Showing posts with label individuality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label individuality. Show all posts

Tuesday, 27 January 2009

The Moral Society and the Rights of the Individual

The rights of an individual only apply in the home, i.e. in the private space as long as it is not influencing others. Any negative habits like smoking or drinking should be kept in the home, because once brought into the public sphere it influences others by becoming socially acceptable, thereby corrupting society and making the negative habit more widespread.
So any person has the right to smoke or drink, but as long as it remains in the private sphere since there is an infringement of other peoples right in the public sphere. You are no longer an individual in the public sphere but a part of a collective where all your actions affect others.
It is up to government to decide what is negative and should remain in the private sphere and what is not. Since a person can leave the private sphere or choose not to enter it remains the realm of the individual, free from society's eyes.
Some negative habits which should be confined to the private sphere are smoking, drinking, gambling, sexual acts, drug use, etc.
In this case, an individual's rights are still protected while still preserving the moral fabric of society.
This also provides an individual with a choice in partaking in immoral activities, which is their right, or to abstain. The public sphere should accommodate the people who choose not to partake as opposed to those who choose to do so.
This does not become an issue of transparency but rather an issue of preventing moral perversion from becoming socially acceptable and therefore harder to remedy as well as prevent problems that stem from this perversion.
The government cannot stop a person from partaking in any activities within the confines and privacy of their own home as long as it does not infringe on the rights of other individuals within that sphere or who are forced into it. There should be freedom of movement into and out of that sphere for all other individuals. But once this immoral activity spills into the public sphere it is the responsibility of the government to protect the public arena from moral corruption.