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But everyone is non-consensually born into a particular environment that they absolutely could not have chosen/affected (because they weren't born yet) and inevitably strongly influenced by it (affecting their later choices) before they develop much of a capacity for true reasoning/genuine choice at all. How do you account for that?
Again, there are no platonic "decisions that individuals freely make". Humans are born barely understanding what a decision is and influenced in their fundamental understandings by factors they have no control of at all for at least years (which isn't even getting into how they're additionally influenced by their genes and fundamental nature, which they obviously also can't control), and these factors readily carry over to what they'll "choose" for the rest of their life. (That is, if you feel my beliefs deny you the prospect of perfect liberty, let it be known that it is actually nature and the unalterable character of existence doing that.)
So let's say you have Bob. Bob's parents, who are also obese, instead of just giving him normal milk bottles, would sweeten them with heavy amounts of sugar and cream. They also let him drink Mountain Dew at mere months old. Bob becomes a chunky baby, kid, and later adult with a major sweet tooth and issues controlling his diet, which he feels major angst about, lowering his self-esteem, harming his health, etc.
Was it just in the nature of Bob to be obese then? And when he reaches for a donut after another dejected moment of looking at himself in the mirror there's nothing other than his comprehensive free choice driving it? And he's better off than he would be in a world where things were arranged to lead him down the path of being healthy and powerful? He's just lying to himself when he says he'd prefer to be thin?
For a supposed libertarian absolutist you're sure not sounding like one here. "You don't actually know your true preferences as well as my political ideology does!" People making "choices" they regret and didn't really want to on many higher levels than that of basic, animalistic temptation is one of the most documented phenomena in human psychology (and is also the whole reason the word "temptation" exists), but it don't real because of your political beliefs?
You can take a Darwinian "If you don't have the strength to resist your temptations then you don't deserve to be free of them." view, but don't pretend that's protecting people's freedom.
??? People have the right to a "freedom" to tempt others? So if I took chemical castration pills to erase my sexual desire, that would be violating the "freedom" of all of the people I'd otherwise be sexually attracted to? If Bob above undergoes hypnotherapy to change his dietary preferences, then he's violating the "freedom" of the Hostess brand to tempt him with Twinkies? That sure doesn't sound like even orthodox libertarianism to me.
Yes, this is exactly my point.
Simple analogy: If I want to go to Arizona in my car, but I don't have the gas to do so or the money to buy it, does that mean I actually don't want to go to Arizona and am just lying about my preferences? Obviously not. So if you have an ideology based on "Everyone should be free to go wherever they want in their car.", then, even if you're not willing to guarantee gas as a positive right, shouldn't you want to create a social environment where gas is in abundant supply for acquisition? If you had a society that seemed to instead tend to reduce the amount of available gas, both individually and collectively, wouldn't you question if maybe your policies were consistent with the world you wanted to create?
And after they're addicted? They're still just choosing, just like you might choose to learn Japanese or the piano? Neurology is fake?
Right. That's why ideally they would be enabled to make better choices the first time.
I can not account for it, nor do I need to in order for my ideology to make sense. I guess you could use something along those lines as an argument for antinatalism but that is a different story.
If I offer Bob donuts thereby tempting him to indulge in his gluttonous habits, I am not coercing Bob in any way, because it is ultimately him and no one else that makes the decision to take a donut. As to the notion that Bob would be better off if he had not been an excessive eater from an early age, yeah Bob is not wrong to think that and he is not necessarily lying to himself, but it is his parents fault for raising him with bad habits. And yet his parents did not necessarily do anything coercive to cause this outcome, so there is no warrant to prevent parents from feeding their children in unhealthy ways. Apart from such measures being uncalled for by liberal morality, it sets a dangerous precedent to allow authorities to control the way people raise their kids, even if there is widespread agreement among other parents that they are doing it wrong.
You can never know if you are going to end up regretting a particular choice, and even if you could, if you go ahead and make the choice anyway it shows that at least at that moment you believed that the benefits outweighed the costs. I don't think I agree that living in an environment where you can not avoid being faced with certain unwanted temptations that you are unable to resist means that you are less free. But I think it is clear that the alternative would be a violation of freedom, preventing people from displaying certain images, messages, or products on their property, and thus also preventing those who would like to have those things made visible to them from having this desire fulfilled.
That is not what I meant, the freedom to tempt is emergent from and bound by the law of property rights. If you alter yourself in a way that makes you no longer under the influence of those temptations, you are not denying the freedom of people to tempt in general, which is what I meant, not that they have a right to get you to notice and submit to those temptations.
Yeah, its not like they unconsciously find themselves consuming heroin, or that somebody is coercing them to consume heroin.
If by enabled you mean something like warned of the dangers of trying heroin, then I agree with that, and I don't think I would necessarily have a problem with it being required, within reason, to make sure that heroin buyers are aware of the potential harmful side effects of heroin use before receiving it.
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