Page 15 - Vaccines

The existence and the use of vaccines

sanctioned deliberately procured abortion, as mere
biological material to be used as may seem fit, especially
for a good, “therapeutic” purpose, as in producing these
kinds of vaccine. A defective anthropology, a utilitarian
or consequentialist moral philosophy or the proportion-
alism connected with radical moral autonomy tend in
this direction. By contrast, those scientists and techni-
cians, however, who use their God-given reason rightly
to investigate nature, including human nature, to seek
solutions to what threatens humanity, are actually
involved in a vocation to “subdue the face of the earth”
(Gn 1: 28) through the study, analysis and harnessing of
the goods of God's creation in the authentic service of
the common good;1 where they eschew those deficient
moral options and respect the basic human goods of all
human beings, their evaluation of the issues at stake and
their actual conduct in developing vaccines to serve the
human community will be very different.

1 This may be understood as a particular application of John Paul
II’s acute analysis of human work as participating in the contin-
uing task of subduing the face of the earth, harnessing the goods
of the earth through intellectual, technical and/ or manual work
to what is objectively good and to the common good, in accord-
ance with the hierarchy of values of the priority of persons over
things, of labour (or work) over capital (goods), of the subjective
over the objective dimension of work, while recognising fully
that things, goods and the objective dimension of work are true
and necessary features of work, necessary for authentic human
development but incapable of attaining it except where the
instrumental causality of a reductive utilitarian focus upon what
is produced or wanted gives way to the efficient (knowing and
deliberate) causality which always respects the true and integral
good of the personal subjects, never using some human beings
as objects for the alleged or even for the real good of others; cf.
John Paul II, Laborem exercens, nn. 5-6, 12–14.

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