Aswad
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Joined: 4/4/2007
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quote:
ORIGINAL: slaveluci
But she could leave. Maybe she didn't feel like she really wanted to, maybe she lacked the confidence to do so, maybe she just really didn't want to disappoint you, etc. There's many maybe's. But there's no maybe as to whether or not she COULD step out that door. She very well could have but, for whatever reasons, she chose not to.
People, or at least some people, I would like to think a small minority (the alternative, that it's free choice, implies things of human nature and human moral fiber I find quite unpalatable to contemplate and an insult to humanity to suggest without evidence to support it), can act in spite of having a gun to their head, too, as evidenced by people like Sophie Scholl. Yet, for the most part, we don't expect them to, and indeed frequently call that "having no choice", even if it's blatantly obvious they can choose the bullet.
Such a situation, most of us would consider to be beyond the line.
But it does serve to illustrate a point:
If the perceived cost of an action sufficiently outweighs the perceived gain, a majority act as if they have no free choice at all. The cost might be a treasured relationship, the perception of which may be made to seem far greater than the average person would see an average relationship, for instance. Value assessments are subjective, after all. The gain might be freedom or safety, the perception of which may be made to seem infinitely small, sometimes even without necessarily diminishing the person in question. Again, a value assessment. Both these assessments can be changed through appropriate techniques and/or collaborative effort by the people involved.
At the point where the perceived cost is on par with the gun to the head scenario, or where the perceived gain is negligible, can we say there is free choice, without also admitting the presence of an equally valid choice in situations such as that faced by Sophie Scholl and, by extension, damning the bulk of the human race as weak and immoral with history as evidence, rather than just recognizing that some are going to have no real, rubber to the road, practical free choice in life whether we ascribe it to them or not?
And if we do admit a free choice, how do we then rationalize interventions, or persecution of one or more of the involved parties to what then necessarily must rest on the shoulders of all with a choice in the situation? Do we abolish such notions and let each fend for his or her own self, permit people to be as free as they choose to be and no freer? I'm not trying to spin rhetoric against it, but rather to ask a simple question. I don't think the bulk of Western civilization is currently ready to elevate freedom to that level, to take off the training wheels and not forcibly install them on everyone.
And, to muddy the waters, we sometimes hear the term "informed" consent, the limitations of which should be obvious to anyone with the capacity for it, and otherwise well illustrated by children, the mentally impaired (of any stripe, including temporary impairment due to the use of drugs such as alcohol) and the nature of a journey with no defined destination. In the "total" part of TPE, we find implicit that this is something that potentially encompasses more than what the person to give informed consent can be truly informed about, as people and relationships evolve and change in different ways over time. Informed consent generalizes to informed free choice. Do we hold people in impoverished parts of the world accountable for choices made without the benefit of sufficient education to realize that their choices are self destructive in the long term? Probably not.
To a great extent, it's a choice of paradigms.
Playing off what JeffBC, Orion and tazzy have said, I would note the Gorean paradigm falls squarely on the side of the idea that some people are not equipped to be free when you strip them of the presence of an external authority that forces them to be, and that many people are not equipped to be free when you strip them of an environment that encourages and enables it, and that most people can be raised or otherwise influenced to surrender their free choice without ever reclaiming it (societal or cultural collective mastery), while a few feel- in the words of Henrik Ibsen, a Danish-Norwegian playwright and poet- that «He who possesses liberty otherwise than as an aspiration possesses it soulless, dead. One of the qualities of liberty is that, as long as it is being striven after, it goes on expanding. Therefore, the man who stands still in the midst of the struggle and says, "I have it," merely shows by so doing that he has just lost it.» and feel so in their very soul, such that they always aspire to it unless broken to the point where they are worse than dead.
The more prevailing paradigm in the West appears to be that everyone is equal, and that accordingly all have this capacity for free choice that is often purported to be inalienable and backed by rights that cannot be surrendered, from which we can only draw the conclusion that most every German that lived during the Holocaust, most every Turk that lived during the Armenian Final Solution, most every US citizen around before the Civil Rights movement or during the Second Gulf War, can be held accountable for their failure to act resolutely and forcefully to put a stop to such injustices at whatever cost to themselves, and thus must be seen as morally corrupt and weak at the very best, with according implications for every human that currently lives in the presence of something against which they should stand but do not.
I find the former view more flattering of humanity in all its diversity, but this isn't necessarily a dichotomy.
As such, my support for the idea of animal rights as a collective minimum standard of tolerable behavior extends to supporting the idea that a slave should be treated no worse than that standard allows, unless having consented otherwise up front or- possibly, and here is part of what I'm ambivalent about in this matter- consented otherwise along the way. I suppose I should note I don't support the notion of a society backing slavery as an institution, though I don't mind a society recognizing it; indeed, a society should recognize anything that's real, and to my mind slavery appears to be real when you take it past mere suspense of disbelief.
An interesting thread, to be sure, and the most promising in a long while.
The usual caveats about uncaffeinated 7am insomnia posts apply.
IWYW,
— Aswad.
_____________________________
"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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RE: Influence of someone's choice and consent - 
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