Second-Hand Smoke

I decided to start a separate thread because this topic arose in the "Herd Immunity and Compulsory Immunization" thread.

Many states have passed "Indoor Clean Air Act" laws banning smoking in "public places" even when they are private property.

I do not smoke but oppose these laws as violations of private property rights. People who dislike smoke should not patronize or work at those establishments. These laws have not extended to private homes yet, but I see the current laws as a precedent, especially with children involved.

I can, however, imagine a counter argument contending that the smoke of some "trespasses" into the lungs of others. Therefore, the argument goes, this form of trespass ought to be illegal. Smokers should either smoke outdoors or even confine themselves to licensed "smokatoriums" as Isaac Asimov proposed decades ago in his futuristic essay "Life in 1990."

Thoughts?

Post 1

Wednesday, February 4, 2009 - 11:28am

As I said in the other thread, there's good evidence of harm (asthma) to kids when their parents smoke.

Asthma incidence is about 5%. Second-hand (or "passive" or "environmental") tobacco smoke is associated with an extra third (33%) risk beyond baseline. That means that -- instead of a 3-4% background or baseline risk -- there's this 5% risk because of kids with smoking parents. So, if we pass draconian laws that making smoking in houses or cars (with kids around) illegal -- then we'd see a drop in absolute risk for asthma of just over 1%.

We'd go from the 5% risk down to a 3-4% risk.

Partial kids
To put this in concrete terms, let's say you're a 'heavy-breeder' with 20 kids of your own. One of your kids should get asthma (if exposed to the mean, average amount of second-hand smoke). Now, if you raise your kids in a smoke-free bubble, then only 4/5ths of one of your kids will get asthma (or perhaps one kid will get asthma, but only 4/5ths of the usual intensity -- this is up for debate). Anyway, I am getting off the track now, so it is better if I change the analogy. I appreciate your patience with me as you have been reading this far into a bad analogy -- just to see if I actually do pull it off and make a good point.

Bridge players
A good analogy is one involving bridge players who are also grandparents. All together, in their direct descendent lines, they have a total of 100 children. If they had an average smoking rate, then 5 of these kids would be asthmatic. However, if they kept all of their kids and grandkids in bubbles -- then only 3 or 4 of them would be asthmatic. One or two kids would have been spared a case of asthma, for every 100 kids living in bubbles. The kids in the bubbles might whine about it, but it's all about that one kid spared. It's "precautionary."

In examining this case for moral fundamentals, first there's the libertarian issue of: "keeping your laws off of my body." Then there's this issue of: I can raise my kids with some personally-calculated risk involved so keep your laws off of my parenting. Then there's the side issue of policing folks inside their cars and homes.

And it's all about that extra 1% of asthmatic kids. How much do we owe them?

Ed

(Edited by Ed Thompson on 2/04, 11:40am)

Post 2

Wednesday, February 4, 2009 - 11:58am

Ed, you finished with this line, "And it's all about that extra 1% of asthmatic kids. How much do we owe them?"

The way to phrase it would be more like this, "Did those kids who became asthmatic because of their parent's smoking, have their individual rights violated?"

We know that children have positive rights relative to their parents. They have a right to be fed and to be provided with minimal health and shelter and educational needs.

We also know that parents are humans that have individual rights - including the right to smoke in their own car or house. So how do we reconcile these? The parents have the right to their own money they've earned, yet society is right in forcing them (if necessary) to spend it on feeding their kids. That would be the argument for not smoking in close quarters with their kids (buy those ash trays that suck up and filter smoke, or have a smoking room, and keep the window down in the car and their cigarette holding hand outside the window.)

I'm not interested in making that argument even if it were valid, not because I don't sympathize with those that have asthma, and not just because the science may be wrong and too much based upon probability rather than cause (which is what we require for most rights violations), but because I don't have the heart for putting cops into houses or cars on nanny-like issues when their are so many more important things to be dealing with in the area of individual rights and because property rights are under attack in areas that aren't defensible.

Post 3

Wednesday, February 4, 2009 - 12:02pm

You own a restaurant. You don't want to exclude smokers, so you post a sign saying "smokers welcome". That's your right.

You like to go to restaurants. You see a restaurant with food you like, but it says "smokers welcome". You make up your own mind as to which is more important to you. You either walk in, or you go elsewhere. That's your right.

You and your friends dislike smoking. You see a restaurant with food you like, but it says "smokers welcome". You pass a law that no one may smoke in any restaurants or bars. That is not your right, and you are a jerk.

Personally, my wife and I will favor the places that have no smoking. We take no offense to restaurants or bars that wish to allow smoking, we just go somewhere else. These laws are inappropriate.

jt

Post 4

Wednesday, February 4, 2009 - 12:16pm

Jay, I agree with you completely. But you didn't address the issue of should parents be allowed to smoke in close quarters with their children if it can be shown to be a health risk for the children.

Post 5

Wednesday, February 4, 2009 - 12:26pm

If a child suffered a respiratory ailment that required hospitalization due to smoking inside the house, would the state have an obligation to prosecute the parental smokers for child abuse?

Post 6

Wednesday, February 4, 2009 - 12:43pm

If second hand smoke violates someone's rights, then isn't the "smoker's welcome" sign akin to a "rights violators welcome" sign? Just because I'm in someone's restaurant doesn't mean I can steal, rape, and murder people in there, even if the proprietor says it's okay. Does the severity of the rights violation determine whether it can be a consentable offense on someone's property?

Under Objectivism, it seems clear to me that if someone initiates force against another, even if the damage from that force is minimal or remote, then it is acceptable to prohibit that initiation of force. Put otherwise, Objectivism promotes *fully* internalizing negative externalities.

I'm not necessarily agreeing with or promoting this view. I just think it's what Objectivism would entail.

Jordan

Post 7

Wednesday, February 4, 2009 - 1:04pm

Jordan asked:

Does the severity of the rights violation determine whether it can be a consentable offense on someone's property?

I think the answer is "yes" based on several factors such as the amount of warning the "victim" has, the severity of the offense, etc.

However, this might require a full article by an Objectivist lawyer to make a rigorous argument!

Post 8

Wednesday, February 4, 2009 - 1:51pm

Steve:

With regard to your post #2, I believe that you are mistaken that children have positive rights with respect to their parents, and I think that the introduction of such is what creates the conflict you mention between the children and the parents. Instead, I would suggest that parents have a responsibility to their children to act for their safeguard, welfare and nurturing, until the children mature to the point where they can assume self-responsibility for these actions. That responsibility is assumed in the course of deciding to become parents. If one is unprepared or unwilling to assume these responsibilities, then they should take actions to avoid becoming parents, either through birth control, abortion or by arranging adoption. Viewed in this light, I believe that the same standards of care apply to a child without the need for the anti-concept of positive rights which undermines the true concept of negative rights. All honest attempts to frame things in terms of positive rights can be explained in terms of responsibility. If responsibility does not apply, then the things being framed as positive rights (e.g., social security, national healthcare, etc.) are simply attempts to sneak in slavery through the back door.

Regards,
--
Jeff

Post 9

Wednesday, February 4, 2009 - 2:29pm

Steve,

I'm not interested in making that argument even if it were valid, not because I don't sympathize with those that have asthma, and not just because the science may be wrong and too much based upon probability rather than cause (which is what we require for most rights violations), but because I don't have the heart for putting cops into houses or cars on nanny-like issues when their are so many more important things to be dealing with ...

You're right that there are more important things. Great point, actually.

At the state or federal level, hardly anything should be done to help folks -- because of these much more important things. I'm not being sarcastic, but real. Instead of spending tax dollars to minimize everyone's risk because they have a sick, psychological sense of entitlement to be "risk-free" as much as possible (which no one has a right to, by the way) -- we should divert stolen funds (i.e., taxes) into protecting individual rights / freedoms.

Draconian interventions can help prevent asthma, they can drop the rate by a third -- see proof below -- but that doesn't mean we have a sick sort of 'entitlement right' to force parents to adopt them.

METHODS: Five hundred forty-five high-risk infants with an immediate family history of asthma and allergies were prospectively randomized into intervention or control groups prenatally. Intervention measures introduced before birth and during the first year of life included avoidance of house dust, pets, and environmental tobacco smoke and encouragement of breast-feeding with delayed introduction of solid foods. Assessment of outcomes at 7 years consisted of examination by pediatric allergists, methacholine inhalation tests, and allergy skin tests.

RESULTS: At 7 years, 469 of the 545 children were contacted, and 380 returned for further assessment. The prevalence of pediatric allergist-diagnosed asthma was significantly lower in the intervention group than in the control group (14.9% vs 23.0%; adjusted risk ratio, 0.44; 95% CI, 0.25-0.79).

from:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15990772

Ed

Post 10

Wednesday, February 4, 2009 - 4:06pm

Luke,

Per your post 7, I think the issue is at least worth a new thread. I'll start one.

Jordan

Post 11

Wednesday, February 4, 2009 - 7:28pm

Whether second hand smoking causes negative long term health effects to children or not, there's also the obvious issue of children being subjected to what is clearly temporary physical discomfort. Their eyes start to water, they start coughing, and it's generally very unpleasant. Parents smoking in front of their kids is just an asshole thing to do. Why not make your kid clean out your septic tank?

Post 12

Wednesday, February 4, 2009 - 9:22pm

Jeff, I agree with what you say about positive rights in general, but I still have questions on that regarding children.

Does an infant have a right to live? Yes, that is an individual right (negative right). If the parent just leaves some food around, and doesn't actually put any formula in a bottle or give it to the child, then is the parent responsible when the child starves to death? Yes. And, as you noted, the parent is "responsible" but that by itself isn't a very strong statement. How does one turn, "You are responsible," into "You are going to prison for child abuse." That is, going to jail for violation of the child's rights. Only with retaliation against a violation of an individual right can we justify that imprisonment. And that infant's right would have to be positive right.

Does it really open the back door to slavery to call for positive rights in only the area of a child relative to its parents? I see this 'contract' as the parent holds the child's negative rights in trust and the child grows into them as they develop. For each aspect of individual rights that the child is not able developmentally to exercise, their is a corresponding positive right the adult has. Also, if children held and could exercise their full set of individual rights, a five year old could leave home and the parents would have no right to stop him - they would be violating his freedom.

I'm responsible for my health, but that doesn't impose any mandatory obligations such that I should be imprisoned for failing to observe healthy practices for myself. But if I had a young child, I would have to observe healthy practices for the child (take him to a doctor if sick).

I think that there are only two alternatives to this. One, you say that children don't have individual rights because they aren't yet fully rational independent beings - but then a parent is free to throw babies into the trash or kill a misbehaving 2 year old. Or, you have to recognize a form of positive rights that arise out of an implied contract. I don't like either of those. I find that the contract that somehow generates positive moral rights (positive legal rights are no big deal - we all have those, like making payments on a mortgage we agreed to) to be the more logical of the two.

We made a contract with children when we have them. We take on a moral responsibility. Moral responsibilities can in some instances confer moral rights. Some moral rights are the source of good law. That is my current take on this.

Post 13

Wednesday, February 4, 2009 - 10:20pm

Steve:

Maybe you and I see the use of the word "responsibility" differently here, although you do speak of contractual responsibility.

When I use the term in this context, I mean that the choice to become a parent is on the order of an implied contract between the parents and child and that one's responsibilities adhere to that relationship in the same way that explicit contractual responsibilities would bind one in any other relationship one enters into. Their is, in most states, a similar implied contract between cohabitating adults which, after a period of time, considers them to be in an implied marriage. I believe that the institutions of marriage and family extend so far into our past and are so culturally pervasive, that I do not think it unreasonable to hold people to a minimal set of generally well understood standards should they enter into these types of relationships.*

Having said that, there are many types of contracts that one may enter into where a breach of responsibilities is grounds for prosecution. Stealing $50 billion of your investor's money is one recent example. I do not see that there is anything different, in principle, with the implied parent-child contract. A parent that fails to provide the minimal requirements for their child is in breach and may be prosecuted in a manner appropriate to the breach. I do see how you can re-frame a set of responsibilities in terms of "positive rights", and I would have no problem with that linguistically if it didn't so muddy the waters in understanding and applying negative rights. That is why I think it important to keep the two concepts in separate camps, calling one "responsibilities" and the other "rights".

In the case of your example of being "responsible" for your own health, I think this is a somewhat different use of the term responsibility. It has many of the same features of a contractual responsibility to another, but lacks the aspects of external judgment and enforcement that is part of a contract. We are responsible for our own well-being, but we have only ourselves to answer to in that case.

I agree with you, that when choosing to become a parent, we accept both a moral as well as a legal responsibility for the children. However, I see no reason to make the leap from moral responsibility (which is just another way of saying that we must adopt a code of conduct for our own decision-making and behavior in that context) to somehow conferring mysterious "positive rights" on the children.

When it's all said and done, I believe that, for all practical purposes, we are really on exactly the same page with regards to the parent/child/societal issue. Our disagreement is only over the use of the term "positive rights", which I think could be defined in benign philosophical terms, but which, in practice, creates a huge confusion and ends up undermining a proper understanding of true negative rights for a great many people.

Regards,
--
Jeff

* In particular, I do not think this is a problem because the option of writing an explicit contract can override any implied contract between two consenting adults. Of course, this is not possible between a parent and child, as the child does not possess the ability to make an informed decision in their own behalf.

Post 14

Wednesday, February 4, 2009 - 11:00pm

Jeff,

We are clearly on the same page in almost every respect.

But, I still think that it is reasonable to say that a child has a "right" to be fed. And that is a positive right. I understand the confusion over positive rights and the muddle it creates. And people also muddle things up when they forget to focus on the differences between legal rights and individual rights, which is different story. But to just say that parents have a responsibility to feed their kids doesn't deal with the whole issue. Don't the kids have the right to be fed? It is a confusing issue in other respects... for example, the parents die in an accident, who is responsible for an infant now? If they are positive rights, who has to fulfill them? The taxpayer? Not a position I want to take. But in practice isn't a problem because it is very rare that one finds a society so mean-spirited that it wouldn't volunteer to care for orphans.

You said, "In the case of your example of being "responsible" for your own health, I think this is a somewhat different use of the term responsibility." You are correct, and that was my intention - to show that my responsibility to myself isn't about rights. I can have a responsibility to my child to be a good role model, say, in being fair about paying an allowance. But that doesn't confer to the child a right to an allowance, or to fairness in that area. That is why I say that responsibility isn't enough and we have to talk about positive rights.

For now at least, I've just decided to take those who get all muddled up over positive rights head on. And tell them that positive rights can only arise in two conditions: Child's to what a parent must provide, and voluntarily accepted contractual obligations to provide something by legal right.

The main reason for going this way is that otherwise there can be absolutely no way to enforce child abuse laws without violating an adult's individual rights. And you create a conflict of adult's individual rights to not feed an infant with the infant's need to be fed or die.

I find it a bit of a challenge to figure this out, but I don't have much interest in arguing it - and we agree on the practicals and on the underlying principles.

Post 15

Thursday, February 5, 2009 - 6:06am

Based on the dialogue between Jeff and Steve, in a laissez-faire society, can we safely assume that unemployed but otherwise able parents who run out of money have a positive obligation to show they sought charitable assistance to feed, clothe, and house their children?

I ask this because we live in an imperfect world and bad things can happen to good people.

What I'm saying is that under extraordinarily bad conditions, even well-meaning and responsible parents can fail their children.

Post 16

Thursday, February 5, 2009 - 8:57am

Don't existing laws, like "reckless endangerment" and "criminal negligence" apply to the extreme cases of parents' failing to act on their responsibilities to parent?

Post 17

Thursday, February 5, 2009 - 9:25am

Mindy, each jurisdiction has its own laws defining child abuse. And its own procedures for enforcement and court. I suspect that they are all very similar. The areas covered include child sex abuse, physical abuse (beatings), emotional abuse (usually on the books, but rarely enforced), and neglect. They are criminal offenses, but are usually handled by Family court - except for the extreme cases and the sex cases, there is rarely a criminal sentence - instead it is more like probation with supervision and a plan put together for the purpose of insuring the kids well-being.

The law is usually applied for the purpose of removing children from homes where they are in danger, or of getting parents to change their behaviors when the abuse isn't great enough to constitute immediate danger.

For the vast majority of children, their parents are their protectors and will go get whatever help is needed on their own. But there are a tiny minority that are wired wrong or screwed up in some way and instead of protecting and caring for their kids they put them in danger.

When I was with Children's Protective Service there were about 75,000 kids under our custody in Los Angeles County. Mostly physical abuse, and most cases at that time the parents were heavy drug users or problem drinkers.

The cases are opened for a 18 month period where the goal is to find a way to make the family work. Second choice, if that isn't possible, is to find placement with a relative. Only if that fails does the kid go into foster care.

Post 18

Thursday, February 5, 2009 - 9:37am

Luke,

I can tell you about cases that came before Family Court in Los Angeles County when I was there. We had several families where they were living in cardboard boxes or abandoned cars. And they were eating by scavenging. They came to our attention because of health issues. The kids were not removed from the parents. Their case worker got them hooked up with private soup kitchens, free clinics, and taught the parents what they had to do to ensure the kids stayed healthy, then closed the cases. The ruling was that they were not violating their kids rights from the results of the hard times, like the inadequate shelter, as long as the neglect didn't rise to level of endangering their health.

There are two side to current Children's Protective Services: criminal enforcement, and social work. I am in agreement with proper criminal enforcement (rights), I am opposed to the use of tax dollars for social work for the parents, and I believe a generous society will take care of kids as the last resort.

Post 19

Thursday, February 5, 2009 - 9:39am