A gambler comes into a casino, which I own. I know this gambler personally, and I know his style. However much he comes in with, he bets it all on black at the roulette tables. If he wins, he places the bet again, and again, until he loses. This time, he has come in with what I know to be his 17-year-old child's college fund. The fund is in his name, and is legally his, but is intended for paying for college. If he loses it, he will not have enough time to build it up again before the child graduates high school. I allow him to bet and lose the money.
How the hell would this be ethical, no matter how consensual and non-coercive it is?
What would be unethical is if you tried to coerce him into somehow not spending it.
The money is not a college fund. Your customer's previously-held inaccurate predictions of the future turned out to be false. He changed his mind. Your assertion that it "is intended for paying for college" is false. It is intended for paying for roulette.
It is not your right to choose for others how they spend their money.
Stop trying to control other people because of your certainty in the belief that you know what's best for them.
That view is insanely simplistic. Sometimes people do things that are against their own interests because they are in the clutches of an addiction. In these situations, it is sometimes OK for someone to step in and overrule them. Sometimes it's not just OK, but morally necessary.
It can be better to temporarily infringe someone's rights if it stops them from doing something that they will regret for the rest of their life.
> It can be better to temporarily infringe someone's rights if it stops them from doing something that they will regret for the rest of their life.
No, this is false. You're incapable of guessing what other people may or may not regret with enough accuracy to use it as a justification for infringing upon the rights of others.
Furthermore, most are heavily influenced by societal norms and customs, making this even more dangerous a justification when used against the rights of those with eccentricities or nonstandard tastes or lifestyles.
It's never ok to infringe upon someone's rights.
A question: how do people find themselves "in the clutches of an addiction"? How do they escape? Could it possibly be their own free will to decide to smoke the first cigarette, or their individual decision to walk past the bar without going in, on their way home from AA?
Not at all. However, any responsible guardian of someone drinking underage should be subject to the appropriate penalties for neglect. It's not a child's fault when they make an error.
Let's take another example, even more extreme. Suppose I run a pawn shop. Somebody comes in looking to sell goods that I know are stolen. I buy them from him. This contract is entered by both of us consensually and without coercion. It is also entirely immoral.
People are social creatures. Trying to ignore that and treat everybody as isolated individuals ignores those.
That's a baseless assertion -- legality and morality are independent and only coincidentally aligned. Unless you want to start telling us about the ethical necessity upheld by the farm subsidy bill.
Clearly it would be immoral for you to intentionally provide a source of liquidity for stolen goods. How does that show anything about your gambler?
They are both separate examples of contracts that are consensual and without coercion, but are immoral, both for different reasons. My goal was to find a counter-example to the statement that "All consensual and non-coercive transactions are ethical.". Once that example was found, expanding from there.
They were discussing morality, not legality. There is a difference. You can base your decision to do/not do something because (you feel) it is immoral, whether it is illegal or not.
Often legality and morality do align (but really not as often as you'd think), and this is fortunate, because it allows good people an easy mental short-cut for weighing one's actions based on legality (and punishment), as well as protecting the weaker-willed parts of society that often end up on the wrong end of moral decisions by people like sneak, who'd let people drink themselves to death because if everybody was completely free they'd surely decide out of their own free will to do what's best for them and nobody would ever prey on the weak-willed like that, ever.
All consensual and non-coercive transactions are ethical.
Another contractor and I are bidding to build a website. The customer is a guy in his 90s who wants a website for his antique furniture shop. The customer requirements aren't water-tight as he's not really into computers. For example they don't say the website should be accessible from the public internet or that I should hand over the source code and hosting credentials. My competitor has bid $1000. Is it ethical for me to bid $900 then later to demand an extra $200 to connect it to the internet, work that only I can do?
In most jurisdictions, that would be in violation of laws. The laws are created to prevent shady operators, like people who go around 'fixing' the roof for old people. They agree to the work, then get charged a fortune for overages, which usually just amount to painting the gutters.
Another example is the phone scammers offering 'virus fixes'. These are generally in violation of different laws.
When I was a consultant in the construction industry world, our contracts all had an clause requiring a "reasonable standard of care". Basically, if something would be reasonably expected to be included (say accessing a website from the public internet which is the reason it's being built in the first place), you need to provide it.
Whether software contracts include that same kind of verbiage, I don't know.
It sounds to me like you've redefined 'consensual' to make your philosophy produce the results you want.
Both transactions were consentual and noncoercive. There were no threats of violence. An adult business owner signed a contract for services which were provided exactly as specified. The customer didn't have to agree to the first, poorly negotiated contract. And they don't have to pay extra for the extra services later on - it's entirely their choice.
It's no more extortion than if you need a new ink cartridge for your printer and you find they're expensive.
I put it to you that the situation I've outlined is unethical, even though it's consensual and non-coercive.
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." -- H. L. Mencken
A half-way competent attempt to examine this issue would need to dig deeper into the meaning of "consensual", "non-coercive", and the fact that we are engineering these products, knowing that these cognitive biases (defects) exists.
Your dogmatic quote meets none of these criteria, and is frankly a pathetic attempt to address this complex and well-studied problem.
Addiction by itself is absolutely not a choice. Whatever it is that someone tried or was coerced to try that eventually resulted in that addiction may or may not have been a choice. A person may indeed, with appropriate support and resources be able to break their addiction, but they remain afflicted with it throughout the rest of their lives. Why do you think most people who were once addicted to alcohol must remain eternally vigilant to never touch the stuff again?
Playing the "no one's pointing a gun to your head" card and claiming it is therefore "non-coersive" in defense of targeting and manipulating addictive behavior may very well be profitable but it's delusional and downright dishonest to everyone, including yourself, to think it isn't exploitive and conducive to serious personal and social issues. You need look no further in the historical record to see how this plays out than the tobacco and alcohol industry.
There are quite literally thousands of documents that disagree with you on that, especially when it comes to physical addiction. Your response demonstrates a misunderstanding as to what addiction is, even if you happen to have experienced it first hand.
If you're really interested in continuing to debate whether your perspective of addiction should be adopted by others feel free to search Google for "addiction" or "is addiction a lifelong problem" or if that's something you don't have time for start with the first Google result I pulled up: http://aspe.hhs.gov/hsp/subabuse99/chap2.htm
There are plenty of other, better, sources that will provide more thorough descriptions of both the physical and psychological characteristics of addition. Practically all of them acknowledge that addiction, once attained, does not grant an individual the luxury of choice as you entertain it. One can certainly choose to seek the tools to control the impulses of addiction through willpower (be it internally or externally inspired), but that will never mean they can choose to make the underlying addiction go away and never bother them again at any point for the rest of their lives.
> All of AA and everyone who's ever quit smoking stand as evidence
Have you ever met a "former" addict? Plenty will tell you it's not as simple as that, unless you're using your own novel definition of "choice," "free will," and given studies generally show genetic predisposition is a factor, "born with."
The issue for me is that if you went to every smoker and said "Do you want to just quit now, cold turkey, no repercussions, no cravings?" I think the majority would say Yes. But the majority don't quit on the spot like that because addiction is a tough thing that can wrap tentacles around your brain.
Because they can't quit. They can't even bring themselves to want to quit. The actions are muscle memory, the thought of smoking brings pleasure to them. Even people who've successfully quit miss it.
Nope. Think British selling opium in India, ethical? And notably, selling a variety of addictive dopamine stimulants [including cocaine and methamphetamine] other than games is considered to be unethical.
I think every time I hear "you should eb ashamed" the free market guy SHOULD stand up and say NO, morality is actually whining that someone should be coerced into doing something they wouldnt want to selfishly do. If there is a market for your thing then caveat emptor.
Screwing your clients? The market will decide whether you can keep operating.
Providing a dopamine fix may be being coercive. It's a reward that may be manipulated by those with few ethics. Certain types of marketing, similarly, may be considered coercive. Coercion isn't limited to physical violence.
Seriously, though, it doesn't even pass the laugh test. People control their own circumstances. Making those circumstances available to be chosen does not alter the source or responsibility of those decisions.
Smokers choose to smoke. Gamblers choose to gamble.
Proof lies in those who subsequently choose to stop.
You always have free will, even if you aren't using it at the moment.
You are assuming that what one person can do, the rest of the population can do with a similar amount of effort. This should be self-evidently false.
Some people can stop addictive behavior with relatively little effort, other people need external help and tons of effort, and other people will literally prefer to die before stopping.
The only way to say that the latter two groups "don't actually want to quit" is to redefine "wanting to" in terms of "being able to", which makes your argument circular.
It is simply not your place to decide for others how they should get their dopamine, or how much they should be paying for it.