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Month: March 2025

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The Vape-o-Gotchi: When Play Meets Health

In 2022, I wrote a piece for The Prindle Post about Palmer Luckey’s insta-kill VR headset. What made Luckey’s custom-made gaming hardware unique from all others currently available on the market was that if you died while playing a game, three explosives embedded within the headset would detonate, destroying your brain and killing you instantly. Thus, the headset bridged the gap between fictional and actual consequences — you die in a game, you die in real life. However, the idea was not for the headset to ever be used, at least not in its current format. Instead, it was more of an object designed to get people thinking. As Luckey noted, “At this point, it is just a piece of office art, a thought-provoking reminder of unexplored avenues in game design.” So, while the headset might invoke echoes of Sword Art Online, in reality, Luckey’s motivations were far less sinister.

In the 2022 piece, I said I might return to some of the questions around consent and Luckey’s legal culpability if someone dies while using his killer headgear; I may still do that, but not here. What I want to do here is look at another unique piece of technology that embodies, in a somewhat troubling way, the intersection between play and, via the intermediary of health, mortality. And while the threat to life and limb is nowhere as immediate as it was with Luckey’s headset, I think this new object’s existence is just as fascinating. I’m talking about the Vape-o-Gotchi.

For those too young to remember, Tamagotchi was a digital pet that took the world by storm in the late 90s/early 00s. The idea was that, within a small, egg-shaped device, you had a little digital animal to raise from an egg to adulthood and eventual death. While the specifics regarding what activities you had to do to keep the critter alive varied depending on the type of creature and what model of Tamagotchi you had, some generic tasks include feeding, watering, playing, cleaning its litter tray, and offering it medicine if it got sick. I cannot explain how popular these things were, how much time they consumed, and how often I had to restart mine because I wouldn’t leave it alone and the thing died of exhaustion.

What makes the Vape-o-Gotchi distinct, however, is that rather than having multiple welfare bars that you need to monitor to ensure your pet is healthy and happy (hunger, thirst, etc.), the Vape-o-Gotchi has only one, its need for vape clouds. The way to meet this need is to use the vape. So, to maintain the Vape-o-Gotchi’s health, you must damage yours.

This absurd creation came into being as part of a New York University “stupid hackathon,” which invites participants to, rather unsurprisingly, make something stupid. As Futurism reports, Rebecca Xun and Lucia Camacho, the people behind the Vape-o-Gotchi’s creation, thought that the idea – which initially made its appearance on Twitter many years ago – fulfilled this criterion and so took it upon themselves to bring the illogical digital pet into being. So, using their respective skills in software and engineering, they set out to bring the oddity into being.

As with Luckey’s VR headset, Xun and Camacho’s bizarre creation raises many philosophical questions, most of which might not be immediately apparent when we think of this object as merely a curiosity; after all, it’s not like they’re selling them in stores. What I want to think about here, however, is not simply an issue inherent in the Vape-o-Gotchi’s existence, but rather, a broader problem for which the Vape-o-Gotchi’s is a solution (or more accurately, represents a broader method of response). That is, by solving the problem of motivation via gamification.

We are all familiar with the problem of motivation. There are a whole host of things that we should do, but we don’t because, well, to put it simply, we cannot be bothered. Think of how often you should have cooked yourself a proper meal but ate junk food instead. How many times you should have sat down to revise a paper but scrolled on your phone. How many times you should have gone to the gym but ended up watching TV. Examples like these ring true for all of us, but such a lack of get-up-and-go isn’t just of interest to us in retrospect (i.e., looking back on an extra hour in bed rather than jogging) but is also of concern for philosophy, specifically in the realm of ethics.

Think about the last time you gave blood. It might be relatively recent (in the past month), longer back (last couple of years), or maybe never. What I think I would be safe in assuming is that you don’t give blood as often as you could. I also think you are probably aware that you should give blood as it is a vital resource used to save lives across the world. You might also be aware (although this isn’t a given) that not enough people give blood, with healthcare providers across the globe suffering blood shortages (see the NHS, for example). These three things together paint the picture of you knowing you should do something, being aware of the impacts of not doing that thing, and yet still not doing it. This example captures a basic fact of morality: knowledge about the good doesn’t always translate into good actions. This problem, the gap between knowing what we should do and doing what we should do, is typically referred to as Akrasia (from the ancient Greek word akrasia), or the weakness of will.

The question, then, is how we solve this weakness. How do we not only provide people with the information needed to make moral judgments but also the psychological tools to motivate the necessary actions that such judgments require? Using the examples above, how do we encourage people to give blood, to go to the gym, or to give up harmful habits like vaping?

There are several options considered by corporations, institutions, and governments alike. One of the most talked about is nudging, where you alter the context in which a person decides so they are more likely to pick the desirable option (i.e., placing hand sanitizers in places of prominence near hospital entrances. Another method, that draws us back to the Vape-o-Gotchi, is gamification. The idea is relatively simple. People tend to enjoy games. Whether it’s solitaire, chess, or Grand Theft Auto, there’s something about the challenge, the problem-solving, and the competitiveness that draws us in. This is despite, from a dispassionate view, that actions we take to play such games are dull. It’s putting a card down, moving a piece from one square to another, or simply pushing a joystick and some buttons. Yet, games are engaging, and gamification is the process of integrating game-like elements into non-game contexts to increase engagement, motivation, and user participation. Via things like badges, point scoring, leaderboards, and rewards, tasks that might initially seem dull or a chore can become a challenge to overcome, with a reward at the end. The most obvious example that comes to mind is learning a language via Duolingo, which uses points, streaks, and rewards.

The Vape-o-Gotchi takes gamification to a strange new place. It transforms vaping from merely an addictive habit to play, for which you’re rewarded by the continued existence of your smoke-dependent digital pet. While the exact mechanics of the Vape-o-Gotchi escape me (i.e., how often do you need to vape to keep it alive?), the idea that one must vape to feed their habit and their companion is undoubtedly interesting.

Yet, despite this interest, I know what you’re thinking: how is this good? People don’t need to be encouraged to vape. It’s addictive enough as is. You’d be right on that count. Indeed, Xun and Camacho originally wanted to create the inverse. They wanted to design a Vape-o-Gotchi that encouraged you not to use it by damaging the digital pet every time you took a hit. The gamification aspect was the same; it was just set in reverse. This idea of encouraging users to disengage from their habit by engaging with their digital pet seems far less objectionable. The reason they chose to make the “evil” version was, as they put it, “it’d be kind of funnier to be evil.” I don’t disagree, but I think there’s something to be said for creating a good version also. And they have said they still plan on doing this.

So, while the Vape-o-Gotchi may not be as immediately fatal as Luckey’s VR headset, there’s much to be said, good and bad, about its use of gamification. Whether the fate of one’s digital pet is enough to halt its owner from using their vape, however, is something about which I’m less convinced. But as a symbol, I think Vape-o-Gotchi is wonderfully imaginative, kind of instructive, and, obviously, so, so stupid.

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Woolly Mice and the Ethics of Cutewashing

Since 2021, biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences has attempted to “de-extinct” a handful of extinct animals through genome editing, including the Tasmanian tiger, the dodo, and, most notably, the woolly mammoth. The company claims that creating new members of these species and reintroducing them to their ancestors’ habitats would help counteract a loss of biodiversity resulting from an increasingly larger number of animal species disappearing every year. The company also claims that the technology developed along the way could help contribute to animal conservation efforts more broadly.

While their goals are lofty, ethical concerns have been raised over Colossal’s projects (some of which I wrote about a few years ago when they first made headlines). For example, one such concern has to do with the allocation of resources: it’s costly and time-consuming to attempt to bring woolly mammoths and other extinct species back to life, and those resources could arguably be better spent protecting species that already exist and are at risk of extinction. Others have expressed concerns about the environmental impact of reintroducing megafauna like mammoths into the wild, especially given the changes that have occurred since they went extinct. Then there is the worry that Colossal Biosciences scientists are messing around with forces that they don’t fully understand or appreciate, and that there could be unforeseen consequences with de-extinction in general.

Although it is debatable how much progress Colossal Biosciences has made in its woolly mammoth project, what they have done is biohacked something undeniably cute along the way: the woolly mouse.

The woolly mouse is the product of taking a regular mouse and splicing its genes with some of those that make the woolly mammoth able to withstand cold temperatures as well as those that make it, well, woolly. The result is a creature that looks like a mouse that might run around an anachronistic caveman house in a cartoon, and has been met with near-universal proclamations of adoration in the news and heart-eye emojis online.

According to Colossal’s cofounder Ben Lamm, “Adorability was one of the unintended consequences that we did not expect.” Intentional or not, it seems to have served as a distraction from those concerns mentioned above. By creating the woolly mouse, Colossal may then be engaged in what we can call cutewashing: creating a distraction from some moral concerns by creating something very cute.

Regardless of its cuteness, the woolly mouse also raises moral problems. We again might be concerned that resources could be better allocated to help preserve existing species: why create a woolly mouse when you could instead attempt to save, for example, the black rhinoceros, pangolin, vaquita, or other critically endangered animals? The woolly mouse also provides no benefit in terms of filling ecological niches, as it was not an animal at all until only recently, and so it is difficult to justify its existence on the grounds of reestablishing lost biodiversity.

Of course, the woolly mouse was not the end goal, but merely a step along the way in Colossal’s larger project. The company has also stated that they do not intend to sell the animal as a pet – although researchers can request them – so there is little risk of them harming the environment. Regardless, we may feel less inclined to be critical of Colossal’s work precisely because they have created something so adorable.

The degree to which a genetically engineered animal is cute should presumably not be a relevant factor when weighing moral considerations around its existence or the actions that led to its creation. But the cuteness of the woolly mouse reminds us that our moral judgments are often intertwined with our affective judgments; in other words, whether we think something is morally wrong or acceptable is often tied up with how we feel about it.

The relationship between our affective judgments and our moral judgments has long been studied by philosophers and psychologists. For example, much has been written on how feelings of disgust influence our judgments that something is morally wrong. One long-established finding is that while many people have no negative reaction to the thought of eating meat, most will feel disgusted by the idea of eating a dead animal if it was their beloved pet. One’s feeling of disgust correlates with a judgment that eating a dead pet is morally wrong, even if one does not judge it immoral to eat other animals. While it’s up for debate how, exactly, feelings of disgust are related to moral approbation, by and large, we tend to judge actions more harshly when we feel disgusted.

The feeling we get when seeing something cute is close to the opposite of disgust, and fittingly seems to have the opposite effect on our moral judgments. That we find things cute at all is hypothesized to be a product of evolution that made sure we protected our offspring – hence why we find babies cute, and why we typically find things that are proportioned in the way that babies are cute, as well. Some researchers have also proposed that our reaction to cute things – the “cuteness response” – has the effect of expanding our “moral circle” around the thing we deem cute. In other words, when we think that something is cute, it is something that we are likely to think is worthy of moral concern.

The cuteness of the woolly mouse may affect our moral judgments insofar as we see it as something with moral worth that is deserving of protection. It is difficult to shake this feeling: the woolly mouse is almost unbearably cute and, if you’re like me, your immediate instinct is that it needs to be protected at all costs. Here, however, is where the risk of cutewashing is most significant: it is easy to overlook some of the more morally questionable acts that are going on behind the scenes if our affective judgments make us less likely to apply strict moral scrutiny.

Of course, a woolly mouse is not a woolly mammoth, and Colossal Biosciences may never actually succeed in bringing the mammoth back to life. If they do, however, we shouldn’t get distracted if it ends up being adorable.

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Banning Candidates in the Name of Democracy

Last year, far-right candidate Calin Georgescu won the first round of the Romanian presidential election. Two days before the runoff election, the Romanian Constitutional Court (similar to the U.S. Supreme Court) declared the original election legally invalid, on the basis of allegations of Russian interference on Georgescu’s behalf. Heightening the crisis, the Romanian Central Election Bureau barred him from re-running — a decision upheld by the court on Tuesday, March 12th. The same bureau has also barred far-right candidate Diana Sosoaca from running, although a third far-right candidate George Simion remains in as of March 16th.

Georgescu and Sosoaca, unsurprisingly, maintain that the behavior by the court and election bureau is anti-democratic. The on-the-ground details matter in Romania, but it raises a more general question: can such “anti-democratic” behavior be justified as necessary for defending democracy?

A tempting starting point is to adopt a rule like, “if the voters are okay with it, it’s okay.” This makes elections the ultimate test of political acceptability. A plausible rationale is that democracies should reflect the will of the people, either directly or through their representatives, and therefore the more they reflect the will of the people, the better and more democratic they are. But this view quickly encounters difficulties.

First, it fails to account for corruption of the democratic process itself. For example, if a politician cheated during an election through hacking voting machines, then voters’ endorsement has little meaning. This conclusion may also hold true in cases of misinformation or other forms of psychological manipulation. Arguably, if voters are sufficiently misinformed about underlying facts, then they cannot actually articulate a political will. By comparison, consider someone consenting to surgery for which a doctor provided a deliberately false description of its risks and benefits — is this really consent?

This suggests that democratic integrity may be a defensible reason to ban a candidate. It seems legitimate to remove people from participating in the democratic process, if they are actively undermining that process. Unfortunately, the precise implementation of this policy is extremely challenging. Something like hacking voting machines is cut and dried; deciding what constitutes misinformation, who decides, and how much misinformation there has to be before the integrity of an election is undermined is much trickier business.

Second, we may think that certain behavior — murder, or theft, or corruption — should, at least for a time, disqualify one from running for office. When someone commits such a deed they typically lose rights and privileges (e.g., the freedom to go where one wishes). Holding political office may simply be another kind of privilege that gets revoked. Again, it may be challenging where precisely to draw the line, but a core idea here is that elections should not be viewed as a substitute for law and justice (for further discussion see my piece on Presidential Immunity).

But most controversial of all is the question of whether someone should be disqualified from the political process not for interfering with electoral integrity, nor for criminality, but because of the particular political positions they hold. An especially extreme example would be a politician whose main campaign promise is to begin a program of genocide on day one. Should this person be allowed to run for office? Should this platform be put to a vote?

A possible grounds for dismissal stems from Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance (previously discussed in the Post). Essentially, if a society is too tolerant of intolerance, then tolerance itself can be lost. Rights, in fact, can secure the very conditions under which the intolerant can grow strong. A party planning to suppress speech has every incentive to take advantage of free speech to get its message out and even to claim its free speech is being suppressed if the government responds. Therefore, a society striving to be tolerant of diverse opinions and beliefs, needs to be at least somewhat intolerant of intolerant opinions – those positions that threaten to undermine the foundations of a free society. Unfortunately, how intolerant of intolerance the tolerant society should be remains a particularly perplexing puzzle. At the center of this difficulty lies a crucial question: Is the commitment to maintaining a tolerant society the kind of thing that should be put to a vote?

The concern here is what philosophers sometimes call the “tyranny of the majority,” previously discussed by Benjamin Rossi. Imagine if 51% of the population could vote to expel or imprison the other 49%. Is this really government by the people? To combat the ability of the majority to define the lives of their fellows, the courts, constitutional minority rights protections, and other democratic institutions and features act as backstops to protect against the majority’s power. Perhaps, holding certain constraints on who can run and what their policies can be are similarly defensible.

Or perhaps the proper way to deal with these concerns is to have constraints on the kinds of policies that can be enacted. A proponent of fundamental human rights, for example, claims that we deserve certain rights and privileges simply on the basis of the kind of thing (a human thing) that we are. Governments don’t “give” us rights; we come into this world already deserving consideration. Plausibly, then, a candidate intending to take away those rights, could be considered illegitimate and barred from participating.

Unfortunately, there is no definitive list of third-rail rights and freedoms which politicians are not allowed to touch. Hopefully, a constitution spells out such freedoms, but it’s typically considered legitimate to modify a constitution. As long as a candidate is committed to this constitutional process, we have no reason to bar their entry. It must be noted, however, that, after granting someone great power, it is not always easy to enforce constraints on what they do with that power. Therefore, there may be a practical argument for removing candidates hostile to others’ rights before they attain office.

As we’ve seen, there are multiple justifiable grounds for potentially barring someone from running for office, from protecting the integrity of the democratic process to protecting minority rights. The implementation however is often exceptionally difficult. Who gets to be the guardian of democracy? Who gets to decide which candidates are offensive, which platforms are objectionable, which values are odious? How could we possibly escape the potential risk of abuse of such king-making power?

Despite these difficulties, we should be clear-eyed about these “who watches the watchmen” concerns. There may be no perfect process to safeguard democracies, no truly neutral party. But there will be nothing left of democracy to protect if we insist on having no safeguard at all.

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The Paris Agreement and Taking Up the Slack

On January 20, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement. Previously, I argued that in doing so, the U.S. is reneging on its moral obligation to combat the climate crisis – an obligation that holds regardless of whether we focus on contribution, benefit, or ability. But what are we to do when someone who should be fixing the problem, doesn’t? Must the rest of us – perhaps those of us who have less of an obligation, or even no obligation at all – do something instead? Put another way: might the rest of us be under an obligation to take up the slack?

Before considering this, it’s important to understand precisely how the global community is attempting to combat the climate crisis. As it stands, the world is on track to be 3.2°C warmer than preindustrial levels by the end of the century. Such an increase would be catastrophic – exposing 600 million people to flooding from rising sea levels, decreasing food production by as much as half, and exponentially increasing the likelihood of severe weather events like droughts and forest fires. This is why nearly all countries decided – via the Paris Agreement – to limit the global average temperature rise to no more than 2°C (with the more lofty goal being to keep this increase below 1.5°C). This is the maximum global temperature rise we can tolerate while avoiding the most catastrophic effect of climate change. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), achieving this with a probability of >66% will require us to keep our total global carbon expenditure below 2900GtCO2.

But here’s the thing: As of the time of writing, we’ve already produced more than 2437GtCO2, leaving us with less than 462GtCO2 – or 16% – remaining. It’s vital, then, that parties to the Paris Agreement do all they can to ensure that we don’t exceed this budget. For its part, the U.S. previously pledged to reduce its emissions to 50% of 2005 levels by 2030.

Of course, all of that’s gone out the window now. President Trump’s executive order will remain in effect until at least the next administration takes office in January 2029. As a result, it’s unlikely that the U.S. will come anywhere near achieving the ambitious goal set under the Biden administration.

What, then, does this mean for the rest of us? If the U.S. has an obligation to reduce its emissions then what happens when they simply refuse to do so? Must other nations now make greater reductions in order to take up the slack? This certainly doesn’t seem fair. But perhaps there’s reason for other countries to do this all the same.

Consider a case where you have the misfortune of participating in a group project at school. Suppose there are five of you in this group – each assigned an even 20% of the workload – and that you will collectively receive a single grade based on the quality of the project taken in its entirety. Suppose that you complete your portion to a high standard, as do three of the other students in your group. Suppose, however, that on the evening prior to submission you discover that the fifth member of your group has completed nothing. As a result, all five of you are likely to receive a failing grade. What would you do?

One solution would be for the four of you who did your part to also take on a share of what your fifth classmate didn’t. Now, this might seem deeply unfair. In fact, the unfairness is two-fold: Firstly, four of you must now do more work than you were assigned. Secondly, your lazy classmate will now receive the benefit of this passing grade, without having made any kind of contribution. But we might argue that fairness isn’t what really matters here. Your reasons for contributing more are simply found in the fact that if you don’t, you’ll suffer bad consequences. Put another way, your reasons for action aren’t necessarily moral, but – rather – prudential.

And perhaps the same is true of climate change. If one country fails to complete their portion of the project, we will all suffer the catastrophic consequences. So even though it might not be fair for other countries to have to cut their emissions further, it might nevertheless be prudentially wise to do so.

What I’ve just described is one example of taking up the slack. We might refer to this as “lateral” slack-taking – where the failure by one member to contribute to a project puts a greater burden on other members (i.e., other countries) to do more. But similar reasoning might also provide us with an argument for vertical slack-taking. What, exactly, do we mean by this? Well, unlike a classmate, the U.S. is a collective – it’s composed of millions of people. So, when the country fails to do the right thing, we might argue that the individuals that comprise it should. But what might this more individualistic version of slack-taking look like?

Well, consider what the U.S. had pledged in accordance with the Paris Agreement: a 50% reduction from 2005 emission levels by 2030. In 2005, the per capita emissions of U.S. residents were 20.7tCO2 – giving us a per capita goal of 10.35tCO2 by 2030. Currently, U.S. per capita emissions are at 14.3 tCO2.  What this means in practice, then, is that each U.S. resident merely needs to reduce their individual emissions by 3.95tCO2 in order to meet the pledge that President Biden originally made.

Is that doable? Most certainly. There are all kinds of meaningful lifestyle changes that would make up this shortfall. Merely washing your clothes in cold water and hang drying your laundry will save a full 0.5tCO2. Switching to a plant-based diet will save an additional 0.8tCO2, while avoiding one trans-Atlantic flight accounts for another 1.6tCO2. Going car-free (and instead relying on public transport) will, on average, save an additional 2.4tCO2. In fact, just these last two suggestions alone (making up 4.0tCO2 in reductions) would be sufficient for us to reach our Paris Agreement pledge.

And, if you really want to make a difference, there’s always having one less child – an action that will save a whopping 59.8tCO2 per year.

Long story short, just because one man has decided to renege on the U.S.A.’s climate pledge, there’s no reason why we, at the individual level, can’t take up the slack and decide to make good on this promise all the same. We might think we have reason to do this because the moral obligation of the collective (the U.S.A.) devolves onto its constitutive members (U.S. residents). But this needn’t be the case. Perhaps, as mentioned earlier, it’s merely prudential. None of us want ourselves – or our children, or our children’s children – to have to live in a world undergoing environmental catastrophe, and this should be enough to motivate us to do what’s necessary.

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Freedom in the Air: Liberty and the Trump Administration

The Trump administration has been aggressive with imposing new restrictions, from banning books on certain topics in the military to freezing National Science Foundation grants. And yet, Trump declared January 20th, his inauguration, America’s “liberation day.” What, one might ask, is America being liberated from? And how does this relate to our broader philosophical understanding of freedom?

A place to start is exclamations by some Trump supporters.

From the Financial Times: “’I feel liberated,’ said a top banker. ‘We can say ‘r****d’ and ‘p***y’ without the fear of getting cancelled . . . it’s a new dawn.’” And from New York magazine: “[This Trump supporter] had supported Biden, but ‘I hate watching the things I say. I took a much farther horseshoe around this time.’ Later, a former Bernie supporter (who looked like the most Bernie-supporting person one could imagine with long, curly hair and a plaid shirt) told me the same: He wanted the freedom to say ‘f****t’ and ‘r******d.’”

These examples are deliberately provocative. Nonetheless, they paint a picture of a particular freedom (a cultural or social freedom) and a particular jailer (political correctness or “cancel culture”) — an analysis shared by certain libertarian political commentators. The Prindle Post has extensively analyzed “cancel culture” previously.

And how does this fit in with freedom writ large?

Typically, philosophers consider both the freedom from certain constraints or obstacles, as well as the freedom to engage in certain acts or actions in pursuit of one’s interests. This is sometimes termed negative liberty and positive liberty (see recent discussion). For example, we might understand free speech as freedom from government censorship. Alternatively, we might consider government supported mental healthcare as supporting our freedom to pursue our well-being without being undermined by illness. Unsurprisingly, freedom to often requires the provision of certain goods and resources.

From the perspective of constraints and obstacles (freedom from) the Trump administration generally represents less freedom. We can see this in the banning of trans individuals from the military, restrictions on certain words at the National Science Foundation, and the barring of the Associated Press from the White House. Each of these actions introduces a new constraint.

One might characterize Trump’s policies as providing freedom from “DEI,” but this view faces challenges. First, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion encompasses an enormously broad range of policies, from programs that provide support for minority students interested in science, to internal reviews of workplace discrimination, to diversity training. It is not one thing that someone can be freed from. Second, while not all of these programs have proven effective, it is unclear how they might represent obstacles or constraints. Arguably, if they mandated preferential hiring or quotas that could be viewed as an obstacle for the majority, but they did not. So it’s not obvious how Trump’s actions can be read as liberating us from outside interference.

What about freedom to? If we look at the direct provision of support and resources, again the Trump administration seems likely to represent a decrease, such as proposed cuts to Medicaid. This is unsurprising and follows a long legacy of Republican administrations being more interested in freedom from and less interested in freedom to. Being expansive about freedoms, the Trump administration does provide certain liberties such as the freedom to not participate in DEI programs. And indeed, from this perspective, almost all government actions provide some freedoms and some restrictions. Even laws against murder diminish the “freedom” to murder. Ultimately, this thicket of competing freedoms can only be fully disentangled through consideration of the importance of specific freedoms and their relation to our overall values, as multiple Prindle Post authors have explored.

We might also turn to a special variety of freedom from, namely, the freedom from arbitrary expressions of power. Philosophers refer to this as republican freedom or non-domination. The characteristic feature of non-domination is that one cannot be subject to arbitrary power, not merely that they happen not to be subject to such power. Consider a prisoner with a very permissive warden. The warden still has power over the prisoner, even if they are not using it, and thus the prisoner lacks non-domination.

To the extent there is a defining characteristic of the new Trump administration, it is the consolidation of executive power under Trump, and a few select others such as Elon Musk. We see this with the firing of Inspectors General, the novel assertion that the executive branch can unmake agencies formed by Congress, the claim that the executive branch can halt Congressionally allocated funds, the strong exercise of control over the Department of Justice, widespread firing of civil workers, and Trump’s controversial tweet: “He who saves the country does not violate any law.”

One can assert, as Trump did, that this consolidation of power is good or necessary, but regardless, it represents a steep decline in republican freedom. If the primary check to the exercise of power is the discretion of the person holding it, then non-domination is low.

None of these versions of freedom – negative, positive, republican – capture the liberation expressed by Trump supporters. Something else seems to be going on. In a series of interviews with everyday Americans, the political theorist C. Fred Alford observed that people rarely consider freedom in grand political terms. For most, freedom primarily concerns having power over one’s life, and the ability through wealth and power, to do what one wills. (Or perhaps truer to the interviewees, formal Bill-of-Rights freedom doesn’t mean much if one lacks money and power.) Interviewees also commonly expressed frustration with bureaucratic systems of control. (Note that this work is 20 years old and the sample size is small, so some caution is warranted.)

For many, Trump and Musk represent a cultural rebellion against claustrophobic liberal standards of communication, norms of behavior, and office activities. That rebellion promises to free people from the social policing they fear and lessen the impression of social censure or “canceling” (even if there were not on-the-book legal consequences). It might be objected that, by comparison, these are not particularly important freedoms. However, again, even if this is true from a big-picture tyranny perspective, Alford’s research indicates that the felt experience of freedom is very intertwined with how people think about freedom.

Experienced freedom is necessarily individual. The same society can be experienced as more free by some, and less free by others. Poor people losing Medicaid, women who want abortions, scientists studying discrimination, trans people seeking to join the military, immigrants having temporary protected status revoked — their experienced freedom will be quite different under Trump than a wealthy individual who feels empowered to say “p***y” and “r******d.”

The individual nature of experienced freedom speaks a larger truth about how freedom operates even under very oppressive regimes. For many people, little changes. Not everyone will run up against the boundaries of political freedom. Many can do all they wish coloring within the lines provided by the state. It is those who, by their nature (e.g., certain minorities), by their profession (e.g., journalists), or by their inclination (e.g., activists), push against such lines that are most at risk in repressive regimes. Currently, trans-Americans, immigrants, and members of the news media stand in the crosshairs of executive power. But what protects other communities? Absent republican freedom, it is not the law, but merely the whims of the powerful that determine their fates. Without true boundaries on power, the lines of acceptability can change with a thought.

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Drug Legalization: “My Body, My Choice”?

Few slogans are as rhetorically powerful as “my body, my choice.” It captures a fundamental intuition: that individuals should have control over what happens to their own bodies. People rightly recoil at the idea of being forcibly subjected to another’s will, and the phrase is often invoked to argue for bodily autonomy in areas like abortion and end-of-life decisions. The assumption is that, as long as an individual’s actions do not harm others, they should be free to do as they please with their own bodies.

Given this, some argue that drug legalization naturally follows from the “my body, my choice” principle. If a person wants to engage in the recreational use of drugs, the reasoning goes, that is his decision alone. As long as he does not harm anyone else, the state has no business interfering. The case seems simple enough — until we examine it more carefully.

The problem is that freedom is not just about making choices; it is about making choices rationally. True autonomy is not simply the absence of external interference but the ability to govern oneself through reason. A person who deliberately impairs his rational faculties through recreational drug use is not exercising freedom. He is attacking it.

To be clear, I am not making the case for any particular drug policy. My point is simply that we need to be honest about what drugs do and not dress up something destructive to freedom in the language of liberty, even if restrictive drug laws are ultimately unjustified.

Freedom Requires Rational Self-Governance

The conceptual justification behind the “my body, my choice” argument assumes that individuals possess and retain rational self-control over their decisions. However, the problem with recreational drug use is that it directly undermines this ability.

Mind-altering substances do not just create pleasurable experiences, they chemically alter the brain in ways that impair self-governance. Recreational drug use can distort judgment, suppress self-restraint, and, in many cases, create dependency that weakens one’s ability to make future choices freely. A person under the influence of drugs is not acting as a fully rational self-governing agent but as someone whose thoughts and actions are being heavily influenced by an external chemical influence.

This is true whether the drug in question is alcohol, marijuana, psychedelics, or harder narcotics. Even substances that supposedly “enhance” mental function (such as certain stimulants) often do so at the cost of rational self-regulation, increasing impulsivity and distorting judgment. When we speak of drugs altering rational agency, we are not only referring to substances that depress cognitive function but also to those that overstimulate it. Proper cognitive function depends on homeostasis, a balanced and well-ordered state that allows the mind to perceive reality clearly and process information accurately. The purpose of our rational and cognitive faculties is to enable us to (1) perceive reality accurately so that we can (2) deliberate soundly so as to (3) act in accordance with the truth. All of these functions are distorted by recreational drug use.

If freedom is about self-rule, then a person who deliberately places himself in a state where his ability to rule himself is severely diminished is not exercising freedom. Invoking drug use as an exercise of freedom makes as much sense as touting the benefits of drinking seawater as a remedy for thirst.

This is not abstract philosophical theorizing. The law already recognizes that a person who is mentally incapacitated cannot validly consent to certain decisions. Contracts signed under severe intoxication can be voided. A person high on drugs cannot give legally binding consent to medical procedures. The state intervenes when individuals threaten suicide by placing them in involuntary psychiatric holds. Why? Because we recognize that rational self-governance is a necessary precondition for meaningful autonomy.

How Drug Use Turns You Into a Slave

The defining feature of slavery is the absence of self-governance. A slave does not act according to his own rational will but is controlled by an external force that dictates his actions. The master determines what he does, where he goes, and how he lives. That is precisely what happens when someone consumes a substance that then overrides their rational faculties. While physical slavery is imposed by another person, chemical slavery is self-imposed. For both, the end result is the same: a loss of autonomy.

A person under the influence of drugs is no longer fully acting according to rational self-direction. His will is hijacked by a foreign chemical influence that suppresses judgment, distorts perception, and overrides impulse control. At that moment, he is not truly free. His actions are dictated by the effects of the substance rather than by reasoned deliberation.

This is not a metaphor. A person in the grip of a mind-altering substance literally loses self-mastery, even if it is just temporarily. The person who becomes addicted to drugs does not simply choose to continue using; his ability to choose is progressively eroded as the drug rewires his brain and makes rational self-control more difficult. At that point, he is no longer the master of his actions — the drug is his master.

John Stuart Mill, who first articulated the “harm principle,” recognized the problem posed by enslaving oneself. In On Liberty, Mill wrote that “The principle of freedom cannot require that [one] should be free not to be free.” In other words, freedom does not include the right to permanently destroy one’s own ability to be free. A person who permanently sells himself into slavery is not exercising freedom but abolishing it. The same logic applies to someone who places himself under the control of a substance that strips away his ability for self-rule. A person who willingly puts himself under the influence of something that systematically erodes rational control is doing the opposite of exercising freedom. Although Mill was talking about political slavery, his points apply just as equally to chemical slavery.

The Paradox of “My Body, My Choice”

The deeper irony of the “my body, my choice” argument is that the more a person engages in self-destructive drug use, the less able he is to make meaningful choices at all. A person addicted to meth, heroin, or even high-potency marijuana is not exercising greater autonomy; he is increasingly at the mercy of chemical dependency, impaired judgment, and distorted perception. His decisions are no longer fully his own. Instead, they are shaped and dictated by the drug.

If we reject political slavery because it violates autonomy, then we should likewise reject chemical slavery, because it produces the very same result: a person who is ruled by something other than his own rational will. A society that tolerates and normalizes widespread chemical enslavement is not a society that is maximizing freedom.

What About Alcohol?

Even alcohol is not immune from this critique. Alcohol, like any substance that affects the mind, can be used in ways that compromise rational self-governance. A person who drinks to the point of intoxication is, in that moment, undermining his own ability to think clearly and act rationally. A blackout drunk, a reckless binge drinker, or a person who routinely drinks to escape reality is no different, in principle, from the drug user who deliberately seeks intoxication. The problem arises when consumption crosses the line from responsible use to rational impairment.

However, the key difference between alcohol and hard drugs is that alcohol can be used in moderation without necessarily leading to impairment. A person can have a glass of wine with dinner, a beer at a social gathering, or a whiskey while unwinding after a long day without losing rational control. Unlike recreational drugs, which are taken precisely for their intoxicating effects, alcohol is unique in that it allows for consumption without cognitive dysfunction.

This is why alcohol is tolerated in a way that drugs like cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, or hallucinogens are not. There is no responsible way to use these substances recreationally — their entire purpose in being used is to override rational agency. Unlike alcohol, which can be incorporated into normal life without necessitating impairment, the defining feature of recreational drug use is that impairment is the goal.

That said, alcohol abuse is clearly subject to the same concerns as other forms of intoxication. Alcohol, like any substance that affects the mind, can become a means of self-imposed enslavement when it is used to evade reason rather than complement normal, responsible living.

So while moderate alcohol consumption does not necessarily violate the principles of rational self-governance, its misuse certainly can. The fact that alcohol allows for some responsible use does not mean it is exempt from the general principle that true freedom requires rational control.

Freedom Requires More Than Just Choice

Recreational drug use is incompatible with freedom. The more a society tolerates and encourages such behavior, the less free that society becomes, not because the government is restricting choice, but because its citizens are actively degrading the very faculties necessary for responsible self-rule.

So does “my body, my choice” work as a defense of recreational drug use? No. It is logically incoherent and self-defeating. If we care about autonomy, we should reject the idea that freedom includes the right to systematically destroy the very conditions that make freedom possible.

Whatever we think about drug legalization, we should at least be honest about what drugs do. Freedom is not a magic word that turns self-destruction into autonomy.

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In the Eye of the Beholder?: Puberty Blockers & the Concept of Harm

Treatment for gender dysphoria in children has come under increased scrutiny in recent years. As of January 2021, no states in the U.S. prohibited youth gender-affirming care. Since then, however, 26 states have passed bans. In December 2024, Wes Streeting, the current Health Secretary of the United Kingdom announced that a previous emergency measure prohibiting new prescriptions of puberty blockers to underage patients would now become an indefinite ban. On Tuesday, January 28th, the White House announced an executive order directing federal agencies to cease supporting gender affirming care for anyone younger than 19. Now, the United States Supreme Court is considering Tennessee’s ban on gender affirming care for minors, including puberty blockers and other hormone therapy.

Why the push to halt the use of these drugs in gender-affirming care? Advocates of the bans cite worries about the potential for long-term harm. The brain undergoes significant development during puberty and it is not clear what role sex hormones play. Unfortunately, the data are just not there – long-term studies of human patients observing the effects of puberty blockers on their development are only just underway and it will take literal decades to determine life-long effects, if there are any. As a result, there is a plausible mechanism by which puberty blockers and other hormonal treatments could produce harm, but the data are insufficient to firmly establish this.

That said, some data suggest that those who take puberty blockers experience changes in body composition, are shorter and have slower rates of growth than their peers. Research in animal models suggest that puberty blockers may produce cognitive deficits – male sheep treated with puberty blockers were significantly slower to progress through a familiar maze, even after treatment ceased.

There are two things worth noting, though. First, reactions in animal models, particularly in pharmacology studies, are not always reliable indicators of human reactions. Second, some of the currently available data on hormone replacement therapy complicates the picture of potential long-term consequences. Animal models provide data suggesting that some consequences of puberty blockers, including infertility, may be reversible with future hormone therapy.

Of course, negative consequences are just one part of the picture. We must also look at the reasons why underage patients seek prescriptions for hormonal treatment. Undergoing puberty causes numerous changes to one’s body. For individuals suffering from gender dysphoria, these changes may produce significant distress. The data show that gender non-conforming youth are significantly more likely to experience symptoms of anxiety and depression, to confront suicidal thoughts, and to attempt suicide. But those who seek and receive gender affirming treatment, including puberty blockers experience positive psychological outcomes, including greater life satisfaction and fewer symptoms of depression and anxiety, after beginning treatment.

As of now, the data suggest these treatments are a mixed bag. There are potential negative consequences associated with puberty blockers and other hormonal treatments, specifically, interference with growth. Negative cognitive consequences are possible, but the data are, at best, suggestive. More research is necessary. But casting a further cloud over the possibility of clarity is that gender dysphoric individuals are more likely to experience comorbid conditions such as depression and anxiety than members of the general population. Troublingly, these conditions correlate with worse performance on cognitive assessment measures.

So, what does this mean for hormonal treatments? If we take it for granted that there are potential long-term negative consequences, then it seems like they offer a trade-off. Specifically, a trade-off between physical health, cognitive function, and mental health.

But just because we regard some initial consequences as negative does not mean that they will prove harmful in the long run. Consider the following case. Imagine that, while crossing the street one day, I am hit by a car and break several bones. The recovery requires surgery along with many months of physical therapy and rehab. While I regain independence, I never quite reach my prior physical capability. Further, having suffered a head injury after hitting the ground, I now have permanent deficits in my long-term memory recall. Nonetheless, I find that the perseverance I developed during rehab serves me well throughout my life; I feel that I am more resilient, better able to regulate my emotions during trying times, and work harder through adversity.

Imagine now that a time traveler offers to travel back in time and push me out of the way of the car, preventing my accident. Should I accept her offer? It seems that either choice would be reasonable. One could hardly blame me for wanting to avoid the suffering, the surgery and the recovery (along with the medical bills), and to undo the deficits which now affect me. Yet, simultaneously, it seems like a rational person may still accept the offer. Perhaps I think my newfound character is worth the negative consequences of the accident.

What does this example show us? It displays the complexity of the idea of harm. This is revealed in two interlinked ways. First, establishing a negative consequence is not by itself enough to demonstrate that something is harmful. It may be the case that something’s positive aspects outweigh its negative aspects. Second, whether the positives do outweigh the negatives may sometimes be best determined by the individual who experiences it. Outright bans on gender affirming care seem to set aside both of these facts. They view the potential for negative consequences as sufficient grounds to eliminate the treatments entirely, not taking seriously the potential positives, nor the possibility that one receiving the treatment might think the risk is worth taking.

Of course, detractors may point out that the bans target these treatments for children only. Perhaps, even if a reasonable adult could judge these treatments as beneficial, a child is not yet a competent enough decision maker for that choice.

Two points are worth raising in response. First, legal adulthood is an arbitrary threshold. The frontal lobe, the portion of the brain that deals with complex decision making and problem solving, does not finish developing until the mid-20’s at the earliest. Yet children in the U.S. may be competent enough to drive at 16, to vote at 18, to buy alcohol at 21, etc. We seem to view competent decision-making as a spectrum, not a binary. It is not immediately obvious why 18 is the appropriate threshold for when one has become competent enough to consent to gender-affirming treatment. Second, legal guardians already serve as the surrogate decision-makers in this context. If they cannot make competent informed decisions regarding gender-affirming care, then this implies that no one can. If the worry is that the many unknowns eliminate the possibility of informed consent, this view would call into question much of currently acceptable medical practice. Few treatments, if any, have their lifetime consequences known before approval. From 2001 to 2010, about one-third of all drugs approved by the FDA were found to have unexpected side-effects, some of which were life threatening. A purely precautionary approach would require a radical revision of how we think about medicine.

In closing, some perspective is warranted. Proponents of bans on gender-affirming care for underage patients, such as Tennessee’s Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, often cite European nations like Finland, Sweden, and the Netherlands beginning to walk back the use of hormonal treatments for minors seeking gender-affirming therapy as evidence supporting bans. Yet this willfully misrepresents the situation. These nations are ensuring that their current treatments more carefully adhere to the “Dutch Protocol,” not altogether banning the treatments. With a matter as intimate as a patient’s relationship to their own body, any universal approach seems like wielding a machete when a scalpel is required. Given the complexity of the issues involved, including the tradeoffs regarding uncertain consequences, decisions about these treatments seem best left to the particular parties involved – parents, patients, and medical providers – not the government.