Collective paternalism and vaccination programmes

One important objection to vaccination programmes involving coercive measures such as re-strictions on unvaccinated people’s access to public space, or even nudging, is that they are paternalistic. We believe this objection is weaker than is often assumed. We defend this belief by: 1) introducing a novel distinction between individual and collective paternalism; 2) showing that, across a range of circumstances, vaccination programmes involve collective, not individu-al, paternalism; and 3) arguing that collective paternalism is not wrong for the reasons that, arguably, individual paternalism is.