I am fully aware that my arguments will have no persuasiveness on those who do not accept the idea of absolute individual rights. They are not my target audience.

The question is pretty simple: is your body your own? Do you have full right to use or abuse it? Is it up to you how you treat your body? Or does it belong to society? Or god?

If your body is your own, and you have absolute right to use it in any way you wish, so long as you don’t violate the rights of others, then some things are immediately apparent. For one, suicide is your right. You can kill yourself how and when you want to, so long as you don’t violate the rights of others. Also, taking a variety of drugs is your right, so long as you don’t violate the rights of others. And, perhaps it is clear to you, if smoking cigarettes is a right, then selling cigarettes is a right, and, so long as you don’t lie, advertising cigarettes is a right (freedom of speech).

Now, someone might say, “but suicide hurts your family and friends.” They are muddying the issue. Yes, it might cause them emotional distress, but freedom from emotional distress is not a right, and a claim of emotional distress does not give us the authority to restrict the actions of others. After all, might it not be emotionally distressing to my enemies when I don’t kill myself?

With smoking, or other drugs, there are a few arguments you will often hear: smokers harm people with second hand smoke, smokers set bad examples which causes people to take up smoking, smokers use more socialized medicine resources, drug users might get into car accidents, drug users might go crazy and hurt people.

Let’s take them one at a time:

Regarding second hand smoke, while I think the dangers are overstated, this is not the issue. The issue is, where is the second hand smoke being breathed in? Is it in a privately owned bar or restaurant? If so, the owner has the right to allow it on his property, since people who don’t wish to breath in second hand smoke are not obligated to enter his property. Selling something on your property does not invalidate the fact that it is privately owned, and that the owners may allow fumes of various sorts inside. For particularly dangerous fumes, I can understand requiring a sign posting outside warning would be customers before entering.

Now, as for setting a bad example, it’s a fine point, except that I have the right to set a bad example. If the bad example argument were applied to all aspects of our lives, you would have no liberty at all. There would need to be a specific standard of “good example” and we would have to live up to it. However, I am a semi-free individual, and I have the right (moral right, not legal) to set bad examples, and if people choose to imitate me, that is their responsibility. In short: It’s not up to me to raise your kids.

How about using socialized medicine? Ah, here we see the horror, not of smoking (which has plenty of horrors), but of socialization: by spreading the responsibility of one’s actions to the collective, you prompt the collective to limit your actions to those which are not demanding of collective resources. Rights and responsibility go hand in hand. When you take away one, you lose the other (though people without rights can unfairly be held responsible). Here, we see that by removing responsibility from individuals, we are lead to the conclusion that we must take away their rights (by taking away responsibility for the care of the individual’s body, we must also limit the individual’s rights to control over his body). But this is only one of the conclusions you could reach. The other, less horrid conclusion, the one which isn’t easily destroyed by reductio ad absurdum is: de-socialize medicine! If socialized medicine leads to the violation of rights, then don’t socialize medicine.

Now, drug users getting into car accidents are a problem. Solution: make it illegal to do activities that are considered dangerous (enough) to other people, like drinking and driving, or being sober and firing bullets into a crowd. Problem solved. And drugs that make people go insane and kill-crazy? Well, if there are such drugs, they should be disallowed under any circumstance where others could reasonably get hurt. Maybe you could allow the use of such drugs in special padded wall cells which are rented out by the users.

Now, what do you call a human whose body is owned by another person (or group of people)?

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