re: "The state has no business in people's sexual lives" (Opinion, May 4)
Dear editor,
Ploenpote Atthakor lucidly sets out why the state has no business in people's sex lives, although it is worth adding, as I am sure she would agree, that this is true except to prevent non-consenting harm to others, which is what justifies laws against rape and the abuse of minors.
Exactly the same arguments and similar facts entail that the state has no business interfering in any citizen's personal affairs except to protect others from direct harm. This is John Stuart Mill's famous harm principle in the opening chapter of "On Liberty" (1859), a moral principle that the rule of law too often fails to respect. This moral principle is why it is wrong to criminalize sex toys, wrong to ban the sale or use of drugs such as alcohol, yaa baa and marijuana, wrong to punish heterodox religious beliefs, wrong to suppress the free expression of deeply offensive and unpopular opinions that are not incitements to harm others, and wrong to stop adults enjoying pornography, and so on.
Of course, state interference in the private lives of citizens is a great boon to corruption, as the US experiment with alcohol prohibition in the 1920s proved every bit as well as did the earlier Chinese experiment with banning opium, and the more recent Thai experience with banning prostitution. With such profits to be made by criminalizing personal decisions that do not harm others, it is understandable why the corrupt favour such intrusive laws that treat most citizens as the property of others or of the state.
We might not like some people's personal decisions, we might even think them, with good reason, to be both extremely foolish and deeply immoral, but that cannot justify the state intruding into those decisions with the force of law to force the prejudices of some, even a large majority, on all. The state's role is to enable free citizens to live their lives as they see fit, not to turn some into the tools or playthings for the prejudices of others.
Felix Qui
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The above letter to the editor is the text as submitted by Felix Qui to the Bangkok Post.
The text as edited was published in PostBag on May 5, 2019, under the title "Immoral intrusion" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/1672168/poisonous-billionaires
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