This is pretty core to my philosophy. Most of the threads I've made the last few years have been rooted in this, so I thought I'd allow the entire root of it to be challenged. Here's a recent comment of mine that will give you a perfect idea of what I mean:
I'm trying to replace an entire culture of prohibition with guidance.
This serves as a decent example. Italy and Greece neck and neck for the lowest rates of alcohol-related deaths and alcohol-related disorders in the world while maintaining cultures that introduce their youth to alcohol by the time they're like 12. You teach the youth how to handle their shit, and they'll be able to handle their shit.
Here is another example. The Dutch people's sex education is insanely thorough, starts at 4, turns out the lowest rate of teen pregnancy in the world, and much higher rates of reported satisfactory first experiences, especially for girls (i.e. not feeling pressured). The author of that article wrote an entire book about it called Beyond Birds and Bees.
I believe that this applies to everything. A 15yo boy dies riding an e-bike and all society can think to do is draw a line and write the number 16 on it. Lazy. Require a class. Create jobs.
There were a string of questions about the recently implemented Australian social media ban on r/askreddit, so I went to r/teenagers and searched 'Australia' to see what they thought about it. Read this post, authored by a 14yo. Hear his/her voice. You can consider everything written there part of my own perspective on the matter, but as it pertains specifically to this thread:
First of all, this will raise an entire generation that will be CLUELESS about internet safety.
I could obviously go on forever but I prefer to keep the OP as brief as I can. Looking forward to the discussion.
Edit: To clarify, the Australian social media ban applies only to under 16s.
/u/AccomplishedAir9550 (OP) has awarded 3 delta(s) in this post.
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I would argue that there are three pillars of societal problem solving. All are good, and none are truly dispensible.
The first is education. For many things which can be misused or mishandled, but which have valid societal use, education is a fine tool for addressing risk. Total agreement with you. An example of where education can help a societal issue? Combating racism.
The second is systemic reform. Sometimes people know the right way to Do The Thing, but external systemic pressure incentivizes ignoring education. An example would be oppressive work quotas that are impossible or extremely difficult to meet without ignoring the education and cutting corners. This pillar prevents the other two pillars from being rendered ineffective. For example, poverty is the number 1 predictor of violent crime (a problem we use prohibition to combat). Systemic reform can reduce poverty, and the crime along with it.
The third is prohibition. This is ideal for things whose use inherently harms society or whose risk represents an unacceptable threat to society, such that individuals, even educated ones, cannot be trusted with the privilege. Examples would include access to deadly pathogens, weapons of mass destruction, or many things we criminalize today (such as murder, sexual assault, armed robbery, and the like).
We can debate the balance of each of these, but at the end of the day, all are needed. If you see issues where education trumps prohibition, it's because prohibition is being used to solve a problem more suited to another pillar. That doesn't mean there aren't situations where an outright prohibition is the best solution (there are). It just means someone used a screwdriver on a problem that needed a hammer.
!delta for this post, I really like it. It's served as an expansion of my perspective. I like your three pillars and the way you describe finding a balance between them makes more sense than my initial absolutist take.
Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Talik1978 (39∆).
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Does this apply even to things that are directly causing bad things to happen to other people, rather than things that are risking harm to yourself or others? For example, would murder be better addressed by educating about how bad it is, rather than prohibiting it?
Honestly, I think it would. Reading the OP it was the first thing my brain jumped to as well. I am still in favour of prohibiting murder, but I think the main thing that stops murder is creating a system where people don't feel the need, and part of that is teaching about how life has value and teaching empathy.
I think prohibition is a valuable tool so I wouldn't go so far as OP, but prohibition alone is ineffective. For one thing, murder is illegal pretty much everywhere but murder rates are higher in some areas than others. Why? Educating ourselves on the other factors that affect murder rates is one step towards fixing the issue.
Personally, I know that speeding, looking at my phone and being drunk while driving are all bad, but part of what stops me when I'm tempted to step on the pedal is that there might be a speed camera around the corner. So prohibition helps. But also, knowing that speeding won't make a big difference to my arrival time, and knowing that I'll have less control and may crash also really effective. So education and prohibition are both helpful.
Okay, I'm going to give out one !delta to the person who was the fastest in pointing out that the title is a bit too broad. Can we all move on from that now and discuss the body text?
You'll need to clarify what your stance actually is in order to do that. Other than your overly-broad one, you didn't actually state your stance.
I suppose if I were rewriting the title, it might say something like, 'Education trumps drawing an arbitrary, imaginary age-based line every single time.'
You stated the same thing in the body text, too.
Ignoring that, what exactly is your view, then? That education is better than prohibition in the situations where education is better than prohibition?
Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Salanmander (273∆).
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Education on the motivations, and psychological and social influences for murder would be beneficial, yes.
Edit: I agree that murder should still be illegal. Can't speak for OP
Would it be better than a prohibition on murder?
Do all that stuff, make murder legal, now the situation is better than it was before?
Yes, but I think the point is murder should still be prohibited, even with those more positive influences.
But OP's view is that this kind of Education should replace prohibition. So do we think giving that kind of education but legalising murder is the right way? That is what OP argues since they believe this applies to "every context". OP is arguing for replacement not additional education alone.
Requiring a class to ride an E-Bike is in fact a prohibition on riding an E-Bike without taking the class.
This is true, but I'm not opposed to requiring an education for things that can be dangerous.
Education isn't instantaneous, obviously.
So the context where prohibition makes more sense than education is the one in which the subject is dangerous, like driving, and the education has not yet been completed.
Drug use is another good example. Education is a good thing, and will generally have positive outcomes, but it isn't enough on its own. You can tell a teenager that cannabis is very harmful to brain development before the age of 25 or so, but some will reject that notion, so we need age-based prohibition as well.
Then there are some things that are simply too dangerous. We can try to teach people why they shouldn't build a nuclear bomb, but we still need to prohibit access to the knowledge and materials necessary to do so.
These may seem like details and edge cases, but you said "every single time in every single context".
What were the effects of this in your own youth? Things are different now that it's legal, but I certainly don't remember the prohibitive measures on weed, which were even more stringent then, stopping anyone who wanted to smoke it from getting it. So what did you perceive as a benefit of it?
You're making the common mistake of seeing people circumvent the prohibitions and reading that is it being easily available to anyone who wanted it. That's incorrect. The fact that prohibitions are not 100% effective does not mean they have no value.
I wanted it. I didn't get it because it was illegal, and I didn't want to break the law in that way. It's the same reason you see weed use rise in certain adult groups with legalization. The prohibition was a barrier.
I was kind of this same way about it, but it was still definitely everywhere. Even if I wasn't trying to get it, that didn't stop me from being surrounded by it frequently around friends and at parties where it was easily available thanks to people who were going out of their way to get it.
One consequence I don't think people consider much in the balance of these things or maybe they've just never heard of a situation quite like the one I'm about to present is that when you set the age of these things specifically (alcohol/weed) way up at 21, you force the youth who are determined to get it (which felt like a decently high percentage from what I remember) to interact with people who are 21+.
My sister ended up losing it to a dude who was like 22. She was 14. The only reason she and her friend were hanging out with the guy was because he could buy them booze.
I think we're getting away from your view from the OP and focusing too specifically on weed, so I'd like to shift back to the core principle.
If you don't think age-based drug prohibitions are actually useful, I'm happy to go with one of the other contexts, like time-gated prohibitions until education can be completed and verified, and total prohibitions based on extreme danger even for the well-educated.
What do you think about those?
Should we have legal driving ages even though people will do it underage? What about a legal age to buy cigarettes? The idea of people will do it anyway is not a justification for not having the prohibition.
In this case, a legal age of 25 would be better for the youth who use cannabis to have less impact later in life.
do ya think the two things are at odds with each other or we should just emphasize education more than we do
I believe that they certainly can be at ends with each other. When you draw a line, tell the youth not to do something, and then just kind of cross your fingers and hope they listen, there seems to be this attitude that we don't need to educate them about it because they're not allowed to do it, which is the exact point the 14yo was making.
I think this is simplifying cause and effect and ignoring massive cultural factors. Specifically in addiction, Italians don’t have the lowest rate of alcohol dependence, it’s mostly Muslim countries because they do almost the exact opposite of what you’re saying is the solution.
Rates of alcohol dependence across the world differ but have one thing in common - it’s always higher among men. Are men being “left out” of this education in Greece and Italy? Or is it the case there are much larger cultural, biological, and personal reasons that men have higher rates?
Can you show this? Is there data for this somewhere?
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/alcoholism-by-country
One of many sources you could find, there is not much alcohol use at all in Muslim countries especially compared to Western Europe
I don’t think this is an argument worth pursuing for two main reasons
Mainly because the prohibition of substances/behaviors by a government can only be effective if it is of a strongly authoritarian nature, which would not be in line with the majority of Western culture. Secondly, in the eyes of a person, a rule imposed from above could hold them back for a certain period of time for fear of the consequences, but as soon as they find themselves in a position where they cannot suffer repercussions, they will have no incentive to hold back.
An example of the second point from personal experience is the fact that many of my friends that came from Muslim countries to Europe got blackout drunk and a couple went to the hospital far more often then my European friends, while this is just personal experience from what I’ve heard it is a common occurrence, so it is most likely a trend.
I’d agree personally but as you’re admitting this only works through the lens of Western culture. Obviously problematic from our perspective, but if we’re wrong and they’re right then it’s a much different issue. Still OPs point is that we can measure success by current incidence rates, which I disagree with.
Yeah I see your point, as you have said this works through the lens of western culture, so from a purely statistical and short term pov limited to the citizen that reside in the country probably prohibition works great in countries that have authoritarian governments or strong religious foundation, which weren’t discarded by ops question so I think your reply is on point, however I definitely believe this type of prohibition won’t benefit citizens of most (western/first world) countries irl
Yeah, I've basically lived this. I didn't really drink often before 21 which I guess you can say is prohibition working, but anyone who had been paying attention might have been able to catch that I had a problem even before I could buy it myself as every time I drank I would drink a lot.
I've sense gotten sober, but when I finally turned 21 it opened the floodgates. I could finally get alcohol whenever I felt like and it turned out that whenever I felt like was all the time.
It seems like using an Italy/Greece type of approach would make it easier to catch that type of problem sooner and nip it in the bud more easily.
Welp, !delta for sure on that one. I'd be curious what measures they're taking to prohibit it. Is it punishable by death or something?
It’s against the law for Muslims in many Muslim countries to drink alcohol because of their religion.
Ah. Punishable by eternal damnation, then.
Good ol sharia law
Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/DrSpaceman575 (2∆).
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Every single context?
Anyone who takes a class on the dangers of fent can go use it?
What about drunk driving, should we just teach people how to do it better?
There has to be some level of prohibition, regardless of education.
We give out derivatives of this shit at the pharmacy (Oxy as an example). An education certainly couldn't hurt and I'm not sure if the typically extremely brief pharmacist/patient consultations are cutting it. We get lines of addicts out the door the exact day each month we're allowed to distribute more.
Education is excellent when the goal is helping people manage a risk they will inevitably encounter, or enabling informed consent in morally neutral activities. However, you make such a recklessly sweeping assertion by saying:
That is such a ridiculously absolutist statement that your otherwise sensible case falls apart immediately.
How about murder? Murder is irreversible harm to a non-consenting party. The downside is infinite for the victim, finite for the actor. Education cannot deter crimes of passion, desperation, psychopathy, or ideology.
Insider trading? You think educating people about the risks of insider trading is more effective than prohibiting insider trading?
Tax evasion? You think educating people about why tax evasion harms society as a whole is more effective than imposing actual penalties for tax evasion? I'd like to see the AB test on that.
Because I actually agree with you when it comes to pure societal behavioral, I'm going to go the cheap route and nitpick your "every single time in every single context" and point out actual criminal behavior with actual victims.
Assault (in all its variations), theft, fraud. You can certainly educate on the consequences (and immorality) of such behaviors, but they also must be banned.
To extend this further into less of a nitpicky topic, there are also other morality-based (read: religious-based) norms that education doesn't always achieve the desired goal in any timely fashion, such as women's rights in islamic countries.
But it all falls under the same axiom. It's not enough to educate; Certain practices that do not respect the rights of others must be banned.
I mostly agree with you, OP. The only thing I would say about the Australia thing is that unlike alcohol and sex & the other examples social media is ever changing & changes fast. Kids can only be educated about the dangers after the harm has been caused & we’ve learnt enough to teach the next lot who have now moved on to different platforms with different dangers.
Another example would be US gun reform. Because of the availability of guns, Americans are probably the most educated on guns & their dangers but also the most harmed by them. Misuse of guns is prohibited through criminalisation but availability & social conditions trumps this. I’m in the uk, we don’t learn about guns here because they’re not readily available but the chances of being shot walking down the street here are slim to none despite our lack of education on them.
‘Prohibition’ though lack of availability/removal is different to prohibition through criminalisation (which is what many societies do with laws around alcohol/sex etc). My understanding is that Australia is removing access for under 16s which makes this a different set of circumstances.
I’m failing to see how your logic extends to everything. You’ve provided two examples, but fail to provide reasoning on how you’re able to extrapolate to everything.
Two datapoints isn’t enough to generalize to everything in the world.
So you've said that your title is too broad and don't want people to focus on that, but then can you be specific about exactly the sorts of things you mean your view to encompass? From your examples, I'm guessing you effectively mean something like Mill's liberty principle where folks should be allowed to do anything they want as long as it doesn't harm any other person (self-harm being fine)?
I agree that the more stigma we remove from a subject, the less taboo it becomes and the easier it is to address, which often reduces problems. However, some things fall outside what can realistically be taught at certain ages. We introduce math in kindergarten, but only at a very basic level, because a five year old is not capable of understanding quantum physics. The same principle applies elsewhere. For topics like sex education, starting early and progressing gradually can be effective. For something as complex and pervasive as the internet, that approach is far less reliable.
During the teenage years, the brain is still developing, particularly in areas related to judgment and long term consequences. Anyone who has tried to explain to a teenager why associating with the wrong people can put them in danger has seen how limited that understanding can be. The internet has many subtle and deeply influential effects on the human psyche that are still not well understood, and as a society we are only beginning to study them.
Before the internet, social feedback was limited and direct. If you stayed out late or reacted badly, your emotional responses had to be balanced against a small, real world group of family and friends. You had to face people in person and take responsibility for your behavior, and consequences were immediate and tangible. This reinforced the idea that actions have reactions. The internet has changed that dynamic. If someone reacts poorly online, they are rarely corrected, instead, they can always find others across the world who agree with them, reinforcing the belief that their reaction was justified and that everyone else is wrong. The internet ends up being a echo chamber for bad behavior instead of accountability for bad behavior.
They can also block dissenting voices and avoid accountability entirely, even while directing hostility at people they will never have to face.
This is not something that can be fully addressed through instruction alone. To navigate the internet responsibly, a person needs a level of emotional regulation and perspective that typically requires a more fully developed brain. Teenagers, by definition, have not yet reached that stage.
If hard drugs were not criminalized where I live I would already be dead by now. Whenever I drink heavy amounts of alcohol or take some drugs, my brain just switches mode and will do anything to get as fucked up as possible. It’s a very common trope for people with adhd.
And I’m not talking about getting more alcohol, that’s not enough. I mean mixes of mephedrone with mdma, nitrous, ketamine, lsd, all taken on the same night. The only thing that has always saved me was that I finally ran out of shit and just had to take benzo and go to sleep.
There was once a service that provided drugs whenever you wanted (basically what we would have if there was no criminalization). I kept ordering shit until my body gave up and I got seizures and almost died. I did drugs again after a year and same story, except this time that service didn’t respond despite multiple attempts and I just went to sleep.
The urge is completely gone when you wake-up the next day. No urge to order anything (it takes a few days to arrive).
As I said, very common in adhd and very similar to DID - dissociative identity disorder. Feels like someone else entirely takes over and he just doesn’t give a fuck about anything except getting as high as possible even at the cost of death.
So yeah, no prohibition policy doesn’t work for people with adhd as one of the defining features of adhd according to DSM5 is severe impulsivity.
There are a few places where outright prohibition has solved problems education couldn't.
For example, ingestion of lead. When paint was leaded, there were educational campaigns warning people against the consequwnces of using lead paint. But people kept on using it, and people, mostly kids, kept on getting sick and dying from eating lead paint chips, because people just didn't trust the warnings enough. And banning lead paint solved the problem.
Do you believe in gun control, OP? Because as it stands, you'd be arguing here that people shouldn't ever be prohibited from owning firearms of any kinds, that they should only be educated about it.
Education is a prophylactic, but it’s only useful for people with strong impulse control. Prohibition gets everyone.
The same could be said for strict punishments like the death penalty. One would think that a punishment that strong would deter people from acting in the proscribed manner, but studies have shown it doesn’t really do anything. Telling them the info beforehand doesn’t actually change the behavior significantly enough.
So education of tax evasion is better than prohibiting tax evasion?
Lets be honest here. Everyone know that taxes are good. They fund the police, firefigther, street, lamps, school, and many more. However, you and I would be rather not pay tax right? And if somehow not paying tax is not a crime, you wouldnt be paying tax anymore right?
Ok, but how about education AND prohibition?
Can you explain how you think your education over prohibition point works in the following cases:
Rape: by your logic we should decriminalise it so it isn't prohibited and should educate someone instead? Please explain.
Sexual Abuse of Children: see point above.
Are you still sure your educate but do not prohibit philosophy is approriate for "every single context"?
You want murder to be legal?