One of the issues that comes around from time to time is the question of how to reconcile liberty with risky behavior.  A little while ago in these parts, it came up in a discussion of driving, and how some of us are fond of driving very fast indeed, and not just at racetracks.  But the issue comes up in all kinds of different contexts, so lets give it a think.

First, because my brain is wired like a lawyer’s, is the question of what we mean by “risky behavior”.  Risky behavior is something that could, to some degree of probability, cause some degree of harm to others, but hasn’t yet (at least as done by you).

I’ll distinguish it from “harmful behavior”, which is something that has actually caused harm to someone else.  Risky behavior becomes harmful behavior when the probability of harm collapses to 1.

I’ll also make the distinction between behavior that could cause direct harm to others, and behavior that is only likely to cause direct harm to you.  The example here might be playing Russian Roulette in the privacy of your own home.  Even if you blowing your own head off will have bad knock-on effects to other people, such as those who, against all odds, care for you, those knock-on effects are what I consider indirect harm.  Indirect harm is its own can of worms, and I think we have a good-sized can of worms even without it.

Of course, evaluating risk and whether to accept it can’t really be done without also evaluating benefit.  This raises the question of “benefit to who?” and also the questions of “how much, how likely, and how direct, is the benefit?”

Let’s acknowledge the slippery slope here (which is hard to miss in our current safety-obsessed society).  Once you start down the road of saying “Yes, there are some kinds of risky behavior that society should penalize or prohibit”, that road can get pretty steep and icy.  However, saying “We should never do anything that could start us down a slippery slope that I don’t like the bottom of”, is a recipe for paralysis reminiscent of the Precautionary Principle.  Consider laws against murder.  They currently have an exemption for self-defense, but there is no reason why starting down the road of “Thou shalt not kill” can’t get sufficiently steep and slippery that the exception gets increasingly narrow and eventually read out of the rule.  We can all think of examples of just that happening in Current Day, right?  That doesn’t mean murder shouldn’t be illegal, though.

So, to get back to the seed of this post, what about driving at very high speeds on public roads.  Is it risky?  I think it is – it has some degree of probability, cause some degree of harm to others.  And the degrees of probability and of harm are higher than driving at “normal” speeds.  So, who benefits, and how?  I think one benefit is mostly if not entirely to the driver – its fun.  Another is to the driver and any passengers – they save time.  I’m not really coming up with any others.

At this point, we want to compare risk and benefit, right?   And we run smack into a difficulty:  the benefit is impossible to quantify.  Not only that, while the risk may be quantifiable, I think the full picture of harm is difficult-to-impossible to quantify, as it involves serious injury or death.  While these can be monetized (and indeed trial lawyers literally have books that attribute values to death and various kinds of injury), because the benefit can’t be, monetizing the risk/harm doesn’t really help us compare them.

Another difficulty, at least for me, raises its head at this point.  Namely, balancing risk and benefit makes it very easy to fall into utilitarianism, which is a moral philosophy that I’m just not crazy about.  Utilitarianism is either a way to ignore the moral component of actions or is a way to smuggle in moral values under the veneer of dispassionate analysis.  Regardless, that’s beyond the scope of this post, so we’ll just plant a warning flag here and move on.

So, (enforced) speed limits, yes or no?  We have a subjective benefit limited to the driver (and any passengers), and a non-zero risk of potentially serious harm to others.  Sounds like a yes, right?  We can make exceptions for long open stretches of road, if you like, but in general, it’s to see why people might not want to accept the risk (or perhaps, have it forced on them) of encountering cars on the road going 50, 60, 80 miles per hour faster than everyone else.  This of course raises the question what speed limits there should be, which is another rabbit hole, that points to the perennial issue of what the rules will be and who will write them.

This is a general problem with living in a society with rules, but it may be more acute when talking about risk acceptance/management, because this, as anyone who has seriously engaged in it can tell you, gets very subjective very fast.  One can quantify the hell out of both of the inputs to risk (harm and probability) and on the benefit side, but these are all projections, the mere raw material to be processed by our inherently intuitive response to risk acceptance and rejection.

We can all think of risks that we would rather not have other people impose on us, and risks that we don’t particularly mind having other people impose on us.  Some risks have benefits for third parties (namely, us) that we might think make it worthwhile.  Some risks may be so remote or the impact so trivial that we just don’t care.  But everyone, I think its safe to say, will have a different list.

And the community that we live in has something to do with that.  If, for example, you drive in Germany, you can expect a higher caliber of driver on the autobahn, which makes the risk of high-speed driving (considerably?) less, and easier to accept.

The complications and rabbit holes multiply.  Where I think this all lands is in a pretty unsatisfying place, but it’s an unsatisfying place a lot more people need to get a lot more comfortable with:

There is no one answer.  It depends.  There is a balance to be struck.

People seem to hate that, which is profoundly immature.  Our world as social animals is made up of balances to be struck, landing spots to be found that are tolerable to most even if few think they are ideal.  Some portion of our current malaise is the refusal to accept this truth, which drives our culture war and rampant safetyism, to name two.  Like it or not, we live in communities, and a community must have a set of shared beliefs about how to approach the world and each other.

Moralistic righteousness can be corrosive to this, especially as it tends to turn into a competition in escalation.  Too many people believe “Doing right ain’t got no end,” and not enough ask “Can’t we all just get along?”  Hyper-rationalists (ahem) can fall into their own version of this, where being right, and even moreso, being seen as right, becomes an overriding impulse, even when there is little riding on being right, and the cost is relationships of far more value.

I believe in some form of “deep libertarianism”, that you can’t have a small state unless you have a society that has no need for anything more because it has a deep well of shared beliefs (one of which needs to be a suspicion of the state).  As a society navigates what risks to accept and what risks to prohibit, that well of shared beliefs will make the inherently subjective decision easier to reach.  A society that is run top-down by a punitive, even carceral, state will have every such issue elevated to a point of contention, the kind of conflict that the state will need to resolve.  And the state’s reflex will always be to ban it, to refuse to accept the risk.  It may even be that one gauge of how healthy a society is, is at what level risk acceptance/prohibition occurs – at the social/civil level or at the state level?