@JMW

I have no problem with large chunks of your comment, and I’m going to pass over those items without commenting back (with a couple of exceptions). This is going to make my comment look like I’m disagreeing with you completely, which I’m not. But I’m trying to be brief .

Doesn’t come across that way at all. Nothing to worry about.

I’m obviously even less clear on the legal status of restaurants as private or public spaces in the United States, but I’m sure you’re more up on that than I am.

For some purposes, restaurants are considered public places in the U.S., but not for several legal purposes. Best example is in public obscenity laws. If I wanted, I could have nude dancers all over my restaurant, but only if they aren’t visible from the street, and I have a control on entry to prevent minors from coming in. Without the windows blocked and with no bouncer, it is a public space for obscenity purposes. Even without blocking the windows and putting in a bouncer, my restaurant is not a public space for the purposes free speech. People have the right to line up on the sidewalk outside of the restaurant to protest me being a non-Democrat in a highly Democratic city (hasn’t happened, so just a joke, btw), but they can’t protest inside my establishment and I can throw out anyone who does protest in there. I can’t do the same for smoking, no matter what, in my state.

I would tend to agree, provided they had the choice. If there are smokers in your restaurant and they are physically incapable of enjoying your restaurant because of this, haven’t the smokers in your restaurant removed the option to enjoy or not enjoy your restaurant from the people with whatever respiratory ailment they have?

There is that choice part. Their enjoyment is no more required on me or any smokers (which I’m not one) than is their displeasure. The smokers may have made it less enjoyable for some, but they’ve made it more enjoyable for others because the others now can smoke too. Granted, more people do not smoke in the U.S. than smoke, but the point is that the smokers are not responsible to protect the enjoyment of others. As a counter-example, there is one lady who is morbidly obese who comes in from time to time. I notice, anecdotally (I haven’t run the numbers), that when she comes in, people order less food. Now, has she taken away their right to enjoy their food?

It’s not be about enjoyment anyways. It’s theoretically, about health. The problem is that they are going beyond allowing people to choose to be unhealthy toward forcing them to be healthy. Another example, I ride a motorcycle. It’s a Honda Shadow, so not a crotch rocket. My state requires I wear a helmet for my protection. I always have, but I’ve heard from others that riding without a helmet is a much better experience. You don’t ride a bike because its safe, after all. I’ll still wear a helmet, but the only reason to require it is to make the motorcyclist safer, not to make the car drivers around them safer.

Hmm…very Heinleinesque.

Heinlein was an interesting one; he was a liberal/progressive as a youth and a conservative after the Nuclear bomb and a libertarian in the 1960s. He evolved his beliefs a lot over his years and a lot of people could find something they liked in his works. Very rounded.

I agree that it’s not your fault they suffer from tobacco smoke; but I would respond that it is your choice to allow smoking in your restaurant, and in so doing you are, effectively, chosing your clientele and opting for smokers rather than those who cannot (or for that matter, choose not) to expose themselves to cigarette smoke.

I already opt for people who like one type of food over another. If I serve strawberries or peanuts on everything, as Incredulous points out, I’m limiting my clientele as well.

You’re acknowledging that their liberty is infringed, but I think that, if you had the option to allow smoking in your restaurant, you would be just as responsible for infringing on the non-smoker’s liberty as the tobacco industry and the people actually doing the smoking.

Still not infringing on their liberty until I force them to walk into my restaurant or draw them in with fraud. They have no more liberty to walk into my restaurant than my house. I merely have opened my restaurant property to them as a result of wanting business.

To be sure if I choose, as a non-smoker without a medical reason to avoid cigarette smoke, not to go into your restaurant then I’m also making a choice to infringe my own liberty and I am responsible for it.

I don’t think your definition of liberty matches up to the philosophical definitions in liberalism. Liberty is the right to chose your course of action for yourself. The only place that your liberty ends, in liberalism, is where it infringes another’s liberty. I am at liberty to walk down a public street. I am not at liberty to step onto private property.

Bottom line, I don’t think there’s one person or entity or industry you can point to and say, “That is the person who has infringed on someone’s liberty.” As usual, it’s more complicated than that.

I absolutely agree, it is more complicated then that, but there are clear philosophical lines IN THIS CASE. It does get more complex in other cases.

Well… longer than I intended… sigh.

Do you think government should have any role in regulating the health and safety conditions of employees of a private business? Because a big part of the motivation for banning smoking in restaurants is to protect employees from the dangers of second hand smoke. I suppose these employees could vote with their jobs and look for work elsewhere. What about farm workers? Should the government have any role in regulating how much pesticide they are forced to ingest when doing their job? Or should they just look for work elsewhere also? Is their any situation that you would approve of the government regulating the conditions of work in a private business?

But these people are on a crusade. They only use the potential for health effects as leverage. The don’t just want places to be free of smoke for their enjoyment and safety. They want to wipe out smoking altogether. Not just where it affects them. It goes far beyond smoking. It is about some self decided morality about everything that they think people should not be doing.

If it is just about safety there are lots of people are doing risky things. People are injured and die every day from many more activities beyond smoking. We all end up having to foot the bill when they hurt themselves. Lets ban football. Look at all the people that get hurt. Lets ban driving. Let’s ban skiing. How about running? Surfing.

These sound like silly examples, but these people are on a roll. They have had some success with their vendetta against smoking and drinking alcohol and are branching out. Now they are getting to food and drinks.

They have already succeeded in that you can’t send an aspirin with your child to school if they get a headache or have a fever. Now they want to decide what you put in their lunchbox. It is no longer an issue of a slippery slope. We slipped off that a long time ago. It is a matter of where the bottom is.

Hi, Terry.

I have no problem with large chunks of your comment, and I’m going to pass over those items without commenting back (with a couple of exceptions). This is going to make my comment look like I’m disagreeing with you completely, which I’m not. But I’m trying to be brief .

A restaurant, unless owned by the government, is a private establishment. It is not a public place.

I’m guessing you’re American; I know that I’m Canadian. My understanding of Canadian law is sketchy at best, so I turn to google. I discovered that smoking bans are provincial and municipal matters, not subject to federal law. The Canadian federal government’s reporting department, Statistics Canada, has a web page about smoking bans in various provinces and cities around Canada. Most use the language “public places, including restaurants, bars, bowling alleys, bingo halls and casinos.” I believe I remember hearing something about restaurants, while owned privately, have the express purpose of providing a place for people to assemble for social purposes and are thus de facto public places, in spite of their private ownership.

I’m obviously even less clear on the legal status of restaurants as private or public spaces in the United States, but I’m sure you’re more up on that than I am.

In the example you provided, it is not a burden on liberty for sufferers of an ailment not to enjoy my restaurant.

I would tend to agree, provided they had the choice. If there are smokers in your restaurant and they are physically incapable of enjoying your restaurant because of this, haven’t the smokers in your restaurant removed the option to enjoy or not enjoy your restaurant from the people with whatever respiratory ailment they have?

The liberty of one person stops at the ability to place a requirement on another.

Hmm…very Heinleinesque. His short story “Coventry” and novella “Methuselah’s Children”, from his Future History anthology, posits a society where everyone is free to do whatever they want as long as they don’t affect anyone else.

If that person suffers because they can not handle smoke, it is not my fault that they suffer. It isn’t their fault, either. It’s nature’s fault and hopefully someday medical science will have a cure for them. Neither I, nor anyone else in my restaurant should have to pay the price for their suffering. Their liberty is infringed by nature or by their own choice or by possibly unfair business practices of the tobacco industry (up for the courts to decide) but not me.

I agree that it’s not your fault they suffer from tobacco smoke; but I would respond that it is your choice to allow smoking in your restaurant, and in so doing you are, effectively, chosing your clientele and opting for smokers rather than those who cannot (or for that matter, choose not) to expose themselves to cigarette smoke. You’re acknowledging that their liberty is infringed, but I think that, if you had the option to allow smoking in your restaurant, you would be just as responsible for infringing on the non-smoker’s liberty as the tobacco industry and the people actually doing the smoking. To be sure if I choose, as a non-smoker without a medical reason to avoid cigarette smoke, not to go into your restaurant then I’m also making a choice to infringe my own liberty and I am responsible for it. But I wouldn’t have to make that choice if you hadn’t first made the choice to allow smoking, and the smokers in your restaurant hadn’t made the choice to light up.

Bottom line, I don’t think there’s one person or entity or industry you can point to and say, “That is the person who has infringed on someone’s liberty.” As usual, it’s more complicated than that.

BTW, I strongly agree with your final paragraph. Makes one wonder if the religious right are more methodologically aligned to the left while being ideologically aligned to the right?

I had to smile when I read this part of your comment – I was thinking the very same thing. And I think it’s true – it seems to me that the religious right is very much about making things “right” for everyone, where they get to define what is “right”, and they will force it on everyone whether they want it or not. Very like the extreme left wing.

Smoking is harmful and addictive and should be restricted, but not outlawed. Smoking bans provide partial restriction, but people are still free to smoke, just not everywhere.

The problem is that the original arguments for restriction have failed so progressives have called for wider and wider bans. If they had stuck with bans on public, closed congested areas and a tax to pay for the incidental medical costs to the public, that would have been fine. I could even get behind incentives to smoke free establishments, such as reducing taxes on other ‘sin tax’ items sold there. (Of course, better to eliminate sin taxes altogether, but that’s not going to happen in our present political climate.)

People are still free to practice their religion just not using certain public venues.

That treads on dangerous territory. The religious have a right to practice their religion, under the Constitution, in all public spheres. They do not have the right, when acting as a representative of the U.S. Government, a U.S. State, or a contracted employee of either, to call on others to obey their religion or pressure others to obey their religion. Even a teacher can inform students that they are of a specific faith, but the second that the teacher insinuates or requires obedience or teaches learning specific to their religion, they have overstepped the bounds set for them by legal precedent.

Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that these are proscribing some limits on human behavior rather than “denying the reality of people’s behavior”?

No, it wouldn’t. Of course, I can only offer my opinion. A progressive adherent or philosopher would probably say that they are proscribing bad behavior, but I think that when they require positive action rather than preventing negative action, that oversteps the concept of proscribing behavior. They require positive behavior as well, hence forceful redistribution of wealth.

One has to recognize the behavior before one can limit it. And since these bans are partial, to what extent can they be said to change human nature?

Smoking bans specifically are attempts to reduce smoking. Smoking is a self-pleasing behavior, but it has environmental consequences and that muddies things up. The bans can be accepted if they are restricting those environmental consequences to places where people know what they are getting into and have no ownership stake in the location. When the bans go beyond that, which they do, they are attempts to change human behavior away from self-pleasing, nonharmful behaviors.

That said, bans are an expression of progressive philosophy hitting American legal processes. Progressivism itself DOES want to reduce smoking for the sake of individuals, just like it wants to reduce heart disease, obesity, STDs, poverty, and a hundred other harmful conditions. These are lofty, but with some exceptions, progressives don’t restrict themselves to changing the behaviors leading to these conditions with education and calls for enlightened self-improvement. When those don’t work well enough, they move from calls to creating disincentives to the behavior, then to restricting the behavior, and finally to outright banning of the behavior. For poverty specifically, they don’t even attack behaviors that trap people in poverty and instead treat it as a solely externally caused problem. Poverty is neither wholly internally caused or wholly externally caused, and any view that claims it is is self-deluding.

Thanks for explaining your view. I don’t know all the politics involved but it seems there are some traditionally Republican states that have passed statewide smoking bans in restaurants: e.g., Georgia, Iowa, Idaho, Arizona.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_smoking_bans_in_the_United_States

So, I suspect there is some Republican support for smoking bans at least in some states. I think these smoking bans are good, but I respect your point about liberty. You think people should be allowed to make their own choices and suffer the consequences even when the majority feels people are making bad choices. I admit I am willing to trade off some freedom to encourage good behavior. Smoking is harmful and addictive and should be restricted, but not outlawed. Smoking bans provide partial restriction, but people are still free to smoke, just not everywhere. Similarly with religious expression. People are still free to practice their religion just not using certain public venues. Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that these are proscribing some limits on human behavior rather than “denying the reality of people’s behavior”? One has to recognize the behavior before one can limit it. And since these bans are partial to what extent can they be said to change human nature?

Banning smoking in a public place is one such loss of liberty I can live with (easy for me, as I’m a non-smoker).

A restaurant, unless owned by the government, is a private establishment. It is not a public place. I can see banning smoking in public plaza’s, government buildings, public transportation and its hubs, etc. Banning it inside of a place of business should be left up to the business owners and people should be allowed to vote with their capital.

So whose liberty wins? Whose liberty SHOULD win?

This is a complex question that often must be settled by the courts, even when government becomes involved. (Personally, I think arbitration works better than the courts, but sometimes courts are necessary due to belligerency of one party or the other).

In the example you provided, it is not a burden on liberty for sufferers of an ailment not to enjoy my restaurant. The liberty of one person stops at the ability to place a requirement on another. I am not required to serve everyone at my restaurant. Good business practices would require me not to turn away anyone without legitimate cause, but I am not required to serve anyone.

If that person suffers because they can not handle smoke, it is not my fault that they suffer. It isn’t their fault, either. It’s nature’s fault and hopefully someday medical science will have a cure for them. Neither I, nor anyone else in my restaurant should have to pay the price for their suffering. Their liberty is infringed by nature or by their own choice or by possibly unfair business practices of the tobacco industry (up for the courts to decide) but not me.

BTW, I strongly agree with your final paragraph. Makes one wonder if the religious right are more methodologically aligned to the left while being ideologically aligned to the right?

Example in Oz right now – we are trying to implement a carbon tax which only compensates lower/middle income earners for the increased costs of electricity, petrol etc. This recasts a simple environmental tax into a wealth redistribution mechanism. Claims that this is “fair” assume a left-leaning prism where the reduction of income inequality is always a good thing. But any attempts by the right to argue against the impact of the tax on social or economic grounds are cried down as “anti-science”! And worse, scientists are often slow to distance themselves from these claims.

Improperly associating science with what are actually policy/political decisions is a very, very dangerous thing, and is IMO the quickest way to end up in a “non-reality based” debate.