Mandatory Seat Belts (Reprise)
Most of us would insist not. Yet that is the justification offered for imposing mandatory seat belt use on the drivers and passengers of New Hampshire.
If we grant the validity of Foster’s justifications for a policy of mandating behavior that is good for us or prohibiting behavior that is bad for us, what other similar policies might we see in the future? Will we prohibit smoking? Eating high-fat foods? Both are currently the subject of activism from particularly zealous advocates of public health. Will we again prohibit the drinking of alcoholic beverages? That certainly takes a personal and social toll. What about the bearing of children out of wedlock? That has been shown to be statistically and sensibly correlated with poverty, poor health, and low life opportunity for both mothers and children, and it costs society a bundle. Should we mandate the use of condoms during sexual intercourse? That would decrease the risk of contracting AIDS. Perhaps we should outlaw SUVs because we all pay for the incremental pollution and depletion of energy reserves that they cause. Perhaps we should ban guns – that argument has been made for decades.
If these seem impossible they shouldn’t. The principle that government can and should prohibit behavior solely because it might, under some circumstance, create personal harm and social cost can be easily applied to any one of those scenarios, and to hundreds more besides. If we grant the principle then the only thing that prevents extending it in those and other ways is fickle political will.
The fact is that we should all wear seat belts. We really should, and the excuses people make for not doing so are pretty pathetic and the costs of doing so are vanishingly small. We also all should refrain from smoking (either tobacco or marijuana), and should never drink alcohol (but should drink red wine to protect our hearts), and should eat vegetables seven times a week, and should avoid fatty foods, and should exercise regularly, and should watch our weights. According to some people we should all attend church regularly for the good of our souls; others claim that requires rather a life of ascetism and servitude. I’m sure I’d be better off if I got enough sleep instead of using those nocturnal hours to broaden my horizons by reading – or perhaps not if you consider my intellectual and spiritual well-being of importance equal to my material well-being. My father always insisted that bicycles and cars could not coexist safely, and that people therefore should refrain from riding bicycles on the public thoroughfares. Or perhaps they should refrain from driving cars instead, because bicycles give us more exercise and less pollution. If we disagree over which it is, does the fact that 51% (or 80%) of the people agree with you make you right?
There are things we all could do to improve one or another aspect of our lives. Sometimes those things are inexpensive; sometimes they are not, and have deleterious consequences for other aspects of our lives; sometimes those consequences are things that only we, individually, can fully and truly appreciate, things that would seem petty or inconsequential to others. And sometimes such improvement would benefit society by making us healthier or by making us better citizens (or more pliant subjects) or by making us friendlier to our neighbors or by making us more attentive to the needs of humanity.
But is that enough to mandate them? By what tenet of our founding political philosophy, and under what article of our Constitution, is the government granted authority to enforce such things? And should we really trust it with that authority?
I’m not sure I do. Do you?
© Copyright 2005, Augustus P. Lowell