> I find it perplexing anyone thinks legalized recreational substance use would actually cause more harm than drug enforcement does, even aside from the metaphysical harm of having your freedom reduced.
People who think this don't have rational arguments. They are generally deep in anti-drug dogma and have no understanding of the harms that enforcement causes. They have not stopped to think about the issue at all and usually are just regurgitating what others have told them. Sadly this is still by far the most common point of view, despite being irrational and uninformed. It's preventing a lot of medicines from being studied and put to use, not just cannabis (psilocybin, LSD, and MDMA come to mind as some with current evidence for medical efficacy). Not to mention a ton of other problems related to the enforcement itself and its impact on society.
Two rational people cannot end up at s different conclusion. If they do, one of them has faulty logic, or incorrect priors.
People against drugs mostly tend to have wildly inaccurate priors. Sort of like creationists. If you have a terrible understanding of evolution ("monkeys randomly turned into people, fish randomly got legs and started walking just because ") then you'll end up at an invalid conclusion. Likewise, if you believe the very inaccurate drug info out there, your conclusions will be wrong.
Less often, someone has good beliefs on the actual drugs, but poor beliefs on personal freedom, or faulty logic on the drug war.
"Two rational people cannot end up at [a] different conclusion"
Wow. I couldn't disagree more. There's so much ambiguity in this world of ours that, even given a universally agreed upon definition of "rational" (which usually is a stand-in for "people whose thinking I approve of") there is enormous room for differing conclusions. The belief that "rational" people must come to same conclusions seems like a basis for transferring the argument from the issues to the people. I.e. if you're "rational" and not coming to the same conclusions as I am then there must be something wrong with you.
"More specifically, if two people are genuine Bayesian rationalists with common priors, and if they each have common knowledge of their individual posteriors, then their posteriors must be equal."
But yes, essentially, even colloquially, if we're both rational and coming to different conclusions, then either one of is making a mistake, or one of has a incorrect assumption. In the case of there being no correct assumption ("red is better color than green"), then feel free to call it "different" assumptions.
In that case "rationality" basically means following the laws of probability theory given an existing statistical model. However, the process of arriving at the statistical model to begin with is fraught with areas of potential disagreement. The promises of that agreement theorem are actually pretty narrow and essentially reduce down to "math is consistent with itself".
You're not wrong. But it should be explicitly noted and let people reduce their arguments to "my priors say an invisible force has a terminal value of consuming drugs being bad".
Then instead of saying how people disagree, we can just note that people have flawed beliefs. Otherwise talking about agreement somehow seems like there's a problem with the correct side, that hey "both are valid" and so on.
Denying rationality to the opposition is pretty much the definition of an 'ad hominem' attack.
There's a wonderful paper of the fundamental difference between the values of people who self-label as 'conservative' and those who self-label as 'liberal'. It has to do with how they prioritize values such as personal liberty, respect for institutions, adherence to authority etc. Both value them; but they prioritize them completely differently.
So, that aristotlean view above may call everything black and white, but actual people start from different premises. So they reach different conclusions.
Its good to respect other's culture including their premises on how we organize our society. Instead of just calling them idiots or that they have 'poor beliefs'. They just don't match yours.
Its good because you can understand them, and have a hope of arguing effectively with them. Instead of disaffecting them by calling them names. Which feels good for a moment, but just balls up any chances of a dialog.
Incomplete info or different value systems are a case of incorrect priors. If "incorrect priors" bothers you for the difference between "People should always be productive" versus "People should do what they want" then feel free to say "different priors".
I'm willing to be fair when the opposition stops jailing innocent people, using forfeiture to steal, allowing people to suffer needlessly, encouraging drug gangs and violence here and abroad, all while allowing pharmaceutical, tobacco, and alcohol companies to distribute truly deadly substances (not that they shouldn't) thereby undermining their own argument.
People who think this don't have rational arguments. They are generally deep in anti-drug dogma and have no understanding of the harms that enforcement causes. They have not stopped to think about the issue at all and usually are just regurgitating what others have told them. Sadly this is still by far the most common point of view, despite being irrational and uninformed. It's preventing a lot of medicines from being studied and put to use, not just cannabis (psilocybin, LSD, and MDMA come to mind as some with current evidence for medical efficacy). Not to mention a ton of other problems related to the enforcement itself and its impact on society.