Quarantines may be justified

Tim May timcmay at got.net
Wed Apr 23 16:30:56 PDT 2003


On Tuesday, April 22, 2003, at 08:16  AM, John Kelsey wrote:

> At 05:22 PM 4/19/03 -0400, david wrote:
> ...
>> It is the initiation of force that is wrong.  People who try to rob
>> others should have their behavior regulated by being killed by
>> their intended victims.
>
> In order to distinguish when force has been initiated, you have to 
> have some agreed-upon definitions of rights.  The whole argument 
> you're in here about smoking has to do with boundaries of rights.  
> Harmon says your cigarette smoke is a form of assault.  This may or 
> may not be valid, but it's certainly possible to come up with kinds of 
> fumes that are a violation of the rights of the people forced to 
> endure them (think of mustard gas, or even the smell of raw sewage), 
> so it's not obviously bogus.
>
> In practice, this is an area where simple rights arguments don't work 
> all that well, because there are big areas of gray.

But in practice, in real practice out on the streets, this has never 
been where the anti-smoking laws have been invoked. No state in the 
U.S., to my knowledge, bans smoking outside, on public streets.

There may be a few places near public congregation areas, near air 
intakes, etc. There may even be a few isolated cases of towns passing 
"no smoking anywhere on our streets" laws. But, by and large, the 
anti-smoking laws are confined to restaurants, office buildings, 
stores, city offices, and other indoor places.

So the real debate is not about Harmon's extreme example of not liking 
the smell of cigarettes when he walks past a smoker, but the issue of 
anti-smoking laws in the above examples.

And here the issue is about as nearly unambiguous as one can get: it is 
up to the property owner to decide on smoking policies on his property. 
This was as it once was, and it worked very well. Some restaurants 
barred smoking, some permitted it, some set up different sections. 
Likewise, some companies barrred smoking, some permitted it, some set 
up smoking lounges, etc.

(As a nonsmoker, as one who has never taken a single puff on any kind 
of cigarette or cigar or pipe, I thought smoking was incredibly 
wasteful, dirty, and annoying. I used to see engineers and technicians 
going off to take smoking breaks (they would have argued that their 
alertness was then raised by the nicotine hit). Whatever my views, it 
was up to my employer to establish his policies. It was not up to some 
outside party to tell my employer what to allow and what not to allow.)

> How about if whenever I see someone smoking in public, I go stand 
> upwind of them and open my package of Instant Sarin Mix?   Which one 
> of us is initiating force?  How about if I'm more polite, and merely 
> open my package of Instant Skunk Scent Mix?  The issue is where you 
> draw the line, and the problem is that there's no unambiguously right 
> answer.
>
> The only way to resolve this peaceably is to have some agreed-upon 
> standards to resolve the gray areas into solid lines.  Those 
> agreed-upon standards are sometimes in the form of written laws, 
> sometimes in the form of precedent in case law, and are very often 
> simply the unwritten standards of conduct that most people live by 
> most of the time.  And often they need courts of some kind to rule on 
> gray areas that exist even within those rules.

The Schelling point for such rights was agreed-upon a couple of 
centuries ago with the protection of property rights. My house, my 
rules. Your house, your rules.

Examples like Sarin are not  helpful, as they differ massively from the 
annoyance of smoking.

--Tim May
"As my father told me long ago, the objective is not to convince someone
  with your arguments but to provide the arguments with which he later
  convinces himself." -- David Friedman





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