There are "immoral laws" and there are "immoral laws." Mandatory female genital mutilation is an "immoral law." Making drugs illegal might be bad policy, but I don't think it rises to the level of immorality.
The fact is that drugs have externalized effects, whether you're talking about peer pressure to engage in drug use, crack babies, broken homes, or drug addicts committing crimes to feed their addictions. It's a pretty widely-accepted that society has a right and legitimate interest in policing things that have externalized effects. It may be the case that it's futile to make drugs illegal--that criminalization creates worse societal harms than drug use, but that doesn't make the laws immoral because there is no denying that drug use does in fact cause societal harms. Drug laws are in that sense no different than gun control laws or liquor laws. They may or may not have the intended effect, but it's hard to deny that they address real societal harms.
Morality is an aspect of subjective perception. It is not, in fact, entirely clear that these black markets are unhealthy for the world. Are they causing drug epidemics? Are they funding terrorist groups? It's hard to say. Maybe this would remove drug activity from the streets. But the point is, they're pursuing novel problems in the world without actually giving any effort to show us the calculus that went into their decisions, and that is immoral as an agent of justice paid by our taxes.
The Mexican cartels don't only engage in drug related crime; the idea that Mexico would become a peaceful utopia overnight if only you could buy crystal meth at your local supermarket doesn't have much evidence to support it.
That's a dramatic shift of the goalposts, isn't it? His argument was that ending prohibition wouldn't immediately make Mexico a safer place. It wasn't that prohibition was itself an intrinsically good idea.
A dramatic shift of goalposts would be equating not having your head chopped off with utopia.
His argument was not that prohibition wouldn't end immediately, it's that "The Mexican cartels don't only engage in drug related crime".
This is a correct statement. Cartels also profit from sex prohibition, but I'm not sure why this justifies anything. Hence my request for a principled argument. Maybe you can help out.
That's a very uncharitable summary of the comment you replied to, and also a stretch, since you're the one introducing "utopia" in the the discussion.
I have an easier time mounting a principled argument against prostitution than for drugs. Here it is:
Adults in western societies compete with other adults in the market (in its broadest sense). You can see this, for example, in every job interview.
Usually, competition is benign.
Some forms of competition are not benign. We've decided for example that the competitive tactic of cornering a market and using that position to fix prices is malignant.
As a public policy matter, we allow the market to operate freely except in those cases where the competition becomes malignant.
As a public policy matter, we've decided that it's malignant to allow the form of competition where the winner is the person most willing to compromise their sexual integrity.
We can do that even while understanding that different people have different notions of what comprises "sexual integrity". That's because we recognize that if you allow competition based on sexual compromise, the market races to the bottom, and we operate at the lowest common denominator of "sexual integrity". The market punishes people for not compromising. That emergent property takes on the coercive force of public policy.
In the same sense as there's no intrinsic moral problem with buying a specific amount of, say, lysine, but there is with buying all the lysine and fixing prices, there's no intrinsic moral problem with exchanging money for sex, but there's an emergent problem with allowing people to compete based on their willingness to sell sex.
Put more simply: legalizing prostitution would be at least in some sense (and I think probably in a very powerful sense) coercive of poor women, and particular poor single mothers who have an extraordinarily powerful obligation to finance the upbringing of their children. Not selling your body would become a luxury. It's terrible public policy that allows that to happen.
It happens, obviously, regardless of the policy levers we pull. But society as a whole doesn't create the expectation that people can/should do that. That would stop being true if we allowed red-light districts in our cities.
Preemptively: you asked for a principled argument, by the way, not a dispositive one.
Um, I used a phrasing that was intended to be slightly more interesting and less dry than "the idea that Mexico would not have violent cartels overnight if ...." - but it should have been obvious what I meant.
You're indeed the one who shifted the goal posts there. You suggested that prohibition is the reason reporters get their heads chopped off in Mexico. I pointed out that it's not the case; cartels do more than just drugs trafficking. You then requested I provide a principled argument for prohibition, as if that's a response to me pointing out a flaw in your own argument.
I find it funny you have a problem "coercing" poor women and single mothers (by allowing them the choice to sell a product they have) but you don't have a problem coercing sex workers out of the industry they chose to work in.
> That would stop being true if we allowed red-light districts in our cities.
Except that the world has several red-light districts and what you're saying would happen never did and never will.
Look, those prostitutes in the Netherlands making pennies for sex, they still have to sit and wait for clients. During that time they can pick up a book and learn other skills. If they're not doing that it's because they don't want to do something else other than have sex for money.
You're looking at it the wrong way. You're taking away the "choice" of a small number of women who would choose to engage in sex work, in return for removing the pressure to do so from a large number of women on the margin.
Or workplace safety laws. You take away the "choice" of people to work for employers who cut-corners in terms of safety, to reduce the pressure on desperate people to take such jobs.
> Making drugs illegal might be bad policy, but I don't think it rises to the level of immorality.
I do. Because we know that it leads to increased detrimental effects of abuse amongst those that abuse drugs, as well as vast amounts of violent crime to support the drug industry.
Personally, I consider legislators that continue to support drug laws no better than mass murderers.
> The fact is that drugs have externalized effects
There is however little to no evidence that outlawing drug use has had a positive effect on these, and a lot of evidence that outlawing drug use is directly causing some of these, such as pushing drug addicts into other crime.
Before these effects were understood I would have agreed that drug laws were not yet immoral. But these effects are known. There's no excuse.
> that doesn't make the laws immoral because there is no denying that drug use does in fact cause societal harms.
Since when it is a requirement that a law has not positive effect for it to be immoral?
> Drug laws are in that sense no different than gun control laws or liquor laws.
What massive social harm does gun control laws or liquor laws cause? How many people are left dead because of gun control laws or liquor laws?
> it's hard to deny that they address real societal harms.
Yes, they are causing a substantial proportion of them.
I'm not sure why you're getting voted down for this.
The drug laws kill, they kill more people that take drugs than they help. They also cause collateral damage all over the place, fund organised crime on a massive scale and contribute to the undermining of stable governments across the world.
There is no doubt at all that prohibition is horrifically immoral.
I was probably getting downvoted because I was rather undiplomatic about how I expressed it. E.g. drawing the parallel between voting for keeping drugs illegal and mass murder means I also implicitly accused anyone who belives drugs should remain illegal of sympathising with mass murder. It's harder to ignore that, than if someone "just" claims that drug prohibition kills without connecting the dots.
But I stand by that.
Still, it stands at 0 at this point, which is quite moderate given how harsh I was.
Source for the relative amount of cost versus benefit? What is the avoided cost of kids not feeling social pressure to engage in legal drug use (as they do with legal alcohol abuse)?
There is significant evidence that legalisation doesn't really affect the levels of use, particularly with weed. So that argument doesn't hold a lot of water.
They make those harms demonstrably and measurably worse. They kill. If negligent homicide is immoral then so is the drug legislation and so are the people that prop it up. In fact it goes way beyond negligent.
ahallock asked the right question, but your response is wrong.
Saying there are "immoral laws" and "immoral laws" as if to imply a difference, is intellectually dishonest and violates the law of identity in logic. You're simply trying to weasel in some other definition of "immoral". I'm simply identifying the rhetorical device you're using, and that it doesn't fool everyone as perhaps you wished.
Mandatory genital mutilation is immoral, in the end, because no one ones another person's body, and no one has authority over another person's body.
Making drugs illegal is immoral for the exact same reason.
Drug addicts committing crimes that harm other human beings is also immoral for the exact same reason.
Society has no right to police things because only individuals have rights, not groups. If you think groups have rights I'd love to be convinced of that.
> there is no denying that drug use does in fact cause societal harms.
This is so easy to deny. There are many ways to go about this. We could say caffeine helps society be more productive and so in the end it may be a net benefit. There are other drugs we could argue are helpful, at least for some people, like lithium, aspirin, etc. Moving on, if you don't accept any of the beneficial drugs, I could argue that many instances of drug use result in neutral societal consequences, for instance, every time I use drugs, there is never a societal harm. I'm taking 'societal harm' to mean violations of the rights of any individual in that society. When I take drugs I do not violate any one person's natural rights. So really, there are so many examples of how drug use does not cause societal harm, that for you to say there's no denying that, is frankly delusional.
Whatever our attitude might be towards drug legalization, expecting a government agent to throw their career by taking a principled moral stand against, er, shutting down drug dealing networks, is perhaps going a bit far. There certainly are areas of government or law enforcement work that I would not like to participate in for personal moral reasons, but without going into the specific technicalities of how this particular investigation might have been conducted, this isn't one of them (though I'm a Brit so this particular case doesn't apply to me, but of course we have similar laws and similar investigations).
The war on drugs may be a bad idea, but that doesn't make drug dealers activities OK. They are after all knowingly and directly funding the gangs and cartels that are murdering people all over Mexico and Colombia. Yes, Silk road sold Cocaine and not just domestic American weed. The law enforcement guys busting those people are doing good work, it's just that the reasons they have to do it are bad. That's on us and our elected representatives more than it is on them as government agents.
This is why I have no time for users of hard drugs claiming they're sticking it to the man and it's a libertarian issue. Yes it is, but that's no excuse for voluntarily choosing to fund murderers.
You are voluntarily choosing to fund murderers by merely circulating the US currency, and obviously by paying taxes.
We all weigh these things out. Maybe the cocaine buyer is funding wars, but it's not his fault, just like it's not your fault that there's a war in the Middle East.
This is my problem with policing in general. The drug laws in particular cause so much harm, but there are many bad laws. As a police officer you have to be involved in enforcing them all regardless.
I don't think that scrapping enforcement is a viable or useful option but...
Because those who would hold them accountable either created or support said immoral laws.
Also, you could go the deontological route, and say that by doing their duty they are being moral, for what other measure do you have, in a subjective and self-referential world?
Although frankly I think that you either have to be amazingly naïve or amazingly egoistical (or both) to work in law enforcement and not have moral qualms about your employ.
Harsh! Without police, random thugs would rule. Now you may slander police as thugs, but they follow rules, and those rules can be changed. Where your random thug is just out for himself, and out to get your stuff.
> Now you may slander police as thugs, but they follow rules
They are supposed to follow rules (aka, the law), just like everyone is supposed to.
There are quite reasonable bases for being concerned that they too often don't, and that they are less constrained to do so than others, because they receive preferential treatment from the enforcers of the law, being as how that is their own community.
define "too often." Of the many interactions police offices have with civilians in a calendar year, what percentage of them could be classified as corrupt/evil?
I'm not saying there shouldn't be police - I'm saying that people who want to be police should not be police. The vast majority of police work could be carried out by individuals selected through sortition, not dissimilarly to jury duty. For longer-term roles, which require a higher level of expertise, we have no solution right now other than career law enforcement folks, but soon, AI could fill that gap.
