Is it unethical to refuse a COVID-19 vaccine?

Unless someone has an unusual medical condition that would render vaccination contraindicated, the short answer is yes, it is unethical to refuse to get vaccinated against COVID-19. I am not a doctor, nor a philosopher studying normative questions of whether a particular course of action is ethical or unethical. However, I do study behavioral ethics — the science of moral decision making — which provides several reasons people might choose not to be vaccinated. None of them good. Studies show that people are irrationally optimistic, tending to believe that the car wrecks, cancers and divorces that happen to other people are not going to happen to them. Why get vaccinated if you just know that you won’t get COVID-19? Since March, I have watched countless interviews with people lying in hospital beds who explained how utterly shocked they were that they had contracted the coronavirus. People also have a tendency to be overly...