Mick Hartley yesterday blogged, in response to this, about the slippery slope that the smoking ban is towards the top end of:
My point isn’t that there’s no truth in this. Of course there is. We know nicotine is addictive, never mind the whole nervous what-to-do-with-my-hands-in-this-tense-social-situation stuff which adds to the compulsion. But when you start going down this road, where do you stop? The more we find out about neurology and psychology the more we discover all these compulsions and genetic predispositions and all the rest of it, and behaviour which used to be seen as a matter of moral choice gets therapeutised as a manifestation of some syndrome or other. Antisocial bastard? He’s got mild Asperger’s Syndrome. Greedy pig? A compulsive eating disorder. Arrogant sod? Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Carry on and ultimately, at some level where Buddhism meets neurophysiology, maybe all our decisions are illusory, and the active responsible agent who’s supposed to be making all these personal choices just disappears.
Great stuff, but I’m not sure that I entirely agree. If this was indeed the slippery slope involved, I would be with Mick Hartley in wanting us to stay at the top of it. But I don’t think it is. I think the smoking ban is about pollution, and about the way that pollution is seen as not being a property rights issue, but instead as a criminal assault issue. Blowing smoke at someone is now seen as like stabbing them. The result is similar; it just takes a little longer. Next on this slippery slope are not individual behaviours, like being a greedy pig, so much as other smoke-belching activities, like driving cars and airplanes, with the rules of what exactly constitutes “smoke” being ever more tightly written.
After all, smoking has been turned from a mere habit into a crime by this ban. And crimes are all about the individual responsibility of the criminals who commit them. I do not hear anyone saying that smoking is an illness, the way they do about drinking alcohol too regularly and too much.
You can argue, and I do argue, that “passive smoking”, like smoking itself, is something you do, and consent to doing, by being near smokers rather than keeping away from them, which you can do if property rights are allowed to operate, and to create areas where smoking is forbidden by the property owner. As Mick Hartley says, in circumstances like that,: “you turn around and go elsewhere”.
But what about people who are obliged, in various degrees, to consort with smokers? Does the fact that a battered wife “consents” to being abused (by not earlier abandoning the abusive relationship) excuse the abuser, when the battered wife finally gives up on the relationship, and calls in the police and presses charges? And what about children raised by smokers? Is that not like beating them every day for no reason? That is the parallel that we now find ourselves arguing about.
And if the argument is that cars and airplanes stink up the entire planet, nobody has anywhere to go to escape from that kind of repeated assault, if that is what it is. So there is no consent argument against banning those nozious practices. Collectivists love pollution, because pollution often is collective, that is, hard to avoid.
So if you want to apply the “what next?” argument to the smoking ban, think noxious fumes, and also things like evil electrical effects from phones, power stations, heaters, carpets, etc. Actually don’t. Don’t give them ideas.
Where neurology arguments might push us down a slope is in those areas and arguments where it is said that this or that crime should actually be less of a crime than it is now. Things like small robberies committed by the unemployed, by ethnic minorities, or by the physically handicapped, etc. Then, I think that Mick Hartley’s argument would be spot on. But smoking is not that kind of issue at all. Not at the moment anyway.
What you say makes sense, but I’m not entirely sure I follow it to the same conclusion. A lot of the people on the other side of this debate may consciously think they are pushing a “public health regulation,” but in the back of their minds they all know it’s really about social engineering. Public health has just been a convenient platform. If it were really about public health, I think it would have stopped at separate ventilating systems for the required non-smoking section. The point is that these people are very (and hypocritically) selective about their targets. They are like Mormons who frown on alcohol but stuff themselves with cake. It really is all about smoking with them, for reasons which remain mysterious.
You’d need a degree in psychology to tease it all apart, but somehow I suspect there really is something to the fact that all Ayn Rand heroes smoke but don’t drink, whereas characters on Star Trek drink but don’t smoke.
Brave words but I’m sure that the author of the quote wouldn’t think twice about getting help from a mental health professional when/if he’ll need it.
The thing about being liberal or libertarian is that you don’t have to be a moralising sod (such as the author of the quote)… That’s something I find I need to stress often. You don’t have to be an Immanuel Kant or St. Aquinas…
As someone with a mild Asperger’s and compulssive-obsessive disorder related to eating I can certainly appreciate the n-th degree of B.S. of the quote.
If anyone is curious, my issues don’t bother people… I don’t let them bother people… but that takes effort and sometimes, yes, understanding on the part of those willing to bother.
As for “moral agents” and “morality”… rather give me “utility-maximizing agent” and economism any day. 🙂
Collectivists love pollution, because pollution often is collective, that is, hard to avoid.
I think the idea is that collectivism is the default option where no system of property rights exists. For example, nobody owns the air, so we have a good old tragedy of the commons in the form of air pollution. And since I think we are about 100 years away from technology which could institute a private ownership system over the air and the oceans (e.g. nanoscopic membranes separating volumes of air and water, programmatically allowing passage according to well defined rules), collectivism really is the only option as far as atmospheric pollution is concerned, and I say this as a committed liberal.
Well, I’m a political libertarian but also a hard determinist and — by extension, almost — an amoralist.
I don’t ascribe moral agency to the things people do. To me, there’s no need for moral distinction. That’s not to say that decisions are illusory — only that the freedom to do otherwise is.
Nor does it mean that we can’t preserve the law and punish transgressors. You can punish someone even if you think they could not have done otherwise given their precise circumstances. You can feel complete empathy for someone and still cart them off to prison or treat them like the gluttonous, self-rightous, rude, irritable pricks that they are.
Heck, the biggest obstacle to defeating someone is learning to understand them, to see what they believe and desire, and where they are vulnerable. But we do it all the time out of necessity.
The problem that society runs into when it decides to remove moral responsibility is that they often throw out actual accountability along with it. The logic goes like this: Why, if he did it because of an identifiable chemical imbalance or genetic predisposition, then he was not morally responsible for his actions (because true moral responsibility requires free will), thus Who are we to judge him?
Well, they’re not taking their own medicalization of human behavior to its logical ends. If even the mildest personality traits, habits, mannerisms, and actions arise out of electrochemical balances and genetic predisposition and exposure to particular environments/stimuli, then no one is responsible for anything they do. We are in a permanent state of temporary insanity.
And if you simultaneously accept also the proposition that no one should be held responsible for actions for which they are not morally responsible, then no action has any positive or negative consequences.
This is the real absurdity of medicalizing and therapeutizing human behavior. You get to pick and choose between those you consider to have moral agency and those who have some sort of “condition.” Oh, angry Uncle Bob’s just got a case of Bush Derangement Syndrome. Little Billy’s not rambunctious; he’s got ADD. Pretty soon we’ll be whispering to each other that Steve in Accounting’s got a “case of the Mondays.”
Even worse, you can start dismissing your opponents not just as wrong but as imbalanced, a little “twisted,” maybe even a bit insane. Did he have a good relationship with his mom? Is she just frustrated by her search for an elusive father figure?
As a result of all this psychoanalyzing, the common man has taken note. Theodore Dalrymple has written extensively on this: criminals not holding themselves responsible for the crimes they committed, people reflexively blaming their childhoods or other influences in their past for their current behavior.
The very belief that they need to be “fixed” rather than change their own behavior makes them all the more truly “anti-social.” It’s not their responsibility when they assault or kill; it’s just that something in their brain “snapped” or the knife somehow “went in” of its own accord — entirely divorced of human handiwork. As a result, the responsibility is transferred onto doctors or onto “the system” in general: if they don’t do their job of fixing me or “sorting out” my head, I can’t be held responsible for what happens. So if I get out of prison, why regulate my own behavior? If I do something bad, apparently the prison psychologist didn’t do a proper job.
I have a suggestion: if we’re going to keep studying how the human brain works, and keep explaining away a growing list of human actions as the result of cascading neuron firings, we need to start telling people that they will be held accountable even for actions that can be explained in a CAT scan or EEG. We hold that your right to swing your fist ends at my nose, and we loan some power to the government to help ensure that this is enforced.
This may not be the most popular position in modern society, but it seems pretty consistent to me… and it seems more realistic than trying to stop the slide down the medicalization slippery slope. The tools to explore the working of the human body, the inner machinery of the brain and decision-making process will be growing in power very quickly in the coming years, and we need a way to respond to the claims that goes beyond insistence on moral accountability.
Side note: In a somewhat perverse way, this hard determinist/amoralist comes around full circle to Christianity. As Orson Scott Card pointed out in Speaker for the Dead:
The question is, what quantum of proof is needed before imposing restrictions on citizens? Is it enough that one other citizen thinks that some behavior is harming him? “Hello, that fellow’s giving me the evil eye! I’m feeling peckish! Kill him!”
The slippery slope leads to the lowest common dingbat denominator.
We have had lead pollution in the atmosphere since 1923 when it was introduced into petrol.
The smoking ban is a purely economic decision, and the surrounding debate is a smokescreen.
Pun intended.
Robert Speirs –
If harm can’t be proven to have a particular source, it can’t be prosecuted. Call it a tragedy of the commons if you will, but unless there is the reasonable expectation that a particular action will cause harm, the actor shouldn’t be punished. Running into one smoker outside the theater might increase your risk of lung cancer by some infinitesmal degree, but try proving in a court of law that it was more than one more straw on the camel’s back. You’ve been exposed to tons of carcinogens throughout your life; virtually every industrial product has some carcinogenic component.
Nothing is gained by punishing the butterfly in Brazil for the tornado in Texas, even if by some Rube Goldberg-like series of events, the flap of the butterfly’s wings somehow leads to the tornado. Punishing that butterfly won’t prevent future tornadoes.
So there’s some limit to how far society can go protecting itself. It has to tolerate — nay, accept — some level of inherent risk.
So, when can you take action; when can you claim harm? When you can verify it, which is the natural limit imposed by reality on us humans. We have a court system that (supposedly) requires actual proof beyond a reasonable shadow of a doubt.
Oh, and be careful with that word, “citizen.” Stick with “person,” since citizenship implies something that is granted rather than something that is inherent; and anything that can be given can be taken away. I don’t want to tie any rights to something that can be taken away, unless I absolutely have to. (While the truth of the matter may be that personhood is equally illusory, at least our shared delusion protects it more than citizenship.)
I don’t feel safer – or more free – for having delusions, shared or not.
Well, okay. But mass delusions create value. For example, the value of money. An American $100 dollar bill isn’t worth much — it’s a little woven scrap that could get you a bit of heat if you burned it. Other than that, its absolute value is pretty much nil.
But because people all over the world *think* — or agree — that it’s worth something, it is. No, you can’t go to some central bank and demand gold for it. But you can walk into stores all over the place, set it down on the counter, and get something for it.
If you don’t feel secure in that, then what you’re really distrusting is the reliability of all those people (which you could argue, of course). And if you think your money, or your rights, would get you anything if all those people decided that they had no value… well, sorry. Your personhood and a buck will get you a decent cup of coffee.
There are many good points in the main posting and comment above. I’d like to add another modest view.
This is by way of a question that could be asked by opinion pollsters, and answered or considered by anyone.
Think of an action, we will call it X, and keep it secret.
This action X should be the thing you do, by habit, repetitively, often, regularly, etc that (of itself) is not against the law or is not a serious crime. However, it is the thing you do that you feel is most objectionable to other people, or certain groups of other people. [Note: examples could be: coarse fishing, paying for sex, using chemical insecticides in your garden, smoking in confined public spaces, spitting in public, breaking open-road speed limits, dropping litter, etc].
Now, do youy feel that it would be reasonable, of society in the UK, to make X illegal (if it is not already), or that it should be made a serious criminal offence (if it is currently only a minor offence)?
Having considered the case of X, what is your view on Y (the current issue of similar nature)?
Has your careful consideration of your action of type X made any difference to your view on whether Y should be made illegal (or more criminal than currently)?
Best regards
The above comment reminds me of a discussion I had about twenty years ago with a tobacco smoker about the idiocy of the anti-pot laws. I asked her “What if they made tobacco illegal? Would you think that’s OK?” Talk about prophetic! But she just shrugged. I guess she thought it could never happen. Or maybe she just didn’t want to concede I had a point!
However, Nigel, at least half of the objectionable practices on your list are no one else’s business. If other people object to them, they’re simply being jerks. This is what I mean about the “quantum of proof” that must be shown before a practice can be appropriately made illegal. It is the responsibility of government to reject irrational delusions, such as that tobacco smoke harms (not just irritates) bystanders.
@Robert Speirs: I think we agree, but am slightly concerned that your comment of 1911hours on 19th Feb indicates that you think otherwise.
More generally, and expanding on the “quantum of proof”, it is also necessary to consider whether the new law (or other procedure) is beneficial overall. For this, in an ideal world (from which we are far), one would also need knowledge of the cost of accepting the “bad thing” times how often it currently happens (the latter being, I think, Robert’s quantum of proof) plus the zero cost of doing nothing about it. This needs to be compared to the cost/inconvenience of the new law/procedure times how often that occurs (ie an awful lot), plus the cost of the “bad thing” times the residual (and unprevented) number of times that occurs under the new “improved” regime, plus the suitably amortised capital cost and running costs of the new regime.
Similar evaluations should also be done on alternative solutions to the problem. For example, in the case of passive smoking being forced upon bar/restaurant workers, one should consider a law compelling installation of effective air conditioning in any smoking zones that bars/restaurants chose, voluntarily, to operate.
While it is often very difficult to calculate the above with any accuracy, it is nearly always possible to make reasonable assumptions about the range of costs and probabilities and so evaluate or bound the range of benefit from the proposed new regime. Where such benefit turns out to be negative, obviously it would not be prudent to proceed.
This sort of analysis is done all the time in industry and commerce, eg concerning whether to drill for oil in certain places, launch an improved product, use a new and expensive medical treatment, etc. It is also done in government, though not when some “higher” political imperative is operational.
From statements that I have heard in the media, it is quite clear that the political sector (not just the Government, given the free vote) believes that this anti-smoking law is good, as it discourages smoking. Such indirect attacks on the freedom of the people are interesting; this is as a substitute for direct attack (ie making all smoking illegal), which is clearly viewed as not politically acceptable.
A really important issue is therefore whether such indirect attacks, on false and deceitful grounds that do not stand up themselves to direct scrutiny, are to be tolerated by the electorate. This is especially where the unaffected majority are forcing a view on the minority “for their own good”, where the minority that are affected do not see it that way.
Hence my question above (at 1528 on 19th Feb). This is, I hope obviously, designed to make the unaffected majority think hard about forcing their view on the unwilling minority when, in all truth, they (the majority) really obtain no benefit themselves (or very little). In Robert’s words: “If other people object to them, they’re simply being jerks.”
Best regards
I agree with Brian that it is a different slippery slope. Hqaving said that, the idea of no one daring to light up in the smoke stained old battle-crurisers of South Manchester is still unthinkable for me. When I go into my local for a pint the landlady is smoking! So… The anti-smoking lobby has achieved the unthinkable. This will encourage all sorts of anti- lobbies. Even if it is a different slippery slope there is nothing to stop the “ban it” crowd from misappropriating the momentum of the smoking ban.
You want my guess? It’s motorists next, and budget airlines. The powers that be hate the fact that private sector travel is so much more successful than the failing state sector. They’ll hit with the environment.
It all depends on what sort of people the parents are. A lot of my friends who have young children also smoke. They just don’t do it around the kids. My parents both smoked when I and my brother were young, but never in the house: they would go out into the garden in order to have a cigarette. Quite simply, any decent person wouldn’t smoke around children. Being wheeled around in low pushchairs is arguably more of a threat to young children’s respiratory health than having parents who smoke – low pushchairs put the children very close to car exhausts after all. I don’t see many people railing against them.
One does not need to be a libertarian to see this. For example M. J. Oakeshott wrote (in “On Human Conduct” 1975) that a collection of ill people with the state as the enity that cares for them is not a sustainable model of association for human beings.
And, of course, we should remember C.S. Lewis’ “Abolition of Man”, with its examination of the consequences of seeing all human action as either the result of various environmental or genetic predetermination or the result of some form of treatment.
Many of the people who are or wish to be in the position of “adjusting” what we do somehow see themselves as outside this environmental and/or genetic predetermination of course.
One may not need to be believe in the existance of the “I” (the self of philosophical,as opposed to political libertarianism) in order to oppose statism (after all F.A. Hayek did not believe in the “I”), but it certainly helps to believe in the existance of agents (i.e. the “I”, seeing human beings as subjects not just objects) if one wishes to support freedom.
After all how can one support freedom if one (the “I”) does not exist?
How can one have any beliefs if there is no “I” (no believer)?
What is even meant by “freedom” in this case?
Is it like making a river “free” by blowing up a dam?
Freedom as randomness – not freedom as the choices of a being.
The denial of the “I” is (of course) the denial of being. And it is self contradictory – not just because it denies the self, but because if there is no “I” who is doing the denying?
“I do not exist” has a radical contradiction in it.
Hayek (for all his great powers of mind and his great complexity – which, I freely admit, I have not explored here – nor will I be examing the “Sensory Order” here) never freed himself from his J.S. Mill style semi denial of the “being” in human being.
J.S. Mill was in philosphy as he was in economics the start of the great decline in liberal thought.
“All this is very up in the clouds” – not at all.
After all even in “On Liberty” (let alone the vile “Principles of Political Economy”) we are told that the putting regulations on what people can sell is not a violation of freedom – because that is freedom in a different sense.
We are also told that whilst overseas trade restrictions are a foolish idea (J.S. Mill did not break totally with free market thought in all things) it was not a violation of freedom (again it is different sense time).
And I have not even touched on the “harm” principle (the great rejection of the common law nonaggression principle).
In Hayek also we see efforts to find a substitute for old doctrines such as the nonaggression principle (because those legal-political doctrines are tied to philisophical doctrines).
Instead we have such things as the need for a law to be universally applied for it to be a proper law (easy – let all people with two legs have one leg cut off, or just a law that no person is to be allowed to have legs), or the endless surprises (such as the point in the “Constitution of Liberty” where Hayek expresses surprise at how licensing laws were being used and states that he has changed his position on them) – a person who accepted the nonaggression principle would not have as many surprises and the need to change position again and again.
But then the nonaggression principle (as, for example, expressed by Bastiat in his work “The Law”) can not be accepted as it is tied to a view of what human beings are – a view that a determist can not accept without either contradiction or breaking with determinism.
So we see the desperate scratching around for other clear principles to limit government or as a guide to what law is – a search for alternative principles that do not work.
Philosiphical confusion (often caused by too great complexity) can have harmful practical political effects.
At least Ludwig Von Mises did not make this mistake. Whilst he never really opposed the determinism of his time he did make a point of stressing the “unanalyseable I”.
Efforts to analyse the “I” in the reductionist sense of reducing the “I” (the self) and its choices into other things (with what ever cleverness this is done) mean leaving the path of wisdom.
And such efforts have had very “practical” results indeed.