad? You can of course say that slander is not part of our essence, but this only reflects what I wrote above that you are playing with words. Instead of defining good and evil, you define good as essence and say that good should correspond to essence. As long as you have not independently defined the essence of the thing, you have said nothing. In the end, you essentially assume that the essence is good, and then define good through the essence.

Tolginus,
I will just comment that in my opinion you are ignoring the prohibition of committing an act of murder against a person, even to save others. You focus only on the consequential consideration. I have written more than once (mainly in my article on organ donation, and also a little on Siamese twins) about the importance of the consequential consideration, but it is certainly not exclusive.

Tolginus,

Nowhere is it claimed that there is a problem in principle with using things outside the human organism contrary to their essence. The moral obligation to act not contrary to human nature is an obligation imposed on man in relation to himself. As described above, only in the human creature does the question of the extent to which he will be good or bad also depend on him, and this is what generates the concept of moral obligation. Of course, this does not permit causing harm to inferior forms of life unnecessarily. But the principle does not impose a responsibility on man to act for the realization of the natural essence in non-human things. At least not in a direct and immediate way.

The possibility that a man could save himself from death by previously extracting a tooth is very, very remote. Usually a man will use his other organs in order to save himself in danger, even if they are greatly damaged as a result, which is initially permitted according to the principle of double effect. In any case, this is why I brought up the issue of the “offense for its own sake.” The fact that a person performs an operation to extract a tooth that is not damaged in order to use it later to save his life does not make the act of extracting the tooth a good act. The act remains equally bad (to a moderate or minor extent). But we say that he probably did what he should have done. The daughters of Zelophehad, who thought that without them there would be no continuation of humanity, did not perform a good act when they slept with their father. The act of incest was still morally wrong to the same extent. But (if the offense was truly “for its own sake”) that is what they had to do.

I think the exact opposite of what you say. Most people would be disgusted by the very thought and would disagree with you: Someone who throws an innocent person off a bridge in order to use him to stop a train that is on its way to kill 100 people is still a heinous murderer. You are probably a Consequentialist, which is a moral misconception that has caused most of the historical injustices, and the murder and death of hundreds of millions of innocent people in the twentieth century.

The achievements that man as a rational animal reaches are naturally bound up with his unique nature as a rational creature. This nature is related to free will, which is able to command the body to perform the best action recommended by reason.

From all your words, I understood that in order to understand you, one must first assume the following things that are not natural to human language:

“The essence of a thing”=what Copenhagen decides is its essence.
“Good”=what Copenhagen decides is good.
“Bad”=what Copenhagen decides is bad.

After assuming these implicit assumptions, one can understand what you write.

But that's not interesting.

Rabbi Michi,
What shall I do? In my opinion, the consequential consideration always dominates the hierarchy, and where it appears, there is nothing without it that would limit it. And in my eyes, only situations are important, not actions (and life has no value, only feelings). The truth is that I am not worthy enough to stand and grapple with such issues, and I also have nothing to say that is not trite and predictable, etc., but if there is one issue that makes my guts churn, it is deontology.

Copenhagen,
1. The distinction between flesh and blood over which human consciousness controls and trees in the forest over which human consciousness does not control is not clear to me. Perhaps you have a reference to someone who proposed this distinction?
2. I did not understand what you answered about the tooth. Of course, I chose this example and not sticking a finger in a dam or the like. If in the end it is permissible to pull out the tooth (to plug a dam or to give it as a ransom to thieves so that they won't beat my brother) then I no longer understand what is forbidden.
4. I don't know too much, but you are the first I see who links free will to (technological) achievements and I really don't understand (unlike many who agree) how you link them. If this is your innovation and you are willing to expand on it, please expand. And if there is anyone who has substantiated this claim, I would be happy if you could point me in the right direction (if there is one online, then that would be great).

To Rabbi,

Aristotle also believes that in the end you draw a finished abstract concept and compare the objects in the world to it. However, the finished complete something is an abstraction that the intellect grasps only after observing particular things in the world that demonstrate it, after which you know what the thing is by means of a universal intellectual concept, which is found both in the intellect as a concept and in the material thing perceived as its form. Intellectual abstraction is perceived as the pure universal concept, and by which we know whether and to what extent there are shortcomings in the way in which some object demonstrates the form to which it belongs, and therefore whether it is a good or bad expression of this essence.

I don't think this is just a play on words. The intellect grasps the essence of the thing after it grasps particular demonstrations of it. Let us examine, for example, a father who shows his home a young man who gives a flower to his beloved, a mother who worries that her child will cross the crosswalk safely, a child who gives up on another child, a father who blesses his son or kisses him on the forehead, etc. He calls all these acts, which are so different in terms of sensual perception, "love." The girl, of course, understands this. Moreover, she will know how to apply the concept to sensual situations that are completely different from what the father demonstrated to her. There is here a non-sensuous abstraction of something that is capable of expressing itself through the senses in countless different ways, and is therefore completely abstract. If we want to describe the abstraction in other terms, we can say that to love someone means to wish good for them - this is the abstraction, Aristotle would say.

The same goes for "good." You ask a child what is good and he answers: pizza is good, ice cream is good, friends are good, sports are good, understanding something that intrigues me is good, etc. These are all examples of “good” in relation to a child. The common denominator for all of them is intellectual abstraction, but this time not about sense data but about another essence, which is itself an intellectual abstraction. After all, all of these are good for the child as a human being, contributing to the realization of the potential that stems from his essence.

You are trying to argue that perhaps this is circular. However, in Aristotle, unlike Plato, the perception of essences is not a priori but a posteriori. The intellect does not have built-in definitions of essences, but only the potential for such definitions given a proper cognitive encounter with objects in the external world. Cognition first apprehends sensory objects, then the intellect strips them of their individual specific data and apprehends the general essence they exemplify. It is then able to apprehend to what extent they realize themselves, that is, their essence - whether an object is a good exemplification of the essence to which it belongs.

Tolginus,

I'm not talking about a prohibition in action. In my opinion, the option of pushing the fat man is not preferable either, in terms of consequences. The reason for this is that one consequence concerns him and the others concern others, and therefore there is no possibility of comparing results here. Even if I were not pushing the person but only deciding what will be done here, it is not clear that it is better to decide on one. For example, if that one (the fat man) himself is supposed to decide, do you think he must push himself? It seems to me simply not. But in a purely consequential consideration according to your interpretation, it seems that he does.
Of course, if you introduce emotions and give them weight, then the discussion is over.

Copenhagen, even if Aristotle says that knowing the idea from the thing is nonsense. How do you decide what the perfect variation is? One must inevitably reach Plato. And in particular, it is nonsense when he gives the idea moral weight, because there is a naturalistic fallacy here. He observes the thing and makes a generalization of it (this is a factual procedure), and now gives this generalization a value status (which must not be harmed or deviated from). And if you say that the generalization is value-based and not just factual, then you have brought in the Platonic idea through the back door.

For Rabbi,

The fact that there are no innate ideas, and that form is not actually realized in its entirety in perceived things, does not mean that the intellect is incapable of perceiving what form is that is not actually realized in its entirety in perceived things. For part of perceiving a thing is also perceiving the potential inherent in it, and potential is determined by essence. Potential is not nothingness – but a kind of being that resides in actual objects, and it is also an object of intellectual perception. The intellect itself is also not a smooth slate, but an immaterial organ that has the power to perceive the essence of things in the world.

As for the ”naturalistic fallacy”, an unbridgeable gap between “facts” and ”values” can only exist given a mechanistic-nominalistic understanding of nature of the kind taken for granted by some modern philosophers like Descartes and the neo-Kantians, who constructed a world devoid of any objective essence or natural ends. No such gap, and hence the 'failure' of drawing normative conclusions from 'purely factual' premises, can exist given an Aristotelian substantive and teleological conception of the world.

I am not aware of any theorist in the classical natural law tradition who attempted to 'derive' what is proper from what is. Morality begins with the first principles of practical reason, which are basic and underivable axioms. These principles are then used *along with an understanding of the nature of the matter at issue* (as was done briefly above in connection with the body cells that mRNA vaccines are designed to suppress) to reach moral conclusions.

In short, you have come back to the existence of ideas. Only you call them essences of things that lie in things or behind things. In reality, there is something here that you compare the thing to, and not that you extract it from the thing itself.

I am not inclined to believe in the existence of Platonic ideas, since it is not clear what is meant by "ideas" without an object that realizes them or a mind that perceives them. It is also not entirely clear what it means that the idea "participates" in the material object and when and how it happened that the baby learned to recognize them before birth.

For Aristotle, essence is an immaterial form that causes the actualization of the potential principle of a thing, only it cannot be seen sensuously but intellectually. When an object is perceived through the sensory cognitive system (“phantasm”), the data received are in principle contingent in terms of the essence of the object and are not sufficient on their own to provide insight into this, and therefore he assumed an “active intellect”, in which all forms exist in an actual manner, acting on the perception of the human passive intellect and bringing out in it the ability to perceive the form that characterizes the thing from potential to actual, like light that brings about the actualization of colors in objects. The forms exist there in the things themselves, only they are not seen at all without the illumination of the active intellect.

Regarding the question of whether intellectual illumination allows one to perceive both the pure form and its degree of demonstration – *Within the object* or just compare it to the pure form that is received in the mind (passive) following the action of the mind acting separately from the perceived object. It is possible to provide different answers (although the second option would create a Platonization in miniature of Aristotle). One tends to think that within the framework of an intellectual perception of the object, one also perceives to which universal (perfect) form it belongs, because the form in its entirety is indeed present in it - this is the essence of the thing, although not entirely in an actual way - and the perception of potential is an inseparable part of the full perception of an object.

I don't see how you escape the two rays of the dilemma: If there is something beyond the object itself and I observe it - that is Platonism. And if there is nothing except the object itself - then what do you see? Only the object, and therefore the perfect object you speak of is nothing but your invention, and has no ontic status.

What you *see* is only the object in terms of its being a visual object. Vision is inherently limited to sensory impressions that the object transmits to visual perception. It is not possible to *visually* see a universal immaterial essence. On the other hand, what is *perceived by the mind* is the essence of the object (the immaterial form). The essence is the form of the object itself – not something “beyond the object”.

As in Aristotle's parable of the light ( = the active mind) illuminating colors ( = essences): the colors exist in the object, but without the illumination of light they cannot be perceived.

It is clear that eyes can only see visual objects, but what does it mean to be “perceived in the mind”? Is there something out there that is “perceived”? Or is it an invention created by the mind within?

On the 12th of Adar 5771

A discussion of the medical aspects, benefits and concerns of the new vaccine can be found in the articles of Dr. Gil Yosef Shahar, ‘Corona Vaccine ‘ Part 1’: Can We Be Calm That It Is Really Safe?’; ‘Corona Vaccine ‘ Part 2’: Comprehensive Information Analysis Regarding the Vaccine’ (on the ‘Rambam Medical Center’ website ‘Health, Nature, Science’). In Dr. Shahar's articles, and in the articles linked to it – The reader will find a variety of arguments and methods, for and against and in the middle. This may help the undecided to do some homework before consulting a professional.

Best regards, Yaron Fishel Ordner (the twice-vaccinated one 🙂

To the Rabbi,

I came across several articles by a researcher named Daniel Povinelli at the time. I don't know how aware he is of the matter, but in my opinion his experiments prove that the cognitive difference between chimpanzees and other animals and humans is delimited according to the Aristotelian definition of intellectual form perception. You can see a glimpse of the matter in the short video here:

For a ”discussion of the practical aspects”,

I read the article you suggested and it is interesting that it uses Aristotelian functionalist reasoning, for example:

“The answer is that when there is a foreign protein in the bloodstream, the cells that will assimilate it into their envelope are the cells of the immune system, which is their defined role: presenting foreign proteins to the cells that produce antibodies.
The cells that produce antibodies know that it is “our powers” And they don't produce antibodies against all the proteins of the presenting cell, but only against the foreign protein that is presented to them.

And in a few other places

But to the same extent, the difference can be interpreted as the ability to observe ideas. I find it very hard to believe that it is possible to decide between Plato and Aristotle with empirical tools.