There may be a good case for not allowing smokers any pub or bar or restaurant anywhere in the land where they can smoke 'among consenting adults'. I don't, myself, believe that there is a good case, but I'm not going to argue that again here, having done so more than once, and then some.
On the first anniversary of the smoking ban in England, however, Libby Brooks writes in support of the ban, saying it's a class issue. What she has in mind is that legal compulsion of this order is justified by the fact that people from lower socio-economic groups suffer more from the ill-health effects of smoking than better-off people do, finding it harder to give up. My worry about this argument is its narrowness of focus. People on the wrong end of social and economic inequalities don't just experience health disadvantages from smoking, but disadvantages across the board - in every area of health, in life expectancy, in the pattern of life chances in general. Shall we impose compulsory legal norms about diet, about exercise, about whatever else, on the grounds of wanting to protect the worse-off from the effects of inequality? Inequality itself closes down - or impinges otherwise negatively on - the freedoms and the choices of those with fewest resources. (It does it already.) For this we should deprive them of the freedom to have a smoke in a pub, somewhere?