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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31255 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023

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Mary Mallon would have been entirely justified to kill her captors and escape for by the point they imprisoned her in perpetuity they broke the social contract and returned her and themselves to the state of Nature.

I was unfamiliar with that but assuming that following is accurate I do not consider it as straightforward. And if you go "returned her and themselves to the state of Nature" then it anyway justifies using raw power to overpower everyone else anyway - and I do not think that it is in any way better.

Mary Mallon (September 23, 1869 – November 11, 1938), commonly known as Typhoid Mary, was an Irish-born American cook believed to have infected between 51 and 122 people with typhoid fever. The infections caused three confirmed deaths, with unconfirmed estimates of up to 50. She was the first person in the United States identified as an asymptomatic carrier of the pathogenic bacteria Salmonella typhi.[1][2] She persisted in working as a cook and thereby exposed others to the disease. Because of that, she was twice forcibly quarantined by authorities, eventually for the final two decades of her life. Mallon died after a total of nearly 30 years in isolation.[3][4]

(...)

She used fake surnames like Breshof or Brown, and took jobs as a cook against the explicit instructions of health authorities. No agencies that hired servants for upscale families would offer her employment, so for the next five years, she moved to the mass sector. She worked in a number of kitchens in restaurants, hotels, and spa centers. Almost everywhere she worked, there were outbreaks of typhoid.[35] However, she changed jobs frequently, and Soper was unable to find her.[13]

In 1915, Mallon started working at Sloane Hospital for Women in New York City. Soon 25 people were infected, and two died. The head obstetrician, Dr. Edward B. Cragin, called Soper and asked him to help in the investigation. Soper identified Mallon from the servants' verbal descriptions and also by her handwriting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mallon

f you go "returned her and themselves to the state of Nature" then it anyway justifies using raw power to overpower everyone else anyway - and I do not think that it is in any way better.

I don't think you understand, one has a duty to escape the state of nature if at all possible (at least according to Hobbes) and enter into more adequate equilibria in general. That tyrannical governments force us out of it by defecting is a moral sin. But once it's you vs the world, yes anything is permitted. John Smith is perfectly legitimate to blow away any and all law enforcement sent by a congress that would pass the kill-John-Smith-on-sight act, or to break any laws passed by such a body as they are now null and void concerning him.

This is not an argument against rebellion, it is an argument against tyranny.

In the case of Mary specifically it's extremely debated whether she knew for a fact she was responsible for those illnesses (which I do believe would carry some amount of responsibility vis à vis nonagression), but I'm merely referring here to the injustice of her perpetual imprisonment as punishment for existing as a danger.

In such a circumstance I would rebel, because there would be nothing else to do than rebel, asking for people to acquiesce to the destruction of their autonomy or indeed to their own destruction is game-theoretically unreasonable, and that's the fundamental truth that natural law attempts to point out.

And this truth, embedded in the concept of natural rights is what makes forcing people to engage in medical procedures unreasonable. You can't reasonably ask people to give up control of their own body. And I don't think it's overstating it to say that this is a matter worth dying over because people have done so in its name in the past.

The issue is they tried to give her several outs, as in not working as a cook. Its only when she went to some lengths to continue doing that, that they locked her up entirely.

If she was justified in killing those who imprisoned her then those she endangered would be justified in outright killing her. But they tried not to do that.

If being imprisoned allows one to kill to stop it, then being infected with a deadly disease by someone who has been told multiple times to stop doing the thing that caused outbreaks should also meet that bar.

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