I think this hits on the only sane way to deal with these kinds of things, though. Any law needs to primarily be justified on the additional problems/inconvenience it causes compared to the problems/risks it lessens or ameliorates.
Case in point, a law requiring helmets while skiing.
–Costs: additional cost, relatively small when compared to total cost of skiing. “loss of parental autonomy”, whatever that might quantify to. Minor additional discomfort/inconvenience for the skier.
–Benefits: Greatly reduced risk of traumatic head injury for skiers.
By contrast, a law banning single parents (to crib your other example) would have to ensure that more children ended up with better outcomes (stable two-parent families) than worse ones (extended foster care/orphanage care). The analysis is totally disproportional unless you value “loss of parental autonomy” ridiculously highly.
As much as I like Ms. Skenazy’s work, I think she’d do well to stick with situations where risks can be quantified as low (like playing outside in neighborhoods while unsupervised) or where risks cannot be accurately quantified. In situations where the risk can be accurately quantified as high (such as the places where helmet and seatbelt laws reside), her arguments in favor of autonomy stop holding water.
I believe that in situations where risk can be quantitatively measured, there are cases to be made for government regulation. That being said, we are terribly backwards in some ways in this country.
We have quantized the risk associated with pregnant women drinking and smoking during pregnancy, and yet this practice is not outlawed (correct me if I am wrong here). Luckily, most women are educated well enough, and our culture makes it pretty hard for a woman to do these things and still be accepted socially, that a law is pretty much unnecessary.
The risks associated with not wearing a helmet during certain activities compared to wearing a helmet are also quantized very well. But our culture has fetishized the issue of consumer freedom and parental rights so much, that it is very socially acceptible for parents to say “oh don’t tell me what to do, if my kid wants to go around without a helmet, then that’s MY choice.” Well, considering the well established risks, NO, it shouldn’t be your choice. Just as it is not your choice to abuse your child, neglect to feed or take care of them, abandon them (except for baby moses laws, I guess), etc. Until our culture changes to the point where everyone recognizes the importance of helmets during certain activities, it is in society’s best interest to mandate these behaviors.
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–Benefits: Greatly reduced risk of traumatic head injury for skiers.
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Does it? How many injuries to children are we talking about on an annual basis that could have been alleviate due to wearing helmets? How many deaths? What is the actual risk level here in terms of injuries/deaths per skier? If it ‘greatly reduces risk’ then that might be a valid point, but I’d need to see what the actual risk is.
I see the preemptive nature of the law in question. Is there a growing epidemic of head injuries while skiing or snowboarding that a law needs to be enacted because parents are too irresponsible to look after their own children? It seems like the perceived risk of not wearing a helmet is being greatly overestimated.
It’s demonstrateable that car seats for children over 2 provide no increase in safety vs regular seat belts, yet you support their mandate correct?
If there is no law and a trauma occurs the damage is done so it’s too late for the child, right? How does this differ from second hand smoke in the home? Speeding? Driving at all? Any argument that can be made for helmets on the slopes can be made for helmets at all times - it’s just a matter of degree. Once you’ve gone down the road of usurping the parents ability to make their own judgements regarding their children the principal of individual responsibility has been violated and you begin simply line drawing.
I don’t think these are analogous, because there isn’t a fix to the stated risk. To fix the risk of not riding in a carseat, you put the kid in a carseat. Even if we acknowledge that being raised by a single parent is more risky than that, what’s the fix? Make divorce impossible to get, or force people to cohabit with exes? Give kids to two-parent foster families? Make it illegal to smoke if you have a child? Ultimately, we have to have practical policies, and on those issues, I can’t think of any solution that actually improves things if implemented.
That said, I agree that we should try to come up with reasonable standards for the risk of harm (and cost of abatement) and apply them to safety laws. Humans tend to be really bad at figuring out what policies would be statistically significant and worth the cost, focusing instead on highly visible examples and easily-understood stories.
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That said, I agree that we should try to come up with reasonable standards for the risk of harm (and cost of abatement) and apply them to safety laws. Humans tend to be really bad at figuring out what policies would be statistically significant and worth the cost, focusing instead on highly visible examples and easily-understood stories.
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Exactly. Humans are horrible at risk assessment. In most cases stuff we shrug off or take for granted are orders of magnitude more risky than stuff that we are terrified. In this case, my WAG is that the actual number of injuries and deaths that could be avoided by forcing parents to put helmets on their kids while skiing is much lower than simply driving your kid to the ski slopes, with or without a car seat.
She is very strongly in favor of helmets and seatbelts and other safety equipment. The point is when the law starts being in charge of what is considered safe, then you wind up with crazy cases like when a mom is being threatened with arrest if she allows her 5th grade child to bike less than a mile to school. No really.
This is a case of a general child neglect statute and a cop drunk on power trying to shoehorn bike riding into that statute. If we have clear statues addressing specific things like ski helmets, then that makes it clear for everyone whether certain specific acts are illegal or not. Although I don’t expect the state to define every possible specific act that could be neglect by statute, defining specific acts is unlawful makes the law more predictable in cases like ski helmets, tanning beds, etc.
Of course that’s not “the only other just alternative.”
What about throwing risks, benefits, negatives, necessity, practicality of enforcement, and some other things all into an equation and see what comes out.
I have no idea what the story is with tanning beds, but if, for example, there’s good solid evidence that they lead to melanoma (which is, I’m sure, what the issue is), then I have no problem prohibiting their use to minors. It’s easy enough to enforce the law in tanning salons, most kids don’t go tanning, and keeping those kids from tanning is not keeping them from any essential activities for children.
Bicycle helmet laws for kids I’m not as sure about. Enforcement would be spotty and impractical, making kids wear the helmets is not really an option (I remember hiding mine behind a tree near my house when I was a kid, after I’d gotten out of sight of my parents), and I’d really want to see the statistics on how many lives they save per mile ridden, or something like that.
But, at any rate, it’s certainly not an all or nothing proposition as you paint it out to be. Justice does not mean all things at the same level on the statistical harm scale need to be treated identically.
All decent questions–my examples were meant to demonstrate that it’s not the mere fact of risk alleviation that makes a valid law, but also whether that alleviation overcomes the further risks associated with the law.
I also have a significantly lower threshold for laws where the con is “a parent is forced to consider their child’s safety and take appropriate precautions”–no matter how high the risk, I’d be leery of a law that banned skiing for children, but mandating protective gear for a person who doesn’t have a fully developed ability to appreciate the consequences of its lack doesn’t bother me.
OK, so to use a previous example. Children raised on a Vegan diet are ate risk of being malnourished in the sense that most children have a diet below the medically determined guidelines for several micronutrients and for calories overall. This is reflected objectively in Vegan children being stunted.
So, while I assume you would be leery of a law that banned a vegan diet for children, would you accept a law mandating, say, one meat meal per week for for a person who doesn’t have a fully developed ability to appreciate the consequences of its lack? Would that bother you?
This sort of thing was really the point of the examples I used above. All sort of choices made by parents have associated risks that chilren can not fully appreciate. Most of them can be easily alleviated by mandating small changes in behaviour while permitting the activity. So a primarily vegan diet with one steak meal/week is just as practical as skiing whiel wearing a helmet.
To me the more pertinent point is that in both cases the risk can be eliminated almost (though never completely) if the parents are adequately educated, committed to their child’s welfare and involved. A vegan parent who takes detailed note of how many calories their child consumes, administers supplements and monitors weight gain carefully could certainly eliminate 99% of the risk of their choices. But then again, a parent who chooses the ski slopes their child uses, ensures they have adequate training and so forth could also eliminate 99% of the risk of their choices. And in both cases the same outcome could be achieved without that much involvement by legislating minor changes.
So I guess the question is, why shouldn’t we force vegan parents to provide one meat meal a week to their children? I feel instinctively that we shouldn’t. But I have to question whether someone who believes in mandating protective measures for a person who doesn’t have a fully developed ability to appreciate the consequences would feel the same way, and if they do, why.
Why one meat meal? The article linked applies only to veganism, not (lacto-ovo-)vegetarianism. All of the nutrients cited as lacking in vegan children’s diets are available in dairy products.
Because, as you said above, it’s perfectly possible for parents to take steps to mitigate the nutritional risks without significantly reducing the supposed ethical benefit of the activity, which forcing them to eat meat would. I would say passing a law requiring supplements, monitoring, etc would be perfectly reasonable if malnourished vegan kids was a serious problem, but the abstract of that article at least suggests that it is not.
A more accurate analogy for your forced meat policy would be if, say, we mandated slow high-friction kiddie skis, which would drastically reduce the fun of skiing. Unless the main benefit you derive from skiing is looking good on the slopes, wearing a helmet has zero effect on one’s ability to enjoy skiing.
The other thing I’d say about helmet laws specifically is that I’m not sure how much the “parental discretion” argument really holds. Other than maybe some religious headgear getting in the way, I doubt there’s that many parents who don’t want their kids wearing helmets. But there are plenty of kids (like young Eonwe) who don’t like wearing them, and considering that in both the case of biking and skiing the kids are rarely in direct parental supervision, what the parents’ actual wishes are may not be all that relevant to what actually happens. I’m sure many, many times more parents’ wishes are currently being usurped by their own brats’ vanity (or whatever compels them to go helmetless) than would be usurped by the state forcing them to wear helmets. Making it a law changes that. Even if you had it so parents could explicitly opt-out, if the default assumption is that kids must be wearing helmets, making sure kids are following the rules they’re supposed to be is a lot easier.
Now, I’ll agree that enforcement is still a problem with bike helmet laws because who’s going to enforce them? Having the cops do it seems a bit excessive. Things are a lot easier with skiing, though, since access to the slopes is already strictly controlled. All that needs to happen is that the kids have to show their helmets when they buy their lift ticket and the lift operators can check if someone with an under-18 pass is wearing a helmet or not. If they aren’t, they get kicked off the slope for the day.
Perhaps the law be more palatable to the gung-ho personal-liberty types if instead of saying “children must wear helmets” it said “ski areas must create and enforce rules requiring children to wear helmets”? Most ski areas already operate under a myriad of state and federal rules, so that’d just be one more on the pile.
Actually it’s not. Requiring vegans to feed their children meat would be an undue violation of their right to live by their chosen ethical code. Requiring them to, say, give their children supplements would not, unless of course their ethical code includes raising malnourished children.
If it really was that dangerous,companies that had ski areas would require helmets. When I went biking down Pike’s Peak in Colorado, helmets were required. When asked about it, the company that rented the bikes and shuttled people to the top said that mandatory helmets were the only way to keep insurance costs down.
