personal freedom and public responsibility
Nov. 1st, 2006 08:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sophiaserpentiaAs a sort of counterpoint to my last post, about how the government does not exist to tell us how to run our lives, i think it is worthwhile to comment also on personal responsibility to the public good.
My thoughts on this come down to what i've written before about the ethics of taking. Ethically, we each have a responsibility to other people, to society, and to the ecology. "How we live our lives" must be tempered by an ethical awareness.
Our answer, to date, is to push this off onto the state. The state becomes the regulator of business, the protector of the environment, the keeper of the peace, the caretaker of the elderly and disabled. Then we act as though anything we do without the state's intervention must be ethically okay. Money and laws and property deeds free us of the burden of pondering the ethical rightness of poverty, wage serfdom, and perpetual debt.
The state does not share our interests or reflect our needs, so ultimately we cannot go on letting the state pretend to be our conscience. The best answer is for each of us, individually and collectively via mutual aid socities, to regulate our own business, protect our own environment, keep our own peace, take care of the elderly and disabled. Each of us plays a role in that and we must ethically own that.
This is nothing other than what just about every religion has ever taught... so this is nothing new. What keeps it from happening?
My thoughts on this come down to what i've written before about the ethics of taking. Ethically, we each have a responsibility to other people, to society, and to the ecology. "How we live our lives" must be tempered by an ethical awareness.
Our answer, to date, is to push this off onto the state. The state becomes the regulator of business, the protector of the environment, the keeper of the peace, the caretaker of the elderly and disabled. Then we act as though anything we do without the state's intervention must be ethically okay. Money and laws and property deeds free us of the burden of pondering the ethical rightness of poverty, wage serfdom, and perpetual debt.
The state does not share our interests or reflect our needs, so ultimately we cannot go on letting the state pretend to be our conscience. The best answer is for each of us, individually and collectively via mutual aid socities, to regulate our own business, protect our own environment, keep our own peace, take care of the elderly and disabled. Each of us plays a role in that and we must ethically own that.
This is nothing other than what just about every religion has ever taught... so this is nothing new. What keeps it from happening?
