Ethics of third-party coercion in medicine: some differences between health care professionals and tattooists

In their paper arguing that vaccine mandates do not impair the voluntariness of informed consent, Smith and Mackie draw on Kiener’s recent work on the ethics of third-party coercion.1 2 Kiener’s work is part of a recent upsurge in interest in third-party coercion, that is, situations where the coercer is not the same person as the person who performs the coerced action.3–5 In most of the cases analysed in the literature, the coercer is a natural person and not an institution or the state. An early analysis of this issue used the example of a tattooist who makes a tattoo on someone who had been coerced to have the tattoo,6 and that scenario is also the main scenario discussed in Kiener’s paper. It is therefore of some interest to consider whether healthcare professionals (HCPs) are in the same…

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