So I've been thinking lately about the justice in decriminalizing public nudity, versus the potential merits of keeping it criminalized, and it has me wondering about some things. I see virtue in permitting free citizens the choice to be nude in public places, but I am obviously in the minority, and it's easy for me to wonder, in occasional moments of weakness, "could the majority of the population be right, after all?" Obviously, I don't think they are, but I have to think long and hard about the reasons I have for disagreeing with them, because I want them to be legitimate.
But it's easy to fall into the pattern of thinking that the way things are, are the way they should be, just because that's the way they've always been (in your experience), and you couldn't imagine how they could possibly work out any other way. But sometimes they can - observe the march of progress throughout history. Ask somebody fifty years ago if homosexuals should be allowed to marry. Ask somebody a hundred years ago if women should be allowed to vote. Ask somebody two hundred years ago if blacks should be entitled to the same freedom as whites.
Obviously, there has to be a limit - when we let murderers run rampant and unchecked, we've gone too far - but the difference between progress and regression should be determinable by the proper application of reason. It's hard to see through the prejudices of the time - at any point in history - but looking back and seeing how many things we got wrong in the past, leads me to want to lean toward a radically tolerant perspective so that we don't continue to make those mistakes with different groups of people well into the future.
I can't make a convincing argument for the legitimacy of murder, but if I think a person's equal rights should be infringed just because they're different from me, or seem strange from my perspective, then that's a huge red flag. I just worry that in spite of all this talk about liberty and justice and civil rights, we're really just reassuring ourselves that we're justified when we do the same thing everyone else in the world is trying to do - enforce their own standards of living on everyone else. That's why these kinds of decisions need to be based on impartial logic, and not any form of prejudice.
And I think that in most cases, it ultimately boils down to consent. We have ideas about what constitutes a good life, but others may have a different idea, and who are we to impose our perspectives on others? Human rights violations occur when people are not given a free choice of what kind of environment to live in, and they do not have a free choice in the absence of education. That's why if a woman chooses to dress in a burqa in America, she should have that freedom, and the rest of the population should respect her decision.
But at the same time, if a whole population of women are being forced to live a lifestyle of oppression without access to, or even knowledge of, any alternatives, then that may perhaps justify intervention - depending on how committed a given society is to bestowing its own vision of basic human rights on other, potentially oppressed populations. Which is up for discussion. Do we have a responsibility to rescue those in need? Do we have a responsibility to spread our perspective of human rights to other populations? I think that generally the answer is yes, but that may depend on how accurate our conception of human rights is - and how can we, as fallible intelligences, ever be completely sure?
I came up with this thought experiment. Some people believe in anarchy. Anarchy doesn't really work because not everybody believes in anarchy, and the people who don't believe in it would be disadvantaged if we adopted it. But should people who believe in anarchy have the freedom to live in anarchy, at least among other individuals who believe in anarchy? It's kind of like creating a BDSM community where the participants all consent to be abused, which makes it okay.
Logistically, it may not be realistic (on this overcrowded planet) to take all the anarchists and [voluntarily] transplant them to some frontier town (in return for the freedom to live in anarchy like they desire). But perhaps in the future when we've mastered interstellar transportation, and have countless planets to colonize, we could set one (or more) aside for all the anarchists. Then everybody who goes there, having been sufficiently warned, will have necessarily consented to live in anarchy, and as long as their anarchy doesn't spread to other colonies with different rules and systems of rule, they can be left alone to do their thing.
It would be an interesting social experiment, at the least, to see what happens. If they eventually all kill themselves or otherwise die out, or if they manage to create a stable system, or even give up and change their minds after a while. Who knows what's possible. But there's a problem. It's fine if the only people that go there have consented to live in anarchy, but what about when those anarchists start having children, and those children haven't been exposed to any alternatives? They haven't consented to live in anarchy, because they don't know of any alternatives (and certainly don't have access to them). And surely their anarchist parents are going to tend to influence them in their formative years to support anarchy.
But is this fair? Is it humane? Do we have a responsibility to interfere in these children's lives, to provide them with the knowledge of (and access to) alternatives? Would it be fair to tell anarchists that they can go and live in anarchy, but they have to be willing to give up their children? Would anarchists ever go for it? Would it be enough to keep every citizen keyed in to a universal database of knowledge and resources, and would that even be compatible with anarchy? If we do take children away from their anarchist parents, would that even be humane, or is it just a matter of choosing the lesser of two evils?
I don't think I have a solution to this problem that doesn't involve radically restructuring the way parenthood works, and that's not something that the entire human population would necessarily agree with. Still, this is a problem for a fractured society, designed in the interest of maximum freedom for alternative lifestyles. The current model seems to favor universal standards applied across the board. In that case, though, I think a radical dedication to liberty and tolerance is necessary. It can't be based, as it currently is, on a majority deciding how people have to live (or at least behave in public), with a list of protections the average citizen has from exposure to things that might challenge or offend them. Rather, it should be based on a foundation of freedom - freedom of choice, freedom of speech, and freedom of self-expression.
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