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Originally Posted by politicophile
As one can see from the smoking thread, pretty much everybody is up in arms about my decision to impose my moral views on other people. Essentially, I think it makes you less of a person (a worse person, as I phrased it earlier) to smoke cigarettes for two reasons:
1. Smoking cigarettes needlessly harms the smoker.
2. Smoking cigarettes needlessly harms people near the smoker.
It is my sincere moral belief that needless harm (as defined on a case-by-case basis by me) to human beings is immoral. Obviously, some people disagree either with my principle or would dispute the fact that cigarette smoke actually causes needless harm.
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Your principle has nothing to do with harm, it's self-imposed moralistic righteousness. I doubt you are that altruistic, simply by your insistence that you are a better person than me because of one fault.
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Originally Posted by politicophile
I created this thread to address a slightly different argument, however. In the smoking thread, Cynthetiq is harshly critical of my using a particular action or characteristic of an individual to rate them based on my own conception of right and wrong. I cannot say it strongly enough: it is absolutely essential that humans in general are willing to impose their moral values on other people. We'll start with the obvious examples and then work from there: |
No, it is NOT essential. Moral values are subjective. Do you engage in premarital sex? Do you masturbate at all? Gay? Ever buy a porn magazine? Good, we may now put you up for scrutiny. Ever hear the quote, let he who is without sin cast the first stone? Sin, morals, whatever you want to call it, are only essential to the one that lives with them, not the observers.
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Originally Posted by politicophile
Acts that harm innocent people must be criminalized simply for stability's sake. So, we criminalize murder, rape, battery, etc. If you so choose, you can essentially leave morality out of the equation here, except insofar as you are imposing on others your moral belief in the superiority of stable society over its alternatives.
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Of course we criminalize murder and rape, et al; they're acts of purposeful violence against another human being. And if I go up to you and blow smoke in your face on purpose, you have the right to charge me with assault. A stable society is one without violence. But it is also one without forceful limitations.
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Originally Posted by politicophile
Next, you have the category of negative freedoms. The government is prohibited from arresting people without charging them with crimes, abridging the freedom of speech, employing cruel and unusual punishments, etc. Someone made decisions in each of those cases that we as citizens have a right to be free of those unwanted governmental practices, that it would be better to live without them. Again, there is a degree of self-interest involved in this calculation, so it is possible to argue that this is not a purely moral judgment. The question remains, however, as to how one decides which negative freedoms to preserve and why. The answer to that question will eventually lead to one's personal moral principles (right to privacy, e.g.).
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Not necessarily. White supremists come to mind. They're more than willing to use the constitutional freedoms for themselves but no one else. Not much in the way of what most would consider 'moral principles'; more like falsely based ideology.
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Originally Posted by politicophile
Moving on, we reach mandatory taxation, the pooling of collective resources for governmental use. It is preferable, we seem to believe, to tax people and use their money collectively than it is to allow those people to spend their money as they see fit. That is, we hold that the projects undertaken with taxpayer funds are morally superior to the individual projects that would be undertaken by people who spend their money individually. (Yes, you can say that the only principle in operation is the maximization of societal utility, but that in itself is a moral principle.)
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Taxation has NOTHING to do with moral principles. There's nothing moral about it, it's a method of spreading the costs of running a government in a (supposedly) fair distribution of income and expenditure, nothing more. If morals were attached to taxes, there'd be no poor or homeless and the most wealthy would not be so wealthy.
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Originally Posted by politicophile
Most obviously, we have laws that regulate individual behavior. One cannot provide alcohol to minors, bring a firearm into a school zone, drive faster than the posted speed limit, etc. This category of laws consists of moral judgments on the relative value of, for example, minors having the freedom of having alcohol given to them and protecting minors from the ill effects of having alcohol given to them. Society has come to conclusions on such matters. Even though those conclusions are not always correct, it is extremely important that society remains willing to impose morally-derived preferences on itself.
Returning to the issue of smoking, there are legitimate moral reasons why one might think it is desirable to ban smoking in places of employment or in high traffic areas. There may even be legitimate reasons for banning tobacco use alltogether.
That, however, is not what I am advocating. I was merely passing judgment on the moral wrongness of a private action, albiet an action I do not believe the government should completely ban through legal means. When you condemn an abortion doctor, a homophobe, a rapist, a child molestor, a NASCAR fan, a Muslim, a deadbeat parent, a crack addict, or anyone else, you are making a moral judgment about that person. It is vitally important that we continue to make these sorts of judgments because this is the method through which society shapes its prohibitions, expectations, and priorities.
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And, unless you own a black robe and sit behind a very high desk, you do not have the right to pass judgment on another based solely on a singular action and when that person is otherwise an unknown.
In the nicest way possible, I will ask: who the hell do YOU think you are that you can sit there and point fingers?
In that line of thinking, fundamentalist christian righters would be making all sorts of strides in lawmaking. It is NOT vitally important to make judgments. It IS vitally important that you do what you can to not infringe on others' rights. Apparently, you feel differently.