Is There a Common Good?

In time of emergency, individual liberty has to be circumscribed. The victorians understood this very well because they had public health problems far worse than us. These questions would have struck the founding fathers as idiotic. But ultimately, if if we were facing smallpox, i don't think this debate would be a very protracted one. If this thing was killing our kids, the debate would be over. Remember polio? There was no anti poleovax movement because people's kids were dying. So this is not complicated any more than it is a complicated question, how we should act if we are attacked by a totalitarian regime.