An implicit assumption of this article which deserves to be made explicit:
“All negative effects of buying things from the banned store accrue to the individual who chose to purchase from the banned store”
In practical terms this would not be the case. If I buy Sulphuric Acid Drink from the store and discover acid is unhealthy and die, that’s one thing. If I buy Homoeopathic Brake Pads for my car and discover they do not cause a level of deceleration greater than placebo, and in the course of this discovery run over a random pedestrian, that’s morally a different thing.
The goal of regulation is not just to protect us from ourselves, but to protect us from each other.
Unfortunately we have not yet discovered a remedy by which court systems can sacrifice the life of a guilty party to bring back a victim party from the dead.
No amount of money can raise the dead. It’s still more efficient to prevent people from dying in the first place.
All people are idiots at least some of the time. I don’t accept the usage of Homeopathic Brake Pads as a legitimate decision, even if the person using them has $1 billion USD with which to compensate the innocent pedestrians killed by a speeding car. I’ll accept the risk of occasional accident, but my life is worth more to me than the satisfaction some “alternative vehicle control systems” nut gets from doing something stupid.
“Homeopathic brake pads” are a reductio-ad-absurdum of the actual proposal, though — which has to do with products that are not certified, tested, or guaranteed in the manner that you’re used to.
There are lots of levels of (un)reliability between Homeopathic (works 0% of the time) and NHTSA-Certified (works 99.99% of the time). For instance, there might be Cheap-Ass Brake Pads, which work 99.95% of the time at 10% of the cost of NHTSA-Certified; or Kitchen Sponge Brake Pads, which work 90% of the time at 0.05% of the cost.
We do not have the option of requiring everyone to only do things that impose no danger to others. So if someone chooses to use a product that is incrementally more dangerous to others — whether because this lets them save money by buying Cheap-Ass Brake Pads; or because it’s just more exciting to drive a Hummer than a Dodge minivan — how do we respond?
Well, as a society, at some point we set a cut-off and make a law about it. Thus some items are banned while others are not, and some items are taxed and have warnings on them instead of an outright ban.
And it’s not just low intelligence that’s a risk. People can be influenced by advertising, social pressure, information saturation, et cetera. Let’s suppose we do open this banned goods shop. Are we going to make each and every customer fill out an essay question detailing exactly how they understand these items to be dangerous? I don’t mean check a box or sign a paper, because that’s like clicking “I Agree” on a EULA or a security warning, and we’ve all seen how well that’s worked out for casual users in the computer realm, even though we constantly bombard them with messages not to do exactly the things that get them in trouble.
Is it Paternalist arrogance when the system administrator makes it impossible to download and open .exe attachments in Microsoft Outlook? Clearly, there are cases where system administrators are paternalist and arrogant; on the other hand, there are a great many cases where users trash their machines. The system administrator has a much better knowledge about safely operating the computer; the user knows more about what work they need to get done. These things are issues of balance, but I’m not ready to throw out top-down bans on dangerous-to-self products.
An implicit assumption of this article which deserves to be made explicit:
“All negative effects of buying things from the banned store accrue to the individual who chose to purchase from the banned store”
In practical terms this would not be the case. If I buy Sulphuric Acid Drink from the store and discover acid is unhealthy and die, that’s one thing. If I buy Homoeopathic Brake Pads for my car and discover they do not cause a level of deceleration greater than placebo, and in the course of this discovery run over a random pedestrian, that’s morally a different thing.
The goal of regulation is not just to protect us from ourselves, but to protect us from each other.
Or, the individual who chooses to purchase from the banned store is able to compensate others for any negative effects.
Unfortunately we have not yet discovered a remedy by which court systems can sacrifice the life of a guilty party to bring back a victim party from the dead.
No, but several historical cultures and a few current ones legitimize the notion of blood money as restitution to a victim’s kin.
No amount of money can raise the dead. It’s still more efficient to prevent people from dying in the first place.
All people are idiots at least some of the time. I don’t accept the usage of Homeopathic Brake Pads as a legitimate decision, even if the person using them has $1 billion USD with which to compensate the innocent pedestrians killed by a speeding car. I’ll accept the risk of occasional accident, but my life is worth more to me than the satisfaction some “alternative vehicle control systems” nut gets from doing something stupid.
“Homeopathic brake pads” are a reductio-ad-absurdum of the actual proposal, though — which has to do with products that are not certified, tested, or guaranteed in the manner that you’re used to.
There are lots of levels of (un)reliability between Homeopathic (works 0% of the time) and NHTSA-Certified (works 99.99% of the time). For instance, there might be Cheap-Ass Brake Pads, which work 99.95% of the time at 10% of the cost of NHTSA-Certified; or Kitchen Sponge Brake Pads, which work 90% of the time at 0.05% of the cost.
We do not have the option of requiring everyone to only do things that impose no danger to others. So if someone chooses to use a product that is incrementally more dangerous to others — whether because this lets them save money by buying Cheap-Ass Brake Pads; or because it’s just more exciting to drive a Hummer than a Dodge minivan — how do we respond?
Well, as a society, at some point we set a cut-off and make a law about it. Thus some items are banned while others are not, and some items are taxed and have warnings on them instead of an outright ban.
And it’s not just low intelligence that’s a risk. People can be influenced by advertising, social pressure, information saturation, et cetera. Let’s suppose we do open this banned goods shop. Are we going to make each and every customer fill out an essay question detailing exactly how they understand these items to be dangerous? I don’t mean check a box or sign a paper, because that’s like clicking “I Agree” on a EULA or a security warning, and we’ve all seen how well that’s worked out for casual users in the computer realm, even though we constantly bombard them with messages not to do exactly the things that get them in trouble.
Is it Paternalist arrogance when the system administrator makes it impossible to download and open .exe attachments in Microsoft Outlook? Clearly, there are cases where system administrators are paternalist and arrogant; on the other hand, there are a great many cases where users trash their machines. The system administrator has a much better knowledge about safely operating the computer; the user knows more about what work they need to get done. These things are issues of balance, but I’m not ready to throw out top-down bans on dangerous-to-self products.