This article makes a case against a variety of modern vices (gambling, prostitution, drug use, etc) from an explicitly non-liberal, non-utilitarian, and non-religious perspective. I thought it would be worth discussing on one of the most reflexively pro-liberal pro-utilitarian places on the internet.
Lehman offers an argument against vice from the point of view of virtue ethics. I know many users are aware of how bad the proliferation of sports betting apps are, but have had trouble squaring this instinct with their liberal values. This essay provides a framework for assessing the states interest in regulating vice without requiring the calculation of harm. For example, addictive products interfere with people’s basic rationality, without which they cannot be good citizens, and a democratic state has a reasonable interest in cultivating good citizens.
vi_sucks on
Yeah, nah.
“I’m restricting your freedoms to save you from yourself” is the worst argument possible.
hibikir_40k on
This approach to vice however lacks the core underpinnings that would allow it to be applied without a clear moral framework. Addiction can have an extra chemical component, but there’s no requirement. Gambling is purely internal, for instance. But so is limerence, and it’s hard to get rid of that one, although there’s been societies that saw it as a vice. How about addiction to podcasts? to being near other people? Videogames? Church attendance? The evils of television or rock and roll? Without trying to go down to harms, we have to decide that humans are rationality machines, and anything that impedes said rationality, like being tempted by good food, might be bad.
There’s no reasonable line, as seeing humans as rationality machines that should avoid all their impulses is… rather inhuman. Why not claim that anyone that finds this appealing is suffering from anhedonia? Why do we not claim that the person that chooses to avoid a weekend of sex and drugs is the one who is broken?
I am for significant control of many modern vices, just because we are way too good at pressing certain levers now, and I find the outcomes personally distateful, but I don’t find a virtue ethics structure for the argument to be all that strong at all. But the road leads to illiberalism, which is great when I am the dictator, but not so good when I am not.
Ernie_McCracken88 on
Im old enough to remember when when right wingers complained constantly about nanny state liberals
Vulcanic_1984 on
Online gambling should be illegal. Sports gambling should be limited to in person bets made at the office of your local newspaper of general circulation or public transit agency (only slightly kidding). Recreational drugs and prostitution should be regulated and legal, but only at casinos or resorts whose number should be tightly limited (not kidding). Ads for hard vices (liquor, rec drugs, gambling) should be only permitted in print copies of public interest newspapers of general circulation.
BakaDasai on
There’s a significant minority of people with addictive personalities. They’re especially _vulnerable_ to addiction.
Banning “vice” on moral grounds punishes these people for their vulnerability. It fines and jails them. It’s victim-blaming. The harm principle is a _more moral_ way of dealing with vice.
So, let’s:
– ban all advertising of “vice”. No ads for gambling or recreational drugs (including alcohol)
– all “vice” products must come in black and white plain packaging—no images, a standard font and font size, no extra words. No “branding” other than the brand name.
– heavily tax vice so its harm is offset by tax revenue, but not so heavily as to produce a significant black market.
Let’s aim for individuals to be free to do vice, but strictly limit corporations’ ability to promote and profit from it. This shifts the morality issue from consumer to producer, while maintaining the harm principle.
fuckyourpoliticsman on
Prohibition doesn’t work.
Best of luck prohibiting ethanol, nicotine, sex, eating… the list of vices goes on and on.
Who wants a nanny?!
Mega_Giga_Tera on
Illiberal. I’ll pass.
Prohibition doesn’t work. Especially bad outcomes when the cat is already out of the bag.
… I’ll read the article now…. and now I have…
> Marijuana, again, is an instructive example. Advocates for its legalization count up the harms of prohibition: the direct and indirect effects of interaction with the criminal-justice system, people deprived of access to “medical” marijuana, the cost of pleasure foregone, the second-order effects of social marijuana use, and so on. Opponents do their own summation: car crashes, mental illness, the toll of addiction, the smell, disruption of family life, etc. And each side attempts to modify the other’s tally, by arguing that marijuana is not addictive, or that the effects of criminal-justice involvement are overblown, or the like.
I love how no sources are provided here… because there is not convincing evidence to support this claim. Car fatalities are recently on the decline, and to the extent they have risen in the 2010s along with self-reported MJ use, blood analysis studies (which are few) often point to polysubstace, and self reporting is itself a confounding factor.
Not only is this article suggestive of illiberal policy (and says so outright in the very beginning), it’s also suggestive of a losing political strategy. The party that bans fun is not the party that’s gonna win, especially if the thing you’re banning is used safely by 99%+ if it’s users, and I put guns in that bucket.
How often is the thing you want to do the thing that’s best for you?
Don’t we have better fights to pick?
FloggingJonna on
Lmao this was written by the old ladies that sat behind me at the First Bigot Baptist Church. Negative externalities exist and should be taxed. If you’re gonna try to implement nanny bullshit have the balls to do it right Mr Lehman. Ban the weed and sports gambling. However ban the other stuff too. Guns, cars that make pedestrians absurdly unsafe in America, all gambling, unhealthy foods, pollution related illness, tobacco and alcohol. Be a proper enlightened despot or don’t do it at all. If you’d like to opine about harm then how bout we start with people dying. Incredibly unconvincing work Mr Lehman. Incredibly. This reads more like a long winded argument that “I don’t like these vices particularly and we should ban them. Never mind this pile of other worse shit that doesn’t bother me.”
PS I went to this guys page and he has several recent essays about pot bad. Oh and one in favor of an amendment against flag burning.
Dont-be-a-smurf on
The state can eat my asshole
I drink and smoke weed in moderation. I live a happy and productive life as a peaceful citizen.
Life, liberty, pursuit of happiness and if that means I’m cranking hog and smoking logs then it does back up government spooks freedom is talking
Someone release some bald eagles and play a guitar solo rock flag and eagle
jbouit494hg on
Hmm, not sure where I land overall, but:
Bad things are bad. If your moral framework says that being against bad things is itself bad, then maybe your moral framework isn’t the absolute panacea you make it out to be.
Online sports gambling in particular has no redeeming upsides and causes obvious harm. Nobody thought it was a moral right until it was legalised in the last decade. The only argument against banning it again is that it would be hard to put the cat back in the bag.
throwawayzxkjvct on
this article’s argument is trite and uninteresting. Lehman makes little effort to engage with utilitarian thought around vice beyond Mill. he does not really engage with utilitarian arguments in favor of vice regulation in any amount of depth, and he only acknowledges their existence to dismiss them. he assumes that utilitarian supporters and opponents of vice legalization have no way of deciding whose argument is correct under utilitarianism (obviously untrue) and dismisses the value of their arguments around the subject on these shaky grounds. he argues that vices are bad because they impair rational thought, and by extension freedom, but this point has been made a thousand times before and Lehman does not make it well. he does not tell us why participants in vice (particularly participants in milder vices like gambling, marijuana, and pornography) are so impaired that they undermine democratic government. certainly Lehman would not want the state to prohibit nail-biting because its compulsive form makes one a slave to their fingers. it’s easy to argue that heroin addicts are having their higher judgment so impaired that the state has an interest in preventing them from accessing heroin, but it is much more difficult to argue that video game addiction is such a threat to a healthy republic that it requires regulation. this whole piece is just baby’s first political philosophy argument.
NickMaduro on
Eight bazillion word essay to say
>the best argument against vice isn’t actual harm but more or less that it harms the vibes
SassyMoron on
The author’s basis for prohibiting vice is “collective revulsion,” but all the evidence cited shows that the vices they’re writing about are getting more and more popular. If people vote to legalize marijuana you can hardly say “well it should be illegal anyway because people find it revolting.” Apparently a majority of them do not agree with you.
The author also narrates the history of the harm principle without actually problematizing it. Basically the author dislikes the harm principle because (1) it doesn’t justify prohibiting the activities they find revolting and (2) because the actual harm caused by policies and laws is not always clear. These are both basically question begging. Note that the author was perfectly happy to cite statistics when they were arguing that the revolting activities are harmful, earlier in the article, then they turn right around and say arguments like that are pointless.
Which is not to say that I support the legalization of every vice described in the article. However I don’t find the harm principle problematic and the author failed to change my mind.
14 Comments
This article makes a case against a variety of modern vices (gambling, prostitution, drug use, etc) from an explicitly non-liberal, non-utilitarian, and non-religious perspective. I thought it would be worth discussing on one of the most reflexively pro-liberal pro-utilitarian places on the internet.
Lehman offers an argument against vice from the point of view of virtue ethics. I know many users are aware of how bad the proliferation of sports betting apps are, but have had trouble squaring this instinct with their liberal values. This essay provides a framework for assessing the states interest in regulating vice without requiring the calculation of harm. For example, addictive products interfere with people’s basic rationality, without which they cannot be good citizens, and a democratic state has a reasonable interest in cultivating good citizens.
Yeah, nah.
“I’m restricting your freedoms to save you from yourself” is the worst argument possible.
This approach to vice however lacks the core underpinnings that would allow it to be applied without a clear moral framework. Addiction can have an extra chemical component, but there’s no requirement. Gambling is purely internal, for instance. But so is limerence, and it’s hard to get rid of that one, although there’s been societies that saw it as a vice. How about addiction to podcasts? to being near other people? Videogames? Church attendance? The evils of television or rock and roll? Without trying to go down to harms, we have to decide that humans are rationality machines, and anything that impedes said rationality, like being tempted by good food, might be bad.
There’s no reasonable line, as seeing humans as rationality machines that should avoid all their impulses is… rather inhuman. Why not claim that anyone that finds this appealing is suffering from anhedonia? Why do we not claim that the person that chooses to avoid a weekend of sex and drugs is the one who is broken?
I am for significant control of many modern vices, just because we are way too good at pressing certain levers now, and I find the outcomes personally distateful, but I don’t find a virtue ethics structure for the argument to be all that strong at all. But the road leads to illiberalism, which is great when I am the dictator, but not so good when I am not.
Im old enough to remember when when right wingers complained constantly about nanny state liberals
Online gambling should be illegal. Sports gambling should be limited to in person bets made at the office of your local newspaper of general circulation or public transit agency (only slightly kidding). Recreational drugs and prostitution should be regulated and legal, but only at casinos or resorts whose number should be tightly limited (not kidding). Ads for hard vices (liquor, rec drugs, gambling) should be only permitted in print copies of public interest newspapers of general circulation.
There’s a significant minority of people with addictive personalities. They’re especially _vulnerable_ to addiction.
Banning “vice” on moral grounds punishes these people for their vulnerability. It fines and jails them. It’s victim-blaming. The harm principle is a _more moral_ way of dealing with vice.
So, let’s:
– ban all advertising of “vice”. No ads for gambling or recreational drugs (including alcohol)
– all “vice” products must come in black and white plain packaging—no images, a standard font and font size, no extra words. No “branding” other than the brand name.
– heavily tax vice so its harm is offset by tax revenue, but not so heavily as to produce a significant black market.
Let’s aim for individuals to be free to do vice, but strictly limit corporations’ ability to promote and profit from it. This shifts the morality issue from consumer to producer, while maintaining the harm principle.
Prohibition doesn’t work.
Best of luck prohibiting ethanol, nicotine, sex, eating… the list of vices goes on and on.
Who wants a nanny?!
Illiberal. I’ll pass.
Prohibition doesn’t work. Especially bad outcomes when the cat is already out of the bag.
… I’ll read the article now…. and now I have…
> Marijuana, again, is an instructive example. Advocates for its legalization count up the harms of prohibition: the direct and indirect effects of interaction with the criminal-justice system, people deprived of access to “medical” marijuana, the cost of pleasure foregone, the second-order effects of social marijuana use, and so on. Opponents do their own summation: car crashes, mental illness, the toll of addiction, the smell, disruption of family life, etc. And each side attempts to modify the other’s tally, by arguing that marijuana is not addictive, or that the effects of criminal-justice involvement are overblown, or the like.
I love how no sources are provided here… because there is not convincing evidence to support this claim. Car fatalities are recently on the decline, and to the extent they have risen in the 2010s along with self-reported MJ use, blood analysis studies (which are few) often point to polysubstace, and self reporting is itself a confounding factor.
Not only is this article suggestive of illiberal policy (and says so outright in the very beginning), it’s also suggestive of a losing political strategy. The party that bans fun is not the party that’s gonna win, especially if the thing you’re banning is used safely by 99%+ if it’s users, and I put guns in that bucket.
How often is the thing you want to do the thing that’s best for you?
Don’t we have better fights to pick?
Lmao this was written by the old ladies that sat behind me at the First Bigot Baptist Church. Negative externalities exist and should be taxed. If you’re gonna try to implement nanny bullshit have the balls to do it right Mr Lehman. Ban the weed and sports gambling. However ban the other stuff too. Guns, cars that make pedestrians absurdly unsafe in America, all gambling, unhealthy foods, pollution related illness, tobacco and alcohol. Be a proper enlightened despot or don’t do it at all. If you’d like to opine about harm then how bout we start with people dying. Incredibly unconvincing work Mr Lehman. Incredibly. This reads more like a long winded argument that “I don’t like these vices particularly and we should ban them. Never mind this pile of other worse shit that doesn’t bother me.”
PS I went to this guys page and he has several recent essays about pot bad. Oh and one in favor of an amendment against flag burning.
The state can eat my asshole
I drink and smoke weed in moderation. I live a happy and productive life as a peaceful citizen.
Life, liberty, pursuit of happiness and if that means I’m cranking hog and smoking logs then it does back up government spooks freedom is talking
Someone release some bald eagles and play a guitar solo rock flag and eagle
Hmm, not sure where I land overall, but:
Bad things are bad. If your moral framework says that being against bad things is itself bad, then maybe your moral framework isn’t the absolute panacea you make it out to be.
Online sports gambling in particular has no redeeming upsides and causes obvious harm. Nobody thought it was a moral right until it was legalised in the last decade. The only argument against banning it again is that it would be hard to put the cat back in the bag.
this article’s argument is trite and uninteresting. Lehman makes little effort to engage with utilitarian thought around vice beyond Mill. he does not really engage with utilitarian arguments in favor of vice regulation in any amount of depth, and he only acknowledges their existence to dismiss them. he assumes that utilitarian supporters and opponents of vice legalization have no way of deciding whose argument is correct under utilitarianism (obviously untrue) and dismisses the value of their arguments around the subject on these shaky grounds. he argues that vices are bad because they impair rational thought, and by extension freedom, but this point has been made a thousand times before and Lehman does not make it well. he does not tell us why participants in vice (particularly participants in milder vices like gambling, marijuana, and pornography) are so impaired that they undermine democratic government. certainly Lehman would not want the state to prohibit nail-biting because its compulsive form makes one a slave to their fingers. it’s easy to argue that heroin addicts are having their higher judgment so impaired that the state has an interest in preventing them from accessing heroin, but it is much more difficult to argue that video game addiction is such a threat to a healthy republic that it requires regulation. this whole piece is just baby’s first political philosophy argument.
Eight bazillion word essay to say
>the best argument against vice isn’t actual harm but more or less that it harms the vibes
The author’s basis for prohibiting vice is “collective revulsion,” but all the evidence cited shows that the vices they’re writing about are getting more and more popular. If people vote to legalize marijuana you can hardly say “well it should be illegal anyway because people find it revolting.” Apparently a majority of them do not agree with you.
The author also narrates the history of the harm principle without actually problematizing it. Basically the author dislikes the harm principle because (1) it doesn’t justify prohibiting the activities they find revolting and (2) because the actual harm caused by policies and laws is not always clear. These are both basically question begging. Note that the author was perfectly happy to cite statistics when they were arguing that the revolting activities are harmful, earlier in the article, then they turn right around and say arguments like that are pointless.
Which is not to say that I support the legalization of every vice described in the article. However I don’t find the harm principle problematic and the author failed to change my mind.