[TheBranca18]

It doesn't. Not sure of the official name but Appeal to Worse fallacies are some of the worst I've come across. The smoking example is pretty much one of the worst ones considering what we're talking about anyway. Smoking has gone through a ton of regulation over the years. And is already rarer and rarer.

Perhaps scientists should stop finding a vaccine for Zika since it isn't as bad as cancer and other deadly diseases.

I think the actual issue is trusting the American government with our privacy. They've shown repeatedly that they don't care about it through various initiatives.

[talmand]

The only time it makes sense to me is when the minor issue gets an unreasonable amount of attention based on emotions rather than science to the point that other issues that may actually be far more important are ignored. Such as shifting limited resources from the major issue to the minor issue for little gain.

Then there's the problem of the minor issue involving a law that can be used for revenue generation.

[LeifCarrotson]

When evaluating a proposed regulation, which will decrease individual liberty to promote safety, it's absolutely necessary to ask if the exchange is an effective sacrifice.

Life and Liberty are core human rights. Sometimes a little of one must be exchanged to preserve the other. And let me be clear that I am not suggesting that we surrender all liberty to maximize safety, nor the other way around. Instead, reasonable compromises must be made.

Unfortunately, while there are units of lives to measure the one, there are no units on liberty.

But exchanging what is subjectively lots of liberty through warrantless phone searches to save a few lives is not a good choice when you also have the option to exchange a little liberty to save more lives through legislation on smoking. Yes, we could do both, but the former is a poor value and the latter is much more effective, making it not a false Appeal to Worse but an honest value comparison. And while there isn't a strictly limited budget on liberty before we reach "1984" - we can always inch fractionally closer - the same decision-making must be made.

Similar value comparisons must be made on other fronts as well: we have spent a lot of money and are very certain find that an overal cure for cancer is going to be hard to find, but it could definitely cure many people - say a 20% chance (sorry, my pessimism is showing through) that a cure can be found for $100B that will save 600,000 US deaths a year (and going back to the earlier topic, 150,000 of those are due to lung cancer...), or 5% that an additional $100B will find a cure. Contrast that to spending less than $100M for the first studies of Zika. Treatment is probably a vaccine, well understood as a tool to combat viruses, likely a just a few years out. Stopping Zika will save millions of lives. Or, alternatively, hundreds of millions of people suffer from malaria and millions die, and known treatments exist, and it's been eradicated in the US and Europe.

What would you spend the most money and liberty on? For some reason, our current answers are cancer and digital surveillance.