If a shop sells wedding dresses, the customer can’t say “well I’m a man and I want to wear a tux, and you’re not selling tuxes, so you’re discriminating against me.” You have no right to demand that the shop carry something it doesn’t choose to carry. On the other hand, the shop can’t say “we won’t sell you a dress because you’re a man.” Neither can the shop say “we won’t sell you dresses because you’re two women.”
Similarly, you can’t sue a Christian bookstore because they won’t carry a copy of Koran. But you could sue them if they refused to sell you a book they already carry, because they suspected you were Muslim.
I’m not sure what good that would do, as this hypothetical perv (let’s not use me anymore, I feel unclean just typing it even hypothetically) could easily follow (since that’s not harming anybody) and, assuming he doesn’t have anything in the way of shame, there’s little that a responsible adult could do to stop him without harming HIM and presumably being subject to punishment for that. They might temporarily block the kids view, I guess, or take them to private property. Again, not really a society I want to live in. I’d rather have a society where when people are doing things that don’t directly physically harm but still harm society as a whole can be stopped from doing it.
You might, however, with a pathological hatred of imposing any restrictions in order to preserve fairness, I suspect that even if you do, considering how much easier it is to get more money and power when you already have an advantage in that area, your libertarian utopian won’t last long before virtually all of the territory and resources are bought up by a few wealthy people (even if they didn’t have an advantage when it started, small variations will eventually snowball) who decide “you know, this actually is my property, and I have a right to control what happens on my property, so you’re going to obey my authoritarian rules or get out.”
You know, kind of like what happened before we had laws the first time, only a little more indirectly and bloodlessly since your society is presumably still punishing ‘direct harm’.
Unless you’re going to forgo property rights altogether, which might be an interesting take.
Let’s use a less hypothetical example. A woman breastfeeding in public. Plenty of people have taken offense to that, so it’s harming society as a whole, no?
If you think those two situations are in any way equivalent, then I pity you.
I’m not advocating “things some people take offense to are de facto bad for society and should be banned.” I’m pointing out that a blanket rule of “the only harms that matter are physical harms (and I imagine they’d also believe property harms are terribly important and need to be enforced, even if they’re not using the property in question), and everything else we should allow” is ridiculous… probably just as ridiculous as the rule you’re falsely implying I subscribe to. My philosophy is that we should try our best to minimize harm and maximize fairness and freedom. And so far the best way to achieve that seems to be a democracy bounded by strict constitutional protections. But yeah, that’s always going to be a delicate balance, and always going to involve some compromise. It’s not a perfect system, there will be mistakes where we wrongly trod on people’s freedoms by using the argument that it’s for the best of society, but it’s better than the alternatives. The “only ban direct harm” philosophy tend to be contradictory and arbitrary (since again, it assumes there’s any particular reason we should consider using somebody else’s property when they aren’t using it is a harm, yet deliberately excluding whole classes from society is not) and unworkable on the face of it if applied universally (as I’m trying to point out by examples).
I’m not directly harming anybody if I drive down the wrong lane of traffic… after all, I’m doing my very best to weave out of the way of any approaching car… so is it wrong to restrict my right to do so? And so what if I had a few, who are you to restrict my right to drink, or my right to drive, or my right to use both of my rights simultaneously? I may be making it dreadfully unsafe and hard for you to continue driving in that way, but, if you don’t like it, well, you can just move elsewhere, right? Under that model, that seems to be the case. You might socially shame people for doing it, but if you’re a heavy drinker, you might be past the point where that matters.
On the other hand, in my model, we don’t just use social shaming, we ban the jackass from driving down the wrong lane or traffic or driving drunk, because it’s unfair and unsafe to the others on the road. Just as businesses discriminating based on gender, sexuality, etc makes life significantly more unsafe for those who suffer from it, it’s unfair.
Refusing to allow masturbation in public is fair, because it’s a rule that affects everybody equally for the perceived good of society. There’s no reason it can’t be done a private location, and that is indeed where people tend to do it. To do it in public, or deliberately in front of children, you’re pretty much deliberately causing harm (albeit not direct, physical harm) for your own selfish reasons.
Refusing to allow breastfeeding is unfair, people taking offense or not: Everyone else is allowed to eat in public, there’s no social norm against that, so you’re just being unfair about babies who are being breastfed. Actually, it’s doubly unfair, because usually, men are allowed to expose their chests, and in many cases, women aren’t. It doesn’t affect everybody, so it’s not the same thing.
I’d be concerned if a woman took a baby who was not biologically hers and made it suck on her nipples, yes. That would be a good example of direct harm.
Offending people’s sensibilities (for example, asking for 2 bridal dresses for a wedding instead of only 1, or using breasts for their actual intended function with a baby who is biologically attuned to that specific food source) is not harming society as a whole.
Clearly, that’s exactly what I think. It must have made you feel dirty to merely type that, you sensitive soul, you.
Now that we’ve gotten the obligatory “insult and demean the other party in the discussion” bit out of the way, let’s get to your actual point. That there are harms to society as a whole that must be prevented by means of legislation.
Except, neither of your examples qualify as harm to society. They’re examples of behaviour that has a high (higher than the baseline behaviour, let’s say) chance of harming individuals. Would you please define harm to society?
There is a discussion to be had about whether potentially harmful behaviour should be prevented before actual harm takes place. This is not that discussion, however.
You’re further proposing that forbidding something that applies to everyone equally is inherently fair. But you chose an extreme example, and I won’t play that game. Is it fair for a majority-Hindu country to ban the consumption of beef, when the ban disproportionately affects the non-Hindus? As far as women having their breasts exposed in public, welcome to Canada, where this behaviour is legal, despite a fair bit of social controversy when the law was first passed.
You seem to be suggesting that there is some sort of objective measure of “social harm” that can be applied to behaviours across the board. Those that pass the test are OK, while those that fail should be legislated against. Never mind that society itself can’t make up its mind about what harms it and what doesn’t. 50 years ago society was perfectly fine with people drinking and driving. 30 years ago society was fine with people smoking in restaurants, offices, and other public establishments.
But even if what you have in mind is legislation following current societal values, that doesn’t really work all that well. The law is neither sufficiently quick to respond nor a precise enough tool to keep up. Witness the wave of child pornography charges being levelled against sexting teens.
(And for crying out loud, man, invest in some more paragraph breaks!)
I apologize for making you feel insulted and demeaned. It seemed to me like you were putting up an example calculated to destroy a strawman view of my philosophy, rather than a legitimate question as to the borders of it. To be honest, it still kind of does, but I’m willing to take your word for it if you claim otherwise.
You know what, this is also not the discussion where I attempt a rigorous ironclad definition of harm to society. We hardly have time for that before the thread closes, but, suffice it to say, greatly increasing the chances of harm to others is part of that. As is unfairly trying to restrict people from full participation in it.
I believe both of my examples qualify. If you don’t, then oh well, I’m not going to attempt to change your mind. You’re free to find another society where they don’t consider that harm to it.
Yeah, I’d say it’s reasonably fair for a country to ban consumption of beef. We do similar things in western countries, where we ban things that we find are harmful, even if some religions believe they should be allowed to do it (the only things that come to mind are certain types of animal/child abuse, although we’re generally a little more lenient when people profess it’s part of their religion). I’d prefer it if they had some non-religious explanation (that eating meat is violates the rights of animals, for example) rather than “it’s illegal because our religion forbids it.” I wouldn’t want to live in any country that forbids purely on religious grounds. But at the same time, as long as people are free to leave, it doesn’t matter as much whether a country decides to use religious basis for the laws it sets. There is some common ground with the libertarian side of the argument, those countries (or businesses) that do legal things you don’t approve of, you have the option to simply go elsewhere. Like everything, it’s a compromise.
And I’m in Canada, and enjoy it very much for that (err, that it’s legal, I actually haven’t seen it occur so I’m not saying I enjoy living in a boobtastic world), but a lot of places don’t have that same freedom, and it’s unfair for that.
No, actually, if you read carefully, I’m suggesting the exact opposite, that maybe there are a few starting points (constitutional protections for race, gender, sexuality, for example) we should use, but largely, it’s going to be a little bit of fuzzy matter, of trying our best to compromise between two competing interests, always evolving, and hopefully to the better.
Interesting example, because it kind of illustrates my point. Zero tolerance rarely works well as a rule. You wind up with things like children expelled for pointing their fingers in a gun shape, or teens labelled as sex offenders for life for sending their same-age boyfriend/girlfriend a nude picture of themselves.
This is why I think a rule of “everybody should be legally free to do anything that doesn’t cause direct harm” is the wrong approach, because it’s pretty much a zero tolerance rule applied to a whole society. There’s no consideration for possible border cases. The response to “hey, these people are discriminating against me” is “move somewhere else”, ignoring that that might not be a possibility. The rule has pretty much ZERO flexibility, since the laws can’t change to address issues where people are being consistently harmed and the tools that they have available to solve the problem (social censure, taking your business elsewhere, etc… tools, by the way, that we ALSO have at our disposal in the fuzzy, legal compromise world) aren’t helping, then they’re stuck in that situation. We at least can realize we made mistakes and adjust the balance.
Oh, I have, but it’s not really an investment if you go spending them willy-nilly at every opportunity, is it? I’m using them as a hedge against inflation.
