Wednesday, March 08, 2006
A Necessary Reconciliation?
Resolved: Public and private philosophies are irreconcilable.
There are certain ideas that people consider publicly necessary yet privately they believe are worthless. An example is the debate over abortion. A woman may believe in the right to choose, although if pregnant she would not consider abortion an option. Her public philosophy is pro-choice; her personally philosophy is pro-life. The dichotomy is not hypocritical. She could also accept a gay couple as friends and family, without believing that legalizing gay marriage is a good thing for society. The personal is not the political.
It is totalitarian to demand that the private and public be unitary. The Communists applied their philosophy to the economy, the government, the family, and the individual. The opposite of this should characterize our thinking. A vital part of a free society is the acceptance that one’s personal ideas are not automatically universal laws. More aptly put, freedom is the acceptance of the complexity of the human condition.
So instead of ending up with politicians who think objectively and take their personal feelings out of their "whats good for the people" decissions....
We end up with someone who's pesonal ideals apeal to the masses or, the more likely scenario, special interest groups.
-C
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