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Definition of wrong things? Here are a few. Murder. Theft. Assault. Most people know about these, but what about the fuzzier points? Well, we have to be careful here but some general rules apply. 1.) Am I taking care of something I caused? Raising kids, cleaning messes you make, fixing something you broke, admitting to an error that could have harmed someone else if left unmentioned. Not doing these things could be considered wrong or irresponsible, although to different degrees. 2.) Am I taking advantage of someone? This might include passing your kids off to someone else, putting people on guilt trips to get your way, using a nice person to get your work done, cheating off someone and getting credit for thier work. You get the idea. People do these things to "pass" responsibility, but they are obviously wrong, or seem to be to me.
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Sounds good to me. Yes, I agree with you on these.
There's the still another issue at least from the ever present political spectre that I seem to drag around in conversations
... let's a assume a few people in some society, whether or not they understand or agree with them, simply don't follow these. They expect other people to take care of their children, they don't clean up after themselves, or want to live in your home etc.
How do you address these? There seem to be 3 possible solutions to me:
1) Use a bunch of police and laws to micromanage everything.
2) Tolerate it and try to live with the consequences (this seems difficuly because it doesn't provide any way to resolve things and can't ultimately allow things to continually get worse as fewer and fewer people want to pull their weight)
3) Good fences make good neighbors approach - simply put, people are held responsible to live with the consequences of their own actions.
I think the history of our country was originally a combination of #3 and #2. Then we tried to use #2 as a model but some people have a hard time with this so we're trying #1 and it's not working either - we create too many laws and people disagree on details, and the costs and harm done by this are too large. I think #3 is the best way to deal with irresponsible people. It's simple and intuitive. You don't even have to predetermine what's right or wrong really, except for the few obvious ones and people can learn what's right or wrong from there on because they directly see what results from their actions. The problem is some of these people don't want #3 available. They see people in terms of global/national/social/military/democratic/environmental etc. and don't leave much elbowroom. What to do? I think many people have been trying #1 and #2 for a long time without any real success. We need something new. What's are your recommendations, Flip?