I work in disability support. People in my industry fail to understand the distinction between duty of care and dignity of risk. When I go home after work I can choose to drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes. My clients who are disabled are able to make decisions including smoking and drinking, not to mention smoking pot or watching porn. It is disgusting to intrude on someone else’s life and shit your own values all over them.
I don’t drink or smoke but that is me. My clients can drink or smoke or whatever based on their own choices and my job is not to force them to do things I want them to do so they meet my moral standards.
My job is to support them in deciding what matters to them and then help them figure out how to achieve those goals and to support them in enacting that plan.
The moment I start deciding what is best for them is the moment I have dehumanised them and made them lesser. I see it all the time but my responsibility is to treat my clients as human beings first and foremost. If a support worker treated me the way some of my clients have been treated there would have been a stabbing.
Like you, I tend to feel that in general, people need to stop trying to force people to live the way they think is best. Unless there is a very real, very serious impact on others (“I enjoy driving through town while firing a machine gun randomly out my car windows”), people should be permitted to choose how to live as far as possible. Flip side is that they gotta accept potential negative consequences of doing so. Obviously, there’s gonna be some line to draw on what consitutes “seriously affecting others”, and there’s going to be different people who have different positions on where that line should be. Does maybe spreading disease because you’re not wearing a facemask during a pandemic count? What about others breathing sidestream smoke from a cigarette smoker in a restaurant? But I tend towards a position that society should generally be less-restrictive on what people do as long as the harm is to themselves.
However.
I would also point out that in some areas, this comes up because someone is receiving some form of aid. Take food stamps. Those are designed to make it easy to obtain food, but hard to obtain alcohol. In that case, the aid is being provided by someone else. I think that it’s reasonable for those other people to say “I am willing to buy you food, but I don’t want to fund your alcohol habit. I should have the ability to make that decision.” That is, they chose to provide food aid because food is a necessity, but alcohol isn’t.
I think that there’s a qualitative difference between saying “I don’t want to pay to buy someone else alcohol” and “I want to pass a law prohibiting someone from consuming alcohol that they’ve bought themselves.”
And who decides what is or is not a necessity? Is entertainment necessary? How much? Are certain shows OK but others not? Should they be restricted to the shows that you like? What about choice? Dignity? Autonomy?
When we lessen others we inherently lessen ourselves. We have a moral duty to consider the harm from both our actions and our inactions. If you choose to not restrict someone else self determine and live their own life it is no less morally wrong than if you took that person and imprisoned them. From a position of power it is tempting to think “I don’t like this thing therefore others should not have it” but follow it through to the logical conclusion. You are binding your neighbour with the very same chains that will land upon you given time.
**It is better to be an enemy of chains than judicious in their use. **
Sure, for donation, but the original context we are talking about disability services which are government funded through taxation. You don’t get to object to the military budget because you are a pacifist, you have to pay regardless. In that context the person receiving the service is entitled to that service by law. They access the service and the service providers are supposed to do their jobs without personal judgement getting in the way. My issue is with providers not doing their jobs because of this type of judgement. I am not donating my time when working with a client, they (or their allocation) are paying me to work.
How much of your income do you want to give to buy alcohol for strangers? Would you donate a large amount of your money to an aid fund that spent 10%? 50%? 80%? on booze? What about meth? Guns? Nazi memorabilia? What it’s only 5% on Nazi stuff, 95% on food?
I’m being a dick but they have a fair point in why people put caveats on aid. I’m a fan of UBI to some degree personally, because I think people as a rule should be trusted with making their own decisions, but I do like choosing where the value of labor goes too.
You might personally think it sucks, but it’s how it rolls. I live in a country where social system payments are straight up monetary amounts. If you are eligible to receive aid, you receive it. How you manage your affairs is none of the government’s business .
There are caveats, such as the income management system, but for the most part that’s actually opt-in and they’re reviewing junking the entire concept as it was originally introduced very very badly by an administration that attempted to leverage vulnerable groups
My taxpayer dollars go to support people doing their peopley things as they choose, as adults. And I’m actually ok with that. It’s a safety net, not a leash. Poverty isn’t a moral position
I mean, sure. But we were talking about disabled people, and disabled people possibly can’t buy anything for themselves for reasons out of their control. You’re essentially imposing a different standard of life on them just based on that.
And maybe that’s not wrong - you’re not the only one that takes this stance - but it does deserve pointing out.
(And with, like, porn it doesn’t even apply. That’s mostly for free)
I disagree with restricting alcohol for food stamps. In fact, it shouldn’t be food stamps, it should be cash. When you attach all these requirements and drug testing and restrictions you are destroying the autonomy of the person you are claiming to help.
It is like with housing. Many of the housing programs available require drug tests, job seeking documentation, separating men and women, and so on. In some cases this can make a little sense, given that men are much more likely than women to be domestic abusers, but other cases make less sense. If someone uses drugs to cope with their life and then you offer housing only if they stop the thing that is helping them cope they will not be helped, they will be harmed. They will not be able to take the housing and end up off the street in a secure place building a life, they will be still on the street and still on the drugs.
If I go and work a job and get paid should my employer be able to say “I’m fine with paying you so you can have housing and food, but alcohol? No, I don’t want to pay for alcohol”? This would be insane. Your employer choosing what you can do with your money outside of work hours is authoritarian nonsense and yet when it comes to welfare or charity people think it is fine. I disagree vehemently.
If I give you money to alleviate your suffering who am I to decide how you employ that? I want you to have more money because it is fungible, you can do almost anything with money, so you can make choices. I want you to have more power to effect your life, not less.
I assume you are an American given your reference to food stamps. Where is the American spirit of independence? Of self determination? Of rugged individualism? It seems quite dead in the modern era of state capture and authoritarian oligarchy. It is a loss and a tragedy.
Statistically speaking the rate of abuse from men to their partners is extremely high. I don’t know how to manage this best but it seems likely that at least some of the situations of abuse would be helped by having spaces without men in them. Does that mean we should force men and women apart? No. But how to manage that I will concede is a difficult problem.
In many cases of abuse the abuser keeps the victim close and prevents any outside contact as much as possible. Having the moment without the abuser nearby can provide an opportunity to escape which seems to provide some significant utility. On the other hand someone who is supported by their partner and actually does derive benefit from that would suffer from the separation, not to mention the suffering of the men who would theoretically be separated from their partners and kids.
I don’t have the answer, but I do see it as fundamentally different from the self destructive behaviour situation. Someone who is disabled is no less able to make bad choices. If I could be a tradie, say an electrician, and I can go to the pub after work and smoke a pack of cigarettes then the same should apply to a disabled person. Is it the best decision? No. But it is theirs.
In the same way an abused partner should be able to make the decision to stay in the abusive relationship, whether that be a good or had choice. That said, paths out from abusive relationships and from smoking should both be made available as much as is reasonably possible.
In Australia, the country I live in, roughly 1 in 4 women have experienced intimate partner violence since age 15. For men this is 1 in 14. 23% compared to 7.3% to be clear. That means that about 3 times as many women have experienced IPV than men. This includes LGBT relationships, so abusive men who abuse other men would show up as part of the men being abused statistic, as with women abusing women.
As for the harm from drug addicts and alcohol use/abuse, where does the harm come from? Surely if I am in my own home and I take a drug and while high I stay at home I am not harming anyone? If I were to hurt my partner or other people in my house that would be a possible route for harm to occur. But if I don’t drive drunk or high and I don’t hurt those immediately around me how does harm happen?
I would suggest that much of the harm around drugs comes from the criminal enterprises involved with production and supply, crime committed to fund addictive drug use, and over policing coming from having already had one interaction with police leading to petty things becoming criminal due to that interaction. Surely there are other harms, but think about how much of this would be alleviated by legalising the less harmful drugs and decriminalising the rest. The legalised ones can be produced under regulation and made safer to consume as well as being made affordable. This would kill the criminal systems around drug production and supply. For the decriminalised ones it would shift the lower towards the user, allowing users to have power over dealers and have a way out of those fairly toxic relationships.
But again, we can always talk about some other harm out there and ignore the case at hand. I would rather close the conversation with a simple statement. We do have a problem with men abusing women which is larger than all other forms of abuse. We would all benefit from this being reduced. And lastly when managing something like a shelter it is reasonable to take a few extra steps to provide a way out for women who are particularly vulnerable at that time. Should we offer that for men? Of course. But is it going to be used far more by women? Yes.
You’re confusing “way too women experience partner violence sometime in their lives” with “all men are violent criminals and need to be separated”.
While yes, a lot of drug related violence is caused by the drug war, the harm for drugs is easy to see from with a significant portion of the homeless, theft and ciolence as the worst addicts fall out of society, and ruined wasted lives. Harm for alcoholism is much more obvious and easy to see, but I’d also add all the victims of drunk driving to it’s harm
I’m not saying all men are abusers or harmful and therefore need to be separated, not at all. If my partner and I were to utilise a service it would not offend me to have a short conversation with her, away from me, to ensure she could say things without me hearing them. Having a safe way out of abusive relationships is the key predictor of whether women will stay or leave. In the 70s women couldn’t get a credit card or bank account in their name so couldn’t leave, but once that changed a whole bunch of women left their husbands and escaped to improve their lives. In a situation like a temporary housing shelter it would be ideal to have that conversation and offer a way out. Is sex segregation the best way of doing this? No. Is it better than nothing? Depending on the rate of intimate partner violence, maybe? I don’t know for sure, but I am open to the possibility that it is better to have that be a space without men.
And yes, most of the harms of alcohol are socially accepted to some degree and thus hidden, so it isn’t well studied and understood. I think we agree that most of the harm comes from the legal context of drug use, not from the drugs themselves as such. I mean paracetamol can cause some harms but it is balanced by the benefit and we make a rational decision to use it. I think the same applies to weed and MDMA, but all of the social and legal things around those two generate tonnes of harm and obfuscate the actual issue.
I want a government to run a test of many different approaches in different areas, matched to reduce confounding, so we can see what actually works. Should weed be legalised or decriminalised? What works better? Which measures do we care most about? Same for all the other issues. Run the studies with agreement in the legislation that if the study shows X works we will do X. It would mean we decide in advance our response to the outcomes of the studies and then work from that basis going forward without regard to current party in office or political pressures.
I work in disability support. People in my industry fail to understand the distinction between duty of care and dignity of risk. When I go home after work I can choose to drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes. My clients who are disabled are able to make decisions including smoking and drinking, not to mention smoking pot or watching porn. It is disgusting to intrude on someone else’s life and shit your own values all over them.
I don’t drink or smoke but that is me. My clients can drink or smoke or whatever based on their own choices and my job is not to force them to do things I want them to do so they meet my moral standards.
My job is to support them in deciding what matters to them and then help them figure out how to achieve those goals and to support them in enacting that plan.
The moment I start deciding what is best for them is the moment I have dehumanised them and made them lesser. I see it all the time but my responsibility is to treat my clients as human beings first and foremost. If a support worker treated me the way some of my clients have been treated there would have been a stabbing.
RIP those disabled people who’s carers won’t even let them nut, and who definitely don’t have anywhere else to go.
Disabled people are so often treated like children and it just sucks.
Like you, I tend to feel that in general, people need to stop trying to force people to live the way they think is best. Unless there is a very real, very serious impact on others (“I enjoy driving through town while firing a machine gun randomly out my car windows”), people should be permitted to choose how to live as far as possible. Flip side is that they gotta accept potential negative consequences of doing so. Obviously, there’s gonna be some line to draw on what consitutes “seriously affecting others”, and there’s going to be different people who have different positions on where that line should be. Does maybe spreading disease because you’re not wearing a facemask during a pandemic count? What about others breathing sidestream smoke from a cigarette smoker in a restaurant? But I tend towards a position that society should generally be less-restrictive on what people do as long as the harm is to themselves.
However.
I would also point out that in some areas, this comes up because someone is receiving some form of aid. Take food stamps. Those are designed to make it easy to obtain food, but hard to obtain alcohol. In that case, the aid is being provided by someone else. I think that it’s reasonable for those other people to say “I am willing to buy you food, but I don’t want to fund your alcohol habit. I should have the ability to make that decision.” That is, they chose to provide food aid because food is a necessity, but alcohol isn’t.
I think that there’s a qualitative difference between saying “I don’t want to pay to buy someone else alcohol” and “I want to pass a law prohibiting someone from consuming alcohol that they’ve bought themselves.”
Nope. Don’t start putting caveats on aid.
You can’t buy comforts. You will live the life i think you should be accustomed to. It’s infantilising and controlling
It’s more like - I’ll help with the necessities to keep you alive. Anything extra is on you. We all have our vices but why should I pay for yours
And who decides what is or is not a necessity? Is entertainment necessary? How much? Are certain shows OK but others not? Should they be restricted to the shows that you like? What about choice? Dignity? Autonomy?
When we lessen others we inherently lessen ourselves. We have a moral duty to consider the harm from both our actions and our inactions. If you choose to not restrict someone else self determine and live their own life it is no less morally wrong than if you took that person and imprisoned them. From a position of power it is tempting to think “I don’t like this thing therefore others should not have it” but follow it through to the logical conclusion. You are binding your neighbour with the very same chains that will land upon you given time.
**It is better to be an enemy of chains than judicious in their use. **
The person donating decides what they wish to donate.
Sure, for donation, but the original context we are talking about disability services which are government funded through taxation. You don’t get to object to the military budget because you are a pacifist, you have to pay regardless. In that context the person receiving the service is entitled to that service by law. They access the service and the service providers are supposed to do their jobs without personal judgement getting in the way. My issue is with providers not doing their jobs because of this type of judgement. I am not donating my time when working with a client, they (or their allocation) are paying me to work.
How much of your income do you want to give to buy alcohol for strangers? Would you donate a large amount of your money to an aid fund that spent 10%? 50%? 80%? on booze? What about meth? Guns? Nazi memorabilia? What it’s only 5% on Nazi stuff, 95% on food?
I’m being a dick but they have a fair point in why people put caveats on aid. I’m a fan of UBI to some degree personally, because I think people as a rule should be trusted with making their own decisions, but I do like choosing where the value of labor goes too.
You might personally think it sucks, but it’s how it rolls. I live in a country where social system payments are straight up monetary amounts. If you are eligible to receive aid, you receive it. How you manage your affairs is none of the government’s business .
There are caveats, such as the income management system, but for the most part that’s actually opt-in and they’re reviewing junking the entire concept as it was originally introduced very very badly by an administration that attempted to leverage vulnerable groups
My taxpayer dollars go to support people doing their peopley things as they choose, as adults. And I’m actually ok with that. It’s a safety net, not a leash. Poverty isn’t a moral position
I mean, sure. But we were talking about disabled people, and disabled people possibly can’t buy anything for themselves for reasons out of their control. You’re essentially imposing a different standard of life on them just based on that.
And maybe that’s not wrong - you’re not the only one that takes this stance - but it does deserve pointing out.
(And with, like, porn it doesn’t even apply. That’s mostly for free)
I disagree with restricting alcohol for food stamps. In fact, it shouldn’t be food stamps, it should be cash. When you attach all these requirements and drug testing and restrictions you are destroying the autonomy of the person you are claiming to help.
It is like with housing. Many of the housing programs available require drug tests, job seeking documentation, separating men and women, and so on. In some cases this can make a little sense, given that men are much more likely than women to be domestic abusers, but other cases make less sense. If someone uses drugs to cope with their life and then you offer housing only if they stop the thing that is helping them cope they will not be helped, they will be harmed. They will not be able to take the housing and end up off the street in a secure place building a life, they will be still on the street and still on the drugs.
If I go and work a job and get paid should my employer be able to say “I’m fine with paying you so you can have housing and food, but alcohol? No, I don’t want to pay for alcohol”? This would be insane. Your employer choosing what you can do with your money outside of work hours is authoritarian nonsense and yet when it comes to welfare or charity people think it is fine. I disagree vehemently.
If I give you money to alleviate your suffering who am I to decide how you employ that? I want you to have more money because it is fungible, you can do almost anything with money, so you can make choices. I want you to have more power to effect your life, not less.
I assume you are an American given your reference to food stamps. Where is the American spirit of independence? Of self determination? Of rugged individualism? It seems quite dead in the modern era of state capture and authoritarian oligarchy. It is a loss and a tragedy.
How are you distinguishing:
From
Statistically speaking the rate of abuse from men to their partners is extremely high. I don’t know how to manage this best but it seems likely that at least some of the situations of abuse would be helped by having spaces without men in them. Does that mean we should force men and women apart? No. But how to manage that I will concede is a difficult problem.
In many cases of abuse the abuser keeps the victim close and prevents any outside contact as much as possible. Having the moment without the abuser nearby can provide an opportunity to escape which seems to provide some significant utility. On the other hand someone who is supported by their partner and actually does derive benefit from that would suffer from the separation, not to mention the suffering of the men who would theoretically be separated from their partners and kids.
I don’t have the answer, but I do see it as fundamentally different from the self destructive behaviour situation. Someone who is disabled is no less able to make bad choices. If I could be a tradie, say an electrician, and I can go to the pub after work and smoke a pack of cigarettes then the same should apply to a disabled person. Is it the best decision? No. But it is theirs.
In the same way an abused partner should be able to make the decision to stay in the abusive relationship, whether that be a good or had choice. That said, paths out from abusive relationships and from smoking should both be made available as much as is reasonably possible.
No. Higher than the other direction but hardly extreme
Statistically speaking the harm from drug adficts and alcohol is is much higher
In Australia, the country I live in, roughly 1 in 4 women have experienced intimate partner violence since age 15. For men this is 1 in 14. 23% compared to 7.3% to be clear. That means that about 3 times as many women have experienced IPV than men. This includes LGBT relationships, so abusive men who abuse other men would show up as part of the men being abused statistic, as with women abusing women.
As for the harm from drug addicts and alcohol use/abuse, where does the harm come from? Surely if I am in my own home and I take a drug and while high I stay at home I am not harming anyone? If I were to hurt my partner or other people in my house that would be a possible route for harm to occur. But if I don’t drive drunk or high and I don’t hurt those immediately around me how does harm happen?
I would suggest that much of the harm around drugs comes from the criminal enterprises involved with production and supply, crime committed to fund addictive drug use, and over policing coming from having already had one interaction with police leading to petty things becoming criminal due to that interaction. Surely there are other harms, but think about how much of this would be alleviated by legalising the less harmful drugs and decriminalising the rest. The legalised ones can be produced under regulation and made safer to consume as well as being made affordable. This would kill the criminal systems around drug production and supply. For the decriminalised ones it would shift the lower towards the user, allowing users to have power over dealers and have a way out of those fairly toxic relationships.
But again, we can always talk about some other harm out there and ignore the case at hand. I would rather close the conversation with a simple statement. We do have a problem with men abusing women which is larger than all other forms of abuse. We would all benefit from this being reduced. And lastly when managing something like a shelter it is reasonable to take a few extra steps to provide a way out for women who are particularly vulnerable at that time. Should we offer that for men? Of course. But is it going to be used far more by women? Yes.
You’re confusing “way too women experience partner violence sometime in their lives” with “all men are violent criminals and need to be separated”.
While yes, a lot of drug related violence is caused by the drug war, the harm for drugs is easy to see from with a significant portion of the homeless, theft and ciolence as the worst addicts fall out of society, and ruined wasted lives. Harm for alcoholism is much more obvious and easy to see, but I’d also add all the victims of drunk driving to it’s harm
I’m not saying all men are abusers or harmful and therefore need to be separated, not at all. If my partner and I were to utilise a service it would not offend me to have a short conversation with her, away from me, to ensure she could say things without me hearing them. Having a safe way out of abusive relationships is the key predictor of whether women will stay or leave. In the 70s women couldn’t get a credit card or bank account in their name so couldn’t leave, but once that changed a whole bunch of women left their husbands and escaped to improve their lives. In a situation like a temporary housing shelter it would be ideal to have that conversation and offer a way out. Is sex segregation the best way of doing this? No. Is it better than nothing? Depending on the rate of intimate partner violence, maybe? I don’t know for sure, but I am open to the possibility that it is better to have that be a space without men.
And yes, most of the harms of alcohol are socially accepted to some degree and thus hidden, so it isn’t well studied and understood. I think we agree that most of the harm comes from the legal context of drug use, not from the drugs themselves as such. I mean paracetamol can cause some harms but it is balanced by the benefit and we make a rational decision to use it. I think the same applies to weed and MDMA, but all of the social and legal things around those two generate tonnes of harm and obfuscate the actual issue.
I want a government to run a test of many different approaches in different areas, matched to reduce confounding, so we can see what actually works. Should weed be legalised or decriminalised? What works better? Which measures do we care most about? Same for all the other issues. Run the studies with agreement in the legislation that if the study shows X works we will do X. It would mean we decide in advance our response to the outcomes of the studies and then work from that basis going forward without regard to current party in office or political pressures.
Patient autonomy!