An informed decision to smoke? I don’t think you can make a truly informed decision to smoke, as a child or adult, without knowing a) the actual risk of getting cancer and other bad stuff as a result and b) exactly how it feels to have cancer (and other bad stuff). a) is roughly possible; I don’t know how to accomplish b) with people who don’t already have cancer.
As I’ve said, though, this doesn’t mean that I think people choosing to smoke are making a “bad” choice. It does mean that “informed choice” should not be a defense for tobacco companies looking to escape or minimize their own responsibility in promoting an addictive product that tends to kill you.
First, I agree with Apos that a vague knowledge that something is bad for you is not the same as an informed decision, especially if information is being deliberately withheld. However, I think that anyone who starts smoking today knows enough to make an informed decision. Obviously, they could know more. But there has to be a point at which we accept that there is enough information, and people have to be responsible for their choice.
As for Gadarene’s hypothesis, I completely agree with it. But I don’t see how it constitutes an uninformed choice. If most people are willing to ignore future consequences, that is their own choice, caused more by some peculiarity in the human mind than by any lack of information.
I think the age issue is critical. Can a person of 11, 9, 14 or 16 be said to be making a * truly * informed decision about anything at all? The oeverwhelming majority of smokers started when they were children or extremely young adults. An irrefutable truth about most very young people is that they are emotionally convinced of their own immortality. Death and disease are not real to them and will never happen to them. They will never be old, so they will never have the diseases of age. Certainly they know better intellectually, but that is meaningless. Emotionally, they are superhuman, and can therefore smoke to their hearts’ content. Not only will they never be felled by smoking related illness, they are equally convinced that they can and will “stop any time they want to”.
That is, IMO, the crucial factor.
So I guess my answer to your OP query is no, they don’t. But for a slightly different reason than you offer.
I think I agree with your hypothesis. And I think there is some present value/discounting that goes on. But here, I think you run into trouble. I don’t need to put my hand in boiling water to know it hurts, nor do I need to have cancer to know it is bad. Would putting my hand in boiling water deter me from doing so again in the future? No doubt. Is it necessary that I experience the boiling water first before I can be said to be making an informed decision? I don’t think so. The fact that the cancer is removed in time from the smoking may make the calculation more difficult, but not impossible, and can not, IMO, form the basis for a claim that people who smoke do so without having made an informed decision.
Good call, Nightime, about the difference between lack of information and a cognitive quirk. I’d say that it isn’t so much that most people are willing to ignore future consequences as that, past a certain point, we’re unable to take future consequences into account. We engage in our own discounting.
I certainly hope so, considering that a 16 year old can drive a car. I said it before, but I’ll say it again: When children participate in adult activities they are to be held to adult standards of care.
All these issues being brought up (kids think they are immortal, people don’t know what cancer feels like, people ignore future consequences) seem irrelevant to the issue of whether or not they are informed.
The real argument here is that the decision to smoke is not valid, despite being informed, because people are incapable of giving the proper weight to their information.
I agree with the first part of this statement, but I think the second needs to be partitioned: it can form the basis for that claim, insofar as you’re talking about people who haven’t made the calculation. Which is kinda circular…
I guess the most fundamental issue is whether there’s a minimum baseline value that we say ought to be assessed a given risk by rational, informed people. Maybe there isn’t. If someone agrees to jump off a cliff tomorrow in exchange for a dollar today, can we say that that person is either acting irrationally or is imperfectly informed (about the value of the dollar, say, or the consequences of jumping off the cliff, or the amount of time elapsing between today and tomorrow)? If so, it just becomes–as in so many things–a question of line-drawing.
I don’t see how you could possibly know the exact risk. Depending on what brand, variety and how much you smoke, diet, excercise, genetic predispositions, etc the exact risk varies substantially. However, it is a well established fact that smoking significantly increases the risk of lung cancer, emphysema, etc.
If only an individualw who already has cancer and thus knows exactly how it feels can make an informed choice to smoke, then any poster to this thread could smoke 5 packs a day until they develop cancer and successfully sue the tobbaco company.
Again, the surgeon general's warning is in every ad and on every pack. Cigarrette's are legal. Though tobbaco manufacturers have witheld information and lied in the past, the general public is now aware that nicotine is addictive, and of the consequences of tobbaco use.
If, in current conditions, an indivual cannot accept responsibilty for their own smoking, they are an infant and should be treated as such. They should not be allowed to make any choices for themselves. That way, they won't have to worry about being held responsible for anything.
People may be more likely to engage in risky behavior that has far-reaching negative consequences, but that doesn’t have anything to do with whether that choice was an informed one or an uninformed one.
Personal experience is not the only information that is out there. Just because people who smoke didn’t have the chance to experience cancer before starting doesn’t mean that other information wasn’t readily available to them.
I disagree with you here Nightime. Being at the helm of the pinnale of all human social achievement (trillions of working hours, condenced into technology the size of a typical rural complex) certainly gives someone the supreme liberty to manufacture humans which desire something easily replicated which damages their cognitive functionality and/or physical functionality for life.
I think it is a shame that people are given the luzury to believe that they have progressed through cognitive stages that they haven’t, simply because they have raised a ‘successful’ family; have a bunch of parrot associates and weapons.
The cognitive stages are there; known. It doesn’t matter how old you are or what degree of social progression you have made:
If you have not progressed beyond a 10 year old cognitive age, you are for all practical purposes ten years old with slightly better coodination.
I’m not sure how removal of cigarette-related ads from TV in 1971 constitutes a dire warning to anyone, much less a 7 year old. I do remember the huge controversy over though, and the socialogical and implications thereof. Oh, wait. No, I don’t because there wasn’t one.
What danger? The tiny print on the side of the package that said “Cigarette smoking may be harmful to your health”? Very blatant. Quite clear. All informed now.
What lame excuse? The fact that children are not capable of making the same informed choices as adults? An adult perceives immortality; a child will live forever. An adult emphasizes with the elderly; to a child, a 35 year-old parent is ancient. The things that might affect someone 70 years older than yourself are not real to children. Based on your argument, we really shouldn’t be arresting 30 year old men for having sex with consenting people under the age of 18, because, after all, those kids were obviously making an informed decision. Hey, they get sex-ed in Junior High, therefore they know exactly what they are doing. Right?
Most of the people who started smoking in the 1970s weren’t getting much information about health risks and the few warnings that existed were weak.
I don’t recall saying I was encouraged. Or is this some other kid?
We were also told that sex was a bad idea for anyone single because it was immoral, reading too much was a bad idea because it caused eyestrain, and that women going to medical school was a bad idea because they’d never find a husband. Shows how much grown-ups know, doesn’t it?
[QUOTE}Hell, the fact that smoking is illegal for minors should have been an incentive to not start smoking. [/QUOTE]
Because children are reknowned for their unwillingness to test authority, right? Goodness knows, you’ll never find children crossing against the red light, drinking underage, buying cigarettes, smoking pot, and having sex before their 18. After all, it’s against the law. For that matter, there weren’t any crackdowns on people selling to minors until quite recently. It’s difficult to comprehend that something may be illegal when you can sashay into a corner store and buy a pack with part of your lunch money.
What kid are we talking about here? Do you know someone whose parents are telling him/her to shut up about emphysema and smoke the damn cigarette or they’d tan his/her hide good-'n-proper? Don’t rant to us; call Child Protective Services! Or are you saying that children should ignore their parents?
Who here is claiming victim status? The kid in your above example whose relatives are apparently forcing tobacco down the poor child’s throat? I’d say that kid was a victim, you bet! Also, you may wish to look up the word “emblazoned” and then do a bit of research on what warnings were posted on cigarette packs and how they were presented.
I’m not surprised.
Yes, banning ads is highly effective when just about every show and/or movie had people chainsmoking their way through the day. There were also still newspaper ads, billboard ads, magazine ads and radio ads. Labels in tiny print about how the Surgeon General thinks that maybe, perhaps, there is a chance that you might, someday, contract some unspecified health problem are, of course, a known deterrent. I’m not certain what other warnings you think were clear. Did animals act skittish? Were there rains of frogs? Was there a clarion of trumpets when some kid reached for a pack of smokes?
How are you disgreeing? You are just restating that it is not lack of information, but an inability (in your example due to low cognitive age) to properly use that information.
I do think that in many cases it is near impossible to properly judge the consequences. People are apt to believe that bad things will not happen to them, or they are incapable of accepting that they will be addicted and unable to stop. Perhaps this is due to low cognitive age, or perhaps it is just a quirk of the human mind. In any case, we have to decide whether we should protect people from their own minds.
So you mean the surgeon general declaring that cigarettes were harmful (and ordering a warning label on each pack) wasn’t enough warning? On each and every pack? I don’t smoke, but I’ve seen these warnings. They aren’t some super-small fine print never-going-to-notice it warnings. You’d have to be a complete moron to not notice them.
What’s that got to do with anything? So they test authority. And if they end up making a bad choice, does that mean that they shouldn’t be held accountable for their bad choices, because they are just kids? What?
Once again, so what? So are you trying to say that kids who cross against the red, or drink underage, smoke pot or have sex should be considered victims or should be exempt from consequences? Or should sue because they encounter consequences that they don’t like (even though they were warned beforehand)? What is your point here?
So? You do something that is against the law, knowing it’s against the law, and it turns out there’s a good reason for it (kids shouldn’t take up smoking) and yet…what? You’re still a victim?
Cite please? How common was it for kids to buy cigs with their lunch money, anyway? Maybe it was a little easier to get cigarettes in the past, but I don’t think that storekeepers ever sold cigarettes to 12 year olds, or at least it was very uncommon for them to do so. And still—does it make that much difference? The kids all had to know it was illegal and yet they went out of their way to do it.
As far as TV ads go - maybe it wouldn’t affect all 7 year olds, but many even slightly olderkids would probably notice the absence of the ads (some of them were pretty catchy). And I don’t believe there wasn’t some news coverage on it.
They are not LEGALLY allowed to begin smoking until they are 18. The majority are already hooked by that time, having immaturely, childishly, and irresponsibly having circumvented the law. You are then holding the 60 year old responsible for the mistakes of the child.
You ignored my theory about why you cannot hold children responsible. Care to address it?
So under Gandaraes logic, nobody has to take responsibility for the long term consequences of their actions.
If I have sex with a woman and she becomes pregnant, I shouldn’t take any responsibility for the child. After all, now that I realize what having a screaming newborn to take care of is like, I realize it was not a good idea to have unprotected sex. If I knew that engaging in sex that one night would result in pregnancy, I wouldn’t have done it. Therefore I shouldn’t take responsibility for taking care of the child.
Again, I bring up suicide because the very concept OF IT allows for human beings to abstract purpose for a reason; a recursive function of purpose upon the self with which to anthropromorphize other objects in which to form tools; that can be abstracted out here instead of the genetic code itself.
As such, applying the social contract to a suicide machine is the only effective means to decompile logical corruption or delusion in relation to the natural environment. It has become readily evidenced that human beings find something which compels delusions of graneuor in relation to existential pressure grounded in reality to be the most important thing to secure. You have groups of human beings literally sitting in front of zipped intelligence and technological abstractions from trillions of hours of human labor devoted to collapsing resources to allow more cognitive space and choice. You literally have a handful of human beings guarded by ‘slingshots’ - turned into nuclear and biological weaponry; and an inpenatrable delusion of national or social security exposed to the very essence of all things derived from intelligent mapping of this earth over the course of history. You’re basically looking at an IQ of 70,000; the death labor of any exersize of rationality in existence - the pinnacle of mapping selection and decompilation just sitting there for a bunch of morons with no accountability. If they can’t show accountability (which I believe can be proven recursively); by being incapable of mapping the necessity of the abstraction for suicide to act as the conceptual ladder to access these types of technology in the first place; then they need to establish suicide machines built from the social contract in order to act as a check and balance against their decision making process of how to use technologies extraced from adherence to the social contract; in a means of unillateral consent. Currently, they are not using it consistently with the method used to abstract the data and they have no system with which to measure their lack of ability to use it in the means which procured it.
These individuals possess no external accountability of consent in regards to how they are using this data.
The only means to decompile corrupt action and meaning with intent; whether it be a human being or a rock (to abstract laws and tools); is to reflect it off of the conception which allowed the system to emerge in the first place. Since this system is not being utilized by their own discretion; I suggest that they need to physically install this in the real world; so that they cannot avoid the impact of their poor decision making capabilities and lack of cognitive progression.
Corrupt logic; abuse of consent can ONLY be decompiled in relation to suicide - as this is the irreducable binary from which consent itself rose into being. It is also the issue oscillated by those who abstracted new concepetions in the framework of the social contract for use by the the social structure. Those devices and those reports COULDN’T be there unless suicide was not being used as a coneptual variable; it’s what allows them to be.
If a human being does not have the cognitive ability to run this abstraction into their heads; as those who extracted this stuff did; then they really shouldn’t be there interacting with all of this data at the expense and/or exclusion of people able to actually bring more of it into being. We basically have a situation where the genetic lottery is forcing people to interact with this data regardless of their ability to actually map reality in such a means as to abstract more of it and add to the data pool itself.
If there is a national security necessity towards hiding this data and assuring that those who cannot process it are given authority over it; then the nation itself is being unecessarily sloppy by not abstracting the consent variable of suicide into the national landscape itself; in order to recieve feedback, so that even an idiot can see how one application of use might be incorrectly applied to the conditions necessary to hold a social collective together (which is required for you to be born in the first place with all of this access).
There is no excuse to completely run complete unaccountability with no rational checks and balances on the use of information being guarded for social security purposes. Statistical analysis alone reveals that people who have access to the decision making process are all cognitively demented, the birth into priviledge clause doesn’t help matters one bit - as this cognitive capacity has no standardized means to come into being except by sheer luck and happenstance.
Hmm… rambling a bit, but hopefully the reason why suicide machines are necessary in order to elicit consent in our current society is the only solution given that national security is considered a barrier of absolute necessity (although this is most likely attributed to the fact that morons have been running this structure in the first place). They can’t actually observe the effectiveness of their decision making process without one or the other.
It’s not a lack of information; it’s a lack of access and a lack of informing. Much of what occurred in the instance of tobacco is still being covered up in regards to the nefariousness of the proceedure. Do you really think 200,000,000 americans would have consented to the creation of a drug which renders 20% of them suceptable to the addiction of another drug; making them pay for that drug, and then providing the option for them to pay for it’s cure if they also ‘decide’ that? How about the consent of an informed unborn child? I think we all know what THAT would be. The issue is that consent is being violated here in regards to the use of data collected solely through adherence to the social contract in a means which contradicts the ability to create it.
This is occurring because no logical checks and balances are present — these individuals have NO pressure or system of accountability with which to measure their decision making process. It’s not only off of their doorsteps; it’s off of their whole perceptual awareness. somebody is going to be standing where all of this technology has been zipped and rendered confidential and blocked and somebody is going to be making decisions with that data without accountability; or even the possibility of transparent consent in regards to the decision.
It is not only the inability to improperly use the information; it is the lack of admitting that you might not be able to properly use that data even though you graduated from every top ivy league college, at the top of your class with a different docterate.
You may still only have a cognitive age of 10; particularly in this society - where memory recall and retention are used as the selection criteria for degree certification; and intelligence recognition.
It is also the lack of refusing to alow a system which might actually show evidence of the very thing you refuse to believe.
Since the data itself is blocked, there is nothing to challenge proper or improper conduct except by those who can process this stuff; and are ruined when they procure a useful abstraction collapse. Their idea is integrated, they are killed unless they play ball (stole to get it in the first place and just added 1+1 to get two).
I see the issue of consent as farther reaching, then your allowance to argue for free-will on behalf of those who consent.
-Justhink