Posts by BenWilson
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OnPoint: Sock-Puppeting Big Tobacco to…, in reply to John Armstrong,
Sacha, you raised the economic argument here. I refuted it here, by saying:
My argument is not economic. It's moral. But I think the cost of smokers in a country that has superannuation is not what you think. It's quite cost effective, really, because it kills off people mostly after their productive life ends. This is a poor argument for it, though.
What about this is hard to understand? You're the one who first spoke of treating people's life choices in terms of their cost to the public health system. I think that's fucked up in a big way, precisely because looking at it that way leads to sick calculus, which was incidentally backed up by Peter Graham here.
For you to even speak of counting the public health cost of smokers as a harm against you is so unlike you I'm flabbergasted. Let's put aside that the claim is unproven, and could be bullshit, purely on economic terms (which was the only reason I raised that point - just noting this for the 10th time for anyone not keeping up, or too drunk to bother reading the thread). You're suggesting that you got harmed by someone else getting sick, because we have a welfare state? When exactly did you join ACT?
Does anyone here genuinely have so little good faith that you're all going to make me go back through this thread and prove that I never, ever said that that the economic arguments for or against smoking are compelling to me in the slightest? Did no one read that my only concern is the moral implications of depriving people of choice regarding their own harm?
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OnPoint: Sock-Puppeting Big Tobacco to…, in reply to izogi,
@izogi
Avoiding it, for anyone who wants to, is a lot to ask.
I never seem to have the slightest trouble.
@kracklite
Please don’t be so glib – there are real effects
I've not denied that.
A little taste and tact please? They’re not mere societal conventions, they’re founded on basic respect for other people.
Show me anywhere I've been disrespectful. All that's happening is I'm dissenting from a group opinion. Naturally not every point is going to be addressed since it's now slipping towards 6 vs 1. I'm doing my best.
@sacha
Perhaps an explanation of why (from that perspective) personal freedom is so much more important than other values could be more productive.
I don't think that. But it is a very important value. In the smoking debate, those anti seem to try to frame it out altogether, or evaluate it on behalf of others. That's not good thinking.
@horansome
Most of us contemporary philosophers think Socrates was a dick.
I'm sure that's going to go through the same cycle of changes it has since the time of Socrates.
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.
That's ridiculous. A smoker alone in an open air public place is harming no one else. My definition wasn't of smokers who never cause any harm to anyone else, ever. It was of smokers who aren't harming anyone at the time of the corralling.
But yes, since you wish to make so fine a point on it, I am writing off the extremely tiny harm of smelling someone smoking from a distance as "no harm". It's only an approximation - the harm is roughly the same as many others you might be simultaneously experiencing, if you are sensitive enough. A loud bus may be passing, hurting your ears. Someone may have farted nearby, causing you to inhale a small quantity of methane. A busker may be playing discordantly. The sun may be inconveniently reflecting in your eyes from a building window. A passer by might brush against you, dislodging your balance. Your coffee might have been overbrewed.
All of these things are just things you deal with in life, as part of being surrounded by other people getting on with their lives, involving extremely minor efforts on your part. You could hold hands to your ears. You could move away from the farter. You could put your mp3 player into your ears. You could turn away from the sun, or put some glasses on, or squint. You can step to recover your balance, or stand aside to let people pass. You could go to different cafe next time.
Yes, it is possible to smoke in a particularly obnoxious way. It's also very easy to point that out, which most smokers will take immediate note of, conveniently moving away, or extinguishing their cigarette. Similar remedies apply if someone is being obnoxious in other ways, like if the busker starts following you, or someone is reflecting at you with something they are holding, or someone looks like barging into your, or is leaning into you. These things do NOT require legislation and specially appointed officials. Just ordinary human respect, arising from ordinary human interaction.
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Up Front: One, in reply to Russell Brown,
Nah. I don’t think anyone in the world likes being reminded of their grief by becoming an involuntary spectacle.
There's a wide range of norms on this. In especially crowded countries, it's a sensitivity people can't afford. But this is NZ, and local customs should always be respected.
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OnPoint: Sock-Puppeting Big Tobacco to…, in reply to Carol Stewart,
Oh, for goodness' sake. a) do you accept that smoking imposes burdens on the public health system and b) do you not think perhaps the aim of these taxes is to offset these costs?
a) I accept that smoking kills people. I'm not sure how much of a burden this actually is, since everyone dies in the end, and people with shorter lives could easily burden it less.
b) It's a handy justification (although quite possibly completely unfair if the numbers are really done properly), but no, I don't think that's why it's taxed. It's taxed to discourage it.Did they offer classes in wearing people down in debate?
It's how the whole thing started. Read any Plato...
But I'm not trying to be difficult. I'm trying to engage this debate, rather than patronizingly agree with things I just don't, or go all quiet, as is the more common practice in this particularly polite debating club.
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OnPoint: Sock-Puppeting Big Tobacco to…, in reply to HORansome,
I do factor in a smoker's enjoyment (that's why I said "limited private utility").
No wonder I missed it. To call something that you do 20-odd times a day and get genuine pleasure from "limited private utility" caused me confusion. I apologize for suggesting you forgot the actual theory, but I totally disagree about the extent to which the utility is limited.
If you have an argument as to how individual utility trumps public utility in this case I'd like to hear it.
What public utility? Please be clear which one you're talking about here, I don't want the above confusion to re-occur.
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.
Not clear which direction this factoring works, though. For some, risk is exciting. Also, the very sense of freedom itself is something that matters to some people way more than to others. Who are you, really, to weigh up any of this private utility on behalf of others? You can only say how it works for you.
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.
No, you're just not taking the time to read carefully. 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. Having got that simple statement of my own personal opinion on the morality of such interference, it's on others to show that it doesn't apply in particular cases. Like smoking out of doors, where the volume of air into which the smoke dissipates is enormous. It's a very long way from the harm generated by passive smoking to just disliking an odour that you are sensitive to. On that one, unless in, say, an actual crowd, it seems to me that people could simply do what they do for all things that they don't much like, avoid them. It's really not a lot to ask.
please don't do the same to us with your puritanism line
I'm calling it how I see it. But sure, I don't accuse any particular person of puritanism. I just find it very strange that no reference has been made except by me to the actual pleasure of smoking that many smokers I've met have claimed is substantial. It's like that doesn't even exist at all, like it's incomprehensible, or that there's some patronizing explanation for it, that shows they're actually wrong about their own evaluation of their own pleasure. Feel free to tell me that you actually accept that this pleasure is real, and that you do actually weigh it up in your calculus.
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OnPoint: Sock-Puppeting Big Tobacco to…, in reply to George Darroch,
Your initial response to the fact that tobacco kills people was to wave it away, and then it was to say that old people are a burden to the state and we're better off economically without them.
No, and no. I don't "wave it away". I consider it an important right to be able to choose to balance harms and goods for oneself. Smokers know it might kill them, but they like smoking. I never said I agree with the economic argument for smoking. I only raised it to show why I don't even consider economic arguments, when it comes to fundamental rights - because they can lead to perverse outcomes just like that. But if you must raise the economic argument, you have to consider whether you are doing it honestly, do the actual numbers on the cost of having lots of old people? Have you done this? If not, why bother with the argument? It's quite likely, in our current system that anything that increases aged mortality actually makes the economy work better. The economics ignores the moral argument, that increased mortality means that these people don't get to enjoy a long life.
So I don't think you've engaged with the fact that tobacco is an addictive substance which is first typically smoked by those in their early-mid teens
Since this is the first time you've raised this, is it surprising I haven't engaged with it?
You've failed to explain why despite all of this, the state is illegitimate in putting (quite minor, in both relative and absolute terms) restrictions on its sale, use, and price. Which, if I understand you correctly, is your claim.
You don't understand, because you've never actually asked my position. I've already addressed your illegitimacy straw man. My objections to nicotine control are pretty specific, as I've repeated, I don't think corralling smokers who aren't harming anyone is a good thing to do. If you can argue an actual harm to anyone else, that might work on me. Simon Grigg has given some more detail in the context of Bangkok, which is very different city to anything we have in NZ, with a very different climate. I also think the aim of the taxes on smoking are simply sin-taxes, tickling an urge in puritans that I find quite unpleasant myself. I'll address this below in response to HORansome, who says:
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.
You know I studied philosophy too, right? Your evaluation of the utilities is simply not the same as mine, at least not in all cases. 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.
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).
That's an argument to ban tobacco made under bad conditions. But the conditions don't even come into the restrictions at all, because the arguments have never been utilitarian. They're about the harm caused here. And only the harm, not the pleasure, which IMHO, is simply considered immoral. That's why I think puritanism has deep hooks in this debate.
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OnPoint: Sock-Puppeting Big Tobacco to…, in reply to Simon Grigg,
I find an endless cloud of toxic smoke that I have to walk through on a stinking hot still day rather uncool too.
Yes, when I went to Bangkok, every time I blew my nose it was black. But that wasn't because of smokers. I gather this has improved, though? I walked along the streets there prior to these wardens and didn't find the smokers even noticeable. It's not that crowded, and hot air rises fast, particularly when it is blown in that direction, as most smokers seemed to do when other people were near them. Far more annoying was being heckled to watch sex-acts, but each to their own.
Mind you, I never did go walking on any really hot days. I can imagine that the smoke dissipates more slowly on those days. Perhaps wardens make more sense in BKK. Here in non-crowded, temperate, windy NZ, I can't see any argument for them. If someone is smoking in your face, it can be handled in exactly the same way as if they were doing anything else that's obnoxious. It's not a major social issue, in need of repair.
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OnPoint: Sock-Puppeting Big Tobacco to…, in reply to George Darroch,
Unless you are a libertarian, and believe that liberty (insomuch as it can exist when people have been misled and then addicted to a commercial product) trumps all other rights and interest claims - there's no way for a non-libertarian to engage a libertarian coherently, because the premises are so completely divorced.
It certainly is important to me. I feel that I've covered the caveats that allow for the other rights, and as for the "right to health and life", I'm not convinced they're rights at all. In fact, I don't even come from a rights based angle at all. I'm a much simpler kind of Utilitarian.
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You're part of a minority.
Having actually looked up the word consensus, I'm rather surprised to find it doesn't mean unanimity. I'll concede this one. I guess I've only ever been in consensus decision making situations that did end up being unanimous. That is, however, probably on account of the way that the term deviates from "majority" - it involves finding a way to give concessions that allow the minority to agree. It is a stretch for you to suggest that smokers have generally agreed to most of your positions here. They just have to suck on them.
However, it does weaken your ability to argue that is is illegitimate for a democratic government to restrict the use of a harmful and addictive substance that imposes massive costs on its users and on society.
I don't argue that. Our government is legitimate, in so far as governments can be.
I really feel like you're arguing in bad faith, Ben, from an ideological position which refuses to engage with the evidence or deal with the pragmatics at hand.
No, I'm just disagreeing with you. Tell me something that I haven't engaged with, and I'll happily engage with it. So far it's me vs 3-4 others, so I'm sorry if I haven't covered every minor angle in what you wrote.
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OnPoint: Sock-Puppeting Big Tobacco to…, in reply to izogi,
In a very dragged out and expensive way though, is it not?
and from George,
the costs of end-of-life healthcare, particularly for cancers, is extreme.
Convince me you've done the number on this. Considering that everyone dies in the end, and the better our healthcare gets, the more likely it is that the end will be dragged out, and probably be cancer because that is uncurable, and in the mean time they've got 13 - 14 years more superannuation on average, and considering that the "smoking related deaths" referred to several times have included the increased chance of sudden death from heart attacks, I need more convincing that the economic argument stacks up. Numbers would be good.
Not that I really care too much about it as an argument anyway, the economics of it are not my concern at all. The concern is the systematic removal of a liberty that harms no-one but the consumer of that liberty. Where it does harm others, sure, I buy that. Where it doesn't, I don't.
Ya lost me.
OK, it's upthread some ways, but I only got into this because Simon Grigg suggested that in Thailand there are people who will actually make you stop smoking in public outdoor places. I really don't think that's cool at all.
Isn't tightening access to cigarettes just, you know, commonsense?
No. Commonsense arguments are no arguments at all. They're an appeal to prejudice, and I can't help but feel with smoking that it has a really strong puritanical edge.
Second-hand smoke effects exist.
Indoors. I'm not talking about indoors.
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