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palou said:
Think train dillemma.
On a more political note: Suppose someone is dying of a fairly preventable disease somewhere near by, helping them would make you lose around 500$ (due to lost time), you decide that it's not worth it. That, to many, is not an action, and while assholish - in the right of the person. On the contrary, suppose you kill the for a prime of 500$. That, to many, is seen as an action, and should definitely send you to jail. Looking at the 2 situations, there seems to be an equivalent choice, in terms of a decision tree based on outcome. They both chose a situation in which they came out with 500$ more, at the cost of a life. |
The train dilemma forces it to be a conscious choice. Most of the time, inaction isn't a conscious choice. Instead, it's something that pretty much happens because of the way a person thinks. Choices happen all the time in life, but we don't really think about most of them. There are definitely cases where action and inaction are quite similar, but in the general case, I don't think that's the case.
palou said:
I feel that, looking at history, this is strictly untrue. Minor infringment on freedom of speech doesn't precede, or indicate a slippery slope into totalitarianism. Pre-Nazi Germany had free speech, almost all of the rights to censor were applied in a single day. You require a sound justification, explanation for any infringment on freedom of speech - and it seems to me that it wouldn't create much more of a slippery slope than anything else. It's, to me, just as bad of an argument as saying that banning hard opioids will lead to the ban of alcohol, saying that allowing 18 year olds to vote will lead to toddlers making decisions in the country. |
I wasn't talking about history though. I was talking about the present and what I've seen people opposing limitations to freedom of speech talk about. I didn't even voice my own opinion; I simply stated what I believe to be a common reason to oppose limitations to freedom of speech. (I think I lied a bit about not voicing my opinion: I said I wasn't in your target group, which implies a certain opinion.) In my opinion, that's a reason that's easy to understand, even if you don't agree with it. Remember, this thread is about understanding other viewpoints and not about whether they're logically sound or whether you agree with them. The fact is that the opposing viewpoint often makes sense for the person having that viewpoint, even if it isn't logically sound once you look deeper into it, or even if you disagree about it.
