| richardhutnik said: When a society has a set of values it seeks to uphold, say derived from natural law, reason, and other things such as science or tradition, and it fails to uphold these values, and things collapse, then how is that not robbing from the future? If it isn't theft it is certainly negligence. I don't say that the solution need to be that the government does it, but the society as a whole needs to do it. Now, one can debate what these values are, and what the state of society needs to be, but it is still there. Part of that is to ask what the net outcome of certain things happening, like say homeless people dying in the streets, or crime running rampant, or a civil war breaking out, or even polution, with businesses creating poluted pools of toxic chemicals in areas accessible by the public. To not ask such questions on what the values should be and the net outcome of ignoring things, is negligence on the very least. |
Boom! There we go. I've always argued that we have a moral obligation to help those less fortunate, or to do what we can to protect the environment. I agree, it is negligent to ignore those things. But we have to be careful about forcing others to do things they don't want to. I say, do what you can, for the causes that you support, and try to convince others to help or donate.
In a society where the fire protection was private, most would buy the fire insurance. For those that didn't because they didn't want to, so be it. For those who didn't because they couldn't afford it, well there could be a charity that provdided fire protection for those people, using donations to buy resources, and volunteers to provide the service. If you cared so greatly about this cause, you could either donate your money to help buy new materials, or you, yourself, could volunteer for the force.
What I don't like are the people who think "I'm so holy, I can donate other people's money".
