{"id":156771,"date":"2024-08-03T21:32:22","date_gmt":"2024-08-04T05:32:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=156771"},"modified":"2024-08-03T16:54:39","modified_gmt":"2024-08-04T00:54:39","slug":"harm-reduction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=156771","title":{"rendered":"Harm Reduction"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wikipedia notes<\/a>: “The harm principle holds that the actions of individuals should be limited only to prevent harm to other individuals.”<\/p>\n

I’ve loved some of my cars and I’ve felt like they were an extension of me. Any harm to these vehicles felt like a harm to me. <\/p>\n

Wikipedia notes<\/a>: <\/p>\n

Harm reduction, or harm minimization, refers to a range of intentional practices and public health policies designed to lessen the negative social and\/or physical consequences associated with various human behaviors, both legal and illegal. Harm reduction is used to decrease negative consequences of recreational drug use and sexual activity without requiring abstinence, recognizing that those unable or unwilling to stop can still make positive change to protect themselves and others.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In his work in progress, Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression: On the Nature and Origins of Conservaphobia<\/a>, Rony Guldmann writes:<\/p>\n

\n* Given that the symbolic realism is invariably intertwined with the biological functioning of a symbolic animal, liberalism\u2019s efforts to mark off a sphere of \u201creal\u201d harm-tracking morality from the realm of airy cultural grievances is necessarily parochial, the product of an ethnocentrism that cannot recognize how liberals and conservatives partake of a shared humanity one side of which liberalism discounts. <\/p>\n

* We now believe our freedom ends only at others\u2019 noses. But pre-moderns saw things, and had to see things, very differently. That deviant conduct created no tangible harms and transpired out of sight was not dispositive because facially private misconduct was a transgression, not only against others\u2019 sensibilities, but also against the order of things. Given that everyone\u2019s place in this order depended on its continued sustenance, a transgression against it was a transgression against all.<\/p>\n

* Steven Smith observes that the harm-principle\u2014according to which the state may only regulate harmful as opposed to merely immoral conduct\u2014has served as \u201ca trusty weapon in the arsenal of liberalism.\u201d22Though conservative defenders of liberty-restricting legislation have sometimes acceded to the principle\u2019s premises and emphasized the harmful \u201csecondary effects\u201d of facially harmless conduct\u2014e.g., pornography\u2019s contribution to urban blight\u2014these arguments have generally been ineffectual, and are also suspected as disingenuous rationalizations for moralistic motivations. Thus, in practice the harm-principle has nearly always yielded liberal prescriptions.<\/p>\n

* Much of the legislation that liberals would veto under the harm-principle as unduly coercive can be defended as a response to the \u201cpsychic harm\u201d and \u201ccommunal harm\u201d which the targeted conduct obviously causes. After all, \u201cpsychic distress is a kind of mental pain\u201d and \u201cis plainly something that people prefer to avoid.\u201d24There is thus an obvious sense in which conduct that causes it\u2014like the consumption or dissemination of pornography\u2014is \u201charmful\u201d and falls within the ambit of the harm-principle, irrespective of secondary effects. The same holds true of communal harm: \u201cIf people get satisfaction or happiness from living in a particular kind of community, then conduct that subverts that kind of community and thus reduces such happiness inflicts a kind of \u2018harm.\u2019<\/p>\n

* The triumph of the harm principle is a merely rhetorical triumph, however. For liberals have by \u201csleight of hand\u201d engaged in \u201crampant equivocation, trading on more ordinary senses of \u2018harm\u2019 for rhetorical purposes while importing technical or artificial conceptions of \u2018harm\u2019 in order to secure their desired conclusions.\u201d They have \u201crigged\u201d the concept of harm by exploiting its commonsense \u201csubject-oriented\u201d meaning\u2014which includes psychic and communal harms\u2014in order to establish the harm-principle\u2019s commonsense rhetorical appeal while then narrowing its application to physical invasions of others\u2019 autonomy when dealing with specific controversies, thus securing liberal outcomes. Liberals are thus \u201clike people who insist that an issue should be resolved by democratic vote while working behind the scenes to disenfranchise groups who might be inclined to vote against their cause.\u201d Their professions to the contrary notwithstanding, liberals do impose their values on others, because their tendentious conception of harm disguises the \u201cquintessentially illiberal practice of treating some people’s ideas of the good life as less worthy,\u201d concealing \u201chow harm principle rhetoric actually works to obfuscate the deeper issues, to conceal real injuries, and to marginalize some conceptions of the good life.\u201d<\/p>\n

* Amy Wax observes that rationalistic liberals are unmoved and unimpressed by social conservatives\u2019 \u201c[v]ague premonitions of erosion or unraveling\u201d of the social order, which they dismiss as \u201can inadequate basis for resisting changes that satisfy immediate needs and urgent desires.\u201d And this is because they understand these vague premonitions as symptoms of a lingering pre-modern sensibility, which cannot be allowed interfere with modern \u201cfulfillment.\u201d Hence Justice Blackmun\u2019s dissent in Bowers v. Hardwick, where he argued that homosexuality in and of itself \u201cinvolves no real interference with the rights of others, for the mere knowledge that other individuals do not adhere to one\u2019s value system cannot be a legally cognizable interest.\u201d This is how moral opposition to homosexuality must be conceived within a strategic perspective\u2014as mere Hobbesian \u201cannoyance\u201d rather than some disequilibrium in the order of things. Thus understood, the desire to regulate others\u2019 unobtrusive personal conduct out of concern for the \u201cmoral fiber of society\u201d is a disingenuous gambit to arrogate state power in the service of merely personal preferences.<\/p>\n

* If the desire to place a cr\u00e8che on public property is a purely symbolic aspiration, then so too is the desire to remove it.<\/p>\n

* What some women will dismiss as harmless sexual innuendo acknowledging the basic fact of animal attraction may be experienced by feminists as a denial of their personhood, a degrading fall from the lofty heights of that personhood into merely animal passions.<\/p>\n

* [Dan Kahan writes in The Cognitively Illiberal State:] “We moderns are no less disposed to believe that moral transgressions threaten societal harm. This perception is not, as is conventionally supposed, a product of superstition or unreasoning faith in authority. Rather it is the predictable consequence of the limited state of any individual’s experience with natural and social causation, and the role that cultural commitments inevitably play in helping to compensate for this incompleteness in knowledge. What truly distinguishes ours from the premodern condition in this sense is not the advent of modern science; it is the multiplication of cultural worldviews, competition among which has generated historically unprecedented conflict over how to protect society from harm at the very same time that science has progressively enlarged our understandings of how our world works.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wikipedia notes: “The harm principle holds that the actions of individuals should be limited only to prevent harm to other individuals.” I’ve loved some of my cars and I’ve felt like they were an extension of me. Any harm to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-156771","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conservatives"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t