In a major confrontation in the first weekend of August 2026, CNN’s Dana Bash and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. argued about the pandemic response and its effect on the country. Kennedy unleashed it all on her in ways that are highly unusual. He made it perfectly clear: a public health crisis is not an all-embracing excuse for violating people’s rights.
“One of the mistakes we made in the last time was suppressing those rights,” Kennedy said. “So people weren’t being heard. Doctors who are saying you’re doing it wrong were being marginalized and vilified.”
For too long, intellectuals have wanted to drive a wedge between individual rights and the common good. Public health represents the common good. We all benefit from good sanitation, clean water, clean streets, technology that keeps food fresh, and so on. Nothing about those hopes conflict with individual rights. There was never a reason to crush them.
This whole debate reminds me of a fake one that has surrounded me since college. We were always asked to consider what happens when the good of all runs contrary to the rights of individuals. We have to choose, we were told.
In higher levels of education, fancier words come along. We have to choose between being a rights-asserting deontologist and being a utilitarian consequentialist. These are big ways of saying the same thing. Deontology is a normative ethical theory that judges the morality of actions based on whether they adhere to rules, duties, or obligations, rather than on their consequences. Utilitarianism is a way of aggregating the overall effect of some policy, one that requires adding up all the benefits and measuring them against the cost to come up with some measurement of common good.
Many decades have gone by when the basic binary here is not questioned. We have to join one camp or the other. If we chose deontological rules concerning rights, we had better be prepared to rally around them even if the world is falling apart around us. If we choose utilitarian consequentialism, we would have to tough it out as rights and liberties are temporarily trampled in order that the overall good would emerge.
For years I bought into this false choice. I would lean one way or the other, seeing the point of rights and then seeing the point of consequences, back and forth. Just when I thought I had settled on the answer, a compelling exception would arise and I would lean the other direction, while still finding fault with hard dogma on either side. Countless hours were spent in my own life debating and considering these issues, always with relevant literature at hand.
It took me far too long to realize that this was always a false dichotomy. What if we do not have to choose? What if the way to realize the long-run common good of society is through individual rights? What if adhering strictly to individual rights is the best means by which we build the good society of collective well-being? In other words, what if there is no real conflict between the interests of the one and the interests of the many?
Think of the Founding Fathers as they wrote the brilliant Declaration of Independence and forged a new nation governed by a strict commitment to rights. They never once imagined that in so doing, they were compromising the emergence of a good society overall in the long run. On the contrary. The means by which a more perfect union was realized was through an ever better and more consistent application of the principle of rights.
This entire debate was the template underlying the discussion between Bash and Kennedy. Since at least the late 19th century, public health and infectious disease have been seen as giving rise to this problem. This is because of a perceived possible problem in immunology. It takes a high level of community immunity to a particular infectious disease to protect those who are vulnerable to medically meaningful effects from it. From that, one might believe that it is important to trample some rights in order to gain society-wide benefits.
This debate became very real in two major areas, the quarantine power and the acceptance of vaccination. An individual who does not want to be quarantined—claiming his individual right to the freedom of movement—is a potential threat to others. Doctors see this whereas a regular bloke might not. So too with vaccination. You might not want to accept the risk of injury but, in so doing, the risk-averse person is holding back herd immunity that would protect everyone.
In real life, however, such a conflict does not exist. No one wants to be sick and no decent human being wants to deliberately infect others in a way that would endanger their health. This is why quarantine powers are rarely truly necessary to invoke. Voluntary isolation in real cases of emergency is a generally accepted principle of human ethics. Those who resist it usually have good reasons to do so.
It’s the same with vaccination. I’ve never heard of anyone who declined to accept it who did not have good reasons. Even for seemingly sterilizing shots like measles, those who do not want the shot are concerned by after-effects and unanticipated outcomes; they would rather risk infection than risk injury and a compromised immune system. That decision, even if some scientist thinks it is wrong, has only individual consequences.
Generally, these seeming conflicts—and of course there will always be tensions in particular times and situations—are not systemic and significant enough to throw out the entire idea of the freedom to choose. In other words, the system of rights creates a social environment that is most conducive to generating the best results over the long term, whereas the power to violate rights too often leads to grave abuses.
That is precisely what happened during the pandemic period we have left just a few years back. We were told that we are all in this together so there had to be censorship, compliance with isolation policies, and forced inoculation. If instead we had pursued a policy of individual rights, people could have decided what was best for their particular cases. This policy would have saved a generation from learning loss and preserved freedom of commerce and religion instead of what we got from a one-size-fits-all policy.
The pandemic years taught a hard but clarifying lesson: the greatest threat to the common good is not the free individual who insists on his rights, but the authority that claims the power to suspend them. When rights are treated as temporary obstacles rather than permanent foundations, the result is not collective safety but collective damage.
The alternative path was always available. A society that trusts people to weigh risks for themselves, to isolate when truly necessary, and to accept or decline medical interventions according to their own judgment does not dissolve into chaos; it generates the very resilience, innovation, and mutual regard that public health claims to seek.
The Founding generation of this country believed that individual rights come from God. If so, why would God grant rights that are in conflict with the capacity to organize itself in a way that encourages the flourishing of the whole? The one and the many both benefit.
There is no tragic choice between the rights of the one and the welfare of the many. The Founders understood this, and so should we. The surest way to protect the vulnerable, to advance genuine public health, and to preserve a free and flourishing society is to refuse the false dichotomy altogether. Individual rights are not the enemy of the common good; they are its only reliable instrument.
