personal freedom or public safety?

[vikki_tics]

Discussion post for the poll over on vikki.

Okay, I know what you're thinking: these two things aren't mutually exclusive. I believe you're wrong. Mostly. (slave_to_anime points out that public safety specifically isn't always mutually exclusive to freedom

Comments

[killyoudead]

While I do agree on many of your points-that "complete" freedom is essentially government-sanctioned anarchy (which doesn't necessarily mean chaos, of course), that it's not necessarily the state/national government's duty to limit this-or-that product in this-or-that setting, and so forth-the final point is that the government of the people and the people themselves are not entirely separate entities. The government is made up of the people, directed by and for them, and while ours in particular carries a mantle of protecting certain freedoms, that is nowhere near the whole of the law.

After all, before even freedoms or rights, the establishment of a government at its basest level is to establish what is criminal, to remove what is criminal from being repeated or causing more harm, and thereby protecting the society as a whole from destructive anarchy.

So then, what constitutes criminal? Murder, and theft, and assault, sure, but to tie with some of your examples: slipping poison into someone's food with the intent to kill them, sure, that's murder. If you feed someone a poison and they die, and it wasn't your intention to kill them (and certainly, you didn't even know it was a poison), it's possible you'd still get charged with manslaughter. It's not difficult to see how this connects to food regulation or limits on commercial tobacco consumption. This or that food that's spoiled, or infected, it can be as deadly as cyanide or arsenic, and cigarettes may take a long time to take a person down, but it doesn't change that the main things cigarettes do to a person is create and foster an addiction to further consumption, and probable cancer/illness/death. Similar laws arise to cover other industries.

As society moved away from having our lives in general threatened more by nature, natural illness, eaten by bears, warfare, or just plain getting murdered over who-slept-with-whose-spouse, the leading causes of death and injury tended to arise from man-made inventions and situations. You can't make Influenza illegal, but you can force a manufacturer of light bulbs to not sell products that will explode and set a house ablaze. With how society's advanced, this growth of government is, really, a natural extension of its core function to begin with.

Of course, government's a lot more complicated than that, as are people. Although most of my argument thus far has been pretty much going on about how the government establishing laws to regulate both industry practice and personal behavior are natural, I did vote in favor of the opposite.

This is why: the citizens will often be the ones approaching the government, to say "this thing is harmful and must be outlawed;" the government itself doesn't need to act independently of its people to determine what should or shouldn't be regulated for public safety. After all, you would only need one angry brother watch his sister get hit and killed by a motorist to lobby his local government into changing the speed limit of such-and-such area. However, because people are more likely to say "this thing is bad, and I don't like it, so it should be illegal" than to say "this thing, while I think it's bad, may not really be so. This action is infringing on rights guaranteed me by my government, and so in this case the law shouldn't be changed."

That is what falls to our elected officials to oversee-to look at what changes the citizenry wants made, and to stop, and to say, "is this just? Does this follow the spirit of how this nation was conceived? If not, is this more just than our history? Is there a way this could be done differently, to infringe on the fewest people?" In the opposite direction, if everything that people wanted to be illegal was, we'd swing into a state of chaos and disorder from too much order, haphazardly constructed out of public whim.

CONTINUING IN A SECOND COMMENT BECAUSE I BROKE THE CHARACTER COUNT, I AM SORRY

[killyoudead]

So, hitting your examples: do you have a right to never see a religious symbol that violates your sensibilities? No, you do not; doing so would be infringing upon the rights of those to whom those religious symbols hold meaning; however, as our nation does have what is meant to be a divide between its religious institutions and those of its various levels of government, valuing or representing any one religion or religions over any/all others (such as in the case of Biblical verses in federal buildings, which seems to crop up a lot) would go against those principles.

For immigration: while illegal immigration is a problem, yes, is this solution the most just? The way it's been framed, as far as I've seen, is that police can request identification from anyone they deem "suspicious" of possibly being illegal immigrants. Considering the location, the primary target of this law will be the Hispanic/Latino community, which makes sense. However, is this just? It seems highly unlikely that a proportionate number of Caucasians would be questioned, so even if the law stipulates that racial profiling shouldn't be used as criteria, wouldn't that be how most officers would be forced to operate? So, going back to previous questions, is this just? Possibly. Is it the most just? No, definitely not; whether intentional or not, this law does infringe upon the rights of American citizens.

After all, unless I'm incredibly rusty on my knowledge of the law, police can't pull you over and search you and your car just because you look like you could be a car thief. And, certainly, police can't enter your home and search through your belongings just because you look like you could be a drug user. If they were to do so, whatever they found or did not find would have to be thrown out as illegally obtained evidence.

So, should the government be concerned about public safety? Absolutely; that's one of its primary functions! But it has to take special care to protect those freedoms, because man, people can be really quick to throw them away.

... I have no idea if any of this made sense.