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To: highball

Unfortunately, this is a common attitude and is wrong. Immorality and freedom cannot co-exist. Immorality, by it's very nature is selfish. A community of human beings cannot exist in freedom when all members or even a majority of members are obsessed with self-indulgence. It will either degenerate to anarchy or tyranny.

Your response is a classic illustration of this: Individualist choices reign supreme. There is no standard of conduct, no unifying code of moral behavior. It's all what each individual wants. That is anarchy, yet paradoxically, it leads to tyranny because the anarchist demands others respect HIS anarchist desires and uses force to back it up.

Thus you get the paradoxical scenario of the anarchist screaming that pornagraphy should be freely available for him to choose by forcing everyone to be exposed to it and demanding that, instead of him actively seeking out what he wants, others must actively seek to avoid what they find objectionable. The individual who has just imposed his tyranny upon his fellow citizens then celebrates what he has done as an extension of liberty because he can now engage in his personal license without any effort and without any stigma and he has forced the decent and moral to expend effort to avoid his filth.


250 posted on 08/23/2005 8:04:30 AM PDT by frgoff
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To: frgoff

What good is freedom if we don't have the opportunity to make wrong choices? How do humans learn if they're always forced to do the wrong thing?

Where did I say that there is no "standard of conduct"? We as a society have the right to look down on poor choices, we have the right to shun them if we so choose. But we do not have the right to prevent people from making those choices if they so desire. That's what freedom is.

Our Constitution doesn't just protect good choices. On the contrary, it protects the minority from the tyranny of the majority. It protects unpopular opinions. It protects the right to make choices of which others do not approve.

Your attitude is what's wrong. You whinge about "anarchy" but seem to see freedom only as the right to make *your* choices. That's selfish, and it's contrary to both the spirit and letter of the Constitution.

Liberty is more than the enshrinement of your own particular preferences (or mine, for that matter). Freedom means the right to make unpopular, foolish or even outright bad choices, so long as they do not infringe upon the rights of others. Freedom isn't pretty, but it is vital.


252 posted on 08/23/2005 8:17:24 AM PDT by highball ("I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have." -- Thomas Jefferson)
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To: frgoff
Unfortunately, this is a common attitude and is wrong. Immorality and freedom cannot co-exist.

Government-enforced morality is meaningless. A person forced to live a moral lifestyle at gunpoint is not truly moral. Living in a free society involves the right to do immoral and stupid things. It is not the society's responsibility to protect people from their own foolish decisions.

Your response is a classic illustration of this: Individualist choices reign supreme. There is no standard of conduct, no unifying code of moral behavior.

There is a unifying code of moral behavior in our society. It just isn't enforced at gunpoint by the government. People in this country are free to shun those they consider to be immoral.

Thus you get the paradoxical scenario of the anarchist screaming that pornagraphy should be freely available for him to choose by forcing everyone to be exposed to it and demanding that, instead of him actively seeking out what he wants, others must actively seek to avoid what they find objectionable.

You are arguing against a strawman. Relying on an anarchist for a definition of freedom is like relying on a communist for the definition of capitalism.

No reasonable definition of freedom includes the right to force others to watch pornography. Similarly, no reasonable definition of freedom includes the right to ban others from watching pornography.

253 posted on 08/23/2005 8:25:30 AM PDT by Modernman ("A conservative government is an organized hypocrisy." -Disraeli)
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