BigBallinStalin wrote:
For the addicted child, sure, previous choices and actions were committed by the mother, but the price the child pays for his mother's actions is unjust because this price was completely beyond his ability to affect. You're advocating for an unjust system, and if there's a god in charge of that, then there's a big problem here.
I never alluded to the position that all is fair in the way we each have to pay for the choices we make in life. It's not always fair obviously.
I'm not advocating anything, just telling it like it is. Don't blame the messenger, I didn't set up the universe. I just live in it.
BBS wrote:it's clear that the end result is not due to his previous choices and actions. So, what does this imply for the rest of your position?
The child would not have had any choices in the very beginning, he got set back due to the decisions of his mother. But is that to say the child never makes his own choices later?
Do not addicts choose to give up the life of addiction and succeed?
Do not many children start life at a level less than others and yet still succeed and end up living happy lives?
Is every heroin addicted baby doomed to life a misery and unhappiness?
If not, then why is it so for one, but not another? What is the difference between the two if not the choices they make later in life despite the handicap they've been saddled with by no fault of their own?
The mother's poor decisions certainly have a negative effect on the child, but the child can grow up and still flourish. His fate is not set in stone. There won't be a magic pill that makes life any easier for him, true enough, but who has that anyway?
There are people born into wealth and opulence and still manage to muck up their lives until they've ruined for themselves everything they touch.
BBS wrote:My point is that the price changes if heroin was legalized because the risks of overdosing would be much lower. Since the addict would not have died from poor quality heroin, then the price paid would be much lower. Government intervention is responsible for the higher price (i.e. death).
Legal, illegal, the State interfering doesn't matter much at all. Legalize heroin and there will still be overdoses. There will still be addicted babies born. Will there be more or less? I Don't know. Even now there are some who have managed to beat the odds, at least in the short term, as it stands now.
Even if heroin were legal, impurities virtually taken out of the product leaving a safer(?) <Ha!> product, would it be wise to engage in the use of heroin? Or would you counsel against using it, even if it were legal?
If you would counsel against it, why?
(Note, I use the term "counsel", not force. I believe in letting people do as they wish, even if such behavior is self destructive. One cannot protect another from themselves. The State especially, or the Church or any authority cannot protect a person from self destructive behavior without brutal and totalitarian methods which in itself is worse than letting people be free to be idiots)
Everyone pays a price for every decision they make, every action they partake. Sometimes people are willing to pay the price, other times that price is not what a person envisioned when setting upon a course. People who make poor decisions lead poor lives, which extends often enough to others around that person, like family and friends.
Enough people making poor choices in a society can certainly lead to a society suffering because of it.
We don't need the threat of Hell and Brimstone under us. Life has a way of kicking one in the nuts in this life for making a bad choice. What is a good and a bad choice? I suppose it all depends on whom you ask.
BBS wrote:if there's a god in charge of that, then there's a big problem here.
But what is the problem? Choices in life have consequences? What's the problem with that? If there is a God and he made everything in our lives all hunky dory and we never knew misery or pain or ever had to confront the consequences of our actions, we certainly wouldn't be "free" in mind or body, would we?
In fact, if it weren't for that one thing, paying for our decisions in life, then not a single one of us would even know what "happiness" was. Such a thing would not exist. One might as well just be a rock on a mountain for all the good it would do them. Not to say that being a simple stone laying on the ground wouldn't have it's own rewards, I suppose.
I'm not a stone but I suppose that a stone never has to worry about being unhappy.
Is that not the purpose of life? To be happy? Is that not what each and every person alive strives for? Happiness?
I pity the poor fool who wakes up each morning and says to themselves- "I'm going to be a miserable bastard today!"
Don't get me wrong, there are people in the world who are exactly like that, even going so far as to decide that since they are miserable, they'll make as many
other people miserable as they can. Now that's a person I'd love to be able to go piece by piece and see everything that has happened in their life to bring them to such a state.
I'd bet you a nickel to a doughnut that they made an overwhelmingly large number of poor decisions in life.
Now, BBS, take into account this thought. Let's use the heroin addict baby. There are people in this world who have decided that they will help these babies. I mean
really help, not just offer lip service and sympathy like most people do, who never invest a single real iota of their lives.
But think of the nurse, or doctor who has of their own free will decided to help people like that heroin addicted baby. Imagine the price they must pay, in regards to
just the aspect of caring for such a child. Some of the babies would be so bad off as to actually die. Could you imagine what that does to a person? (Not the baby, but the person trying to help and really save the baby).
It must be soul crushing. A price many of us other people would never pay in a million years. Or be able to.
Maybe that's one reason why so many doctors and medical type people have such high rates of alcoholism. They help people, and in some, maybe many cases, that help they provide is rewarded with truly amazing stories that bring a tear to the eye of even the most heartless cynic. But imagine those crushing defeats who that person ends up going step by step the whole way trying to prevent and end up failing.
It happens. Not just crack babies, but all kinds of terrible things that doctors and nurses have to deal with. I suppose that's why there are never enough doctors and nurses, cause it's not a job everyone could do. The price is too high.
Even good decisions, good actions have often enough a steep price to pay.
Maybe that's why the world is so screwed up. Because too many people want a free ride through life. The "pursuit of happiness" transformed into the "right of happiness".
All the money in the world couldn't buy many people happiness.
Though,
I must admit,
a jet ski would do the trick.
Have you ever seen an
unhappy person on a jet ski?
I haven't.
So, money may not buy happiness, but it will buy you a jet ski, and I dare anyone to be unhappy on a jet ski.....