Placing this here be cause it seems like prime debate material, but if mods determine it should be in the Covid forum, so be it.
So the company that both of my daughters work for has recently announced that they will provide a $300 payment to any employee that chooses to get the Covid-19 vaccine (any version). They have both already been vaccinated so the money did not factor in to their decision though they will get the bonus.
My wife is beside herself, believing this to be an unethical practice of the highest degree. To be clear, she is a nurse, believes everyone should be vaccinated (barring a valid medical reason not to, such as allergies), and has been vaccinated herself. She just believes it is unethical for anyone to offer a financial incentive, believing it might be an undo influence to someone who might not want to be vaccinated. $300 is a lot of money to some people. She is not opposed to non-monetary incentives, such as a contest to see which store can get the highest percentage of its employees vaccinated, with maybe a pizza party or something as the prize.
I dont see the ethical dilemma. The same company imposes a health insurance penalty ( in the form of a higher premium) on smokers (and it is made clear that it is a penalty for smoking, not a bonus for not smoking) and she has no problem with that. She says that the smokers choose to smoke. My position is that the vaccine is still optional, the employees just have one more reason to get it.
So what do the smartest people on the internet say? Is it unethical? Is charging smokers higher premiums unethical? If your answers are different, why?
Also, as a bonus issue, would it be ethical for a company or other private (non- government) organization to pay people to NOT get the vaccine?
An employee getting Covid is going to cost a company significantly more than $300 in lost work, medical care, disruption, and long term productivity. Why wouldn’t they pay to avoid that?
I think it is unethical to NOT get the vaccine, and I think it makes perfect sense for society as a whole, including businesses, to encourage people to act ethically (including financial incentives). Not to mention possible issues for the company if someone starts spreading covid around the office.
If I were running a company I’d require all employees to get the vaccine.
It would be downright evil to incentivize NOT getting the vaccine.
To me it is completely ethical for a company to do this. It is not only for the best health of the employees, but possibly the financial health of the company. They apparently do not require the employees to get vaccinated, so any incentive to get it is good, whether it be time off to get the vaccine, or a $300 payment.
I see nothing unethical in providing non-coercive incentives to people to engage in actions that benefit both themselves and the public at large.
Indeed, when I had covid it cost my employer over $1700 just in wages paid to me while I was on medical leave. Then there is the portion of testing costs they paid for. And, given that I was able to ride it out at home, I was one of the cheaper instances. Multiply all that by the 120+ individuals of the workforce at my store alone that have had covid or quarantines or both, then by the over 220+ stores in the company as a whole, the warehouse/distribution workers, corporate offices, and truck drivers, some of whom wound up in the hospital and were off work for considerably longer than I was, and the at least six company employees that died from the virus… Offering a hundred or three incentive to encourage vaccination and avoid yet more costs due to illness, even with the cost of vaccination figured in and perhaps a day off if someone has side effects is a whole lot cheaper for the company. Especially since the vast majority of the employees are essential workers with a couple hundred face-to-face customer interactions every work day (hence why so many of us got sick over the past year).
No. Because that is putting obstacles in front of people attempting to act in their best interest and the best interests of the public at large.
I think that it is perfectly ethical to make employment contingent on getting the vaccine, assuming that it is available and you don’t have a valid medical reason that contraindicates it.
The only problem I see with paying people to get the vaccine is that people with a valid medical exemption miss out through no fault of their own.
Not only that but health insurers, and companies themselves, can effectively give people money for healthy lifestyle choices, sometimes in the form of reimbursing gym costs and sometimes in the form of just paying people for having a fitness plan or getting a physical.
I think in the interest of fairness, if someone has a medical reason that they’re not allowed to get the vaccine, it would make sense to give them the same money that vaxxers are getting. But I don’t know if failing to do this would necessarily be unethical.
I think it’s unethical and anti-social and sociopathic to refuse to get vaccinated (absent a real medical reason to forego the vaccine), and I’d be perfectly happy with administering the vaccine at gunpoint to refusers, but I’m also fine with incentives.
As others have pointed out, many employers (including mine) offer incentives, either in kind or in money, for healthy habits. Gym memberships, lower insurance costs for non-smokers (or penalties for smokers), even expensive gifts (if not cash). My firm, for example, will give me a Fitbit if I participate in their “wellness” program.
So I have no particular objection to the $300 bonus described in the OP.
My company pays us up to $200 to buy health and wellness items in an effort to encourage us to improve our fitness and overall health. It’s ethical and beyond that it is objectively a public good to encourage people to stay healthy, whether it’s to buy health equipment or get vaccinated.
I posted a little earlier in QZ that my nephew was paid $250 by his employer to get the vaccine. Prior to the financial incentive, he used the typical Trumpster talking points as reasons why he would not.
Personally, I do not care that it essentially took a bribe for him to obtain the vaccine. I’m just happy he did it.
Basically this. I think there may be moral issues involved but I don’t see any way that ethics is part of it. I’m pretty sure we’d have much lower vaccination rates if the shots weren’t free, so there is a financial incentive already for anyone who wants the shots.
Thanks for all the responses so far. Is no one taking up the “unethical” side of the argument? According to my wife, she talked to several coworkers ( all nurses) and they all agreed that it was unethical. She even accused me of not understanding what ethics is, asking me “have your ever taken a class on ethics?” ( matter of fact I have, as part of my college degree). She has a bachelor’s degree in nursing, while my degree is in industrial psychology. Is there a difference between medical ethics and business ethics?
I can’t see how incentivising behavior that isn’t immoral could be immoral. Personally, I can’t send my employees on site with clients without a vaccine since it risks my guys and the clients so getting the vaccine was a condition of employment as a small shop with rational people it wasn’t a problem. I’m not sure what I would have done if someone claimed a medical or religious exemption but they certainly would have been prevented from coming to the office or client locations.
Then they need to elaborate on what the ethical problem with this situation is. How is it ethical to incentivize one generally accepted good behavior (stopping smoking) but not ethical to incentivize another generally accepted good behavior (getting a Covid vaccine)?
No, I’m not taking it up because I see nothing unethical in incentivizing good behavior. I am actually puzzled as to why anyone would consider unethical.
I don’t understand why she and her co-workers view it as unethical. I really don’t.
How sincere can someone’s anti-vaxx beliefs really be if $300 is enough to get them to do something they really don’t want to do? If I offered you $300 to drink some rat poison, would you go for that deal?
And really, what’s the ethical difference between a cash incentive and a non-cash incentive? In both cases you’re trying to get someone to do something they’re inclined towards not doing. “Oh, what if the anti-Vaxxers are all secretly addicted to pizza? That might be an undue influence!”
Personally I have a pretty high threshold for this sort of thing. In order for a monetary incentive to be a problem, the thing being incentivized has to meet a certain level of danger or detriment, the person being incentivized has to be at a certain level of desperation, and the incentive has to be incredibly high. So, I would have a problem with, say, offering housing to the homeless that was contingent on surgical sterilization, because that’s a permanent and potentially devastating thing you’re asking of very desperate people by offering something they may not be able to turn down.
But if you remove just the badness of the thing being asked, you change the calculus dramatically. What if you’re offering housing to the homeless on condition they refrain from assaulting the other residents? Surely that’s not unduly coercive? Likewise, if the incentive is modest and the people are in a position to say no, I’d tolerate a much more dubious thing being asked of them. Surely your wife is aware that, in order to develop these lifesaving vaccines she thinks everyone should get, the companies paid a lot of people to be guinea pigs? I was one of them, although the cash wasn’t why I did it; I actually donated most of it to various political and charitable causes. And yeah, I would’ve been uncomfortable with them dangling that money in front of skid row residents who needed to eat but had reasonable reservations about being experimented upon. But someone employed at a company that can offer this kind of incentive, being offered $300, for something that has been tested now and is safer than not getting it? Yeah, I’m definitely cool with that.