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I have no problem with people becoming addicted to drugs and other substances. I'm not saying it's a good idea, but I have no problem with it because it's none of my business how they choose to live their lives.
I think this response is beautiful. This was the standard response of the laissez-faire economist and the social liberal pre-2024. It has dominated western politics and was basically the default position of anyone who drank water, breathed air, and wanted to not be fucked with. Leave well enough alone, what I do is my business. You don't have a right to tell me what to do, and I don't have a right to tell anyone what to do.
I also think that this response is very dated. Partly as a result of the way the internet systematically crushed the vast majority of social barriers to information, partly because of the wilful detonation of social structures and institutions (What if people are excluded? Well, then everyone needs to be excluded! Wait, why'd they let that in? Screw this, I'm outta here!).
There is a fantasy of man as an island that has never gone away.
It is still possible, for some, to a limited extent. For the rest of us, who don't hunt, kill and butcher our own meat, make our own clothing, craft our own domiciles and generate our own electrical power, we have to engage with society in some way. But that breaks the fantasy. We wish to think of ourselves as alone, fully in control of our own destinies, that society loses more from us not participating in it than we lose by not participating in society.
I think we're past that. Isolated as we are, we are all easy pickings for those who've managed to coordinate meanness. I think that's also why people have such poor reactions to this poor creature who has sold her body to a crowd for attention. They are concerned with great ideas, like the collapse of pair bonding, stable male-female relationships, and what this signals for both sides of the fence, as well as the governments that rule them. Maybe some of them are concerned for her mental well-being, who knows. It's a tug of war between those who see society as something to be preserved, shaped in a way that benefits them, or at least in a way that doesn't make their lives actively worse, and those who couldn't give a hundred fucks about society.
We do not care for the crackhead. What he does with crack is his business. But we do not live near him either.
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Please meet Daniel Penny, another person who didn't care how others choose to live their lives until he really, really cared.
I mean this is such a naive response. Of course no one should care how another person lives their own private life. But we live in a society. We interact with one another. If your horribly addicted to drugs, you might choose to "involve" yourself in my life in a drastic way.
Perhaps you'll say, "oh, sure, you can beat the crap out of an addict if they accost you" - but the median position in society is that we shouldn't let people become addicted (to at least the illegal substances) so that we can avoid the far more costly "beat up the zombies" method of social regulation.
Blind/naive libertarianism is just such a poor way of even approach the world. Complex system interact with one another. Unintended consequences are real. People's quality of life extends beyond the walls of their apartments.
A person becoming addicted to drugs to the point that he starts to be violent to people or overuse the healthcare system is a social problem because, well, he starts to be violent to people or overuse the healthcare system. A person choosing to have sex with 100 men in one day in a safe manner causes no harm to others that I can think of. I guess you can put forward complicated theories that boil down to some kind of magically contagious social rot, but I neither find having sex with 100 people in a day to be rotten nor am I convinced that its contagious nature is much of a problem.
It causes harm to the self. That's the whole point. This was a bad decision by the lady in question and it was a bad decision that should be easy to avoid.
Again, utilitarianism and/or libertarianism congratulate themselves by saying "we have a hard line up against harming others" conveniently leaving out that all "others" are "selves" depending on reference point. While I definitely don't think the power of the State should be employed to inhibit people from doing things that may or may not be harmful to themselves, I do believe that a useful moral system must necessarily state that there are some actions and motivations that are harmful to the self (and do not offset this with noble and/or virtuous self-sacrifice ) and ought to be avoided for moral reasons ... not just in service of a self-preservation instinct.
It causes harm to the self if you're the kind of person who is harmed by having sex with 100 people in a day, in which case you shouldn't do it. If you're the kind of person who isn't harmed by it, your argument doesn't apply.
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Would you say it's immoral for someone to intentionally burn themselves so they could get a cool scar? What about smashing their own (non shared) things in a fit of rage?
Do they correctly dispose of the smashed bits afterwards? Did they do the smashing when I don't have to see or hear them and they aren't inconveniencing anyone?
Is the scar in a visible part of the body? Will it be deleterious to their health now or in the future?
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What if they took a drug that caused 100% of users to violently assault the next person they see? What about 50% or 10%?
Because other people using drugs does actually affect you in most cases. Whether it's something relatively small like having to step around hobo puke on the sidewalk, or something more direct like a junkie biting your face off because they're high on bath salts.
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