The ethics of a smoking licence.

To cite: Halliday D. J Med Ethics Published Online First: [please include Day Month Year] doi:10.1136/ medethics-2013-101347 INTRODUCTION Many governments implement policies that officially aim to discourage tobacco use among their citizens. Much of this effort is realised through attempts to better educate people about the effects that tobacco has on health. Most familiar are the increasingly graphic warnings displayed on cigarette packets. Other policies combat the activities of the tobacco industry, for example, restrictions on advertising. It is widely accepted, however, that it is not enough to simply educate users and coerce industry. Some amount of coercion must also be imposed on people to make them smoke less or not start. So, governments often attach substantial consumption taxes to tobacco products. Almost always, this is implemented as sales tax, or VAT: Each time someone buys a tobacco product, they are required to pay a certain extra amount. The idea is that people will respond by smoking less, quitting smoking or not starting in the first place. But sales tax is not the only consumption tax available. The licence approach, as I shall call it, is a plausible alternative. Its main distinguishing feature is that users are forced to pay a relatively large amount of tax before being allowed to make any tobacco purchases. In this paper, I am going to explore some of the moral considerations relating to smoking licences. And I shall offer a limited defence of licences as a replacement for sales tax on tobacco products. This defence will include some moral arguments in favour of one particular licence design over others. What follows is, in at least some respects, an attempt at doing non-ideal theory. Very roughly, ideal theory attempts to give an account of what an ideally just society would look like, with relatively little attention paid to contingent facts about society. Non-ideal theory seeks to develop proposals about how to cope with problems that ideal theory sometimes assumes away in the pursuit of a more general and abstract treatment of what justice and related concepts are ultimately about. From the perspective of ideal theory, smoking licences might not be a very interesting topic. There exist different conceptions of what an ideally just society would look like. Some of these might ban tobacco altogether, others might not restrict it at all and some might restrict it in ways not involving tax policy. However, the fact is that consumption taxes on tobacco are a fairly entrenched part of regulation in many actual societies. The use of such taxes could, from a moral point of view, probably be improved. It is part of non-ideal political theory to respond to such facts by exploring what sort of changes might be morally defensible and by drawing attention to which unanswered questions might be most urgent or morally significant. Doing non-ideal theory requires one to take seriously the actual effects of any proposed policy change. I can only do this to a limited degree. Some considerations (to do with, say, enforcement) might take on a greater significance for licensing than for standard sales tax approaches. But I suspect that, like many distinctions in philosophy, ‘ideal versus non-ideal’ does not have a strongly binary form and can be viewed as a spectrum of positions between two extremes. It is perfectly possible to motivate the sort of theorising that might lie somewhere in the middle ground, even if one would like to get closer to some conception of the non-ideal extreme later on. Here is how the paper proceeds. In the section ‘Background: taxes and justice’, I will make a few background points about taxation and justice. This will help me locate my proposal within a set of more abstract claims about taxes and justice, register a few assumptions and distinguish my proposals from other philosophically interesting positions on tobacco taxation. In the section ‘The general case for a smoking licence’, I will spell out more fully the general idea of a tobacco licence and a basic principle that supports it. The section ‘Refining the licence proposal: options and challenges’ compares different refinements of the licence approach. The section ‘Conclusion’ concludes.