Public Good vs Personal Choice
In Lynn Canyon near here there is a beautiful and popular swimming hole. It's a bit of a hike to get there. There is a problem - kids keep getting killed by jumping off a cliff into the water.
Warning signs were placed but were destroyed. Fencing met the same fate. Kids weren't about to be refrained from a thrill because of danger. How dare the 'government' interfere with our fun.
A part of the problem was an optical illusion. From the jump off point you didn't see that your head would be passing within inches of a jut in the cliff.
It's been many years since I went there. I imagine that now that dangerous rock was just removed - perhaps at the cost of spoiling the swimming hole.
Humans are social animals and we run into this conundrum a lot - we have two measures of good - an individual level and a social level - that can conflict.
Lately we've seen pretty clear examples of this in public health. And there seems to be no automatic response.
Women who face restrictions on abortion by laws rightly say that they get to control what happens within my body. The forced birthers say that society has an interest in bringing all fetuses to term.
On the other hand we have anti-vaxxers who oppose vaccination for various reasons and say that they have a right to decide what happens in my body. And the medical world says that having everyone vaccinated so that society reaches herd immunity is a public good. (aside: perhaps "herd immunity" is the wrong term to persuade those who think that most people are 'sheeple)
Personally, I don't find the choice hard in either case, but I can't decide on the basis of some sort of "right" - one way or the other. That is to say - the question of public good vs personal choice is not a one dimensional issue.
As social beings we decide thing using various means from might is right to constitutional democracy thru to gangs of kids choosing up teams for a baseball game. In that sort of context the simpler the rules the better. This gives an advantage to simple one dimensional explanations over complicated explanations.
I see this as a general human condition. We are sort of paradoxical in a way - we're social individuals. We need to persuade each other and the simpler the explanation the better. But to really have a grasp of any topic - from religion to physics - takes years of study and rarely yields a simple explanation.
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.