Response to "CONSIDERATION VS PERSONAL FREEDOM?" by The Fool's Crusade

Here is a revised and edited response to a blog post "CONSIDERATION VS PERSONAL FREEDOM?"

To answer your questions, yes consideration does impede personal freedom. I would follow up your video by asking, is personal liberty the most important value?

These are philosophical questions. It all has to do with values.

Back to consideration, if someone's goal in life is to seek pleasure (the philosophy of hedonism), than being considerate to others may conflict with there personal freedom (PF). Depending on their sense of pleasure, restrictions to PF would vary. Part of hedonism is avoiding pain, so that would definitely call for being considerate to prevent those ass kicking you mention.

It really comes down to individuals. I'm all for consideration as you are. But I do not value PF over other social norms. I love PF. I support having a large range of PF, just not absolute PF.

For your movie theater example, being quite is a social norm. So another question arises: should people follow social norms? If we traveled back to Shakespearean days, crowds were rowdy and that might have increased the entertainment of the show. Personally, I strongly dislike any distractions in a movie theater. During Revenge of the Sith, my friend next to me was texting his girlfriend the whole movie, and I was pissed about it.

I have two other comments.

First I wasn't sure where you were going with the fighting. I felt you were taking the discussion in the wrong direction. But I couldn't agree more about the results of getting your ass kicked. Most people think and act differently after an ass whooping. I can't say this applies to everyone, but for most of us, we'd think about why it happened. And sensible people would come to the conclusion that it wasn't because of their lack or strength or fighting skills. But we've all met or know people who act worst after getting beat up. They fight more or take it out on weaker people. Ultimately, violence is not the most effective way to teach, but it does wonders for managing behaviors.

Last thought, about blaming the children, how much can we blame the parents? Were parents not children once who had no choice in how they were raised? I don't have the answer here because at some point in life, people have to accept responsibility for their actions and life. I just find it hard to blame people. I can't support my next idea with any evidence or data, but I would assume that consideration is strongly correlated to empathy and education. I also know reading is correlated to higher empathy which connects to education, family life, and privilege all things people cannot control when they are young. Maybe growing up to be considerate is just luck of the draw, as with most things.

Well, that was a lot more than I originally expected to write. You bring up a great discussion. It'd be interesting to read what philosophers have to say about PF vs consideration and societal norms.