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As fc explains below, the principle of precommitment is sacrosanct to me. If I am not willing to suffer for my beliefs, I don't believe them. But there is a bit more to it than that of course - prior experience suggests a member of organised crime won't shoot over something so trivial, so yeah, I'd call the bluff. My fate was sealed in this hypothetical, but it has actually been an outrageously successful tactic irl, I wish I'd employed it a lot more during my life, everyone capitulates far too easily these days.
At first I thought my fate was sealed during covid too - I practice social distancing and proper hygiene because illness doesn't care about principles, but I live in Queensland and during the mask mandates and lockdowns I went out every single day, just like I had before, and I didn't wear a mask. I let the gold coast council bully my market into forcing masks on people for two weeks, then told them to shut us down if they didn't like us letting people do what the pleased (we would have had to shut down anyway if we'd kept doing it, I'm not claiming to be Terry Toughnuts, just explaining another covid rule that was primarily about throwing weight around). I got pulled over by a cop once, but no punishment, because the cop thought it was a stupid policy too (I assume, she didn't say that of course but she looked embarrassed pulling me over and barely even waited for me to give my lazy food situation excuse before letting me go.)
So I am not anti-vax (although I am anti covid vax) but I am not willing to force it on others. I might not like it when it goes against what I want, but I always respect people who are willing to throw there life away for there beliefs. I do think a high trust society could make an argument for vaccine mandates, but I don't think we live in a high trust society. We live in a society where they will mandate untested vaccines and lock people in their homes based on bad science, then refused to acknowledge their errors until they had no choice. That's a society that should not be trusted. That's probably the major disconnect between us it looks like (aside from our moral frameworks of course). I don't get the impression you think we have a high trust society though - do you see high trust societies as institutional facts in the Searle sense, sort of self fulfilling prophecies? Because I do think that's true, but we definitely don't live in a high trust society, and I am not willing to play along until I see something to trust again. I'm not saying all of society has to become deontological... But I can also think of worse ways we could go.
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