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it looks like the primary problem with using this language is tactical, politicophile.
strangely enough, in reading through your posts what i get mostly is a kind of aesthetic attraction for this kind of language---the claims you make could easily be transposed into a more neutral kind of terminology, but would i suppose loose some of their emphatic character--it is almost like stripping out the moral terminology would leave you having to type the word "really" alot of times as in "i really really really really do not like smoking." (which is, of course, your prerogative).
reverse version of the same thing: i do not see how your use of this language functions except as an intensifier in this context.
the argument you outline in the op works from a generalization of the notion of harm, which you follow with a series of riffs that presuppose agreement on the premise (that you can generalize the category of harm as you do to include cigarette smoking, then move from harm to the notion of a social harm, then to the question of law, then to a series of examples of other laws in other domains that regulate social harm, etc.)
but the static generated by the language itself effectively prevents any such agreement from happening.
so the tactical problem apparently wins out.
an alternative might have been to pose the op more as a question about the place of the discourse of morality or ethics in this kind of debate.
i like to pretend to myself that i am good at this kind of defusing of potentially volatile debates, but i think roachboy's actions in politics show that to be a nice internal fantasy that i, the person who pulls roachboy's strings, prefers to have around. like a stuffed bear or a chia pet.
happy birthday, btw.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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