Slate‘s new Human Nature blog-column reasons:
Cell phones make young people drive as poorly as old people. A simulator study indicates drivers 18 years to 25 years old who use cell phones, even hands-free, react as slowly and overlook things as badly as drivers 65 years to 74 years old who don’t use cell phones. Implications: 1) Don’t talk on the phone while driving. 2) If phone use by young drivers is dangerous enough to ban, why do we let old folks drive at all?
The columnist may have just been trying to be provocative, but I know lots of people who make similar arguments (in various contexts) sincerely. Behaviors A and B impose the same costs on third parties (which is to say banning them would create similar benefits) — why do we treat them differently?
Often the answer is very simple: Banning A and B may have similar benefits, but banning them would create very different costs. In most American cities, banning a person from driving usually dramatically interferes with the person’s ability to lead a normal life. Sometimes this might be justified, in order to protect others from death and injury. But it should take a lot of risk to justify imposing such a burden (and it might require us to invest some effort in case-by-case decisionmaking, rather than just resting on statistically accurate generalizations about how dangerous most people in an age group are).
On the other hand, banning people from using cell phones while driving is a minor burden on them. It is indeed a burden; it interferes with their liberty, and it may make them less efficient in various ways. But it may rightly take a lot less risk to justify such a comparatively small burden.
(People who prefer to think in rights-based ways may reach similar conclusions: If you believe that people who share what are — for better or worse — government-run roads should have a right to do what they please so long as they don’t create undue risks to the rights of others, it seems quite plausible to measure the “undue-ness” of a risk by the cost to people’s freedom of eliminating the risk as well as by the benefit to others’ security of eliminating the risk. I realize some libertarians may disagree, but I suspect that most libertarian-minded people would take something like this view.)
Of course, one could still plausibly argue that (1) the risk posed by old drivers is so high that we should ban them from driving, or (2) the risk posed by cell-phone-using drivers is low enough that we shouldn’t ban such behavior. But the analogy given in the Slate column doesn’t really get us very far.
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