The cigarette industry is a very well known evil, for sure. I am not defending them per se, I’m arguing that in a free society we should have the freedom to make bad decisions. Cigarettes have a very well known long term health risk and are addictive. Key here is that the risks are highly publicized and occur gradually. There’s time for someone to try smoking, decide they made a bad decision, and quit without adding any further risk to the risk that they’ve taken up to that point.
Lots of products that are allowed to be sold are known to be bad for you. If the government bans everything that presents a risk over time or with heavy use I worry that people will stop thinking for themselves as much. “This product was not banned by the government therefore it must be safe.”
Now to be clear I’m not recommending that anyone should be smoking. I’ve never smoked, the risks were clearly conveyed to me in school and are printed on every pack of cigarettes and I don’t think it’s worth it. I also think that if a product has a high chance of injuring someone right away or in the short term, like if it’s known to explode and kill someone since it’s badly built, or if it has a choking hazard for kids and is intended for kids, those should be recalled and fixed or banned.
I may be off-base here but that’s my reasoning. Unrelated to reasoning, my emotional response to seeing this headline is that I feel like once the government bans cigarettes they’re going to start banning all sorts of other products since they’ve been emboldened to take more control over people’s lives. That’s a slippery slope fallacy though so it’s not a good argument.
And my argument is that the freedom to become addicted to nicotine infringes upon your freedom to make decisions in the future. It's similar to usury in that regard - the government denies you the right to borrow money at extortionate rates because doing so will put you in a hole that you might never escape.
The cigarette industry is a very well known evil, for sure. I am not defending them per se, I’m arguing that in a free society we should have the freedom to make bad decisions. Cigarettes have a very well known long term health risk and are addictive. Key here is that the risks are highly publicized and occur gradually. There’s time for someone to try smoking, decide they made a bad decision, and quit without adding any further risk to the risk that they’ve taken up to that point.
Lots of products that are allowed to be sold are known to be bad for you. If the government bans everything that presents a risk over time or with heavy use I worry that people will stop thinking for themselves as much. “This product was not banned by the government therefore it must be safe.”
Now to be clear I’m not recommending that anyone should be smoking. I’ve never smoked, the risks were clearly conveyed to me in school and are printed on every pack of cigarettes and I don’t think it’s worth it. I also think that if a product has a high chance of injuring someone right away or in the short term, like if it’s known to explode and kill someone since it’s badly built, or if it has a choking hazard for kids and is intended for kids, those should be recalled and fixed or banned.
I may be off-base here but that’s my reasoning. Unrelated to reasoning, my emotional response to seeing this headline is that I feel like once the government bans cigarettes they’re going to start banning all sorts of other products since they’ve been emboldened to take more control over people’s lives. That’s a slippery slope fallacy though so it’s not a good argument.
And my argument is that the freedom to become addicted to nicotine infringes upon your freedom to make decisions in the future. It's similar to usury in that regard - the government denies you the right to borrow money at extortionate rates because doing so will put you in a hole that you might never escape.
Fair point! I haven’t previously considered that argument.