Posted: Apr 13, 2020 2:10 am
Spinozasgalt wrote:jamest wrote:Spinozasgalt wrote:Pfft. Speed limits were the real end of democracy. And seatbelts.
You make a good point actually as JS Mill is my favourite philosopher when it comes to freedom etc.., but his (AND MINE) bottom line is that any democratic government should be protecting the freedoms of THE WHOLE at the expense of the few. Therefore, laws should be imposed to protect the many, such as restricting speed limits.
If we extend Mill's philosophy to THIS emergency, you will see that everything our government is doing now is to protect the needs of the few at the expense of the many, including themselves.
There is no nice way of saying this, as many people are going to suffer and die. But what needs to be stated here is that current policy will eventually kill more people than Mill's policies would have allowed for and that (into the price) democracy and capitalism will also die.
The whole? How do you protect the freedoms of the whole at the expense of the few? The few are a part of the whole. You mean the many (which you switch to in the next para), I assume. No idea why you're citing Mill or what part of Mill you want to draw my attention to.
You're not communicating clearly.
Mill's 19th century philosophy, which I was fortunate enough to encounter several years ago, is similar to Spock's: "The needs of the many outweight the needs of the few". It's a democratic philosophy of the whole, which seeks to encompass the differences thereof.
The point of it all (wrt this thread) is to reconcile freedom/democracy with law. It should be fucking obvious, for sure, that a democratic government imposes the MINIMUM amount of laws in order to honour the ideal of democracy, which should seek at all costs to maximise the freedoms of its people.
Why do I even need to explain this, especially in a room half-full of Americans?
