ent (rarely) informed
Adults are responsible for their own choices and the consequences.
We should not be told what to do or what profession we should choose. We know what we want.
This works well in practice for certain types of decisions. When we add in the network effect, profiteering industrial entities, statistics and long-term impacts, this often falls apart.
Few people who have terminal lung cancer were fully informed when they began smoking cigarettes decades earlier. Millions of teenagers who became addicted to Juuls didn’t. We are tempted to accept the “free” cases of bottled waters that our local supermarket offers, without thinking about what will happen to the bottles after we have finished them. While it is easy to overregulate testing and distribution, it is even easier to underregulate.
There is no one right answer. Instead, we have a spectrum.
We’d all like to be able make informed decisions that will last a long time. I’m a rational person, but I, like many others, don’t conduct a longitudinal research before buying or taking a drug. We make decisions based on buzz, hype and social status without using statistics or peer review.
It’s important to ask questions about the best way to balance individual freedom and community standards. Is it possible that people will be misled, tricked or confused into taking actions which harm themselves and others? There are incentives for people to skip consent or make money when they’re not informed. Are there vulnerabilities in our decision-making process that could be exploited by other organizations with a different agenda? Do the public health impacts outweigh individual benefits?
The classic marketing theory is also a microeconomic theory that happens in a vacuum. It does not happen in the real world. In order to put this theory into practice on a large scale, we must think about the impact of millions decisions that are often made without clarity and perspective.
