Although the health reason for stopping smoking is the best reason, I think the deeper reason that cigarettes are so reviled isn't the small amount of second-hand smoke, that's just the reason people give, but that it's a public display of vice, which isn't acceptable in culturally Puritan areas.
Puritans did something similar during their witch trials. They say they're burning someone for being a witch, but nearly all of their victims just so happened to have one of the following characteristics: spinsters with no children, widows who never remarried, single men into their 30s who never mastered a craft or became a clergyman, etc.
These were universally unacceptable, impure traits. Puritans were all about the collective rather than the individual, and they believed that the collective had the liberty to shape and bend the individual to its will, else the collective suffers. Non-conformists were made to conform, whether through shunning, shame, or violence, or else they were removed from the collective.
So no, you can't smoke in public, not because we care about your health or our health, but because it is decidedly impure, and a good Puritan must be pure, and if a member be not pure, he must be shamed and molded to be so, for if we're not all pure, our moral fabric comes apart.
Culture fundamentally changes very slowly over time, although the particulars may transform quite a lot, and this is a great example of that. A very interesting look at how Puritan culture is expressed in the modern day.
Puritans did something similar during their witch trials. They say they're burning someone for being a witch, but nearly all of their victims just so happened to have one of the following characteristics: spinsters with no children, widows who never remarried, single men into their 30s who never mastered a craft or became a clergyman, etc.
These were universally unacceptable, impure traits. Puritans were all about the collective rather than the individual, and they believed that the collective had the liberty to shape and bend the individual to its will, else the collective suffers. Non-conformists were made to conform, whether through shunning, shame, or violence, or else they were removed from the collective.
So no, you can't smoke in public, not because we care about your health or our health, but because it is decidedly impure, and a good Puritan must be pure, and if a member be not pure, he must be shamed and molded to be so, for if we're not all pure, our moral fabric comes apart.
Culture fundamentally changes very slowly over time, although the particulars may transform quite a lot, and this is a great example of that. A very interesting look at how Puritan culture is expressed in the modern day.