Comment by epgui | Hacker News Reader

Comment by epgui | Hacker News Reader

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This is the problem with people who think like you. You see someone say "there can be good reasons to suspend rights in exceptional circumstances" and you just go and find an example of a terrible justification to suspend rights (sometimes with an outright evil or cruel motivation), as if it was the same thing.

When I used the example of STIs, I was alluding to things like how the "duty to report" [1] and the criminalization of very limited and targeted behaviours [2] have the effect of narrowing very specific rights in very specific circumstances. These are policies that are reasonable and that generally are designed to limit rights and freedoms as little as possible in order to achieve a particular goal. We're not talking about suspending rights just because it's "convenient", and I wasn't alluding to using humans as guinea pigs for unethical research programmes... I don't know what you were thinking.

You apparently don't see the difference, but that doesn't mean you have special insight-- if anything, it just means you're confused about the principles at play (or, perhaps more charitably, you're assuming that I'm a fool and are misinterpreting what I'm saying).

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[1] https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/001929.htm

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/policies/law/states/exposure.html

^ The provided links are US-centred (because I'm assuming most readers are American) but one can easily find very similar policies in Canada or almost any other developed country.

I recognize that you were not trying to allude to the countless times where the limitation of rights were used to cause harm. I also recognize that good and bad justifications are not the same thing. My thinking is simply that there are better examples than Syphilis and HIV, such as seat belts or speed limits. What I saw you say was "You live in a society that actively limits the spread of these diseases" and I'm saying that is a poor example of justification for such limitations because:

1) The listener might be disease-free regardless of society's efforts (the limitation's benefit might not be relatable)

2) We live in a society that actively spreads diseases in the name of protection and profit (the justification behind limitations might be engineered)

3) These diseases still exist in unknown quantities (the limitations might be ineffective)

A better example would be something like seat belts or speed limits because:

1) The listener is far more likely to have been in or around a vehicle than they are to have contracted syphilis. (the limitation's benefit is relatable)

2) There are no instances of seat belts or speed limits having been used to justify excessive harm. (the limitation's benefit cannot be argued as having been engineered)

3) The impact on safety is far easier to measure and compare. (the limitation's effectiveness can be measured immediately)

But if you don't believe any of this to be relevant, then I must accept that. Thank you for your time.

The example was very well chosen, because:

1) it's exactly the type of infectious disease that public health experts deal with routinely. See the first link I provided for a long list of others.

2) it's not an "extreme" concern in the sense that there's no real danger of syphillis posing an immediate existential threat: it's a very mundane example

3) there are limitations on rights today, in most developed countries, centred around the chosen example. There are tradeoffs in place today which, similarly to seatbelts, are generally well tolerated by society.

4) it is in some sense better than the seatbelt example because it involves population dynamics (exponential growth and all the models we must make use of to make well-informed policy decisions), which are a different beast. Seatbelt behaviour is linear and has an individual blast radius. Infectious diseases are non-linear and have a collective blast radius.

There's a reason there was no trucker convoy protest over seatbelt laws: people were panicking because they didn't know anything about infectious diseases and didn't understand the motivation for taking public health action. It's an almost-classic case of fear of the unknown, and yet there were always similar types of measures in plain sight.

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