I disagree with the notion that the state is capable of defining what is right for everyone and think that efforts to do so often lead to more harm than good. I use weed daily and am firmly convinced that it is right for me to do so because it helps me to live a more productive, saner life. Weed use makes me reflective and imaginative, which are very desirable states for someone who wishes to be a writer, as I do. It also tends to make me less emotional, so I'm less prone to the manic anger that used to hobble me. I'm confident that I would be miserable without it.
All assessments of what counts as a vice are inevitably based on incomplete information and the biases of those who get to decide. Policy makers are mostly not weed users and assume that it is negative, so they try to measure its negative effects. But that means that they don't take into account the potential positive effects of so-called "vices." Who has ever attempted to measure the psychological and social benefits that drug use brings? And the same consideration applies to other vices.
I agree that greater liberalization can sometimes lead to negative outcomes, and I would be open to the notion that some outcomes are so clearly negative that we ought to outlaw them. But I think that all such efforts should meet very high standards of evidence, and I don't think weed use does.
I think that policy decisions about "vices" should take into account the views of people who view those vices as life-enhancing. If a bunch of non-weed users or sexual puritans make decisions about drug use and pornography, those decisions will inevitably be biased, and the cure might well be worse than the disease. When we make decisions about drugs or pornography, we should seek the input of drug and porn users, and I don't think anyone is doing that.
Another framing is that we should deny peddlers of vice access to the state-regulated market economy. Large-scale businesses are only possible because the state provides access to the courts as a predictable dispute resolution mechanism. In the absence of state enforcement of contracts (at least as a fallback), it is not practical to scale businesses beyond what can be managed by an extended family network.
The state is not obligated to provide this service to every type of business. We've historically chosen to deny many types of businesses access to the state-regulated market, and we still do.
I think this is complementary to your argument in the article.
Related to this, we could also make a vice legal but ban advertising for it. We do some of this already eg no tobacco ads on TV. We can legalize a vice but make it inconvenient or expensive or unglamorous -- eg alcohol/tobacco taxes, Sunday liquor bans, government-owned liquor stores.
Imagine if you had to do your sports better at a drab, depressing, ugly building, and the other people there were old degenerate regulars who are sad to look at, and you have to drive across town to get there, and the taxes are high enough that winning is less fun.
If we have a right to do something, does that mean we must have a right to do it cheaply, conveniently and anonymously? Can we allow the freedom to engage in vice, but raise the costs substantially, and still be a free society?
I agree with pretty much everything here and still want to think of myself as a "liberal". I tend to think the principled, "neutrality between competing conceptions of the good" version of liberalism was always a non-starter. For one, it never had a principled answer to the question of why it's legitimate for the state to say you can't walk around public spaces with a boom box blaring at 120 decibels, but not legitimate for the state to say you can't walk around public spaces wearing really ugly clothes. That is, the question of what counts as "harm" of the sort the state can legitimately regulate can't be answered in a value neutral way.
So I like a thin, "modus vivendi" sort of liberalism. In large, pluralistic societies with people who vary along lines of religion, ethnicity, culture, and lots more, there are going to be lots of questions where its wise for the state to remain as neutral as possible. The wars of religion in Europe teach us that if you try to have a state religion in a religiously diverse country, there will be a lot of conflict over just what it should be, and things could get very bloody. So we should be looking for compromises, rather than each of us trying to get the state to adopt the religion we think is true. And similar, though less extreme, considerations will support looking for compromises in many other areas of policy. But we shouldn't hastily generalize from the wisdom of a general disposition to look for compromises to some (likely incoherent) principle of liberal neutrality.
Tend to agree BUT how do you explain among teens the enormous drop in use of alcohol and drugs as well as decline in sex and pregnancy while all these (amoral) shifts are ongoing?
I don't think that philophical liberalism lies behind the reluctance to tax "engagement" of social media, or enforce restrictions on smoking marijuana in places where non-smokers receive the stench, or making gambling a lot more costly to engage in beyond some low recretional level, or taxing net emissions of CO2.
There is a continuum. Vice will generate harm, it's about how much harm and where that harm is targeted. In purely illiberal states the individual bears the vicious brunt of state force when they engage in vice. But when liberalism becomes too amoral and permissive, the harm doesn't go away, it dissipates into the community where more addicts roam the streets, more financial harm and destruction enters households. It's about balancing individual freedom with the radiant effects of vice. And that requires, as you say, moral grounding. Institutions cannot be transaction level judges, they must have a POV.
I find Ezra's change of tune to be interesting, because it mirrors mine from years before. The educated class who support decriminalization are always imagining some acquaintance or fictional 'good person' who happens to dabble in vice from time-to-time. There is rarely consideration for the person who abstained because of existing frictions, and then lost themselves in it. For Ezra, and I imagine many others, they have to see the actual outcomes of such policies in order to alter their position.
Vice, defined as doing something that harms the doer but nobody else, strikes me as none of the government's business. Certainly government enforces morality at a fundamental level—that is, after all, its purpose (to constrain natural impulses that would tend to destroy society)—but there is a level of granularity in which it is counter-productive. People who choose to destroy themselves ought to be allowed to do so. Otherwise, we wind up a society full of coddled weaklings.
No. There is no such thing as vice that only harms the individual. Even the most private vice (say, porn) corrupts the individual and affects how they treat others.
For drugs, alcohol, and gambling the vast majority of users are able to engage responsibly. The state’s effort should be focused on intervening for small percentage of people who abuse vices. I think a model similar to AOT that allows for state intervention with a behavioral health framework in vice-abuse situations could be more effective and politically pragmatic than prohibition.
I think the primary harm of prohibition is that it provides a revenue source for gangs. Is this concern borne out by the evidence?
But the perfectionist rejects the idea that the state should remain neutral about what the good life is, insisting instead that the good life should inform state action.
This is gret so long as we don't reify "the state"
I'm old enough to remember when it was possible to drive your kids to school without having them staring at gigantic billboards with pictures of half-naked women selling lap dances to desperate men...
I disagree with the notion that the state is capable of defining what is right for everyone and think that efforts to do so often lead to more harm than good. I use weed daily and am firmly convinced that it is right for me to do so because it helps me to live a more productive, saner life. Weed use makes me reflective and imaginative, which are very desirable states for someone who wishes to be a writer, as I do. It also tends to make me less emotional, so I'm less prone to the manic anger that used to hobble me. I'm confident that I would be miserable without it.
All assessments of what counts as a vice are inevitably based on incomplete information and the biases of those who get to decide. Policy makers are mostly not weed users and assume that it is negative, so they try to measure its negative effects. But that means that they don't take into account the potential positive effects of so-called "vices." Who has ever attempted to measure the psychological and social benefits that drug use brings? And the same consideration applies to other vices.
I agree that greater liberalization can sometimes lead to negative outcomes, and I would be open to the notion that some outcomes are so clearly negative that we ought to outlaw them. But I think that all such efforts should meet very high standards of evidence, and I don't think weed use does.
I think that policy decisions about "vices" should take into account the views of people who view those vices as life-enhancing. If a bunch of non-weed users or sexual puritans make decisions about drug use and pornography, those decisions will inevitably be biased, and the cure might well be worse than the disease. When we make decisions about drugs or pornography, we should seek the input of drug and porn users, and I don't think anyone is doing that.
Another framing is that we should deny peddlers of vice access to the state-regulated market economy. Large-scale businesses are only possible because the state provides access to the courts as a predictable dispute resolution mechanism. In the absence of state enforcement of contracts (at least as a fallback), it is not practical to scale businesses beyond what can be managed by an extended family network.
The state is not obligated to provide this service to every type of business. We've historically chosen to deny many types of businesses access to the state-regulated market, and we still do.
I think this is complementary to your argument in the article.
Related to this, we could also make a vice legal but ban advertising for it. We do some of this already eg no tobacco ads on TV. We can legalize a vice but make it inconvenient or expensive or unglamorous -- eg alcohol/tobacco taxes, Sunday liquor bans, government-owned liquor stores.
Imagine if you had to do your sports better at a drab, depressing, ugly building, and the other people there were old degenerate regulars who are sad to look at, and you have to drive across town to get there, and the taxes are high enough that winning is less fun.
If we have a right to do something, does that mean we must have a right to do it cheaply, conveniently and anonymously? Can we allow the freedom to engage in vice, but raise the costs substantially, and still be a free society?
I agree with pretty much everything here and still want to think of myself as a "liberal". I tend to think the principled, "neutrality between competing conceptions of the good" version of liberalism was always a non-starter. For one, it never had a principled answer to the question of why it's legitimate for the state to say you can't walk around public spaces with a boom box blaring at 120 decibels, but not legitimate for the state to say you can't walk around public spaces wearing really ugly clothes. That is, the question of what counts as "harm" of the sort the state can legitimately regulate can't be answered in a value neutral way.
So I like a thin, "modus vivendi" sort of liberalism. In large, pluralistic societies with people who vary along lines of religion, ethnicity, culture, and lots more, there are going to be lots of questions where its wise for the state to remain as neutral as possible. The wars of religion in Europe teach us that if you try to have a state religion in a religiously diverse country, there will be a lot of conflict over just what it should be, and things could get very bloody. So we should be looking for compromises, rather than each of us trying to get the state to adopt the religion we think is true. And similar, though less extreme, considerations will support looking for compromises in many other areas of policy. But we shouldn't hastily generalize from the wisdom of a general disposition to look for compromises to some (likely incoherent) principle of liberal neutrality.
Tend to agree BUT how do you explain among teens the enormous drop in use of alcohol and drugs as well as decline in sex and pregnancy while all these (amoral) shifts are ongoing?
Good question. One possible explanation is that a "better" vice can croud out a "worse" one. Like, who still smokes opium?
I don't think that philophical liberalism lies behind the reluctance to tax "engagement" of social media, or enforce restrictions on smoking marijuana in places where non-smokers receive the stench, or making gambling a lot more costly to engage in beyond some low recretional level, or taxing net emissions of CO2.
There is a continuum. Vice will generate harm, it's about how much harm and where that harm is targeted. In purely illiberal states the individual bears the vicious brunt of state force when they engage in vice. But when liberalism becomes too amoral and permissive, the harm doesn't go away, it dissipates into the community where more addicts roam the streets, more financial harm and destruction enters households. It's about balancing individual freedom with the radiant effects of vice. And that requires, as you say, moral grounding. Institutions cannot be transaction level judges, they must have a POV.
I find Ezra's change of tune to be interesting, because it mirrors mine from years before. The educated class who support decriminalization are always imagining some acquaintance or fictional 'good person' who happens to dabble in vice from time-to-time. There is rarely consideration for the person who abstained because of existing frictions, and then lost themselves in it. For Ezra, and I imagine many others, they have to see the actual outcomes of such policies in order to alter their position.
I am ok with government nudging towards a more moral life.
But almost always am against outright bans.
For example, prohibition of drugs has outright failed. It's been fifty years we've spent over a trillion dollars in locked up millions of people
And yet, still anyone can get any drug they want at any time. Even in prison.
The reality is government can only do so much a society, culture, religion. That's where morality needs to come from
No. Was much harder to get drugs pre-legalizing weed. Less people used. Friction in vices is good.
A one-sided cost-benefit analysis
No it wasn't. I've got about thirty years of experience.And it has always been extremely easy to get any drugs you want
Not for you, but say the average Grandma who wouldn’t know where to begin but now can drive to a store.
Vice, defined as doing something that harms the doer but nobody else, strikes me as none of the government's business. Certainly government enforces morality at a fundamental level—that is, after all, its purpose (to constrain natural impulses that would tend to destroy society)—but there is a level of granularity in which it is counter-productive. People who choose to destroy themselves ought to be allowed to do so. Otherwise, we wind up a society full of coddled weaklings.
No. There is no such thing as vice that only harms the individual. Even the most private vice (say, porn) corrupts the individual and affects how they treat others.
Vices like drugs of course affect others in secondhand smoke, drugged driving, etc.
For drugs, alcohol, and gambling the vast majority of users are able to engage responsibly. The state’s effort should be focused on intervening for small percentage of people who abuse vices. I think a model similar to AOT that allows for state intervention with a behavioral health framework in vice-abuse situations could be more effective and politically pragmatic than prohibition.
I think the primary harm of prohibition is that it provides a revenue source for gangs. Is this concern borne out by the evidence?
But the perfectionist rejects the idea that the state should remain neutral about what the good life is, insisting instead that the good life should inform state action.
This is gret so long as we don't reify "the state"
I'm old enough to remember when it was possible to drive your kids to school without having them staring at gigantic billboards with pictures of half-naked women selling lap dances to desperate men...
https://www.stlpr.org/other/2006-08-22/federal-court-throws-out-ban-on-sexually-explicit-billboards
I think we’re missing a paragraph on the externalities of private vices, but otherwise an excellent discussion.