Free to err? Conceptualising personal autonomy in the postpandemic welfare state

In the public healthcare system, personal autonomy has rightly become a key element of health politics. Nevertheless, conflicts can arise when the interests of a caring welfare state collide with the decisions of those in its care. In such cases, the concept of autonomy as a fundamental ethical principle can cause harm, if solely interpreted as freedom from interference by the public sector, devoid of demands on personal responsibility. Based on the example of vaccine hesitancy during COVID-19, we propose that resolving these conflicts should integrate two divergent basic tenets of autonomy, as developed over time, and recently applied disjunctively to the pandemic by ethicists, so that the principle can be consistently operationalised as a function of an open but also binding argument within society. This may have implications far beyond SARS-CoV-2. We touch on philosophical grounds where the assertion of axiomatic moral rights is replaced by an epistemological framing of the deliberation process as a ubiquitous and not merely representative argumentative act, while validity claims are individually redeemed in a dialogical balancing of reasons and objections. Recognising this as the humanistic core of healthcare calls for an expansion of the state’s communicative obligations but also implies proportionate paternalism.