The 2023 Tobacco and Vapes bill proposed gradually raising the legal age for smoking until smoking was totally banned in the UK. Meant as  Rishi Sunak’s signature policy, it was shelved because of the early general election, Now, the new Labour Government has signalled it will resurrect the bill. But concerns about whether an eventual total smoking ban infringes on people’s freedom remain. Andreas Schmidt argues that such concerns are misplaced, and defends a liberal’s case for eventually banning smoking in the UK. 

The human costs of cigarettes are gigantic, heart-breaking, and avoidable. Luckily, over the last forty years tobacco control has scored big wins for public health. Buoyed by such success – but also disheartened when it started to level out – tobacco control proponents began dreaming up more ambitious proposals, particularly in the early noughties and 2010s. Such “endgame” proposals aimed to get rid of cigarettes once and for all, for example by banning cigarettes for anyone born after the year 2000. As a philosopher working on both freedom and public health, my interest was piqued. If successful, such proposals would save so many lives. At the same time, banning a product seems like a severe interference with people’s freedom. Can liberal governments permissibly pursue endgame policies?

A few years on, those questions have moved from academic journals to parliaments. In 2022, New Zealand’s liberal government passed plans for a partial ban, only for the new, right-wing government to repeal them the year after. Now the spotlight is on the UK, where endgame prospects are brighter. A flagship policy of former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, the Tobacco and Vapes bill aimed to prohibit “the sale of tobacco to people born on or after 1 January 2009”. Interestingly – and unusual for post-Brexit politics – the House of Commons passed this bill with an overwhelming bipartisan majority. The bill was shelved when Sunak called an early election in May, but reflecting the bipartisan support for the bill, the Labour Government included it in the King’s Speech.

While product bans affect liberal freedom, liberal theories do not speak against the tobacco phase-out.

But not everyone is convinced. Besides practical concerns, critics have previously voiced objections around personal freedom. For example, former Prime Minister Liz Truss opined that the bill was “emblematic of a technocratic establishment in this country that wants to limit people’s freedom”. Setting aside the ‘technocratic establishment’ comment, the worry around freedom should resonate widely: should liberal governments really be in the business of banning cigarettes? This was precisely the worry that motivated me to write articles on the topic. Often, philosophers ask good questions but give disappointingly hedged answers (“it’s more complicated than you thought: on the one hand, this, on the other hand, that…”). But in this case, I arrived at a clear answer: if such policies work in practice, individual freedom is not a reason against them. Quite the opposite, freedom speaks in their favour.

Even the most ardent liberal cares about values other than freedom. Sometimes we must balance freedom with other concerns.

To see why, consider liberal theories that identify freedom with the availability of options and the absence of interpersonal interference. While product bans affect liberal freedom, liberal theories do not speak against the tobacco phase-out.

Freedom as one value among others

First, even the most ardent liberal cares about values other than freedom. Sometimes we must balance freedom with other concerns. And because smoking is the leading cause of preventable illness and death, health concerns might outweigh freedom. Consider the following thought experiment: imagine cigarettes had not yet been introduced to our markets; but then a company invents them and now seeks regulatory approval. Assume also that we have all our current information about cigarette’s ghastly effects. Should countries allow that company to start selling cigarettes? I am confident the UK would not, and rightly so. But if we would withhold cigarettes in this thought experiment, should we not also withdraw cigarettes now that they exist?

I argue elsewhere that the justificatory threshold for withdrawing options is higher than it is for withholding options (but that the threshold is still met for withdrawing cigarettes). For the UK tobacco bill, however, we can ignore this complication: it does not withdraw anyone’s option to buy cigarettes, it only withholds the option for anyone born after 2008. So, if withholding the option seems justifiable in the thought experiment, it should be justifiable here too.

We should protect individuals against options that bind their future selves into severe unfreedom.

Freedom itself supports a ban

And then there is a second powerful argument: we do not even need to weigh freedom against other values, freedom itself already supports a partial ban. Here is why.

John Stuart Mill was famously anti-paternalist, but even he allowed exceptions. For example, in On Liberty, he argued we should ban slavery contracts even when they are voluntary:

“… by selling himself for a slave, he abdicates his liberty; he forgoes any future use of it beyond that single act. […] The principle of freedom cannot require that he should      be free not to be free”.

The option to smoke carries a smaller but still substantial risk: in expectation, if you become addicted to cigarettes, your future freedom shrinks massively. First off, your life expectancy goes down by 10 to 15 years. Your options decrease accordingly, as you have zero options when you are dead. Cigarettes also worsen your health, which in turn reduce your ‘physical options’ and thus freedom when you are alive. Cigarettes also reduce financial freedom. Three out of four smokers wish they could stop. But they cannot, so their expensive cigarette addiction reduces the money they can spend on other things they need or value. Finally, philosophers typically think that addictions also make us less free in a psychological sense. Addictions prevent our actions from lining up with what we autonomously desire to do with our life.

All in all, cigarettes reduce your expected lifetime freedom. We should protect individuals against options that bind their future selves into severe unfreedom. This argument becomes even stronger, if we care about how freedom is distributed between people. Smoking makes social distributions of freedom more unequal. Smoking has a social gradient, meaning that those with lower socioeconomic status are more likely to smoke. Through higher mortality, morbidity, and financial burdens, tobacco disproportionately reduces the freedom of those who already had less to begin with.

If the UK’s partial ban ends up working in practice, a concern with freedom speaks in its favour.

Do smokers consent freely?

Now, one might resist my conclusion by adopting a different notion of freedom: freedom is not some good to be promoted, nor should we care about people’s range of options. Instead, the government’s only freedom-based duty is to respect people’s choices and to respect whatever they freely consent to – no matter how dangerous or silly such choices. However, this response has several problems. Such a view does not hold up well under philosophical scrutiny: respecting consent is an important part of freedom, but it’s hardly the whole story!

Moreover, even radical versions of such a view acknowledge that consent can be overridden when there are third-party harms, of which there are plenty for tobacco. And, most importantly, most smokers do not consent rationally and freely to the degree that is required for the argument to go through. The vast majority of smokers wish they had never started, wish they could stop, and have tried to stop but failed. And most smokers typically pick up the habit before the legal age of consent. Finally, smokers often underestimate smoking’s health risks and addictive potential. If the UK’s partial ban ends up working in practice, a concern with freedom speaks in its favour.

All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of LSE British Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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