Should smokers be discriminated against?

The Ryan: *Is there something inherently wrong with hindering other people’s rights? *

Why, yes, of course there is. Other people’s rights are only truly meaningful insofar as they actually have the practical ability to exercise them. Trying to hinder other people from exercising their rights, which they are just as much entitled to as you are, is unfair, oppressive, and damaging to a free society.

Of course, it’s not that simple, because in many cases you can’t legitimately exercise your own rights without hindering other people from exercising theirs. So we have a dilemma: it’s a good thing for you to have as much freedom as possible to exercise your own rights, but it’s also a good thing for other people to have as much freedom as possible to exercise their rights, so these two good things conflict with each other. What to do??

Your solution is to remove governmental action from this dilemma entirely and let the imbalance of power decide it. The individual with more power has the freedom to exercise his/her rights to the maximum possible extent, and if that hinders the less powerful individual’s ability to exercise his/her rights, too f***ing bad. Problem solved.

My solution (and that of American jurisprudence in general) is less tidy but, I think, ultimately much more fair: we try to ensure that all individuals maintain a certain degree of real freedom to exercise at least their most basic rights. So we restrict the freedom to exercise certain other rights which have the most hindering and damaging effect to this basic degree of liberty. This way, your practical ability to exercise your rights isn’t entirely dependent on how much power you have.

I really don’t appreciate your distortion of an honest question.

Sorry if my response appeared to be “distorting” your question, and I will try to be more careful to interpret it exactly as you meant it.

I would like to know what, if anything, is the principle that distinguishes silly hat legislation from anti-discrimination legislation.

Without exactly knowing how you’re defining “principle” in this case, I’d say the distinction lies in the principle of striking a reasonable balance between employers’ and employees’ liberty to exercise their basic rights. Being denied a job is much more likely to interfere severely with your liberty to exercise your rights than is being denied the sight of your employer in a funny hat. Therefore, it is reasonable for the law to require employers not to discriminate for non-job-related reasons, but it’s not reasonable for the law to require employers to wear funny hats.

If you’re concerned that this may involve gray areas and ambiguities, and that we may run up against situations where the distinction between “reasonable” and “unreasonable” restrictions isn’t so clear, you’re quite right. I pointed that out several posts ago. Trying to establish a legal balance between clashing rights that tend to hinder one another in practice is a difficult job, with a lot of inevitable fuzziness built into it. I still think it far preferable to your laissez-faire solution of leaving the practical liberty of exercising rights to be entirely determined by power.

With kimstu and xeno saying pretty much everything I would want to say, only better, there seems to be little reason for me to pipe in at this point.

However, one thing I want to expand on is this issue The Ryan seems to be getting at, and kimstu has been addressing, that libertarian principles are simple and forthright to administer whereas these other principles take us down slippery slopes, force us to draw fuzzy lines, etc.

Okay…here’s the big admission…if you want to base your political philosophy on simplicity and elegance, I think libertarianism wins hands down. It provides direct and straightforward answers to most questions (as does fundamentalist religion, which with it shares more than a bit in common). The problem is simply that it doesn’t work for shit in the real world in producing any sort of just society (where, admittedly, justness is in the eyes of the beholder); in fact, it doesn’t even work very well in producing a practical society which is why most of its adherents are eventually forced to admit some limitations to property rights, some role for government which may result in the restriction of certain people’s rights, etc.

Most of what kimstu and xeno are presenting here are the ways in which it leads to an unjust society. One of my favorite quotations, which I think gets to this whole issue of “rights” in a very strict libertarian sense vs. “liberties” in a more practical, real-world sense and gets to the issue of how apparent fairness can lead to practical unfairness goes something like, “The law against sleeping under bridges applies equally to the rich and poor alike.”