Volenta wrote:I'm not advocating the practices that lead these extremely bad consequences, like drunk driving and binge drinking.
I was trying to say the general form of the argument is just not good.
You are supporting those things, though, just slightly indirectly if you don't do them yourself. You're advocating a product and practice of entertainment that is inherently prone to abuse.
I've witnessed nearly every drinker I've known well drive over the limit. It's extremely common (self reporting is poor, but apparently 9% of people admit to it). They try to be responsible and don't do it often, but they do it. They just get a little lucky. It's a game of roulette, even with otherwise fairly responsible people.
Even if you never ever do it, you're supporting a product and social habit that inherently leads to it. There's a
very strong causal link there, and there's no clear way to prevent it. Again, that's not even to mention the other consequences.
Volenta wrote:
but then you can't scale the advocacy up and interpret it as a support for all meat…
That's what I'm saying. You can only advocate things that are actually harmless, or helpful, not that are potentially harmless. Only once you realize the harmlessness (and demonstrate it through sound evidence) is there a reason to advocate it.
This has not been done with alcohol. The practice is inherently prone to abuse, and public information intervention has only been marginally successful at reducing it. Supporting the practice of alcohol as entertainment is inherently problematic.
A better analogy is diamonds.
You can come up with all of the certification processes you want, but it doesn't work. Yes, by taking extraordinary precautions that nobody actually takes (or even can take since sellers don't track this stuff), maybe YOU can find a diamond that is sourced from Canada, and you can actually track it and ensure that it's not a conflict diamond. But buying diamonds still increases the demand on a fungible market and increases the cost, fueling conflict by funding rebel groups in Africa, destabilizing the region, and causing all kinds of death and destruction and human suffering.
Volenta wrote:
Moderate drinking isn't a fantasy. Millions of people are able to do exactly this.
And they drive drunk occasionally, and usually get lucky, and sometimes don't. And of the people they introduce to alcohol through its social nature, how many of them do too, or even if they themselves do not? And how many end up not drinking in moderation?
Another good analogy is religion, which is also a very social practice. Moderate religion is a thing, surely. But so is extremism, and it's insulated, supported, and finds justification in the overwhelming population around them that validate the core beliefs upon which the extremism is founded.
Sam Harris explains it pretty well:
http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Secular ... rates.aspx
The same is essentially true of alcohol culture. Like religion, it's something inherently prone to abuse and extremism in a certain portion of the population which scales with usage/adherence.
Unless moderates are actively working against their extremists to suppress and control them, they're doing more harm than good by simply counting themselves as a member of the faith and validating those basic beliefs.
Same with drinking.
I'm not saying you can't make up for the harm you do by participating in the culture of alcohol. Offering drunk strangers rides when it looks like they'll get behind a wheel now and then probably more than makes up for the influence you have.
That's in the nature of consequentialism -- you can do a little extra good to make up for the bad you do, and as a consequence your net existence isn't a bad in the world.
Nobody's perfect. We all do bad things. Any of us who are honest even do bad things knowingly. But hopefully we make up for them somehow.
The point is that the act of participation in the alcohol culture is a little bit of weight against that proverbial cosmic feather that answers the question of whether you were a good person in life.
Volenta wrote:
Weren't you the one who said that wearing fake leather isn't something we should avoid, irrespective of the promoting effects it has on the usage of actual animal skins?
I said I don't think it has any meaningful promotional effect for most people. I also said if you're a celebrity/model/etc. then it probably does, and in those cases it would be wrong.
Wearing something that looks like leather isn't quite the contagious social currency that alcohol is, and in circles where fashion is a big thing, people very vocally ask each other about brands, etc. so would know it was faux (and probably why- cruelty free).
Your status as a drinker or not has a much more meaningful effect on those around you than your wearing leather or not, which most people literally wouldn't even notice (and, Crucially, if they do, for drinking it is the same product- Alcohol, not Synthehol). Unless you wore something really fashionable, or were a trend setter of some kind.
Volenta wrote:When I'm drinking a beer that others can see me do, I'm not promoting drunk driving or excessive drinking, and I'm always explicitly stating this when the conversation asks for it.
Virtually nobody is promoting those things. Moderate Muslims, for example, even decry (not that they do anything about it) the actions of the terrorists. But they are promoting the mindset and general practice behind it by affirming the core ideology and creating these insulated communities, unless they do a lot more than just talk the talk to stand against it.
Volenta wrote:
It's immoral in pretty much the same sense that it's immoral to buy your products at a supermarket that also sells meat.
No... When you buy vegan products, they restock those. It's a supermarket.
That's more like going to a restaurant that serves alcohol and not buying alcohol. The restaurant isn't the problem, nor is the supermarket, it's the product itself that is the problem.
Volenta wrote:You're helping them with continuing to exist, which increase the chance (only a tiny bit) of people doing immoral things. I don't think you can hold me accountable for those people. We all have our own responsibility to make choices from there on.
You're accountable for all of the negative consequences of your actions, or at least in a statistical sense. Ignoring consequences arbitrarily doesn't seem consistent. When those consequences are very small, you have to weigh those consequences in a cost-benefit analysis.
What are the benefits of alcohol, and what are the costs?
These are the things that need to be considered. Sometimes something is so incredibly small that taking measures to avoid it costs more than just ignoring it and making up for it elsewhere. The thing was still wrong, but it was rational to do it. Other things are more easily avoidable, or cost substantially more.
If the benefits of alcohol outweigh the costs in truth, considering opportunity costs, then it should be advocated.
If the benefits of alcohol are less than the costs, then it should be discouraged.
Volenta wrote:The same state of mind that alcohol and other drugs are able to create, no.
Why is that particular altered state essential, or beneficial more so than other means of arriving at social intimacy?
