Smoking

[FrustratedFool]

I was in art school way back before smoking became socially unacceptable. It was definitely a significant part of conversations. The way the teacher would light up when he settled down to talk, and inhale while he's listening, and wave the cigarette around for emphasis. It was all a little dance that we did that had meaning. Stamping the butt out on the floor of the classroom was making a point. Obviously it was less of a thing in lecture classes, but one-on-one it was ritualistic. 

No doubt a lot of this came from media examples. This was still back when the hard-drinking death-defying genius was a thing people believed in. The ideal was to be a New York expressionist or a Parisian intellectual. Those images were cool to us. 

But as you say, the "social rebelliousness and death-drive factor" has always been important. 

Maybe you've heard of Edward Bernays. He was Sigmund Freud's nephew, but moved to America and became the first great ad man. One of his greatest coups was to associate smoking with women's liberation. He paid prominent libbers to smoke in public, and got people calling cigarettes "freedom torches." Before that it was low-class for women to smoke, but he enlarged the market hugely by creating the image that smoking=liberation.

And I think this image is still probably the main factor in why people smoke -- in fact the more the normies scold smoking, the more it will be attractive to some people. The people who pass judgement and scold maybe don't realize how unpleasant they sound. Shaking their fingers and saying "get that stuff away from me." I'd rather be a smoker than someone who goes around wrinkling up his nose at everything he disapproves of. 

"Live fast die young" used to be considered a possible choice. As atheists, we normally believe that there is no transcendental rule saying that a long healthy life is the only acceptable choice.

It’s not a matter of simple disapproval or even of the health of smokers. Even if non-smokers are never exposed to secondhand smoke, it still costs them - it’s a strain on healthcare resources and raises health insurance premiums. Even more than alcohol and drug use, smoking is a social ill. What should I have to pay for your voluntary emphysema?

Smokers should rightly be treated as pariahs.

Boru

I guess one could level the same argument on drinkers, fast food eaters, people who own guns, sports player, drivers, people who have casual sex, and so on.  It's just where one draws the line.

Living in the UK with the NHS this is a very live debate - should taxpayers fund healthcare for people who choose to eat junk, drink alcohol, live in a city, drive a car, play rugby, have children, have a stressful job, have a sedentary job, have sex, and so on etc.

Interesting economic debate.  But not one I want to get into here.  I want to focus on aesthetics and social status.