Shocking news from across the pond:

Study leader Professor Mark Bellis, director of the Centre for Public Health at Liverpool John Moore’s University said: “Millions of young Europeans now take drugs and drink in ways which alter their sexual decisions and increase their chances of unsafe sex or sex that is later regretted.

“Yet despite the negative consequences, we found many are deliberately taking these substances to achieve quite specific sexual effects.”

Hear him now, understand him later: people actually seek out behaviors and situations that they’ll regret afterward. The mystery of original sin — not that mysterious after all. Not even practical morality can fully escape the gravitational pull of moral judgment. We simply like being bad sometimes, even if ‘bad’ is measured only on a totally autistic and subjective level. The big question is what we’re then supposed to do about it. The big tension nowadays involves managing the tension between our passion for destructive pleasure and our interest in maximum health and security. The big problem nowadays, then, is that the scale of this tension and our habit of outsourcing trouble to the experts combine to suggest that we should continue doing the stupid things we do and pay the government to figure out how to keep us from running completely off the rails. Personal liberty suffers damage from both directions.

(Photo courtesy of Flickr user katenadine, whose moral character is neither explicitly nor implicitly impugned by association with this post.)