drug addicts have or develop very strong preferences for drugs. The assertion that they can’t make their own decisions is a declaration of intent to coerce them, or an arrogation of the right to do so.
I really don’t think this is an accurate description of what is going on in people’s mind when they are experiencing drug dependencies. I’ve spent a good chunk of my childhood with an alcoholic father, and he would have paid most of his wealth to stop being addicted to drinking, went through great lengths trying to tie himself to various masts to stop, and generally expressed a strong preference for somehow being able to self-modify the addiction away, but ultimately failed to do so.
Of course, things might be different for different people, but at least in the one case where I have a very large amount of specific data, this seems like it’s a pretty bad model of people’s preferences. Based on the private notebooks of his that I found after his death, this also seemed to be his position in purely introspective contexts without obvious social desirability biases. My sense is that he would have strongly preferred someone to somehow take control away from him, in this specific domain of his life.
This seems like some evidence that the principled liberal position is false—specifically, that it is not self-ratifying. If you ask some people what their preferences are, they will express a preference for some of their preferences to be thwarted, for their own good.
Contractarianism can handle this sort of case, but liberal democracy with inalienable rights cannot, and while liberalism is a political philosophy, contractarianism is just a policy proposal, with no theory of citizenship or education.
A sidetrack, but a French surgeon found that Baclofen (a muscle relaxant) cured his alcoholism by curing the craving. He was surprised to find that it cured compulsive spending when he didn’t even realize he had a problem.
He had a hard time raising money for an official experiment, and it came out inconclusive, and he died before the research got any further.
I really don’t think this is an accurate description of what is going on in people’s mind when they are experiencing drug dependencies. I’ve spent a good chunk of my childhood with an alcoholic father, and he would have paid most of his wealth to stop being addicted to drinking, went through great lengths trying to tie himself to various masts to stop, and generally expressed a strong preference for somehow being able to self-modify the addiction away, but ultimately failed to do so.
Of course, things might be different for different people, but at least in the one case where I have a very large amount of specific data, this seems like it’s a pretty bad model of people’s preferences. Based on the private notebooks of his that I found after his death, this also seemed to be his position in purely introspective contexts without obvious social desirability biases. My sense is that he would have strongly preferred someone to somehow take control away from him, in this specific domain of his life.
This seems like some evidence that the principled liberal position is false—specifically, that it is not self-ratifying. If you ask some people what their preferences are, they will express a preference for some of their preferences to be thwarted, for their own good.
Contractarianism can handle this sort of case, but liberal democracy with inalienable rights cannot, and while liberalism is a political philosophy, contractarianism is just a policy proposal, with no theory of citizenship or education.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivier_Ameisen
A sidetrack, but a French surgeon found that Baclofen (a muscle relaxant) cured his alcoholism by curing the craving. He was surprised to find that it cured compulsive spending when he didn’t even realize he had a problem.
He had a hard time raising money for an official experiment, and it came out inconclusive, and he died before the research got any further.