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The U.S. men’s national soccer team (USMNT) has played on perennial ryegrass and Kentucky bluegrass and Latitude 36 Bermuda grass, but it hasn’t played a game on artificial turf in the U.S. in the past two years.¹ Compare that with the U.S. women’s national team (USWNT), which was forced this weekend to either refuse to play in a friendly match against Trinidad and Tobago because of unsuitable field conditions at Aloha Stadium in Hawaii, or to play in front of Hawaiian fans for the first time but risk injury.

The argument surrounding turf versus natural playing surfaces is ongoing, but there wasn’t much nuance to the situation at Aloha Stadium: “The artificial turf was actually pulling up out of the ground,” the team wrote in a collective post on The Players’ Tribune. “There were sharp rocks ingrained all over the field.” The women chose not to play.

The playing conditions for the USWNT are baffling when compared with those for the men’s team — both are overseen by governing body U.S. Soccer (USSF), and yet the men’s team has played 100 percent of its U.S. games on grass (or turf overlaid with grass) since 2014. During the same time period, the women have played less than 70 percent of their U.S. games on grass.

Both teams have played fewer than 30 games in the U.S. in the past two years, so a difference in surface for a few games can dramatically change these percentages. And that’s what happened with the USWNT: In the run-up to the Women’s World Cup this summer, the USWNT had played only two games on turf since 2014, the last of which was in September 2014 at Sahlen’s Stadium in Rochester, New York. But after losing its legal battle against FIFA and the Canadian Soccer Association over artificial turf fields at the Women’s World Cup, the women returned home world champions and were awarded a 10-game victory tour — with eight matches scheduled to be played on artificial turf.

Claims of sexism and discrimination have dogged the federation as the issue of playing surfaces has gained attention, and it’s not hard to see why. For instance, the USSF does not vet venues before matches for the USWNT, as it does for the USMNT. But whatever is motivating the decisions, they send a message: indifference to the preference of USWNT players, in particular when compared with the men.

That preference is at root here. FIFA and other governing bodies say there is no greater risk of injury playing soccer on artificial turf than on natural grass (a recent ESPN report suggests that there might be other risks, though). The study FIFA cites is lacking, as it’s based on a small sample of mostly male teams playing on FIFA-certified turf, but it’s also irrelevant to the broader concern. Players vigorously prefer natural grass to artificial (if you’ve ever tried a slide-tackle on turf, you know the feeling), but only one set of preferences has been taken to heart. If USSF has deemed turf unsuitable for the men’s team, the women shouldn’t be playing on it either.

The next game on the USWNT victory tour is a friendly Thursday at the Alamodome in San Antonio. When the USWNT last played there against Australia in 2013, Australian forward Kyah Simon tore her ACL in a noncontact play within 30 seconds of entering the match. It’s the same field that was overlaid with grass for a USMNT friendly against Mexico in April (which has its own shortcomings), but as of Monday, the USSF had no plans to remedy the Alamodome turf for the women.

The United States women's national team was forced to cancel a friendly against Trinidad and Tobago on Sunday due to an unplayable surface at Aloha Stadium in Honolulu. Just one day earlier, star player Megan Rapinoe tore her ACL on a practice field that was in poor condition, but apparently not quite as poor as the actual stadium's playing surface.  The stadium's turf was coming up at the seams, so the team informed U.S. Soccer that they'd decided it was unsafe to play the match, and the federation agreed.

On its own, absent context, scheduling a match on an unplayable surface was a pretty big screw-up by U.S. Soccer. With the added context of players' prior complaints and information that came out after the match's cancellation, it's clear that it's part of a pattern of neglect. U.S. Soccer treats the USWNT players like money faucets that will never turn off, not human beings who have relevant, important concerns, and who deserve to be treated like world class athletes.

Former USWNT star and current ESPN analyst Julie Foudy chimed in with a revelation just after the game was canceled.

I'm being told for men's team a rep flies to venue months in advance & no @ussoccer rep inspected this Hawaii field. #USWNT

— Julie Foudy (@JulieFoudy) December 6, 2015

U.S. Soccer didn't refute that. Laura Vecsey was on the scene in Honolulu for FOX Soccer and more or less got confirmation of Foudy's information without getting confirmation. "U.S. Soccer spokesman Neil Buethe could not confirm whether the Aloha Stadium field had actually been vetted by anyone at U.S. Soccer," reported Vecsey.

Between the PR disaster and the lost revenue that went along with canceling the match, U.S. Soccer knows that it has to change so this never happens again.

Being told @ussoccer is working w the team & coaches to get a protocol in place similar to men's. How not already in place is beyond me.

— Julie Foudy (@JulieFoudy) December 6, 2015

And despite their clear negligence in this case, U.S. Soccer does care if their players get hurt. Rapinoe going down with a torn ACL hurts the USWNT's chances of winning an Olympic gold medal, which hurts U.S. Soccer's chances of making a lot of money off the team in the near future, so they're going to reduce the chances of that happening again.

This is the bare minimum, though. USSF doesn't get brownie points for not wanting players to get torn ACLs or starting to inspect fields after one of their games gets called off because a field is unplayable. They should be doing much more for the USWNT players who bring tens of millions of dollars more money into U.S. Soccer than any other women's national team does for their federation.

In their statement on The Players' Tribune, the USWNT players made it clear that this game's cancelation was not about the lingering turf vs. grass issue in international soccer. It was just about a field that was a serious safety risk. But the turf problem persists, and it's part of the broader issue surrounding this game.

World Cup Golden Ball winner Carli Lloyd made her feelings clear after Sunday's announcement.

So over the turf. 8 out of 10 Victory tour games on turf. https://t.co/OSrMwnzofg

— Carli Lloyd (@CarliLloyd) December 6, 2015

Yes it was bad enough playing a WC on that and we thought it would have stopped there and it didn't. https://t.co/VwZPS27rMi

— Carli Lloyd (@CarliLloyd) December 6, 2015

And they're not done yet. During their next four games, the USWNT will only play once at a stadium that has a natural grass surface installed.

The team's feelings on turf have been made very clear. Three of them even filed a gender discrimination lawsuit ahead of the 2015 World Cup. From said lawsuit:

"The players' perceptions about the drawbacks and risks of elite soccer on artificial turf are also well-founded. Turf exposes players to injuries that do not exist on natural grass, such as skin lesions, abrasions and lacerations ... the most reliable scientific research indicates that there is a higher risk of serious injury to lower extremity joins on artificial turf than on natural grass. According to a 2013 article [in the Journal of the American Academy of Orthopedic surgeons], 'reliable biomechanical data suggest that both the torque and strain experienced by lower extremity joints generated by artificial surfaces may be more than those generated by natural grass fields.'"

That lawsuit was killed through stall tactics by FIFA's lawyers and intimidation tactics by individual FAs, but it was very clearly one that had merit, and one that made players' feelings on the issue well known.

So why, knowing all of this, did U.S. Soccer schedule a victory tour on artificial turf fields that they didn't inspect? It's reasonable to infer that they did it because they didn't care what the players thought. They care enough about the players to take steps to improve conditions after a big revenue loss, a PR disaster and a serious injury, but not enough to listen to their players before those things happened.

The USWNT players give up chances to play club soccer overseas, fly discount airlines and stay in discount hotels to keep the National Women's Soccer League's costs down, leave their NWSL teams for international call-ups, do any media appearances, anywhere, at the drop of a hat, play on turf with minimal protest and take photos with fans for hours before and after games. They do all of this because they love their jobs, and their fans, and they want to make women's soccer better for the next generation of players.

Checking fields is the absolute least U.S. Soccer can do for these players. They should be scheduling all of their home friendlies on grass and taking any other concerns the players have into account. U.S. Soccer needs to be treating the USWNT players like the extremely valuable people they are, not like robots who occasionally present PR problems.

This post was revised to incorporate new information provided by Mark Zuckerberg in a Facebook post on December 3rd.

The announcement, on Tuesday, by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, that, during their lifetimes, they will donate to philanthropic causes roughly ninety-nine per cent of their Facebook stock, which is currently valued at close to forty-five billion dollars, has already prompted a lot of comment, much of it positive. That is understandable. The fact that Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and a number of other billionaires are pledging their fortunes to charity rather than seeking to pass them down to their descendants is already having an impact.

Last year, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which was founded in 2000, dispensed almost four billion dollars in grants. A big slug of this money went toward fighting diseases like H.I.V., malaria, polio, and tuberculosis, which kill millions of people in poor countries. Zuckerberg and Chan have also already donated hundreds of millions of dollars to various causes, including eradicating the Ebola virus. In their latest announcement, which they presented as an open letter to their newborn daughter, on Zuckerberg’s Facebook page, they said that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the new philanthropic organization that they are setting up, would focus on “advancing human potential and promoting equality.”

It’s not just the size of the donations that the wealthy are making that demands attention, though. Charitable giving on this scale makes modern capitalism, with all of its inequalities and injustices, seem somewhat more defensible. Having created hugely successful companies that have generated almost unimaginable wealth, Zuckerberg, Gates, and Buffett are sending a powerful message to Wall Street hedge-fund managers, Russian oligarchs, European industrialists, Arab oil sheiks, and anybody else who has accumulated a vast fortune: “From those to whom much is given, much is expected.”

Speaking at Harvard in 2007, Gates attributed this quotation to his dying mother. (A slightly different version of it appears in St. Luke’s gospel.) In 2010, Gates and Buffett challenged fellow members of the ultra-rich club to give away at least half of their wealth. Since then, more than a hundred billionaires have signed the “Giving Pledge.” Some of these mega-donors, such as Buffett, are content to let others direct their donations. (In 2006, he signed over much of his fortune to the Gates Foundation.) Increasingly, however, wealthy people are setting up their own philanthropic organizations and pursuing their own causes—a phenomenon that has been called “philanthrocapitalism.”

That is the positive side. It is also worth noting, however, that all of this charitable giving comes at a cost to the taxpayer and, arguably, to the broader democratic process. If Zuckerberg and Chan were to cash in their Facebook stock, rather than setting it aside for charity, they would have to pay capital-gains tax on the proceeds, money that could be used to fund government programs. If they willed their wealth to their descendants, then sizable estate taxes would become due on their deaths. By making charitable donations in the form of stock, they, and their heirs, could escape both of these levies.

The size and timing of the tax benefits to Zuckerberg and Chan are uncertain, but they are likely to be large. In the initial version of this post, based on the open letter Zuckerberg and Chan posted on his Facebook page, and on the opinions of several tax experts, I said that the couple, in donating stock to the new philanthropic organization, would gain immediate tax credits equal to the market value of the stock, some of which could be rolled over into future tax years. Typically, that is what happens when a rich person donates stock to a family foundation or to certain types of L.L.C.s constituted for philanthropic purposes, such as ones owned by family foundations.

On Wednesday, in a follow-up post on Facebook, Zuckerberg provided more details about the couple’s plans. Evidently, the L.L.C. that he and Chan are setting up will not be seeking tax-exempt status. “By using an LLC instead of a traditional foundation, we receive no tax benefit from transferring our shares to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, but we gain flexibility to execute our mission more effectively,” Zuckerberg wrote. “In fact, if we transferred our shares to a traditional foundation, then we would have received an immediate tax benefit, but by using an LLC we do not.”

Even if the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative doesn’t obtain tax-exempt status, over time its activities will most likely have a big impact on the taxes its founders pay. The I.R.S. treats ordinary L.L.C.s as “pass-through” structures, and shifting financial assets to such entities doesn’t usually generate any immediate credits or liabilities. But whenever the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative issues grants to nonprofit organizations, it will almost certainly do so by donating some of its Facebook stock, and that will generate tax credits for Zuckerberg and Chan equal to the market value of the stock at that time. As the years go by and the Initiative steps up its charitable activities, these credits seem likely to add up to very large sums.

Unlike a regular family foundation, the L.L.C. may also generate some tax liabilities for Zuckerberg and Chan. If it invested in a commercial enterprise, such as an online-learning company, taxes would be owed on any profits the investment generated. And if, as Zuckerberg also pointed out, the L.L.C. sold some of the Facebook shares that he and Chan have donated to it, they would have to pay capital-gains taxes on the proceeds. But since the couple will control the L.L.C., they will be able to decide how it finances itself, and whether it sells any stock.”

If what Zuckerberg is doing were an isolated example, it wouldn’t matter much for over-all tax revenues. But the practice is spreading at a time when the distribution of wealth is getting ever more lopsided, which means the actions of a small number of very rich people can have a bigger impact. In 2012, according to

By transferring almost all of their fortunes to philanthropic organizations, billionaires like Zuckerberg and Gates are placing some very large chunks of wealth permanently outside the reaches of the Internal Revenue Service. That means the country’s tax base shrinks. As yet, I haven’t seen any estimates of the over-all cost to the Treasury, but it’s an issue that can’t be avoided. And it raises the broader question, which the economists Thomas Piketty and Anthony Atkinson, among others, have raised, of whether we need a more comprehensive tax on wealth.

Arguably, there is another issue at stake, too: democracy.

Although organizations like the Gates Foundation portray themselves as apolitical, nonpartisan entities, they aren’t completely removed from politics. Far from it. The Gates Foundation, for example, has been a big financial supporter of charter schools, standardized testing, and the Common Core. (It has also given some money to public schools.) Zuckerberg, too, has also provided a lot of money to charter schools. They featured prominently in his costly and controversial effort to reform the public-school system in Newark, New Jersey, which Dale Russakoff wrote about in the magazine last year. In the letter posted on Facebook, Zuckerberg signalled that he isn’t done with such efforts. “We must participate in policy and advocacy to shape debates,” the letter said. “Many institutions are unwilling to do this, but progress must be supported by movements to be sustainable.”

My intention, here, isn’t to enter the education debate. It is simply to point out what should be obvious: people like Zuckerberg and Gates, by virtue of their philanthropic efforts, can have a much bigger say in determining policy outcomes than ordinary citizens can. (As Matthew Yglesias pointed out on Vox, one of the advantages of registering the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative as an L.L.C. is that it can spend money on political ads.) The more money billionaires give to their charitable foundations, which in most cases remain under their personal control, the more influence they will accumulate. And relatively speaking, anyway, the less influence everybody else will have.

Some Americans—not all of them disciples of Ayn Rand—might say that this is a good thing. I have already cited some of the Gates Foundation’s good works. Isn’t Michael Bloomberg, with his efforts to reform gun laws, promoting the public interest? Isn’t George Soros, through his donations to civil-rights organizations, lining up on the side of the angels? In these two instances, my own answers would be yes and yes; but the broader point stands. The divide between philanthropy and politics is already fuzzy. As the “philanthrocapitalism” movement gets bigger, this line will be increasingly hard to discern.

So by all means, let us praise Zuckerberg and Chan for their generosity. And let us also salute Gates, who started the trend. But contrary to the old saying, this is one gift horse we should look closely in the mouth.

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THE Supreme Court has decided four major cases furthering gay rights. Justice Antonin Scalia has written a bitter dissent from each.

In Lawrence v. Texas, for example, where the court invalidated Texas’ ban on homosexual relations between consenting adults, Justice Scalia complained that: “Today’s opinion is the product of a Court, which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, by which I mean the agenda promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct.”

He added: “Many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children’s schools, or as boarders in their home. They view this as protecting themselves and their families from a lifestyle that they believe to be immoral and destructive. The Court views it as ‘discrimination’ which it is the function of our judgments to deter. So imbued is the Court with the law profession’s anti-anti-homosexual culture, that it is seemingly unaware that the attitudes of that culture are not obviously ‘mainstream.’”

Justice Scalia made these remarks 12 years ago — and predicted in his dissent that the court would eventually rule that the Constitution protects the right to same-sex marriage. This June, Justice Scalia’s prediction came true in Obergefell v. Hodges. He has vented even more than his usual anger over this decision. It has become apparent that his colleagues’ gay rights decisions have driven him to an extreme position concerning the role of the Supreme Court.

In a recent speech to law students at Georgetown, he argued that there is no principled basis for distinguishing child molesters from homosexuals, since both are minorities and, further, that the protection of minorities should be the responsibility of legislatures, not courts. After all, he remarked sarcastically, child abusers are also a “deserving minority,” and added, “nobody loves them.”

Not content with throwing minorities under the bus, Justice Scalia has declared that Obergefell marks the end of democracy in the United States, stating in his dissent that “a system of government that makes the People subordinate to a committee of nine unelected lawyers does not deserve to be called a democracy.”

The logic of his position is that the Supreme Court should get out of the business of enforcing the Constitution altogether, for enforcing it overrides legislation, which is the product of elected officials, and hence of democracy. The model he appears to be embracing is that of the traditional British Constitution; until recently, Parliament was deemed to be Britain’s “supreme court.” It could overrule judicial decisions, but courts could not invalidate parliamentary legislation.

We doubt that Justice Scalia would go that far, for he has repeatedly voted to strike down statutes that he believes violate the First Amendment and various federalism provisions of the Constitution, as well as affirmative action measures that he thinks are in conflict with the 14th Amendment.

But who knows? Maybe he’ll now cease voting to strike down statutes under any provision of the Constitution, as otherwise he might be thought of as one of those “unelected lawyers” who so threaten our democracy. Not only an unelected lawyer, but — a patrician. For he said in his Obergefell dissent that “to allow the policy question of same-sex marriage to be considered and resolved by a select, patrician, highly unrepresentative panel of nine is to violate a principle even more fundamental than no taxation without representation: no social transformation without representation.”

Obergefell seems to obsess him. In a speech at Rhodes College in Memphis, he said that the decision represents the “furthest imaginable extension of the Supreme Court doing whatever it wants,” and that “saying that the Constitution requires that practice” — same-sex marriage — “which is contrary to the religious beliefs of many of our citizens, I don’t know how you can get more extreme than that.” The decision, he said, “had nothing to do with the law.”

The suggestion that the Constitution cannot override the religious beliefs of many American citizens is radical. It would imply, contrary to the provision that forbids religious tests for public office, that religious majorities are special wards of the Constitution. Justice Scalia seems to want to turn the Constitution upside down when it comes to government and religion; his political ideal verges on majoritarian theocracy.

In a talk last month at the Union League in Philadelphia, he criticized the court’s interpretations of the establishment clause of the First Amendment, which prohibits the government from “establishing” a religion. He did so, according to the moderator, Robert P. George, a professor of jurisprudence at Princeton, on the ground that “there is no textual or historical basis for the Court’s claim that laws and policies must be neutral not only between different religions, but also between religion and nonreligion.” The implication is that if a majority of Americans reject same-sex marriage on religious grounds, the Supreme Court must bow.

It comes as no surprise that Justice Scalia also said that state and local officials who are not actual parties to Supreme Court cases have no obligation to obey judicial rulings that those officials think lack a warrant in the text or original understanding of the Constitution.

He cited Abraham Lincoln’s remark concerning the infamous Dred Scott ruling that decisions by the Supreme Court are formally binding only on the parties to the case. That’s technically true, but few Americans will agree with Justice Scalia that Obergefell, which conferred rights on millions of Americans, is comparable to Dred Scott, which denied rights to millions by ruling that slaves were not citizens and could not sue in federal courts.

And can Justice Scalia want his own decisions to have diminished and perhaps negligible force until separate lawsuits are brought in each state to enforce them? That implies that state and local officials are free to ignore his gun-friendly decision in District of Columbia v. Heller (holding that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to own a gun). Perhaps a few state and local officials will take Justice Scalia up on that offer.

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

This interview, the latest in a series on political topics, discusses philosophical issues concerning the criminalization of drug use. My interviewee is Douglas Husak, professor of philosophy at Rutgers University. He is the author of “Overcriminalization: The Limits of the Criminal Law.” – Gary Gutting

Gary Gutting: A bill moving through Congress is proposing reductions in sentences for violations of drug laws. Some critics of the bill, including The New York Times editorial board, think it doesn’t go nearly far enough. What’s your view?

Douglas Husak: I’d go much further, at least regarding penalties for drug use. I think it’s a serious moral wrong to send people to prison for the recreational use of drugs such as marijuana, cocaine, and heroin. What we need is a total decriminalization of drug use.

G.G.: What leads you to that conclusion?

 D.H:  Everyone agrees it is seriously unjust to punish people in the absence of very good reasons to do so.  But the case in favor of punishing people for using drugs has never been made.

G.G.: I suppose popular thinking is roughly that punishment is a good way to deter people from doing something that they would otherwise be very tempted to do and that may well lead to terrible consequences if they do it. The pleasure that drugs bring makes them attractive, and the consequences of using them can be overwhelmingly hideous. So, unless there’s reason to think that the consequences of drug use are not as bad as we think or that no form of punishment is likely to deter drug use, then it seems reasonable to punish it.

D.H.: I think it’s wrong to punish people just to get them not to do something bad.  That principle would allow us to punish overeating, smoking, failing to exercise, and lots of other activities that virtually no one proposes to punish. Most crimes we punish (murder, rape, robbery) do serious harm to other people. Almost all people who do drugs at most harm only themselves. The hideous effects of drugs on users and their families we hear so much about occur in only a very small minority of instances.  Most drug users do not suffer substantial harms, and we should be cautious about generalizing from worst-case scenarios.  We should not subject tens of millions of Americans to punishment because of bad effects that materialize in only a small subset of cases. In addition, threats of punishments don’t do much to deter drug use. Most drug users don’t believe they’ll be caught, and they are right.

G.G.: I’d like to hear more about two points you just made. First, why do you think that drug use is not “substantially harmful”?   Maybe there’s not much substantial harm done by smoking marijuana, but what about heroin addiction? Also, what’s the evidence that threats of punishments don’t do much to deter drug use? Most drug users may rightly believe that they won’t be caught, but that doesn’t mean that those who don’t use drugs aren’t deterred by the threat of punishment.

D.H.: I say that drug use itself is not substantially harmful because longitudinal studies indicate that health and life expectancy of the roughly half of all Americans who have used drugs (with the exception of tobacco) is virtually identical to that of the half of Americans who have not. Again, no one should generalize from worst-case scenarios to criminalize conduct that is harmful in only a small percentage of cases. These generalizations would allow the prohibition of lots of behaviors, including the consumption of alcohol. And efforts to prevent these worst-case scenarios almost certainly cause harm that is greater than whatever harms they prevent. When adolescents are caught and punished for using drugs, the consequences of punishment are worse than whatever harm the drugs are likely to have caused.

The evidence that threats of punishment don’t do much to deter drug use involves comparisons of prevalence rates in times and places where punishments are more or less severe. If these threats deterred, one would expect less drug use when and where those threats are increased. But there is no such correlation in the United States or indeed anywhere in the world. (See, for example, “Drug War Heresies,” by Robert J. MacCoun and Peter Reuter, pp. 78-86.)

G.G.: Those of us who aren’t experts in the relevant area aren’t in a position to evaluate empirical evidence put forward in favor of a policy recommendation. The only thing we can rely on is consensus among those qualified to judge the matter. Is there a scientific consensus that the relevant evidence supports the conclusions that drug use is not substantially harmful and that punishment does little to deter drug use?

D.H.: I don’t suppose a “scientific consensus” could be said to exist on many of these matters. But criminologists concur that the deterrent effect of punishments for drug offenses is minimal. In any event, since well over 120 million living Americans have experimented with illicit drugs, one would like to hear from them (and not just from the most extreme cases) as to what harms they have suffered. In most cases, I’ll bet those who have been caught and prosecuted would report that the punishments did more damage to their lives than the drugs they were using.

G.G.: The case against allowing drug use is often tied to the need to protect children from taking them. Specifically, I suspect much of the intense opposition to drug use is due to parents’ fear that their children will become addicted.

D.H.: Adolescents seldom behave in the way their parents would like.  Some experimentation with drugs should be expected.  Since legal drugs should be less dangerous than illegal drugs, parents should prefer a regime of decriminalization.  Today, parents should be more worried that their children will get caught and punished than that the drugs they use will harm them.

G.G.: What about the suggestion that punishing drug users is necessary to reduce drug-related crime (for example, robberies to support a drug habit)?

D.H.: No one can be too sure how drug decriminalization will affect rates of economic crime (e.g., theft, burglary) committed by drug users.  Many variables contribute to the incidence of these crimes, including the cost of decriminalized drugs.  As long as they are affordable, and not taxed excessively, we should expect these crime rates to fall.  We don’t see too many alcoholics or nicotine addicts committing economic crimes to finance their habits.

G.G.: Even many opponents of decriminalization agree that current penalties and enforcement policies need rethinking. But don’t we have to distinguish between the question of the most fair and effective ways of punishing drug use and the question of whether there should be any punishment at all? How do you go beyond the case for reforming our legal penalties for drug use to a case for abolishing them?

D.H.: Obviously, a more severe punishment requires a stronger rationale than a less severe punishment.  But any punishment, even a slap on the wrist, needs to be justified.  We don’t think we should punish other behaviors that primarily hurt just those who engage in them — here, getting drunk might be the closest comparison.

G.G.: There’s also the fact that punishing users is well established as a major way of opposing the bad effects of drugs. It’s one thing to reform this approach to eliminate some of its obvious failings.   But if we move to a very different approach, don’t we risk unintended consequences that could well make things much worse?

D.H.: Sure, moving in a new direction has risks.  New approaches always do.  But it’s hard to be impressed by what we’ve been doing for the past 45 years or so. What have we really accomplished? Those who support our present policy could allege that success is around the corner if only we could identify “the right way to punish drug users.” But no better ideas are on the horizon, and we’ve been trying to find them for decades. Finally, I repeat that a truce in the drug war should be called not simply because we are unable to win it, but because we had no good justification for waging it in the first place.

G.G.: So far we’ve said nothing about the production and selling of drugs. Do you think they also should be decriminalized?

D.H.: In my view, we have to resolve the more basic question of what the law should do with drug users before we decide how to regulate manufacture and sale. If drug use itself is decriminalized, there is lots of room for trial and error to find the best system of distribution. Our models governing alcohol are a sensible place to start.

G.G.: Supposing we decriminalize drug use along the lines you suggest. Do you think there are any steps we should take to discourage the use of recreational drugs?

D.H.: Sure. I am all in favor of state efforts to promote healthy and productive lifestyles. The private sector should contribute to these goals, too. We should all be encouraged to eat better, exercise more and study harder. But criminal law and punishment should not be used for these purposes.

G.G.: Given the failures and frustrations of the “war on drugs,” why do you think the police continue to place so much emphasis on drug-law enforcement? Is it, as some suggest, a part of the racist structure of our society?

D.H.: The racist aspects of drug-law enforcement are real, but frequently exaggerated. In the hands of many police and prosecutors, drug offenses give the state leverage to prevent and solve crimes — not drug crimes, but the kind of serious crimes we all care about. The existence of drug offenses gives police a pretext to detain and arrest people they believe to be suspicious. Police collect DNA samples, frisk for weapons, and use the threat of prosecution to extract information about serious crimes that have occurred or might occur. If I am correct, the goals of drug-law enforcement are valuable. The problem is that far too many innocent drug users get caught in the net and suffer as a result.

The real question for philosophers is to identify a satisfactory rationale for fighting a “war on drugs.” Even though most of us now realize that this war cannot be “won,” we were never very clear about why we were waging it in the first place. Someday we may look back at this era the way we now think about (alcohol) Prohibition: a failed experiment that was indefensible in principle.

This interview was conducted by email and edited. Read the entire series of interviews with philosophers on political issues, here.

Gary Gutting is a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and an editor of Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. His new book, “What Philosophy Can Do” offers essays, expanded from his Stone columns, on politics, science, religion, education and art.

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Before this year’s NBA season started, I had a conversation with a Golden State Warriors fan. He was excited about his team and was keen to explain its success: It was perfectly balanced, with perfect chemistry, role players, coaching and management. That Stephen Curry is pretty amazing also helped.

His point that the Warriors are some kind of Zen basketball masterpiece is hardly controversial. Yet a few minutes into our conversation I found myself arguing strenuously that this diehard Curry fan didn’t really understand how great — and how important — Curry is.

Other than Daryl Morey, Curry is perhaps the figurehead in the NBA’s Three-Point Revolution™. It’s easy to get swept up in the narrative that 3-point shooting has been long-undervalued and that smart sharpshooters are finally taking over the NBA. Teams that shot the most and the best from beyond the arc last year dominated like never before. The correlation between a team’s rate of attempting threes and its winning percentage was the highest it has ever been (.47). In the playoffs, the top 3-point-shooting teams made up the entirety of the conference finals:

Despite this, I’ve been a tiny bit skeptical of the notion that the 3-point shot is inherently superior. I’m not anti-three the way Byron Scott is, but I’ve suggested that the midrange game — which has historically been a strong indicator of success in the NBA — might still be important once defenses adjust to the new offensive math and a new equilibrium is reached.

But Curry kills all that. Curry isn’t a product of the math; he’s so good that he has his own math. Indeed, the math is so far in Curry’s favor that the Warriors — and even basketball in general — may not fully understand what they have yet.

While arguing with that Warriors fan, I may have said some things I shouldn’t have. Like that Curry has an outside shot at breaking Wilt Chamberlain’s season record of 50 points per game. Even as MVP, Curry scored only 24 points per game last year, so obviously I was exaggerating for effect … right?

Through November, Curry is scoring nearly 32 points per game this season (despite having the luxury of sitting out several fourth quarters as the Warriors roll). As ESPN’s Director of Analytics Ben Alamar wrote, Curry “seems to have figured out that he truly cannot take too many 3-point shots.”

And that’s the heart of the matter. The deeper you dive into the data, the more you realize that Curry isn’t just a deadly efficient shooter, but he’s also virtually immune to burden. As he has been asked to produce more and more, he hasn’t gotten any less efficient. (Economists would say Curry has nearly constant¹ returns to scale.) The question is: How much additional shooting volume could Curry handle while still remaining the Warriors’ best option?

I could rattle off a couple of stats and make a guess, but as my sanity depends on this, I didn’t want to take it casually. So I’ve examined the issue from a number of angles, including a foray into the NBA’s latest tracking data.²

There’s good news and bad news. The bad news is that the results really don’t give us a clear indication of how much burden Curry may be able to handle. The good news is the data doesn’t show even the tiniest hint that Curry is anywhere near his limits yet.

So how good is Curry’s shooting?

Although Curry does a lot of things well, his main skill is chucking the ball into the basket, so let’s start with that. To look at Curry’s shooting, I used NBA shot-tracking data from the start of the 2014-15 season through Saturday’s games³ (courtesy of Nylon Calculus). The data set contains not only shot distance, but also the distance of the nearest defender and the time left on the shot clock (usually). From this, I created a quick regression to find an expected value of each shot taken,⁴ which I then compared to the results. This plot shows how much value each player has added since the start of last season versus how many shots he took (with the size of each bubble corresponding to the number of shots taken per game):

Among players with more than 200 shots, Curry was only the fourth-most-efficient shooter on a shot-by-shot basis (behind Kyle Korver, DeAndre Jordan and Kevin Durant).⁵ Yet Curry has more than 1,600 shots in that span, while none of the other three players has even half that. He has 371 total points added from shooting efficiency alone, with Korver in second place with 247. Note that this doesn’t include additional value from free throws earned — which would probably make Curry’s advantage even greater (Curry has 416 made free throws in the period, compared to Kyle Korver’s 118).

This year, Curry is making his 2014-15 MVP season seem practically pedestrian. Curry is playing better in a number of ways — among other things, he is on pace to set career highs in stealing and rebounding, and he has his best defensive rating to date. He is also hitting a career high in shot attempts per 100 possessions (29.0 this year vs. 25.1 last year) and 3-point attempts per possession (15.5 this year vs. 12.1 last year). Most importantly, even though he’s taking all these extra shots, his shooting efficiency has gone up! As a reminder, here’s Kirk Goldsberry’s shot chart for Curry this season (as of last week):

But perhaps my favorite stat in all of this: Curry’s assists per 100 possessions has plummeted (11.6 last year, 8.5 so far this year, his lowest since 7.8 his rookie year). It’s probably fair to infer that Curry is taking more shots that he used to set up for teammates.

As well he should! Curry should only be setting up others’ shots if he is unable to take or get a better shot himself, which is not that often.

Curry’s bad shots are better than others’ good shots

I like to joke that Curry should just take “all the shots” — which is an exaggeration (I think). But there’s strong evidence that the Warriors could be asking Curry to take even more of them.

Let’s get very basic for a second: Some shots are better than others. Sometimes a defense breaks down and leaves a player an open look, and sometimes the clock runs down and a player has to heave up a prayer despite being tightly defended. A good offensive scheme is one that generates a lot of good shots. But of course this is relative to who takes them: An open three is useless if it’s taken by a poor shooter like Shaq, while a pretty well-guarded three can be valuable if it’s taken by a good shooter like Curry.

If the Warriors were to assign Curry even more shots, they would have to come from somewhere. If Curry can steal shots that are as good as or better than those his teammates would have taken, that’s pure gravy. But if we assume that the Warriors are already distributing their shots wisely, giving Curry more shots likely comes with a trade-off: To give Curry more shots would mean taking “better” shots away from his teammates. Moreover, Curry’s new shots are likely to be worse, on average, than the ones he is taking already (if they were better, he would probably already be taking them).

So if our hypothesis — that Curry should be taking more shots — is true, it would suggest that sometimes the Warriors should pass up a good shot for Curry to take a bad shot. So how good is Curry at bad shots?

Very, very good.

One way to measure his skill at bad shots is to look at how he shoots when he’s well-defended. In the shot data, the simplest proxy for this is the distance of the nearest defender. For example, NBA players on the whole made 35 percent of all 3-point attempts last season, but they made 44 percent with the closest defender at least 12 feet away.

Here’s Curry’s 3-point shooting over the past two seasons, broken down by distance to closest defender:

Leave aside the sharp drop on the right of the chart for a moment: Curry has hit 45 percent with a defender between 2 and 4 feet away, 44 percent with a defender between 4 and 6 feet away, and 47 percent with the closest defender more than 6 feet away. Yes, that’s right, Curry shoots threes about as well with a defender 2 to 4 feet away (classified as “tight” by NBA.com) as an average NBA shooter does with the nearest defender 12 feet away.

Sure, Curry has shot poorly when “smothered” with defenders less than 2 feet from him. This is perhaps unsurprising considering that Curry is only 6-foot-3, and this includes blocks by definition. But note that these types of shots are pretty rare: They accounted for only 25 shots in the data, about 3 percent of his 3-point attempts. In any case, Curry seems to be all right at getting himself good looks:

So aside from the rare smothering, Curry seems fairly immune to defense.⁶ He hits about 42 percent of the hardest quartile(ish) of his shots (specifically, the 28 percent with the closest defender less than 4 feet away),⁷ or about 126 points per 100 attempts. In other words, if Golden State could replace its entire offense with just the bottom quartile of Stephen Curry’s 3-point attempts — without him ever being fouled and with them never collecting an offensive rebound — they would have the best offense in NBA history by a wide margin.

But it gets crazier.

Another proxy for a shot being pressured is how much time is left on the shot clock. As the clock winds down, the expected value of a possession drops as well, since players may be compromising shot quality to get a shot off. With Curry, not so much:

Curry takes a huge portion of his shots early in the shot clock (more than 50 percent) and is deadly on these. His worst time frame is with around 12 to 16 seconds left — where he has still made 42 percent. Then, he somehow shoots better and better as the clock runs down! In addition to being another example of how the traditional ideas of “good” and “bad” shots don’t really apply to Curry, this also has the very practical implication that Curry’s teammates should be willing to pass up reasonably good shots even if it means Curry will have less time to set up his own.

Curry vs. the Warriors

Of course, the Warriors aren’t an average team. So perhaps it’s impractical to think that their great shooters should be passing up good looks. For this, let’s first look at how well and how often the entire Warriors squad shoots. I’ve plotted each Warrior’s true shooting percentage⁸ against his field-goal attempts per 36 minutes this season.

We normally expect a flat to negative relationship between these two variables: Players with a small burden are more selective and tend to be “sharpshooters” taking wide-open threes and such, while high-volume shooters have to do the dirty work of taking shots that aren’t open and aren’t easy but are better than nothing. Incidentally, this is one reason why some great players with heavy shooting burdens may appear less valuable than they are: If they’re forced to take all the bad shots, they could be doing better on those than average but still have low efficiency.

With Curry, we have no such problem:

Curry demolishes the trend by taking an absurd number of shots efficiently. Here’s Curry’s true shooting percentage over the past four years compared with that of the other Warriors:

This already has a big impact on the Warriors’ bottom line. But the huge gap between him and the rest of the club — his “perfectly balanced” supporting cast — again makes it likely that a subpar shot for him may be well above average for his team.

The Curry stratagem

One way to get Curry more shots is to have players pass up shots so that Curry can take them. But another angle is for the offense to set up and have Curry take certain shots as quickly as possible. A shot like the pull-up 3-point jumper, say.

The pull-up three is not normally a great shot in the NBA. The league on the whole converts about 28 percent on average (corresponding to 84 points per 100 possessions) — well below the 35 percent that players convert on all 3-pointers. But since the start of last season, Curry has converted 42 percent of his. Here’s a plot of every player with at least 100 pull-up 3-point attempts in the same period:

So say Curry was instructed to take significantly more pull-up 3-point attempts than the large number he already takes. Even assuming that these shots were a little bit worse than the ones the Warriors would be able to get otherwise (highly questionable), getting efficient shots off early in a possession has other ancillary benefits. For one, it allows the Warriors to pack more possessions into a game, which is good because they are gaining ground on their opponents for every possession exchanged (unless they play a better opponent, which these days they don’t). But second, being able to play a very fast-paced offense when necessary (such as Curry taking quick threes early in the clock) allows them to extend the game as much as possible when they’re behind, just as being able to play a slow-paced offense (such as holding the ball unless you have a clear shot and then letting Curry shoot under pressure) is valuable for shortening the game when they’re ahead.

In other words, building your offensive strategy around “Curry as options 1, 2, and 3” has win-maximizing benefits beyond Curry’s shooting efficiency.

No, seriously, Curry is getting better

Every article about every great young athlete ever seems to end with “And he’s just getting better and better” — even though this often isn’t true. So let me end this one with, “No, seriously, he really is getting better and better.”

And, other than the fact that Curry is so good right now that he can’t possibly get better, there’s no evidence of him slowing down. To illustrate, here’s every NBA season during Curry’s seven-year career:

Curry has taken on additional shot-making responsibilities throughout his career, yet his true shooting percentage has been getting better and BETTER.

As I mentioned earlier, for most players, this is a trade-off: The larger the burden placed on them, the less efficient they are. I’ve added a trend line through all of the players other than Curry⁹ to show how it’s normally flat. This is because better players tend to get more shots, which counteracts the fact that a given player taking more shots tends to be less efficient. I’ve also colored in LeBron James and Durant, so you can see that the standard relationship basically holds even for MVPs. But Curry has set career highs in both attempts and efficiency — in the same year — four times, including each of the past three seasons. That is, Curry comes only in shades of good, better and best (in that order). Curry is truly the Dennis Rodman of shooting!

Indeed, when considering Curry’s potential, I think Rodman is perhaps an even more important precedent than Chamberlain or Michael Jordan. Rodman came into the league as a reasonably well-rounded player but had an incredible talent for rebounding. As years went by, his teams leaned on this skill more and more. He took on fewer and fewer offensive responsibilities, and he started gathering larger and larger shares of his team’s rebounds. In the 1993-94 season, he gathered nearly 29.7 percent of all available rebounds — at the time, the highest by any other player was Moses Malone, with 23.4 percent in 1976-77. Despite being one of the most one-dimensional players ever, this made Rodman one of the most valuable players in NBA history.¹⁰

While exceeding 50 points per game sounds crazy — it would require Curry to take on the order of half of his team’s shots — as evidenced by Rodman, fully exploiting a game-breaking skill can lead to unthinkable results.

Do I really think that the Warriors will adopt an all-Curry-all-the-time strategy and knock Wilt out of the record books?

I don’t know. But Curry himself is a microcosm of the revolution that we’ve already seen. Just as the math suggests that good midrange jump shots should often be exchanged for worse 3-pointers if possible, so the math suggests that good non-Curry shots should be exchanged for worse Curry shots. I’m confident in saying that we aren’t there yet. And if that revolution happens as well, look out.

The first time I saw my boss, Nate Silver, give a talk was at the 2014 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston. As usual, he was going on about numbers and statistics, but what stuck with me longest wasn’t quantitative. Pointing to the practice of relegation in European soccer leagues, he said European sports tend to be more capitalist by nature, while their American counterparts tend to be more socialist.

“It’s kind of ironic,” Silver said. “American sports are socialist.”

That may be true, but Stephen Curry is a pure basketball capitalist.

Nate’s framework was right: With provisions like “salary caps,” “revenue sharing” and drafts that generally allot the best new talent to the worst teams, American leagues intentionally promote parity while suppressing the natural tendency for some clubs to dominate others. But Curry and his teammates are unapologetically destroying Adam Silver’s Bolshevist basketball state. The Golden State Warriors are 15-0. If they win Tuesday against the lowly Los Angeles Lakers, they will break the record for the hottest start in NBA history; no NBA team has won its first 16 games.

How are they doing this?

Well, the Warriors have by far the most efficient offense in the NBA, logging a massive 112 points per 100 possessions. They shoot well above league averages from every spot on the floor, especially in the areas beyond the arc.

That’s pretty good, right? But while their offense deserves a lot of attention, don’t sleep on their defense, which ranks fifth in the NBA by giving up just 97 points per 100.

It’s as if at some point in the past few years, the Warriors solved contemporary basketball, at least perimeter basketball. They know that 3-pointers are the best way to rack up points on offense, so they developed talent and tactics to master that. But they have also employed defensive principles to prevent their opponents from doing so on the other end.

As of today, they are the only team averaging at least 12 threes per game on offense; they are also the only team giving up fewer than six threes per game on defense. Remember when a team won games by controlling the paint? These Warriors win by controlling the edges of the scoring area. By scoring 37.5 points per game beyond the arc while allowing opponents just 17.7 from out there, Golden State isn’t just tweaking how we value court real estate, its best players are forcing us to rethink how we value personnel as well.

It used to be that the most valuable guys in the NBA were interior giants who dominated the paint. Now the most valuable player in the NBA is a point guard with the sweetest stroke in the league.

Curry leads the league in scoring, and if he wins a scoring title this season, he will be the most perimeter-oriented player to ever do so. As I wrote last season, he’s transforming the way we see point guards and 3-point shooters in the NBA. That may seem like hyperbole, but it’s not; between Curry’s volume, his efficiency and his quickness, it’s easy to argue that he is the best 3-point shooter the NBA has ever seen.

So far this season, Curry has made 74 threes — the most in the NBA. Damian Lillard ranks second, with 45. To say that Curry is an outlier would be an insult to the word outlier. So far this season, 84 percent of NBA threes have come off assists. But for Curry, that number is just 62 percent, and his ability to get his own deadly looks beyond the arc is arguably his signature weapon as a scorer. For context, only one of Klay Thompson’s 33 threes has been unassisted this season.

Everyone already knows that Curry is a savant beyond the arc; the most noteworthy improvement in his repertoire is his ability to get buckets in the paint. As a young player, Curry struggled in that area. Just three seasons ago, he was one of the league’s least-effective close-range scorers. Out of 168 players with at least 200 shots inside of 8 feet that season, Curry ranked a dismal 151st in field goal percentage. But those days are gone, and the new Curry is suddenly one of the league’s best volume scorers in the paint. So far this year, 27 players have made at least 50 field goals within 8 feet of the rim, but only two of those guys — Hassan Whiteside and DeAndre Jordan (both giants) — are converting those close-range shots as frequently as Curry, who has made a ridiculous 68 percent of his 83 tries inside of 8 feet this season.

Curry is an emblem for his team at large. He’s a young, perimeter-oriented genius who is reforming how we think about dominance in the NBA and making the rest of the league look feckless while doing so. He’s already a champion, but, just like his team, he is still getting better. Curry and the Warriors are just getting started, and what a golden start it’s already been.

CORRECTION (Nov. 24, 12:55 p.m.): A chart in an earlier version of this article incorrectly labeled the Warriors’ defensive proficiency for some shots. A color on the chart suggested the Warriors were at about the average league level in limiting opponents’ scoring from the left elbow and right baseline 3-pointer, but the data showed opponents are shooting above average from those zones.

Read more: NBA Player Career Projections