Dr Alberto Giubilini, will give a short talk to introduce his new, open access book 'The Ethics of Vaccination' (Palgrave Macmillan).
Tuesday 5 March, 5.00 - 6.15pm (followed by a drinks reception)
Oxford Martin School, Broad Street, Oxford OX1 3BD
To register (recommended): https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/event/2663
To watch the live webcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EEVhMX3Cqw
Download the book for free here.
Vaccination raises ethical issues about the responsibilities of individuals, communities, and states in preventing serious and potentially life-threatening infectious diseases. Such responsibilities are typically taken to be about minimising risks for those who are vaccinated and for those around them. However, there are other ethical considerations that matter when defining the responsibilities of different actors with regard to vaccination. Such ethical considerations are not often given due considerations in the debate on vaccination ethics and policy.
Thus, in this talk Dr Alberto Giubilini aims at offering a defence of compulsory vaccination taking into account not only the importance of preventing the harms of infectious diseases, but also the value of fairness in the distribution of the burdens entailed by the obligation to protect people from infectious diseases. He will offer a philosophical account of the key notions involved in the ethical debate on vaccination, of the types of responsibilities involved, of the possible types of vaccination policies ranked from the least to the most restrictive, and of the reasons why compulsory vaccination is, from an ethical point of view, the best policy available, as it is the most likely to guarantee not only protection from infectious diseases, but also a fair distribution of the burdens and responsibilities involved.
About the author: Dr Alberto Giubilini is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the Oxford Martin Programme on Collective Responsibility for Infectious Disease and the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities, University of Oxford, UK. He holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Milan, Italy, and has held previous appointments at Monash University, University of Melbourne and Charles Sturt University, all in Australia, working on different topics in bioethics and philosophy more generally.
