Moral Haze
Even fundamental libertarians cannot deny the mutual responsibility we have towards each other, including people inclined to make stupid decisions. By Fred Pawle
The anguish over who should be responsible for young adults wanting to take potentially dangerous drugs and all the consequences this might entail conflates a variety of issues. Let’s look at them separately.
Liberty. One of the founding principles of Western civilisation is that each of us is free to make decisions that may or may not be personally beneficial, but must accept whatever negative consequences also ensue.
The assumption here - still a reasonable one, despite appearances to the contrary - is that we are capable of informing ourselves about the likelihood of an adverse outcome, and learning from experience. This principle has given us everything from free enterprise - the sole driver of our unprecedented prosperity - to stunning Youtube videos of thrillseekers wearing batsuits jumping off mountains and flying through picturesque valleys (although the scenes where they crash into cliffs and die have been politely omitted).
In the case of drug use, the equation is simple: If you want to experience the alleged highs, be prepared to accept the consequences if your “big night out” winds up less salubrious than if you’d stayed at home and watched Gardening Australia instead.
But sadly it’s not that simple. Families are involved, often tragically so. The consequences for parents can be unimaginable. In NSW alone, six kids have overdosed at music festivals since September; six families are dealing with the loss of a child who should still be in the prime of life.
John Stuart Mill himself, one of the founders of libertarianism, acknowledged the difficulty of isolating people’s risk-taking in On Liberty. It is impossible for a person to do anything seriously or permanently hurtful to himself “without mischief reaching at least to his near connections, and often far beyond them,” he wrote. This manifested in the person’s inability to participate in society - a debt owed for the benefits therefrom - and becoming a burden to others in the event of deteriorated “bodily or mental faculties”.
Mortality being more common back then, Mill didn’t dwell on the grief caused by unnecessary death, but if he were around today would certainly acknowledge it as a, or even the most, significant factor of this moral dilemma.
But then Mill makes a fundamental point: the state has no role in policing what is essentially undesirable behaviour.
It is a sign of how much the state has since grown that even many libertarians not only accept the state’s self-appointed role of moral guardian in these matters, but advocate extending it in order to protect young people from themselves.
There are some noteworthy exceptions: conservative stalwart Alan Jones recently said that the war on drugs had been lost, and that criminalisation was creating more problems than it solved. US Millennial conservative podcaster and broadcaster Ben Shapiro says: “I’m actually a libertarian on drugs. Let me be clear about this - people who smoke dope annoy the living crap out of me and they smell terrible. That said, if you want to smoke dope and lose brain cells then that’s your problem so long as you’re not coming to me for a handout.”
Young people whine too much. Millennials are adept at telling their elders to curb their consumerism in order to “save the planet”, but watch them throw a hissy fit if they see a couple of sniffer dogs outside a music festival. Their right to narcotically enhanced entertainment is apparently just a fact of life. “Young people take recreational drugs at music festivals. It’s a fact,” said The Age in an editorial this year. “And so is that some of them die.
Pardon the analogy, but a little more than a century earlier the same newspaper reported the landing of the first Australian troops at Gallipoli, in which thousands would soon die involuntarily, as the “finest feat” of the entire war. The death of a handful of kids now for taking calculated risks is tragic for the families involved but is hardly a society-wide issue.
The indignation of young people upon seeing police at a festival is matched only by their demands for the government to test their illegally obtained pills for nasty chemicals. The diggers of last century would rightly wonder why they bothered.
Government-financed pill testing. Despite the demands from those who believe governments can solve everything, there is no reason for state health officials to be sent to music festivals so young people can enjoy the alleged highs without taking risks.
This is the generation that grew up with participation awards and helicopter parents. The vicissitudes of risk and reward are mostly alien to them. It’s about time they learned that life is not wrapped in cotton wool, although there are probably better ways of doing so than overdosing on MDMA.
Aside from that, no test can guarantee the safety of a drug. Nor should it. Life is full of risks. Get used to it.
Baby boomers are too bossy. Most public debates about this topic are conducted between boomers who have forgotten what it’s like to be young and stupid. Not everyone grows up without making mistakes. Indeed most of the older people now debating this topic only acquired their wisdom in hindsight.
To return to Mill, and I paraphrase, every society gets the youth it deserves. If you object to young people turning in large numbers to the idiocy of chemically induced fun, what have you done about it? Have you volunteered to coach a local junior football team? Mentored a troubled kid? Donated to the PCYC?
If not, you are part of the problem.