On 31/05/2010 8:28 AM, Boris Liberman wrote:
I would even disagree that it is my responsibility to get involved in a
child being locked in a hot car, in that the law should have no right to
force me to get involved, either by actively coercing me by saying I
have to, or passively coercing me by charging me with negligence for not
doing so.
Well, that's disputable, but it would be a general ethics dispute, which
I think we might want to avoid, at least on list.
To a great extent we are discussing ethics. That is what the law is about.
We take the ethics we would like to see in our society and compel people
into following what we think is an ethical approach.
It tends to break down when special interest groups get their wedge into
the door and start to force people into doing not what is necessarily
right for society, but what is right for them.
To bring this back to the discussion at hand, if a special interest
group in my country put a big push on to have some sort of child alert
device mandated into every new vehicle sold, they would make a lot of
noise about it being "for the children", and anyone who disagreed would
be branded as a child hater who wants to see kids getting killed in hot
cars.
By making this jump in logic, they would effectively shut up any
discussion on the subject and would force their will onto the majority
of the people.
I've seen this sort of thing happen enough to be very wary of any
special interest group.
--
William Robb
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