Posts by HORansome
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Hard News: Dropping the Bomber, in reply to Steve Withers,
Actually, people do provide a credible and plausible alternative candidate explanation for the material Bomber ruminates on (in a conspiratorial fashion), which is that National (and Labour, just not to same extent[1]) are adherents to a free market hypothesis which doesn't seem to work (i.e. it doesn't provide the results predicted by the theory). This common rival explanation explains the data by saying that it's not a masterplan to give the wealth to the already wealthy but rather the result of dogmatic adherents failing to realise that no matter how many times they assert "The market will sort this out!" it doesn't.
It's a classic case of what Chomsky calls "institutional analysis." We had/have a generation of economists (who are trained our current crop of MPs and Treasury officials) who subscribe to a economic model that doesn't seem to work. Rather than give up on the degenerating research programme they keep making ad hoc modifications to it to try and rescue it, but it always end up with the same result: a widening gap between the rich and the poor.
Folk psychology time: I suspect that the adherence of certain economists to things like Neo-liberalism is analogous to the adherence by some to sophisticated theological doctrines, which also get lots of ad hoc modifications to protect dogma from criticism.
1. Which is one of the many reasons why I will be voting for the Greens, and not voting Labour, with my party vote: Labour are just the more acceptable face of the free market and I don't find that acceptable at all.
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OnPoint: Sock-Puppeting Big Tobacco to…, in reply to BenWilson,
But there are things that I don't support. I might go into them later, if I get a sense that this debate is heading in a direction of attempting to understand each other, rather than preaching to the choir.
How very Owen Glenn of you.
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OnPoint: Sock-Puppeting Big Tobacco to…, in reply to BenWilson,
I'm defining the smokers I'm talking about in this sentence as ones who aren't harming people, and saying corralling them is not good.
I think part of the problem in this debate is that we don't think your group (the smokers who harm no one) actually exist and thus we are talking about the group that does exist, smokers who do cause some harm to others.
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OnPoint: Sock-Puppeting Big Tobacco to…, in reply to BenWilson,
It's how the whole thing started. Read any Plato...
It might be how it started, but it's not how it's done now. Most of us contemporary philosophers think Socrates was a dick.
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OnPoint: Sock-Puppeting Big Tobacco to…, in reply to Andrew E,
What public utility? Please be clear which one you're talking about here, I don't want the above confusion to re-occur.
Societal goods. Utility to society as a whole. You know, the main factor in most modern forms of utilitarianism when it comes to discussion of public policy.
I think you're vastly overstating the psychological enjoyment of smokers as being constitutive of the utility they get from smoking. If you want to do that, fine, but then you also need to factor in what addictions and health harms also play in that utility, as well as the future goods and harms. Also, given that you continue to ignore the role of addiction (which might undermine the enjoyment principle if the pleasure smokers get is actually satisfying symptoms of withdrawal), it's hard to take your claims of being a utilitarian seriously.
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OnPoint: Sock-Puppeting Big Tobacco to…, in reply to BenWilson,
You don't seem to account at all for the enjoyment that smokers get from what they are doing. Both the actual smoking, and also the freedom to choose to smoke, which has a big rebel factor in it. Furthermore, they really enjoy it, in a lot of cases. I'm surprised you would have forgotten this, but I guess utilitarianism somehow ended up meaning harm minimization over the last 150 years, so it's easy to conflate the two.
Having accused George of straw manning your argument now you are straw manning mine. Well done, sir.
I do factor in a smoker's enjoyment (that's why I said "limited private utility"). If you have an argument as to how individual utility trumps public utility in this case I'd like to hear it. Simply saying that people really enjoy smoking (which is a, but not the only, factor, in its utility). Smoking also has negative utility to a smoker (let alone other people around the smoker), and whilst some utility is psychological most of it is not; most modern versions of the hedonic calculus factor in known risks as being part of an activity's utility.
And, once again, you're just being wilfully ignorant about the harms of smoking when you say:
I don't think corralling smokers who aren't harming anyone is a good thing to do.
Also, if you are going to accuse us of characterising you as holding straw man positions, please don't do the same to us with your puritanism line. Some of us have actually studied the physiological, sociological and psychological harms in this case.
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OnPoint: Sock-Puppeting Big Tobacco to…, in reply to BenWilson,
Having actually looked up the word consensus, I'm rather surprised to find it doesn't mean unanimity.
That's a problem Climate Change Deniers have been suffering from for a long time. :)
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OnPoint: Sock-Puppeting Big Tobacco to…, in reply to BenWilson,
In fact, I don't even come from a rights based angle at all. I'm a much simpler kind of Utilitarian.
Well, if you're a utilitarian, then I think you should be agreeing with us rather than disagreeing. The public utility of restricting tobacco use (better living, everyone!) is a good which rather outstrips the limited private utility of smokers' not being harangued about their habit.
(This will be true of rule-based utilitarianism as well as standard consequentialism. Also, if you're a utilitarian you'll need a really good reason to think the means of production of tobacco production, the selling of tobacco (with its associated targeted advertising) et al aren't factors in deciding the public good of tobacco restriction).
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OnPoint: Sock-Puppeting Big Tobacco to…, in reply to BenWilson,
There's something fucked up about making the lives of people who do no harm to anyone else difficult, I dislike it where ever I see it.
Smoking, as an activity on the part of a smoker, does no harm to others? Really? What about secondhand smoke? The environmental impact (not just of smoking but the production of cigarettes)? The terrible working conditions in the plantations where tobacco is grown and the factories where said cigarettes are made?
A lot of us enjoy smoking, but let's not turn a blind eye to the consequences of that habit. Smoking doesn't just adversely affect the lives of smokers.
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OnPoint: Sock-Puppeting Big Tobacco to…, in reply to Keith Ng,
I think Graeme's point is that whilst you've shown why enshrining property rights is good for Big Tobacco you haven't shown that ACT's motivation to enshrine property rights in the BORA is motivated by Big Tobacco (i.e. isn't this a confluence of interests rather than sock puppetry?).