this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2025
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Since you don't care about human life, maybe money matters more to you: Seatbelts decrease auto insurance costs.
I absolutely care about human life, and it's sad and senseless when people kill themselves with stupid choices.
I just respect their humanity enough to not impose my will on theirs, when their decisions don't cause significant enough externalities for the people around them to justify treating them as less human than I see myself.
And legal penalties for high BMI decreases health insurance costs, which are much, much higher than car insurance costs (as well as preventing far more needless deaths, since you're such a humanitarian).
Why is freedom of choice valid in the more egregious cost scenario but not less egregious one?
I get that this is an onion-derived convo and I see the wishy-washy word there too.
But if I were to swerve and miss a child running into the street and run into your car instead, I will have assumed safety features would protect you when instead I've just killed someone not wearing a seatbelt. Humans are seriously squishy.
Absolutely - we make decisions every day on the assumption that the people around us are making smart decisions as well, and that's not always the case, and other people sometimes suffer negative outcomes as a result of those stupid, but legal, decisions.
And when you've come to the point where you're having to fabricate the kind of incredibly specific scenario you're proposing to get even a hypothetical externality, you're probably dealing with a situation that should be left to individual choice.
I'd also be completely fine with immunity to charges of manslaughter against anyone hit while not wearing a seatbelt, or something of that nature (and significantly higher insurance rates too, of course).
I understand the counter-argument that you'd probably suffer increased trauma in this incredibly specific scenario that you've concocted, but death is a fact of life, and with how far removed we are in this scenario from the likelihood of direct negative outcomes, I still feel that the agency to make one's own choices far outweighs any hypothetical marginal social good of legislation.