I thought it was fairly obvious that preventative measures can be ordinary means, but Daniel O’Connor tried to make the argument online to the contrary. This will include all his original post, and some back and forth. I’ll cover my […]
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A Stronger Moral Obligation to Vaccinate (National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly)
Back in December, I published a summary of an academic article from the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly on why COVID vaccines were ordinary means. Not only did I summarize it, but after communicating briefly with one of the authors, I […]
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COVID Vaccines Are Ordinary Means & Thus Morally Obligatory (National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly)
Back in the spring, I posted two pieces in a series. In one, I argued that by a usual definition of “ordinary means,” widely (almost universally) recommended vaccines, including COVID vaccines, are ordinary means. In the second, I posted snippets […]
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Catholic Identity Conference Misses the Mark on All 3 Points
This week, several Catholics in Pittsburgh are going to declare their resistance to Pope Francis at the Catholic Identity Confernece. They claim three main issues where Pope Francis needs resisting but on all three they are wildly off-target. They interpret […]
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Active Catholics Are the Most Vaccinated Religious Group
In the discourse about COVID vaccines online in Catholic circles, there was immense debate about the astronomically remote connection to abortion. In explicitly Catholic forums, this raged on for months. It seemed like almost 50% of Catholics were not vaccinated […]
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The Duty to Vaccinate in Catholic Social Teaching (2/2)
On Wednesday, I wrote about some moral theology principles on vaccines. I showed several points. Diseases are physical evils and vaccines thus relate to the most fundamental principles of moral theology. Vaccines are ordinary means so have a general obligation. […]
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What Is Medical Testing? (A Response to Dr. Paul Casey)
Dr. Paul Casey wrote a piece arguing that very few medicines had medical testing on fetal cell lines, specifically HEK-293. The main issue with his argument is that he uses non-standard definitions of terms like medical testing and lying, and […]
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Catholic Anti-Vax Arguments & Reductio ad Absurdum (2/2)
Yesterday, I posted a piece explaining the structure and possible counterarguments to a reductio ad absurdum. If you haven’t read that, you might want to go and read it. Now we deal with a claim where a reductio ad absurdum […]
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Top 10 Posts of 2021
Here are the top-10 most viewed posts I wrote in 2021. There seem to be a lot of posts on vaccines, with posts on Pope Francis coming in second. A few are completely unrelated to those two themes like the […]
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Omicron Turned My Christmas Plans Upside Down
For the second year in a row, my Christmas plans got changed at the last minute. Last year, I started feeling sick the evening of the 21st and got a positive COVID test on the 24th. (It was not fun […]
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