> Well the same reason you don't share your email with the FBI and agree to be monitored at all times.
Perhaps you could spell out this reason, and explain how it also applies to wearing face masks?
Perhaps you could spell out this reason, and explain how it also applies to wearing face masks?
You should wear a mask. You may be an asymptomatic carrier, and masks have fairly good odds (~90%) at stopping liquid droplet spread.
However legally mandating masks is a different problem. The state is engaging in compelled action - which is usually right out save a few cases. Just as the state can't legally mandate someone to say they support the president, the state can't mandate helpful behavior - it's just not a power the state has.
Could the state legally require condoms unless you were intending to conceive? Condoms are effective at stopping almost all std/sti, and are 99.98% effective when used properly at preventing unwanted pregnancy. We could eliminate HIV tomorrow if the state forced their usage. You should use a condom, but that isn't the same as legally mandating them.
Maybe you actually do think the state shouldn't intrude on those freedoms, but you would be in a minority holding those views. Personally, I like laws that impose mask use during pandemics, speed limits on roads and restrictions against firing shots randomly into crowds, because their absence intrudes on my freedom to continue existing.
I even consider it possible to like these things while not considering it reasonable to "share your email with the FBI and agree to be monitored at all times". An analogy about condom use does not explain the connection at all.
When I'm not allowed to drive over 65mph, that's a restriction. I have no innate power to use government roads, so even requirements like a license and a seltbelt are aligned.
Let's talk about discharging a firearm since that doesn't have some of these special cases like government vs private roads. I do have a right to bear arms, I don't have a right to discharge them.
Typically there are restrictions even on private property. You can't discharge a firearm in a city, or on property that is too small. But, if I have several acres in the country I can discharge a firearm. If my discharge (either the noise or the round) crosses my property, then I may have an issue.
I agree these are good things but good and legal are unrelated. I think universal condom usage and donating to non-profits is good, but legally mandating those things would be problematic.
If everyone shared all of their data with the FBI - well, we could stop a lot of crime. Insider trading, lots of fraud, some premeditated murder. Though, that would be a grave invasion of your rights, wouldn't it?
Would you consider a law that disallows people from getting too close outside, or being in the same room, acceptable? Technically that is a restriction rather than a compelled action... one that's much more onerous than a mask mandate, but that's not the point, right?
Edit: "universal condom usage and donating to non-profits" are still red herrings regardless of this technicality. The point of masks is stop you from personally and directly killing someone that did not consent to you getting near to them and infecting them. Condoms only directly affect people that consented to be with each other (if one didn't consent then obviously that's another matter). Donating to charity may save lives but that's not the same as stopping you from personally killing someone.
Edit 2: I also feel like masks could be phrased in terms of being a restriction rather than a mandate. Surely a law not allowing you to spit in someone's face is a restriction? What about a law restricting the concentration of your breath droplets that get onto other people's faces, at least during a pandemic? If the only way to satisfy this is to stay well away from everyone or wear a mask, that's still a restriction. (Even I feel like that's cheating. But I also think that the existence of "cheats" like this is part of why the distinction is so silly to start with.)
I recall reading years ago about an AIDS patient who was convicted for manslaughter after knowingly having unprotected sex with many people without disclosing their condition.
Going back to speed limit analogy, driving at 100mph down a crowded high street (I'm thinking of a narrow European-style street here where there's no such thing as jaywalking) is tantamount to murder. But - like your seasonal flu argument - even if you set the speed limit at 10mph (imagine a fantasy world where people stuck to that speed limit) occasionally there would be a road death to pedestrians. Does that mean that is essentially murder too, and that we should ban all driving altogether? No, we have to choose some threshold, a speed limit, that is an acceptable trade off between allowing people to live their lives vs safety to others. Any limit like that will always be somehow wrong - too high and too low at the same time, in some sense - but you have to draw the line somewhere. The same goes for a limit to how much we allow people to risk spreading potentially deadly diseases to others.
If that trade off only involves the safety of the participants then you can leave it to them to choose that threshold. For example, some might choose to take part in extreme sports while others consider them too risky. But if the trade off is between the benefit of the participant vs risk to an unconsenting third party, then the threshold of course has to be set in law.
(BTW, on the subject of comment votes, I've not been down voting your comments (except the first one so others don't end up down this rabbit hole), actually I've been upvoting them to ungrey them. Although I still find your views extremely strange it has been interesting and you do seem to be constructively engaging, and I hope I have been too.)
No, you're making the wrong distinction. The right distinction is between causing actual harm, and not causing actual narm.
You do have a right to travel unimpeded over public roads (since you're a member of the public and a taxpayer). Imposing a 65 mph speed limit on you and giving a cop the power to stop you and write you a ticket that imposes a fine (or a court appearance) for exceeding the limit, even if you have caused no harm to anyone, is wrong. However, posting a sign that says "maximum safe speed 65 mph", and then imposing extra liability on you if you cause an accident and it is found that you were exceeding that posted limit would be fine.
Similarly, forcing you by law to wear a mask in public, even if you have caused no harm to anyone, is wrong. But if you aren't wearing a mask and you cough or sneeze on someone and they get COVID-19 because of that, having a law that imposes liability on you would be fine.
This is because alcohol impairs your judgement and reflexes - and when you're driving a 1 tonne piece of metal that can maim and kill, you want your wits about you.
I confess I find this kind of reasoning very bizarre - I truly do admire the US, and all the freedoms, literature, and amazing critical thought it's given to us. But I still don't understand the strange logic that seems to emanate from certain circles - where people will sincerely claim it's their God-given right to drive over the speed limit and kill people, to take drugs and kill people, to shoot guns and kill people, and other such things.
It's also in this context I hear people from the US complaining a lot about the "nanny-state".
Or that somehow, if the government provides any modicum of healthcare, you are infringing on their God-given right to make really poor healthcare spending decisions.
I get it there's happy medium between the two - and I apologise if there's hyperbole in the above - but as an outsider looking at how the US has handled the COVID-19 pandemic - it's heart-wrenching.
As a country, you have nearly 100,000 people dead (the worst in the world I think?) - and people are still talking about how "mask wearing is oppression", or "lockdowns are trampling on our rights!".
Even your leaders - if the press can be believed - apparently see wearing a mask as a sign of weakness. Yet other governments (e.g. UK, Australia, Scotland) have sacked high-level ministers, simply because they breached the health lockdown rules. It's the complete opposite - those governments are taking it seriously (or at least trying to be seen to be).
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-52553229 https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/apr/10/nsw-m... https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-52177171
There are some things our government does well and many things it does far less than well. Government is also self-perpetuating, so if you’re going to make a mistake, I think it’s wise to make a mistake in having too little government, as that’s easier to correct.
(In any event, I think it’s also fair to observe/predict that “drunk driving is OK as long as the outcome does not result in a crash” is an extremely minority view in the population and does not reflect the laws in any US state.)
You are misstating the view I was describing.
I did not say drunk driving was OK as long as it doesn't cause actual harm. I only said drunk driving should not be punishable by law if it doesn't cause actual harm. Not being punishable by law does not make it any less stupid or irresponsible.
I also did not say that there are no ways at all to address drunk driving that doesn't cause harm. For example, consider the following scenario: I'm a cop, and I see a car driving erratically. I turn on my lights and pull the car over. I am perfectly justified in doing that because the car is driving erratically.
I find out that the driver of the car is drunk. I tell the driver, "sir, why don't we leave your car parked here, off the road, and lock it, and I can call someone to come and pick you up?" If the driver protests, I put him in the back of my police car, make sure his car is safely parked and locked, and drive him to the police station--where I then call someone to come pick him up. No ticket, no citation, no fine--just getting him safely home and avoiding possible harm to anyone else.
Have I overstepped the boundaries that I have argued must be placed on what the government can do? Not at all. First of all, a cop is still a citizen, and any citizen has the right to try to stop someone from continuing obviously reckless and irresponsible behavior. Second, I didn't punish the person; he gets no fine, no jail time, no record of any offense. So the rule that nobody should be punished by law unless they cause actual harm has not been violated.
It is true that supporting the kind of regime I just described, in preference to what we have now, is an extremely minority view. But I think it's because people have simply failed to think through the implications.
I have made no such claims. I did not say anyone had a right to harm anyone else. I explicitly said that people who cause actual harm should be punished.
You are simply attacking a straw man here. And you should definitely not be judging the US by what you see in the popular press.
Surely you can see that's a recipe for disaster?
People are very bad at judging risks - and everybody things they're cleverer/more careful/better than the average.
That's exactly why no government that I'm aware of has ever enacted what you dscribed.
Ok - so you make it that driving whilst drunk is OK - and you will only be charged if you kill/maim somebody. You will soon get a whole bunch of young 20 year old males, who think they are invincible (or that they can hold their liquor like Captain America) who end up destroying families in completely preventable MVAs.
Everybody thinks they're a "better driver than the average" - or that "their reflexes are really good". Unfortunately, the average is exactly that - the average.
Sure, according to you - you can now charge them after having killed a mum and her kid walking across the road - but what about the fact that you've essentially encouraged this behaviour, and raised the probability of such things happening?
Similar logic applies to any risk taking behaviour - yes, there are certainly grey areas - but there's a reason handguns are a restricted item and not anybody can buy them at any corner store. Having a gun in and of itself doesn't "harm somebody", as you say - but having more handguns distributed among the population, without any attempt to reduce the risk (e.g. background checks, safety checks, licensing checks) will increase the risk that something bad will happen.
Likewise drugs are a controlled item.
And with public health directives like this - the aim is to force people to take sensible precautions to protect those vulnerable among the population. I hate to say this, but people are sometimes selfish and only think of themselves (we all do this). So sometime you need somebody to look out for society as a whole.
No. You evidently lack basic reading comprehension, so I suppose it's futile to ask you to go back and re-read what I wrote to see that I explicitly contradicted this.
> People are very bad at judging risks - and everybody things they're cleverer/more careful/better than the average.
First of all, speak for yourself.
Second, evidently you have no clue about how people who actually are good at judging risks get that way. Hint: it isn't by "thinking" anything. It's by objectively evaluating your own behavior the same way you objectively evaluate other people's behavior. Everybody can see when someone else is doing something dumb. All you need to learn is how to look at yourself as the someone else. This is a learned skill.
Third, if it's true that "people" are very bad at judging risks, that's just as true of government bureaucrats and lawmakers. Why should I trust them to properly balance all the risks vs. benefits of various laws and policies? Let alone "look out for society as a whole", to use your phrase? All the historical evidence we have says that they suck at it.
Fourth, drunk drivers don't kill other people, if and when they do, by magic. And they don't do it purely on their own. There is always a chain of events, and there are plenty of places to break the chain. For example, you describe a drunk driver killing a mother and child walking across the road. How did the mother and child come to be walking across the road when a car was coming? If they had waited, they'd still be alive. If you say "well, it was a blind turn and they didn't see the car", why weren't they taking extra precautions if it was a blind turn? And so on.
Similar remarks apply to other situations where irresponsible actions by one person harm others. Everybody focuses on the harm to the victims and the badness of the irresponsible person. Nobody spends any time teaching themselves, or their friends, or their kids, how not to be the victim. But knowing that there are some irresponsible and dangerous people in the world, and learning how to keep from being harmed by them, is supposed to be part of being an adult human being in this world. Certainly an adult human being is not supposed to expect the government to make sure no bad things happen to them; no government can possibly do that, or even come close. But that's what our mentality has become.
Were you firing it at someone on purpose? Or did you just not realize you were pointing it at someone?
If you were firing it at someone on purpose, even if you didn't hit them, that's already a common law crime: in most jurisdictions it's called assault with a deadly weapon or something similar. Whether it would also qualify as attempted manslaughter would depend on your intent: were you actually trying to kill them, or just scare them?
If you just didn't realize you were pointing it at someone, and you didn't cause any harm, you should not be liable for any offense. But if I were the someone you were pointing the gun at, I would do my level best to avoid all further interaction with you since you're clearly a careless and irresponsible person. I would also spread the word amongst the neighbors so they know it too.
there are places you can live in the world that work much more closely to your post-facto ideal. however, if you want the benefits of the rest a contemporary western industrial society, you'll either have to convince a lot more people that post-facto only is right, or just live with the fact that most of the rest of us thing that post-facto only is wrong.
Yes, because most of the rest of you do not see the harms caused by sanctioning behavior that some government official believes increases the odds of harm. If you did, you would realize that only sanctioning behavior that causes actual harm is the right rule for the government, because humans simply cannot be trusted with the power to dictate the behavior of others based on some estimate of "the odds of harm" when no actual harm is caused.
Most of the rest of you also do not realize that the sanctions of law are not the only kinds of sanctions that can be applied. For example, I do not believe the government has the right to require me to wear a mask whenever I go out. But I do believe the grocery store I go to, for example, has the right to require me to wear a mask before I enter the store (which it does, and which I happily comply with--indeed, I'd be doing it even if it wasn't required), as a condition of being allowed to shop there. (And all the store employees are wearing masks as well.) I also believe I have the right to require anyone who comes into my house to wear a mask (as my wife and I did a few days ago when two people from the flooring company came to look at gaps in the laminate floor they installed--they made no objection to wearing the masks).
When I describe cases like this, I get asked: well, if you're doing the same thing the government is telling everybody to do anyway, what's the problem? The problem is that the cases I just described are the easy ones. What about the hard ones, where someone's particular circumstances make the best thing for them different from what the government is mandating for everybody? For example, an acquaintance of my wife's recently was forbidden from visiting her dying grandmother in a nursing home, because of government mandated lockdown rules. (No family members were permitted to see her.) The family would have been fine with wearing masks and gloves, washing their hands, and taking all other prudent precautions; but nobody was even permitted to exercise common sense, because the government lockdown did not allow for that; it was just a single, one-size-fits-all, hard and fast rule. So the grandmother died with no loved ones there with her, because of a government diktat. That is simply wrong in any country that calls itself a free country. And a government that forces such things on people loses the confidence of the people.
* government policy/law is always one-size-fits-all and that never works
* government is incapable of nuance or intelligence when deciding policy
* government preventing harm preemptively is oppression
So far, I see no evidence that you have any arguments that were not a part of that usenet group from 25 years ago. I feel fairly comfortable with the way these were debated and shot down back then, so in the absence of an actual new argument, it doesn't seem worth continuing.
Is not what you say. If you insist on breaking it down into "axioms", here are some:
(1) Government policy/law cannot take into account the individual circumstances of individual cases, since it is impossible for government officials/lawmakers to obtain that information; so government policy/law that dictates what people must or must not do will always dictate the wrong thing for some people.
(2) The government dictating the wrong thing for anyone is wrong in a free country.
(3) Therefore, government policy/law should not dictate what people must or must not do at all unless failing to do so would make it impossible for a free country to exist.
Whether or not the government dictating that everybody must wear masks in public, or must not leave their homes except for a certain small number of reasons, would be justifiable under #3 is a question that might be worth discussing (I personally think it wouldn't be, but others might be able to give reasonable arguments that it would). However, the grounds under which the government dictating those things is actually being justified is nothing like that. The grounds on which it is actually being justified is that we don't actually have a free country: that the government does not need to meet anything like the above standard before dictating what people must and must not do.
If your response is basically, yes, indeed, we don't have a free country (which is what it seems to me to be), then I guess you're right that the discussion isn't worth continuing. But it certainly seems like a sad outcome considering the country's original goals.
I also put my foot down on legal penalties for compelled actions such as mask wearing. I also give masks out for free to my neighbors and friends. I support wearing a mask, I will never support fining or jailing an American over not wearing one.
With rights come... well just rights.
The state requires me to wear underwear on the bus, put kids in car seats, signal at intersections, keep a gun safely, not let my tires go bald, and many other things to protect people around me.