E-cigarettes: The Long-Term Liberal Perspective

The debate for and against making e-cigarettes available to smokers is to a large extent empirical. We do not know the long-term health effects of vaping and we do not know how smokers will respond to e-cigarettes over time. In addition to these empirical uncertainties, however, there are difficult moral issues to consider. One such issue is that many smokers in some sense choose to smoke. Though smoking is addictive and though many start young, it does not seem impossible to plan for and implement cessation. Yet many choose not to do so and we arguably have some reason to respect this choice. I propose that liberal opposition to strict tobacco control, based on respect for choice, is mitigated when e-cigarettes are available, since they are such a close substitute. Making e-cigarettes available to smokers might therefore not only enable switching in practice, but may make tougher tobacco control more justified. Another moral issue is that making e-cigarettes widely available might induce many people to vape, who would otherwise have neither vaped nor smoked. If this is so, the price of using e-cigarettes to accelerate smoking cessation may be a long-term vaping epidemic. Since vaping is less harmful than smoking, both individuals and society will have less reason to end this epidemic and so it may endure longer than the smoking epidemic would otherwise have done. This raises further questions around the weighing of reduced harm to current smokers against increased harm to future vapers. Implications: Because they are a close substitute, e-cigarettes makes tougher tobacco control more morally and politically feasible. Because e-cigarettes are less harmful than combustibles, making them available may accelerate smoking cessation but also lead to a long-term vaping epidemic, as we have less reason to combat vaping, once established. Moral evaluation of this possible scenario requires considering at least three things: (1) the cost of addiction to autonomy, in addition to health effects, (2) possible distributional effects due to differences between current smokers and future vapers, and (3) the fact that a possible vaping epidemic affects mainly future people and future society.