Harm Reducing or Harm Enabling?

By Piero A. Tozzi, J.D. | January 11, 2010

In many United Nations policy circles it is a given that humans are going to behave in certain ways that are harmful to them, so therefore the goal should be to reduce the risk of such activities, rather than encouraging people to correct their behavior. According to this behaviorist mindset, handing out condoms to combat AIDS makes perfect sense, whereas moralistic programs that emphasize abstinence or fidelity are misguided at best, or even pernicious.

From Matthew Hanley writing over at the Catholic Thing comes this reminder that enabling individuals to engage in harmful behavior, cloaking them with a misplaced sense of invulnerably, far from reducing harm, actually increases it.

Our Doug Sylva has also weighed in on this debate in the past, noting that the underlying assumptions of condom-pushing policy experts are often based more on ideological predilections rather than clear-eyed objectivity: “[A]s a deadly pandemic spread mainly through promiscuous sexual activity, [AIDS] threatens some of the most cherished modern norms concerning sexual liberation. So to promote the most obvious response to such a pandemic — do not engage in promiscuous sexual activity — would in essence be a capitulation, an admission that the dream of consequence-free sexual activity was not only impossible, but perhaps at least partly responsible for the scourge.”

Hence the condom: “As an alternative to a sound and sensible risk avoidance strategy, the international community found the only readily available device that held out some promise of risk reduction, of lessening the risk of infection caused by promiscuous sexual activity.”

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