A Moral Defense of Recreational Drug Use

Is recreational drug use morally wrong? In this book, I examine four types of argument for the view that it is – religious, nonreligious, harm-based, and non-harm-based – and contend that, by and large, they do not succeed. Specifically, in Chapter 2, I evaluate nonreligious harm-based arguments that focus on harm to the user. In Chapter 3, I evaluate nonreligious harm-based arguments that focus on harm to someone other than the user. In Chapter 4, I evaluate nonreligious non-harm-based arguments linked by the concepts of instrumentalization, addiction, and degradation. In Chapter 5, I continue to evaluate nonreligious non-harm-based arguments, this time linked by the concept of pleasure. And in Chapter 6, I evaluate religious arguments, both harm-based and non-harm-based.

Rob Lovering is Associate Professor of Philosophy at College of Staten Island, City University of New York, USA. He is the author of God and Evidence: Problems for Theistic Philosophers as well as numerous articles on ethics and the philosophy of religion. He lives in Manhattan, USA.