zlacker

Yet humans have fared mostly fine as a whole with even a moderate level of those things, legal or not, consistently happening throughout history and cultures. The biggest problem we have is when these vices are driven underground so the vice itself is conflated with the additional risk of having to put one’s self in a dangerous situation to engage with it.

Looking at western culture (the only one I feel confident speaking about), we are still bound by puritanical values that were imposed as control mechanisms but managed to sneak their way into a set of cultural norms as a moral code despite their actual value to us not being evaluated and actively selected.

>>samtho+(OP)
> Looking at western culture

It's not a "western culture" thing. Many western cultures do, sure. Many eastern cultures do as well. Not literally puritanism and that specific history, but very similar kinds of thoughts and ideas.

>>samtho+(OP)
There’s still value in curbing many of these vices. Smoking is a good example. You can smoke, but you can’t advertise cigarettes, you need to be an adult to buy them, you can’t smoke them indoors, and we’ve all been subjected to propaganda from birth about how smoking is bad for you. If you have all of that in place (which took decades for tobacco and now people are trying to ban it in some places), you can have legal vices.

>>samtho+(OP)
It's absolutely not western nor is it puritanical. The value is clear, there is a wide funnel like no other from starting drugs to ending up on the street, etc. Other societies, asian, middle eastern, etc found their way to the exact same values, sometimes enforced much harsher by the state.

This libertarian stance where neither you nor the state should care about how your neighbors lead their lives is the exception, not the norm, and it has its merits, but the cost of this ideology is obvious.