Yes I’m for legalization. I’ve studied pharmacology and neurochemistry for years at this point. I do make a “moral” argument if you can call it that. I also base a lot of my argument around pharmacology and busting drug myths.
One of the things I've been known to complain about is the lack of basic philosophical education in the vast majority of curricula.
Assuming you're telling the truth about studying pharmacology and neurochemistry for years you must certainly know far more than me and are probably at the point where I would be lucky to know half the terms you use.
... However, the implication that you can make an argument for or against legalization without a moral theory is the philosophical equivalent of asking how to boil water.
Say you bust every drug myth. What does that have to do with anything?
Assume we're talking about marijuana and you prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that marijuana never made a person more violent and never will. Does that mean it should be legal? There is a huge amount of assumptions and hidden premises that go into that answer. It's not intractable but it's no less critical a path to determining the proper legality than establishing the objective truth about the drug.
The first and most critical question is not "what does the drug do" but "what gives the government a right to attack people for possessing/using a drug?" which is a subset of "what gives anybody a right to not be attacked by anybody else for any reason?"
It's one thing to gloss over things that are long agreed upon, but it has been my experience that people don't gloss over morality because they agree on it; they aren't even aware of their own moral assumptions and follow a contradictory maze of principles and prejudices.
What if marijuana makes you more content with your life on the edge of society doing small scale farming? Obviously you're not hurting anyone right so that means you should be allowed to do it?
What may be obvious to you or me is not obvious to everyone. There are plenty of things that are harmless (or rather, cannot be proven to be harmful by any strong argument) that are considered immoral. (Oh and nobody believes in a separation of legality and morality, that's just a bizarre myth that got started because of atheist talking points I think).
Maybe somebody believes that this marijuana user is wasting his or her potential and wouldn't be if they didn't use marijuana. Here you might insert your objective facts about marijuana being not that addictive and really doesn't impair your thinking too much (or something). They'll just come back with "but it makes you happy or else they wouldn't do it, fake satisfaction destroys motivation. Unmotivated people are a detriment to the net utility of society and thus it should be illegal on those grounds."
Do you see how easily the goalposts are moved from what you assumed about the moral theory at work vs what this person is implying? Now anything pleasant is a possible threat to society? How can that be a princible?
but as I said people don't care about contradicting principles they don't know they have. They'll throw one at you one minute and forget about it the next.
Democracy is another locus of presumed moral authority. Suppose that it's not anything that is pleasant that society must stop, but only those pleasant things that the majority by whim decide are a step too far.
Well ad populum is a known logical fallacy but that doesn't matter to someone using this argument because MUH DEMOCRACY!
At this point you're dealing with someone with a completely unbounded moral theory. It has no principles and can have no principles because whim is the opposite of principle no matter whose whim it is. Against such a thing all the objective facts about drugs are useless. An unbounded moral theory could justify dropping a nuclear bomb because candy causes cavities.
I've done some sloppy work categorizing all the common variants of unbounded moral theories and one of the most fundamental is moral subjectivism. Everyone who gives the lazy and useless answer of "well I don't believe in an objective morality but..." <- there is no "but", the guy just denied the existence of anything resembling truth. Subjective morality is the epitome of whim.
"Marijuana should be illegal because [I believe] it's wrong." (they often leave off the "I believe" even though it's intrinsic to subjectivity)
"Why"
"I can't explain it to you, it's a subjective truth"
"Then why should I care?"
[At this point they insert some other common unprincipled nonsense]
"There are more people who think like me than who think like you" OR "If you don't already know why it's wrong there is just no hope for you, leave and never return!" OR "God told me, trust me bro" OR "Here are some really smart people who agree with me (dumps of bunch of links because there is always somebody somewhere who agrees with something)"
Reasoning is as strong as the weakest link in the chain. Good (objective) science can never bridge the is-ought chasm alone. It needs good (objective) ethics (and matching epistemology & metaphysics).
So if you’d like to have that sort of discussion we can. I have another form called “drug education with pharmacology” or something like that. We can have the conversation there.
I'll check it out (if I don't forget). My experience with drugs is quite pedestrian and I wouldn't mind knowing more. My one observation is of a family member on some kind of antidepressant. He blamed a lot of near sociopathic behavior on "coming off" that drug. I also have anecdotally noticed these things show up a lot in the history of school shooters.
it’s hard to vote against the evidence and logic I have
I wish that were true, but what you call controversial isn't all that controversial in the grand scheme and quite a lot of people are open to the legalization of some drugs.
It's like you're arguing for homosexual liberation five years after the stonewall incident, or for civil rights after MLK was assassinated. It's easy to get a false sense of the rationality of your fellow man when you're swimming with the rising tide.
