From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Wed May 01 2002 - 17:08:21 MDT
Emlyn said:
> As much as I hate to do it, I must agree with the anti-
> reproductive-cloning camp. Cloning is still broken...
> don't try this at home kiddies!
I wish to discuss a long discarded concept called "freedom"
that was widely understood in the 18th century. The word is
frequently still used today, but the meaning has all but
vanished from the consciousness of 20th and 21st century
peoples, and certainly from the posts on this list.
The basic idea is that if someone causes no other existing
citizen harm, nor in any way harms that person's property,
then we do not focus upon and attempt to legislate away
that person's freedom to engage in that activity. As the
U.S. Constitution said, "The powers not delegated to the United
States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states,
are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people"---in
effect allowing freedom as the default condition.
This is pretty radical, because of the inherant unpredictability
it unleashes on society. Things, under the auspices of freedom
and liberty, may actually change in unforeseen directions! The
system would be "out of control", and so it's easy to see why
"freedom" is an extremely unpopular concept in our current
risk-adversive safety-conscious society.
It takes some time to get used to: imagine your neighbor engaged
in any kind of activity whatsoever behind his or her own closed
doors that doesn't affect you. Believe it or not, "freedom"
dictates that you mind your own affairs and make no attempt to
interfere by force NO MATTER HOW DISGUSTING OR REVOLUTIONARY THAT
ACTIVITY IS. The mind boggles: your neighbor may be taking
drugs! Your neighbor may be harming kittens! He or she may
even be performing aberrant sexual rites, or deriving
satisfaction from dirty pictures. All these activities, and
more, are---under this archaic mindset that I am attempting
to describe---none of your business, hard as that may be to
fathom.
Edmund Gerch added
> However, cloning for the purpose of reproduction?
> I fail to find any social argument for allowing such
> procedures for the average person.
Exactly! Whether something should be *allowed* is the
question, to the modern mind. Unless there is a good
reason for something to be allowed, then it should be
forbidden.
Rafal summed it up nicely:
> Lee Corbin wrote:
>> I'll mind my business, and you mind yours, and if yours
>> involves the mistreatment of cats, dogs, chimps, pigs, or
>> cattle, well, it's none of my affair nor anyone else's.
### But it is *my* affair! I am perfectly willing to impose
### my own purely subjective ideas about humane treatment of
### animals on every dog-torturer I can affect, (except if he
### proves the need for torture to save innocent humans).
Thus in the modern view, everything of which one strongly
enough disapproves of is one's affair. What we do, you see,
is democratically vote on it. If enough of us think that
something, e.g. homosexuality, is bad, then we ban it. If
enough of us think that cloning is bad, then we ban it.
If we conclude that our neighbor should be taking his
children to the doctor but isn't, then we take them by
force. ANYTHING that for whatever reason makes a majority
of us uncomfortable is fair game, and is to be disallowed.
### I guess we are rather close in our views except I am
### somewhat less deferential to other people's liberty.
Just so.
But no matter. Liberty and freedom are completely outmoded
principles no longer practiced anywhere. It's extremely
difficult to even imagine how they could be workable, and
certainly they're no longer even vaguely understood by
people today. I only bring it up on this list as a point
of historical curiosity.
Lee Corbin
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