Steve H,
The smoking ban (which I think went too far) was designed to maximise the health of everybody, thus improving present and future happiness, and also make life more comfortable for the people who claim to dislike or be affected by smoky atmospheres. The calculation was that the inconveniencing, and thus decreased happiness, of smokers would be outweighed by the increased happiness of the miserable sods who want everything their way (sorry, a bit of bias creeping in there - I'm a pipe-smoker) and the increased health of the general population. The aim was an increase in happiness, not anything else - better general health is desirable not for its own sake, but because it leads to greater happiness. Yes, it's very hard to calculate, but the point is that happiness, not anything else, was the aim.
Yes, I know what the
aim was as and I’m happy to agree with it. What though if the aim and the effect are different – if the road to hell is in fact paved with good intentions? Take the smoking ban still – let’s say that because of it a number of people will not now die of lung cancer and will instead live to ripe old ages, More happiness right? But let’s say too that in old age they’ll require a substantially increased amount of state geriatric support that requires funding to be withdrawn from, say, children’s services thereby increasing the unhappiness of a different number of people. How would you propose even to identify the untended consequences of the ban, let alone to weigh their net effects against an overall happiness scale?
Again, to be clear I’m all for the smoking ban and for that matter for other measures that to the best of our ability to compute these things increase the net amount of happiness there is. It’s still the case though that as a practical tool for ethical behaviour to call it problematic would be an understatement. At heart ethics is subjective, messy, changeable and not objective and fixed by inviolable rules at all.
Difficult, but not impossible. Removing all restrictions on smoking, to continue with that example, including getting rid of health warnings and allowing advertising, would lead to a great increase in lung cancer and other preventable diseases, and a much greater early death rate, and thus a reduction in happiness. It's not as impossible as you make out.
Yet it is – see above. Your problem here is the interconnectedness of events – we might be able to foresee, say, ten consequences from an action or maybe more. What we can’t do though is to foresee
all of them because life is far too complex for that. Try reading about the unintended effect of banning agent orange for example, itself an act whose aim was entirely benign but that arguably actually cost countless lives.
