What happened to morality and the Constitution?

Are there limits to "the common good?"

In the movie “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” Spock deliberately exposes himself to fatal radiation in order to save the lives of the officers and crew of the starship Enterprise. His Vulcan heritage, morality, and ethic bid him to make this sacrifice because “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few … or the one.” There are voices in the current post-Christian, post-modern world who argue that individual liberties must be considered subordinate to the needs of the collective. A quick study of Marxism / communism reveals that this idea is not new but is the essential feature of socialism. How do we make sense of this rising ethos in the context of a constitutional Republic? To what extent can society make demands upon the individual in the interest of “the common good?” More specifically, what health choices may government force upon its citizens against their will on the basis of law or morality?

The past three years of the coronavirus “epidemic” have strained the understanding of “constitutionality” and “morality” as government agencies and other secular institutions have sought to constrain the choices made by citizens regarding religion, vocation, recreation, and health. There is little doubt that the Founding Fathers anticipated such scenarios because the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution both sought to set forth the sovereignty of the individual over and against the State and the boundaries of a just government. The Bill of Rights, comprising the first ten Amendments to the new Constitution, were composed as a further safeguard for certain specific liberties that the various states felt were inadequately protected by the Constitution. Among those amendments the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth and Tenth seem to indicate a limit to what government can enforce in the aforementioned spheres of society, including limits to the pursuit of an end to a virus epidemic through mandatory vaccinations. There is also the question of what moral justification is sufficient to extend the reach of government beyond the boundaries of the Constitution “for the common good.”

For example, the 1st Amendment guarantees the right of citizens to worship freely without interference from the government. But that freedom is bounded by certain moral constraints – in some cases society has seen fit to prohibit religious animal sacrifices as fundamentally immoral. Does that also mean that government can prevent churches, synagogues, and mosques from holding worship services for the “common good?” Similarly, citizens are free to assemble with other like-minded individuals – but they are generally prohibited from forming a mob to harass the children of another citizen who opposes their viewpoint, an act which would be judged immoral because the children are innocent. Does that mean, then, that police can claim a moral duty to arrest a group of citizens that exceeds an arbitrary number of people because they “might” spread the coronavirus? And what is the moral pathway for those high-profile critics of the coronavirus vaccine to get back their right of free speech after being silenced by the government / technocrat partnership?

There are a multitude of similar examples of the collision between morality / constitutional rights and the dictates of the administrative state regarding the “common good.” But if morality and constitutionality are things to be discarded in the face of peril, where does that leave us? Consider Spock’s choice in a hypothetical situation where a virulent and deadly virus has been contracted by a small number of American citizens; the only way of stopping the spread of the virus is to kill the hosts. What are the moral and constitutional issues at stake? When it comes to the problem of deciding to take one life in order to save others, isn't that the moral dilemma faced in many situations? The Judeo-Christian ethic says murder (not killing) is wrong. But as just one example of the "exception", the conspirators (including the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer) who attempted to kill Hitler made that choice on the justification that it would save lives. So in one sense, "morality" is individual and subjective on the basis of the situation. In the case of government “officials” (or another person) who dictate with black-and-white certainty the "moral" choice for another person, they ignore or refuse to acknowledge that they might not have all the relevant information, don't know all the possible outcomes and / or ignore the possibility of divine intervention. As to constitutionality, it primarily applies to the relationship between citizen and State, it can't always ensure morality in matters outside that purview. But it does provide a safeguard against the ability of the State to dictate the individual and subjective moral choices of the citizens.

Circling back to the question of mandatory vaccinations: the State has no business mandating the moral choice of being vaccinated against Covid because the State doesn't know all the possible outcomes of that act. In fact, recent developments seem to indicate that the State did not actively seek to discover adverse events associated with the vaccines. There is no constitutional warrant for the federal government to intercede in health care decisions for individual citizens – the overturning of Roe v. Wade should have made that abundantly clear. If we wish to preserve our constitutional Republic, we must find common ground to push back against the loss of autonomy in these kinds of choices. We are not Vulcans.