When they are a functioning adult - that’s why we distinguish between children and adults. Of course, I’d put the line fairly early (16-ish), so IMO, teens older than that are responsible for planned pregnancies, but that’s basically where I stand. We have to acknowledge that the line’s essentially arbitrary, and more of a region than a line anyway - some countries acknowledge this with the varying sex-driving-marriage-drinking age differentials. Others might have one arb age for everything. Me, I think if you’re old enough for sex (most commonly 16, I believe), you’re old enough to be considered an adult in terms of responsibility for your actions.
It’s also worthwhile to point out that while the person in question bears responsibility, their family doesn’t. If we were to say the fired man in question bears responsibility for his actions (which he does) but that he deserves no help because of that, what about his kids? They’ve done nothing. The pregnant teen should have to drop out of school - what about the baby itself? Its bears no responsibility. Why should it bear resulting problems because its mother screwed up?
When they are a functioning adult - that’s why we distinguish between children and adults. Of course, I’d put the line fairly early (16-ish), so IMO, teens older than that are responsible for planned pregnancies, but that’s basically where I stand. We have to acknowledge that the line’s essentially arbitrary, and more of a region than a line anyway - some countries acknowledge this with the varying sex-driving-marriage-drinking age differentials. Others might have one arb age for everything. Me, I think if you’re old enough for sex (most commonly 16, I believe), you’re old enough to be considered an adult in terms of responsibility for your actions.
I don’t know if they are conservative or liberal values, but the value system you have set up seems to create a dichotomy between “no one is responsible for their actions” and “you made your bed so lie in it”.
I think people should be accountable for their actions, however punishment for their mistakes should lot amount to a life sentence (unless, of course, their mistake was going on a coked up rape and murder rampage).
Don’t know if I have much to add. But I think that in broad outline, it is fair to say that conservatives prefer to treat the crime in an isolated way and liberals want to look at the causes and treat them, as well. But thinking that someone’s upbringing lead them to being a scumbag is compatible with thinking they are a scumbag, and should be put away for the protection of society, if for no other reason. So I don’t think there’s a cancellation of responsibility. Thus, I think people should be punished for antisocial behavior.
And it doesn’t just extend to ordinary crime, either. In the wake of 9/11, a lot of liberals were asking if US policies in the Middle East were causing antipathy toward the US which might have been a contributing factor to the 9/11 attacks. I perceived this as an attempt to get at the root causes of anti-US terrorism; but many conservatives accused these liberals of “blaming America first.”
I’m a liberal. Any good doctor treats the root cause of a disease (when possible), and not just the symptoms.
Here’s a rant of mine from a couple of years ago on a similar topic.
As many others have said, I don’t think that assigning blame and “holding people responsible” really has much to do with it, when you get to issues like pregnancy. If you have 100 teenagers, 5 of them are going to get pregnant. That is true now, was true 100 years ago, and will be true in any possible conservative utopia. It will just happen. Now, we can try various approaches (abstinence education? free condoms? sex ed?) which will increase or decrease that number, and we might not agree on which ones will increase it and which ones will decrease it, but at the end of the day, there are going to be some pregnant teenagers. At that point, does it gain us anything to have a philosophical debate about whether it was the mother’s fault vs. the father’s fault vs. their parents vs. teachers vs. TV vs. liberals vs. what? I mean, who cares, at this point… there are pregnant teenagers who are at serious risk of ruining their own lives and the lives of their children. And the typical liberal position in such a situation would be to provide, at taxpayer expense, the things that we hope will prevent those lives from being ruined… things like education, medical care, job training, daycare, etc. One can represent that as “the mom made the mistake of getting pregnant, now you are coddling her instead of making her take responsibility for her actions”, but that’s missing the point entirely. She’s pregnant. The deed is done. How best now to proceed?
Consider that some unreformed social Darwinist / borderline sociopath might likewise consider the modicum of compassion you have displayed here as an abdication of the principle of personal responsability. Relative to this straw person, I’m sure you can appreciate where liberals are coming from, right? Now you just have to accept that some of us might feel the same way about you and it will all start to make sense.
Or, to put it another way, imagine Der Trihs had made this thread. It would have read something like: “Are conservatives even capable of empathy and compassion? Or do they actually derive pleasure from others’ misery as the vampires I suspect they are?” I’m sure you could see how that might be a less than faithful account of the way conservatives actually think, out there in the real world. Well, without comparing yourself to him, perhaps you hold similar misconceptions about progressives when you suggest we don’t want to hold people responsible for much of anything. We just don’t want them to starve, same as you.
Meh, I am Danish and - at least in US terms - quite liberal. (The Danish scale is graduated considerably more to the left, of course.)
In practical terms, the sort of person who ends up as a permanent welfare recipient is very unlikely to have it sufficiently together to have a bought-and-paid-for HDTV or other luxurious comfort items. More likely, it’s bought on an installment plan and it’ll be repossessed rather quickly. If you’re a permanent welfare recipient, even in Denmark, you’re not going to be able to maintain the sort of cashflow that’ll keep you in nice things like that - unless you cheat, of course. Permanent welfare status is very often combined with either substance abuse, low-level psychological issues or both.
More to the point: If you’re a temporary welfare recipient, I’d much rather you expend your energy on getting your sh.t together to rejoin the workforce, rather than on selling stuff. I consider that public money well invested.
If you’re going to be a permanent welfare recipient, well - it’d be nice if you tried to get by on your own first, but enforcing that would mean having someone show up at your door to make sure you’re not holding on to anything of value. That’ll easily cost more to implement than whatever can be saved.
(It can happen in Denmark, incidentally - personal bankruptcy means that the authorities can take your stuff and sell it to settle your debts, leaving, by law, “a modest home”. Not fun and not to be taken lightly…)
I’m only pretending to pick on the Danish. I think it’s fair to say that in Denmark, as in Scandinavia generally, the safety net is vastly softer and stretchier than it is here in the U.S. Great if you’re in need of it, though somewhat onerous to pay for. Question of priorities, I suppose.
Hmmm, should we provide the bare necessities for the indigent or lower taxes for the better off? I don’t know about you, but I’m not sure it’s liberals who ought to be defending their position here. It seems quite straightforward to me. How discretionary income ranks above life and security however, I can only wonder, but perhaps Bricker will do us the honour of coming back to this thread to elucidate his own position a little further. Unlike his attempted characterization of the liberal mindset, he could speak to the matter with some authority.
I essentially agree with you, but I think fiscal conservatives would dispute your characterization. You don’t “provide” someone with any kind of taxes: instead, you take taxes from people under threat of imprisonment. The question isn’t balancing a benefit to the rich vs. a benefit to the poor, under this thinking; it’s a question of what sort of burden you’ll put on the rich in order to provide a benefit to the poor.
Personally, I think private property is a half-skewed theory: there are occasions in which it’s a useful fiction for determining who gets to use what, but it is by no means a moral end in itself. For this reason, I don’t adopt the conservative view of taxes: what’s being taxed isn’t necessarily rightfully theirs in the first place.
Daniel
If my characterization only succeeds in bringing the unspoken assumption that “my tax dollar > your life” to the fore, it will have served its purpose. But as much as I agree with you Daniel, I would much rather hear it from someone who actually believes such things, lest I be accused of knocking down straw men. I can come up with my own theories as to the motivations of conservatives, but I’m afraid they might not recognize themselves in my words anymore than I did in the OP’s. They can speak for themselves if they feel so inclined, just as I expect to be extended the same courtesy*. So there’s your chance to fight some ignorance: explain to me how lower taxes is worth the sick going untreated or families homeless.
*Which makes me an hypocrite for putting words in Der Trihs’s mouth earlier. Sorry about that.
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You are? Many of your political positions do seem moderately liberal to me, but I also remember you starting [thread=268701]this thread[/thread], so I wonder how your political opinions have shifted since then.
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Well, lemme turn it around on you. IS your money worth more to you than someone’s life? For whatever the cost you pay for Internet access, you could probably pay for some HIV-positive kid’s medication each month. And if you decide to drop Internet in order to pay for his medication, what about moving to a cheaper house/apartment, so that you can take those savings and help some war refugees so they won’t die of malnutrition? If you phrase things as weighing dollars against lives, you’re going to run out of dollars very quickly.
Which some people do. They’re called saints.
I see the point you’re making, and it’s legitimate to a degree. But in its absolute form it’s untenable for most folks. There needs to be a balance, IMO, between letting the destitute suffer miserably while we wallow in luxury, and putting oneself into poverty in an effort to save the world.
Daniel
When these choices could not reasonably be seen as the least-bad option available, or lack any reasonable chance of yielding good results. If you believe, for example, that you have a choice between dropping out of high school to work and help provide for your family, and letting your siblings go hungry - well, that’s not much of a choice at all. Even if there are, in fact, aid programs available, you might not know about them. So, this is a choice that a reasonable person in a bad situation might acknowledge is likely to be harmful in the long run, but the short-term consequences of every other choice he/she knows of are completely unacceptable. It follows, then, that it’s not improper for government to try to extend a hand to high-school dropouts - help them get their GEDs, etc.
As an example of a life choice that could have yielded good results, but simply didn’t, consider almost any blue-collar profession. If my parents were steelworkers, and made good money at it, it wouldn’t have been unreasonable for me to go into that trade as well. If I then get laid off at age 40, and I know how to do is work in a steel mill, and my savings are dwindling fast, it’s not unreasonable for the government to consider stepping in to help me get training in a new job, and get back on my feet.
In short, I’d say that, whatever it means to “hold people responsible”, it’s not inappropriate for government to help people out when they make reasonable decisions that simply play out poorly.
Indeed I should be doing all those things, as should we all. I readily acknowledge that this is a moral failing on my part even though it would be a difficult standard to live up to. But the latter does not excuse the former in my opinion. If conservatives are willing to concede that their opposition to rudimentary welfare and universal health care are likewise ethically suspect, I’ll have accomplished all I set out to do in this thread.
I have tried to couch the issue strictly in terms of bare necessities and discretionary income, so I’m hardly asking for anyone to become poor. We can quibble endlessly over the precise definition of those terms, but the crucial distinction in my view is that providing the former alleviates actual physical suffering while taking away the latter does not cause it. Thus, if you are trying to minize suffering, as liberals are wont to do, this sounds like a fairly efficient way to go about it. If we ever reach a point where taxes become more than a relatively minor inconvenience (or basic needs have been met), perhaps I’ll change my position. In the meantime, I find the suffering/inconvenience dichotomy (shamelessly cribbed from an old post by SentientMeat*) to be a useful guideline.
*Mod note: I’m a former lurker, not a sock. Please don’t ban me, okay?
You’d certainly call me a liberal, and I don’t agree with this view. What it comes down to for me is the distinction between “explanation” and “excuse”. I am, as I’m sure you are, a law-abiding productive member of society. For me, being law-abiding has been very easy. I grew up under modest circumstances (incredibly wealthy circumstances compared to most of the world, but modest compared to my immediate vicinity), but I never lacked anything. There was no incentive to steal, there were no drugs or gangs or guns around. If I had grown up as a destitute fatherless child in South Central L.A., I can’t say with absolute certainty that I wouldn’t have become a criminal, and I don’t think you can honestly say that about yourself either. Does that mean we wouldn’t be responsible, or shouldn’t be held responsible, for our criminal actions? No. We would be and we should be.
But in recognising that circumstances do affect us, I think we should work to amend those circumstances rather than simply punish wrongdoers. If we can say that circumstance A promotes behaviour B and behaviour B is undesirable, then the question of personal responsibility is less interesting than the question of how to eliminate circumstance A.
Sure, some people grow up under circumstance A and never commit a single act of B, but few correlations are 1-1. It still remains a fact that circumstance A promotes behaviour B.
That’s where I think this comes from. We wonder why something happened and what to do to prevent it in the future, which may sound like looking for excuses, while it is looking for explanations. The alternate explanation - “he was born evil!” - doesn’t cut it for me.
Just want to point out that I was admittedly not fatherless, nor in South Central L.A., but my childhood was not remotely wealthy: my father came here from El Salvador with the classic “only the shirt on his back” and so while I appreciate your larger point, I do have to say that I know for a fact that if had grown up destitute, I wouldn’t be a criminal, cause… kinda did.
I hope this is within the purview of the thread (and Bricker, please let me know if it isn’t), but I think that also worth considering right now is where “fault” actually lies with respect to victimless crimes according to conservatives and liberals.
Laws against drug use exist in order to… well, I don’t actually know the answer to that. They seem entirely nonsensical to me. In fact, I would characterize them as nothing less than the artificial manufacture of “fault” to punish people who don’t deserve it. Just as liberals are concerned with society as a whole when deeming it a prudent investment to tax the wealthy in order to create a safety net, I suspect that conservatives see a similar societal trade-off by finding fault with people who use certain drugs.
I have no idea what that trade-off is supposed to be.
It’s also impossible to ignore that some conservatives’ own drugs of choice are not held to be illegal (single malt scotch being a not-entirely-random example), while the drug choice of poor minorities are harshly punished. The cocaine/crack sentencing dichotomy is a particularly heinous abortion of justice, and yet it continues to exist because of the indifference at best (and deliberate racism at worst) of the predominately white rich male Congress.
In the case of the ludicrously stupid War on Drugs, I’m not only being asked to find “fault” in activities where I see no actual moral transgression, I’m also expected to support the continuation of utterly wasted spending (our tax money, remember) that could instead be allocated to better services that produce a general societal benefit. And if those funds were better allocated, taxes might not need to be so high to maintain things like the safety net.
Point. However, I believe there is a set of realistic circumstances, had you grown up under which, you could not say the same for certain.
If the above is grammatically horrific, it’s a combination of tiredness, alcohol, and un-Anglo-ness. Apologies.