This will be kind of preachy. I'm sure this sort of thing has been said countless times in the past, but it's worth repeating. [[Note: after writing this, I found a much better expression of much better, but related thoughts in the first few pages of Velleman's 'A Right to Self-Termination?', which are followed by an argument that such thoughts aren't really at the heart of the matter. While being less interesting, my paper is shorter and talks about death rays.]]

Very few of the smokers I've known (and, to be sure, it hasn't been a representative group) denied that they were putting themselves at pretty serious risks. There are still plenty of people to be convinced about that, but those aren't the people I'm aiming this at.

No - most of the smokers I've known made efforts to confine the damage to themselves. The noise about second-hand smoking has done a lot of work. There are also still plenty of people who need to have it hammered into their heads not to make others breath their smoke, but those also aren't the people I'm aiming this at.

What I have in mind is a thought many considerate smokers have that runs something like, "I know it's not good for me, but I'm not hurting anyone else, and I have a right to screw my own health over if I want." It may or may not be true that we have rights like that (I'm certainly inclined to think we have at least some), but the real problem comes from the fact that the second clause is only in present tense.

Compare the following: "I'm turning my eyes into deathrays down here in my basement. I'm not hurting anyone else, and I have a right to take away my eyesight if I want." The problem with that doing that sort of thing is that it's likely you're going to come out of the basement at some point. And at that point, it's likely you will start hurting other people, though not in the way you hurt yourself.

The analogy rests on what it's like for the friends and family of a smoker to find out that he or she has cancer, and then watch what follows. Nobody except a true hermit can smoke without there being a real risk of this. So nobody except a hermit can be truly considerate while being a smoker.

So: if you smoke, stop.


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