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Contributors KF contributed to the conception and design of the work, reviewing and interpreting the literature, drafting the article and revising the article. AC contributed to the conception and design of the work, critical revision of the article and gave final approval of the version to be published.
Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing interests None declared.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.
↵While we will not quibble at length with Hassoun’s formulation of P1, it runs together two sources of obligation: (1) associative ties that bind community members to one another and (2) role-based obligations of leaders. As we write in our article, ‘Our claim is that community membership and intra-communal roles create special obligations. These, in turn, can justify partial allocations of vaccines or at least elevate those considerations to the status of moral reasons’ (Ferguson and Caplan,2 p3). This is significant since the latter type of obligation belongs only to particular role-occupying agents.
↵In the context of granting that citizens also belong to a global community, we write, ‘it does not follow that cosmopolitan obligations automatically outweigh obligations one bears by virtue of one’s membership to other, smaller-scope communities’ (Ferguson and Caplan,2 pp2–3). But that does not mean the latter outweighs the former. We also note that community membership and intra-communal roles mean that ‘some will have the primary obligation, though not their only obligation, to privilege their own’ (Ferguson and Caplan,2 p3, italics added). But just because leaders have these obligations immediately, in their capacity as leaders, and consider them first in a sequence of deliberation, it does not mean those obligations are absolute or that they necessarily overpower all other obligations regardless of circumstances.
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