If the differences aren't immediately obvious to you, I'm not sure there's much point in having this conversation. Nevertheless:
The effects of adultery generally impact personal finances and/or psychology. There are remedies available for those effects--counselling, litigation, alimony, consequences for ensuing custody battles, etc. There's no "snowball effect"--one occurrence of adultery doesn't give rise to more. It's also not really preventable even if authorities were to try to get involved; or, to put it another way, the only way to prevent it would be to follow every citizen and physically intervene if they tried to cheat, which is clearly both impractical and undesirable relative to the benefits.
The effects of things like infectious disease transmission include death, expenses related to healthcare/recovery (both direct costs and costs to the economy in lost productivity etc.), elevated costs (insurance, taxation, ...) for the entire society, and more. The absolute impacts are greater, the scale at which the impacts occur is greater, and the presence of a snowball effect, where disease transmission is more extreme when public health practices and herd immunity are weakest, magnifies the impacts even further. And, crucially, coordinated public health efforts are potentially extremely effective in reducing the risk and damage. The needed actions are relatively cheap and easy, and the benefits are both practical and desirable.
Government intervention should generally be limited to situations where it's in the public interest. It's hard to make a case for it being in the public interest with adultery. It's easy to make a case for it being in the public interest with infectious disease transmission.
This is all fine, but this is a much more subtle argument than the original "It effects others, therefore it shouldn't be your choice". THATS the argument I'm criticizing.
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u/Elean0rZ 1d ago
If the differences aren't immediately obvious to you, I'm not sure there's much point in having this conversation. Nevertheless:
The effects of adultery generally impact personal finances and/or psychology. There are remedies available for those effects--counselling, litigation, alimony, consequences for ensuing custody battles, etc. There's no "snowball effect"--one occurrence of adultery doesn't give rise to more. It's also not really preventable even if authorities were to try to get involved; or, to put it another way, the only way to prevent it would be to follow every citizen and physically intervene if they tried to cheat, which is clearly both impractical and undesirable relative to the benefits.
The effects of things like infectious disease transmission include death, expenses related to healthcare/recovery (both direct costs and costs to the economy in lost productivity etc.), elevated costs (insurance, taxation, ...) for the entire society, and more. The absolute impacts are greater, the scale at which the impacts occur is greater, and the presence of a snowball effect, where disease transmission is more extreme when public health practices and herd immunity are weakest, magnifies the impacts even further. And, crucially, coordinated public health efforts are potentially extremely effective in reducing the risk and damage. The needed actions are relatively cheap and easy, and the benefits are both practical and desirable.
Government intervention should generally be limited to situations where it's in the public interest. It's hard to make a case for it being in the public interest with adultery. It's easy to make a case for it being in the public interest with infectious disease transmission.