Can libertarians support a smoking ban?
Lamont university professor at Harvard University and Nobel prize winner for economics Amartya Sen wrote a comment for this past Monday’s edition of Financial Times. In Dr. Sen’s essay, entitled Unrestrained smoking is a libertarian half-way house, he criticizes the libertarian arguments against smoking bans, arguing that appeals to liberty do not apply.
Dr. Sen attacks the fundamental freedom of choice and free-will when it comes to smoking. He questions whether “habit-forming behaviour today restricts the freedom of the same person in the future,” and “whether youthful smokers have an unqualified right to place their future selves in such bondage.” Dr. Sen refers to “the leading apostle of liberty,” John Stuart Mill, to attempt to validate his argument. Mill argued, Sen contends, “against a person’s freedom to sell himself or herself into slavery.” Indeed, Mill concluded in On Liberty that “the principle of freedom cannot require that the person be free not to be free.” However, to this affect, Dr. Sen is claiming that tobacco smoking is tantamount to self-imposed slavery, and that Mill would agree with him that a person has no liberty to do so. Speaking of liberty, Dr. Sen believes that society has the liberty to “take the view that [ill smokers] have no claim to public resources”. Although Dr. Sen agrees that this stance would be of “a monstrously unforgiving society,” for society to not take this stance would mean that “the interests of [non-smokers] would surely be affected through the sharing of the costs of public services.”
There is no Constitutional, judicial, or legal right given to smokers in the U.S.. Dr. Sen, however, questions whether or not anyone has the implied right or the sovereignty over themselves to smoke at all. This argument alone (not to mention Dr. Sen’s correlation of smoking to self-imposed slavery) reveals the depravity of his arguments, clearly deep-rooted in necessitarianism.
There is no way around it — smokers cost society. Not only for the negative health issues they inflict, but also for the littering and perhaps even loss of productivity from smoking breaks during work. Smokers especially cost socialist societies and those with universal health care. However, for anyone to propose, even indirectly as Dr. Sen has, that access to heath facilities and “public resources” should or could be denied to smokers is a purely unreasonable and morally bankrupt argument. If public resources are denied to smokers, so will they have to be for the obese. People that don’t wear seat belts and get into car accidents will be denied access to the hospital. AIDS, syphilis, chlamydia, and other STDs preventable with condom use will go untreated. In other words, any activities or behavior that is enacted by choice that can result in a preventable negative impact of society should be completely and unquestionably banned.
Finally, I see little or no relation to libertarian principles in Dr. Sen’s arguments. His thesis argument is that the appeal to liberty does not apply in the case of smoking bans. But the argument that libertarians most often make against smoking bans deals with the rights of the business owner, not the rights of the individual consumer. Dr. Sen never mentions, let alone attempts to rebuke, in his comments any arguments related to property rights or self-determination.
It doesn’t take a libertarian viewpoint, merely a rational one, to observe that Harvard professor and Nobel prize winner Dr. Sen’s arguments hold no water.