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"Build something. Do something."
Does it make any difference to you what we do, or is it enough just to have a job? Is the guy selling cigarettes at the same worth as someone making buildings?
There’s an interesting question there which I don’t think I have a very developed answer to. Namely, how socially negative can a job be before we stop being proud to do it.
I tend to see cigarettes as one vice among many but bookmaking as a terrible thing. I may not be entirely consistent.
Cigarettes seriously harm you when used as directed. Most other vices have to be abused to harm you.
The religious mind may consider harm and sinfulness to be inversely correlated (smoking vs promiscuity). The latter is particularly unfair to the believers and offensive to the gods precisely because the sinners are having fun without repercussions. The greater the temptation, the stronger the smell of sulfur.
Speaking in generalities, we do not. On the other hand, regardless of what we disapprove of, whether smoking or promiscuity, it seems that the irreligiously-minded are always ready to explain how our disapproval shows us to be terrible people.
It's pretty uncommon to see people commit murder over cigarettes, and yet they commit murder over promiscuity all the time and across a wide variety of cultures. This seems odd to square with claims that promiscuity is "harmless".
Because the harm is attributed to the person who chose to commit murder.
If Alice does $THING (being promiscuous, wearing the 'wrong' clothes for her gender, expressing unpopular opinions, eating rice on Tuesdays, &c., &c.), and Bob chooses to kill or otherwise harm her over it, that does not make $THING responsible for the harm done to Alice; the blame lies on Bob. Otherwise, Bob would have the ability to prevent Alice from doing anything he didn't like. (cf. the Heckler's Veto.)
They're often choosing to commit murder because they are having what is commonly known as a significant emotional event. Hence the term "crime of passion". Such crimes have been a constant through all of recorded history, indicating that their emergence is not the result of particular social customs. It seems pretty clear to me that sex tends to be deeply emotionally significant for healthy humans, and that perceived violations of trust in these matters cause intense emotional reactions indicates that promiscuity can, in fact, cause significant harm.
You use, excuse and legitimise an extreme minority of rage-fueled murderers to condemn everyone’s harmless daily desires. You've catastrophically misidentified who the healthy humans are.
Whether the daily desires are harmless is the question you are begging. I am pointing out at least one instance where those involved do not act as though they perceive them as harmless. I am not "excusing" or "legitimizing" anything. I am pointing to a phenomenon that has existed at least since the invention of written language, and which seem directly fatal to your argument. If sex is harmless fun, where is the rage coming from?
Nor is this confined to murder driven by jealousy. Long-term relationships being destroyed by infidelity is extremely common, and those who undergo it certainly seem to consider the infidelity to have been harmful, to the point that our legal system explicitly accounts for fidelity or its absence in the legal decoupling of such relationships.
Nor does it stop there. In the last decade we've seen a massively effective social movement aimed at rolling back huge parts of the sexual revolution from within erstwhile liberal feminism, driven by an explicit rejection of "sex is harmless fun" and a demand for a jugaad-ethics pseudo-traditionalism. This movement has very clearly been generated by the broadly accepted belief that in fact sex is not "harmless fun", that it is in fact fraught and requires serious safeguards to prevent serious harm. That their proposed solutions are absurd, unworkable and perverse does nothing to change the nature of the problem: Whether you like it or not, whether you recognize it or not, sex has serious consequences that cannot be effectively prevented or engineered around.
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