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#171
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Warning: H*lm*t content
David Trudgett wrote: "Bleve" writes: This calls up the issue of responsibility. You should recall that we were discussing withholding medical care (perhaps only if the person can't afford it), not personal responsibility per se. You make a choice, and "society" makes a choice about what it's prepared to pay for. If (and this is a hyothetical, I'm not advocating it as such at this time) the law (the arm of society) says "thou shalt wear a helmet approved by standard X when riding a bicycle", and an individual makes a choice not to wear it - and something goes wrong, and the non-wearer then ends up with some injury that the helmet would have prevented (yes, I know ... this is a hypothetical ...) then at some point "society" would be justified in saying "you broke the rules, you're on your own". This, of course, would not be an issue of accident, but rather deliberate breach of the rules, and the consequences of same. So, if your choice is such that it exceeds what society is prepared to pay for (ie: breaks the rules), then you have to make your own arrangements in case of accident. The upshot of this aspect of the law is that it has injustice built right into its very foundation. Those who do suffer from a real and unavoidable lapse in concentration will be judged in the same way as the liar and the person who could care less about safety. You're confusing responsibility with retribution, and event with intent. Accidents are not the same thing as deliberate breaches of the rules. Determining which is which is the hard part. It is one thing to play cricket in the front yard and break a window with an accidentally overplayed shot, it is another thing altogether to walk up to a window with a cricket bat and smash it. It doesn't matter what excuses get cooked up for them. When I crashed my bike into another rider, it was my fault for not paying attention. I had 3 good excuses, but it was my responsibilty. I was tired, I had a lapse of concentration and I was unlucky. So what? So, unless you are lying, or you have a machine-like perfect control over concentration, you are not morally responsible for the accident. This is the basic meaning of "accident", after all. It was an accident, but I was still the responsible party. As such, I paid for the damage. That's called "Accepting responsibility". When I was a kid, I broke (by accident) a few windows. I paid to have them fixed. Sure, I didn't *mean* to put cricketballs through them, but it was my responsibility, as I caused the event to occur. So, don't let me get in the way of your being a martyr. If you really want to blame yourself, then go ahead. After all, you're the only one who really knows how guilty you really are. No judge, no jury can know it, but *you* can. I'm not being a martyr, I'm accepting responsibility for the consequences of my actions. It was still my fault and I fully expected to be judged accordingly. As such, I paid for all the damage and did my best to make sure my crashee was ok. As any decent person would. This is a different matter from moral responsibility. Responsibility is not the same as punitive retribution. that's where intent comes in (which is why we have a legal system, imperfect as it is ...). |
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#172
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Warning: H*lm*t content
"David Trudgett" wrote in message ... blah, blah, blah Bicycle bicycle bicycle I want to ride my bicycle bicycle bicycle I want to ride my bicycle I want to ride my bike I want to ride my bicycle I want to ride it where I like You say black I say white You say bark I say bite You say shark I say hey man Jaws was never my scene And I don't like Star Wars You say Rolls I say Royce You say God give me a choice You say Lord I say Christ I don't believe in Peter Pan Frankenstein or Superman All I wanna do is Bicycle bicycle bicycle I want to ride my bicycle bicycle bicycle I want to ride my bicycle I want to ride my bike I want to ride my bicycle I want to ride my Bicycle races are coming your way So forget all your duties all year! Fat bottomed girls They'll be riding today So look out for those beauties oh yeah On your marks get set go Bicycle race bicycle race bicycle race Bicycle bicycle bicycle I want to ride my bicycle Bicycle bicycle bicycle bicycle Bicycle race You say coke I say caine You say John I say Wayne Hot dog I say cool it man I don't wanna be the President of America You say smile I say cheese Cartier I say please Income tax I say Jesus I don't wanna be a candidate for Vietnam or Watergate Cause all I wanna do is Bicycle bicycle bicycle I want to ride my bicycle bicycle bicycle I want to ride my bicycle I want to ride my bike I want to ride my bicycle I want to ride it where I like |
#173
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Warning: H*lm*t content
Bleve wrote:
Responsibility is not the same as punitive retribution. that's where intent comes in (which is why we have a legal system, imperfect as it is ...). if i were religeous i could just say "god did it, was his *will*" releasing me from my actions, but i'm not so lame to try to claim that i am. if you go about life with the attitude that you are responsible for your own actions and how those actions impact on others, you don't end up taking the risks others might take and not end up in the same messy situations. kim |
#174
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Warning: H*lm*t content
Theo Bekkers wrote:
TimC wrote: Imagine how much smarter humanity would become in such a short time? Evolution restored back to humanity, instead of humans becoming stupider and stupider each year for the past 100 years. someone mentioned about tv, where you don't have to think to be entertained. where you don't have to participate. i read a couple of studies years ago that proposed that children and teenagers were gleaning life experience from watching TV. the thing that they tried to cover was the fragmented nature of coverage to kids, ie they never quite watched the whole thing through or didn't understand all of the elements of the story, so they tried to apply the bits they did understand without understanding the consequences. how accurate this is i do not know. Is this why young people appear to be more stupid? young people take uneducated risks[2]. when you're older you tend to take less risks[1]. older people have "values", you tend to get them with real-life experience, as opposed to watching tv cheers, kim [1] although older folk may not be more "educated" they may be more experienced [2] because they don't know the consequences |
#175
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Warning: H*lm*t content
Kim wrote: Bleve wrote: Responsibility is not the same as punitive retribution. that's where intent comes in (which is why we have a legal system, imperfect as it is ...). if i were religeous i could just say "god did it, was his *will*" releasing me from my actions, but i'm not so lame to try to claim that i am. if you go about life with the attitude that you are responsible for your own actions and how those actions impact on others, you don't end up taking the risks others might take and not end up in the same messy situations. Not necessarily, everything we do is a calculated risk. Smarter people hedge their bets by taking precautions where the risk/reward payoff is tenable. I'm constantly amazed by idiots in cars who belt along at 90km/h in a 60 zone, risking licence loss and big fines (not to mention the safety issues) to get to the next red light, which saves them absolutley no time. That's risk *without* reward. Dumb ... Taking responsibility is not the same as taking no risks. It's accepting the consequences of what happens afterwards, and taking reasonable means to reduce or mittigate those risks or probable consequences. |
#176
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Warning: H*lm*t content
"Bleve" writes:
David Trudgett wrote: "Bleve" writes: This calls up the issue of responsibility. You should recall that we were discussing withholding medical care (perhaps only if the person can't afford it), not personal responsibility per se. You make a choice, and "society" makes a choice about what it's prepared to pay for. Yes, this is undoubtedly the case, and I don't see how anyone could dispute it. Yet, what we are discussing is *precisely* the issue concerning the choice that our hypothetical "society" makes in that regard (glossing over our sloppy use of 'society' for now). What we are *really* talking about is how much we are going to care for each other. That is the bottom line. The Christian's (and in my opinion, any good person's) answer to the bottom line is that we should care for each other as if we were each the other's flesh and blood. Would I let my child (of any age) suffer a life of avoidable pain because he rode a bicycle without a helmet contrary to the law? No I would not, and neither would any good person. But there is no difference between my child and my neighbour's child (of any age) that has any bearing on this question. This means that there is no difference between you and I, and that therefore I should do for you what I would do for myself. You had better hope I'm not a masochist ;-) In contrast to that view, there is the selfish, animalistic view where dog eats dog, so to speak, and it's everyone for himself in a game of survival of the fittest. From this perspective, we do as little as possible for each other in order to maximise our own wealth. We only provide health care so that people can go on producing for the consumer society, not because they deserve it as human beings. We only provide education in order to manufacture productive workers, not because the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom is an essential part of what makes us human. And in the provision of these things, we always feel dissatisfied and peeved that other people should be a drain on our wealth. So the choice is not "society's", it is yours and mine. A "society" is not a person and cannot make choices. It is you and I who make choices, and you and I get to decide how much we are going to care for each other. (Don't get all romantic on me.) Each of us has a choice between selfishness, greed and self-interest on one hand, and love on the other. All you have to do is make that choice and forget about that mythical "society" person. The upshot of this aspect of the law is that it has injustice built right into its very foundation. Those who do suffer from a real and unavoidable lapse in concentration will be judged in the same way as the liar and the person who could care less about safety. You're confusing responsibility with retribution, and event with intent. In fact, I'm not. It is a function of your understanding what I am saying. Perhaps I am not being clear enough. For my part, I understand perfectly well what your position is, but I am telling you that your view of the issue is incomplete. Accidents are not the same thing as deliberate breaches of the rules. That's obvious, but accidents happen with or without breaching "rules", and you are advocating for the instance in which they happen while (someone else's) "rule" is being breached, that a human being should stop being treated like a human being, and in that way be punished for breaking the "rule". It does not matter how clever the sophistry is that is used to justify this action, it cannot disguise the essential nature of retribution inherent in such an attitude. It is not a matter of simple "consequences" as you try to make out, because we are not talking about immutable laws of the natural world. We are talking instead about the way we decide to treat each other. Your use of "consequences" means this: I say to you, "Don't touch my ice cream, or I'll shoot you with my shotty." You go ahead and eat my ice cream and I shoot you with my shotty. Too bad, that was just the "consequence" of your action. After all, I had no choice but to shoot you, right? Determining which is which is the hard part. It is one thing to play cricket in the front yard and break a window with an accidentally overplayed shot, it is another thing altogether to walk up to a window with a cricket bat and smash it. And you can tell if a person is temporarily insane and can't help their actions? As you said, it *is* the hard part, isn't it? Why can't everything be so *easy*, like it is in theory? It doesn't matter what excuses get cooked up for them. When I crashed my bike into another rider, it was my fault for not paying attention. I had 3 good excuses, but it was my responsibilty. I was tired, I had a lapse of concentration and I was unlucky. So what? So, unless you are lying, or you have a machine-like perfect control over concentration, you are not morally responsible for the accident. This is the basic meaning of "accident", after all. It was an accident, but I was still the responsible party. This is actually a self-contradiction. If it was an accident, you were *not* morally responsible by definition (unless you deliberately or negligently courted the accident in the first place). Notice I use the word 'morally' right before 'responsible'. Your use of the word 'responsible' is vague, wishy-washy and, from a broader perspective, wrong. You are saying that because you did something, you are somehow "responsible" for it, without having a clear understanding of what you mean by the word. You are conflating different uses of the word. "responsible for an action": -- Morally accountable; the action was done deliberately or negligently. -- Legally accountable; your action infringed a law. -- You did it; someone else didn't do it. -- Someone else did it, but you are being blamed. What you are saying is that because you did something, you should make amends for it, whether or not you are actually guilty or to blame in any moral sense. This is a Christian value, and I completely agree with you. But I do not agree with you that you "must" do that because you are "guilty" of being human and making mistakes. If you crash into someone, it is your duty to help them no matter who is "guilty" or if no one is "guilty". In fact, it is also your duty to provide such help even if you are not involved in the accident at all. All this has nothing to do with "responsibility", however you care to define it. As such, I paid for the damage. That's called "Accepting responsibility". This again shows your confusion about the word 'responsibility'. It's good that you paid for the damage. If you didn't, who else would? Furthermore, from their point of view, you appeared to be negligent, so failure to make good would look bad, so to speak. If it had been visually obvious to them that the reason for the crash was beyond your control (say, in some totally different scenario), then I would hazard they would likely not have thought about accepting compensation from you. Once again, none of this has anything to do with "responsibility". It has to do with doing the right thing by others. When I was a kid, I broke (by accident) a few windows. I paid to have them fixed. Sure, I didn't *mean* to put cricketballs through them, but it was my responsibility, as I caused the event to occur. Here, the issue of moral responsibility *does* come into it, because of negligence. Kids old enough to be playing cricket also know that hitting cricket balls into things may break or damage them. Of course, kids may not fully appreciate the danger or likelihood of such damage, which lessens the moral responsibility. Now what if you had turned someone into a "vegetable" for life instead of merely breaking a window? Cricket balls are quite capable of doing that, you know. Would it also have been your responsibility to live in abject poverty for the rest of your life in order to pay for the life support systems? Things are not so simple as the word 'responsibility' may make it seem. We all have a duty of care to each other individually and collectively, even when individuals do the wrong thing deliberately or negligently. So, don't let me get in the way of your being a martyr. If you really want to blame yourself, then go ahead. After all, you're the only one who really knows how guilty you really are. No judge, no jury can know it, but *you* can. I'm not being a martyr, I'm accepting responsibility for the consequences of my actions. Although no one will argue that you shouldn't try to make amends for the consequences of your own actions, you can't accept something that doesn't belong to you. That is not "accepting responsibility", it is doing what you can to make your part of the world right, while realising that things like lapses of concentration *can* be as much out of your control as, say, getting a punctured tyre. You do not have any *moral* duty to fix anything that you were not morally guilty of breaking. An accident implies no guilt (although, in practical terms, there usually is a degree of guilt, which is partly why the law has such an obsession with finding the "guilty" party); therefore, a true accident involves no guilty party, and therefore no one to "accept responsibility". In the real world, though, it works a bit differently, because we have to, for practical reasons, look at *apparent* responsibility. In your accident, you were apparently responsible for it in the moral sense. You were riding along, and you just crashed into someone minding their own business (presumably). From an observer's point of view, you were negligent (since it is not possible to observe the state of someone's mind). Therefore, from an objective observational perspective, you would have to be treated just as if you were morally guilty of at least negligence, whether or not that was the reality of the situation. It was because you were *apparently* morally responsible for the incident (not "accident" now) that both parties felt you should pay for the damages. It does not help (because it is not true) to claim that just because you did something, you are morally bound to pay damages. If you were hunting wascally wabbits in the countryside but, through no fault of your own (because of having taken every precaution), that little bunny you just shot turned out to be someone's head, would you be morally bound to support the deceased's family for the rest of your life? It would be good if you could do that, but you would not be *morally* bound to do it. (We're assuming here, of course, the best possible set of circumstances which would clear the shooter of any possible charge of wrong-doing.) Accidents are part and parcel of life as a community. Some accidents are virtually or totally blameless on anyone's part. In others, there may be partial blame on one or both sides. Sometimes, one party is completely to blame, and in these cases, the incidents are not properly called 'accidents', because they were caused by negligence or even malice (like road rage). But living together as a community means that we collectively and individually look after each other whenever accidents occur, no matter who is to "blame" and why, and most especially, when no one is to blame. It was still my fault and I fully expected to be judged accordingly. As such, I paid for all the damage and did my best to make sure my crashee was ok. As any decent person would. This is a different matter from moral responsibility. Responsibility is not the same as punitive retribution. Responsibility is not the same as marmalade, either, but the point is elusive. that's where intent comes in (which is why we have a legal system, imperfect as it is ...). You seem to be saying that the legal system can determine a person's intent. It's an interesting theory, I'll admit... David -- David Trudgett http://www.zeta.org.au/~wpower/ Of course, the naturalistic evolution assumption [...] proposes that an extended series of step-wise coincidences gave rise to life and the world as we know it. In other words, the first coincidence led to a second coincidence, which led to a third coincidence, which eventually led to coincidence 'i', which eventually led up to the present situation, 'N'. Evolutionists have not even been able to posit a mechanistic 'first' coincidence, only the assumption that each step must have had a survival advantage and only by this means could evolution from simple to complex have occurred. Each coincidence 'i' is assumed to be dependent upon prior steps and to have an associated dependent probability 'Pi'. The resultant probability estimate for the occurrence of evolutionary naturalism is calculated as the product series, given the following: N, the number of step-wise coincidences in the evolutionary process. i = the index for each coincidence: i = 1, 2, 3 ... Pi, the evaluated probability for the i'th coincidence. PE = the product probability that everything evolved by naturalism. Innumerable steps are postulated to exist in the evolutionary sequence, therefore N is very large (i.e. N...). All values of Pi are less than or equal to one, with most of them much smaller than one. The greater the proposed leap in step i, the smaller the associated probability [...] and a property of [a] product series where N is very large and most terms are significantly less than one [is that it] quickly converges very close to zero. The conclusion of this calculation is that the probability of naturalistic evolution is essentially zero. -- Jerry R. Bergman, B.S., M.S. Psychology, Ph.D. in Evaluation and Research, M.A. Sociology, Ph.D. Human Biology. |
#177
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Warning: H*lm*t content
I bet you discuss nothing but bicycles when you go to church on Sundays.
Just a sneaking suspicion. |
#178
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Warning: H*lm*t content
Bob Wrote: I bet you discuss nothing but bicycles when you go to church on Sundays. Just a sneaking suspicion. church clashes with cycling time -- ProfTournesol |
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