The philosopher Peter Singer (pictured above), writing in Project Syndicate, describes the strange case of Dr. Hasan Gokol, the physician overseeing COVID response, including vaccination protocols, in Harris County, Texas, a big job as that's the home county to Houston. The local DA has charged Gokol with theft and violating the very protocols he was charged with enforcing. Here is what, in Singer's account, happened (the second above link is to his article):
The Moderna vaccine is delivered in vials holding 11 doses. Once a vial is opened, the vaccine remains good for six hours. After that, any remaining doses have to be discarded. Last December, at a site vaccinating medical workers, the last dose from an open vial was administered shortly before closing time. Then one more patient showed up for a shot. That left 10 unused doses in a freshly opened vial. Gokol began looking for people to vaccinate—a handful of medical workers and a couple of cops still on site, all of whom had either already been vaccinated or turned down the opportunity. He spread the net wider by calling phone contacts and asking if they knew anyone who qualified for a vaccination. He went so far as driving to the homes of people he knew qualified and, with their consent, vaccinated them himself. Back at his own house, he continued making calls, and three people agreed to come to his home for a shot. They would have received his three remaining doses, but one cancelled about a half hour before the six hours were up. Fifteen minutes after that, Gokol administered the last dose to his wife, who, on account of a medical condition, qualified for a vaccine. Next day, he reported what had happened and supplied the names of the ten people who had been vaccinated with doses that would otherwise have been wasted. Soon thereafter, he was fired and charged with theft by the Harris County DA. Singer is a little vague about the specifics of the charge, although an article he links to indicates the DA thinks Gokol used his authority to help acquaintances of his "jump the line." A judge dismissed the case when no written document stating the protocol that had been violated could be produced, but, according to Singer, the DA hasn't given up on prosecuting Gokol.
I feel almost everyone thinks something's wrong here, but what they choose to say about it varies. In this respect, the incident resembles a Rorschach test. I read Singer's article after the novelist Joyce Carol Oates tweeted about it, and her take is that the case illustrates the problem of "prosecutorial discretion." There are of course homicides and other serious crimes, but also every day in a county of several million inhabitants some merely sketchy things occur that the authorities decide whether or not to prosecute. They have wide latitude and, though I may be amplifying Oates's complaint, the calculus might involve the likelihood of winning a conviction, an aspect of which could be the status of the alleged offender and their capacity to defend against a charge. Everyone loves to compile a winning record! It's not clear what the prosecutor's motive would be in the case of Dr. Gokol, but Oates would probably say that's just her point. The DA decides. The DA's latitude is wide and rarely is subjected to scrutiny. If this case is prosecuted, and not that one, the public whose interest the DA purports to serve remains in the dark about the reasons, which may be bad, stupid, benighted, personal, corrupt—no one can judge. The justice system recognizes that this is a problem, which explains why, for the most serious crimes, the prosecutor cannot go forward with a case before securing a grand jury indictment. But no one thinks it's much of a protection—thus the saying about how any half-assed prosecutor can "indict a ham sandwich." But it isn't even a theoretical protection for lower level crimes to which the grand jury system does not apply.
Singer is an ethicist who is generally sympathetic to—perhaps it would be accurate to say he subscribes to—the utilitarian theories of philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, both of whom he refers to in his article. According to a shorthand description of utilitarianism, the moral status of actions is determined by whether they result in "the greatest good for the greatest number." If the question involves, say, the allocation of scarce resources, one calculates, for each possible course of action, the benefits to these people and the costs to those people and then selects the option with the highest benefit surplus. According to this school, the case of Dr Gokol is an easy one, since it's easy to detect the benefits (these 10 people got vaccinated) and impossible to detect any cost (because it's not the case that those 10 people didn't get vaccinated—the alternative was that 10 doses are wasted).
Perhaps Singer is attracted to this case because it tends to make a persuasive advertisement for his favored moral theory. He proceeds to criticize the Catholic church for condemning a certain medical procedure that, in past obstetric emergencies, rescued the mother from grave peril by crushing the skull of an infant that couldn't be born. By the lights of a utilitarian, you are allowed, even required, to take measures resulting in one death rather than two. My impulses are all with Singer on these questions. Suppose, however, that by killing me and mining my corpse for organs the lives of four people, all desperately ill, all younger than I am, could be saved. I assume Singer and I agree this would be wrong, and I understand my reasons, but what are his? Utilitarianism seems inadequate for any number of moral questions. Slavery wasn't wrong in America because the misery of the slaves filled a bigger bucket than the one holding the ease, pleasure, and prosperity of their owners. The morality CPAs can perform their calculations but it doesn't matter what the results are.
Well, the Harris County DA should leave Dr Gokol alone, like Peter Singer says, even if the reasons Singer supplies seem a little suspect.
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