[Serious] Good People

[Belacqua]

and accompanying this is an underlying variable that I haven't been able to communicate successfully. 

You're communicating clearly. But the consensus is so strong that people aren't going to take in arguments that fall outside what's been decided.

People can do some very heartless things once they believe they are fighting for a good cause. 

We have a set of principles which we hold dear: think for yourself; question authority, don't just go with the herd. But once consensus is sufficiently reached then these no longer apply. Misrepresentation and ridicule become more than acceptable. 

I suppose part of the problem here is that my knowledge of ethics is extremely limited.

In an important sense, everybody's knowledge of ethics is extremely limited. In cases of this sort, where the limits of government coercion and bodily autonomy are being drawn, nobody is offering an argument as to why we have to draw the line just here. The consensus is so strong that no arguments are deemed necessary -- it's something people just know, and if you don't just know you're bad. We could try to figure out arguments as to why the violation of one kind of bodily autonomy is OK and one kind isn't, but no one seems willing to try that. 

For the record, I think it's almost certain that getting the vaccinations will be a good thing. I wish they were more available where I live. But as you said at the beginning, the issue is not vaccinations per se but the morality of how we enforce them. And now the thread has become an issue of how we represent people who are skeptical about them -- it's been deemed OK to misrepresent their motives.

Once a cohort has been sufficiently disapproved of, then misrepresentation is acceptable on this forum. We don't like Christians, for example, so it's OK to describe them all as science-denying people who believe in talking snakes.