Seat Belt Laws - The Latest Ad Campaign

POSTED BY: SergeantX
UPDATED: Tuesday, June 7, 2005 02:46
VIEWED: 9635
PAGE 4 of 7

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The costs to society and other supporting arguments seem secondary at best
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I agree with you in this case. The protect-you-from-yourself seems to be the driving (excuse the pun) factor in the seat belt laws, which I personally think does go too far in the "Nanny State" direction. I do support, however, government requirements for manufacturers to equip cars with seat belts/air bags/etc. Whether people choose to use them is pretty much up to them.

Jayne, your mouth is talkin. Might want to look into that.

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There is also a problem with the concept of "personal responsibility" in general is though. If you look at it, USA - and the world in general - has been changing from a family centric and geographic centric society of one where everyone moves around all of the place. The idea of a common framework is in shambles when people, kids, relatives, friends don't hang around in the same geographic location and share the growing and understanding of a common framework. This coupled with the increasing divorce rates leaves people with none-to-nil really solid social surroundings. One could imply that there is a greater lack of common agreement on what the social norms are - without that common understanding including what "personal responsibilities" are, people can fall back to hopefully their early childhood teachings. But that's also falling by the wayside as well, what with most parents spending less than 2 hours together with their kids each day as they are growing up - there isn't a lot left for parental guidance in many of these cases...

I am not saying either way whether all of these things leading to what we have are good or bad, but the result is just a greater lack of understanding on how each of us are suppose to behave in any given setting. (and you can argue that you should just *be yourself*, but look at what being completely American has led to a greater part of these misunderstandings in the rest of the world).

Anyways, because there is this growing lack of a general norm, people are even more apt to push for a bigger Nanny-state to produce this artificial set of overall norms.



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To me, the bottom line with seat belt laws is that they are based on the notion that it's the government's responsibility to protect people from themselves.

The costs to society and other supporting arguments seem secondary at best and wouldn't even be an issue without first accepting the above premise.

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I'm not sure costs are secondary.

What you do to yourself you do to society IF it carries the costs of your actions. Are you saying that society should have responsibility but no authority?

PS This is not a trick question. The logic leads to this box. I'm hoping you can find a way out. I'd be happy to follow.

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Originally posted by Jasonzzz:
But that's sort of like saying "Don't wear condoms since it doesn't protect you from disease exactly 100% of the time in every single situation", or "Go ahead and lick the toilet seat, it won't make you sick every single time".

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Waaait a minute. I never said, "Don't use seatbelts since they don't protect you every time." What I said was, "Let people choose for themselves, since seatbelts don't protect you every time." To go with your condom analogy, that would be like saying, "Since condoms don't always protect all people all the time, individuals--not the govt--should decide if condoms are best for them or if they want to use an alternative means for protection."

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I'm not arguing your EMT friends didn't make his observations, but this is also the type of "statistical" or observation nonsense that makes bad science...All I saying is there is a good chance that the sampling is skewed.

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I never said those incidents were representative of the average accident, or that those examples were findings of a scientific study--so sampling and "bad science" are neither here nor there. Those examples were given to illustrate the undisputed fact that sometimes seatbelts hurt. Could be those times are 1 in a million, could be they are more common. Could be we don't know just how often they occur. The fact that they DO happen makes a case that maybe people should be allowed to decide, for themselves, what the risks are of wearing vs. not wearing a seatbelt, and if they want to take those risks.

My only point is that seatbelt use is not a blanket "all benefit-no cost" decision that the government can make for all people, all the time. In decisions like these, folk need to be able to govern themselves.

Moreover, I think Mal and those gorram pesky independents would agree with me.

Can't Take My Gorram Sky

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There might be a difference in opinion and concept there. Some people would define society as apart from the "guvment" (i.e. not a part of). Where the people around them - they might view as a part of society; but the "guvment" they view as this over protective parent/overlord figure.

That's an alternate view, might be a valid comparison in some instances where the bureaucrats in the government do, in fact, themselves take that view.





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Originally posted by canttakesky:

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Originally posted by Jasonzzz:
But that's sort of like saying "Don't wear condoms since it doesn't protect you from disease exactly 100% of the time in every single situation", or "Go ahead and lick the toilet seat, it won't make you sick every single time".

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Waaait a minute. I never said, "Don't use seatbelts since they don't protect you every time." What I said was, "Let people choose for themselves, since seatbelts don't protect you every time." To go with your condom analogy, that would be like saying, "Since condoms don't always protect all people all the time, individuals--not the govt--should decide if condoms are best for them or if they want to use an alternative means for protection."

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I am following you and I would agree in general that people should be allowed to make and take the own choices - if those are well informed and well educated choices (just in principal, not as a matter of legality) and of course doesn't intrude upon other people right to make their choices...

But at the same time I can not conscionably recommend that someone shouldn't use a seatbelt because it only works part of the time. Seatbelt usage and effective scenarios are fairly predictable - not in every single case, where as the failure scenarios are merely corner cases. If we use the argument that was proposed, each of us would have to try and remember exactly what scenarios out of the 10 million (some swag) different possible ones, we will need to carry around computers that can effectively measure all of the possible parameters in the split instance before some unforseen tragedy, then apply our tremendous power of analysis that everyone of us have, arrive at the exact conclusion on whether the seatbelt might be effective or not and strap it on.

or we can reasonably conclude that seatbelts work in enough general situations to provide general protection that we should recommend everyone to wear it. And for the scenarios where they do not work, there are supplementary active restraint systems that can help you.

In other words, we can not simply throw out the entire solution because of a few corner cases, there will always be corner cases in every solution.

On the flip side though, it stands to obvious reason if the solution can be demonstrated to cause harm effectively in more scenarios and much more frequently than whatever good it provides, then we can recommend its disuse.

And I guess the same line of reasoning goes in the example that was given for your EMT friend's observation. Merely citing an observation doesn't make it a related case, without the proper measurements, it might be a sad coincidence, an anecdotal piece of data, or simply another corner case. For example, let's say that by luck, you borrow your friend's new electric car 3 times out of the month, but each time that you make the friendly request, it happens to need recharging and he tells you to come back later. Now can you really reasonably conclude that the car doesn't work or doesn't really have any inherent worth simply because each of those times that you visited (took the sample), it wasn't working?

I don't think seatbelts are a complete solution to every single case, but it works in enough cases to the benefit and much more so than the few odd cases where they might harm or be ineffective. Where they do, most cars have supplementary systems, for instance, front airbags, side curtain airbags, additional lapbelts, etc.

But back to my original thing with making well informed and well educated choices. If we get rid of that law tomorrow, how exactly will you go about assessing each situation to make sure that you would be making the correct one?

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Originally posted by canttakesky:

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I'm not arguing your EMT friends didn't make his observations, but this is also the type of "statistical" or observation nonsense that makes bad science...All I saying is there is a good chance that the sampling is skewed.

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I never said those

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