Absolving people from the consequences of their decisions is usually a mistake. I'm sure we agree about many, maybe most cases. For example, it's absurd to sue the cigarette maker when you get lung cancer. But things are not always so simple. As my Mum used to say, the quality of mercy is not strained, and not all requests for relief are without merit.
The question is what, if anything, should be done to protect people from their own mistakes. The best way to test the idea that people must always be held responsible for the consequences of their decisions is by a kind of reductio ad absurdum, i.e. to look at an extreme case, e.g. the supply of heroin. As a Libertarian you probably think that there should be no restrictions on the sale of any drugs. After all, it is a matter of personal responsibility to buy and use heroin, and if you get addicted it's your choice. Following this line of reasoning, surely there's no justification for putting age limits on the sale of heroin, either. Now we are arguing for a position that would be unacceptable to 99.9% of the population, who would say that young people at least should be protected from their own folly, and probably more than 50% would say that even adults should be protected from this kind of folly. OK, it's an extreme example, but it illustrates the general point that society - probably any society that we'd call civilized - accepts the idea of protection for the weak, the stupid, the vulnerable. Do you accept this idea in any form? |
