What responsibility is implied by autonomy? If I own a pig farm do I own the smell, traffic and filth associated with it?
ISTM that I must operate within the ‘benevolent coercion’ of the law to meet social requirements and in exchange the society benefits from jobs and products. Isn’t that the the social contract?
Crazy by itself doesn’t make me dangerous and doesn’t give you sufficient reason to worry that I am, but if I do anything that a reasonable person would regard as a threat, then yeah, sure. Although under most cases the intervention should begin with an attempt to inquire of the crazy person whether they intend anyone any harm.
If you think crazy people are a bit scary, try considering how you’d feel if officials who are allowed to lock you up and drug you started to question your mental state. The latter is a much more frightening situation to be in, most of the time.
So it’s permissible if the person committed a crime?
Crimes are easily enough crafted, if not already present.
This page is thick with posts so it’s not surprising that you missed this one:
In other words, you don’t think crimes should even exist in the first place. If you don’t support the enforcement of the law, then there is no law and everybody can do whatever they want.
Yeah, I’m sure that will end well…
Well then the OP is basically no different than saying, “I’m an anarchist. However, deep in my soul I know that it’s not practical and only bad would happen because anarchy would only ever work in a world of reasonable and decent people, like myself, so talk me off the ledge and let me protest the cruelty of the world that won’t let me happily believe what I want to believe!”
So, what do you want me to say?
Ultimately, anarchist systems rely on the assumption that we’re all reasonable, decent people (as noted) and so we should be able to make deals and agreements with one another, without a central power.
Well, let’s say that most of everyone is like that or at least subconsciously agrees that reasonableness and decency are the right strategy. Then we end up with a case where we freely make deals with one another to keep stuff organized. It’s like an HOA that, say, appoints someone to handle the gardening and another person to handle the plumbing, etc. that’s shared between us. Poof, centralization.
Centralized government is the product of free, anarchic individuals discussing how to fairly and reasonably coordinate between all of us as equals.
This is the end state of anarchism.
I just finished reading one of the best books I’ve read in a long time: The Best Minds by Jonathan Rosen. It’s about the exact issues raised in the OP, and in fact I thought a lot about AHunter3 while I was reading it. It certainly made me consider the point at which it’s reasonable to intervene with someone who is mentally ill and rejects treatment. But I can’t let go of the idea that the autonomy of some people ends at the point where they are a threat to the lives of other people. I personally would rather spend the rest of my life locked in a hospital forcibly medicated than know that I murdered someone I love.
I agree with SpoilerVirgin. I don’t get to threaten other people’s lives. And when I do, they get to react so as to ensure their own safety.
ETA: I dunno why Discourse thinks I was repying to @Sage_Rat instead of @SpoilerVirgin
Unless your reject the very concept of cognitive issues, you seem to be saying that a person with them is better qualified to make decisions rather than a set of experts operating under due process. I don’t think anyone is advocating for some guy intervening with no expertise.
I’m not sure if you’ve ever observed this problem from the outside, but I have, and I have seen drugs pull people from the brink. I come from a family with a history of suicide, one reason I won’t own a gun. Some people have swings that go up and down. You can disagree on how these swings should be moderated, but if someone’s life is cut off on a downward swing, there will no longer be an upward one. As for harm, if a person has no one who cares about them, then I suppose suicide does no harm except to the victim, but in all other cases it does a lot of harm. Not all harm involves guns and knives.
If you want to argue in favor of coercing people to stop them from doing (what you consider to be) bad things to themselves because of how it affects you, the caring companion or relative, it’s a reasonable argument, but let’s be clear on one thing: you aren’t doing it for them, in that case, it’s not benevolent, it’s about your feelings, that’s what you’re protecting.
And no, I don’t think it outweights their right to make their own choices. Our right to make our own choices. That’s more important, although I acknowledge that what we put you folks through is real pain sometimes.
It is not.
I’ll leave it at that, as everyone else is arguing the position just fine.
Children are horrible.
Mean, egotistical, self absorbed. Adults don’t teach kids bullying, they come up with that all on their own. Turning them into grown ups means tempering all these primal impulses and (hopefully) teaching empathy, compassion, impulse control. All things adults need to lessen friction between individuals.
We’ve been doing this since… well forever. Baby chimps hit puberty at about eight and show similar behaviour to humans: aggression, social competition, risk taking. Rearing our young’uns has clearly been a good survival strategy for both humans and chimps, or we wouldn’t still be doing it.
70 years ago, this idea, @AHunter3 was fictionally explored to see where it could lead:
William Golding’s depictions of children are disgusting.
Children do a lot of “horizontal oppression” because they can’t safely lash out at those who coerce them, and they’re being pushed around a lot.
ETA:
I didn’t want to bring up evolution, but here we go. The fittest baby bird is not the one who can get away from a cat, it’s the one that manages to kick its sibling out of the nest, thereby ensuring more food and that the cat goes away after a feathery snack. Baby birds grow up competing against other baby birds, and we humans compete with other humans. For resources and ultimately sex. Those who lose aren’t killed off, they become incels.
Your opinion about Golding is, well an opinion. But you didn’t reply to what I wrote.
This is correct, but I think your conclusions are wrong. There’s a constant tug of war between parents <=> children, where they want larger autonomy but the grown ups are holding back. To continue with the biologism, it appears to be a successful strategy. We don’t corral all 10 year old kids and ship them off to fend for themselves, hoping everything will turn out fine. It is my absolute conviction that we’d get Lord of the Flies. You seem to think we get Neverland.
Humans are evil bastards, as witnessed in the news all the time. But most of us quell those impulses for our own selfish benefits.
We aren’t evil bastards so much as we’re selfish bastards. But part of what we selfishly want for our self-serving selves is good connections with others, belongingness, trust, a sense of family and community.
Some inequality, and coercion and deliberate hurtfulness, is omnipresent and not fixable, but we’re at our best when we enshrine that everyone gets to walk the earth as if a god among gods, that the only infringement on your freedom is the paradoxical one, that you can’t infringe on anyone else’s. We’ve never had consensus on the specifics of the “your freedom to swing your fist ends at my face” stuff but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a laudatory principle and something to aspire to.
Neverland Ranch, maybe.
And you know what has historically been a very attractive and effective shortcut for forming these social groups? Fostering belongness, turst, community, etc - all that is hard. Creating an outgroup and performatively persecuting it to establish trust with other ingroup members? That’s easy.
Your RL example from earlier was of a small group of friends who were already close before their shipwreck - close enough to all go out and steal a boat together. That’s a very different scenario than the one in Lord of the Flies, where you have a bigger group of boys who aren’t self selected friends and which already had preexisting ingroups and outgroups (I highly doubt Piggy had never been bullied before landing on the island…)
I’m curious, do you think all instances of school age bullying are caused by the impositions we put on kids, and without adult society ruining things it would all be so much better? Because frankly, I’m not buying it. Kids are absolutely savage to one another. Without adults to reign them in, I think bullying would sometimes result in the death of the victim. Not all the time or maybe even often, but far more often than our society would be willing to accept.
It’s an understandable viewpoint. God knows they were savage to me when I was growing up.
But let’s unpack that. First off, it wasn’t all the other kids. Enough of them to create quite a gauntlet, but 15% of the nasty interactions were overt meanness and cruelty, 40% were other people laughing derisively (snarking on me, you might say) but not really actively doing any mean things, and the remaining kids weren’t involved. Still doesn’t sound like a great situation; I mean, when you’re swimming and some of the fish in your vicinity are sharks, they’re going to occupy a disproportional amount of your attention and you don’t find it reassuring that there are non-predatory fish all around you too.
Second, the hostility was overwhelmingly aimed at kids who were Different in some way, whether like me (sissy boy) or like the kid with a physical deformity, or the only Black kid in the class. Some xenophobia is probably natural and inevitable, and to be fair, I was hostile to the kids who were different from me, too — the mainstream Joe and Susie Normal kids, the kids with such a strong attitude that everyone should like and do and be the same; so I wasn’t nicer, but I was outnumbered. I think left to our own devices, we’d have outgrown most of that, and in fact many of us did.
Third, the coercive streak in the hostility — the bullying that was mostly focused on “I can make you do things you don’t want to do, I can boss you around, I can humiliate you by dominating you” — there’s actually a decent body of research into kids’ bullying that supports the notion that the ones who do a lot of this are having a lot of this done to them by someone else. Parents, preachers, coaches, older siblings or cousins, racist police, authoritarian teachers. People exposed to coercive bullying tend to react either by doing the same to someone else to compensate for the feeling of powerlessness and loss of self-confidence, or by becoming fervently opposed to this dynamic. The latter for me. Coercion breeds coercion and that’s a damn good reason to get rid of it as much as possible. That means relinquishing oversight powers and control over populations that currently get bossed around and controlled pro forma.
All the arguments that can be aimed at what 10 year olds would do if we didn’t keep a tight rein on them are arguments that have been aimed at people in general to argue why we need rigid rules and rule enforcers on every corner, because we’re such utter shits and will do bad things unless stripped of the opportunity at every possible turn.
You seem to be assuming that we are rational actors 100% of the time, which is demonstrably false. If we were talking about intervening to prevent someone dating the wrong person or even getting drunk, I’d agree with you. All those are recoverable. Perhaps the person will admit they screwed up, and will say they wish they had listened. Suicide is a different case. No coming back to ones senses, no recovery.
Let’s take myself as an example. When I was 10 (back in 1987) I would have spent my time sitting around playing video games, not doing any school work, and eating very little, with what I did eat consisting of junk had my parents done as you suggest.
Instead my parents limited my video gaming, made me go to bed at a reasonable hour, made me do my homework, and my mom even taught me algebra so that I could get ahead in math.
If my parents had let me live like the first paragraph rather than imposing the structure of the second, my life would have turned out differently, almost certainly for the worse. Assuming that to be the case, why were my parents wrong for doing what they actually did?