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The ethics of a smoking licence

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 peoplei 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 …