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Originally Posted by filtherton
Here's the thing. You assert that you have rights as a smoker and that business owners have rights as business owners. What you ignore are the rights of people who aren't business owners or smokers.
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See, I dispute that he's doing that. I don't see any actual rights violations in a restaurant owner allowing people to smoke on his private property. No one has a right to the products of a smoke-free restaurant. Hell, no one has a right to the products of a restaurant, period. (Other than restaurant owners, of course.)
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By any definition that you've offered the rights of these groups are equivalent in scope and magnitude. Your right to smoke in a bar and a bar owner's right to allow smoking in a bar, and a person's right to go to a bar and not smell like smoke are all based on the same legal footing. There's nothing remotely inherent about any of them.
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The former rights are based upon the right to property. The latter right is based upon... nothing. There's nothing equal about the right to modify your own property and the 'right' to modify someone else's property without permission.
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The fact that you used to be able to engage in a certain activity doesn't make that activity inherently something you should always be able to do.
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No, but the fact that non-smokers are free to avoid the harm caused by said activity
does make it something that you should always be able to do.
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At some point you have to recognize that you live in a place where, if the stars are in proper alignment, people have the ability to participate in the process of making laws. Sometimes these people will make laws that you disagree with and that's just how it goes.
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Well, sure. It's not like there's never been an unjust law before. But this thread has basically become a debate concerning the quality of this law. We get that it's a law, the question is this: is it a
good law? Still looks like a solid
no to me.
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Your "rights" as a smoker depend on how much smoking society wants to put up with and once society decides to tell you no you don't have the right anymore. That's just how it is.
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If society tells me that I don't have the right to smoke on my own property, then that's not society getting rid of the right, that's society violating the right. The right's still there. The right to property and free movement wasn't partially nonexistent when slavery was legal, it was partially violated (no, I'm not comparing the magnitudes, that would be silly).
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You could say that you want the right to smoke in bars back, but that assertion really holds no more weight than the assertion that i want the right to go to a bar and not deal with smoke.
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Sure it does. A lot more weight. One's based in the right to property, the other's based in nothing.