Hi, folks. Vacation is fun, but it’s also fun to be back on the mailbag grind! Note that these are all questions from before the debate, which is why it’s not just a bunch of questions about that.
Milan Singh: Recently (after being yelled at on the weight loss mini-post) I have been toying with the idea that our society has been set up to maximize addiction to a ton of things. Short-form video, for example, is perfectly designed to capture your attention for hours on end. As Ben and I have written, the rise of sports gambling is like this. This is one of the downsides of legal weed—dispensaries obviously want to maximize revenue and that means trying to increase usage. Fast food being designed to be more and more fatty and sugary and salty and tasty is another example. And I do take some of the haters' points about it being difficult to excercise discipline on so many fronts at once.
Setting aside policy rememdies—because “well we should tax the externality but that is politically difficult” is I think a take you have done a couple times before—I am curious what you think about this philosophically. Specifically in the context of J.S. Mill’s civil liberties argument that anything that only harms oneself should be legally permitted, and Wickard aggregation-style arguments about the societal impacts of aggregated individual choices.
I am not a big fan of the Mill-style harm principle. If you take this literally, then you could argue that heroin should be sold at every 7-11 in America (it’s a victimless crime!), but it should maybe be illegal to grill in your backyard because the smell might bother your neighbor.
I’m much closer to an impartial consequentialism, along the lines of Derek Parfit, which says that harms you do to future versions of yourself are every bit as much an ethical problem as harms you inflict on others. The reason that heroin is worse than smoke from your Weber is that heroin is much more harmful. The fact that the harm it inflicts is harm to you doesn’t really change that. Of course, I’m not a total psycho; there are limits to how much paternalism people will accept. And prudentially, we should think hard about the epistemological and political economy problems inherent in letting bureaucrats or legislators make choices for people rather than letting people make the choices themselves. The instinct to have a bias in favor of freedom is completely correct, especially because enforcing rules against victimless crimes can be very costly and difficult and involve compromising other important values. But I don’t think you want to enact this as a hard Mill-style principle.
To your larger observation, I completely agree. Rather than “addiction,” which I think can get you into controversial disputes about exact biological mechanisms, I usually think in terms of the Ancient Greek concept of akrasia — weakness of will. We all have some things that we know we should do but struggle in practice to do consistently, and some things that we know we shouldn’t do but find ourselves consistently tempted by.
Some forms of akrasia, like a strong tendency to overeat, seem to afflict the majority of the population. Others are rare — opioid addiction is both a big problem in the United States and also something the vast majority of people have no trouble avoiding. Other things are in the middle. It’s pretty common to over-indulge in alcohol at least occasionally in life, but only a minority of drinkers ever develop a serious problem with it. Other forms are mild but still serious. Home entertainment systems are better than ever, and lots of people don’t get as much sleep as they should because they’re up too late scrolling or playing games on their phone. I don’t think we do this because we’re confused or because nobody’s ever been told that getting a good night’s sleep is important. It’s weakness of will, and it looms larger and larger in society because we struggle less than ever with basic material deprivation.
Alexa: What do you think about AIPAC’s involvement in Democratic primaries, specifically in races like Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush’s, two candidates who are very outspoken progressives who likely damage the Democratic brand. I’d imagine you’re not a fan of either of them and are perfectly happy to see them lose, but it’s unclear if the ends (them losing) justify the means (AIPAC making Israel a wedge issue in Democratic politics).
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Slow Boring to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.