Less Wrong is a community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality. Please visit our About page for more information.

mattnewport comments on The uniquely awful example of theism - Less Wrong

32 Post author: gjm 10 April 2009 12:30AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (157)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: mattnewport 11 April 2009 09:52:02PM 4 points [-]

Presumably because of the implicit assumption that banning harmful things is inherently a good idea. We haven't really discussed that issue because it is not necessary to hold the position that banning people from making choices harmful to themselves is not justified to argue against drug prohibition. Drug prohibition clearly fails on its own terms without needing to convince proponents of the fact that even if it worked it would still be immoral. Many people here would probably take that fact for granted however and so people were presumably voting down the implicit assumption in the statement. They would expect further justification for the claim.

Comment author: imaxwell 12 April 2009 04:29:51PM 1 point [-]

Isn't that pretty much what CronoDAS said, though? The stated premise of banning certain drugs is that they are harmful (either individually or socially). So, again, drug prohibition fails on its own terms, because they are not even choosing the most harmful substances to ban.

A serious attempt to ban harmful substances would start with things like rat poison and cocaine, and work its way down as far as things like tobacco and alcohol and cheesecake, but probably leave out things like psilocybin and THC.

But of course I'm presuming there is a serious attempt to ban harmful substances. In reality there is a serious attempt to ban getting high, which is not the same thing at all.