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The "when you do $x, you drain society's emergency resources" is, IMO, an absurd argument.

If this is true, then you need to point the finger at so many things. Rock-climbing. Mountain biking. And it progresses, to "anything even remotely risky", where "risky is now the absolute lowest common denominator".

And of course, so many sports? Banned.

This sort of "walking on eggshells" view of life is quite disturbing to me.

You've just described the world's attitude to Coronavirus.

Not even remotely true. The world has responded with "lockdowns", "masks", and more, which is the result of an unprecedented, 100 year class event, that being a pandemic.

Your comment isn't really about normality, but instead about an extreme edge case scenario. The only thing worse than a pandemic, might be nuclear war, a massive nuclear accident, or large-scale disaster.

Normality need not be conflated with actions during emergency scenarios.

Lastly -- imagine if people DID engage in more, "only affected themselves' risky behaviour. It would mean more hospital visits, therefore more hospital capacity, more doctors/nurses/etc etc, which would mean more ability to absorb and deal with large scale emergency issues.

Perhaps not the greatest example given that it’s killed one-point-six million people to date.

That’s an awful lot of people, and if you don’t think that’s a terrible thing then I don’t know how you sleep at night.

It's terrible but similar number of people die every year in car accidents yet there is no moral panic. We can't even agree on finally enforcing speed limits but with the virus we closed the whole world. I mean pollution in major cities is a bigger health problem objectively than the virus and yet we still allow old diesels to drive in most of them.

What I am saying is not that we shouldn't treat the virus seriously but that we really need a lot not urgency when dealing with topics like speeding and pollution.

That “similar number of people” still die despite the enormous amount of work that goes in to road death reduction! We are doing things, and we are affecting the road toll. A quick look at Australia shows that from the worst years, 1970s, where ~3,500 died a year, we’re now down to ~1,200. That’s a 3x reduction because we did something. (Airbags, improved car design, improved road design, improved compliance, etc.)

If only we had some sort of analogue for doing something vs. not doing something re: COVID. Oh wait, we do.

- Number of Australians dead: 908.

- Population adjusted, 13.1x: 12,000.

- Number of Americans dead: 298,000.

That’s 25x as many. We did something, America didn’t.

Spotting a pattern?

The key difference is that all of the things you’ve listed are legal. Society allows them because the risk comes with some reward, and we find it tolerable to accept or mitigate that risk.

There are plenty of other activities like speeding where the rewards do not justify the risks, and the government has made laws to prevent that risk being taken. Unlicensed aviation, amateur gas boiler repair, knife-fighting...

Legality is not relevant. Morality is. Do not conflate the two, for they are not the same.

Example: society, and yes democratic ones, once told black people that they had no rights ; that they were animals; livestock. They also told Jews that they could not vote.

Was society spot on there?

What about the 1000s upon 1000s of examples of immoral laws which can be found, over time, and yes even now, which serves to invalidate the claim that following them is moral? From where I sit, each law must be measured against ones own morality. Failure to do so, is to cast the responsibility each human has aside, to instead wrap yourself in a shell of false righteousness!

I am not claiming "ignore the law", but merely that you may not determine what is 'right or wrong', merely due to the opinions of others around you, nor due to a societal system which attempts to balance thousands of pressures, and then pass laws.

Firstly, courts have repeated struck down sections of laws, or laws in their entirety, for this very reason. And often after those laws have stood for decades. By your logic, by your reasoning, to follow those laws is a moral requirement, yet one minute you are moral, the next immoral?

The stroke of a judge's pen, an argument in Parliament/Congress, and your morals are now right, or wrong?

No.

Your morals must be crafted on your own, examined, re-examined, see battle against your own interpretation of the universe, and grow with time. Laws are not this.

Laws are not morals.

Laws are not to be followed blindly.

To that end, I find your argument to be lacking. You assume that society is "better than the person" at determining "right or wrong". This is not so.

The government is not papa, mama, to be looked to for advice.

If you wish to discuss further, I am happy to, but I will not accept an argument that places legality on some sort of even keel, even subsuming morality.

No. Never.

Keep in mind that how strict the speed limits are seems to vary significantly by local laws and driving culture.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limits_in_the_United_Sta...

So what might be unacceptable "speedo pedo"ism where you live might be completely normal going 5 miles over the posted speed limit elsewhere. My personal experience is that people tend to drive at a speed they feel safe at, and don't pay that much attention to the signs.

Japanese law requires the police to prove that you were speeding beyond reasonable doubt, so posted speed limits are all 20km/h+ under the de facto speed limit. It leads to absurd situation like expressways with a posted 60km speed limit but a 100km/h real limit.

That's the reason we need to enforce speed limit. People are terrible at assessing what's safe. Even if they can somehow manage to assess their personal safety they have terrible judgement when it comes to other road users. You may feel very safe going over speed limit in a residential area but pedestrians, cyclists etc. won't.

A few points on this: society doesn’t make speed limits, municipal administrators (and sometimes small town police themselves) do. The speed limits are often set by observation, and they intentionally leave a large number of drivers over that limit (they say this is for safety, but it seems to also be for revenue generation). Look up 85th percentile speed.

So some politicians and engineers draw a line so that 15% of the population is in violation and will change the speed limit at any point that this isn’t true (if nobody is in violation, they lower the speed limit). You can’t then cast moral judgment on that 15%. It’s intentional criminalization of the citizenry, even though it’s generally with the intent of saving lives.

They are also set for other reasons, like "Bob complained a lot, because of the noise of cars", and the limit gets reduced.

Or "this road was quiet 20+ years ago", but the city has grown, and now it is a major throughfare, so "Local residents campaigned to get a low speed limit", so that alternate routes are preferable.

Both of the above have happened in my locale.

> saying “I was only going a little over 30!” called speedo pedos, because it’s exactly like saying “she was only a little underage!”

I laughed at "speedo pedos", but is it though?

One of these crimes is clearly considerably more serious than the other, and legislators agree with me. That's why in UK law minor speeding offences attract a fine and points on your license[0], but no criminal record, whereas offences of pedophilia result in prison time, a criminal record, and addition on the sexual offenders register.

The line of thinking is superficially similar, the weight of the offence isn't, and we shouldn't trivialise serious offences by drawing false equivalences with those that are considerably less serious.

[0] This is generally the case, but if you accrue too many points you can of course lose your license. Similarly, more serious speeding offences attract more serious penalties, and may even result in jail time. There are plenty of other examples but, see, e.g., https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-34744.... The level of stupidity on display here is truly monumental.

Food for thought: social budgets shouldn't determine the extent of your personal freedoms ala ambulances.