Thinking about how we sometimes try to turn a deontological argument into a consequentitalist one, I am struck by the example of drug laws, which take a different and even more bizarre approach: they convert a deontological argument into a consequentialist one by first altering the consequences of a particular choice and then claiming that the altered consequences make the argument against that choice a purely consequentialist one.
It’s even more weirdly circular than that in practice. Here’s an example:
“Taking drugs is wrong.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“If you take drugs you could wind up in jail!”
“How come? Why are drugs illegal?”
“Because taking drugs is wrong!”
Seriously: this is how every anti-drug ad ever made works. They don’t say, “Drugs are bad because you’ll end up living a life where your choices are controlled by some biochemical addiction” but rather “Drugs are bad because you’ll end up on the wrong end of some authority figure’s power trip.”
Think about it for a minute: if drugs were all that bad, would you have to make them illegal for people to not take them? If the worst harm an anti-drug advocate can bring up is the purely spiteful punishment the anti-drug advocate will give you for taking drugs, doesn’t that imply drugs are not so bad?
If an anti-drug campaign was honest it would point out that drugs can really fuck you up, and leave it at that. And don’t get me wrong: drugs can really fuck you up. My own drug-of-choice, alcohol, can and does ruin lives, destroy families and leave otherwise healthy people broken.
But this is not what any anti-drug campaign anywhere has ever done. They all end up with cops or teachers or parents confronting the poor drug-addled teen, making it clear that the big negative consequence of drug use is not permanently altering your neurochemistry for the worse (as meth does) or putting you at increased risk of various psychotic disorders (as I understand grass does) or increased risk of various cancers (as alcohol and especially tobacco does) but getting subject to arbitrary punishment by power-hungry assholes.
The real reason why drugs are wrong is a principled one: they elide our human dignity by limiting our sphere of choice. They remove capabilities and make us feel good about it. Imagine a drug that made you feel great, but you couldn’t read while on it. Would you take it? I wouldn’t. But to some extent this is what all drugs are like: imposing limits on our minds for the sake of feeling good.
There are better ways to feel good, and while I’m all for drugs used in moderation (at least the legal ones… I have a thing about obeying the law) there are drugs that are really hard to use in moderation. A friend of a friend took up smoking six or seven years back to prove how easy it was to quit. He’s still a smoker to this day, and the statistics say the odds are overwhelmingly high he’ll die a user. Sucks to be him.
Drugs take away our choices, and tobacco is the worst of all in this respect, with meth a close second (and with much higher and quicker harm.) Most other drugs… well, the worst thing you can say about them is that they’re illegal. And if that’s the worst thing you can say, then maybe it’s time to think about legalizing them, because there is no more significant step we could take to reduce the harm that they do.
When the legal punishment for using a drug exceeds the harm the drug does to the average user, there is clear evidence of a deontologist meddling with the legal process, trying to make the courts supply a consequentialist argument for their lame position.
When prohibition makes otherwise harmless street drugs like Ecstasy dangerous (and if you’ve looked into Ecstasy synthesis you’ll realize how easy it is to make it dangerous) then prohibition, not drug use, is the cause of the negative consequences. The only kind of person who could disagree with this is a deontologist who is wedded to the idea that drugs must be wrong because they are wrong, but who is so damned cowardly that they are willing to promote policies that do more harm than the drugs they loathe just so they can avoid standing up and announcing their principles clearly and openly.
Anyone who believes drugs are wrong because they destroy lives–which is a consequentialist position–must also believe that prohibition and the “War on Drugs” is far more wrong because they destroy far more lives. If on the other hand you believe drugs are wrong on principle, then you will be in favour of prohibition, regardless of how many lives it destroys.
Anti-drug fundamentalists are destroying far more lives than the drugs they purport to be protecting us from. The time has come to focus on the consequences of anti-drug laws, and compare the damage they do to the undoubted damage drugs do. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize how that particular equation balances.
