Not Buying It: Opting out, Vaccination and Morality

The paper starts with describing the problem of “naive” or “freshman” relativism that is typically encountered by ethics teachers in introductory ethics classes. I then go on to show that this well-known problem, described and thoroughly analysed by several authors, might have obscured the emergence of a new and different problem – opting out – and that this has become particularly obvious during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on authors such as Albert O. Hirschman, Wendy Brown and especially Bonnie Honig, I go on to argue that this new phenomenon is best thought of as a symptom of neoliberal rationality “colonizing” the domain of morality. I further suggest that we should view morality as what Bonnie Honig defines as a public thing, and I briefly consider some implications of this proposal. Finally, I suggest some possible ways of dealing with the problem of opting out of morality.