Part II - Alcohol and Marijuana Use: Are They on Ethical Par?

I wanted to explore this topic with Revised PDE (R-PDE) in mind.  What does Pruss’s discussion of R-PDE have to say about the ethics of alcohol and marijuana use?

Grant that drunkenness is inherently wrong.  It can’t be intended as a means or an end.  It can’t be a part of one’s action plan.  But it can be foreseen as a consequence of one’s action plan.

Drinking alcohol to enjoy its taste and aesthetic qualities is a good.  Let’s say that I have an action plan with the goal of enjoying an alcoholic drink.  Is drunkenness something accomplished for the sake of enjoying the alcoholic drink?  Not necessarily.  For drinking alcohol does not necessarily lead to drunkenness.  Nor is drunkenness being used as a means for enjoying the alcohol.  So drunkenness is not necessarily accomplished in the typical use of alcohol.

Still, with drunkenness being an intrinsically wrong foreseen effect, the consumption of alcohol can be defeated via the proportionality criteria.  So R-PDE can prohibit alcohol consumption on two grounds: Insofar as it is being consumed to produce drunkenness, and, via the proportionality criteria, if an increasing drunkenness begins to defeat the proportional good of ingesting a good drink.

Weed usage and alcoholic usage for purposes of getting drunk is forbidden; however, insofar as alcohol gets one drunk on an increasing scale and can be taken without much of a intoxicating effect for a few drinks, then it’s permissible until the proportionality condition of R-PDE defeats it.  With marijuana being less of a tiered drug and producing more of an immediate effect of intoxication, it’d presumably defeat the proportionality criterion quickly or immediately, and so would be forbidden.  

Insofar as one could smoke marijuana without becoming intoxicated it’d be permissible; and presumably the only type of motivation for such a practice would be something akin to enjoying it’s “good bud” aesthetic qualities; but these would presumably be defeated quite quickly by the proportionality condition of PDE insofar as one quickly becomes intoxicated.  It's my inclination to think that marijuana usage would quickly disappear if this were the only motivation (I think this is the result of the Hedonator thought-experiment); while alcohol usage would carry on as it has for centuries if the “good drink” motivation were its only motivation.

I think the Hedonator device is merely illustrating the usual intent with which a marijuana user ingests marijuana, and to intend to become intoxicated is willing an inherent wrong, so should be avoided. The Hedonator thought-experiment only has one purpose:  To illustrate the reasons for which the typical pot smoker smokes vs the typical reason why an alcoholic user drinks.

Objection: What about the case of alcohol used for analgesic purposes?  The intent of the action is to dull pain.  But the means to dull the pain is drunkenness.  So it seems R-PDE may disallow anesthesia, which seems like the wrong result.  

But whether it’s the drunkenness of the mind that is the means by which the pain is dulled is not something we should take for granted.  It could be that the dulling of the pain is a separate mechanism from the drunkenness, and so drunkenness would fall under foreseen consequence and is not something accomplished by the action.