3 ms·
Counterpoint - consumption/sin taxes.
by yunohn 3y ago
Counterpoint - consumption/sin taxes.
- avianlyric 3y agoNot sure what they have to do with morality either.
- yunohn 3y agoI’m not a huge fan of taxes, but they are absolutely about morality. Society as a whole deciding to discourage consumption of harmful/unhealthy things like sugar, soda, cigarettes, alcohol, etc.
- smitty1e 3y agoA moral argument can be offered, sure. However, there is copious cause/effect data showing that non-sobriety is expensive in terms of health- and societal repercussions.
- yunohn 3y agoWhat do you think morals are? > Morality is the differentiation of intentions, decisions and actions between those that are distinguished as proper and those that are improper. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morality https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morality
- smitty1e 3y agoSource? Morality seems more of a subjective call, e.g. "Thou shalt marry heterosexually ahead of procreation", than a stochastic analysis, e.g. "X percent of fatal car crashes involve blood alcohol above Y concentration."
- yunohn 3y agoStraight from Wikipedia, which is an objective source for such a general topic. Religious morality is a sub-category, not all of morality itself. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morality https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morality
- smitty1e 3y agoWhat I'm after is that much of the ethics by which our legal system operates, e.g. a BAC limit for legal driving, is divorced from moral questions such as: "Is drinking beer a sinful act?"
- yunohn 3y agoI think you’re gravely misguided. BAC has nothing to do with sin, it’s connected to the morality and ethics of putting your fellow citizens at risk of your impaired driving.
- smitty1e 3y agoIndeed, this is the point I'm after. Glad we could get there.
- yunohn 3y agoMy repeated point has been that morality != religious sin, rather the latter is a subset. I don’t necessarily agree with laws/taxes in this regard, but it’s important to understand where they come from.
- smitty1e 3y agoOK, I disagree with the "subset" point, though I yield to your majority opinion on the matter. My argument is that we can declutter discussion by treating all "moral compass" arguments as orthogonal to an "ethical plane". If our subjective judgements are treated as internal (booze==sin), and de-conflicted from the external, legal arguments, we'd be in better shape. But too many are invested in the status quo to tidy up the model like that.
- avianlyric 3y agoIt’s not a requirement for consumption taxes to driven my morality as a first order effect. It’s entirely reasonable for law to take the moral stance that people should broadly pay for the benefits as participating in organised society, so to ensure the long term upkeep and maintenance of that organisation they derive benefits from. At which point consumption taxes have nothing to any moral judgement about the consumption of various products, but simple calculus that the voluntary consuming those products increases the cost of running our society, and so you should pay a bit more for engaging in these activities. But none of that is judgement on the morality of activity. I personally couldn’t give a shit what drugs you or anyone else consumes. But I don’t particularly like the idea of having pick up the bill later for an activity I didn’t participate in. So if you pay some extra taxes to cover to cost of additional healthcare, then feel free to consume whatever the hell you want.
- yunohn 3y ago> But I don’t particularly like the idea of having pick up the bill later for an activity I didn’t participate in. The repeated grouping of morality/ethics into purely religion/judgement throughout this thread really bothers me. IMHO your argument is an argument of moral propriety of making people pay for others choices. You’re semantically choosing to not call it that is all.
- avianlyric 3y agoNah I’m more than happy to agree that I’m making an argument of moral propriety. There has to be some consistent basis for forming laws, and some sort of coherent social order. But my point is there’s a difference between moral basis for having laws and taxes, and their specific implementation. Consumption taxes are just one approach for implementing a social system build on the basis “fair contribution/usage”, or whatever we want to call it (my views on “moral” behaviour are too nuanced and confused to fit into an internet comment, so let’s just work with something simple). But the taxes themselves aren’t a direct expression of moral judgment themselves, but rather an implementation detail of a broader governing moral system that provides legitimacy to laws and the states rights to enforce them. It might be a distinction without a difference. But if someone is going to call out consumption taxes as somehow more inherently driven by moral judgments than any other part of a system of law, then I think making the distinction is reasonable.