quittin' smoking

[Chris Rapier]

On 3/14/06, Jeremy David <epistemology at gmail.com> wrote:
> I agree. Obesity is soon to be the #1 cause of preventable death in
> the U.S. It should be overtaking the current #1 cause of preventable
> death, which is smoking, sometime soon.

If I remember correctly it already has. Of course, my memory sucks.

> Obesity hopefully will never be this kind of a civic issue though,
> because I can't make you fat. I can however make you sick from
> smelling my noxious cigarettes. If you're fat, it shouldn't be the
> problem that the city government needs to deal with. Smoking, however,
> affects people other than the smoker, so it is a legitimate public
> health issue.

Obesity affects more than just the fat person. Increased medical
costs, shortened life spans (and hence reduced life time
productivity), the strain it places on famlies, the additional costs
to businesses to accomdate them... There are very very few actions
that any individual can engage in that doesn't affect the other people
around them in a direct way. As such almost all aspects of behaviour
can be justifiably regulated to meet the greater needs of society.

Now, we have, for a long time, tried to balance the right of an
individual to engage in certain behaviours with the perceived risk to
society. This behaviour might be driving, drinking, having sex,
working when you are sick, smoking, certain medical proceedures, and
so forth. Certain practices are regulated and justifiably so, drinking
and driving for example (though I think we're starting to go overboard
there as well). However, other practices were seen as being either low
risk or avoidable enough to escape many aspects of regulation. The
perception of risk is changing significantly though - we are getting
to the point where *any* risk is seen as unacceptable. As more
regulations start to circumscribe permissible behaviour I think we'll
see an acceleration in the regulation of our daily lives as people try
to eliminate risk.

Life is risky and its more than understandable that people would want
to mitigate those risks. However, people need to be given the freedom
to make their own choices and that unavoidably *increases* risk.  So
here is the crux of the problem - how to balance the understandable
desire to decrease risk against the decidely risky excercise of
freedom? Given the way things have been going lately I'm concerned
about any idea that seeks to restrict behaviour.