Victimless crimes
I wrote a long piece in response to ishamael's complaint on Advogato about police enforcing laws against victimless crimes. But I haven't finished it or posted it anywhere.
Zack wonders (along with a political science professor I met about two years ago) whether there aren't duties to the self (in the sense of whether people have moral obligations to themselves or can be acting immorally in their treatment of themselves). The political science professor suggested that submitting to coercion might be wrong even if the coercion itself is wrong -- because we should not permit ourselves to be so abused if we can find an alternative. (The song says, by way of example, "You gotta keep the faith, you gotta keep the faith, you better keep the faith and run away. It's time to break free, oh oh oh oh, run away...") In libertarian thought, this would be a very foreign concept, although not as foreign as the idea that somebody else could legitimately help enforce these duties (maybe by forcing someone not to use drugs or something).
I remembered the good old days of arguing with Kevin Sabet on the opinion page of the Daily Cal. I would write a piece to the effect of
Let's first get out of the way the myth that drugs are not harmful. They are, at least potentially. They are very dangerous and using them is typically a poor choice and a great risk. Now, everyone has a fundamental liberty interest in doing whatever he or she wants with his or her own body. Governments and the societies they claim to represent have no right to legislate over what people do to themselves; when they try to create restrictions like this, they are overstepping what legitimate authority they might have. If you try to force someone not to use drugs just because they are risky, you are infringing on that person's rights.
I would really take pains to emphasize that I thought that drugs were really bad and recreational drug use was a really big problem. (In that sense I think I came close to suggesting that I thought that there were duties to the self -- because most of my published criticisms of drugs were based on what they do to their users. But I argued at length that there is no right on the part of anyone else to enforce those duties, if they exist.)
So Kevin Sabet would always write in and respond to my letter, except what he would say was always along the lines of "But drugs are really dangerous, and really harmful". And it was really bizzare, because I took such pains to agree to that and to support his contention that drug abuse was a real problem and was really upsetting. But his responses always seemed to be limited to citing statistics about health risks from various drugs or correlations between drug use and poor academic performance or the likelihood that people would become addicted to something.
And (as often, as very often, alas) we were really talking at cross purposes, because we weren't contradicting each other (although I did think that Sabet overstepped in his categorical denials that marijuana had legitimate medical uses; however much medical marijuana in California may be used as a cover for recreational drug use, it seems that there is no reason to dismiss the potential benefits of a drug when that drug is surrounded by a recreational-use tradition). But Sabet would conclude that because drugs were so dangerous, it was vitally important that society act forcefully to suppress the depredations... and I would conclude that there is no right to compel individuals against their will and the government should get its laws off of everyone's bodies, as the emotionally tinged slogan runs.
It was frustrating to argue with Kevin Sabet. Our perspectives were apparently so different that we couldn't even disagree with each other effectively.
(That happened with affirmative action too, although not with Kevin Sabet in particular. It took me a long time to notice that the most fundamental disagreements were not even about affirmative action, but about what a university is for. Some people thoughts of public universities as instruments of public policy or social welfare. So therefore if a government had a socially useful policy, it could implement it through a university. Other people were just horrified that politics could get involved in a university at all and thought that universities should have a remarkable detachment and independence and promote knowledge in general rather than specific social goals. And then it just so happened that governments sponsored universities, because universities are good and it's difficult to get people to found enough of them, but the governments should not expect anything back from the universities, but should leave them alone to be universities. I mean, if people are intermittently horrified that religious universities compromise their independence by trying to promote religious beliefs, why should they not be horrified when government universities compromise their independence by trying to promote government economic policies? Do I overstate the point? I've barely gotten started here exploring the depths of the disagreement on this issue! People who argue about affirmative action in public universities have virtually no common ground and they completely misunderstand each other or talk, again, at cross purposes because of their different starting point.)
What is a university for? In precisely the same vein, what is a romantic relationship for? When we've solved those, we can take on Wendell Berry's question, because founding universities and creating romantic relationships are prototypical human activities.
(I remember talking to Biella about Don Marti's complaint that universities were becoming fancy tax shelters for startups and for proprietary corporate research. Too simple, she said. Universities are more complicated and multifarious than that. So there would be an element of this sort of thing, but we would have to look at the whole picture and see what all different kinds of people were up to in the context of a university. But if we believe, as some people do, that things have a particular essential purpose -- which is one of the oldest academic traditions in the world! -- then it's worth asking what universities are really supposed to be about. And you'll find that people have absolutely no consensus about that. The people who are there don't agree on what they're there for and the people who pay for it don't agree on why they pay for it and the people who examine and criticize the universities don't agree on what the universities were supposed to be doing in the first place.)
