What legal ways do people make a profit that produce the largest net loss in utility?

Jack said that there two sides to the ledger with respect to tobacco

And I replied there were similarly two sides to the ledger with respect to many other drugs.

He didn't say which side would necessarily prevail in this case.

Neither did I.

Furthermore, there is no reason why the side that's stronger for one drug is necessarily stronger for another.

Are you saying that out of all existing non-legal drugs, not even one would have a similar profile to tobacco?

There is a lot of moralizing around smoking and I suspect those numbers are inflated. [...] People give answers that they think others want to hear: that's not the same as reflective equilibrium.

Although I expect that plays a role, I believe the effect is small.

Even in 1978, when anti-smoking campaigns were far less intense than in the 1990s & onwards, most smokers in a Gallup poll agreed that "[a]ll things considered" they'd like to give up smoking, and while there was more agreement in later surveys the increase was gradual (66% in 1978 vs. 74% in 2014).

Unfortunately the data for the other attitude-related questions don't reach back as far, although it looks to me like the proportion of smokers answering yes to "Do you consider yourself addicted to cigarettes or not?" has been broadly constant since that time series began in 1990, though the 1990 data point does happen to have the highest proportion answering "No" (graph available further down the page at the previous link). Meanwhile, the proportion answering "No" to "If you had to do it over again, would you start smoking or not?" has grown at only a sedate pace (83% in 1991, 88% in 2013).

A reference in an anti-smoking journal article by Robert Proctor points the way to some older data from "A Study of Cigarette Smokers' Habits and Attitudes in 1970", a market research survey of "a representative nationwide cross section" of adults, prepared by Roper Research Associates for Philip Morris. In that sample, 23% of smokers said they "have no intention of quitting", whereas 72% responded that they'd either "like to stop smoking" but doubted they would, or that "[i]n all likelihood [they]'ll quit smoking before too long". Another table shows that when asked about enjoyment, most smokers either claimed to smoke "from habit" (50%), or felt there was "[n]othing good about smoking" (16%); only 32% chose the "[e]njoy smoking" option.

Even at that relatively early date, a fair chunk of the people in the survey had already made efforts to quit. 36% of the respondents smoked, but "22% reported they had smoked in the past, but had quit". Among the current smokers, "well over half (59%) [...] said they had at some time tried to quit smoking and given it up for as long as a week. And further, 40% have tried to quit two or more times". About four fifths of both the ex-smokers and those who quit temporarily had decided to quit on their own, rather than at the urging of doctors or family.

Summing up, there are quantitative differences between how smokers report feeling about smoking now, and how smokers reported feeling decades ago. But even in the 1970s it appears that most smokers (at least in the US, where we have data) said they'd like to quit, or indeed had tried to quit at some time or another. That this was the case even before much of the recent campaigning against smoking (as well as the fact that most smokers in the Roper survey who'd tried to quit allege doing so on their own initiative) weighs against the idea that smokers, in response to contemporary "moralizing", are misrepresenting their beliefs to a major degree.

Also, the fact that people are interested in quitting doesn't have anything to do with whether or not it is pleasurable.

I'd be surprised if this were so. While pleasure isn't the only factor affecting people's thoughts on quitting, it's surely one of them; in a counterfactual universe where nobody derived any pleasure from cigarettes at all I'd expect there to be an even bigger percentage of smokers who're seriously thinking about quitting, and attempting to quit.

It's very pleasurable, which is why people start and continue. They often want to stop because they know that it causes cancer. But they still derive pleasure from it.

Some do, at least.

So up to 90% of smokers know some of the less well-publicized health risks? The numbers for lung cancer and emphysema must approach 100%.

94%-95% for lung cancer, but the paper doesn't have numbers for emphysema, unfortunately.

Don't cherry pick your evidence.

It's a cherry pick in the same way that responding to "Odd numbers are prime" with "what about 9?" is a cherry pick. While the number 9 is, in that scenario, cherry-picked in some narrow technical sense, calling it out as cherry picking is a noncentral fallacy: exhibiting one counterexample of many isn't what people generally mean by cherry picking. Likewise, if I reply to "smokers know the negative implications for their health" with "how about strokes (or heart disease, or impotence)?", I wouldn't say that's cherry picking; it's exhibiting a counterexample (or three). That the vast majority of First World smokers nowadays understand they're risking lung cancer isn't sufficient to show that smokers have a good idea of the hazards of smoking, because lung cancer is just one cause (and a minority cause!) of smoking-induced mortality.

And come to think of it, I didn't even probe the level of understanding of smokers outside developed nations. The situation is very likely even worse there...so one could accuse me, with more justice, of cherry picking the evidence most favourable to smoking.

As to the rest of your comment: I'm not claiming cigarettes are a boon to humanity. The question was what ways of making a profit cause the largest loss of utility and I was objecting to an answer that failed to consider the actual value created by an industry.

Yes, and that objection was a legitimate one, which is why I'm bothering to address it by furnishing evidence about the relative size of the other side of the ledger.

Sorry I guess it wasn't clear. I was contrasting two naive utility functions: a flat one which adds up the utilons of all people versus one that only counts the utilons of stock brokers. I'm not asserting that one or the other is "right". Both utilities would have some additional term giving utility for preserving resources, but I'm not being concrete about how that's factored in. [I'm also not addressing in any depth the complications that a full utilitarian calculation would need like estimated discounted future utilons, etc.] Did I clear it up or make it worse?

I value utility given to humans much higher than I value that given to animals.

Why? Do animals feel less pain?

I would expect a being with fewer neurons to feel less pain, in the same way that a being with the same number of neurons that's running the relevant operation on them for a shorter period of time (i.e. not in pain as long) would feel less pain. That's not enough to make factory farming worth it.

Finally, please list three alternatives to factory animal farms which provide higher net utility.

Why three? In order to explain it, I only need to give one alternative with much higher net utility.

There are two obvious alternatives. Not eating meat and raising the animals humanely.

I took factory farms as including those which focus on plants and produce, not just livestock.

That's not what the term means.

Here are four, all of which have higher net utility for humans only:

1)Status quo pre-factory farms

2) Modern CSAs on a broader scale

3) General movement of the average diet to be closer to vegetarian (the demand for factory-farmed meat is mostly artificially created and superstimulus-based anyway)

4) The 'grass farmer' farm model