It’s a mistake to speak as if risks were all or nothing. Degree of risk and likelihood of various outcmoes matter. It’s not enough to say that people knew vaugely in the 40s that smoking was bad for you: unless they knew exactly HOW bad, or how addictive, they couldn’t be said to be making a fully informed decision. Certainly, if they knew that they lacked this knowledge, and undertook that uncertainty anyway, that’s again is their choice. However, if they were deliberately misinformed about the health effects and addictive effects, that’s back to them not being fully informed.
Addiction is interesting precisely because though people understand that it’s real, they have a hard time believing that it could happen to them.
Length of time is also an interesting issue. It’s well known that most simple Cost/Benefit analysises have the problem that costs or benefits that come far in the future can be “discounted” away, even if they are huge. A decision that has great benefits now, but would blow up the planet in 700 years for sure (causing total destruction: pure cost in terms of everything), could easily have a B/C ratio of above 1, but would anyone think it would be a good idea to accept it? The hard question is: what alternative calculation could we use, and if people don’t use that alternative, are they really making rational decisions?
I’ll respond to the rest in a bit; I just had to clear this one up:
Well, that’s because that “argument” is a straw man. Whoever said that the choices were bad? I’m just contending that they’re not truly informed. Now, it’s arguable whether the decision to smoke is a rational one, and this certainly plays a part in what I’m saying–but nowhere am I imposing some kind of moral judgment on the choice itself (or, obviously, the chooser).
Doc:
Absolutely untrue. If I’m deciding between eating an apple and eating an orange, I’m making an informed choice on the basis of taste–I’ve eaten each before, and I know, roughly, what the experience will be like. If I’m deciding between eating an apple and eating a loquat, on the other hand, mine will not be an informed choice. I’ve never eaten a loquat. I can make my choice more informed by reading about loquats, asking others what they taste like, et cetera–but my choice between an orange and a loquat (when I’ve never had a loquat) isn’t truly informed. And that’s perfectly fine. There’s no need for every choice someone makes to be as informed as possible–we’d all be paralyzed by analysis. But when it comes to a choice that will in forty years probably kill you in a slow and excruciating manner, and when people are telling you that it’s your own fault you’re going to die because you made an “informed choice”…then I feel it’s incumbent upon me to point out that, given that a potential smoker likely doesn’t really grok the consequences of his actions, the choice isn’t nearly as informed as it could be.
No need to reduce it to “no human is capable of making an informed decision about anything.” There are gradations, and information is more important for some decisions than for others.
If a 10 year old makes a choice to cross the street against the light, and gets hit, the kid will still get hit. No amount of “I was too young to understand my choices” will change the outcome of their ill-informed immature choice.
The kid was informed that red light means “don’t cross” and yet they crossed anyway, and had to suffer the consequences. The kid is able to read and sees the warning label on the cigarette package, yet smokes anyway, and has to face the consequences.
There is no situation in which you can have perfect knowledge, so to say that the lack of exact information precludes making an informed decision is, I think, incorrect. And your second point is a good one too, if people didn’t know whether smoking was good or bad, and chose to smoke anyway, well then they have again made their decision. While the tobacco folks have certainly been less than honest, I think the dangers of smoking have been known for a long time to anyone who cared to notice.
I side with the OP here, in that we know informed consent is unillateral. Wihtout painless suicide machines; the mechanism for observing the effects of consent violation in regards to behavior and law are not present. I believe these effects can still be predicted in relation to the contradiction frequency over time ratio.
I have a question for you. If there was a single pill which gave all the benefits of smoking without any of the side effects considered harmful; and that taking it once collapsed the entire resource of smoking; do you believe it would be released?
Or, do you believe someone would figure out how to reduce it’s effectiveness to make it a product which requires life-long purchase and consumption in order to collapse the resource of smoking?
There is a vast abyss between availability and consent; transparency and choice, data collection centers and guns which block access. From everything i understand about cigarette manufacture; they have used a trillion dollars simply for research to make them effectively a product to bypass consent on as much as the population as possible; utilizing the nexus of our collective biological investagatory establishment to effectively reverse engineer benefit into coded addiction and dependency. Maybe instead of charging people with having weak wills or being stupid; one might want to take a glance at what a trillion dollars and the peak of human bilogical observation tools and laboratories can purchase, and whether this ‘consent’ is even mildly collective.
In support of what Apos was saying about the fascinating regulatory practice of discounting, check out this link.
An excerpt:
And, to complement Apos’s example–an action that will be guaranteed to save one million lives in one million years will likely, under most discounting models, be disfavored no matter the cost.
I can’t believe I am going to do this, but I am going to respond to Justhink
The pill of which you speak, would that be like a vaccine? You know, like the ones that pharmaceutical companies make that give children immunity from diseases even though they could not market the vaccine and sell alot of drugs to deal with the diseases themselves on a case by case basis?
On the suicide machine dead horse which you flog on a daily basis, and I think I pointed this out when you first showed up, they are called bridges, they are fast, they are painless, they are available. Walk to bridge, jump off. Simple and effective.
A good example of this is Paxil. Paxil is designed to give electrical tremors in the nervous system when stopped. 20% percent of people who take Paxil will need to take it for life in order to keep these electrical tremors from plaguing them for life.
What I’m saying is, find me someone who would start smoking if it made them, say, completely bald tomorrow. Alternatively, find me someone with emphysema who would smoke just as much the second time around, if given the chance. People are free to make choices for themselves. Those choices may be irrational (or more irrational than rational), but that’s a far cry from being stupid.
When a child undertakes an adult activity they are held to the same standard of care as an adult. A kid on a snowmobile, for example, needs to be as careful as an adult would be. Smoking is an adult activity, so the kid is expected to act as an adult.
These vaccines (polio, anthrax in particular) have effectively created a cancer epidemic and a somatic epidemic and an axiety epidemic in America. In fact; Rawanda civillians are being force by the military there to take the live polio vaccine daily; which is counter-indicated against other manufactured viruses like AIDS which is extremely prevelent there. Instead of considering to attack something like malaria, cholera or AIDS in Rawanda; their government is being supported by US interests to inject 5 dollar-a-pop shots to all their civillians to give them a disease which doesn’t exist in Rawanda.
Oh, I think it is an established fact that people are using non-existential pressure pockets to declare their superiority and bravery. They are doing this by irrationaly using technology which could only come about by virtue of a social contract; as such, they are effectively gaining status by using something equivilent to a socially constructed painless suicide machine every day; and critisizing those who aren’t ‘brave’ enough to hop a bridge. Those who do manage to hop bridges and whatnot have been so harshed as to take the chance of non-success. Non-success in this society; presents an excellent opportunity for life-long drug experimentation confiscation in closed facilities. Families of oppulence can circumvent such measures; but as such, may not. These socially constructed machines also have the benefit of being designed specifically for the impossibility of prolonged pain or confrontation with the grizzly effects of taking that step and not coming back - the fear; the panic, the worry, the regret. People are able to use socially constructed devices like this every-day; to bypass this effect and gain the benefit of those who cannot, because the opposing choice for statistical accountability is absent. It is a double standard, and a pathetic one at that.
The distinction is noted, but I think it is a distinction without a difference. What is your take on my modification of your proposed scenarios? I think you are dangerously close to strawmanning yourself when you talk about 5% of a human life being worth $50.
I still don’t see what impact the fact that people would make different decisions if given a second opportunity has on whether or not the first decisions were informed. Given the opportunity again I would have dumped my AOL stock @ $250/share. The fact that I didn’t do so does not imply that my decision to hold the stock was irrational or uninformed.
Those are completely arbitrary numbers–make it $1000 if you want, or $10,000, as long as both the risk and the amount remain the same in all scenarios while the temporal aspect shifts. I’m not making any normative claim about the worth of a life–I’m just saying that it’s my perception that people would be more likely to accept the money if the chance of negative consequences–no matter how dire–were located much further in the future.
To the extent that you believe–as with your driving example above–that people would be as likely to undertake an action with modest benefits and entailing great (but far future) risk if they got a taste of what the consequences would be, we’ll have to agree to disagree. Although there are a few crucial differences between the smoking/cancer and driving/accident scenarios. For one, driving is accepted by most people as a generally necessary activity. For another, the risk of accident after driving every day for ten years is a) in part skill-dependent and b) much less than the risk of cancer after smoking every day for ten years. (And these two things–risk and necessity–are intertwined. If we believed that driving was necessary, and yet the risk of accidents was undesirably high, we’d take steps to make driving safer.) Third, an accident can happen any time after sitting down behind the wheel–the probability doesn’t become greater over time and, more importantly, the adverse effects aren’t guaranteed to be deferred until some point in the future. When I begin driving, I do so with the knowledge that I could get into an accident tomorrow. When I begin smoking, I do so with the knowledge that there’s no way I could get cancer tomorrow.
So this is why your AOL example is inapt. I’m not talking about looking back after the fact from an adverse consequence that had, say, a 1 percent chance of happening at any point from the time you bought the stocks. I’m talking about an adverse consequence that has a (again, throwing out numbers–it’s the scale and time differential that are important) 70 percent chance of happening after fifty years, but a zero percent chance of happening before twenty years.
I’ll also suggest that the cure itself for a specific addiction or dependency may not be present in a pill; or a socially viable means of reparations. Being born in a society which is banking on you to have a certain type of genetics which can be exploited to damage you irrepairably into biological and psychological slavery is not something that money can repay. There are a lot of things that money cannot buy; that an apology cannot buy - rather the decision to get the hell out, provided by societies which have coded this into their social stratum and permanent philosophy.
All you’re seeing are means slightly less blatant, less noticable, more encrypted, less transparent than then scooping out the frontal lobe upon birth. The pinnicle of biological invetigatory tools and research is abstracted outside of public representation and legal accountability; as layers upon layers of “top secret” “national security” “non-disclosure even if you are correct” effectively impedes any collective voice or observation.
There is one irriducable effect that all of these behaviors will translate to; logically corrupt use of the social contract will increase suicide rates if a socially constructed suicide machine is created. This reverse engineers the logical corruption inherent in these decisions and places the existential pressure right upon their front doorsteps; as a mirror of using the same system iwith the same logic; only inverted.
Find somebody who would start driving if it made them get into a fatal car accident tomorrow.
If we KNEW with an absolute certainty what is going to happen as a result of all our decisions, we’d sure as hell avoid such things. But we can’t. We make calculated decisions based on the chances and sometimes we get the bad luck of the draw.
Hypothesis: The willingness to undertake a risky activity is directly proportional not only to the degree to which the perceived probability and nature of benefits outweighs the perceived risk and severity of costs, but to the perceived length of time likely to elapse before a risk of costs begins to accrue.
Gadarene
So what exactly in your opinion does it take for some one to make an informed decision?
Re-Starting At A Young Age
Again, my class was shown actual lungs when we were seven and eight. They told us that ‘This is what smoking does to you.’
Further, a ten year old who smokes regularly has made several other decisions-
I will participate in an activity I know is prohibited.
I will lie about and conceal this activity(presumably. Though, I suppose there are some parents who happilly light up a Camel with their kid) from parents and other authority figures.
I will spend money on cigarrettes and lighters rather than the standard things my age group consumes (comics, toys, candy, videogames, firecrackers etc)
JustThink
Several things. #1 Paxil does cause withdrawal. However, ( Cite Dr Amy Brodky a licensed and practicing MD and psychiatrist. Damn good one too) stepping down the dosage gradually rather than stopping cold turkey eliminates withdrawal symptoms. This takes 2 weeks at the outside.
#2 I say this seriously and without any malice. You need the help of a mental health proffessional. Your posts indicate a disordered thought process. Further, you seem to believe in a number of vast conspiracies. There are no suicide machines guaranteed to instantly and painlessly end your life. But there many people who will work with you to ease your pain and improve your life more than you would believe possible.
