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Krista T's avatar

I’ve now read Yascha’s piece on this, Nate Silver’s and Zayep’s. And the comments below.

I think there are reasonable ethical arguments why essential workers and healthcare workers should be prioritized and given vaccine earlier. I definitely think the Stanford residents have a point for example- they are taking on risk, have very little agency (much less than nurses for example), and make much less money/compensation (than nurses and attending physicians)—- but they do skew much younger than these other cohorts. Essential workers are similar. It’s like having a VA system-“to care for him who shall have borne the battle.”

What disturbs me is this conflation of “equity” among groups defined by skin color and historic grievances, and ethics. It seems reasonable enough to say we have an obligation to “reward the worker fior their toil,” but if motives here are “reparations through vaccination” than that has all of the ethical issues of reparations and has no place here.

All of this shows the dangers of what I hope will soon be called “late wokeness.” Intersectionality, critical theory, and the like are useful frameworks for examining how historic power imbalances among groups have influenced a situation; however, it’s not robust enough to be the only or the defining framework for any analysis. They are one side of a triangle and used alone it’s a becoming dagger into the heart of our civilization.

If our aim isn’t for a colorblind society, for a truly multicultural society, then what are we aiming for? If we no longer dream for a day when people are judged not by the color of their skin but the content of their characters, we have to replace it with something, and replacing it with “no wait let’s use the color of skin as a surrogate for who has been victimized the most” seems to me to only lead right back to hate, division, inequity, and despair. Despair most assuredly as in a world where the loudest victim wins, everyone will feel a pull to become a “victim” and for every interaction to escalate into a fight.

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walter frank's avatar

I agree with a number of the criticisms offered respecting Yascha's article but I think it's worth pausing for a moment to recognize the thanks we all owe him as founder of Persuasion. The comments made in their totality comprise precisely the kind of civilized debate that Persuasion aims at. I could not be more grateful to him.

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