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.
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.