Transcript LARD01 violence and drugs

LARD01 violence and drugs
(a special composite for 2010)
General Issues -- Liberal Dilemmas
• Reconciling individual freedom and social
responsibility
• Early approach -- Bentham and the pursuit of
the greatest happiness for the greatest
number
• Later approach -- JS Mill -- protect minority
rights, act on long-term interests
• Identifying social harm, weighing costs and
benefits of legislation
State vs market
• Violent leisure (and porn and drugs) as free choice,
best left to the market to regulate or…
• A kind of ‘market failure’? Exploitation? A result of
asymmetric power? Addicts are not rational
consumers?
• Long-term ‘bad’ or degrading effects as a kind of unpriced ‘public bad’, ‘de-merit goods’?
• Can market mechanisms recover these costs?
The regulation of violence
• What is violence? ‘Good’ violence? What sort of
violence is regulated? (e.g. is making people
redundant ‘violence’?)
• Sporting violence. Is sport a special case (Kerr). Does
watching violent sport make us violent?
• Why do people do violence? The pleasures of
violence? The need for violence? Social/cultural
conditions or personal blame?
• Contradictions and partial resolutions
What is a drug?
• Chemical, medical or recreational drugs, legal
definitions based on social harm etc.
• Good drugs and bad drugs, legal drugs and
illegal drugs -- consistent divisions?
• The problems with alcohol.
• Defining harmful drugs -- Addiction? Health
hazards? Social costs? Drugs used by
minorities?
Drugs in Sport
• What is a performance-enhancing drug?
• What is an illegal performance enhancing
drug?
• Is illegal drug-taking widespread?
• Should we and can we regulate drug usage?
Policy implications
• Regulating ‘harmful’ drugs --protecting the
vulnerable or forbidding pleasures?
• Legal remedies or cultural ones (e.g. informed
choice, health and safety)
• Informing people of the risks in ‘risk society’
(risks have been individualised and privatised)
• Principles or practice (Colebatch)? -knowledge and detection, conviction
variables, perimeter policing?
Media effects
• What are the effects of media – eg on violent
behaviour? Why is it so difficult to gain evidence?
(Buckingham, Belson, Birmingham Uni)
• Recent American studies – Anderson & Dill,
Vandewater
• How is media violence regulated in Britain -- indirect
regulation and e.g. the BBFC
• Dominant tastes? Moral panics? (e.g. the James
Bulger affair –see Buckingham)