Our liberal society and our conception of personal freedom leads us to believe that anything is permissible so long as it is between consenting adults.
Trudeau's famous saying in the '60s of "government have no business in the bedroom of the nation" legitimized consenting adult behavior in privacy as outside of the business of others and therefore government.
Rather than providing a conduct of behavior, our laws are now mainly involved in the protection of children, minorities, and parties who cannot properly give or withhold consent.
What examples do you have that involve behavior or things that should be legitimately banned even among consenting adults?
One example is that what is agreeable between two consenting adults may have implications to other adults whose permissions were not asked for or granted.
An employer cannot hire someone at less than minimum wage even if the worker agrees to work for less than minimum wage because it affects other jobseekers who wants to be protected by the minimum wage legislation.
Individual citizens cannot agree to break a society's laws just because they disagree with the law legitimized by the majority of society.
Or maybe the actions of two consenting adults have what environmentalist call externalities, implications on future generations who cannot participate in the consent process. We cannot agree to pollute a lake that unborn generations have to clean up later on and yet have no consenting participation for this decision.
What about prostitution or variations there off?
What about exploitation ?
Is an exchange among consenting adults always a "fair exchange" ?
Of course, anything we do have affect on others. It is impossible to do something without some affect on others around us.
So does it mean that we always have more adult consent to sort after other than the immediate parties involved?
This will make a mockery of the concept of personal freedom if there is nothing we can do that does not affect others and our "freedom" is always at the mercy of other people's "consent"
Perhaps there is a way we can draw the line on our personal freedom versus how our action affect others. Where do we draw this line?
Maybe we do not need to get the consent of the grocery clerk every time we see a grocery sale because we can assume that it is not at the sacrifice of their job for us to get the sale. But what if it is? Should we still take the sale and keep the clerk's job as not related to the sale offered?
How do we identify who should be considered as stake holders in any transaction?
Does prostitution involve the consent of only the prostitute and the customer? What about the customer's spouse? What about the neighbors where the prostitute carry on his/her business? The landlord who rented the facilities? The employer of the customer who wants to project a decent corporate citizen image? The community organization that the customer belong to who do not want any scandal to discredit the organization?
We are having our Ideas Cafe discussion this Wednesday and we will see whether we are actually as "free" as we think we are.
A number of interesting points coming out of the Ideas Cafe Meeting.
ReplyDelete1. A person on a desert island has the most freedom. His freedom starts to be compromised as soon as someone else arrives on the island. The bigger the community we live in, the more restrictions there are to our freedom in considerations of others.
2. The tricky part is to figure out the threshold where one compromise one's freedom so as not to encroach on someone else's.
3. Other examples of consenting adults are rough play in hockey games and soccer games when pushing other players and kicking other players would not be acceptable in regular public places. Display of nudity in live performances when nudity is not accepted in other public places.
4. Right to life and to euthanasia was also discussed but it is a matter of society imposing value on individuals.