If I sell a kid an illegal drug, am I harming the kid? If I sell it to a young adult who I have as much belief will make poor decisions as that kid, am I harming that young adult? If I sell it to a parent who I believe will neglect their kids, am I harming someone? If I sell chemicals that will cause birth defects, but the other party agrees to them (in the 2pt font fine print), am I causing a level of harm they did not consent to? If I build an incinerator behind my house that produces the most foul smelling, but not actually poisonous, fumes imaginable and run it every day, am I harming my neighbors?
A person can (and plenty do) justify prohibition over the idea of preventing harm like you are saying.
Take segregation. If I require all facilities to equally be accessible to males and females, am I harming anyone? I'm including things like changing rooms. Enough people will say yes. Go back a few generations and people would say the same about other forms of segregation even if today's response is that if someone was harmed by it then they need to get therapy and stop being abnormal.
Laws are passed all of the time that recognize that children aren’t capable of making the same decisions as consenting adults.
Hopefully few would argue that passing laws that a grown person having sex with a 10 year old should be enforced. That doesn’t mean that any type of sex between consenting adults should be illegal.
If I sell it to a young adult who I have as much belief will make poor decisions as that kid, am I harming that young adult? If I sell it to a parent who I believe will neglect their kids, am I harming someone?
If you run a retail shop and see that a parent is spending money frivolously and not feeding their kids are you morally obligated to not sell the item to them? There are so many things that parents can spend money on and not take care of their kids that can be argued about anything.
That’s why we as a society have “must report” laws when it comes to kids where people who interact with children must report suspicions of abuse.
If I sell chemicals that will cause birth defects, but the other party agrees to them (in the 2pt font fine print), am I causing a level of harm they did not consent to?
Again that comes under the same concept of the difference between laws that carve out protections for children.
Also cigarettes are harmful, but we as a society has decided that informed consent in big letters is enough and let adults make their own decisions. It’s also completely legal even under the ACA to charge more for insurance for smokers.
Well yes, but it shows that concepts such as "Laws should only be passed when you’re harming someone else." have some variability in how we define harming someone else. So while many people agree with your example, many people also agree with the idea that employing someone for $1/hour is harming them enough that we ban it. Less people agree (I assume), but enough to get laws passed. It shows even given the above standard, reasonable people can disagree resulting in quite different takes on what laws are justified.
>If you run a retail shop and see that a parent is spending money frivolously and not feeding their kids are you morally obligated to not sell the item to them? There are so many things that parents can spend money on and not take care of their kids that can be argued about anything.
So we thus see there are difference between engaging in behavior (that the majority believes) harms the child directly and engaging in behavior that harms the child indirectly. Is that difference enough to justify a law in one case but not the other? That's another case where reasonable people can disagree and result in quite different views as to what laws are justified.
>and let adults make their own decisions.
Well, a significant portion enough to change the laws did just recently decide that not all adults are allowed to make such decisions. Once again where reasonable people can, following the original logic, come up with vastly different laws that are justified.
My point was that such a standard is ineffective in limiting the scope of laws because of how much of such a standard is left open to interpretation.
When you look at it closely a lot of these laws (which have roots in old religious law) do have a kind of hook into "public safety." You can - through the lens of people without the technical capability to mitigate them - understand how the causality of certain acts were reflected in the creation of the laws.
The argument that was made about alcohol was that it had a systemic, cascading effect on society. I think it's a fair argument at scope. Rampant alcoholism certainly can lead to a lot of larger societal problems.
What prohibition proved, though, was that sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.
As much as some people love their guns for instance, the NRA and conservative politicians like Reagan were all for gun control when minorities were “exercising their rights”.
Except laws or strongly enforced social norms surrounding homosexuality, race, etc are universal in the human experience and not unique to the US.
Alcohol arguably does "harm someone else" when the alcoholic comes home and beats his family in a drunken rage, or when they lose their livelihood and cannot support their family anymore. It was these real issues affecting people other than just the drinker that the prohibitionists were confronting.
It's a misguided attempt to control the culture of their community, but in their mind I think they really feel threatened and harmed.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/000145...
Cough cough DUI cough cough liver disease cough cough domestic violence
Is illegal and I don't think anyone here is arguing against that.
> Liver disease
That's harming you, not someone else. If the state pays for the healthcare requirements that then arise then a more nuanced argument can be made, but surely if it's your own liver and you pay for healthcare then you're harming no one else.
> Domestic violence
Once again, already illegal and I don't think anyone here is arguing against that.
Also, the US has a poor history of actually getting rid of things that people want.
The US has a long history of passing laws governing morality even if it isn’t harming anyone else from segregation, to laws against interracial marriage, to laws banning homosexuality.