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Path: utzoo!utcsstat!laura
From: laura@utcsstat.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.flame
Subject: THE most important thing in the world
Message-ID: <816@utcsstat.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 6-Aug-83 15:12:08 EDT
Article-I.D.: utcsstat.816
Posted: Sat Aug  6 15:12:08 1983
Date-Received: Sat, 6-Aug-83 15:33:03 EDT
Organization: U. of Toronto, Canada
Lines: 199


	I came back from vacation and read an awful lot of news in
various newsgroups, including this one. Perhaps I am wrong, but I
have come to the conclusion that the reason that Tim Maroney has
yet to have his views contested logically is that too many people
are happy with their position of hating him personally.

	maybe you folk are reading different articles than I, but
I have yet to see any indication that Tim Maroney is stupid.  I
have found pleanty of indications that his value system and hence
his morals differs from that of most people I know, but I dont
really see why this is cause for the incredible hatred some people
have posted to this newsgroup.

	So far, many people have sent me hate mail, but few have
abused me over the net, so i will take this as an indication that
I am less well hated than Tim Maroney. (Perhaps i am about to
change this.) In this long article I am going to outline every
objection I have to a "no-smoking" by-law.  I believe that Tim
has outlined every one of these already, but I get the impression
that you arent willing to listen to him. Perhaps you will listen
to me. If you listen, perhaps you could let me know why you were
willing to listen to me and not to Tim Maroney (if indeed that was
the case).

	I am going to argue from one position, but I have to make one
disclaimer before i set sail. What I am going to talk about is
freedom. From conversations with people I have concluded that many
people equate 'freedom' with 'irresponsibility'. 'Free' therefore
means 'no price tag' or 'I can get away with it'. If you suspect that
this is your definition of 'free', then I suggest you save this
article in a file and then globally change all occurrances of the
word 'free' with the word 'responsible' and the word 'freedom'
with 'responsibilities'. To my mind, freedom and responsibility
are inseperable. When i speak of one i mean the other as well. My
freedom is your responsibility (and mine as well, of course). It
is precisely because I feel responsible for your freedom that I am
speaking now.

	In the same way, 'responsibility' does not mean 'punishment'.
I know people who cannot tell the difference between the two. If
you are one of those unfortunate souls who thinks that 'freedom'
means 'irresponsibility' and 'responsibility' means 'punishment'
I doubt that you will understand this at all.

	i believe that freedom sis a good thing. in fact, my definition
of 'good' is expressed in terms of freedom. Having enough food to eat
is freedom from starvation, for instance. Love is freeing. When it
ceases to be freeing, it is an obligation, not love. I have yet to
see anything (or the lack of anything) as important as freedom, therefore
it forms the basis of *my* morality.

	of course there are conflicts. Every moral system has conflicts.
Smokers restrict other people's freedom for clean air. Militant non-smokers
restrict a smoker's freedom to smoke. Therein lies the problem. Let me
recap the arguments that the proponents of "no smoking everywhere" use.

	1: people who smoke are killing themselves with lung cancer.
	   the government should do something about this.

This argument does not allow for the people who have smoked and not died
from lung cancer. Current theories on cancer seem to indicate that there
is a (probably inheirited) propensity for cancer. People who have this
propensity get cancer from smoking while others smoke twice as much and
die of old age. However, this is not my strongest objection to this
argument. **I do not think that it is the business of government to
forbid people from making mistakes.** Information about the risks of
lung cancer should be made available to everyone who intends to smoke,
but I do not think that any potentially dangerous habit should be
banned. Motorcycling and mountain climbing can also be dangerous,
remember, and nobody forces you to do any of these -- or to smoke.
I have learned some painful lessons from mistakes that I have made.
I could not learn them any other way. being told about them would not
have done any good -- I had to find out for myself. Everyone should
have similar opportunity to make mistakes.

People who want to protect others from mistakes also seem to share a
rather obnoxious trait. They believe that they know what is right and
good for everyone. No one is that wise. This is gross arrogance and
usually ignorance as well.


	2: smoking is harmful to others.

Unfortunately, all the evidence on this is not in. if smoking causes
cancer in people who do not smoke but work with people who do we have
a real reason for banning smoking, the same sort of reason that
raw sewage isnt dumped into lakes. The freedom of people to *live*
is in my opinion a far greater concern than the freedom of people
to *smoke*. However, if you go to your local medical library, you
will find some very contradictory evidence. Claims like 'the tobacco
industry is funding all the pro-smoking studies' wont help you,
thoough, for the majority of the non-smoking studies were done by
people who were rabis non=smokers from before they did their experiments.
Each camp can call each other biased, but I would conclude that not
enough evidence is in. In the meantime, I think that the threat to
my freedom (when in doubt, ban) is greater than the threat to my
life.

	3: Smoking stinks. i dont care whether it is harmful
	   or not, I hate it.

I hate cigarette smoke too. I do not question that it stinks. I
do question whether a law against it is a good idea. Assume that every
business or office is capable of putting up no-smoking signs and
enforcing them. Do you want to force the businesses to be policemen?
Why? Some people claim it is so that they can eat in restaurants
or travel in elevtors without smoke. All of this is fine and good,
but why does one need a law? If anti-smokers are in the majority
a campaign of letter-writing to various restaurants asking for a
no-smoking section seems in order. If there are not enough people
to affect a change without a law (which tacitly assumes the agreement
of a lot of people who obviously are apathetic or sincerely do not
care about the agreement) then there are not enough people to warrant
a law.

	 I personally am rather frightened of the third sort of
reasoning. In my opinion, "not liking something" is a rather poor
reason for a law. We have too many of these sorts of laws already.
There are several bad point of such laws which many people do not
bother to consider. the first is that they are an attack on freedom.
They arise out of an attempt to define a legal system out of a long
list of "thou shalt not"s. This tradition has had a long history.
Adding one more to the list, therefore, does not seem to be a bad
thing. I find it far more appealing to define a legal system by
"freedoms and responsibilities" rather than "wrongs" for several
reasons.

	To begin, the assumption made which I feel is invalid, is
that anybody not violating the law is okay. By this definition
a lot of neglect, apathy and 'looking the other way' can be condoned.
There need to be specific laws about child-neglect as child-abuse to
handle some of the ramifications of this thinking, but it does not
deal with sheer apathy which is one of the most terrible threats to
freedom that I know. Apathy is distinct from sincerely having no opinions
on a matter; it is characterised by an unthinking attitude as well.
Sincere people who do not know whether the bomb should be banned
should not be grouped with those that do not know and do not care
about any issue.

	The other tacit assumption that a "list of wrongs" type of
legal system makes is that through law the world will be a safe place.
In hindsight, this seems rather strange. After all, you only get to 
catch and punish someone *after* he has committed a crime and thus
made the world not a safe place. Clearly, while there is a need for
law-enforcement the world is not a safe place. A society in which
no one committed any wrongs would be a safe place, (well, relatively
safe, accidents still happen) but the legal system does not set out
to define how a responsible person should act in such a society; it
merely points out the punishments which will be attributed to those who
make the world an unsafer place. It also does not attempt to discribe how
a society which is still unsafe can move towards improving itself.
The standard solution is to get more laws. 

	To my mind, adding laws is akin to pouring more oil on a fire.
There is a necessity for new laws only when there is a new technological or
political development that had not been forseen before, of course, but
in all other cases I see a lot of wasted effort. Censorship in Ontario
is based on 'not offensive to community standards'. Erect penises
are an example of what is considered 'offensive' and so is public
nudity. As far as I am concerned the government has no business
protecting people from being 'offended'. There are a lot of offensive
things in this world, and a society of people which have been isolated
from offensive things cannot do much to help end offensive things (if
they need ending) or tolerate them (if that is in order). The other
terrific problem with 'community standards' is that in practice this
is a nebulous term which means 'what the censor board thinks'.

	Nobody has ever asked me to be on the censor board. I am
a member of this community, but I am unlikely to ever be asked to
censor anything. I *like* erect penises. I would like to be able
to go skinny-dipping (if they will ever clean our lake water which
this week was declared unfit for swimming). As such I will never
be allowed to censor movies which makes the 'community standards'
not representative of everyone here. I would assume that if the
community standards were so strongly felt movies which did not
live up to those standards would be poorly attended and film makers
out of purely monetary reasons would make more acceptable films.
censors think otherwise. they have stated that more people would go
to movies if they were not there with their scissors cutting out
the 'dirty bits'. Now *that* says something about how hypocritical
'community atandards' are!

	Did you catch the connection between smoking and censoring?
In both cases a law is suggested so that people will not be offended.
In both cases a select group of people get to define what is offensive.
In both cases, a point of view is being overlooked. If there are so
many anti-smokers that a law can be passed for their (vast majority)
benefit then there ought to be enough people to establish no smoking
elevators and no smoking sections in restaurants *without a law*.
If there are not enough people to do this, then there seems no need
for a law. And if we have reached the stage where one can do nothing
without a law -- if laws are necessary to define all behaviour and
only the 'shalt nots' matter in behaviour -- then we have a
FAR, FAR, more serious problem than obnoixious smokers. We are
no longer free, even to ourselves.

laura creighton
utcsstat!laura