This is what self-ownership is about. To try to control others in this way is deeply immoral.
I'm all for decriminalization of drugs and sex work, but another first principle is that society should protect the vulnerable. Sometimes, regulation will be the best tool for that. Other times, a deregulated market will be the best tool. Unfortunately, the world is complex. While our principles can guide us, each situation needs to be considered individually and the right set of tools needs to be selected after careful consideration.
That is precisely when it's most needed! There is no entity on Earth that can make any better claim to authority over a person's kidney than the owner of that kidney. The fact that you call them an "addict" as a way to delegitimize their decisions is an appeal to emotion; but ultimately every person is the sole determining authority on their own kidneys, without exception. This is not something that the opinions of others have any bearing on. In fact, "in cases of addiction" is a good canary in this coal mine: it's frequently trotted out by people who think that circumstances—any circumstances—are legitimate reasons to override another person's self-determination about their own physical person or choices about which that harm no other party, in an appeal to "common sense". It's not!
There isn’t a contradiction in an addict deciding to destroy themselves in continuing an addiction, and this decision is no more or less legitimately made than an addict deciding to cease their addiction. In all cases it is theirs alone to make.
Many of my friends have made each choice. It is always theirs to make, and neither is correct and neither is incorrect—unless it is forced upon them against their will!
It’s not a matter of “vulnerable”, or “decriminalization”, or “regulation”, or of markets. It is the basic philosophical premise that you don’t get to make these decisions for others unless you are willing to declare yourself their master and dominate them, using some handwaving excuse (e.g. "addiction") as justification for substituting your wishes for theirs—over their own body or choices.
The fact that you may have widespread opinion supporting “people shouldn’t get addicted to drugs and destroy themselves” is irrelevant. No person can legitimately claim this power over another in any circumstance, especially and most importantly the extreme ones. Self-destruction of any kind, but, to use an example, euthanasia, is not only legitimate in the case of terminal illness, or when loved ones agree and empathize with it. It is every person's own right to determine what happens physically to their own body, at all times and in all circumstances.
You’re using a lot of words and emotional context to dodge this plain and simple (and perhaps inconvenient) fact; the truth is, unfortunately, that such arguments have no moral basis, and are fundamentally immoral in that they violate consent.
Our bodies are our own to destroy and mutilate in any way we see fit. To use force to impose your will over top of their own and prohibit someone from exercising that basic right of self-determination is the blackest of crimes against an adult human being; it is logically equivalent to raping them, in my view of the violation of consent that it opts to impose upon them.
Please abandon this way of thinking, that you (or anyone else, or "society", or "government") are entitled to choices over the body of another person—for any reason, including and especially the ones you find disgusting, destructive, distasteful, or repugnant.
Full and unlimited self-determination implies that all contracts made in any situation by an individual are valid. But not every contract is well-analyzed and well-considered and made in perfect information.
If you are arguing that all contracts made by individuals are valid, even when in imperfect information, when not right of mind, etc, then I disagree with you. It may be a fundamental philosophical difference, but all your feels good "oh dont violate my right to self determination" seems weak if that person can't even properly comprehend the transaction they are making.
If you are not arguing this then your entire argument falls apart: once we care about being right of mind, we can speak of restricting addicts or drunks from certain transactions. Once we care about imperfect information, we can restrict or remove usurious loans. Indeed, these basic ideas of what is a "valid" transaction give credence to to the language of "vulnerable people" and laws that aim to protect them from predatory transactions.
These issues should be decided by courts, after deliberating on the facts of individual cases, and not narratives that spread throughout the public due to the virality of simplistic generalizations that appeal to emotions.
It is impossible for you to substitute your definition of correct for another person’s own when it comes to their body and their life without denying them agency and declaring yourself their superior, and in the process violating their rights to self-determination.
If they are harming no one but themselves, you have no moral basis to deny them their freedom to do so, unless you deem yourself competent to be their parent or guardian simply on the basis of that single decision of theirs, which is not reasonable by any stretch of the imagination.
> People need to be protected from themselves sometimes.
The only protection that most people want is protection from people who think this way about their lives, myself included.
If an individual can’t decide for another, no assemblage of individuals can legitimately claim that authority either.
I certainly don’t want to live in a place where it takes hundreds of years for the majority to finally decide that, for example, racial minorities really do deserve equal protection under the law (or a hundred years to reach the point where it is not legal to enslave them).
Surely you see the problem.
Ultimately power has to rest somewhere. If it's nowhere then someone will come and take it.
The modern alternative isn't some panacea. It's the corporation and the indifference of rights so long as it doesn't negatively impact the bottom line.
Said every dictator, ever. Also:
"It's for your own good"
"Without me, others would take advantage of you"
"I am protecting you"
"I know better than you what you need""Nobody knows better than me what is better for myself and mine."
It's not always true (see vaccination or smoking) but the alternative is much worse and in much more cases.
Smokers and anti-vaccination also use the same argument. Even though their actions are also dangerous to other people(kids). I am sure they felt oppressed when public smoking was banned. Smokers will tell you that smoking isn’t different to dangerous sports or unsafe sex. Yet, dangerous sports/unsafe sex isn’t banned.
And if someone does have a hermetically sealed room no smoke will escape from, I suppose that is OK, so shouldn't be illegal except forcing someone to do against their will.
Please address their point about antivaxxers.
This is the only moral stance to take. It is amazing how people, with totally incomplete information and no matching life experience, decide they can decide for others. Popular example: payday loans are bad. Well sometimes they are the last line of defense between having a working car and being able to go to work vs loosing everything. Just ask them, people may have better reasons than you can imagine.
Its the same kind of folks who think that Facebook should be outlawed/heavily regulated because it caused all the ills in the world ("Trump"). No it didn't, stop thinking of other people as gullible idiots and yourself as the one with all the smart ideas.
Payday loans exist because people in vulnerable situations are not protected as they should be.
In many cases, the “bad” is less bad than the alternative; I’m opposed to restrictions on freedom of informed choice in general.
I would love for the rate of all three of those things to be reduced to zero by effective interventions upstream. Until they are though, I want all of those things to be available options.
So, that's what we should do. It seems like you agree, so hopefully you are contributing to the political/democratic will to do this.
That clearly doesn't apply to the other two cases. I also disagree that "interventions" are necessarily preferable.
Banning payday loans seems like a noble thing to many people, but that simply ignores the real question, which is: what to do if someone signs a stupid contract and then wants to annulate it.
As a society, we should put measures in place to make sure no-one ever has to make this decision (easily accessible food banks, state support etc).
And we should make sure anyone making that decision is aware of the alternatives (and implications) and not suffering from a medical condition which is impairing their ability to make decisions.
But the fundamental choice should be down to the adult in question.
But the way to do this is by adding new, better options, not by restricting existing, 'bad' options.
Lets allow people to get exploited because it might not be a problem in the distant future? Or, work from both ends. By restricting bad options at the same time as we add, best we can, the good options.
We shouldn't allow people to get into a situation where they have to choose between losing a kidney and their children starving.
But - if someone is in that situation - it makes absolutely no sense not to let them decide which option they find least worst.
By doing that, you're only making things worse.
But such transaction happens within a lifelong game with at least two players. Changing the rule of the game can influence their game tree and their behavior, far before they get into a situation where the change applies.
For the kidney trade, banning it might discourage potential organ-buyers from 'check-mating' people into selling their kidneys. It also might nudge parents to work harder since they have one less things to sell off.
I acutually have no opinion over banning organ trade. I'm just saying that it could make some sense.
Person A1 and A2 are compelled by circumstance to compete. The nature of this competition forces A1/A2 to prioritize their values according to the cost to retain them (eg., suppose X = privacy in living quarters, and retaining X costs $100/day)
The impact of X being unaffordable is equal on A1/A2, ie., equally traumatic. But A1 is more able to compete than A2 (ie., retain their values) due, eg., to having more money.
Are we saying that A2 is free when she "decides" that $100/day is too expensive? And therefore has to abandon X (eg., dignity)?
Should we instead, rather, regard these circumstances suspiciously. Circumstances in which people are compelled to throw-away their values and race-to-the-bottom.
If A1/A2 never enters these circumstances they both retain X, if they do, only one does. Do we wish for dignity, privacy, (...) to be so circumstantial?
We can regulate to prevent this (and routinely do, very successfully) -- if society bares additional costs for its members retaining X (eg., via taxation to provide welfare/housing), then so be it.
Circumstances routinely bring people into competition where success requires abandoning values such that all participants would have preferred never to have been in that competition -- but when in it, abandon them.
The libertarian view of the mind is deeply naive -- it takes behaviour as always based on desire. We are more complex: we endure the trauma of not being free to act on our preferences when circumstances overwhelmingly incentivise behaviour contrary to those. Freedom is not mere action, it is acting according to our desires.
Addiction is a paradigm case, but extreme competition for resources is of the same kind: we sincerely wish not to do what we are compelled to do by external incentives that destroy our sense of self, will, freedom.
I don’t think anyone is being compelled to do anything here.
Any person can be made into a slave through "abusive freedom": overwhelming financial incentives (eg., blow up this building and ill give your very poor family $1mil); overwhelming social incentives (eg., take drugs or you wont be our friend); overwhelming constraints; ...
A person is a deeply malleable thing and circumstances change people, they traumatise and abuse them. A person can be arbitrarily reduced to an arbitrarily murderous/desperate/slavish state.
The libertarian notion of freedom mystifies this and prevents us from recognising it.
We need to distinguish between those cases where people change through learning, growth, development (ie., value their X differently due to learning more); and those cases were people are caused to abandon freedom-preserving, dignity-preserving, life-preserving values.
We oughtnt regard all behaviour as "expression of true desire", and all changes to what we desire as being of the same kind. When the very poor are provided with an overwhelming incentive to abandon their dignity (ie., here, essnetially free housing) we should regard the effects of these incentives as harming those people.
And that harm isn't theoretical: it is abusive to live without privacy; it is traumatising. That people do it does not mean they desire to, it does not mean they want to. This is a vicious misunderstanding of human psychology.
People are trapped in circumstances of abuse "freely" and routinely. So much for that notion of freedom.
Further constraining their freedom by forbidding them from making their own decisions about what is most important to them will only make their lives worse. They know more about what tradoffs (even difficult ones!) are worth doing in their own lives than you do.
> They know more about what tradoffs
This just seems like an ideological presumption. Empirically it is obviously, routinely, false. There are very many cases where people make self-injurious decisions that post-decision they wish they would not have made; and were obvious to everyone they shouldn't have made it.
The relevant political question is: in what cases should "society" regulate to prevent those cases arising?
If we say "every case" then we end up in a tyranny, and a very terrible one, because "society" is unlikely to get every case right. If we say "no cases" then we permit widespread abuse and manipulation.
A modern casino is a skinner-box designed by psychologists to maximize your merely impulsive behaviour (ie., non-free behaviour). Should we regulate to prevent people from ever entering? I'd say so.
A human being is not 'master of their own house'; they are not 'acting under their own will' much of the time. We are pigeons whose animal nature is easy to exploit: society should act to preserve our willful capacity to act under reason and preference.
Not action under impulse, desperation, etc.
I'm a grown man with my own money who has always been responsible with it. Spending a few hours playing cards isn't merely impulsive behavior, it's something I find entertaining. I know more about my own money and my own desires then you do.
Gambling in this way destroys people and their families, much like drug addiction. You might say those people are "vulnerable" in some special inherent way, but really, they just happen to be in different circumstances than you.
My view is that your enjoyment here has a cost: it preserves environments we know cause human animals to change for the worse. I don't see that as, empirically, a controversial point.
Casinos take a healthy rat in, and frequently, an unhealthy rat leaves.
Behind all this "decision making" is the reality of human psychology, and of abuse, trauma, and health. And it is no hidden thing that gambling, opioid over-prescription, prostitution... as environments take in healthy desperate animals and exist deeply unhealthy ones.
This transition preserves "freedom" in the libertarian sense -- and it is my view therefore that this sense is pathological and misunderstands people.
What you are saying is that pre-post casino you retain your freedom (in the intuitive, healthy sense). Alas very many people do not.
When environments cause people to give up on values that keep them healthy, those environments are sick and make people sick. Humans are not blank slate masters of everything: we're animals. And what we need isnt arbitrary and different and unique and special.
There are some values so essential that when we see people giving them up, we ought regard the perpetrators of that changes as abusive manipulators; or at least, naively engaging in abuse.