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Freedom is one of those things everyone wants and always complains they don't have. Even here in the United States people shout about how they lack some basic freedoms. But how much freedom should one have? Should there be complete freedom? Should some restrictions exist? Where is the line drawn? Well, lets look at what happens when you have complete freedom. Probably the closest thing that comes to that is anarchy. Since anarchy does away with government there are no restrictions placed upon you by any governing body (unless you choose to have a governing body ruling over you). But would anarchy work? You would think that chaos would ensue at some point with no rules set up. I know the anarchists like to argue that people as a society would self-organize and handle themselves, but I refuse to believe that people would keep themselves in check enough to prevent them from doing rash things just because they can get away with it; people are not inherently good. At best they are neutral. Anarchy does not appear to be a viable option. So some rules need to be in place to keep chaos from occuring. The question becomes how far should those rules go? How much impedence upon us should we be willing to accept? Well, what would happen if we allowed people to do whatever they wanted that did not affect you? A perfect example of this is drug use. In what way would personal drug use affect you if it happened within someone's house? You won't be able to smell it. If it upsets you it won't matter since you won't be able to see it. How could it possibly affect you? Well, I am sure someone right now is saying "what about someone hopped up on PCP causes harm to someone by storming out of there house and killing the neighbor?" OK, that is a fair point. But wouldn't incidents of deaths from bad drug deals go down since drugs would be available to the public? And you could also control drugs like PCP that causes people to lose control of their sanity. I would think that most instances like this where doing something completely out of the public's way would not add to the problems of society and might quite possibly lower some problems. Now what about something that indirectly affects you? A good example of this is public nudity. There is no way that public nudity hurts you. Seeing someone nude will not cause you any unduly harm. Yes you might be offended, but that is not going to cause you any grave harm. And yes, you might not want your children to see it, but then again I might not want my children seeing smoking and we still allow that in public. So that in no way affects you. Someone is going to argue that if a woman is walking down the street nude she is inviting herself to be raped. Perhaps, but what right to we have to impose restrictions upon her? I impose the chance of death everytime I drive down the street, but I don't see anyone stopping me from doing that. The chance of personal harm is with us with any action. The only thing left to discuss is something that directly affects you. Probably the safest thing to say in regards to this is that nothing should be forced on you unless it is punishment for doing something wrong. This plays into Kants version of the Golden Rule "Do not unto others as you would not have them do unto you." Some astute readers might notice that this comes close to Libertarianism. You are probably right, although this view might not take the full extent or extremes that full-on Libertarianism would take. But basically the views in this rant basically says "You leave me alone, I leave you alone, and that way we won't get the police involved." |