[Micaiah_Chang]

Do we want to talk about a hypothetical world where deontology was the underlying moral principle? Where, for example, a large agency in charge of approving vaccines decided to delay approval of a life saving because, even though they received the information on November 20th, they scheduled the meeting for December 10-12th dammit, and that's when it'll be done? By potentially delaying several months because, instead of using challenge trials to directly assess the safety of a vaccine by exposing willing volunteers to both the supposed cure and disease, instead gave the cure to a couple of tens of thousands of people, and just waited until enough of them got sick and died to a disease "that would have got them anyway" to gather enough statistics for safety? Which is definitely good, you see, because no one got directly harmed by said agency, even if many more people in the country were dying of this theoretical disease. [0]

Or, even better, what if distribution of this life saving cure was done based on the deontological concept of fairness? Surely, this wouldn't result in limited and highly demanded vaccines being literally thrown away[1] in the name of equity and where vaccination companies wouldn't need to seek approval for something as simple as increasing doses of vaccines in vials. [2]

You know, just all theoretically, since it would be a terrible shame if any of these things happened in the real world, since this is just one specific scenario and I'm sure I can make up various [3] other [4] ways [5] in which not carefully evaluating the consequences of moral actions would turn out poorly, but hey!

I'm sure glad that utilitarianism isn't being entertained more on the margin, since we already live in the best of all possible moral universes.

(Footnote, I'm not going to justify these citations within this post, because it's pithier this way. I recognize this is not being fully honest and transparent, but I'd be happy to fully defend the inclusion of any these, if necessary)

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7014e1.htm

[1] https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-story-of-vaccinateca ctrl f "On being legally forbidden to administer lifesaving healthcare"

[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/moderna-asks-fda-approve-mor...

[3] https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2010/07/01/the-playpump-wh...

[4] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2641547

[5] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=983649