Pragmatic Calculations
The Johnson & Johnson Rule.– For a vaccine that gives you a slightly lower chance of getting sick with what is in effect a bad flu virus, which could be dangerous if you have a serious underlying medical condition or are very old, you should be willing to risk a slightly higher chance of having a fatal stroke, which could occur without warning even if you are young and otherwise healthy.
Subtext: Your vaccination might prevent someone else from getting the virus (or it might not). Your blood clot, on the other hand, is your problem and yours alone. Therefore, for the good of the collective….
Democratic Party (elected and media wings) Rule.— The life of a black teenage girl who tries to murder another girl in a knife attack is worth more than the combined lives of the black teenage girl she would have murdered and the white police officer who used lethal force to save the almost-murdered girl. Every semi-rational human is defending that police officer against the Left’s insanity on this issue. I ask you, instead, to take a moment and ask yourself how you are supposed to feel today if you are the girl who was about to be stabbed to death at the moment that officer intervened. All the “Black Lives Matter” thugs and celebrity sympathizers out there bemoaning “police racism” and whitewashing the “young girl” who lost her life are actually telling that other girl, in no uncertain terms, that justice in this case would have meant allowing her to be stabbed to death.
Subtext: The overarching standard of any moral calculation about the relative value of lives must always be, “Whatever will promote the best optics for the further incitement of violent faction and fissure throughout a society, toward the ultimate imposition of progressive totalitarianism, is true.” This, by the way, is the deepest meaning and stripped-bare intention of the philosophy of pragmatism. “The truth is what works.” Good old John Dewey, the father of down-home American-style democratic communism, on the march yet again.
