It's hard to overstate the importance of common sense. Educated, sophisticated people are particularly vulnerable to losing it. When education goes in one ear, common sense can leak out the other, leading wiseacre attempts to obscure the forest of wisdom. Users of Waze should lift their eyes to see whether the app is really leading them to their destination. It's all a question of balance and proportion. Privacy is an important value and discrimination can put human liberty at risk, but without justified limits to privacy and closely-monitored justified discrimination – there is neither life nor civilization. Elected officials should be put in charge of that critical balance. Legal scholars can help them and serve as warning lights, but they must not be allowed to take the wheel.
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Through its representatives, the public can decide to instate a major attack on privacy to battle a serious threat. At the airport, we're all willing to have our bags and even our bodies searched, as well as our medicines, our documents, and our selection of destinations, because the alternative is true and present danger. Nearly all of us give up privacy in most aspects of our day-to-day lives for a much less dramatic purpose: convenience. Anyone who uses a smartphone should know that all their personal information is accessible to anyone willing to make a bit of effort. Even if their democratic government has no interest in cracking it, crime organizations, China, or Russia might. It is a possibility, and nothing to hold it back. Through the device and its Internet history, effectively anyone can know what we've done, whom we've spoken to, where we were, what interests us, and often what we think and whom we like or hate. We opened the door to all this.
But those who trade in human rights see "legal difficulties" in exposing one piece of information that is so intimate, so sensitive, which would expose us to such a critical blow that it is worth keeping private from the local authorities in which we live: whether or not we have been vaccinated for COVID. From atop this slippery slope, our municipalities could contact us. And possibly, heaven forbid, we might be tempted to get vaccinated – saving our lives and the health of our children and our friends and putting the health of the public at less risk.
And another fake threat to human dignity and freedom: Discrimination. Anyone who takes the trouble to think about it and can withstand the Pavlovian temptation of cloying self-righteousness will quickly conclude that a sweeping rejection of any discrimination is no less dangerous than policies that enable serial discrimination. A cultured society cannot exist without discrimination. A society like this not only discriminates against criminals by revoking their freedom, it also discriminates against the blind by not issuing them drivers licenses; against children by not allowing them to vote; on behalf of the disabled and elderly in allocating them special seats on the bus; against the most gifted in one context and those of limited cognitive abilities in another.
To anyone who takes the trouble to think about it, it's obvious that discrimination is necessary, and the public discourse (not necessarily the legal one) should decide based on values what discrimination is justified in a given set of circumstances. For the sake of an effective debate, one landmine must be neutralized: the purist manipulation of the "slippery slope" argument, which assumes that anyone who kill cockroaches today will tomorrow be building gallows, concentration camps, and crematoria. Anyone who allows the purists, through legal or other excuses, to lead the discussion will get morally twisted decisions that will infuriate the public and ensure that supporters of unacceptable discrimination rise to power.
It is permissible and worthy to discriminate against those who refuse to be vaccinated on any grounds other than medical ones when it comes to their contact with others, including entering certain areas, boarding flights, and even working in professions such as teaching. The same goes for offering bonuses to those who protect their health and that of those around them. It is simply immoral to allow vaccine refusers to endanger others by their whim. Finally, horrifically, we have the great taboo: vaccine coercion, which would put something into the bodies of the refusers against their will. Israel has mandatory conscription. We send our beloved children to defend us all, despite the risk that a 5.56 mm projectile will be forced through their bodies. When the enemy, whether its Hezbollah or coronavirus, threatens our lives, anyone who is too sensitive, who avoids the battle, is living at others' expense.
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