Sure, agency and personal responsibilities are important values. But if you were the lawmaker here, would you remove the sin tax? Empirically, you should be p

Sure, agency and personal responsibilities are important values. But if you were the lawmaker here, would you remove the sin tax? Empirically, you should be pretty confident that removing the tax will cause deaths, illnesses, etc. to go up. Keeping it costs some people some annoyance, and reduces everyone's agency. At the end of the day, you have to make a judgement on: value(agency) + value(tax annoyance) > value(deaths, illnesses, etc., externalities of these on others) So what do you do? You might think it's obvious. I'm genuinely not sure -- and I think `value(agency)` is pretty high. But am I confident enough in just how high it is /really/ to live with the possibility of being wrong? (And the, in this case pretty concrete, blood on the hands?) (What I'm really getting at here is a way to think about this, not the actual problem. Things are extremely polarized these days. Calling something paternalistic/etc is asking for an emotional response. But if what this really means is just that someone thinks `value(agency) > value(X)`, and I don't... well, there's no immediate emotional response there. How confident am I in `value(agency)` and `value(X)` really? That seems like a path to much healthier discussion, at least to me.)