Abstract

An ethical and legal obligation generally exists for informed consent to be obtained prior to the administration of medical interventions. This includes vaccinations. For an individual’s informed consent to be valid, it must be given voluntarily. Hence, when individuals are required to be vaccinated—for example, as a condition of employment—we might ask whether this impairs the voluntariness of their informed consent, thereby rendering it invalid. If this turns out to be the case, then this would count as a pro tanto reason to think vaccine mandates are unethical. Assuming vaccine mandates count as ‘coercive’, interrogating this question requires an account of consent under third-party coercion, since the pressure or coercion exerted by vaccine mandates is exerted by third parties, such as employers, rather than the recipients of consent. Accordingly, this paper draws on Maximilian Kiener’s Interpersonal Consenter–Consentee Justification account of the voluntariness of medical consent under third-party coercion to develop an explicit argument as to why vaccine mandates do not vitiate the voluntariness of informed consent. Vaccine mandates do not necessarily impair the voluntariness of informed consent because, in such cases, the consent-receiver neither contributes to a vaccine mandate’s coercive threat nor wrongs the consent-giver in any way. Consent is not obtained by coercion in such cases, even though it may be motivated by it. The mere presence of third-party coercion does not invalidate consent since third parties cannot directly negate the voluntariness of consent.