A socio-economic argument against incest is that if everything "stays within the family", the family will have less influence over other people in the community, thus weakening socio-economic cohesion. — baker

I don’t think it’s common for any family to have any involvement or influence in the community in this modern age to begin with. I can’t remember the last time any member of my family had any serious involvement with the community. So, I don’t see how this would make much of a difference to the lives of most people. I think most people interact with the community to put food on their table more so than anything involving romantic relationships. I guess I should also point out that seems highly unlikely that incest would ever be so widespread in any society that it would have this sort of big macro effect.

Again, we'd need to consider the miscarriage rate and the abortion rate, as compared to those rates in the normal population. I imagine they are both higher in the incestuous population. — baker

I don’t think those are overly high either. I think older couples that try to have children also have really high miscarriage rates but I don’t think you would use that as an argument against them having children. People that have genetic disorders or carry genetic disorders probably have much higher rates of genetic disorders, miscarriages, and abortions than incestuous couple do. In addition, incestuous couples often choose to use contraception and not have children so shouldn’t we also consider the indirectness of the relationship between incest and bad pregnancies?

It may be a struggle to find the data, but I would assume there to be more genetic disorders from non-related couples actively trying for a baby, compared to an equal sample of related couples using protection against pregnancy. — Down The Rabbit Hole

Yes, that seems to be true. My understanding is that incest only creates a modest increase of risk for an offspring to have genetic disorders. Actually, I think older couples that want to have kids are just as likely to have kids with genetic disorders. People who have genetic disorders and carry genetic disorders are like wayyy more likely to have a child with a genetic disorder. So, I do think it’s a pretty weak argument against incest myself.

If that's true, does it change your questions? — T Clark

I don’t see why it would, child molestation is really common and I don’t see why we need to look at incest as the problem. I think it’s like pointing out that lots of boys get molested by grown men and then making that part of homosexuality statistics. Though, I’m not sure if you were trying to use statistics to argue against incest since I’m not sure exactly what your comment is saying.

Does homosexuality lead to offspring with genetic disorders, high infant mortality, children with broken immune systems, and weak hearts? If not, then the two are not comparable. Homosexuals do not have to worry about the suffering of their future offspring directly caused by their homosexuality, nor do they or society have to pay the medical fees for mitigating that specific suffering. — Kenosha Kid

Homosexuals have contributed to higher rate of AIDS in our society though. I have heard that roughly 80% of people in the US that have AIDS are homosexual men. That also causes a lot of suffering and a lot of medical bills for society to pay. I also have heard that incest only creates a modest increase of risk having genetic disorders, high infant mortality, children with broken immune systems, and weak hearts. So, I think from a purely consequentialist perspective, incest probably actually fares better than male homosexuality.

A man wants his daughter to be sexually attractive.

A man doesn't want to have sex with his daughter.

What could possibly go wrong? — TheMadFool

I think most fathers don’t necessarily like to think of their daughters as sexual beings to begin with. Regardless, I think you can desire someone to be sexually attractive to certain people while also not being sexually attracted to that same person. For example, I hope that my brother remains sexually attractive to his wife but I’m not sexually attracted to him.

Do you have the actual statistics? — baker

No, I would make a more rationalist(rather than empirical) sort of argument for why I think incest between 2 consenting adults is more rare than homosexuality between 2 consenting adults. The argument is that it seems really far fetched and extremely unlikely that 2 people from the same family have incestuous tendencies and they also both mutually agree that they are compatible with one another enough to have sex or a full blown relationship. By contrast, a homosexual can choose to be with all the vast numbers of other homosexuals in order to practice his homosexuality and to be considered homosexual. In addition, I would say that almost everyone that is open to having an incestuous relationship doesn’t feel that this is the only kind of relationship that would make them happy. They would probably mostly be cool about living in an anti-incest society. By contrast, homosexuals often need to practice homosexuality to be happy.

There another argument I could make here. Given that homosexuality has become legalized and more de-stigmatized and incest is still usually illegal and highly stigmatized, wouldn’t it makes sense to think that it’s because homosexuals are probably more common and thus more politically powerful?

Here is my question as it relates to ethics:
Is it permissible to do something on someone else's behalf because one has a notion that "most people" would "want this"? — schopenhauer1

I would say that it can very often be permissible. For example, suppose that a billionaire asked me if I want him to give you a million dollars. I know that if I were to send you a DM here asking if you want a million dollars, then you probably would assume that this is a joke or a scam(after all, why would some random person offer you a million dollars for no reason). So, I would have to make a decision on your behalf here or just have you forfeit the million dollars. Surely you wouldn’t think that I should tell the billionaire not to give you a million dollars just because I can’t be certain that you will be happy about receiving the money. Though, I’ll grant you that the overall goodness of being born is more controversial than the goodness of receiving a million dollars. But, if the vast majority of people are happy about the fact that they are born then why wouldn’t it make sense to take that risk of an occasional child being unhappy about existence?

I think you have a better case to make for legalizing assisted suicide with these consent arguments as it may be argued that if you make a decision on someone else’s behalf then that person has a right to not have people preventing her from wanting to undo the outcome of that decision to the greatest extent that it can be undone(which is suicide). I think it’s kinda strange to argue that we are never justified taking risks on other’s behalf because we actually take risks on other’s behalf quite often. For example, my retirement fund is being managed by some professional investors that I don’t know and they certainly don’t ask me permission for every investment decision that they make. Nonetheless, I trust that they probably know what they are doing and I don’t think it’s wrong for them to make decisions with other people’s money. Though, you should be allowed to object to their decisions and try to undo their decisions if you have the time and will to study and analyze them.

If there really are cases of close family members consensually having sex, I don't see a reason to legally regulate it. Typically incest occurs as molestation, so perhaps it's too large a net to illegalize it per se as there might be some honest, loving mother fuckers caught up in the mix who are unnecessarily prosecuted. — Hanover

Yep, I would say incest laws are pretty redundant if someone is only concerned with underage cases. I don’t understand why we wouldn’t just charge someone that molests his daughter with child molestation(or maybe something like “aggravated child molestation” if you want the punishment to be more severe for incest cases).

What makes reciprocal altruism work is closer to hedonistic utilitarianism (maximising happiness for all involved) but really is about perpetuating my genome (which is incapable of pleasure or pain, only continuing or dying out). — Kenosha Kid

I’m interpreting this comment to mean that you think it’s valuable or good to perpetuate your genome. Is that an accurate interpretation of this quote from you?

That doesn't counter the likelihood that our morality derives from our social biology, nor is it particularly useful to attempt to build a morality around edge cases, or one that admits every conceivable behaviour. Whatever your thoughts on what morality is, there's a bunch of people who aren't doing that, so that's a doomed exercise. — Kenosha Kid

I think it is useful to have our conception of morality incorporate edge cases as well as stereotypical cases and I think I have a way to define morality games that does just that. I understand morality games to be rhetorical language games and I think that can incorporate all the edge cases that I have mentioned. In addition, I don’t see any good reason to reject my understanding of morality games as it seems like a pretty intuitive understanding of them. My basic argument was intended to be that all moral philosophers are part of the morality game and that there are at least some moral philosophers that don’t believe in and violate every kind of supposed moral duty.

In addition, I think there something else that‘s kinda weird and paradoxical about duties being requirements for being part of the morality game. Namely that it would seem counterintuitive to say that a single violation of a duty permanently prevents someone from being part of the morality game. I would think that you would agree with me that people can be redeemed and brought back into the morality game. But, if violating duties only temporarily make someone not part of the morality game then doesn’t that make duties seem very trivial and unimportant?

I disagree. I don't think you'd find a book encouraging you to eat and drink with gay abandon in any self-help section. — Kenosha Kid

Egoistic hedonism is the view that one should make themselves feel as good as possible in the long run(at least if we’re talking about prudential egoistic hedonism rather than what’s known as folk hedonism which is the stereotypical form of hedonism. You can read about that distinction in philosophy encyclopedia entries on hedonism). This would typically involve finding ways to limit the hardships in your life as well. It doesn’t necessarily have to be about immediate gratification(and it almost never is). The most popular egoistic hedonist philosopher in history was Epicurus who would mostly advocate for you living a very modest life with the minimum amount of mental distress and physical pain.

Self-help is an ethic of looking after and improving oneself. — Kenosha Kid

What counts as looking after and improving oneself though? I would argue that serious egoistic hedonist philosophers were all about looking after and improving oneself. For example, I talked about how hedonists often focus on minimizing hardships in their life. The hedonist self-help philosopher could try to figure out the best methods for doing that. I think one good method is being really good at saving money and having a large emergency fund. Another thing you might want to do is eat healthy so you are less likely to develop chronic illnesses. Another thing you would want to be good at is spotting toxic people and learning to avoid them.

I think even a stereotypical folk hedonist that is only focused on immediate gratification can be a self-help philosopher. After all, couldn’t you improve yourself in the ways that you receive immediate gratification. I think you can. Some ways that I have found to increase pleasure in my life involve increasing the intensity of my orgasms through stimulation of the perineum and precise application of pressure on various parts of my genitals. This actually took me a lot of experimentation and practice to figure out and master. I think you can certainly put that stuff in a self-help book. Another pleasure maximizing technique that I use is what I call “pleasure meditation” where I concentrate on the taste of the food that I’m eating or drink that I’m drinking. I think a lot of what determines how pleasurable something will be to you is about the mindset that you have about and this is why I think training your mind to experience more pleasure is also very important and worth putting in a self-help. To tie this all together with our previous discussion about how cuddle hormones can give you a significant amount of pleasure and how the hedonist might want this pleasure. The hedonist self-help philosopher can explore what kinds of compassionate acts will bring them the most pleasure and what kinds of compassionate acts are most likely to minimize their hardship because it would help them earn allies that would help them avoid hard times.

I'm not sure this is an apt counterexample though. Presumably, being a Jainist, should they encounter someone needing help despite their aims to encounter no one at all, they would help them and, likewise, should he be found by another needing help he would accept that help. By absenting themselves from morality altogether, I had in mind more someone who simply would not help others or accept help, whether they harm animals or no. — Kenosha Kid

We can simply modify my previous example then and have the hermit be convinced by some Jainist-like cult religion where humans are seen as evil and not worth helping but you should avoid crushing bugs. I think it would still be intuitive to think that this weird hermit is still playing a morality game(even if it’s a weird one).

I think you misunderstand. You can't have a biological capacity for reciprocal altruism. Reciprocity is an outcome, not a drive. You do have biological instincts for altruism, egalitarianism and empathy, but also for counter-empathetic responses. — Kenosha Kid

Actually, many people like myself choose to help others sometimes only because we feel that this would result in getting more people to help us in the future. Of course, we might often disguise this as genuine altruism and it’s hard to distinguish between the two a lot of times. I think we have actually evolved to be altruistic in part because we expect reciprocation. Though, I do think some people are evolved to be directly altruistic. Still, I think there are definitely cases where someone is motivated to be altruistic for selfish reasons.

You do have biological instincts for altruism, egalitarianism and empathy, but also for counter-empathetic responses. — Kenosha Kid

I don’t think that having biological instincts for altruism, egalitarianism, and empathy necessarily would give you the kind of morality that requires you to rescue a child drowning in a shallow body of water. For example, I could imagine a highly pessimistic and suicidal person who has fair amount of empathy towards others choose to ignore a drowning child because he might envy the position that this child is in. He might think that the child is better off dead and might be planning his own demise as well. But, he wouldn’t be a psychopath or an isolationist who isn’t part of the morality game. I think he just has a weird morality game. In his morality game, survival is bad rather than good. Of course, being that kind of a pessimist isn’t necessarily good for survival but it could result from a genetic mutation or something. If his pre-disposition is still based in DNA and something biological then I don’t see why the lack of survivability of his traits makes them not part of morality if morality is about biological characteristics that enable you to care about others. After all, this person cares about the child but in a really weird sort of way which might have resulted from a rare mutation.

But self-help is not the same as hedonism. — Kenosha Kid

I think that any form of egoistic hedonism firmly falls into the self-help category. For example, I could write a book that gives people advice on how to experience more pleasure in their life and one of the advice I might give is encouraging them to be more compassionate towards others as that would release the cuddle hormone. This hypothetical book that I am writing really seems to resemble other kinds of self-help books so it probably is a hedonistic self-help book. Either way, egoistic hedonism doesn’t seem to be a moral philosophy so I think my point from my last post still stands.

But then what would make it a moral philosophy? I mean, in the extreme where the philosophy is 'do nothing for anyone, accept nothing from anyone', what makes this a philosophy of morality as opposed to any other neutral politic? — Kenosha Kid

I think moral philosophy could reasonably be defined by the rhetoric and choice of words used by a person making a moral claim. For example, we can analyze how moral philosophers and theologians talk compared to how self-help authors and counselors talk. One obvious difference is related to how moral philosophers are more likely to describe certain things as evil or prohibited or obligatory or wrong(they don’t necessarily have to use all those terms though). By contrast, self-help philosophers usually just speak of more wise and less wise behavior without moralizing that behavior too much. Another difference seems to be that moral philosophers are more likely to speak on issues that are very emotionally charged like abortion, rape, and racism. In contrast, self-help philosophers usually speak about more tame topics like retirement planning, time management, and occasionally they might touch a more emotive topic like mental health issues. Basically, you can probably go to your local library and pick up a random book in the ethics section and quickly categorize that book as a moral philosophy book or a self-help book by just reading the cover or a few pages from the book. This is because you probably intuitively just notice the similarities regarding choice of words and style of rhetoric for each kind of book.

since morality concerns particular ways we interact with each other, not interacting with each other isn't categorically a moral philosophy (in much the same way zero isn't categorically a positive integer). — Kenosha Kid

I can provide you an example where something seems to be morality but it doesn’t involve people interacting with each other. Imagine a Jainist hermit who lives in a mountain home alone. He decided to become a hermit as he felt it was obligatory for him to do so as he sees society as an evil temptress that provoke him to
harm sentient creatures. As a Jainist, he has a strong religious moral conviction that he ought not to harm sentient creatures. He considers insects to be sentient creatures and thus he uses a broom every time he walks by to ensure that he doesn’t kill any of them by accident. He wouldn’t regard those insects as “others” though as he could not socialize with them in even simple ways that you might socialize with a cow for example. He also views them as inferior to other animals but he still thinks it’s pretty wrong to harm them. It seems to me that this Jainist hermit has legitimate moral convictions and he is playing the morality game by himself and with himself. After all, it’s hard to doubt the sincerity of his beliefs given the lengths he is willing to go because of them and his beliefs seem to resemble other kinds of moral beliefs. Thus, I don’t think morality necessarily has to be about us interacting with others.

I think a surer sign of objective morality is manifest in the way that, over the last few hundred years, against powerful concepts like religion, empire, colonialism, slavery, capitalism, neoliberalism, the very real, very ontic morality I speak of has gradually biased us towards something better, more human. Abolition, suffrage, civil rights, equal opportunities, LGBT rights, animal (!) rights, stewardship of the planet, equity. These have arisen against powerful vested interests simply by virtue of a global village of people having a united voice. Only a minority of people benefit from gay marriage rights, but the majority of us think it's important to fight for. Why? Because deep down, despite everything done to us, despite the great efforts to destroy every last vestige of community spirit -- the remainder of our traditional ways of living -- those drives that make us distinctly human, social, moral, reassert themselves ever more strongly. That's far more obviously objective than merely insisting that one convention is objective imo. — Kenosha Kid

I don’t think that the supposed moral progress that you speak of had been brought about by something like a global village of people having a united voice. For example, you mentioned how only a minority of people benefit from gay marriage but it should also be mentioned that it seems that almost nobody gets harmed by gay marriage either. So, I think we hardly had any incentive to be against gay marriage to begin with. I think the vast majority of people don’t care about gay marriage at all much less be willing to fight for it(outside of maybe lazy slacktivism where someone expresses their support for gay marriage on a social media site), I’m also confused regarding what issues like abolition, suffrage, and civil rights have to do with reciprocal altruism or morality being in our DNA. I don’t think that the Northern states that fought to abolish slavery in the past ever had the favor returned to them by the freed African slaves and the men who marched with MLK to give African Americans civil rights didn’t seem to get rewarded by African Americans in any way. If anything, it seems to me that we have biologically evolved to be very tribalistic and put our ethnicity above other ethnicities(after all, isn’t that what our pre-historic ancestors did). So, I’m not seeing where caring about the issues that you have mentioned has any sort of biological basis to it. I think cultural evolution is a more likely reason why we had abolition, suffrage, and civil rights happen. Culturally influenced morality doesn’t seem to have a legitimate ontic basis to it.

I'm saying you're born an altruist: it's biological, not philosophical. — Kenosha Kid

If someone is born an altruist then wouldn’t being altruistic make that person feel good? If that’s so, then wouldn’t this give them a purely selfish self-help sort of reason to be altruistic?

Saving the drowning child essentially becomes morally obligatory only insofar as, if you do not, you are not in the morality game at all (psychopath, sociopath, individualist, isolationist). — Kenosha Kid

Wouldn’t making rules about what allows a person to be labeled as participating in the morality game going against the spirit of moral existentialism though? If people can rationally work out their moral philosophy for themselves then it seems that they can presumably create a moral philosophy without duties where actions can only be morally praiseworthy or morally blameworthy in a supererogatory sort of way. In addition, it seems to me that moral existentialism would suggest that anyone who claims to be part of the morality game is part of the morality game simply by virtue of asserting that they are part of the morality game. After all, the term “existentialism” doesn’t really hold a connotation of caring about what society thinks and it seems to have a hyper-individualistic ring to it(I think this holds true especially in regards to many classic existentialist philosophers like Nietzsche and Sartre. Though, I’m not sure how much in common your conception of moral existentialism has with the existentialist philosophers. Perhaps you are talking about something completely different).

That's actually an interesting variant. A man sees two children drowning in a pond. He saves one and has plenty of time to save the second. Must he? — Kenosha Kid

I’m not sure why anyone would think that the obligation is dependent on the number of children that need to be saved rather than the amount of effort that would be required of you.

I'd say the opposite: if moral duties are just arbitrary things we get to decide through philosophy, then they don't have any ontic value at all. An evolved characteristic for moral behaviour is objectively real. — Kenosha Kid

Well, I want to talk about another thing that we have probably evolved to believe in and care about and that is religion. I think there’s good evidence that a belief in the supernatural was somewhat beneficial to the survival and reproduction of our ancestors. It can bring people a great deal of hope and it might ward off pessimistic life attitudes that are probably bad for survival and procreation. Nonetheless, if I made a comment that religions are just arbitrary things that we get to decide through philosophy and they don’t have any ontic value then you probably would think that this invalidates religion. It probably wouldn’t matter to you that there is an evolved characteristic for religious behavior that is objectively real. Though, maybe you do think the same way about religion as you do morality. At the end of the day, it kinda feels like your non-ontological understanding of morality kinda already dismisses the idea of genuine moral duties(at least the kind of moral duties that I think most people care about).

I mean, if you accept that there are moral reasons, then you must accept that there is, in any situation in which moral reasons are present, what you have overall moral reason to do. What are you going to call that, if not your moral duty? — Bartricks

I would call that an instance of supererogatory moral reasons that come with choosing to make a particular decision outweighing the self-help reasons and other supererogatory moral reasons that comes with not choosing to make a particular decision. I think this is a more intuitive classification because I don’t think it makes sense to say that you are required to do what you have overall reason to do. It might be better to do what you have overall reason to do but I’m not seeing where you are getting the requirement aspect of duties from. Why should I think that I’m required to abide by those alleged moral duties rather than just see them as helpful suggestions(which would intuitively make them seem to not be very duty-like and hence my point about them probably not existing).

The rest of what you have to say regarding the anecdote tells me you entirely missed its point. In it, I related certain particular details of what happened, but left it to the reader to draw the conclusions without explicitly stating them myself: — Leghorn

I read the anecdote again for the third time and I’m not sure what point you think that I missed about your anecdote. You mentioned that you think your brother probably had a moral agenda but I saw no clear indication of that from your anecdote. Your brother didn’t talk about his decision to buy the keyboard using moral language or rhetoric for example(at least it seems your anecdote didn’t state as much).

What does my brother’s behavior after Christmas suggest about his motivations for giving the gift? — Leghorn

I don’t think his behavior suggests any motivation as we cannot rule out the possibility of it being a coincidence that he got interested in playing the keyboard. Maybe he thought he would only occasionally play it but surprisingly got really into it. Either way, I actually don’t think that his motivations matter in the context of our discussion regarding how to distinguish morality from self-help considerations. I think that distinction is more about what narrative one wants to express regarding a particular action or behavior. Your brother didn’t express any narrative as far as I can tell so I’m not sure why you think he might have had a moral agenda if agendas seem intuitively to be verbal expressions or narratives.

In this schema, it would still be morally praiseworthy to choose to move to Africa (assuming the intent is altruistic) and save some but not all children (a la the ending of Schindler's List). To not save the drowning child would be antisocial and, in a small social group, the person would not be fed, protected, or the object of altruism which, projected onto a moralistic framework, is equivalent to saying that there's a moral obligation to save the child (insofar as moral obligations are really about reciprocal altruism, and the correct response would be ostracisation). — Kenosha Kid

Wouldn’t reciprocal altruism be in the realm of self-help philosophy though? After all, I could imagine a self-help philosopher telling people that you do nice things for others and not harm them because that will effect how they treat you. I don’t see a moral philosopher appealing to reciprocal altruism much though. It has been argued plenty of times that reciprocal altruism and kinship ties were the evolutionary explanations for why the notion of morality was created. That actually seems like an argument to give against the existence of moral duties though. After all, if moral duties are nothing more than evolved mechanisms to ensure that others treat you well, then why should we assume that they have some sort of real ontological existence.

...technically my brother had his wife’s interest in mind when he bought that piano; one could moralize his action and say so; you could call it “other regarding”, for it was technically a gift to her; we could certainly frame it that way, based on appearances (and ignoring certain other details), and I don’t doubt that he inserted this moral agenda into the decision he made. — Leghorn

I think this is an example of something that wouldn’t actually be moralized in our modern western culture even if it was other regarding. Even if his sole motivation was to make his sister in law happy, we probably wouldn’t give him that much moral praise. But, if he refused to give any present to a family member that he was spending Christmas with then I think that tends to be moralized as many people in our culture have a pretty strong attachment to the tradition of gift giving. Usually, it doesn’t even matter that much what the gifts are. I think it’s just seen as a courtesy expected of you.

this seems a rather antiquated and misogynistic scenario: doesn’t his wife work also? How does she manage her money? Do they combine their incomes, or keep their monies separate? If the former, who has the final say? — Leghorn

Yes it is seen by modern westerners to be an antiquated and misogynistic scenario. I’m sure the folks in the Middle East would have less problems moralizing the husband for not being able to support his family while his wife sits at home. I think those people in the Middle East are wrong about this. Though, the moral reaction that I have towards their practices seems to be purely emotive. I think I could maybe point out that their cultural practices are not beneficial from a pure utilitarian sort of way. If they introduced women into their workforces then their productivity would greatly increase. I could argue that it’s preferable to live in a society with more productivity or that it is better to be married to a more productive wife all things being equal. I’m not sure if I could argue that what they were is immoral nonetheless because I think our colloquial understanding of what morality is about has a strong emotive element to it.

It seems to me that emotions are not intellectual entities that you necessarily could argue about. Perhaps you can argue about what emotions would be most beneficial for you to display towards certain actions. But, I think that would be framing morality in a self-help context. We can also talk about the most beneficial emotional reactions people should have towards certain actions for the benefit to the world or society, but that seems to ignore a very large number of people that don’t understand morality to be about benefiting the world or society. So, I still think it’s more plausible and eloquent to understand the distinction between self-help and morality by analyzing the words and rhetoric used by those to proclaim to give a moral message as opposed to a self-help message.

I am not sure I see a problem. There are normative reasons - moral and instrumental being the kind we are concerned with here - and there's what we have overall reason to do (which will be a function of the force the different reasons present have).

We can call what we have overall reason to do, 'rational'. — Bartricks

I wasn’t trying to dispute the existence of moral reasons in my OP. I was actually trying to argue against the existence of moral duties which I think is like a particular sub-category of moral reasons.

When it comes to self interest, sometimes the fact that doing x would compromise your interests can operate to prevent other facts from generating moral reasons. So we do not have moral reasons being overcome by instrumental reasons, rather we have some facts preventing other facts from generating moral reasons. — Bartricks

If instrumental reasons have the power to prevent the generation of moral reasons then I think this would be an example of instrumental reasons trumping morality(even if they aren’t trumping moral reasons per se). My argument was that it is highly counterintuitive to think that there are some moral reasons(namely moral duties) that can trump any other kind of reason and yet other kinds of reasons somehow have the power to prevent the generation of moral duties. Don’t you think that this is kinda strange and weirdly paradoxical? I think that it is and I suspect that at least some people would see what I’m getting at here. Nonetheless, I can’t expect my argument to appeal to everyone’s intuitions and I understand if you don’t find your perceived relationship between moral and instrumental reasons to be counterintuitive. But, I just find the idea of moral duties trumping instrumental reasons despite also relying on a lack of big instrumental reasons against the duty for the said duty’s existence to be very confusing and absurd.

However it's worth noting that the difference between them is not that one person is saving children and the other standing by, but rather that one person made the decision to get on a plane to Africa to help hypothetical persons and the other did not (i.e. we can't infer that the doctor in NY wouldn't help a child in need). — Kenosha Kid

Unless I mis-wrote something in my last post, I recall mentioning that the doctor from Africa refuses to help the children who have the condition if they can’t pay for it. My point was that this doesn’t make him a more blameworthy person than the person that chose to be a doctor in NY because he would feel obligated to help the children for free if he was in Africa. But, it seems that the refusal to provide free treatment is the equivalent to refusing to rescue a child from a shallow pond. Hence why I reject the proximity requirement for something to be a duty.

I take it that what you say here simply expresses what I have said above, namely that moral normative reasons trump other kinds of normative reason. It is more important - that is, we have more reason - to do the right thing, than anything else.

So far that sounds correct. It seems like a conceptual truth that whatever it is morally right to do in a situation is that which we have most reason to do. ("I can see that Xing in these circumstances is what it is morally right to do; but what do I have most reason to do?" sounds confused). — Bartricks

No, that’s actually not what I meant in C2. C2 talks about moral duties rather than moral reasons. I don’t think that moral reasons trump over self-help reasons as a conceptual truth. Rather, I think there are more plausible ways to distinguish moral reasons from self-help reasons. I personally think the distinction is probably purely emotional rather than intellectual. I think it’s more about the rhetoric and the choice of words used by a speaker when talking about a particular subject matter. But, there is another theory about how to distinguish moral reasons from self-help reasons that I’m also sympathetic towards. That has to do with the fact that it could be argued that moral reasons are always about others rather yourself. This view has some objections as someone might use the example of someone thinking that homosexuality is immoral as an example of morality not being purely about others. But, I tend to think that the reasons why most people are anti-gay primarily has to do with their belief that homosexuality wrongs or harms someone other than the homosexual himself. The religious folks would probably think that it wrongs God for example. So, I think it’s extremely rare for someone to actually think that something is morally wrong without also claiming that this thing harms or wrongs someone besides the agent. So, I think this way of distinguishing moral reasons from self-help reasons also seems to be decently plausible.

But you're making the much stronger claim that this entails that morality will be too demanding. I don't see how that follows. For instance, that instrumental reasons and moral reasons are not the same does not prevent instrumental reasons affecting what we have moral reason to do. If Xing would not frustrate too many of my ends, then I may have an obligation to do X. But if Xing would frustrate many of my ends, then it may be that I do not have an obligation to do X. For instance, it seems to me that I am entitled to do pretty much anything if my life is at stake and I am not responsible for it being so. If an innocent person is about to explode and kill me and the only way I can prevent them from exploding is to shoot them dead, then I am entitled to do so. And if there are ten such people I am entitled to shoot the lot of them. Normally, of course, one is not entitled to shoot innocent people for the sake of one's own interests. But under these circumstances one is. So these sorts of cases are ones in which instrumental reasons are radically affecting what one is morally entitled to do. — Bartricks

I wasn’t trying to make a claim that morality will be too demanding actually. Rather, I was trying to argue that in order for moral duties to exist, there has to a legitimate difference between something being a moral duty and something being a thing that we ought to do because the moral benefits of the action outweigh the self-help harms of that action. For example, there is supposedly a difference between claiming that someone has a moral duty to rescue a child from a shallow pond and claiming that someone ought for supererogatory moral reasons to rescue that child from a shallow pond despite it not being a moral requirement. I think there’s something extra about claiming that doing something is a requirement(which is often used as a synonym for duty) as opposed to a mere wise decision based on moral considerations. Yet there doesn’t actually seem to be a meaningful difference between those 2 things unless one were to argue that duties have a special property of completely dominating self-help concerns. I think this is the only thing that would properly separate the concept of moral duties from mere supererogatory moral reasons.

Under my view, because moral duties don’t exist, all moral reasons are supererogatory reasons just as self-help reasons are. But, moral duties, if they actually existed, should go beyond those plain sorts of reasons. I think this is evident by the fact they are also called moral requirements. It seems really strange to me to think that something could stop being a requirement just because it inconveniences someone enough. That seems to be the kind of considerations that only plain ol supererogatory moral reasons would be constrained by. If the moral duty status of an action can be altered just in case the action is too demanding, then wouldn’t it just make more sense to acknowledge that our understanding of moral duties actually ironically makes them seem incredibly permissive and supererogatory. Hence why I think there is something paradoxical about saying that something can’t be a duty because it’s too demanding and also thinking of duties as strong and authoritative requirements. I think the paradox is best resolved by the abandonment of the concept of duties.

Morality is practical. Practically, the decision is never going to be whether to live in an area with drowning children or not. People do isolate themselves, have done for centuries, in stately homes, secure mansions, penthouse suites, or as hermits. This is really the only way to avoid living in the world, and living in the world involves opportunities for selfishness and callousness that are also opportunities for kindness. — Kenosha Kid

I think there can some practical cases where someone could be motivated to choose to live in a particular location to avoid duties. It probably wouldn’t be a full blown hermit situation but let me give you a more modest example...

Suppose that there are 2 doctors. One doctor chose to live in a village in Africa and the other doctor chose to live in New York. Both doctors make the same amount of money and have similar luxurious lifestyles. The doctor who lives in New York really wanted to live in the village in Africa where the other doctor lives but he heard that there are lots of children there who have a super rare deadly condition. As it so happens to be, him and the doctor working in the village in the Africa are the only ones that are competent enough to treat this condition and save the lives of the children. The doctor from Africa is willing to treat the condition but he wants to get paid his normal hourly rate. The problem is that the families of lots of children that come to his hospital do not have any money. The African doctor only works 30 hours a week but he would have to work an additional 10 hours a week to treat any child that can’t pay for the treatment. That would be 10 hours a week of unpaid labor. That’s a pretty a significant sacrifice but probably not overly demanding by most people’s standards. The doctor from New York feels that he would be morally obligated to help the children with the rare condition if he decided to work in Africa and that would significantly lower his quality of life. But, he also accepts that because he is far away from the children with that condition that need free treatment and because the other doctor also refuses to help them that he isn’t responsible for not helping those children. He also knows that the doctor in Africa hates him for some reason and will transfer out of the hospital if transferred to his hospital. This means that he cannot rely on the bystander effect as he would literally be the only doctor that could have helped the dying children with the rare condition.

While this scenario is obviously fictional, it isn’t outside the realm of possibility. That is to say, this scenario could actually happen in this world in the future(even if the probability of it happening is low). Nonetheless, I think it would be strange to argue that the doctor from New York avoids violating a duty just because he chose to distance himself from the children with the rare condition that can’t pay. Nonetheless, avoiding duty violations seems to understandably be his primary reason for choosing New York as his residence.

However, a child drowning in a pond is an immediate problem that only those nearby can resolve. The responsibility to assess whether to do so falls to a few people out of everyone on the planet. If the only way to save the child was to dial the same telephone number that the rest of the world was somehow simultaneously privy to, that personal responsibility would not be present, even though first-hand sight of the problem still would be. — Kenosha Kid

I think that this argument here potentially allows for duty dodging though. I mentioned in the OP about how a privileged person could choose to live in a place where he is extremely unlikely to encounter drowning children and thus he could avoid having to make personal sacrifices while it seems that others would arbitrarily have to make those sacrifices to avoid violating duties. If this is indeed an implication of your reasoning then many people like myself think it makes more sense to think that duties just don’t exist rather than asserting that duties can be dodged by seemingly arbitrary factors like the location where one chooses to live.

The bystander effect is like a bug in our moral reasoning. It allows 100 people to watch a child drown and do nothing, when any one of them alone would have saved the child. (The 21st century equivalent is you'd get 100 videos of a child drowning uploaded to the internet.) — Kenosha Kid

I’m confused. If you say that the bystander effect is a bug then I presume that you think it is bad. Yet, earlier in the post you seem to imply that the presence of bystanders eliminates your moral responsibility. So, I’m not exactly sure of what to make on your thoughts on the bystander effect. I tend to think that if something as seemingly silly as the presence of bystanders could eliminate moral responsibility then that makes the notion of moral responsibility so counter-intuitive that it would just make more sense to argue that moral duties don’t exist and that there are only plain sorts of moral reasons where some decisions are morally bad in a non-duty sort of way.

And were you to prove no moral duties exist, do you think for a moment you would be free of them? — tim wood

Yes, I think moral duties have to exist in order for someone to not be free of them.

Moral duties and the questions surrounding them seem intrinsic. That is, not a question of if they are, but rather what they are and what kinds of things are they. — tim wood

I would disagree. There are plenty of philosophers that don’t think moral duties exist and so they don’t really seem so “intrinsic”(which I guess is supposed to be a synonym for obvious in your post but correct me if I’m wrong) to many people. The point of my OP was to illuminate why the concept of moral duty seems absurd to many philosophers and why maybe a different sort of paradigm makes more sense like a paradigm where some actions are just morally bad in like a supererogatory sort of way. This actually still gives us reason to criticize people for being immoral but it would just come with the acknowledgement that immorally is one bad trait that a person could have among many rather than seeing morality as superimposing on any sort of self-help concern.

I’m not sure what portion of my OP you were responding to here. I agree with your post for the most part. The only thing I would add is that technically any kind of decision that you make could be moralized and be framed as being “other regarding”. For example, a man could believe that he has a duty towards his wife and kids to learn to manage his finances better because they are financially dependent on him. Normally, managing your finances is seen as a self-help concern. Nonetheless, I think one can usually insert a moral agenda into any sort of life decision that one makes. Sometimes, moral agendas get introduced in even the most personal and purely self-impacting of decisions that people make. For example, an Indian mother and father might tell their daughter that she has a moral duty to marry some guy that the family wants her to marry. Of course, most western moral philosophers would find this moral claim disgusting and repugnant. This is why westerners tend to think about such decisions mostly through a self-help lens and we use self-help type discourse to discuss it.

I think what this Indian family case is supposed to demonstrate is that perhaps the best way to understand the distinction between morality and self-help is by looking at the rhetoric and choice of words that are being used. It seems that we usually discuss our life decisions with others through a casual and down to earth self-help type speech. That speech just coming off as advice meant to be taken as a helpful suggestion rather than an authoritative command. Occasionally, it seems that our decisions might deeply offend others and that’s when I think they change their tone towards us and they start “moralizing” what we do. They start labeling us as evil if we don’t do as they think we should do and maybe they’ll go as far as saying that we are violating our duties. Basically, I think there isn’t anything coherent or intellectual that separates the notion of evil from a more casual self-help type notion of someone being irresponsible or unwise. Rather, I think it just says something about the heightened emotional feeling that the speaker of the moralizing words has about a particular subject matter.

What I dislike about advertisement is that the way ads try to influence people is manipulative, almost a form of "mind control". The people making the advertisements know their target audiences better than those audiences know themselves.

Unless one is very conscious of advertisement, their messages find their way into one's subconsciousness whether one wants them there or not. — Tzeentch

I’d have to disagree with that. Most ads that I view on a daily basis on YouTube seem to be terribly out of touch with my personality. For example, the ads are extremely irritating to me to the point that I literally turn off my headphones to avoid listening to them because I’m driving and can’t skip the ad. They like to ear rape with sudden loud noises for some reason as well. In addition, they often give off a scammy vibe when they talk about “the secrets that the industry doesn’t want you to know” and “I’m going some kind of a secret trick”. That just rubs me the wrong way. I kinda think most advertisers are kinda moronic. They seem to be better at pissing people off than actually getting people to trust them and want to buy their product. What I think would actually be a convincing style of ads is quick and purely factual type ads like “are you looking for a new place that give your car an oil change? Well, we have a tire shop in your that you can check out”. That kind of ad is short and simple and they aren’t trying to say that they are the best company or even a good company. Rather, they let you make your own judgement about the company. I kinda think this builds trust and this makes the ad more effective.

On the other hand, maybe over-selling yourself works really well on some people. I once did a social experiment on a dating app where I made what I thought was an obvious “too good to be true catfishy type” fake profile. It included a photo that looked like it was a photo of a male model that was produced in a studio that I found with a quick Google search and I created a cheesy persona for that guy that he was an outgoing country boy(which is very popular where I live) who likes hiking and camping and is only looking for a gal to eventually marry and have children with. Surprisingly, I got a shit ton of likes from women (more than what my actual honest profile would have ever gotten). The women really seemed convinced by this obviously fake profile. So, I guess many people are gullible. It’s hard for me to say for sure though because I don’t consider myself to be unusually smart or good at not getting manipulated or tricked. So, theoretically, if ads don’t seem to work on me then they shouldn’t work much on others either.

I think that advertising affects us on a subliminal level, but not just in terms of specific products, but with a whole set of values about what is desirable. It is about having the 'perfect' body, and home, lifestyle and a whole underlying rhetoric of consumer materialism. — Jack Cummins

I agree. I think most people have too many redundant and useless gadgets that they don’t need. For example, I always wonder why anyone would own an iPhone and an IPad and an Apple Watch when I think the IPhone pretty much makes the other gadgets redundant.

I'm not sure I'd agree, but then the strongest argument against advertising that I can see is not enumerated: it's impact on health, both physical (junk food cues) and mental (anxious materialism). — Kenosha Kid

Yeah, I forgot to include that argument. Though, I do think there is a decent response that supporters of ads can give to this argument. It could be argued that healthy food products get advertised just as much as junk food and if you dispute that claim then they could still argue that the reason they don’t get advertised as often is because junk food has a greater pre-advertisement demand to begin with. If junk food has a greater pre-ad demand then ads seemingly make no difference on the demand for junk food because people would still be mostly buying junk food even if it never got advertised. Another point that could be made is to point out the example of illegal drugs. They never seem to get advertised and there are actually ads warning about the dangers of those drugs. Nonetheless, it’s not clear if the lack of ads for illegal drugs does much to reduce the demand for those drugs.

As far as anxious materialism goes, I think that’s definitely a downside to ads but it’s not clear to what extent this is actually a big problem. I have personally never heard of any actual person who has what I would describe as anxious materialism and I certainly never seen anyone seemingly need professional help for it. One could speculate that this issue doesn’t get recognized by society or the psychological establishment because we live in a society that wants to indoctrinate people into believing that being a big consumer is always good but I’m not entirely convinced by that myself. There seems to be a great deal of recognition of the phenomenon of reckless spending and taking on too much credit card debt which does seem to show that there is a general social disapproval of excessive consumption. It could also be argued by the opponent of ads that this sort of thing is caused by anxious consumerism. But, it seems that it’s more likely to be caused by people trying to alleviate their boredom or depression by going shopping. Anecdotally, I haven’t seen where anxiety about how much stuff you own really contributes much to this. In addition, I think anxious consumerism would still exist if ads never existed and it could be argued that ads make up only a small increase in anxious consumerism. Though, I suppose it could also be argued that ads help encourage people to use shopping to alleviate their boredom or depression and it doesn’t particularly matter what the precise cause of reckless spending is. We could argue against ads either way. I think that this argument is strongest when focused on reckless spending but that seems to fall more into my Waste of Resources Argument as we probably spend too much money on things we wouldn’t ever want without ads.

Then there's the Social Hierarchy Argument: People need to learn that human society functions as a matter of hierarchy and that it is of vital importance to learn one's place in said hierarchy, and also, that one must fight (sometimes literally, with fists and kicks, other times less physically, with money and power) for one's place in it. — baker

I’m not sure if your expression of the argument indicates that you actually endorse this argument on any level but I’m a bit confused about the argument. Would you be able to provide an example of a person who failed to learn of one’s place in the social hierarchy and experienced a negative outcome in life because of that?

A candidate might be the small child who insists on running into the street. But a problem is to make sure the right lesson is learned. A child might easily learn not to enter the street while you're present, but that it is ok when you're not. — tim wood

I agree, it seems that CP only provides incentives for children to behave well when their parents will know about their behavior. In addition, it seems that CP can only be done with children that you are able to CP. It becomes a completely ineffective strategy for most adults and older teenage boys who might be stronger than you at that point or have legal freedoms not to put up with your CP. I think this greatly limits the extent to which CP provides incentive for good behavior in the long term.

Presumably there is a sweet spot somewhere, and we need studies to lead the way. — Down The Rabbit Hole

I think it’s pretty hard to find reliable studies on this topic. The first thing we have to worry about is who is funding the studies and if they have an agenda to promote. The second concern is the replication crisis in psychology and sociology and how you can usually find at least one study to support both sides of a debate. Another concern is related to whether a study simply establishes a correlation or if they actually do the tedious work of isolating each additional variable to determine the most probable cause. I think a good meta-analysis of studies would be most helpful but there are also different standards regarding what studies they would consider to have acceptable sample size and acceptably non-biased sample.

English is probably not the absolute easiest language to learn. I have heard that a language called Esperanto is the easiest but that’s only because the language was basically invented in the 19th century for pretty much the sole purpose of being easy to learn. Nonetheless, I think English is the easiest popular language to learn despite its tricky spelling which is probably the most difficult part about the language(mind you that spelling isn’t actually that important for having a practical understanding of the language but neither is conjugations). I have learned English as my second language when I was 9 in about 6 months but I also had plenty of exposure so I guess it wouldn’t be that hard for any language.

I tend to think that you can’t prove any sort of positive or negative claims but you can provide some evidence for just about any sort of claim. For example, suppose that God has been popping out on the sky in front of you every day for your entire life. I don’t think that even this would prove that God exist. You can still make an argument that an evil demon is tricking you into believing in God but making an image of God appear. Nonetheless, it would be pretty strong evidence that God exists. I think that whether or not the lack of our ability to discover God constitutes evidence against the existence of God is dependent on whether or not one thinks that we should expect to see God if God really existed.

There are certain things that we usually believe in even if we can’t see them because we have a compelling explanation for why we wouldn’t be able to see them. For example, most scientifically educated people believed in the existence of black holes even before we actually managed to see or detect them. It seems that the reason why most educated people rightfully believed in black holes before they could see them is because there was a compelling explanation why we wouldn’t be able to see those things right away. Namely, that you would need to have special technology to detect black holes.

By contrast, I tend to think that if there really was a God that loved us and wanted to have a relationship with us that we should be able to easily see him because there doesn’t seem to be a compelling explanation for why someone that loves us wouldn’t just immediately reveal themselves to us. Personally, I think it’s more likely than not that such a loving entity wouldn’t make themselves hidden. Most Christians probably disagree. Therefore, I tend to think that this is pretty good evidence against the existence of the Judeo-Christian God. So, I think this sort of dispute is more about whether or not we should expect to see something like a God if such entities existed.

True, true. Yet, I think it has to do also with some kind of damp affective feel towards stimuli. — Shawn

I would say that if someone has a damp affective feel towards all kinds of stimuli indiscriminately then I would speculate that this would have a biological cause. A person who wants to reduce suffering in their life would probably only want to dampen their reaction to unpleasant stimuli and maybe also pleasurable stimuli that could lead to the creation of suffering-causing desires. So, they probably would become apathetic towards the stimuli of feeling cold because that stimuli is unpleasant and they would probably become apathetic towards the stimuli involved in falling in love because while those stimuli are pleasurable they also have great potential to cause suffering. But, those people probably wouldn’t be apathetic towards the stimuli of something like listening to music because that sort of stimuli doesn’t seem to have a potential for suffering.

I’m kinda skeptical that apathy exists in practice. I think this precisely because what normally seems like stereotypical apathetic behavior to us does seem to be motivated by pain and the cruelty of life. But, it actually strikes me as paradoxically ironic to say that pain causes apathy because if someone cares about pain then it seems that they are not apathetic by definition.

Thus said, I hardly see how these matters actually affect our agreement over the the harm principle. We can agree with the harm principle without agreeing to a common theory of the significance of harm. We can agree that 1) an action which only hurts me 2) jand does not impact someone else 3) in a significant manner in order to constitute it as harm, should not be criminalized. We can agree on the principle (albeit a very reinterpreted one) without agreeing with what precisely is a significant harm comprised in condition 3. Therefore, the harm principle isn’t in any way vague about what conditions are relevant for prohibition, but it is quite harder for it the be specific about what it prohibits. — Godefroy

That’s a pretty good point. I think I was wrong to call my thread “The Vagueness of The Harm Principle” as this doesn’t actually seem to properly describe the issue that I have with certain kinds of libertarians applying the harm principle. The problem doesn’t seem to lie with the principle itself as it really doesn’t seem to be vague per se —rather I think that the assumption that weed doesn’t cause harm to others is what really seems suspect to me.

If we have an interactionist definition of harm, preferably, one which was prealably deliberated with the community, we have no trouble applying the harm principle. — Godefroy

I got a question. Under this interactionist definition of harm, could we have some kind of coherent and unified way of explaining what all types of harmful actions have in common? For example, would we be able to provide an explanation for why taking something without someone’s permission necessarily constitutes a harm while an act like smoking weed wouldn’t necessarily constitute a harm? I’m inferring from your post that your answer would be that a particular action is harmful just in case it was considered to be harmful by a particular community(at least that’s how I understood what you were saying). My hesitations with this sort of definition of harm mostly has to do with how difficult it is to determine where a particular community starts and where the community ends. For example, do we subdivide communities into nation states or do we subdivide them into something smaller like towns or cities? On the issue of weed legalization, I think there can be huge differences regarding the opinions that different communities will have regarding how often weed causes harm to others.

In addition, I think some communities, especially more religious ones, may conceptualize harm as something that could be impersonal and victimless. For example, they might say that smoking weed causes harm because it upsets God or because it violates the sanctity of the community even if done completely privately. I think this consideration also could potentially pose another big challenge to the harm principle if we were to reject my phenomenological definition of harm.

The action of smoking weed does not necessarily imply harm towards others, even if some who use weed may hurt their relationships because of it, it isn’t a necessary consequence of the action of smoking weed. — Godefroy

Well, I’m not sure if any action necessarily implies harm towards others. It seems to me that even an action such as theft doesn’t necessarily produce a negative consequence towards someone. The victim of theft doesn’t always have to upset about the loss of his property and may even use his situation as a learning experience to change his life for the better. In addition, it’s possible that a thief can steal something that either has negative value or would inadvertently have negative value. For example, a thief could steal something that would end up being dangerous to the owner or would end up greatly inconveniencing the owner of the property. Another possibility involves a thief stealing property that the owner never ever realized that he had and property that he would have never really discovered that he owned or lost. So, I’m not sure why banning an act like stealing wouldn’t violate the harm principle but banning an act like smoking weed would.

Compare: You may know that I get upset seeing kids walking around with their pants down and their underwear showing. Guess what? Tough shit to me! You walking around with your pants down and your underwear showing, even if you know it upsets me, is not you upsetting me. It is me upsetting myself. How much more so if you don't know it upsets me? — James Riley

Given that those kids played a causal influence in making you upset in this hypothetical case, I find it more plausible to think that those kids did contribute to your victimization. In addition, I want to point out that I think it’s completely possible for someone to victimize someone else and not realize that they have victimized someone else. So, the fact that I might not know that you would be upset by seeing me walk around in sagging pants doesn’t really seem relevant regarding questions relating to whether or not a particular activity victimizes others.

Because you don't know me, and you have no duty to go around asking everyone how they feel about something before you do it. — James Riley

I agree that you don’t have a duty to not smoke weed. I think it’s perfectly compatible to believe that making people upset by smoking weed victimizes the person who is upset at your actions and to believe that you just don’t have a duty not to victimize that person.

Indeed, what if am upset by people with thin skin who get all upset about me smoking weed? Maybe we should outlaw their feelings and make them stay inside and not look out? Whose feels trumps whose feels? — James Riley

I think pretty much any kind of law or action victimizes people constantly. It’s pretty obvious that a law prohibiting the possession of weed would also victimize people that wish to smoke weed and those weed smokers would also be victimized. The point of my OP was not to argue against weed legalization. To try to answer your questions, I do think that the victimization of weed users by the law is greater and more unnecessary than the victimization of people who are upset about living in a weed friendly society. This is why I think weed should be legal. Nonetheless, I don’t think that the fact that the victimization of the weed haters is smaller implies that they wouldn’t be victimized at all if weed was legalized.

If X has not done anything to cause Y to believe that X will not smoke weed, then if Y is upset, Y made himself upset. — James Riley

Yes and the employee has taken the drug test which I think does count as X doing something to cause Y to believe that X will not smoke weed.

If you said you would not smoke and then lied and did it, that is like the agreement with the SO. — James Riley

Yes and I think that happens quite frequently. Hence why I don’t think it makes sense to call the act of smoking weed a victimless activity in a near universal sense like it is frequently argued to be by certain kinds of libertarians.

By using the word "cheating" you imply an agreement. There is no agreement, implied or otherwise, that X not smoke weed. — James Riley

I think that there are plenty of implied agreements that X not smoke weed. For example, when an employer requires a drug test and using weed would make you fail that drug test, doesn’t that constitute an implied agreement with your employer that you not smoke weed? In addition, suppose that you have a roommate that doesn’t want to live with someone that smokes weed and you lie about your weed smoking habits, doesn’t that also violate an agreement? If you accept this, then wouldn’t it make sense to say that there are plenty of cases where someone smoking weed victimizes another person or entity?