[Pica_soO]

I would think it only fair to put the burden of the health damage on the company who sells addictive products.

If you sell cigarettes and a customer looses part of the lung, you pay or behave to prevent. If you sell alcohol and a customer drives a car in a crowd, you pay or behave to prevent. If you are a narco and sell crack, you pay for the results. The problem is not the unknown problems with those substances, its the fact that the producers are detached from the consequences of their actions.

[15charlimit]

By that logic, no individual is responsible for anything they ever do because just about everything is "addictive" or "habit forming" in some way. Your suggestion is terrible for a number of reasons, but primarily due to the shirking of personal responsibility that it promotes.

Should Hershey be required to pay medical costs for morbidly obese individuals because they eat a dozen chocolate bars a day? Sugar is a highly addictive substance, after all.

Should automobile manufacturers be required to pay the medical bills of every individual injured in a high-speed accident because driving very fast generally causes an adrenaline rush, which is addictive?

Stop making it someone else's problem. Start casting blame where it needs to be - on the individual(s).

Nobody is forced to start smoking, or start drinking, or start eating sweets, or drive recklessly, or to do this or that. I'm tired of the popular trend of infantilization that offloads the burden of one's own actions onto society/industry/government.

[Pica_soO]

That personal responsibility thing works out great doesn't it. https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statisti...

I think it would be a great start if we started to differentiate- some humans are capeable of this, but others are not. To just leave them to there suffering because they had a "choosing-chance" is just wrong. No pr-opaganda can explain the facts on the ground away, sorry.

[15charlimit]

Right and wrong are not objective units of measure, please don't be insulting by trying to state "facts" regarding something being "right" or "wrong".

As far as "leaving them to suffer" goes, there are plenty of ways for people to get help with just about every health condition and disorder that's lifestyle related. They simply require that the individual actually take responsibility for their own existence and reach out.

Who makes the decision that someone is "not capable" of caring for themselves, and at what level? Do you force them into a special program? Do you take away all of their other individual rights at the same time? Who decides what aspects of personal responsibility apply to which people? That's a very slippery, dangerous slope to tread. Smarter people than you, or I, haven't been able to come up with "the right" answer.

I'll err on the side of personal agency, thanks.

[nitrogen]

Nobody is forced to manufacture addictive products, advertise them in misleading ways, pay celebrities and filmmakers to use them conspicuously, or buy prominent product placement everywhere a person trying to quit has to go, either.

You are introducing irrelevant other ideas to distract from the core of the OP's argument, which while a bit excessive IMO, warrants an honest discussion, not hyperbolic overreaction.

[Tenhundfeld]

Ugh, what a nasty little, finger-pointing, stone-casting society you seem to desire. Is there anything that you'd blame on society/industry/government, or is it always 100% the individual's fault?

[15charlimit]

Who said anything about throwing stones, or pointing fingers? Nothing in my post indicates that help should be refused to individuals who make poor decisions and then try to recover from them, just that, in a free society, the onus should not be solely on the head of "a higher authority" (govt, industry, etc) to be responsible for doing so.

The world you seem to desire would make cellphone manufacturers and service providers fully liable for accidents that happen when an idiot is using their phone and gets in a car wreck.

The individual chose to get into a car, and drive somewhere, and use a cellphone, all at the same time. This despite the fact that it is made abundantly clear that doing so impairs driving ability much like alcohol would, via advertisement and public notice and safety publications, in the news, and even by state law in some cases. You cannot prevent people from doing stupid things. You can, however, make them bear the repercussions of those stupid decisions.

The world you seem to desire is one where every device and tool is covered in thick layers of bubble wrap and warning labels and dozen-pages-thick usage contracts to indemnify the manufacturer.

The world you seem to desire is one where no criminal is punished for their actions because they were just "a victim of their environment and don't know how to do anything else".

And that is something that I cannot and will not agree with, ever, on a fundamental level. Personal freedom comes with personal responsibility.

If there's a tool designed in such a way that using it in an accidentally-slightly-incorrect manner will electrocute the person using it - sure, hold the manufacturer responsible.

But if there's a tool that does exactly what it's designed to do, but someone uses it for a completely different purpose in a completely different way than it was designed to do, and it electrocutes them - that's on the user's head.

[Tenhundfeld]

> Start casting blame where it needs to be - on the individual(s).

Those are your words, my friend. Maybe I misinterpreted them. I didn't say individuals are 0% responsible. It's a mix, right?. Individuals deserve blame but also support. Companies deserve protection from inane lawsuits but also bear some responsibility.

> But if there's a tool that does exactly what it's designed to do, but someone uses it for a completely different purpose in a completely different way than it was designed to do, and it electrocutes them - that's on the user's head.

Sure. That doesn't apply to tobacco or sugar. We're using it in exactly the way the sellers intended. I don't know why you're stuck on the reckless driving example, when it doesn't really pertain to the general context of the article.

> I'm tired of the popular trend of infantilization that offloads the burden of one's own actions onto society/industry/government.

Sure. But my question stands. Do you think the society/industry/government ever bears >0% of the responsibility?

[15charlimit]

> Sure. That doesn't apply to tobacco or sugar. We're using it in exactly the way the sellers intended.

Moderate tobacco use, in some forms, moderately increases cancer risk. Moderate sugar consumption doesn't overtly increase the risk of heart disease or obesity.

Overuse of most tobacco products dramatically increases your cancer risk, just as overuse of sugar dramatically increases its associated risks.

My point stands that nobody is forcing you to start smoking tobacco or eating large volumes of sugar. Why do you want to push all of the responsibility away from someone who willingly undertakes an optional activity with known risks?

It's not like every widely-available tobacco product hasn't had 50% or more of its packaging plastered with "warning, cancer!" labels for the last 30-odd years.

Should tobacco companies be held responsible for objectively-false advertising and marketing? Yeah, if memory serves they got beat up pretty well for that by the government many years ago. When was the last time you saw an ad for cigarettes on TV? It's been quite a long time since I have. That problem has already been taken care of.

With sugars you might be able to make an argument about a lack of in-your-face warnings - but why should those be required? Moderate consumption is fine. Excessive consumption is where the problem starts kicking in. Various government entities are already kicking up a stink about sugar-heavy products, so I wouldn't be surprised if we got such warning labels in the future anyway.

[Tenhundfeld]

> Why do you want to push all of the responsibility away from someone who willingly undertakes an optional activity with known risks?

Where did I say or even imply that? I just said it's less than 100% – but more 0%. You're obviously quite passionate and/or angry about something, some injustice you've seen or something. I feel like we're talking past each other and you want to have an argument just for the sake of arguing on the Internet. I'm not super interested in that.

I hope you have a wonderful rest of the day. Maybe we'll meet in person one day and debate the issue in a higher bandwidth medium. Cheers.

[Pica_soO]

Good thing we don't write those apps to be addictive. Good thing we all have clean consciousness - else we might end up compulsively venting guilt by propagating aggressive libertarian ideology's. Good things.

I program Robots for a living, and you know what - im guilty of those peoples lives going to hell when they are let go. They are not guilty that they can not retrain at 40. They are not to blame that there endurance might not be high enough to get a degree. Its also not the CEO who employs me to do my job, which i just do. I could quit my job anytime. Im guilty and thus must work hard, to even that guilt out. I try my best to promote basic income and unshaming unemployment in my home country. Individual responsibility, suddenly sounds less happy, does it? Sounds like hard work and shame.

You arguments sounds suspiciously like shirking responsibility's by idealizing other people. Imagine if a whole society would do that, what a catastrophe, could you even call that a society anymore?

[mobilefriendly]

At least with tobacco in the U.S., there was a serious effort along these lines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Master_Settlement_Agre...