Monday, October 18, 2010

So where is the line drawn in your mind between acceptable and unacceptable behavior?

People should seek pleasure to the extent that they are not, in their informed estimation, doing harm to themselves or others, now or in the future. Knowingly harming people is unacceptable. The line of how much harm against others warrants punishment is drawn by legal systems throughout the world, though in reality it is possible to do more harm to a person psychologically with a single offhand comment than hitting them in the chest with a golf club.


Implicitly not taking care of yourself and forcing society to pay for it when this goes bad is harming others in that the money could be going instead to the needy. Wearing an ugly sweater harms others because the viewers will feel sad for a few seconds when looking at you. Washing your hands with antibacterial soap adds to the likelihood of antibiotic-resistant bacteria evolving. Walking down the street in a busy city harms people because the brain's facial recognition software can't handle all of the stimuli, so it's been suggested now that living in larger cities makes you less intelligent (likely not helped by the measurable levels of ambient cocaine in the air in every metropolitan population center in the modern world...)

Everyone has to decide for themselves how much they are willing to mess up other people and how much they are going to let the other people get away with themselves.

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