re: #146 MandyManners

Madison’s Alcohol License Review Committee unanimously recommended an ordinance Wednesday that would penalize liquor stores that sell booze to people identified by the city as chronic alcoholics, ALRC member Ald. Michael Schumacher, 18th District, said.

Is this Constitutional based on the Eighth Amendment?

Excellent question, and it is something the likes of which is discussed by Kelly Ross, a PhD out in CA. To whit:

Sometimes so many people seem to be screaming about their rights, while neglecting to answer to their responsibilities, that many of us may become completely disgusted with the whole discourse of “rights.” A whole movement exists, billing itself as “Communitarianism,” that promotes an effort to restore the notion of responsibility and to establish a balance both between rights and responsibilities and between individuality and community. There has actually been talk of building a “Statue of Responsibility” on the West Coast as the counterpart of the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor. The movement is spearheaded by sociology professors Robert Bellah, in Habits of the Heart, and Amitai Etzioni, in The Spirit of Community. Their viewpoint is shared by many others, including historian Garry Wills; and it is reflected in the title of Hillary Clinton’s book on the responsibilities of government in child rearing, It Takes a Village.

Communitarians, however, promote a certain view of rights and responsibilities that is quite different from that of John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, etc. It is more in the tradition of G.W.F. Hegel, where the community, or the state, is more real than the individual and the individual who does not fit in with the social norms or the law is objectively irrational. Hegel has been regarded, justly, as the father of modern totalitarianism. How different these attitudes are comes out in the Communitarian treatment of things like seat-belt and motorcycle helmet laws. Etzioni would deny to the automobile or motorcycle rider the right to decide for themselves whether to wear seat-belts or motorcycle helmets because, if they are injured, the public is liable to end up paying for their injuries. Thus the riders have a duty to protect themselves in such a way as to not impose a burden on the public through their injuries.

This is interesting reasoning, for the denial of the right of choice about seat-belts and motorcycle helmets is really predicated on the concession of another right: that the injured riders have the right to be treated at public expense. The claim of that right is then used to deny the other [3]. The question is not even asked: do those who don’t want to use seat-belts or motorcycle helmets really want their liberty curtailed for the privilege of their injuries being treated at public expense? Evidently they are not even asked. The consequence, then, is not that Communitarians want to balance rights and responsibilities; it is that they want to deny certain rights in favor of certain other ones, without asking whether that is the particular choice other people really want to make.

—SNIP