If you really want to engage in the high philosophy, I suppose I'll point out that "no, you have to prove that it is harmful", as a general principle, has some perverse incentives on the pursuit of creative ways to complicate this proof. With finance being a prominent example.
And all law enforcement is costly. If you want a illegal-graffiti-free society, you have to ban far more than the act of illegal graffiti itself for the enforcement to be practical. Bans can be quite non-intuitive, even (hence my 'chewing gum' bait above, which I'm surprised nobody took). It is not self-evident that the ethical obligation is to pursue the contrapositive, and give up the aim, although that is what Western states frequently do. Either route imposes some suffering upon innocents.
(if Feral is a progressive libertarian, I suppose that makes me a progressive authoritarian in comparison!)
I don't think you'll find any defendants of American drug policy as it currently exists. But all legislation is the product of the sausage-factory, not high principle. You would hardly argue that the flaws of American tax policy render all taxation unethical.
All criminal law theoretically exists for the good of a society and the people in it. I don't really think it's "high philosophy" to expect laws to be ethical, or to discuss the ethics of a law if not everyone is in agreement about them. The sausage factory is just a compromise of different people's opinions of what's ethical. It does seems self-evident that if a law fails at its intended purpose, it should be changed, abandoned or replaced. It also seems self-evident that a law should have a reason to exist, and that it's the responsibilty of the proponents of that law to provide the reasoning. If the connection between law and effect isn't immediately intuitive, that makes your task slightly harder, but it doesn't absolve you of the responsibility. Basically, while what you've said is all true up to a point, none of it shifts the burden of proof of the shoulders of the prohibitionists.
I'm not talking about American drug policy specifically, but it makes as good an example as any. Obviously, while there may not be any defendants of the policy exactly as it currently exists, there are those who are in favour of prohibiton being as strict as or stricter than it is now, hence the compromise. Those people have an obligation to show their reasoning and supporting evidence, we can't just make things illegal on their say-so.
I repeat that insisting that the burden of proof always lies on prohibitions of any kind, as a principle of high ethics, has some undesirable incentives on the way people react to legislation
The point of costly law enforcements outlines the symmetry between shrugging at the consumers of that which you may wish to prohibit, and shrugging at the victims of whatever weakly-associated inconvenience or crime or harassment, that you cannot decline to rigorously (and expensively) protect them from. In this case there is no clarity on where the burden of proof falls at all - indeed there is arguably no burden here. Go with the neutral cost-benefit analysis, not bias toward some non-existent principle of non-intervention. It is intervention either way.
you're playing rather fast and loose with "perceived as unethical" and "unethical" there
Unless you want to assert some objective framework of ethics, I'm not sure this is a distinction with a difference.
ethics don't even need to be objective here; it just requires that people are often wrong. there can be a flexible ethics here, albeit merely one that doesn't track popular outlooks exactly
1. The act of ingesting a drug (be it aspirin, caffeine, alcohol, cannabis, or heroin) is not unethical per se.
2. The act of breaking the law is not unethical per se, i.e. the law is not self-justifying.
3. A person who has behaved ethically in all respects is innocent of wrongdoing.
4. To deliberately harm an innocent person is unethical.
This is a tautological argument. It only works if you accept the above definitions. I disagree with the first three points made.
1) Please see my previous post regarding ethics of drug use.
2) There is a social convention that we all follow that includes following the laws. Part of our ethical makeup is compliance to this social convention, and failure to follow this convention by others is often perceived as unethical. By deciding not to follow the law, you may put someone else at risk, and thus fail the criteria of "do no harm to others".
I would say that the vast majority of laws are written following ethical guidelines, but the laws themselves are ethically neutral. The act of breaking a law, however, requires a conscious decision on our part, and is unethical because it goes against our social convention.
3) "The road to hell is paved with good intentions"
It's not a tautology. They're premises. You either agree with them or you dispute them.
1) I agree drug use can be unethical, but not intrinsically. That is, I believe it's possible to use drugs ethically, and that the act of using drugs is not inherently wrong (unlike, say, murder - the act of depriving another person of life is inherently wrong unless some additional factor exculpates you. The act of using a drug is inherently ethical unless some additional factor - like harm caused to others - condemns you.) Once you accept that distinction, it becomes simply a question of which is least unethical/which causes least harm, drug use or drug prohibition?
2) I don't consider violating social conventions to be unethical. Care to back that statement up?
I repeat that insisting that the burden of proof always lies on prohibitions of any kind, as a principle of high ethics, has some undesirable incentives on the way people react to legislation
The point of costly law enforcements outlines the symmetry between shrugging at the consumers of that which you may wish to prohibit, and shrugging at the victims of whatever weakly-associated inconvenience or crime or harassment, that you cannot decline to rigorously (and expensively) protect them from. In this case there is no clarity on where the burden of proof falls at all - indeed there is arguably no burden here. Go with the neutral cost-benefit analysis, not bias toward some non-existent principle of non-intervention. It is intervention either way.
I can't parse this second paragraph very well, sorry. Could you expound that, maybe lay it out for me like I'm dumb? I don't feel like I have a good grip on your argument.
you're playing rather fast and loose with "perceived as unethical" and "unethical" there
Agreed, but that's because there are different kinds of ethics. For example:
Personal Ethics which are the rules/guidelines a particular individual follows.
Societal Ethics, which are the conventions of ethical behavior followed in a particular society.
So while from a personal perspective, drug use/purchase may not be unethical, from a societal perspective it is as it breaks the social convention.
1. The act of ingesting a drug (be it aspirin, caffeine, alcohol, cannabis, or heroin) is not unethical per se.
2. The act of breaking the law is not unethical per se, i.e. the law is not self-justifying.
3. A person who has behaved ethically in all respects is innocent of wrongdoing.
4. To deliberately harm an innocent person is unethical.
This is a tautological argument. It only works if you accept the above definitions. I disagree with the first three points made.
1) Please see my previous post regarding ethics of drug use.
2) There is a social convention that we all follow that includes following the laws. Part of our ethical makeup is compliance to this social convention, and failure to follow this convention by others is often perceived as unethical. By deciding not to follow the law, you may put someone else at risk, and thus fail the criteria of "do no harm to others".
I would say that the vast majority of laws are written following ethical guidelines, but the laws themselves are ethically neutral. The act of breaking a law, however, requires a conscious decision on our part, and is unethical because it goes against our social convention.
3) "The road to hell is paved with good intentions"
It's not a tautology. They're premises. You either agree with them or you dispute them.
1) I agree drug use can be unethical, but not intrinsically. That is, I believe it's possible to use drugs ethically, and that the act of using drugs is not inherently wrong (unlike, say, murder - the act of depriving another person of life is inherently wrong unless some additional factor exculpates you. The act of using a drug is inherently ethical unless some additional factor - like harm caused to others - condemns you.) Once you accept that distinction, it becomes simply a question of which is least unethical/which causes least harm, drug use or drug prohibition?
2) I don't consider violating social conventions to be unethical. Care to back that statement up?
3) An aphorism is not an argument.
1) I think use of certain drugs is intrinsically unethical due to the nature of those drugs. Heroin, from the OP, is an example of this. It's so addicting and difficult to give up that it forces people to act in an unethical manner, and it certainly fails the criteria of "cause no harm to others".
2) Using your example of murder (the act of depriving another person of life), it is ethically acceptable to end another's life in wartime. This is by social convention. It is also ethically acceptable to end another's life in self-defense.
3) If I make a series of decisions that are ethically sound, but the end result is great harm to others, am I ethically responsible for this harm?
I repeat that insisting that the burden of proof always lies on prohibitions of any kind, as a principle of high ethics, has some undesirable incentives on the way people react to legislation
The point of costly law enforcements outlines the symmetry between shrugging at the consumers of that which you may wish to prohibit, and shrugging at the victims of whatever weakly-associated inconvenience or crime or harassment, that you cannot decline to rigorously (and expensively) protect them from. In this case there is no clarity on where the burden of proof falls at all - indeed there is arguably no burden here. Go with the neutral cost-benefit analysis, not bias toward some non-existent principle of non-intervention. It is intervention either way.
I can't parse this second paragraph very well, sorry. Could you expound that, maybe lay it out for me like I'm dumb? I don't feel like I have a good grip on your argument.
Let's go with chewing gum, because it's honestly hilarious that it's actually a thing because it makes the ethical characteristics wonderfully clear.
We populate our gedanken with two things, chewing gum and a metro train. Now, some people ride the trains. Some people chew gum. Some of the people who chew gum, then stick gum on the train, where it dries and jams the doors, which (let's say) is an insurmountable barrier to cost-efficient train operation.
Now there is no plausible argument by which we assign ethical blame for the stopped trains on gum-chewers who do not stick gum on the train. We cannot blame any general culture of gum-related impairment, medical or otherwise. Wrigley's is conspicuously free of guerilla warfare and third-world poppy fields. There is no latent lawlessness inherent to acquiring, and then chewing, chewing gum. So this simplifies the argument: there is some narrow subset people who chew gum and then stick that gum on the trains, and this is their fault and theirs alone.
Now real life is full of problems, so let's have one. Let's say that Nature, in her guise of practical limits to first-world policing, has seen fit to prevent us from actually identifying and stopping these people: stealthily decorating the door you are leaning on is rather hard to observe, after all. If chewing gum is acceptable, then some people will chew gum and some of those people will jam the train-doors.
This gives us our choice: we can have a society where people can chew gum, and the people cannot take trains that work. Or we can have a society where the people can take the trains, and cannot chew gum. The latter is the result of prohibition, and the former the result of practicality, but I trust the symmetry is made obvious. Unless you are a particularly dedicated deontologist with peculiar answers to ye olde Trolley Problem, then in either outcome, some people will be restrained from pursuing some self-actualizing goals in life, like getting to work via trains that run on time. Or, you know, chewing some gum.
We do not assign blame. We do not assign fault. It is nobody's fault, in this here thought-experiment, that we cannot separate the vandal from the gentleman. We accept that innocents will suffer for no fault of their own; the state's discretion is in deciding who.
---
Got all that? Now let's return to reality. Let me point out that it is this shift in thinking that distinguishes criminal jurisprudence from regulatory policymaking. This reflects, more than anything else, a shift in state ideologies across the past couple of centuries rather than any particular cost-benefit argument. Compared to, say, 1913, the world of 2013 puts its modern disputes into the box of regulation rather than tort or crime.
Sometimes I sense that political philosophy has not quite caught up. When we say to an employer: put safety railings up, or we'll arrest you under OSHA, it's not necessarily because we can prove that this employer, in particular, is going to harm those employees, in particular, by failing to put railings up. Maybe this employer intends to never order anyone to work near that ledge! Maybe the employees might even prefer not to have railings up, and take the savings in wage payments. Maybe writing a railing safety specification that derives exactly-appropriate standards for all situations and all people is wholly impossible, so in particular this case the railings might not even be justified on any ethical ground - it might not even be ethically wrong to fail to put railings up! But all of that is simply irrelevant for a modern regulatory state; bureaucracies operate on standardization and protocol to tame an increasingly complex society, and that constraint alone is enough to motivate occasionally punishing the innocent, for priorities that are achieved elsewhere.
Bluntly, it is this: it is too difficult for us to exercise sufficiently fine control, and we care too much about those edge cases, so you don't get to do it. At all. Once the principle is admitted, the rest is just bargaining over the price.
ronya on
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
I repeat that insisting that the burden of proof always lies on prohibitions of any kind, as a principle of high ethics, has some undesirable incentives on the way people react to legislation
The point of costly law enforcements outlines the symmetry between shrugging at the consumers of that which you may wish to prohibit, and shrugging at the victims of whatever weakly-associated inconvenience or crime or harassment, that you cannot decline to rigorously (and expensively) protect them from. In this case there is no clarity on where the burden of proof falls at all - indeed there is arguably no burden here. Go with the neutral cost-benefit analysis, not bias toward some non-existent principle of non-intervention. It is intervention either way.
I can't parse this second paragraph very well, sorry. Could you expound that, maybe lay it out for me like I'm dumb? I don't feel like I have a good grip on your argument.
Let's go with chewing gum, because it's honestly hilarious that it's actually a thing because it makes the ethical characteristics wonderfully clear.
We populate our gedanken with two things, chewing gum and a metro train. Now, some people ride the trains. Some people chew gum. Some of the people who chew gum, then stick gum on the train, where it dries and jams the doors, which (let's say) is an insurmountable barrier to cost-efficient train operation.
Now there is no plausible argument by which we assign ethical blame for the stopped trains on gum-chewers who do not stick gum on the train. We cannot blame any general culture of gum-related impairment, medical or otherwise. Wrigley's is conspicuously free of guerilla warfare and third-world poppy fields. There is no latent lawlessness inherent to acquiring, and then chewing, chewing gum. So this simplifies the problem: there are some narrow subset people who chew gum and then stick that gum on the trains, and this is their fault and their fault alone.
Now real life is full of problems, so let's have one. Let's say that Nature, in her guise of practical limits to first-world policing, has seen fit to prevent us from actually identifying and stopping these people: stealthily decorating the door you are leaning on is rather hard to observe, after all. If chewing gum is acceptable, then some people will chew gum and some of those people will jam the train-doors.
This gives us our choice: we can have a society where people can chew gum, and the people cannot take trains that work. Or we can have a society where the people can take the trains, and cannot chew gum. The latter is the result of prohibition, and the former the result of practicality, but I trust the symmetry is made obvious. Unless you are a particularly dedicated deontologist with peculiar answers to ye olde Trolley Problem, in either outcome, some people will be restrained from pursuing some self-actualizing goals in life, like getting to work via trains that run on time. Or, you know, chewing some gum.
We do not assign blame. We do not assign fault. It is nobody's fault, in this here thought-experiment, that we cannot separate the vandal from the gentleman. We accept that innocents will suffer for no fault of their own; the state's discretion is in deciding who.
---
Got all that? Now let's return to reality. Let me point out that it is this shift in thinking that distinguishes criminal jurisprudence from regulatory policymaking. This reflects, more than anything else, a shift in state ideologies across the past couple of centuries rather than any particular cost-benefit argument. Compared to, say, 1913, the world of 2013 puts its modern disputes into the box of regulation rather than tort or crime.
Sometimes I sense that political philosophy has not quite caught up. When we say to an employer: put safety railings up, or we'll arrest you under OSHA, it's not necessarily because we can prove that this employer, in particular, is going to harm those employees, in particular, by failing to put railings up. Maybe this employer intends to never order anyone to work near that ledge! Maybe the employees might even prefer not to have railings up, and take the savings in wage payments. Maybe writing a railing safety specification that derives exactly-appropriate standards for all situations and all people is wholly impossible, so in particular this case the railings might not even be justified on any ethical ground - it might not even be ethically wrong to fail to put railings up! But all of that is simply irrelevant for a modern regulatory state; bureaucracies operate on standardization and protocol to tame an increasingly complex society, and that constraint alone is enough to motivate occasionally punishing the innocent, for priorities that are achieved elsewhere.
Bluntly, it is this: it is too difficult for us to exercise sufficiently fine control, and we care too much about those edge case, so you don't get to do it. At all. Once the principle is admitted, the rest is just bargaining over the price.
I was going to make a similiar, but no doubt inferior, post, but @Ronya has this argument covered. I have never missed the old awesome system as much as right now, as this is perhaps the best post that I have ever read on these forums. Well done, my hyper intelligent canine friend!
Ronya, I can't find anything to disagree with in your post. But I must be dumb after all, because I'm afraid I still can't see the connection between your argument, and my issue with burden of proof.
I'll stick to the gum experiment since, as you say, it lends things a useful clarity. Assume everything is as you've written it. My question is then not, as you might possibly have misunderstood it, whether the freedom of the train-riders to ride working trains has moral preeminence over the freedom of the gum-chewers to chew gum. As a matter of fact, the freedom of the gum-chewers does not enter into it - except insofar as to establish that in an ideal world, people should have the freedom to chew gum.
My demands of the legislators of the anti-gum laws are as follows. Can you:
A) quantify in some way the reduction of harm resulting from the anti-gum laws, i.e. is less gum being stuck in train doors, and if so how much?
demonstrate satisfactorily that the aforementioned reduction in harm is greater than the total aggregate increase in harm that occurs as a direct result of the anti-gum laws, i.e. in this case, probably only law enforcement expenses?
Your demonstration need not be rigorous; it must be sufficient to convince your fellow legislators, who for the purposes of this discussion we'll assume, like you, are rational and intelligent human beings who are participating in the discussion in good faith with the common goal of minimising overall harm to the public, and have no ulterior motives.
If you cannot demonstrate this, then in my evaluation your legislation has failed and must be reviewed. Any modification or alternate proposal must be subject to the same test, both on its theoretical or predicted effects prior to implementation, and on its observed or actual effects at appropriate intervals thereafter. If there is consistent failure, then we must begin scaling back our anti-gum legislation, until we reach either a revision that passes the test or total decriminalisation, the former being the most likely outcome.
I would hope that the reason we should default towards freedom rather than restriction is obvious, but let me know if it isn't.
Now: have I misunderstood either your thought experiment or your argument, and if so in what way? If not, what's the point of contention between us?
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JuliusCaptain of Serenityon my shipRegistered Userregular
I would hope that the reason we should default towards freedom rather than restriction is obvious, but let me know if it isn't.
Well that seems to be the point of contention. This is an ethical preference, which informs where you think the burden of proof lies. It could be just as easily said that it's on you to prove that anti-gum laws do more harm than good because we prefer restriction above freedom.
A) quantify in some way the potential net support for gum legalization and any changes in (cultural?) vandalism propensities since the passage of the prohibitory legislation, i.e., would gum be once again stuck in train doors, and if so, how much?
demonstrate satisfactorily that the aforementioned increase in aggregate harm, i.e., direct costs of repair plus associated economic losses due to breakdowns in public transport, are less than the projected public interest and desire for gum legalization?
Similarly, of course, your demonstration need not be rigorous, but if you cannot demonstrate this, then the repeal bill should be summarily discarded.
Because, after all, in an ideal world, people should have the freedom to rely on the train, without having to risk it suspended just to fix the damn doors. Surely we would not like to force needless costs and disruption onto literally hundreds of thousands of people whilst they jam back into automobiles just to go about their daily lives.
And that is the point of my argument, that it is symmetric and you achieve a freedom and lose another in either direction. In one universe, you chew gum. In another universe, you take the train. For the state to say: I will punish you if you foolishly choose to acquire gum, is not more restrictive than the state saying: I choose to let another punish you if you foolishly choose to rely on the train. And the state must make this choice, because doing nothing is an endorsement of the status quo.
1) I think use of certain drugs is intrinsically unethical due to the nature of those drugs. Heroin, from the OP, is an example of this. It's so addicting and difficult to give up that it forces people to act in an unethical manner, and it certainly fails the criteria of "cause no harm to others".
That would make the use of heroin unethical, yes, but not intrinsically unethical, unless you believe that it is literally impossible to inject heroin without harming others. Easy litmus test:
When I say that drug use is not intrinsically unethical, I don't mean that it is necessarily ethical in any particular instance, or even in all particular instances. All I mean is that it's a freedom that people should have unless there is some external reason they shouldn't, like social cost, risk, or indirect harm to others.
2) Using your example of murder (the act of depriving another person of life), it is ethically acceptable to end another's life in wartime. This is by social convention. It is also ethically acceptable to end another's life in self-defense.
If I accepted that the reason it is ethical to kill someone in self-defence is because of social convention, which I don't, it still doesn't follow that to violate social convention is unethical.
3) If I make a series of decisions that are ethically sound, but the end result is great harm to others, am I ethically responsible for this harm?
No, you wouldn't be. Are you leading up to an argument about strict liability in law?
(I should point out that the symmetry argument is frequently made by blurring the distinction between positive and negative liberties, but it isn't even needed here! Both freedoms here are essentially negative ones. It is not a right to a train, but a right to have the train you rely on protected from vandals, that the state fails to perfectly provide - and thus compromises, either on this right or on another.)
The situation is not symmetric, though. The gum-chewers face active persecution from the government, while the train-riders do not. For the purposes of deciding what should be put into law, I draw a distinction. Do you?
I would hope that the reason we should default towards freedom rather than restriction is obvious, but let me know if it isn't.
Well that seems to be the point of contention. This is an ethical preference, which informs where you think the burden of proof lies. It could be just as easily said that it's on you to prove that anti-gum laws do more harm than good because we prefer restriction above freedom.
If that's the case, the disagreement is probably axiomatic. I'm not sure how far I could get in an argument with someone who could honestly say they were "anti-freedom."
The situation is not symmetric, though. The gum-chewers face active persecution from the government, while the train-riders do not. For the purposes of deciding what should be put into law, I draw a distinction.
Really? Let us say that government did not prohibit gum, but refused to prosecute anyone who beat you up, seized your property, or detained you for chewing gum - because it is too costly for the state attorney's office, say. Suppose you believe, and you know the government knows you believe, that there is a band of anti-gum zealots waiting to do just that.
Would that policy make you feel free to chew gum?
The right to be protected from other would-be rulers of your life is fundamental to the state. It's in that "monopoly on the legitimate use of force" bit.
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JuliusCaptain of Serenityon my shipRegistered Userregular
I would hope that the reason we should default towards freedom rather than restriction is obvious, but let me know if it isn't.
Well that seems to be the point of contention. This is an ethical preference, which informs where you think the burden of proof lies. It could be just as easily said that it's on you to prove that anti-gum laws do more harm than good because we prefer restriction above freedom.
If that's the case, the disagreement is probably axiomatic. I'm not sure how far I could get in an argument with someone who could honestly say they were "anti-freedom."
The stance is not anti-freedom, it is just prioritizing certain freedoms over others. As has been pointed out, society is a system complex enough that that is what you always have to do.
I repeat that insisting that the burden of proof always lies on prohibitions of any kind, as a principle of high ethics, has some undesirable incentives on the way people react to legislation
The point of costly law enforcements outlines the symmetry between shrugging at the consumers of that which you may wish to prohibit, and shrugging at the victims of whatever weakly-associated inconvenience or crime or harassment, that you cannot decline to rigorously (and expensively) protect them from. In this case there is no clarity on where the burden of proof falls at all - indeed there is arguably no burden here. Go with the neutral cost-benefit analysis, not bias toward some non-existent principle of non-intervention. It is intervention either way.
I can't parse this second paragraph very well, sorry. Could you expound that, maybe lay it out for me like I'm dumb? I don't feel like I have a good grip on your argument.
Let's go with chewing gum, because it's honestly hilarious that it's actually a thing because it makes the ethical characteristics wonderfully clear.
We populate our gedanken with two things, chewing gum and a metro train. Now, some people ride the trains. Some people chew gum. Some of the people who chew gum, then stick gum on the train, where it dries and jams the doors, which (let's say) is an insurmountable barrier to cost-efficient train operation.
Now there is no plausible argument by which we assign ethical blame for the stopped trains on gum-chewers who do not stick gum on the train. We cannot blame any general culture of gum-related impairment, medical or otherwise. Wrigley's is conspicuously free of guerilla warfare and third-world poppy fields. There is no latent lawlessness inherent to acquiring, and then chewing, chewing gum. So this simplifies the argument: there is some narrow subset people who chew gum and then stick that gum on the trains, and this is their fault and theirs alone.
Now real life is full of problems, so let's have one. Let's say that Nature, in her guise of practical limits to first-world policing, has seen fit to prevent us from actually identifying and stopping these people: stealthily decorating the door you are leaning on is rather hard to observe, after all. If chewing gum is acceptable, then some people will chew gum and some of those people will jam the train-doors.
This gives us our choice: we can have a society where people can chew gum, and the people cannot take trains that work. Or we can have a society where the people can take the trains, and cannot chew gum. The latter is the result of prohibition, and the former the result of practicality, but I trust the symmetry is made obvious. Unless you are a particularly dedicated deontologist with peculiar answers to ye olde Trolley Problem, then in either outcome, some people will be restrained from pursuing some self-actualizing goals in life, like getting to work via trains that run on time. Or, you know, chewing some gum.
We do not assign blame. We do not assign fault. It is nobody's fault, in this here thought-experiment, that we cannot separate the vandal from the gentleman. We accept that innocents will suffer for no fault of their own; the state's discretion is in deciding who.
---
Got all that? Now let's return to reality. Let me point out that it is this shift in thinking that distinguishes criminal jurisprudence from regulatory policymaking. This reflects, more than anything else, a shift in state ideologies across the past couple of centuries rather than any particular cost-benefit argument. Compared to, say, 1913, the world of 2013 puts its modern disputes into the box of regulation rather than tort or crime.
Sometimes I sense that political philosophy has not quite caught up. When we say to an employer: put safety railings up, or we'll arrest you under OSHA, it's not necessarily because we can prove that this employer, in particular, is going to harm those employees, in particular, by failing to put railings up. Maybe this employer intends to never order anyone to work near that ledge! Maybe the employees might even prefer not to have railings up, and take the savings in wage payments. Maybe writing a railing safety specification that derives exactly-appropriate standards for all situations and all people is wholly impossible, so in particular this case the railings might not even be justified on any ethical ground - it might not even be ethically wrong to fail to put railings up! But all of that is simply irrelevant for a modern regulatory state; bureaucracies operate on standardization and protocol to tame an increasingly complex society, and that constraint alone is enough to motivate occasionally punishing the innocent, for priorities that are achieved elsewhere.
Bluntly, it is this: it is too difficult for us to exercise sufficiently fine control, and we care too much about those edge cases, so you don't get to do it. At all. Once the principle is admitted, the rest is just bargaining over the price.
The problem with this is all the things that get ignored when people design hypotheticals. The effects of the bureaucracy on the people is just one aspect, but it's a huge one. Or just the tremendous, mindfucking, unnacceptable-to-intellectual-nerds complexity of life - the one where trains and chewing gum can be compatible.
The purpose of my state is not efficient operation. I'm not sure what it is exactly. Perhaps maximizing happiness. But I am sure that it is not maximizing efficiency and smooth operation.
Personally I think that this is one of the main value traps of modern life - pursuing efficiency instead of happiness. You see it all the time in capitalist rhetoric.
I would hope that the reason we should default towards freedom rather than restriction is obvious, but let me know if it isn't.
It's not obvious. In debate, the only obvious positions are self-evident tautologies. "Freedom is good" or "freedom is preferable" are not self-evident tautologies; the predicates of "good" and "preferable" are not contained in "freedom". These are position for which one needs to argue.
Given that your interlocutors seem to disagree with this position, you need to offer compelling arguments, rather than simply repeat that your position is self-evidently true.
When I say that drug use is not intrinsically unethical, I don't mean that it is necessarily ethical in any particular instance, or even in all particular instances. All I mean is that it's a freedom that people should have unless there is some external reason they shouldn't, like social cost, risk, or indirect harm to others.
Couple things.
1) In ethical debates, we're operating in a binary system: X is either ethical or unethical. It doesn't make sense to argue for some third position of "not unethical, but also not ethical" if our concern is for ethical value.
2) "it's a freedom that people should have" That's an interesting position. Perhaps you'd like to argue for it.
1. The act of ingesting a drug (be it aspirin, caffeine, alcohol, cannabis, or heroin) is not unethical per se.
2. The act of breaking the law is not unethical per se, i.e. the law is not self-justifying.
3. A person who has behaved ethically in all respects is innocent of wrongdoing.
4. To deliberately harm an innocent person is unethical.
1 does quite a bit of work. Given that people are arguing against it, you may need to restate it or argue for it, rather than take it for granted and then fault others for taking issue with it.
2 Sure. It's fine to maintain that there are such things as unjust laws. The question is what standard of justice one utilizes to discern whether or not a legal prohibition is just or unjust.
3 "wrongdoing" may be problematic. A person who behaved ethically has not behaved unethically, sure. However, there is a legal sense of "wrongdoing" that still maintains despite our ethical qualms. So, one may act ethically, but still engage in "wrongdoing", if we understand "wrongdoing" in a legal, rather than ethical, sense.
4 "deliberately" is a term you need to clarify. "harm" is a tem you need to clarify. "innocent" is a term you need to clarify. It doesn't seem difficult to argue that taking drugs is, itself, a biological harm that a drug user deliberately inflicts on its self. Given your position you don't seem to take the biological effects of drugs to be harmful...which means that you're using definitions that are contrary to the norm.
If you want people to take your argument seriously then you need to either
1: Provide arguments for your premises.
2: Only converse with Drug Addled Rationalists, who don't notice that your premises are not self-evident, in the strictest sense.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
I repeat that insisting that the burden of proof always lies on prohibitions of any kind, as a principle of high ethics, has some undesirable incentives on the way people react to legislation
The point of costly law enforcements outlines the symmetry between shrugging at the consumers of that which you may wish to prohibit, and shrugging at the victims of whatever weakly-associated inconvenience or crime or harassment, that you cannot decline to rigorously (and expensively) protect them from. In this case there is no clarity on where the burden of proof falls at all - indeed there is arguably no burden here. Go with the neutral cost-benefit analysis, not bias toward some non-existent principle of non-intervention. It is intervention either way.
I can't parse this second paragraph very well, sorry. Could you expound that, maybe lay it out for me like I'm dumb? I don't feel like I have a good grip on your argument.
Let's go with chewing gum, because it's honestly hilarious that it's actually a thing because it makes the ethical characteristics wonderfully clear.
We populate our gedanken with two things, chewing gum and a metro train. Now, some people ride the trains. Some people chew gum. Some of the people who chew gum, then stick gum on the train, where it dries and jams the doors, which (let's say) is an insurmountable barrier to cost-efficient train operation.
Now there is no plausible argument by which we assign ethical blame for the stopped trains on gum-chewers who do not stick gum on the train. We cannot blame any general culture of gum-related impairment, medical or otherwise. Wrigley's is conspicuously free of guerilla warfare and third-world poppy fields. There is no latent lawlessness inherent to acquiring, and then chewing, chewing gum. So this simplifies the argument: there is some narrow subset people who chew gum and then stick that gum on the trains, and this is their fault and theirs alone.
Now real life is full of problems, so let's have one. Let's say that Nature, in her guise of practical limits to first-world policing, has seen fit to prevent us from actually identifying and stopping these people: stealthily decorating the door you are leaning on is rather hard to observe, after all. If chewing gum is acceptable, then some people will chew gum and some of those people will jam the train-doors.
This gives us our choice: we can have a society where people can chew gum, and the people cannot take trains that work. Or we can have a society where the people can take the trains, and cannot chew gum. The latter is the result of prohibition, and the former the result of practicality, but I trust the symmetry is made obvious. Unless you are a particularly dedicated deontologist with peculiar answers to ye olde Trolley Problem, then in either outcome, some people will be restrained from pursuing some self-actualizing goals in life, like getting to work via trains that run on time. Or, you know, chewing some gum.
We do not assign blame. We do not assign fault. It is nobody's fault, in this here thought-experiment, that we cannot separate the vandal from the gentleman. We accept that innocents will suffer for no fault of their own; the state's discretion is in deciding who.
---
Got all that? Now let's return to reality. Let me point out that it is this shift in thinking that distinguishes criminal jurisprudence from regulatory policymaking. This reflects, more than anything else, a shift in state ideologies across the past couple of centuries rather than any particular cost-benefit argument. Compared to, say, 1913, the world of 2013 puts its modern disputes into the box of regulation rather than tort or crime.
Sometimes I sense that political philosophy has not quite caught up. When we say to an employer: put safety railings up, or we'll arrest you under OSHA, it's not necessarily because we can prove that this employer, in particular, is going to harm those employees, in particular, by failing to put railings up. Maybe this employer intends to never order anyone to work near that ledge! Maybe the employees might even prefer not to have railings up, and take the savings in wage payments. Maybe writing a railing safety specification that derives exactly-appropriate standards for all situations and all people is wholly impossible, so in particular this case the railings might not even be justified on any ethical ground - it might not even be ethically wrong to fail to put railings up! But all of that is simply irrelevant for a modern regulatory state; bureaucracies operate on standardization and protocol to tame an increasingly complex society, and that constraint alone is enough to motivate occasionally punishing the innocent, for priorities that are achieved elsewhere.
Bluntly, it is this: it is too difficult for us to exercise sufficiently fine control, and we care too much about those edge cases, so you don't get to do it. At all. Once the principle is admitted, the rest is just bargaining over the price.
The problem with this is all the things that get ignored when people design hypotheticals. The effects of the bureaucracy on the people is just one aspect, but it's a huge one. Or just the tremendous, mindfucking, unnacceptable-to-intellectual-nerds complexity of life - the one where trains and chewing gum can be compatible.
The purpose of my state is not efficient operation. I'm not sure what it is exactly. Perhaps maximizing happiness. But I am sure that it is not maximizing efficiency and smooth operation.
Personally I think that this is one of the main value traps of modern life - pursuing efficiency instead of happiness. You see it all the time in capitalist rhetoric.
It always amazes me when people make it out like efficiency is a bad word. No matter what you want your society to accomplish, you should always want it to efficiently pursue those goals, otherwise you are advocating waste, and less success in achieving the goals you set out. If you want a society aimed at producing the most happiness possible, then why wouldn't you want to be as officiant as possible in producing happiness?
I repeat that insisting that the burden of proof always lies on prohibitions of any kind, as a principle of high ethics, has some undesirable incentives on the way people react to legislation
The point of costly law enforcements outlines the symmetry between shrugging at the consumers of that which you may wish to prohibit, and shrugging at the victims of whatever weakly-associated inconvenience or crime or harassment, that you cannot decline to rigorously (and expensively) protect them from. In this case there is no clarity on where the burden of proof falls at all - indeed there is arguably no burden here. Go with the neutral cost-benefit analysis, not bias toward some non-existent principle of non-intervention. It is intervention either way.
I can't parse this second paragraph very well, sorry. Could you expound that, maybe lay it out for me like I'm dumb? I don't feel like I have a good grip on your argument.
Let's go with chewing gum, because it's honestly hilarious that it's actually a thing because it makes the ethical characteristics wonderfully clear.
We populate our gedanken with two things, chewing gum and a metro train. Now, some people ride the trains. Some people chew gum. Some of the people who chew gum, then stick gum on the train, where it dries and jams the doors, which (let's say) is an insurmountable barrier to cost-efficient train operation.
Now there is no plausible argument by which we assign ethical blame for the stopped trains on gum-chewers who do not stick gum on the train. We cannot blame any general culture of gum-related impairment, medical or otherwise. Wrigley's is conspicuously free of guerilla warfare and third-world poppy fields. There is no latent lawlessness inherent to acquiring, and then chewing, chewing gum. So this simplifies the argument: there is some narrow subset people who chew gum and then stick that gum on the trains, and this is their fault and theirs alone.
Now real life is full of problems, so let's have one. Let's say that Nature, in her guise of practical limits to first-world policing, has seen fit to prevent us from actually identifying and stopping these people: stealthily decorating the door you are leaning on is rather hard to observe, after all. If chewing gum is acceptable, then some people will chew gum and some of those people will jam the train-doors.
This gives us our choice: we can have a society where people can chew gum, and the people cannot take trains that work. Or we can have a society where the people can take the trains, and cannot chew gum. The latter is the result of prohibition, and the former the result of practicality, but I trust the symmetry is made obvious. Unless you are a particularly dedicated deontologist with peculiar answers to ye olde Trolley Problem, then in either outcome, some people will be restrained from pursuing some self-actualizing goals in life, like getting to work via trains that run on time. Or, you know, chewing some gum.
We do not assign blame. We do not assign fault. It is nobody's fault, in this here thought-experiment, that we cannot separate the vandal from the gentleman. We accept that innocents will suffer for no fault of their own; the state's discretion is in deciding who.
---
Got all that? Now let's return to reality. Let me point out that it is this shift in thinking that distinguishes criminal jurisprudence from regulatory policymaking. This reflects, more than anything else, a shift in state ideologies across the past couple of centuries rather than any particular cost-benefit argument. Compared to, say, 1913, the world of 2013 puts its modern disputes into the box of regulation rather than tort or crime.
Sometimes I sense that political philosophy has not quite caught up. When we say to an employer: put safety railings up, or we'll arrest you under OSHA, it's not necessarily because we can prove that this employer, in particular, is going to harm those employees, in particular, by failing to put railings up. Maybe this employer intends to never order anyone to work near that ledge! Maybe the employees might even prefer not to have railings up, and take the savings in wage payments. Maybe writing a railing safety specification that derives exactly-appropriate standards for all situations and all people is wholly impossible, so in particular this case the railings might not even be justified on any ethical ground - it might not even be ethically wrong to fail to put railings up! But all of that is simply irrelevant for a modern regulatory state; bureaucracies operate on standardization and protocol to tame an increasingly complex society, and that constraint alone is enough to motivate occasionally punishing the innocent, for priorities that are achieved elsewhere.
Bluntly, it is this: it is too difficult for us to exercise sufficiently fine control, and we care too much about those edge cases, so you don't get to do it. At all. Once the principle is admitted, the rest is just bargaining over the price.
The problem with this is all the things that get ignored when people design hypotheticals. The effects of the bureaucracy on the people is just one aspect, but it's a huge one. Or just the tremendous, mindfucking, unnacceptable-to-intellectual-nerds complexity of life - the one where trains and chewing gum can be compatible.
The purpose of my state is not efficient operation. I'm not sure what it is exactly. Perhaps maximizing happiness. But I am sure that it is not maximizing efficiency and smooth operation.
Personally I think that this is one of the main value traps of modern life - pursuing efficiency instead of happiness. You see it all the time in capitalist rhetoric.
It always amazes me when people make it out like efficiency is a bad word. No matter what you want your society to accomplish, you should always want it to efficiently pursue those goals, otherwise you are advocating waste, and less success in achieving the goals you set out. If you want a society aimed at producing the most happiness possible, then why wouldn't you want to be as officiant as possible in producing happiness?
It depends what you mean by efficiency. Efficiency is about not wasting resources in pursuit of a goal, right? A dystopian fiction like BNW is about how you can lose sight of what's worthwhile in an attempt to maximise happiness. And generally, people advocating brutal capitalistic policies which have society operating as a tremendously efficient engine forget (or never gave a shit anyway) about whether this makes anyone except themselves any happier.
Personally, though, I don't think our society has a goal. Because we don't have one society. When someone here says 'We have decided' or 'We think this', I always think 'Who are you calling we, buddy?' Society is not monolithic. And it never will be.
We have multiple competing ideologies whose goals are frequently incompatible. Take deeply religious people, for example. Many of their goals are incompatible with atheistic ones. And the people doing the governing and the bureacratising are members of those groups too. So you want as liberal a state as possible, so that all these varying societies have some chances of achieving their goals.
Which is why, to come back to ronya's original point (as I understand it - sometimes I don't get what you're trying to say, sorry mate) we need to resist laws which curtail freedom and, at base, require a law or other restriction to firstly, and then continually, prove its worth.
poshniallo on
I figure I could take a bear.
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JuliusCaptain of Serenityon my shipRegistered Userregular
1) In ethical debates, we're operating in a binary system: X is either ethical or unethical. It doesn't make sense to argue for some third position of "not unethical, but also not ethical" if our concern is for ethical value.
Well there are things that fall into that category, and one could argue that drug-use falls into that category. An action can be ethically neutral. Frankly, it seems absurd to argue otherwise. Unless you're dismissing the weight of ethics itself. (something being ethical must imply that one should do it, right?)
It's perfectly all right to claim using or not using drugs is itself an ethically neutral action in certain situations. For example, I could smoke this weed that I got right here now or not, and the decision is not an ethical one.
It always amazes me when people make it out like efficiency is a bad word. No matter what you want your society to accomplish, you should always want it to efficiently pursue those goals, otherwise you are advocating waste, and less success in achieving the goals you set out. If you want a society aimed at producing the most happiness possible, then why wouldn't you want to be as officiant as possible in producing happiness?
I imagine the idea is that there can arise conflicts. Which according to definition is impossible, but I suppose the issue is with "efficiency" as a buzzword thrown around by managers and politicians and not with it's textbook definition.
1) In ethical debates, we're operating in a binary system: X is either ethical or unethical. It doesn't make sense to argue for some third position of "not unethical, but also not ethical" if our concern is for ethical value.
Well there are things that fall into that category, and one could argue that drug-use falls into that category. An action can be ethically neutral. Frankly, it seems absurd to argue otherwise. Unless you're dismissing the weight of ethics itself. (something being ethical must imply that one should do it, right?)
It's perfectly all right to claim using or not using drugs is itself an ethically neutral action in certain situations. For example, I could smoke this weed that I got right here now or not, and the decision is not an ethical one.
1: You stated "one could argue", but did not, in fact, provide an argument.
2: You stated that actions can be ethically neutral.
3: You stated that it's "absurd" for that not to be the case.
4: You've stated that it's "all right" to claim that X is ethically neutral.
5: You provided an example of stating that decision-X is not ethical.
But you never actually provided an argument.
So, let's try that again. Is drug use an ethically neutral action? Why or why not?
_J_ on
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JuliusCaptain of Serenityon my shipRegistered Userregular
1) In ethical debates, we're operating in a binary system: X is either ethical or unethical. It doesn't make sense to argue for some third position of "not unethical, but also not ethical" if our concern is for ethical value.
Well there are things that fall into that category, and one could argue that drug-use falls into that category. An action can be ethically neutral. Frankly, it seems absurd to argue otherwise. Unless you're dismissing the weight of ethics itself. (something being ethical must imply that one should do it, right?)
It's perfectly all right to claim using or not using drugs is itself an ethically neutral action in certain situations. For example, I could smoke this weed that I got right here now or not, and the decision is not an ethical one.
1: You stated "one could argue", but did not, in fact, provide an argument.
2: You stated that actions can be ethically neutral.
3: You stated that it's "absurd" for that not to be the case.
4: You've stated that it's "all right" to claim that X is ethically neutral.
5: You provided an example of stating that decision-X is not ethical.
But you never actually provided an argument.
So, let's try that again. Are there ethically neutral actions? Why or why not?
I didn't think I needed to make an argument because I am not the one arguing that drug-use is ethically neutral and I also didn't think I seriously had to explain that actions can be ethically neutral.
The reason I feel incredibly comfortable in saying that actions can be ethically neutral (and that it's absurd to argue otherwise) is because there are frillions of examples that are exactly that.
So I'm going to use an important real world example right now. Yesterday I was faced with a choice. I could either put on a pair of black socks with the small red stripe at the top, or another pair of black socks with a sort of beige stripe at the top. I went with the beige because they were the closest. Now, in the weird fucking world you live in that action (putting on the beige striped socks instead of the red striped ones) has to be either ethical or unethical, right? Supposing I made the ethical choice in picking them a natural consequence of saying that would be to conclude that had I put on the red striped socks I would be making an unethical choice. Ethics being what ethics is, the moral pick, the course that I should have taken, was to pick the beige striped socks and put them on. Had I picked the other pair I would have made a morally wrong choice.
I dunno, _J_. I just feel really comfortable in stating that saying someone can be morally wrong for picking one pair of socks over another is an absurd suggestion.
You're agreeing with a statement that says one of your premises is false, and then you're saying it doesn't invalidate any of your premises?
I was glossing over your somewhat inaccurate wording to try and help the discussion along. The statement "People who have bought black market cocaine have behaved unethically" doesn't actually invalidate the premise "A person who has behaved ethically in all respects is innocent of wrongdoing."
And my point isn't that "using drugs should not be illegal" is generally false, my point is that it does not follow from "The prohibition of drug use entails the deliberate incarceration and punishment of innocent people", i.e. the moral innocence of those punished under existing laws. I'm not objecting to the conclusion (well, not at the moment), I'm objecting to trying to get there by maintaining that prohibition hurts innocents who just wants some cocaine by throwing them into jail after buying cocaine.
Because in the vast majority of cases (homegrown/picked mushrooms being two obvious exceptions) they are not actually morally innocent, because they provide material support for criminal organizations.
I think I see the source of the confusion. My argument isn't that drug users are, as a group, morally innocent. My argument is that drug use is not in and of itself unethical, and that, barring other considerations (such as social harm), people should not be punished for ethical behaviour, since they are - again, barring other considerations - innocent of wrongdoing. Drug use is not inherently unethical. The fact that purchasing illegal drugs can be unethical is not a valid consideration, because any argument made on the basis that users must purchase their drugs on the black market presupposes the existence of the very law that I'm arguing against.
The logic from the opposite side looks something like this:
1. Drug use is unethical/harmful.
2. Therefore the use and sale of drugs should be illegal.
3. Because the sale of drugs is illegal, purchasing drugs necessarily entails the use of the black market.
4. The use of the black market funds unethical behaviour.
5. Therefore, purchasing drugs is unethical.
If you remove point 1, which is the point under argument, 2-5 cease to apply. My claim is that drug use is not unethical, and that the harm it causes has not been shown to outweigh the harm caused by prohibition. Point 5 is therefore not relevant - if I'm wrong, it's superfluous, since the use of drugs is unethical anyway and should be prohibited in its own right; if I'm right, it actually supports my argument, since it's a consequence of 2. In no case can 3-5 cannot be used to support 1, since they are reliant on 2, which is itself reliant on 1.
Back to the car theft example: if the only way to get to a party were to steal a car, you could prohibit parties on the basis of reducing car theft. But you couldn't prohibit parties on the basis that they're unethical, because they aren't. It's not a negligible distinction. If you punish someone for an ethical and non-harmful act then you are punishing an "innocent" person, regardless of what other crimes they may have committed. It's not okay. You wouldn't frame someone for one crime in lieu of convicting them for another.
Or, back to you and me on a desert island: if you look at it from the opposite perspective, i.e. the question of criminalising drug use where it was not illegal before, the problem doesn't exist, since there is no black market.
(Though I would argue that we should have laws against drug use, because chemically undermining people's ability to make free choices is bad, but they would be less strict than current laws, because there are drugs that are currently illegal that do not actually undermine people's ability to make free choices, and those drugs should not be illegal.)
I'd be open to hearing such an argument, if you want to make it. Although I'd still like to hear from someone who actually supports the current laws.
But the enacting of the punishment presupposes the violation of the law, during the course of which we perform acts that are unethical in their own right. Denying access to a particular product is a direct result of prohibition, punishment for violating that prohibition is not - eating an orange being ethical is not the same thing as an imperative requiring me to eat oranges. Excluding the act of acquisition makes sense if we're talking about denial of acquisition, not when we're talking about the punishment that must, by neccessity, occur after acquisition.
I'm not sure how productive this line of discussion is going to be past this point, because I'm full circle back to wondering why we're limiting the scope by excluding the act of purchase. It was interesting to explore though, so thanks for humoring me. I'll add more at a later date on the utilitarian arguments when I'm not busy missing the bus.
1) In ethical debates, we're operating in a binary system: X is either ethical or unethical. It doesn't make sense to argue for some third position of "not unethical, but also not ethical" if our concern is for ethical value.
Well there are things that fall into that category, and one could argue that drug-use falls into that category. An action can be ethically neutral. Frankly, it seems absurd to argue otherwise. Unless you're dismissing the weight of ethics itself. (something being ethical must imply that one should do it, right?)
It's perfectly all right to claim using or not using drugs is itself an ethically neutral action in certain situations. For example, I could smoke this weed that I got right here now or not, and the decision is not an ethical one.
1: You stated "one could argue", but did not, in fact, provide an argument.
2: You stated that actions can be ethically neutral.
3: You stated that it's "absurd" for that not to be the case.
4: You've stated that it's "all right" to claim that X is ethically neutral.
5: You provided an example of stating that decision-X is not ethical.
But you never actually provided an argument.
So, let's try that again. Are there ethically neutral actions? Why or why not?
I didn't think I needed to make an argument because I am not the one arguing that drug-use is ethically neutral and I also didn't think I seriously had to explain that actions can be ethically neutral.
The reason I feel incredibly comfortable in saying that actions can be ethically neutral (and that it's absurd to argue otherwise) is because there are frillions of examples that are exactly that.
So I'm going to use an important real world example right now. Yesterday I was faced with a choice. I could either put on a pair of black socks with the small red stripe at the top, or another pair of black socks with a sort of beige stripe at the top. I went with the beige because they were the closest. Now, in the weird fucking world you live in that action (putting on the beige striped socks instead of the red striped ones) has to be either ethical or unethical, right? Supposing I made the ethical choice in picking them a natural consequence of saying that would be to conclude that had I put on the red striped socks I would be making an unethical choice. Ethics being what ethics is, the moral pick, the course that I should have taken, was to pick the beige striped socks and put them on. Had I picked the other pair I would have made a morally wrong choice.
I dunno, _J_. I just feel really comfortable in stating that saying someone can be morally wrong for picking one pair of socks over another is an absurd suggestion.
There are plenty of ethical components to your sock story.
1: Any monetary exchange is subject to ethical considerations, given that your money is used to fund projects, pay persons, etc. In the United States, monetary exchanges are legally considered a version of speech. So, there's also the consideration that your spending money at store-X is taken to be a tacit endorsement of the practices of store-X. This was an issue we got into with the Chick-Fil-A thread.
2: Those socks were made from something, which came from somewhere. Purchasing the socks is a tacit endorsement of the production methods utilized to create the socks. Were they free-trade socks, or sweat-shop socks?
3: The red stripe or beige stripe result from a different material. Perhaps the ink involved in either color is produced through ethically problematic means, or is made of some chemical that has negative environmental consequences.
Those are just three ethical considerations.
It's not absurd to maintain that every action, or inaction, can be assessed from an ethical perspective. I'll agree that it's somewhat inconvenient, and involves thought, and can make people feel more guilty than they'd like to. But that doesn't make the considerations absurd. It just indicates that the persons who get grumpy are ethically ambivalent / lazy, and so opt to think of their actions as having no consequences.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
I repeat that insisting that the burden of proof always lies on prohibitions of any kind, as a principle of high ethics, has some undesirable incentives on the way people react to legislation
The point of costly law enforcements outlines the symmetry between shrugging at the consumers of that which you may wish to prohibit, and shrugging at the victims of whatever weakly-associated inconvenience or crime or harassment, that you cannot decline to rigorously (and expensively) protect them from. In this case there is no clarity on where the burden of proof falls at all - indeed there is arguably no burden here. Go with the neutral cost-benefit analysis, not bias toward some non-existent principle of non-intervention. It is intervention either way.
I can't parse this second paragraph very well, sorry. Could you expound that, maybe lay it out for me like I'm dumb? I don't feel like I have a good grip on your argument.
Let's go with chewing gum, because it's honestly hilarious that it's actually a thing because it makes the ethical characteristics wonderfully clear.
We populate our gedanken with two things, chewing gum and a metro train. Now, some people ride the trains. Some people chew gum. Some of the people who chew gum, then stick gum on the train, where it dries and jams the doors, which (let's say) is an insurmountable barrier to cost-efficient train operation.
Now there is no plausible argument by which we assign ethical blame for the stopped trains on gum-chewers who do not stick gum on the train. We cannot blame any general culture of gum-related impairment, medical or otherwise. Wrigley's is conspicuously free of guerilla warfare and third-world poppy fields. There is no latent lawlessness inherent to acquiring, and then chewing, chewing gum. So this simplifies the argument: there is some narrow subset people who chew gum and then stick that gum on the trains, and this is their fault and theirs alone.
Now real life is full of problems, so let's have one. Let's say that Nature, in her guise of practical limits to first-world policing, has seen fit to prevent us from actually identifying and stopping these people: stealthily decorating the door you are leaning on is rather hard to observe, after all. If chewing gum is acceptable, then some people will chew gum and some of those people will jam the train-doors.
This gives us our choice: we can have a society where people can chew gum, and the people cannot take trains that work. Or we can have a society where the people can take the trains, and cannot chew gum. The latter is the result of prohibition, and the former the result of practicality, but I trust the symmetry is made obvious. Unless you are a particularly dedicated deontologist with peculiar answers to ye olde Trolley Problem, then in either outcome, some people will be restrained from pursuing some self-actualizing goals in life, like getting to work via trains that run on time. Or, you know, chewing some gum.
We do not assign blame. We do not assign fault. It is nobody's fault, in this here thought-experiment, that we cannot separate the vandal from the gentleman. We accept that innocents will suffer for no fault of their own; the state's discretion is in deciding who.
---
Got all that? Now let's return to reality. Let me point out that it is this shift in thinking that distinguishes criminal jurisprudence from regulatory policymaking. This reflects, more than anything else, a shift in state ideologies across the past couple of centuries rather than any particular cost-benefit argument. Compared to, say, 1913, the world of 2013 puts its modern disputes into the box of regulation rather than tort or crime.
Sometimes I sense that political philosophy has not quite caught up. When we say to an employer: put safety railings up, or we'll arrest you under OSHA, it's not necessarily because we can prove that this employer, in particular, is going to harm those employees, in particular, by failing to put railings up. Maybe this employer intends to never order anyone to work near that ledge! Maybe the employees might even prefer not to have railings up, and take the savings in wage payments. Maybe writing a railing safety specification that derives exactly-appropriate standards for all situations and all people is wholly impossible, so in particular this case the railings might not even be justified on any ethical ground - it might not even be ethically wrong to fail to put railings up! But all of that is simply irrelevant for a modern regulatory state; bureaucracies operate on standardization and protocol to tame an increasingly complex society, and that constraint alone is enough to motivate occasionally punishing the innocent, for priorities that are achieved elsewhere.
Bluntly, it is this: it is too difficult for us to exercise sufficiently fine control, and we care too much about those edge cases, so you don't get to do it. At all. Once the principle is admitted, the rest is just bargaining over the price.
The problem with this is all the things that get ignored when people design hypotheticals. The effects of the bureaucracy on the people is just one aspect, but it's a huge one. Or just the tremendous, mindfucking, unnacceptable-to-intellectual-nerds complexity of life - the one where trains and chewing gum can be compatible.
The purpose of my state is not efficient operation. I'm not sure what it is exactly. Perhaps maximizing happiness. But I am sure that it is not maximizing efficiency and smooth operation.
Personally I think that this is one of the main value traps of modern life - pursuing efficiency instead of happiness. You see it all the time in capitalist rhetoric.
It always amazes me when people make it out like efficiency is a bad word. No matter what you want your society to accomplish, you should always want it to efficiently pursue those goals, otherwise you are advocating waste, and less success in achieving the goals you set out. If you want a society aimed at producing the most happiness possible, then why wouldn't you want to be as officiant as possible in producing happiness?
It depends what you mean by efficiency. Efficiency is about not wasting resources in pursuit of a goal, right? A dystopian fiction like BNW is about how you can lose sight of what's worthwhile in an attempt to maximise happiness. And generally, people advocating brutal capitalistic policies which have society operating as a tremendously efficient engine forget (or never gave a shit anyway) about whether this makes anyone except themselves any happier.
Personally, though, I don't think our society has a goal. Because we don't have one society. When someone here says 'We have decided' or 'We think this', I always think 'Who are you calling we, buddy?' Society is not monolithic. And it never will be.
We have multiple competing ideologies whose goals are frequently incompatible. Take deeply religious people, for example. Many of their goals are incompatible with atheistic ones. And the people doing the governing and the bureacratising are members of those groups too. So you want as liberal a state as possible, so that all these varying societies have some chances of achieving their goals.
Which is why, to come back to ronya's original point (as I understand it - sometimes I don't get what you're trying to say, sorry mate) we need to resist laws which curtail freedom and, at base, require a law or other restriction to firstly, and then continually, prove its worth.
I think that what @Ronya 's example deftly illustrates is that it is an illusion to claim that we can choose the society with the "greatest degree of freedoms," because there are always trade offs. I think that most people would automatically say that the society with gum chewers is the freer society, when really, it is the society which has privledged the choice to chew gum over the choice to use a well functioning rail system. When I look at a society (like ours) which privileges the rights of gum chewers over the rights of train users, what I see is a society that has failed to prioritize the rights of law abiding citizens (those who use the train) ahead of rule breakers (those who place gum on the doors). It is my belief that a government must ensure that people who follow the rules are not disadvantaged by rule breakers, otherwise the incentive to follow the rules is weakened. We can't guarantee both that law abiding gum chewers may chew their gum and law abiding train riders will have the train available, and so in making the choice, I believe the government should always choose the group that is fully law abiding (train riders) over the mixed group (gum chewers).
Applying this to drugs and prohibition, it is my view that drugs ought to be prohibited, because that is the only way to resolve the tension (for example) between non-users driving without being at a higher risk of accident and users sometimes putting others at risk when driving under the influence. The responsible user loses out, but, since we cannot perfectly discern responsible and irresponsible users, the alternative is that all non-users lose out.
On efficiency, I agree that we are not a monolithic society, and so we may have rules in different areas that may seem contradictory or compromise positions which don't fully satisfy anyone, but this doesn't mean that once those choices are made, we shouldn't make an effort to minimize waste. Any position based on increasing wastefulness deliberately as a firm of compromise is fundamentally incoherent in my mind, as if represents the decision to destroy resources.
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JuliusCaptain of Serenityon my shipRegistered Userregular
There are plenty of ethical components to your sock story.
1: Any monetary exchange is subject to ethical considerations, given that your money is used to fund projects, pay persons, etc. In the United States, monetary exchanges are legally considered a version of speech. So, there's also the consideration that your spending money at store-X is taken to be a tacit endorsement of the practices of store-X. This was an issue we got into with the Chick-Fil-A thread.
2: Those socks were made from something, which came from somewhere. Purchasing the socks is a tacit endorsement of the production methods utilized to create the socks. Were they free-trade socks, or sweat-shop socks?
3: The red stripe or beige stripe result from a different material. Perhaps the ink involved in either color is produced through ethically problematic means, or is made of some chemical that has negative environmental consequences.
Those are just three ethical considerations.
It's not absurd to maintain that every action, or inaction, can be assessed from an ethical perspective. I'll agree that it's somewhat inconvenient, and involves thought, and can make people feel more guilty than they'd like to. But that doesn't make the considerations absurd. It just indicates that the persons who get grumpy are ethically ambivalent / lazy, and so opt to think of their actions as having no consequences.
What in the actual fuck are you talking about? I wasn't considering which pair of socks to buy, I already own these. They came in the same fucking pack. Would it be clearer if the socks in my example were just two pairs of the same socks without stripes? And if I fabricated them out of thin air?
Sit there all day and invent other actions where ethics come into play but be so kind as to tell me where ethics come into play in this specific action. Please just tell me how putting on one pair of socks instead of another somehow involves ethics. If you're just going to trace causality backwards to a point where you find ethics then you're doing a far better job of giving a reductio ad absurdem than I am, and that is itself absurd!
It is actually fundamentally irrelevant where the socks come from. Because I'm not asking whether it is ethical or not to wear these socks. I am asking if the choice between the pairs is an ethical one.
The problem with this is all the things that get ignored when people design hypotheticals. The effects of the bureaucracy on the people is just one aspect, but it's a huge one. Or just the tremendous, mindfucking, unnacceptable-to-intellectual-nerds complexity of life - the one where trains and chewing gum can be compatible.
The purpose of my state is not efficient operation. I'm not sure what it is exactly. Perhaps maximizing happiness. But I am sure that it is not maximizing efficiency and smooth operation.
Personally I think that this is one of the main value traps of modern life - pursuing efficiency instead of happiness. You see it all the time in capitalist rhetoric.
Sure. Societies contain people like SKFM, however, who (I presume) find happiness in the efficiency and smooth operation of trains. Societies also contain people who like to chew gum. There's no prima facie reason to favour one over the other. Substitute "an hour of extra time, every working day, for sleep or family" if you wish. These are entirely real gains.
It's not even very capitalist; capitalist societies rarely care much about the quality of working-class mass transit - it's more "you get what you pay for, and if you can't afford improbably expensive attention to detail, then that's just too bad". Cities in the United States tolerated this for decades:
which is hardly a level of quality that Americans tolerated in their private transit in the period. Private affluence and public squalor, as Galbraith said.
You would not design a flying machine by assuming away the problem of gravity. It's a little unpersuasive to complain that the challenges that life presents to you are simply so complex that it must only exist in the minds of nerds - that, I suppose, if we believed hard enough, the problem would go away.
There are plenty of ethical components to your sock story.
1: Any monetary exchange is subject to ethical considerations, given that your money is used to fund projects, pay persons, etc. In the United States, monetary exchanges are legally considered a version of speech. So, there's also the consideration that your spending money at store-X is taken to be a tacit endorsement of the practices of store-X. This was an issue we got into with the Chick-Fil-A thread.
2: Those socks were made from something, which came from somewhere. Purchasing the socks is a tacit endorsement of the production methods utilized to create the socks. Were they free-trade socks, or sweat-shop socks?
3: The red stripe or beige stripe result from a different material. Perhaps the ink involved in either color is produced through ethically problematic means, or is made of some chemical that has negative environmental consequences.
Those are just three ethical considerations.
It's not absurd to maintain that every action, or inaction, can be assessed from an ethical perspective. I'll agree that it's somewhat inconvenient, and involves thought, and can make people feel more guilty than they'd like to. But that doesn't make the considerations absurd. It just indicates that the persons who get grumpy are ethically ambivalent / lazy, and so opt to think of their actions as having no consequences.
What in the actual fuck are you talking about? I wasn't considering which pair of socks to buy, I already own these. They came in the same fucking pack. Would it be clearer if the socks in my example were just two pairs of the same socks without stripes? And if I fabricated them out of thin air?
Sit there all day and invent other actions where ethics come into play but be so kind as to tell me where ethics come into play in this specific action. Please just tell me how putting on one pair of socks instead of another somehow involves ethics. If you're just going to trace causality backwards to a point where you find ethics then you're doing a far better job of giving a reductio ad absurdem than I am, and that is itself absurd!
It is actually fundamentally irrelevant where the socks come from. Because I'm not asking whether it is ethical or not to wear these socks. I am asking if the choice between the pairs is an ethical one.
My apologies. When I read your post I thought it said "bought" instead of "put on". My mistake.
If we categorize aesthetics as a branch of ethics, then your decision of which sock you "ought" to wear could be described as an ethical "ought".
Absent that aesthetic consideration, there's still the question of why you're wearing socks at all. Is it that you were wearing a kind of shoe for which you "ought" to wear a sock? Were you shoeless and thought you "ought" to wear the socks in order to not spread some foot fungus on the floor?
Presumably you are not wearing the socks in a vacuum, independent of any other actions and absent any motivation. If you actually live in a world wherein all you do is choose which sock to put on, then you'd have a point. But you don't live in a sock-only world. There are other actions, other decisions, and a vast realm of consequences that are causally connected to your socks. Ethics involves those other aspects of your reality, and the consequences of the various features of that existence.
That's one of the problems with the OP's position. There are a plethora of consequences to buying drugs and using drugs. If we narrow the scope down to "I smoke this joint" then we're engaging a very bizarre hypothetical that in no way relates to our actual lived reality. The money used to buy the pot went somewhere, and came from somewhere. The pot smoke will have various effects on one's biological self. The effects of the pot will have effects on one's mentality and disposition, and influence one's decision making process. All of those aspects of life have ethical consequences, and require ethical consideration.
Said another way, you aren't giving an actual example. You've narrowed your scope of reality to a laughably miniscule dimension.
I think that what @Ronya 's example deftly illustrates is that it is an illusion to claim that we can choose the society with the "greatest degree of freedoms," because there are always trade offs. I think that most people would automatically say that the society with gum chewers is the freer society, when really, it is the society which has privledged the choice to chew gum over the choice to use a well functioning rail system. When I look at a society (like ours) which privileges the rights of gum chewers over the rights of train users, what I see is a society that has failed to prioritize the rights of law abiding citizens (those who use the train) ahead of rule breakers (those who place gum on the doors). It is my belief that a government must ensure that people who follow the rules are not disadvantaged by rule breakers, otherwise the incentive to follow the rules is weakened. We can't guarantee both that law abiding gum chewers may chew their gum and law abiding train riders will have the train available, and so in making the choice, I believe the government should always choose the group that is fully law abiding (train riders) over the mixed group (gum chewers).
Applying this to drugs and prohibition, it is my view that drugs ought to be prohibited, because that is the only way to resolve the tension (for example) between non-users driving without being at a higher risk of accident and users sometimes putting others at risk when driving under the influence. The responsible user loses out, but, since we cannot perfectly discern responsible and irresponsible users, the alternative is that all non-users lose out.
Well, the OP has found his interlocutor at last :rotate:
I should note that the categories being drawn here are rather arbitrary. The people who stealthily stick gum on the doors are, by definition, both train-riders and gum-chewers. Neither are completely law-abiding. In this particular case, it happens that it is insensible to ban riding the train to protect the ability to ride the train, but that's because of the simplicity of the problem as constructed. You can easily tweak the problem to construct a different category.
To make this obvious, suppose you surveyed CCTV recordings and found that all hat-wearing train-riders never stick gum on the doors. Then you now have two groups, the be-hatted gentlemen who are fully law-abiding, and the hatless knaves who are the mixed group. Then you could simply expel all the hatless from the train, i.e., this subset of train riders, who are quite possibly unrelated to the subset of gum-chewers, save for the fact that the hatless group contains at least one individual who chews gum.
In the limit of the proportion of hat-wearers approaching zero, you get the original problem. In the limit of the proportion approaching one (and thus the criteria successfully identifying the vandals perfectly), you get no problem at all! Surely, the right choice depends on empirics and relative costs here, not how we designate categories - it would be utterly insensible to pursue the mixed group if it left only this gentleman on the train, and nobody else:
(doubtless photographed at the platform of B&O)
And you can play this game with drugs, endlessly. Clearly you cannot discern between responsible and irresponsible drivers, who own a two-ton speeding hunk of metal despite knowing that they enjoy pipe-weed of the finest variety. And, of course, all drug-using non-drivers do not drive under the influence, by definition, so it is their group who is law-abiding. Clearly we should ban cars!
The situation is not symmetric, though. The gum-chewers face active persecution from the government, while the train-riders do not. For the purposes of deciding what should be put into law, I draw a distinction.
Really? Let us say that government did not prohibit gum, but refused to prosecute anyone who beat you up, seized your property, or detained you for chewing gum - because it is too costly for the state attorney's office, say. Suppose you believe, and you know the government knows you believe, that there is a band of anti-gum zealots waiting to do just that.
Would that policy make you feel free to chew gum?
The right to be protected from other would-be rulers of your life is fundamental to the state. It's in that "monopoly on the legitimate use of force" bit.
A paper-thin excuse to deny someone basic rights is still purposeful persecution by the government. Also, the severity of the persecution isn't the reason there's a distinction.
Let's scale way back. Stop me at the first point you disagree with.
I have a right to total freedom, to the extent that my freedom causes no harm to others.
In evidential matters, the burden of proof rests on the positive claimaint. I cannot prove that none of my actions are harmful to others, nor should I be expected to; it is the claimaint's responsibility to demonstrate harm or risk of harm. In other words, I am innocent until proven guilty.
(I have a responsibility to explore the consequences of my own actions to avoid causing harm to others, but that's not relevant at the moment.)
Now, suppose the existence of two parties, who I will imaginatively title Party A and Party B.
Party A believes that Party B is infringing upon Party A rights, and responds with legislation restricting the rights of Party B. In order for this to be justified, Party A must show firstly that Party B is in fact infringing upon their rights, and secondly that the restriction of Party B's rights will actually have the desired goal of preventing the infringement of the rights of Party A.
However, the reverse is not true. Party B believes that Party A is infringing upon Party B's rights via this legislation. However, Party B does not need to prove that their rights are being infringed, because that is known a priori – it's encoded into the law, literally a matter of public record. Similarly, Party B does not need to prove that removing the law will restore their rights, since that too is known a priori – the law itself constitutes the infringement. It therefore falls to Party A to demonstrate that this infringement is justified.
In order words, it is always the responsibility of the lawmaker to provide justification for the law.
The same principle applies to laws enacted on utilitarian grounds. It is known a priori that the law will curb people's rights; everything else requires evidence. The law is a negative by default, and therefore by default it should not exist, until an argument is made to the contrary.
In your quoted example above, the restriction of rights may not be explicitly encoded into law, but it's so trivial to prove that it comes to the same thing.
Let's scale way back. Stop me at the first point you disagree with.
I have a right to total freedom, to the extent that my freedom causes no harm to others.
In evidential matters, the burden of proof rests on the positive claimant-
DING DING DING DING DING. You are still presuming a priority between negative freedoms with no self-evident justification.
You desire to take the train. There is a contracted metro-company with a train, waiting for you. But someone else violates this right by harming you first, by damaging the train and preventing you from taking it. Where is the state's protection of this right? Where is your just recompense for the violation of your freedom? On what basis do you refuse this to enforce right?
Surely you are being the positive claimant, by summarily discarding this right. It is, as a matter of public record, that you can see the damage - the train does not work, after all - and yet you choose to do nothing. How is this not purposeful?
Let's scale way back. Stop me at the first point you disagree with.
I have a right to total freedom, to the extent that my freedom causes no harm to others.
In evidential matters, the burden of proof rests on the positive claimant-
DING DING DING DING DING. You are still presuming a priority between negative freedoms with no self-evident justification.
You desire to take the train. There is a contracted metro-company with a train, waiting for you. But someone else violates this right by harming you first, by damaging the train and preventing you from taking it. Where is the state's protection of this right? Where is your just recompense for the violation of your freedom? On what basis do you refuse this to enforce right?
Surely you are being the positive claimant, by summarily discarding this right. It is, as a matter of public record, that you can see the damage - the train does not work, after all - and yet you choose to do nothing. How is this not purposeful?
I can see the damages - the harm exists. Who (or what subset of a larger group) caused it, and will my infringement upon their rights rectify the situation? These things are not known a priori.
Let's scale way back. Stop me at the first point you disagree with.
I have a right to total freedom, to the extent that my freedom causes no harm to others.
In evidential matters, the burden of proof rests on the positive claimant-
DING DING DING DING DING. You are still presuming a priority between negative freedoms with no self-evident justification.
You desire to take the train. There is a contracted metro-company with a train, waiting for you. But someone else violates this right by harming you first, by damaging the train and preventing you from taking it. Where is the state's protection of this right? Where is your just recompense for the violation of your freedom? On what basis do you refuse this to enforce right?
Surely you are being the positive claimant, by summarily discarding this right. It is, as a matter of public record, that you can see the damage - the train does not work, after all - and yet you choose to do nothing. How is this not purposeful?
I can see the damages - the harm exists. Who (or what subset of a larger group) caused it, and will my infringement upon their rights rectify the situation? These things are not known a priori.
Well, the gum is chewed, so a gum-chewer caused it :rotate:
And that being as far as we can identify is the crux of the problem.
Well, the gum is chewed, so a gum-chewer caused it :rotate:
This is you demonstrating proof (sufficient or otherwise) that gum-chewers are the problem. So it may be sufficient justification for the law. But it's still you providing the justification, it's just that it's such an obvious proof that it appears self-evident. It boils down to this:
It is known a priori that a law restricting people's freedoms is an infringement of rights. It is not know a priori that the removal or absence of that law is an infringement of rights. Therefore, burden of justification rests on the lawmaker.
However obvious the proof or simple the demonstration, it still rests on the lawmaker.
It is not known a priori that the removal or absence of that law is an infringement of rights...
.... but you've just acknowledged that the harm exists. And that is how you have defined rights: freedom from harm. Whether or not you can further identify the infringer is irrelevant to the acknowledgement of infringement.
It is the case that, a priori, a refusal to enforce the right to freedom from a given harm is tantamount to endorsing the harm. Otherwise you admit the possibility of non-state repression, yet again. If you want real examples, there are numerous existing societies with theoretical rights to freedom of religion, but no actual willingness by the state to restrain non-state militias from conducting their own religious persecution, simply because it would be terribly unpopular to do so.
It is trivial for hypothetical legislation to be sufficiently draconian. I don't think anybody really doubts that if you are willing to ride roughshod over enough rights, civil or otherwise, you can set up a police state.
I will point out, further, that you happen to already live in a world of outrageously draconian drug laws. That's your status quo! By your logic, wouldn't the burden of proof for the predicted consequences of repeal lie on the legislator proposing a repeal bill?
I'd like to hear some arguments in favour of drug prohibiton.
It probably does lower actual drug use (for the substances that are controlled, anyway). This was certainly true of alcohol prohibition.
The question more or less then becomes, "Is fewer people taking drugs a significant enough benefit that the cost of getting there is a worthwhile expense?" and the answer, in my opinion, is "Nope."
Some days I really wish I could agree with the American DEA / ATF, because frankly I am sick and tired of having to deal with people that have blown-out their neurons with whatever crap they're currently abusing and having to deal with even more of them is a pretty unwelcome prospect, but it's just flat-out not worth it.
It is not known a priori that the removal or absence of that law is an infringement of rights...
.... but you've just acknowledged that the harm exists. And that is how you have defined rights: freedom from harm. Whether or not you can further identify the infringer is irrelevant to the acknowledgement of infringement.
I've acknowledged that "bad things exist", yes. When I said the harm exists, I did not mean to imply anything about cause or responsibility. Again, it is not known that the absence or removal of a given law will result in an infringement of rights. Not without evidence. It is known, without evidence of any kind, that the existence of a law is an infringement of people's rights.
I feel like we've drilled down to the crux of the issue, so I'm very interested in your responses.
It is the case that, a priori, a refusal to enforce the right to freedom from a given harm is tantamount to endorsing the harm. Otherwise you admit the possibility of non-state repression, yet again. If you want real examples, there are numerous existing societies with theoretical rights to freedom of religion, but no actual willingness by the state to restrain non-state militias from conducting their own religious persecution, simply because it would be terribly unpopular to do so.
A refusal to enforce freedom from harm is tantamount to endorsing the harm. It does not then follow, in the absence of evidence, that the absence of any given law causes harm and is therefore an infringement of rights, although it may be trivial to prove so.
I will point out, further, that you happen to already live in a world of outrageously draconian drug laws. That's your status quo! By your logic, wouldn't the burden of proof for the predicted consequences of repeal lie on the legislator proposing a repeal bill?
No, not at all. That you would suggest so shows you must not have followed/agreed with my logic. Which of the following do you take issue with:
1. It is known a priori that a law restricting people's freedoms is an infringement of rights.
2. It is not known a priori that the removal or absence of that law is an infringement of rights.
3. Therefore, burden of justification rests on the lawmaker.
You raised no objections to 1 thus far, so your issue appears to be with 2. While evidence or logical argument may be sufficient to establish that an infringement of rights accompanies the absence of any given law, it cannot be established in the absence of evidence that an infringement of rights accompanies the absence of any and all laws, while the contrary is not true. All laws are infringements of freedom. Not all absences of law are infringements of freedom. If you feel you can establish that the absence of any law is known a priori to be an infringement of rights, please do so.
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Unless you want to assert some objective framework of ethics, I'm not sure this is a distinction with a difference.
I repeat that insisting that the burden of proof always lies on prohibitions of any kind, as a principle of high ethics, has some undesirable incentives on the way people react to legislation
The point of costly law enforcements outlines the symmetry between shrugging at the consumers of that which you may wish to prohibit, and shrugging at the victims of whatever weakly-associated inconvenience or crime or harassment, that you cannot decline to rigorously (and expensively) protect them from. In this case there is no clarity on where the burden of proof falls at all - indeed there is arguably no burden here. Go with the neutral cost-benefit analysis, not bias toward some non-existent principle of non-intervention. It is intervention either way.
ethics don't even need to be objective here; it just requires that people are often wrong. there can be a flexible ethics here, albeit merely one that doesn't track popular outlooks exactly
It's not a tautology. They're premises. You either agree with them or you dispute them.
1) I agree drug use can be unethical, but not intrinsically. That is, I believe it's possible to use drugs ethically, and that the act of using drugs is not inherently wrong (unlike, say, murder - the act of depriving another person of life is inherently wrong unless some additional factor exculpates you. The act of using a drug is inherently ethical unless some additional factor - like harm caused to others - condemns you.) Once you accept that distinction, it becomes simply a question of which is least unethical/which causes least harm, drug use or drug prohibition?
2) I don't consider violating social conventions to be unethical. Care to back that statement up?
3) An aphorism is not an argument.
I can't parse this second paragraph very well, sorry. Could you expound that, maybe lay it out for me like I'm dumb? I don't feel like I have a good grip on your argument.
Agreed, but that's because there are different kinds of ethics. For example:
Personal Ethics which are the rules/guidelines a particular individual follows.
Societal Ethics, which are the conventions of ethical behavior followed in a particular society.
So while from a personal perspective, drug use/purchase may not be unethical, from a societal perspective it is as it breaks the social convention.
1) I think use of certain drugs is intrinsically unethical due to the nature of those drugs. Heroin, from the OP, is an example of this. It's so addicting and difficult to give up that it forces people to act in an unethical manner, and it certainly fails the criteria of "cause no harm to others".
2) Using your example of murder (the act of depriving another person of life), it is ethically acceptable to end another's life in wartime. This is by social convention. It is also ethically acceptable to end another's life in self-defense.
3) If I make a series of decisions that are ethically sound, but the end result is great harm to others, am I ethically responsible for this harm?
Let's go with chewing gum, because it's honestly hilarious that it's actually a thing because it makes the ethical characteristics wonderfully clear.
We populate our gedanken with two things, chewing gum and a metro train. Now, some people ride the trains. Some people chew gum. Some of the people who chew gum, then stick gum on the train, where it dries and jams the doors, which (let's say) is an insurmountable barrier to cost-efficient train operation.
Now there is no plausible argument by which we assign ethical blame for the stopped trains on gum-chewers who do not stick gum on the train. We cannot blame any general culture of gum-related impairment, medical or otherwise. Wrigley's is conspicuously free of guerilla warfare and third-world poppy fields. There is no latent lawlessness inherent to acquiring, and then chewing, chewing gum. So this simplifies the argument: there is some narrow subset people who chew gum and then stick that gum on the trains, and this is their fault and theirs alone.
Now real life is full of problems, so let's have one. Let's say that Nature, in her guise of practical limits to first-world policing, has seen fit to prevent us from actually identifying and stopping these people: stealthily decorating the door you are leaning on is rather hard to observe, after all. If chewing gum is acceptable, then some people will chew gum and some of those people will jam the train-doors.
This gives us our choice: we can have a society where people can chew gum, and the people cannot take trains that work. Or we can have a society where the people can take the trains, and cannot chew gum. The latter is the result of prohibition, and the former the result of practicality, but I trust the symmetry is made obvious. Unless you are a particularly dedicated deontologist with peculiar answers to ye olde Trolley Problem, then in either outcome, some people will be restrained from pursuing some self-actualizing goals in life, like getting to work via trains that run on time. Or, you know, chewing some gum.
We do not assign blame. We do not assign fault. It is nobody's fault, in this here thought-experiment, that we cannot separate the vandal from the gentleman. We accept that innocents will suffer for no fault of their own; the state's discretion is in deciding who.
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Got all that? Now let's return to reality. Let me point out that it is this shift in thinking that distinguishes criminal jurisprudence from regulatory policymaking. This reflects, more than anything else, a shift in state ideologies across the past couple of centuries rather than any particular cost-benefit argument. Compared to, say, 1913, the world of 2013 puts its modern disputes into the box of regulation rather than tort or crime.
Sometimes I sense that political philosophy has not quite caught up. When we say to an employer: put safety railings up, or we'll arrest you under OSHA, it's not necessarily because we can prove that this employer, in particular, is going to harm those employees, in particular, by failing to put railings up. Maybe this employer intends to never order anyone to work near that ledge! Maybe the employees might even prefer not to have railings up, and take the savings in wage payments. Maybe writing a railing safety specification that derives exactly-appropriate standards for all situations and all people is wholly impossible, so in particular this case the railings might not even be justified on any ethical ground - it might not even be ethically wrong to fail to put railings up! But all of that is simply irrelevant for a modern regulatory state; bureaucracies operate on standardization and protocol to tame an increasingly complex society, and that constraint alone is enough to motivate occasionally punishing the innocent, for priorities that are achieved elsewhere.
Bluntly, it is this: it is too difficult for us to exercise sufficiently fine control, and we care too much about those edge cases, so you don't get to do it. At all. Once the principle is admitted, the rest is just bargaining over the price.
I was going to make a similiar, but no doubt inferior, post, but @Ronya has this argument covered. I have never missed the old awesome system as much as right now, as this is perhaps the best post that I have ever read on these forums. Well done, my hyper intelligent canine friend!
I'll stick to the gum experiment since, as you say, it lends things a useful clarity. Assume everything is as you've written it. My question is then not, as you might possibly have misunderstood it, whether the freedom of the train-riders to ride working trains has moral preeminence over the freedom of the gum-chewers to chew gum. As a matter of fact, the freedom of the gum-chewers does not enter into it - except insofar as to establish that in an ideal world, people should have the freedom to chew gum.
My demands of the legislators of the anti-gum laws are as follows. Can you:
A) quantify in some way the reduction of harm resulting from the anti-gum laws, i.e. is less gum being stuck in train doors, and if so how much?
Your demonstration need not be rigorous; it must be sufficient to convince your fellow legislators, who for the purposes of this discussion we'll assume, like you, are rational and intelligent human beings who are participating in the discussion in good faith with the common goal of minimising overall harm to the public, and have no ulterior motives.
If you cannot demonstrate this, then in my evaluation your legislation has failed and must be reviewed. Any modification or alternate proposal must be subject to the same test, both on its theoretical or predicted effects prior to implementation, and on its observed or actual effects at appropriate intervals thereafter. If there is consistent failure, then we must begin scaling back our anti-gum legislation, until we reach either a revision that passes the test or total decriminalisation, the former being the most likely outcome.
I would hope that the reason we should default towards freedom rather than restriction is obvious, but let me know if it isn't.
Now: have I misunderstood either your thought experiment or your argument, and if so in what way? If not, what's the point of contention between us?
Well that seems to be the point of contention. This is an ethical preference, which informs where you think the burden of proof lies. It could be just as easily said that it's on you to prove that anti-gum laws do more harm than good because we prefer restriction above freedom.
A) quantify in some way the potential net support for gum legalization and any changes in (cultural?) vandalism propensities since the passage of the prohibitory legislation, i.e., would gum be once again stuck in train doors, and if so, how much?
Similarly, of course, your demonstration need not be rigorous, but if you cannot demonstrate this, then the repeal bill should be summarily discarded.
Because, after all, in an ideal world, people should have the freedom to rely on the train, without having to risk it suspended just to fix the damn doors. Surely we would not like to force needless costs and disruption onto literally hundreds of thousands of people whilst they jam back into automobiles just to go about their daily lives.
And that is the point of my argument, that it is symmetric and you achieve a freedom and lose another in either direction. In one universe, you chew gum. In another universe, you take the train. For the state to say: I will punish you if you foolishly choose to acquire gum, is not more restrictive than the state saying: I choose to let another punish you if you foolishly choose to rely on the train. And the state must make this choice, because doing nothing is an endorsement of the status quo.
"In a perfect world, people could commit battery."
"In a perfect world, people could use drugs."
"In a perfect world, people could rape."
"In a perfect world, people could murder."
When I say that drug use is not intrinsically unethical, I don't mean that it is necessarily ethical in any particular instance, or even in all particular instances. All I mean is that it's a freedom that people should have unless there is some external reason they shouldn't, like social cost, risk, or indirect harm to others.
If I accepted that the reason it is ethical to kill someone in self-defence is because of social convention, which I don't, it still doesn't follow that to violate social convention is unethical.
No, you wouldn't be. Are you leading up to an argument about strict liability in law?
(It's late, I'll come back to this tomorrow.)
If that's the case, the disagreement is probably axiomatic. I'm not sure how far I could get in an argument with someone who could honestly say they were "anti-freedom."
Really? Let us say that government did not prohibit gum, but refused to prosecute anyone who beat you up, seized your property, or detained you for chewing gum - because it is too costly for the state attorney's office, say. Suppose you believe, and you know the government knows you believe, that there is a band of anti-gum zealots waiting to do just that.
Would that policy make you feel free to chew gum?
The right to be protected from other would-be rulers of your life is fundamental to the state. It's in that "monopoly on the legitimate use of force" bit.
The stance is not anti-freedom, it is just prioritizing certain freedoms over others. As has been pointed out, society is a system complex enough that that is what you always have to do.
The problem with this is all the things that get ignored when people design hypotheticals. The effects of the bureaucracy on the people is just one aspect, but it's a huge one. Or just the tremendous, mindfucking, unnacceptable-to-intellectual-nerds complexity of life - the one where trains and chewing gum can be compatible.
The purpose of my state is not efficient operation. I'm not sure what it is exactly. Perhaps maximizing happiness. But I am sure that it is not maximizing efficiency and smooth operation.
Personally I think that this is one of the main value traps of modern life - pursuing efficiency instead of happiness. You see it all the time in capitalist rhetoric.
You seem to have an unstated premise for which you have not adequately argued.
It's not obvious. In debate, the only obvious positions are self-evident tautologies. "Freedom is good" or "freedom is preferable" are not self-evident tautologies; the predicates of "good" and "preferable" are not contained in "freedom". These are position for which one needs to argue.
Given that your interlocutors seem to disagree with this position, you need to offer compelling arguments, rather than simply repeat that your position is self-evidently true.
Couple things.
1) In ethical debates, we're operating in a binary system: X is either ethical or unethical. It doesn't make sense to argue for some third position of "not unethical, but also not ethical" if our concern is for ethical value.
2) "it's a freedom that people should have" That's an interesting position. Perhaps you'd like to argue for it.
1 does quite a bit of work. Given that people are arguing against it, you may need to restate it or argue for it, rather than take it for granted and then fault others for taking issue with it.
2 Sure. It's fine to maintain that there are such things as unjust laws. The question is what standard of justice one utilizes to discern whether or not a legal prohibition is just or unjust.
3 "wrongdoing" may be problematic. A person who behaved ethically has not behaved unethically, sure. However, there is a legal sense of "wrongdoing" that still maintains despite our ethical qualms. So, one may act ethically, but still engage in "wrongdoing", if we understand "wrongdoing" in a legal, rather than ethical, sense.
4 "deliberately" is a term you need to clarify. "harm" is a tem you need to clarify. "innocent" is a term you need to clarify. It doesn't seem difficult to argue that taking drugs is, itself, a biological harm that a drug user deliberately inflicts on its self. Given your position you don't seem to take the biological effects of drugs to be harmful...which means that you're using definitions that are contrary to the norm.
If you want people to take your argument seriously then you need to either
1: Provide arguments for your premises.
2: Only converse with Drug Addled Rationalists, who don't notice that your premises are not self-evident, in the strictest sense.
It always amazes me when people make it out like efficiency is a bad word. No matter what you want your society to accomplish, you should always want it to efficiently pursue those goals, otherwise you are advocating waste, and less success in achieving the goals you set out. If you want a society aimed at producing the most happiness possible, then why wouldn't you want to be as officiant as possible in producing happiness?
It depends what you mean by efficiency. Efficiency is about not wasting resources in pursuit of a goal, right? A dystopian fiction like BNW is about how you can lose sight of what's worthwhile in an attempt to maximise happiness. And generally, people advocating brutal capitalistic policies which have society operating as a tremendously efficient engine forget (or never gave a shit anyway) about whether this makes anyone except themselves any happier.
Personally, though, I don't think our society has a goal. Because we don't have one society. When someone here says 'We have decided' or 'We think this', I always think 'Who are you calling we, buddy?' Society is not monolithic. And it never will be.
We have multiple competing ideologies whose goals are frequently incompatible. Take deeply religious people, for example. Many of their goals are incompatible with atheistic ones. And the people doing the governing and the bureacratising are members of those groups too. So you want as liberal a state as possible, so that all these varying societies have some chances of achieving their goals.
Which is why, to come back to ronya's original point (as I understand it - sometimes I don't get what you're trying to say, sorry mate) we need to resist laws which curtail freedom and, at base, require a law or other restriction to firstly, and then continually, prove its worth.
Well there are things that fall into that category, and one could argue that drug-use falls into that category. An action can be ethically neutral. Frankly, it seems absurd to argue otherwise. Unless you're dismissing the weight of ethics itself. (something being ethical must imply that one should do it, right?)
It's perfectly all right to claim using or not using drugs is itself an ethically neutral action in certain situations. For example, I could smoke this weed that I got right here now or not, and the decision is not an ethical one.
I imagine the idea is that there can arise conflicts. Which according to definition is impossible, but I suppose the issue is with "efficiency" as a buzzword thrown around by managers and politicians and not with it's textbook definition.
@Julius
You don't seem to have provided an argument.
1: You stated "one could argue", but did not, in fact, provide an argument.
2: You stated that actions can be ethically neutral.
3: You stated that it's "absurd" for that not to be the case.
4: You've stated that it's "all right" to claim that X is ethically neutral.
5: You provided an example of stating that decision-X is not ethical.
But you never actually provided an argument.
So, let's try that again. Is drug use an ethically neutral action? Why or why not?
I didn't think I needed to make an argument because I am not the one arguing that drug-use is ethically neutral and I also didn't think I seriously had to explain that actions can be ethically neutral.
The reason I feel incredibly comfortable in saying that actions can be ethically neutral (and that it's absurd to argue otherwise) is because there are frillions of examples that are exactly that.
So I'm going to use an important real world example right now. Yesterday I was faced with a choice. I could either put on a pair of black socks with the small red stripe at the top, or another pair of black socks with a sort of beige stripe at the top. I went with the beige because they were the closest. Now, in the weird fucking world you live in that action (putting on the beige striped socks instead of the red striped ones) has to be either ethical or unethical, right? Supposing I made the ethical choice in picking them a natural consequence of saying that would be to conclude that had I put on the red striped socks I would be making an unethical choice. Ethics being what ethics is, the moral pick, the course that I should have taken, was to pick the beige striped socks and put them on. Had I picked the other pair I would have made a morally wrong choice.
I dunno, _J_. I just feel really comfortable in stating that saying someone can be morally wrong for picking one pair of socks over another is an absurd suggestion.
I'm not sure how productive this line of discussion is going to be past this point, because I'm full circle back to wondering why we're limiting the scope by excluding the act of purchase. It was interesting to explore though, so thanks for humoring me. I'll add more at a later date on the utilitarian arguments when I'm not busy missing the bus.
There are plenty of ethical components to your sock story.
1: Any monetary exchange is subject to ethical considerations, given that your money is used to fund projects, pay persons, etc. In the United States, monetary exchanges are legally considered a version of speech. So, there's also the consideration that your spending money at store-X is taken to be a tacit endorsement of the practices of store-X. This was an issue we got into with the Chick-Fil-A thread.
2: Those socks were made from something, which came from somewhere. Purchasing the socks is a tacit endorsement of the production methods utilized to create the socks. Were they free-trade socks, or sweat-shop socks?
3: The red stripe or beige stripe result from a different material. Perhaps the ink involved in either color is produced through ethically problematic means, or is made of some chemical that has negative environmental consequences.
Those are just three ethical considerations.
It's not absurd to maintain that every action, or inaction, can be assessed from an ethical perspective. I'll agree that it's somewhat inconvenient, and involves thought, and can make people feel more guilty than they'd like to. But that doesn't make the considerations absurd. It just indicates that the persons who get grumpy are ethically ambivalent / lazy, and so opt to think of their actions as having no consequences.
I think that what @Ronya 's example deftly illustrates is that it is an illusion to claim that we can choose the society with the "greatest degree of freedoms," because there are always trade offs. I think that most people would automatically say that the society with gum chewers is the freer society, when really, it is the society which has privledged the choice to chew gum over the choice to use a well functioning rail system. When I look at a society (like ours) which privileges the rights of gum chewers over the rights of train users, what I see is a society that has failed to prioritize the rights of law abiding citizens (those who use the train) ahead of rule breakers (those who place gum on the doors). It is my belief that a government must ensure that people who follow the rules are not disadvantaged by rule breakers, otherwise the incentive to follow the rules is weakened. We can't guarantee both that law abiding gum chewers may chew their gum and law abiding train riders will have the train available, and so in making the choice, I believe the government should always choose the group that is fully law abiding (train riders) over the mixed group (gum chewers).
Applying this to drugs and prohibition, it is my view that drugs ought to be prohibited, because that is the only way to resolve the tension (for example) between non-users driving without being at a higher risk of accident and users sometimes putting others at risk when driving under the influence. The responsible user loses out, but, since we cannot perfectly discern responsible and irresponsible users, the alternative is that all non-users lose out.
On efficiency, I agree that we are not a monolithic society, and so we may have rules in different areas that may seem contradictory or compromise positions which don't fully satisfy anyone, but this doesn't mean that once those choices are made, we shouldn't make an effort to minimize waste. Any position based on increasing wastefulness deliberately as a firm of compromise is fundamentally incoherent in my mind, as if represents the decision to destroy resources.
What in the actual fuck are you talking about? I wasn't considering which pair of socks to buy, I already own these. They came in the same fucking pack. Would it be clearer if the socks in my example were just two pairs of the same socks without stripes? And if I fabricated them out of thin air?
Sit there all day and invent other actions where ethics come into play but be so kind as to tell me where ethics come into play in this specific action. Please just tell me how putting on one pair of socks instead of another somehow involves ethics. If you're just going to trace causality backwards to a point where you find ethics then you're doing a far better job of giving a reductio ad absurdem than I am, and that is itself absurd!
It is actually fundamentally irrelevant where the socks come from. Because I'm not asking whether it is ethical or not to wear these socks. I am asking if the choice between the pairs is an ethical one.
Sure. Societies contain people like SKFM, however, who (I presume) find happiness in the efficiency and smooth operation of trains. Societies also contain people who like to chew gum. There's no prima facie reason to favour one over the other. Substitute "an hour of extra time, every working day, for sleep or family" if you wish. These are entirely real gains.
It's not even very capitalist; capitalist societies rarely care much about the quality of working-class mass transit - it's more "you get what you pay for, and if you can't afford improbably expensive attention to detail, then that's just too bad". Cities in the United States tolerated this for decades:
which is hardly a level of quality that Americans tolerated in their private transit in the period. Private affluence and public squalor, as Galbraith said.
You would not design a flying machine by assuming away the problem of gravity. It's a little unpersuasive to complain that the challenges that life presents to you are simply so complex that it must only exist in the minds of nerds - that, I suppose, if we believed hard enough, the problem would go away.
My apologies. When I read your post I thought it said "bought" instead of "put on". My mistake.
If we categorize aesthetics as a branch of ethics, then your decision of which sock you "ought" to wear could be described as an ethical "ought".
Absent that aesthetic consideration, there's still the question of why you're wearing socks at all. Is it that you were wearing a kind of shoe for which you "ought" to wear a sock? Were you shoeless and thought you "ought" to wear the socks in order to not spread some foot fungus on the floor?
Presumably you are not wearing the socks in a vacuum, independent of any other actions and absent any motivation. If you actually live in a world wherein all you do is choose which sock to put on, then you'd have a point. But you don't live in a sock-only world. There are other actions, other decisions, and a vast realm of consequences that are causally connected to your socks. Ethics involves those other aspects of your reality, and the consequences of the various features of that existence.
That's one of the problems with the OP's position. There are a plethora of consequences to buying drugs and using drugs. If we narrow the scope down to "I smoke this joint" then we're engaging a very bizarre hypothetical that in no way relates to our actual lived reality. The money used to buy the pot went somewhere, and came from somewhere. The pot smoke will have various effects on one's biological self. The effects of the pot will have effects on one's mentality and disposition, and influence one's decision making process. All of those aspects of life have ethical consequences, and require ethical consideration.
Said another way, you aren't giving an actual example. You've narrowed your scope of reality to a laughably miniscule dimension.
Well, the OP has found his interlocutor at last :rotate:
I should note that the categories being drawn here are rather arbitrary. The people who stealthily stick gum on the doors are, by definition, both train-riders and gum-chewers. Neither are completely law-abiding. In this particular case, it happens that it is insensible to ban riding the train to protect the ability to ride the train, but that's because of the simplicity of the problem as constructed. You can easily tweak the problem to construct a different category.
To make this obvious, suppose you surveyed CCTV recordings and found that all hat-wearing train-riders never stick gum on the doors. Then you now have two groups, the be-hatted gentlemen who are fully law-abiding, and the hatless knaves who are the mixed group. Then you could simply expel all the hatless from the train, i.e., this subset of train riders, who are quite possibly unrelated to the subset of gum-chewers, save for the fact that the hatless group contains at least one individual who chews gum.
In the limit of the proportion of hat-wearers approaching zero, you get the original problem. In the limit of the proportion approaching one (and thus the criteria successfully identifying the vandals perfectly), you get no problem at all! Surely, the right choice depends on empirics and relative costs here, not how we designate categories - it would be utterly insensible to pursue the mixed group if it left only this gentleman on the train, and nobody else:
(doubtless photographed at the platform of B&O)
And you can play this game with drugs, endlessly. Clearly you cannot discern between responsible and irresponsible drivers, who own a two-ton speeding hunk of metal despite knowing that they enjoy pipe-weed of the finest variety. And, of course, all drug-using non-drivers do not drive under the influence, by definition, so it is their group who is law-abiding. Clearly we should ban cars!
A paper-thin excuse to deny someone basic rights is still purposeful persecution by the government. Also, the severity of the persecution isn't the reason there's a distinction.
Let's scale way back. Stop me at the first point you disagree with.
I have a right to total freedom, to the extent that my freedom causes no harm to others.
In evidential matters, the burden of proof rests on the positive claimaint. I cannot prove that none of my actions are harmful to others, nor should I be expected to; it is the claimaint's responsibility to demonstrate harm or risk of harm. In other words, I am innocent until proven guilty.
(I have a responsibility to explore the consequences of my own actions to avoid causing harm to others, but that's not relevant at the moment.)
Now, suppose the existence of two parties, who I will imaginatively title Party A and Party B.
Party A believes that Party B is infringing upon Party A rights, and responds with legislation restricting the rights of Party B. In order for this to be justified, Party A must show firstly that Party B is in fact infringing upon their rights, and secondly that the restriction of Party B's rights will actually have the desired goal of preventing the infringement of the rights of Party A.
However, the reverse is not true. Party B believes that Party A is infringing upon Party B's rights via this legislation. However, Party B does not need to prove that their rights are being infringed, because that is known a priori – it's encoded into the law, literally a matter of public record. Similarly, Party B does not need to prove that removing the law will restore their rights, since that too is known a priori – the law itself constitutes the infringement. It therefore falls to Party A to demonstrate that this infringement is justified.
In order words, it is always the responsibility of the lawmaker to provide justification for the law.
The same principle applies to laws enacted on utilitarian grounds. It is known a priori that the law will curb people's rights; everything else requires evidence. The law is a negative by default, and therefore by default it should not exist, until an argument is made to the contrary.
In your quoted example above, the restriction of rights may not be explicitly encoded into law, but it's so trivial to prove that it comes to the same thing.
DING DING DING DING DING. You are still presuming a priority between negative freedoms with no self-evident justification.
You desire to take the train. There is a contracted metro-company with a train, waiting for you. But someone else violates this right by harming you first, by damaging the train and preventing you from taking it. Where is the state's protection of this right? Where is your just recompense for the violation of your freedom? On what basis do you refuse this to enforce right?
Surely you are being the positive claimant, by summarily discarding this right. It is, as a matter of public record, that you can see the damage - the train does not work, after all - and yet you choose to do nothing. How is this not purposeful?
I can see the damages - the harm exists. Who (or what subset of a larger group) caused it, and will my infringement upon their rights rectify the situation? These things are not known a priori.
Well, the gum is chewed, so a gum-chewer caused it :rotate:
And that being as far as we can identify is the crux of the problem.
It is known a priori that a law restricting people's freedoms is an infringement of rights. It is not know a priori that the removal or absence of that law is an infringement of rights. Therefore, burden of justification rests on the lawmaker.
However obvious the proof or simple the demonstration, it still rests on the lawmaker.
.... but you've just acknowledged that the harm exists. And that is how you have defined rights: freedom from harm. Whether or not you can further identify the infringer is irrelevant to the acknowledgement of infringement.
It is the case that, a priori, a refusal to enforce the right to freedom from a given harm is tantamount to endorsing the harm. Otherwise you admit the possibility of non-state repression, yet again. If you want real examples, there are numerous existing societies with theoretical rights to freedom of religion, but no actual willingness by the state to restrain non-state militias from conducting their own religious persecution, simply because it would be terribly unpopular to do so.
It is trivial for hypothetical legislation to be sufficiently draconian. I don't think anybody really doubts that if you are willing to ride roughshod over enough rights, civil or otherwise, you can set up a police state.
I will point out, further, that you happen to already live in a world of outrageously draconian drug laws. That's your status quo! By your logic, wouldn't the burden of proof for the predicted consequences of repeal lie on the legislator proposing a repeal bill?
It probably does lower actual drug use (for the substances that are controlled, anyway). This was certainly true of alcohol prohibition.
The question more or less then becomes, "Is fewer people taking drugs a significant enough benefit that the cost of getting there is a worthwhile expense?" and the answer, in my opinion, is "Nope."
Some days I really wish I could agree with the American DEA / ATF, because frankly I am sick and tired of having to deal with people that have blown-out their neurons with whatever crap they're currently abusing and having to deal with even more of them is a pretty unwelcome prospect, but it's just flat-out not worth it.
Could you say it in one sentence? Preferably without using hypotheticals?
I feel like we've drilled down to the crux of the issue, so I'm very interested in your responses.
A refusal to enforce freedom from harm is tantamount to endorsing the harm. It does not then follow, in the absence of evidence, that the absence of any given law causes harm and is therefore an infringement of rights, although it may be trivial to prove so.
No, not at all. That you would suggest so shows you must not have followed/agreed with my logic. Which of the following do you take issue with:
1. It is known a priori that a law restricting people's freedoms is an infringement of rights.
2. It is not known a priori that the removal or absence of that law is an infringement of rights.
3. Therefore, burden of justification rests on the lawmaker.
You raised no objections to 1 thus far, so your issue appears to be with 2. While evidence or logical argument may be sufficient to establish that an infringement of rights accompanies the absence of any given law, it cannot be established in the absence of evidence that an infringement of rights accompanies the absence of any and all laws, while the contrary is not true. All laws are infringements of freedom. Not all absences of law are infringements of freedom. If you feel you can establish that the absence of any law is known a priori to be an infringement of rights, please do so.