{"id":41,"date":"2006-04-19T11:28:00","date_gmt":"2006-04-19T15:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=41"},"modified":"2006-04-19T11:28:00","modified_gmt":"2006-04-19T15:28:00","slug":"passive-smoking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=41","title":{"rendered":"Passive smoking"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s quite common to see people in wheelchairs smoking at the entrance to hospitals, Usually they are in wheelchairs because they have had feet or toes amputated as a result of diabetes; if there is one thing guaranteed to worsen their poor circulation, it is cigarettes. Yet still they smoke. But the prize for acute suicide by cigarette in hospital goes to Philip Hoe,<\/a> 60, who lit up on a fire escape at Doncaster Royal Infirmary, where he was being treated for a skin condition. The treatment, in his case, had been to swathe him in a mixture of paraffin and kerosene wax. He had been told this was inflammable, but he lit up anyway. He died a few hours later in the specialist burns unit of a Sheffield hospital.<\/p>\n\n

But even this, however criminally stupid, couldn’t really be said to have harmed anyone else. A real cynic might point out that if you have to die, you might as well do so in a way that gives pleasure to millions of people all around the world. If he’d burned the whole hospital down, that would have been damage from passive smoking. It might have been one of the first recorded instances of harm done by other people’s cigarettes.<\/p>\n\n

I don’t smoke myself any longer, and I don’t miss it more than seven days a week, but the argument that you should give up because it harms other people has always seemed to me completely bogus medically. It’s certainly much less damaging to be around smokers than to be around drunks. Dominic Lawson claims to have published a study proving this, when he was editor of the Sunday Telegraph.<\/em><\/p>\n\n

On the other hand, even if he and I are right – especially if we’re right – the assault on "passive smoking" does demonstrate that anti-smoking seems a moral cause: we feel, instinctively, that morals must be binding on everyone. If smoking were treated as merely unhealthy, we would not mind other people doing it any more than we mind tem drinking. But but because it is treated as immoral,<\/em> the anti-smoker is not satisfied not to be smoking themselves. They want a world where no one smokes and enjoys it. This makes perfect sense if moral sentiments are in fact an adaptation to group living, as Herbert Gintis argues. The great problem with altruism, in a Darwinian world, is to stop others taking advantage of you by not behaving as you do. The smoker, if they are violating a moral rule, is threatening everyone who doesn’t; and all the fuss about "passive smoking" is merely dramatising this intuition.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s quite common to see people in wheelchairs smoking at the entrance to hospitals, Usually they are in wheelchairs because they have had feet or toes amputated as a result of diabetes; if there is one thing guaranteed to worsen … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}