ANSWERS: 5
  • Can you give me an example of an WHATEVER?
  • Isn't that a sort of anarchy? It certainly would lead us all into chaos. Rules are essential...order is essential....it's the balance which we struggle with.
  • No, I think this is a bad idea and it's a good idea to take it down and put it out to pasture. The problem is that it conceives of "individual" as something separate from society, government, the environment, the economy, and really all system-level entities. This is a false and misleading way to conceive of an individual, and a bad basis for the concept of individual rights. It's easy to find examples that illustrate: suppose I really like rabbits, so I breed a zillion of them on my property, and then I go off to public lands and set them free. The rabbits are cute little harmless bunnies, yes? But they eat up the low vegetation, breed like.... well, rabbits... and then the other small animals start to die, and that upsets the ecosystem of the region, and next thing you know the mountain lions are prowling down in the suburbs because they've lost their food supply -- and their favorite meal is toddlers. All I did was set the happy bunnies free! What's so wrong with that? I'm not hurting anybody! Well, how do you know? Unless you could foresee the complex unintended consequences of this action, you'd have no way to evaluate what "hurting others" means. And the only way you can possibly foresee such consequences is to treat individuals as something integrally woven into the higher-level systems of life. Without that, you have "ontological garbage": ideas about what a human is which do not map to reality, and which serve as a very shaky basis for systems of moral and ethical thinking. So this notion of "everybody do their own thing and don't harm others" is far too simplistic to be useful beyond managing 3rd graders on the playground.
  • What you describe, if I'm not mistaken, is anarchy. In theory, it works. Since it's human nature be greedy and always want more, however, some law needs to be in place making sure that the people who are doing "risky" things don't cross a line, as StableBoy illustrated with the rabbits.

Copyright 2023, Wired Ivy, LLC

Answerbag | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy