Vaccine exemptions are a necessary part of religious toleration

I do not share or even quite understand the objections made by those Orthodox who refuse to have their children vaccinated against measles and other diseases. The content of these objections is of very little interest to me because I am not Jewish. But I do believe in religious toleration — the rather antique notion that one can freely confess the falsehood of a sect or a doctrine while believing that its blameless adherents ought to be allowed to do as they wish.

It is odd to me, too, that so few have discussed the way in which the coverage of measles cases in New York makes effortless use of tropes about Jews as somehow unclean or contaminated and thus requiring a mandatory purification by the authorities. This is not the first time that black hats and long beards have become outward signifiers of an unspeakable interior pollution.

These do not exhaust my concerns. There was a time when one could expect a certain degree of epistemic humility from good liberals who had read their Thomas Kuhn. No longer. Science has joined “the economy” as one of those first-order goods whose pursuit we are told cannot be questioned. The ease with which all moral and prudential questions are being subsumed into the rhetoric of “science,” “health,” and “safety” should worry all persons of humane views and skeptical temperament.