Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utcsstat.UUCP Path: utzoo!utcsstat!laura From: laura@utcsstat.UUCP Newsgroups: net.flame Subject: A reply, specifically to Kenneth Almquist, but also to some others who sent me mail Message-ID: <842@utcsstat.UUCP> Date: Wed, 10-Aug-83 02:34:27 EDT Article-I.D.: utcsstat.842 Posted: Wed Aug 10 02:34:27 1983 Date-Received: Wed, 10-Aug-83 02:49:27 EDT Organization: U. of Toronto, Canada Lines: 226 Here is a reply to the part of the letter that Kenneth Almquist sent me which he also posted to net.politics. Unless there is overwhelming objection all further articles from me on this subject will be posted to net.politics only. At the end of this oversize submission are some answers to questions which Kenneth and others have sent me. There seems to be a lot of confusion about why I do not like our present legal system and why I do not think that societal convention is a good basis for law. If you have not read Tim Maroney's article on this very topic I suggest that you do so. I believe that he is clearer than I am. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Over in net.flame, Laura lists three arguments against smoking with which she disagrees. 1: people who smoke are killing themselves with lung cancer. the government should do something about this. Laura replies that it's not the business of government to prevent people from making mistakes. I'm agreed in this particular case. Does this mean that there are other cases in which you feel that government intervention is justified? 2: smoking is harmful to others. I cannot accept Laura's resolution of this conflict. I believe that she would agree that, if my health is harmed by an individual or corporation which knowingly emits harmful substances into the air, that my rights (freedoms) have been curtailed. I assume that she would go farther and argue that the government may pass laws to protect my rights, even if these laws impinge upon some else's freedom to pollute. If by "knowingly emits harmful substances in the air" you mean "substances that are known to harm all people, or most people, or the environment and thus indirectly all people", then yes. If, on the other hand, you mean "substances that are known to harm at least one person" I would have to argue no. I know of a woman who went to a neighbouring school when I was in high school. She developed a severe problem with her immune system. All plastics and most "artificial" products would make her very sick. people who went to visit her could not wear plastic jewelry, or synthetic clothes, or even rubber soled shoes. Her room (from which she rarely ventured) had no synthetics in it. Her books often had no covers or bindings since the glue made her ill. Clearly, all these substances were harmful to her, but I do not think that they should be banned for her sake. The gist of her argument seems to be that this reasoning doesn't apply when it is not known for certain that the substances are harmful. But surely if I am harmed, my freedom has been curtailed regardless of whether it was known in advance that I would be harmed. If the government can prohibit certain violations if my rights, why can't it prohibit possible or probable violations of those rights? The only interpretation of Laura's argument that I can accept is that, when balancing the rights of smokers vs. nonsmokers, less weight should be given to the potential health hazards posed to non-smokers that would be given if we were sure such hazards actually existed. Exactly. We don't know whether smokers curtail non-smokers' freedom to live, but we do know that non-smokers curtail smokers' freedom to smoke. This leaves us with the task of actually balancing these rights or freedoms. One rule I use for resolving such conflicts is: People have the right to do anything they want to as long as they don't interfere with the rights (freedoms) of anybody else. (But you are proposing to interfere with the rights of the smokers to smoke...) This rule can be viewed as the supremacy of the status quo. That is, in the normal course of events I will have a certain amount of good health; if someone performs an action which interferes with my health then that person is interfering with the status quo. By the rule, my right to be healthy should take precedence over somebody else's right to interfere with my health. In the case of smoking I agreed that the right to be healthy should be discounted before being compared to the rights of smokers because the threat to health was uncertain. Nevertheless, assuming the probability that nonsmokers are harmed by ambient smoke is reasonably good (say 50%), I still have to come down on the side of the nonsmoker. The right to health is rather fundamental since curtailment of it can have such a drastic effect upon other freedoms. Please explain why you think that you can use figures in this way. Either ambient smoke harms all people, or it harms some people, or it doesn't harm anyone at all. I don't see where the 50% comes in; is it the 50% of surveys saying that ambient smoke is harmful versus the 50% that say that it is not? This sounds like faulty logic to me -- if smoking is harmful then one group is wrong; if smoking is not harmful then the other group is wrong. If smoking is harmful to 50% of the population, then we have a different situation, but that is not what the results I have read are saying. They are saying that smoking is 100% harmful or 100% harmless. I don't think that you can "split the difference" in this case. 3: Smoking stinks. i don't care whether it is harmful or not, I hate it. I am going to try to elaborate here. I have received enough mail that it is obvious that a lot of people didn't understand me at all. If you are going to condone laws on the basis of 'I like' or 'I dislike' something, I will challenge you to demonstrate what sort of laws do we need and how are we going to maintain them. I cannot see freedom doing very well under this scheme. (I don't see freedom doing very well under the present scheme either.) There are numerous historical examples where what the majority of people thought was right in hindsight turned out to be a ghastly mistake. Slavery, Witch-burning, and current Cuban and San Salvadorian guerrilla training policy strike me as wrong despite the large number of people who feel or felt that it was right. I have been to Honduras. I saw hospitals full of the survivors of such guerrilla training, and have talked to them. here is an objection I have seen many times: I don't want my govenment boggled down with all the details of settling personal disputes between individuals. Individuals come into conflict far too many times for it to be feasible to make a list of every eventuality. What we end up doing is deciding on 'legal precedent'. If you ever wondered how all those lawyers spend their time -- a lot of it is looking up precedents for one thing or another. In effect, every court case becomes part of the de facto law. You can change this by declaring some past decision a 'mistrial' or perhaps 'unconstitutional', but you can see that there is an incredible waste of energy in such a legal system. Moreover, I do not want everybody to be curtailed by my personal decisions. I will not let you smoke in my office or my apartment. On the other hand, if I want something from your office I will either risk finding it smokey, or I will ask you to bring it to me so that I do not need to undergo the risk. This does not require government intervention. (I am assuming, in the last paragraph, for the sake of argument, that you are a smoker.) A legal system is a moral system. There are moral systems which are not legal systems, but a legal system is also, by definition, a moral one. Here is the OED definition of moral: moral: 1. Concerned with character or disposition, or with the distinction between right & wrong. < So what sort of system are you proposing? one that prohibits apathy? How are you going to legislate that?> I believe that the legal system is a flawed moral system because it determines what is right and wrong by making a list of what is wrong. You then draw the conclusion that everything else is right. This may not be the case. If you allowed me to change the legal system I would do such a thorough job on it that a 'patch fix' -- say a law against being apathetic -- would not be necessary. Not being apathetic would have to fall naturally out of the system. Of course, if it were based on principles of freedom, people would not always be able to phone their lawyer to find out if they have the legal right to do something, for many things would be left to the discretion of the individuals. They would therefore have to do their own thinking, a notorious cure for apathy. The problem with select groups of people such as censors is that they do not stop with providing information about what they are censoring. They get out the scissors and start demanding cuts. In effect they are saying that anything obscene is wrong, and they get to define obscene. The same thing holds for smoking. If you pass a law against smoking because you do not like it you are still declaring it wrong. I do not think that smoking is wrong because you and 5 million other people do not like it. Wrongness is not measured by society's approval or disapproval alone. Freedom and rights are not the same thing to me. Freedom is continuous; Rights are discontinuous. You can make a list of rights, but you cannot make a list of freedom. When I get sloppy I talk about the 'freedom to do X' which I really ought to term 'freedom as expressed in the ability to do X'. We have reached a philosopher's dilemma here. I have very little way of knowing what you mean by Rights. This makes it very difficult for me to know whether we are meaning the same thing at all. Having considered the question of the meaning of freedom for a rather long time, I am fairly certain that my definition is not exactly the same as that of many others. I cannot really solve this to a dictionary quote now, for my meaning of the words which are used to define freedom seem also to have altered. The OED definition of freedom that I use is: freedom: n. Personal liberty, non-slavery; civil liberty, independence; liberty of action, right *to* do; power of self-determination, independence of faith or necessity; The "power of self-determination" definition is (in my mind) predominant. Those of you who try to understand this by looking up the OED definition of liberty will discover that it is defined in terms of freedom, which is not very useful. It will probably help you to understand what I mean by freedom if I let you know that my definition of 'good' is in terms of freedom. Laura Creighton utzoo!utcsstat!laura