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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   30491 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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That's merely the distinction between why they think it's wrong in the first place, not the harm reduction variable.

That is, a general form of the "Harm Reduction" argument says that if thing A is bad because it leads to bad outcomes, then a decriminalized harm reduction environment where it can be done more safely with fewer negative outcomes is good because, although the thing is still bad, it's less bad here and they were going to do it anyway.

The tradeoff is that you are implicitly endorsing the behavior in exchange for this harm reduction. This argument doesn't really depend on the type of harm involved. If someone is being non-consensually harmed by DV, and this is extra bad, then the harm reduction is even more good, and the implicit endorsement and incentives are more bad, and presumably these are proportional so it should still be worthwhile or not for the same reasons as with drug use.

I suppose you could try to make specific mathematical arguments about the tradeoff values where harm reduction facilities for DV would be less effective at reducing harm and more legitimizing to DV such that the net effect would flip signs for this but not for drugs, but we've never tried it before, nobody has that data, and nobody who advocates for harm reduction for drugs seems to do any math or acknowledge tradeoffs in the first place.

Exactly as I would have said just much more intelligent and coherent. Thank you for elucidating my point!

OK, I guess we have two different notions of “harm reduction”-ism in mind.

The one I was thinking of is internally consistent, because it is as follows: Call an act personally risky if it is performed with the consent of its actor, and poses a risk to life or limb of that actor, but not to any other party. Call an act evil if it harms (or threatens to harm) another party without that party’s consent. We should endeavor to reduce the harm/risk of harm faced by people who engage in personally risky activity, without requiring them to refrain from the act entirely, but we should not tolerate evil activity.

Drug use should be made safer by safe needle sites and the like because it is personally risky. Domestic violence must be cracked down on with the full force of the law because it is evil.

In other words, my imagined “harm reduction”-ist is not a pure utilitarian/consequentialist. His consequentialism is conditional on the acts in question not nonconsensually harming anyone.

Drug use should be made safer by safe needle sites and the like because it is personally risky.

Wait, you just converted that "personally risky" activity to "evil" by imposing the cost of safe needle sites and the like on other parties (taxpayers) without their consent.

This argument is like "eating sugar harms society because of health care costs". It's the taxation that imposes it on other parties, not the needle sites.

I’m not a “harm reduction”-ist myself, but if I had to provide a steelman here I would point out the various arguments for why taxation is not theft (the Rawlsian veil of ignorance, for example).

The Rawlsian veil of ignorance, which says one must privilege the slightest improvement in the situation most miserable cuss in the society over any improvement to anyone (or everyone) else? I think I'll just reject that one. Anyway, I'm not arguing taxation is theft, I'm arguing that it is harm.

Arguments that taxation is not theft generally advance the view that the “harm” caused by taxation is, in some sense, consensual*, and therefore not evil per the definition above. So, my imagined “harm reduction”-ist would say, we face a tradeoff between two personally risky things (namely, drug users using drugs and taxpayers having to pay taxes—both of these are consensual, but have their downsides). How we optimize between both sides of this tradeoff is a matter of administration, an implementation detail; there’s no fundamental inconsistency here.

Look, this is all my attempt to pass an ITT, to steelman a view that I don’t even hold. I just happen to think that this particular case is a values difference, not an instance of one side or the other being irrational/inconsistent.

*There are better and worse arguments out there for the “implicit consent”/“social contract” views of taxation, and I agree with you that the Rawlsian one is not without its shortcomings. FWIW I am in reality much more libertarian than the median American, so it’s hard for me to give more than a halfhearted defense of this take.

Drug use should be made safer by safe needle sites and the like because it is personally risky.

....and all the externalities caused by strung-out junkies are just an unrelated random happenstance? Like, the part where they are using drugs is entirely unrelated to all the other stuff they do because they're a person addicted to drugs?

A consistent harm reduction-ist would say yes_chad.jpg; if a junkie robs a convenience store to get his fix, the crime is the robbery, and the drug addiction is irrelevant.

A consistent harm reduction-ist would say yes_chad.jpg; if a junkie robs a convenience store to get his fix, the crime is the robbery, and the drug addiction is irrelevant.

People care about cause and effect. If junkies commit wildly disproportionate amounts of crime, people are going to converge on the explanation that they commit crimes because they are junkies, and they are going to recognize that preventing people from becoming junkies is clearly consistent with harm reduction.

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