Comment by munificent
4 days ago
> The blame is 100% on the individuals making their own health decisions.
If you put a pile of junk food on the floor, your pet will eat it until they make themselves sick.
We are smarter than many animals and have more discipline. But we are still animals and do not have unlimited executive function. The people who architect the environment of incentives that surround us bear some amount of responsibility for the behavior those incentives create.
Denying that is denying that we are living beings subject to all of the same limitations as any other mortal animal. We are not spherical rational actors in a vacuum.
You can't control the incentives, you can only control your reactions to those incentives.
We can control the incentives!
The idea that we should completely cede the environment and public space to corporations and give them total autonomy over the incentives that surround us is crazy.
My apologies. I was responding to the fact that animals and humans have base instincts that steer us towards bad food choices or over-stimulations. I was considering those instincts as the incentives that can't be changed.
On a macro scale, yes I agree that we should revolt against campaigns designed to exploit our animal nature. However on a personal basis, I do believe we owe it to ourselves to take radical responsibility over our own reactions to those things.
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