Smoking Licenses - A step too far?

An advisory body to the government has recommended that in order to purchase cigarettes, you should need a ’smoking license’, which you have to fill in a long and arduous form in order to get. The rationale being that if this were the case, fewer people would smoke.

There’s been a fair bit of comment, claiming that such a proposal is wrong, and wrong due to its attack on personal liberty. For a decent post arguing just that, see Lib-Dem Jonny Wright over at Hug a Hoodie.

I’m sceptical that if this proposal is wrong, it’s wrong because it’s an affront to the idea that we can do what we want to our own bodies (provided we don’t harm others etc). Firstly, this will not prevent people from smoking. If you fill in the relevent forms, nobody will be able to stop you from buying your pack of 20. So, at most the government is changing the cost/benefit analyis of smoking (adding an extra cost of form-filling) rather than outright banning it. The cost/benefit analysis of buying particular things is changed often by the government (via indirect taxation etc), and more often still by other free agents (when a free agent chooses to buy something, they contribute to a market mechanism that over time will lead to prices responding). So, it can’t be wrong because it alters the cost/benefit calculus, unless these other actions which alter such a calculus are wrong too. Perhaps I’ve missed the point here though, and what’s doing the work in Jonny’s argument is that it’s changing the cost/benefit analysis in a particularly unreasonable way. If that’s the case, we need to hear an additional argument as to why this licensing system is unreasonable. Prima facie, I don’t think that it is (though I’m open to persuasion). It’s not like they’re imposing a cost a huge punitive fine , or a period in gaol. Clearly, such huge costs would be unreasonable, and not at all like imposing an extra tax.

It seems quite intuitive that such a proposal is merely a “nannying attitude that tries to use legislation to save people from themselves”, and that thus this is a bad thing. But, we already have paternalistic legislation in the UK, and what’s more, some of it is pretty obviously a good thing (eg. forcing people to wear seatbelts in cars). By not wearing a seatbelt when I drive, the only person I’m a danger to is myself. Yet despite that, few people would claim that the government’s forcing me to wear a seatbelt is wrong. Indeed, it seems pretty sensible - sometimes people make poor decisions, and when the results of these decisions are particularly grave (for the person taking them) it’s understandable that the government take action to prevent these decisions.

Of course, it doesn’t follow from any of this that this proposal isn’t wrong for a different reason. In fact, I think it could be. For, presumably their will have to be some sort of database with all the details on of those who have smoking licenses (how else could a system of licenses that have to be renewed be maintained?), and I’m not sure that I’m OK with. If drugs were legalised, and there was a similar licensing scheme for say, the purchase of heroin, if I was a heroin user I probably wouldn’t want the government poking its nose in and putting my details on some central computer, as if taking heroin (in my fictional example) or smoking (in this real world example) is a crime.

I think that this is a difficult issue - I’m not entirely sure if I oppose or support this scheme, but I think it isn’t going to be settled decisively by an appeal to Mill’s harm principle.