Law – Page 23 – a sibilant intake of breath

Options for the civically minded

For people who feel a sense of civic duty – a determination to do what they can to improve the laws and policies of their society – it seems to me that there are multiple valid avenues through which to apply your efforts.

The most overt may be entering politics, but it is an option that carries many costs. You might have to spend a lot of time at small-town barbecues wearing a silly apron, to try to convince voters that you’re an ordinary guy like them and not some fancy-school elitist. You might also have to lie about or conceal beliefs that go beyond what the mainstream is willing to accept (better not be an atheist, for instance). Still, if you do take the political route and find yourself in a position of influence, at least you have a pretty defensible mandate to try to implement the ideas you campaigned on.

The civil service is another option. The influence and the constraints of the civil service are both tied to the same role: providing advice. Being someone who provides advice gives you the freedom to use your judgment and the best available evidence to suggest a course of action. The trouble is, you can always be over-ruled by your superiors or by the people who ultimately make the decisions. Civil servants therefore have a moderate level of freedom for expressing their honestly-held and well-justified views, but little certainty that their advice will ever make a difference.

Journalists and academics have the most freedom to speak and defend their arguments in public, but they have even less certainty that their efforts will ever produce concrete changes. Judges, by contrast, know their judgments will have concrete effects, but they don’t know whether that influence will be confined entirely to the case at hand, or whether it will become a more influential precedent.

Setting aside the advantages and disadvantages of different roles, I think it is important to acknowledge that people in all of these roles can be doing their civic duty, in the sense of trying to serve the best interests of their country and the world more broadly. It is possible to serve those interests through obedience – for instance, those who put themselves in physical danger for the good of others – but it is also possible to serve them through honest and open criticism. All governments have made serious mistakes in the past and face major challenges today. If we are to navigate successfully to a safe and comfortable future, there needs to be energetic and open debate based on the best evidence available.

Please register as an organ donor

In most jurisdictions, you need to take action in order to be registered as an organ donor. In Ontario, for instance, you can sign up when you update your health card. You can also complete a form available online and mail it in. I really encourage people to do so. Those who choose not to be organ donors are effectively saying: “In the event of my untimely death, I would rather have my organs be burned or rot in the ground than have them save or improve the life of someone else”. To me, that seems needless and perhaps selfish.

Those who ride bicycles or motorcycles are especially encouraged to sign up. Compared to the population as a whole, they face a significantly higher risk of dying from a traumatic head injury that leaves their other organs usable.

Quite possibly, it would be better to have an ‘opt out’ system, where it would be assumed that everyone is willing to donate their organs unless they specifically register an objection. That would increase the availability of organs for transplant, without impinging on the right people have for their organs to remain unused upon their deaths.

Personally, I am signed up to donate anything and everything there is any need for. I think my body should be put to the best possible use upon my death. The highest value use is clearly organ donation, if applicable. Failing that, I would want the nutrients in my flesh to return to the biosphere quickly and in a usable form – no cremation or burial in a concrete vault for me, please.

Georgia’s drug courts

Ira Glass recently produced an especially interesting episode of This American Life, talking about a particular drug court in the United States: Very Tough Love.

One potential advantage of the fiscal mess states like Canada and the United States have gotten themselves into is that it might help drive the advancement of more sensible drug policies. Our current approach is excessively punitive, fails to respect the sovereignty of the individual over their body, and is needlessly costly and destructive.

Planet Money on drug legalization and ‘Freeway Rick’

In a recent episode of NPR’s Planet Money podcast, they interviewed a former L.A. drug dealer about the economics of his profession. He was apparently a high-ranking member of the illegal drug industry, operating with 30-40 employees and sometimes handling daily revenues of $3 million per day.

He largely confirms the new conventional wisdom: that prohibition massively increases the price of drugs (1000 fold, he says) and substantially increases how much crime and violence is associated. As the episode concludes in saying, the question is whether the supposed benefit of fewer people using drugs justifies all the costs and harms associated with prohibition.

Imagine anybody could buy one shot of heroin at the LCBO (Ontario’s liquor store) for $5. Suddenly, there would be no illegal market. Nobody would buy heroin of unknown purity from an illegal dealer if it was available for a low price from a government-sponsored source. People would not have to commit major crimes to buy drugs, and they would get drugs of assured priority and consistent potency. More people might use heroin, but it would be less dangerous and harmful for society as a whole.

The episode also argues that it is the hopelessness within their communities that drives people to become drug addicts and to join the illegal drug industry. The lack of better employment options makes the special costs in terms of jail or violence less of a deterrent than they would be for people with better options.

The episode is called: “#266: A Former Crack Dealer On the Economics of Dealing”. It is available for free through the iTunes Store.

Open thread: explicitly ethnic states

It can be argued that it is fundamentally inappropriate for any state to try to have a single ethnic or religious character. It can be argued that all states should be secular and pluralist when it comes to race (however you choose to define it) or religion.

At the same time, it seems possible that a state could try to have an ethnic character without being unjust as a result. If two groups live in a region – the As and Bs – is it always better for them to both live in the secular state of Plural-Land – or might it be better to have an A-land and a B-land? Can this question be answered from first principles, or only with reference to particular historical examples?

What really matters may be the effect of the system of government on people both inside and outside the state. Thoughts?

Will my vote matter?

Previously, I created a flowchart for use in voting in Canadian elections. It occurred to me today that it could be interesting to elaborate the concept into a website.

The site would allow people to enter their riding and rank their preferences for either local candidates or parties. It could then estimate the odds that their vote will make a difference they care about. For instance, if someone strongly prefers Party X to Party Y, and both candidates have a shot at winning in that person’s riding, then their vote is relatively likely to matter. By contrast, if someone hates both Party A and Party B equally, and one of their candidates is basically certain to win, then that person’s vote is relatively unlikely to matter.

There are different possible methodologies for the site. For instance, it could be based entirely on past election results, entirely on polling data, or on some combination of the two.

In circumstances where a person is told that their vote is unlikely to matter – for instance, if they prefer a party with minority support in every riding – the website could direct the person to more information on electoral reform and alternative electoral systems like the various kinds of proportional representation.

Unsurprisingly, this is one of those ideas that falls into the “things that may be interesting to discuss, but which I do not have the time to actually do” category.

Warning labels for booze

According to a study in the British Medical Journal, alcohol could be responsible for 10% of cancer in men and 3% in women. The scientists performing the study examined data from eight European countries. Reporting on the study, the CBC raised the question of whether there should be warning labels on alcoholic beverages.

I think there should be. They should warn about the risk of addiction, about damage to unborn children, and about other well-documented risks. These days, there are warning labels on everything from plastic bags (choking hazard!) to coffee cups (this beverage is extremely hot!). When governments put warning labels on some things with long-term health consequences, it implies that anything without such a label is considered safe by the government, or at least substantially safer than the things that do bear warnings. Given that alcohol is one of the most lethal drugs consumed by human beings, along with tobacco, it just makes sense that there be warning labels there too.

I think it’s absurd that Canada is considering putting warning labels on beer to alert people of the presence of wheat, but not considering putting on labels advising that if you drink enough of the stuff, it could kill you in a matter of hours.

P.S. Non-alcoholic beer can be a good option for those who enjoy beer, but want to avoid alcohol for whatever reason.

Locksport

Locksport is the practice of studying and learning to defeat locking systems, primarily mechanical locks such as pin and tumbler locks. As I understand it, it is driven by curiosity and the desire to understand how things work, rather than any desire to circumvent real-world locks. Practitioners are people who puzzle their way to inside information about an industry that tends to be close-knit and secretive, not unlike the people who watch classified satellite launches in the U.S. and track the orbits of mysterious secret satellites.

The Dutch blog blackbag is a good source of information on locksport, including picking, bump keys, and impressioning. The Open Organization Of Lockpickers is a group for locksport affectionados. Theoretically, they have a chapter in Ottawa, but it doesn’t seem to be active.

I think it’s worth trying one’s hand at picking locks, if only to get a sense of how secure they really are. I found that with a few minutes of work and no professional instruction, I could open the locks and deadbolts in my old apartment using a tension wrench and simple pick. The same goes for padlocks – both the omnipresent cheap Master Lock variety and higher security versions with security pins.

The legality of tools for manipulating locks varies by jurisdiction. In the United States, it varies from state to state. In Canada, lock picking tools (except for key duplication tools) are legal and treated just like any other tool.

Freedoms and loyalties

Modern political life is complicated, in terms of the obligations and allegiances people possess. For instance, it is entirely sensible to say that a person has simultaneous and differing obligations toward family, friends, co-workers, fellow citizens, humanity as a whole, and even all of nature. These obligations can be contradictory. For instance, one’s family might be best served by choices that would harm fellow citizens or humanity as a whole.

There is an important distinction between freedoms in the abstract and freedoms in practice. For instance, one might have the right to legal counsel but be financially unable to secure adequate representation (especially in civil matters). Similarly, the most fundamental of abstract freedoms – sovereignty over one’s own mind and body – are frequently interfered with by states. Despite that interference, however, I think the logic underlying them is sound. What happens to a person’s body and mind should be up to that person. If another person or a government forces something upon you without your informed consent, they have violated important rights, even if they were trying to do good. That’s not an assertion of the fundamental validity of rights, but rather part of a utilitarian calculus. It’s simply the case that a world where the fundamental rights of individuals are respected is better than a world in which they are violated and ignored. It’s the collectivity of outcomes that really matters, but the collectivity is often served best by treating all individuals decently.

It seems to me that our highest loyalty should be to humanity as a whole, or perhaps to the collection of all species with a reasonably rich mental life. It is impossible to behave unethically toward an inanimate object. Crushing a rock to powder can only be a problem if, in so doing, you negatively affect the mental lives of thinking beings. At the same time, there are many smaller groups of humans that demand and frequency receive loyalty, often manifested in behaviours that harm humanity as a whole.

There are clear-cut examples of this: if you are in the army and ordered to use biological weapons against a civilian population, you have been placed in a situation where someone is asserting that your loyalty to them should trump the concern you have for other living beings. In such circumstances, it seems admirable to refuse by asserting the greater importance of loyalty to humanity compared with loyalty to your army or loyalty to your country.

Ultimately, we are all in a complicated ethical position. We have sovereignty over our bodies and minds, but we never have individual security. We are all vulnerable to the will of others and, in cases where it contradicts our own will, we do not have the power to resist the whole world. We will also frequently be punished for obeying higher loyalties rather than lower ones, partly because an important way through which lower loyalties are maintained in the general population is by punishing those that violate them (though consent accompanies coercion in most systems of control).

On the basis of our particular combination of capabilities and options, all we can do is try to behave in the way that best respects our ethical obligations, such as they can be determined on the basis of determined and selfless examination.

The legality of prostitution in Canada

Canada’s laws criminalising aspects of prostitution are going to be challenged before the Supreme Court.

Personally, I cannot see how treating prostitutes as criminals helps anybody. If government wants to reduce exploitation in the industry, they would do better by regulating it and fostering good relationships between sex workers and the police.