Drug Legalization

To determine what a just government ought to do, one must determine what “justness” means in general. It is fair to say that that which is just is the good, and that which is the unjust is the bad. If the good is that which is to be pursued by any moral man, then the bad is that which is to be avoided. Therefore, a just government must always be sought after, and an unjust government must always be avoided. Things are either pursued for their own sakes or for the sakes of things outside themselves. If a thing is merely a tool used to obtain another value, it is plain to see that that final end is greater than the stepping stone. In horseracing, putting on a saddle is not an end in itself – the saddle is put on in order for the jockey to ride the horse, the horse is ridden so the jockey can win the prize, the prize is won so the jockey can buy things, etc., until an end in itself is reached, that thing being the highest value possible (for if it were not, it would not be sought for its own sake instead of the sake of something greater than itself). If this end in itself is that which is always pursued, then it is the chief good, and good actions are those which aim to obtain or maintain it. Likewise, the bad is that which moves one further away from the ultimate good. Therefore, if this ultimate good is identified, proper action will be illuminated. The greatest good must be valued. But what are the prerequisites of value? It is nonsensical to think of a rock as having values, and, in the same way, a corpse cannot value anything. For something to be valued, there must exist a valuer, as without this there would be no entity to do the valuing. The chief good, then, if it is valuable, is logically dependent on the life of a valuer – it cannot exist without one. If the valuer was erased, so would any values, including this standard of value. If this is so, then the only rational end in itself would be the life of the individual qua man, since, without the protection of this thing, nothing else can be worthwhile (making it the primary concern which precedes all others). If such a life is the ultimate value, then, as established earlier, that which advances it is the good and that which destroys it is the bad. It is obvious that values must be chosen – a man being carried away in a tornado does not “value” the direction he’s headed, since he did not make the choice to go that way. He did not have any input on the course of his life, including what he would work towards and value. If this is so, it seems that the standard of value, the life of a self, is also dependent on freedom for any values to exist (you cannot negate the source of all values without contradicting yourself – the very act of the negation implicitly houses the value judgement that you thought it was the right thing to do, which is impossible if you are destroying value judgements in general). Given this, autonomy needs to be preserved by any just actor. With autonomy as an immutable right, we can now examine the issue of drug legalization. No matter what the effects of recreational drugs are, denying the right of individuals to use them is to deny the right to choose for themselves – you would be subjugating them to your whim and your edicts, making them slaves to your moral code, a moral code that negates itself by destroying the very thing that it requires to remain coherent. If you cannot logically hold that what you are doing is just while negating the concept of “justness”, then such force can, logically, never be just, and is immoral absolutely, regardless of circumstances. The conclusion of the abolition of force is that the abstract use of drugs, devoid of context, cannot be justly banned. For my opponent to win this debate, he has to show that it is right to initiate force in order to put mens’ minds and bodies in shackles for any reason. On to Con!