Hacker News Reader

It is likely that many people overweight are already ashamed and it helps absolutely nothing to attempt to further pile onto that negativity.

Sorry, but no amount of "truth telling" in this way will come off as anything but being an arse. I'm sure you have your own selfish actions and your own ways of "taking a toll on society". This post reeks of a special kind of arrogance, whether you intend it or not. Your flawed analogy makes it worse. Why not just equate it with smoking itself- instead of something like a house burning down?

It's far more complicated than "person does selfish thing and hurts society because of it". Your post speaks like someone that has never had to lose weight or break out of an addiction.

I don't say any of this to attack you but just how ridiculous and supremely unhelpful this line of thinking is. It's like telling someone to just snap out of depression, or "just stop smoking", or whatever. It's not as simple and devoid of nuance as you'd like to believe.

And trust me, as someone that has gained and lost weight both, the last thing that matters to me is something external and abstract like my effect-in-the-aggregate on society. I'm far more interested in feeling healthier, sleeping better, and gaining the personal benefits from it. The same goes for most people, I would think, and no amount of philosophizing about society will change that.

Fat people already know they’re fat. “Telling them the truth” isn’t useful, to you or to us.

Being fat isn’t selfish, it’s just self-destructive. Same as smoking (in private, where no other party is exposed to any smoke). Your “and burns a house down” example is an attempt to conflate the two.

> Their obesity exacts great cost to the medical system that we all have to bear, it takes from their productivity that they could offer to others (society and their own family) and benefit from themselves in a multitude of ways.

This complaint runs into a more fundamental dispute: freedom versus collectivism. In a purely libertarian world, everyone would be absolutely free to do whatever they want. In a completely socialist world, one is only free to do what they want insofar as it has no negative effect on others, or if it does, they should compensate others for the harm they cause.

There are problems with both extremes. Absolute freedom can lead to anarchy which will effectively prevent people from coordinating and building anything collectively. But forcing individuals to adhere to a strict cost/benefit analysis for every action stymies creativity and personal freedoms.

When considering a ban on a particular individual behavior (e.g., eating too much), it's perfectly reasonable to talk about the larger social harms (e.g., increased medical costs). But it's also important to consider the freedoms that are being taken away by such a policy (e.g., the freedom to eat what you want).

Western society has never solely been focused on maximizing overall social well-being, it has also balanced ideals of individual freedom with it. China, in contrast, has focused almost entirely on collective well-being over individual freedom. Many people (myself included), would prefer to live in a less successful but free country rather than a more successful authoritarian one.

> When considering a ban on a particular individual behavior (e.g., eating too much), it's perfectly reasonable to talk about the larger social harms (e.g., increased medical costs). But it's also important to consider the freedoms that are being taken away by such a policy (e.g., the freedom to eat what you want).

You get both individual freedom and remove the harm to others from obesity if you stop forcing service providers to work for free.

The only reason that people who choose to become obese are a drain on others is because there is currently a mechanism for them to force others to absorb the cost of their resulting health care.

Make it so that people have to pay for healthcare for themselves either out of pocket or via insurance instead of forcing hospitals to serve all comers (like any other service that is provided to people), and suddenly you get the best of both worlds: everyone gets to eat what they want, smoke what they want, inject what they want, and nobody else is forced to pay for the poor decisions of anyone else. Everybody wins.

> Make it so that people have to pay for healthcare for themselves either out of pocket or via insurance instead of forcing hospitals to serve all comers (like any other service that is provided to people), and suddenly you get the best of both worlds: everyone gets to eat what they want, smoke what they want, inject what they want, and nobody else is forced to pay for the poor decisions of anyone else. Everybody wins.

Unfortunately, your argument runs into an opposite extreme. Yes, freedom is important, but it's not the only thing that's important. There is different, but similarly strong argument that society should preserve life.

Freedom dictates that people should be allowed to do what they want, even if it causes self-harm. Life preservation dictates that we should do whatever it takes to preserve life. Both of these values are are pretty fundamental, baked into most religions and political philosophies. Sometimes however, as in the case you point out, these two values butt against each other.

The answer is not to choose one or the other, but to properly balance them.

Forcing people to pay for things at gunpoint that they do not wish to buy is pretty far down the list of acceptable trade-offs, in my book.

It’s absolutely not an extreme view. We already do this for food, for example, which is also required to support life. Being hungry does not entitle you to steal from a supermarket, under our system.

Forcing hospitals to treat anyone regardless of ability to pay is really just forcing an unfair tax onto everyone else who happens to use that hospital in the form of increased prices. That’s not a reasonable system.