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?
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no subject
Date: 2006-11-01 02:51 pm (UTC)What i'm wondering is why. I'd like to see people's thoughts on why some people will cheat and take advantage, why some will use violence and coersion.
Is this part of the natural order? Is it typical animal or mammal or primate behavior? I've called this behavior cannibalistic in the past, though it's debatable how accurate that is.
Perhaps it has more to do with our capacity for intelligence. Maybe some people naturally favor slight short-term benefits even at the cost of long-term deficit?
Or maybe we have a natural propensity for cooperation and compassion, but some people are just fundamentally miswired. Maybe there's something to the "monkeysphere" idea.
I've speculated in the past that maybe PTSD is what makes oppression possible. Perhaps the malfunction comes about because so many of us have been traumatized?
Maybe it is some combination of the above. Or none of them entirely.
no subject
Date: 2006-11-01 03:18 pm (UTC)That hits the nail on the head. No single issue is at play, which makes the problems all the more intractable.