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I wouldn't say "always"; the freedom of gay people to have gay sex in the privacy of their homes doesn't affect anyone except themselves, and certainly doesn't
by arp242 3y ago
I wouldn't say "always"; the freedom of gay people to have gay sex in the privacy of their homes doesn't affect anyone except themselves, and certainly doesn't infringe on the freedom of others. In other cases the restrictions of "freedom" are not really legitimate – e.g. the "freedom" to not see interracial marriage or something like that (and I did see some twat complain about that on HN just a few months ago).
But in some cases, yes, there's an interaction of conflicting freedoms and finding the right balance can be tricky, and consumer protection laws are a good example of that.
- kubb 3y agoThat freedom of gay people does affect the freedom of religious fundamentalists to prevent what they consider sin from happening. But in general, there might exist creative counterexamples. I haven’t found any though.
- kaptainscarlet 3y agoIn other words freedom is like energy. It is finite.
- graftak 3y agoReligion is an artificial limitation
- HeatrayEnjoyer 3y ago> That freedom of gay people does affect the freedom of religious fundamentalists to prevent what they consider sin from happening. Except that this is not a good faith or legitimate freedom. Hurting people is not a freedom to anyone but a complete sociopath. The fact that the law forbids me from detonating a bomb in times square is not a restriction on any part of my ability to live life.
- kubb 3y agoAnd yet for centuries, the freedom of the sociopaths, as you described them, was valued higher than the freedom of gay people. We decided that we should protect the latter from the former by restricting the ability of religious people to act in accordance with their worldview very recently.
- HeatrayEnjoyer 3y agoSo?
- kubb 3y agoSo your “good faith” is an arbitrary criterion and doesn’t change anything.
- arp242 3y agoI think that's stretching the meaning of "freedom" well beyond the point of usefulness.
- vidarh 3y agoI think it will always inherently affect some "freedom" but some of them may so contrived and the competing concerns so unevenly stacked between the "freedom to X" and the "freedom from X" that there's legitimate case to be made. Your interracial marriage example would clearly be one - it has significant impact on the quality of life on one side, and no remotely similar impact on the quality of life on the other side. It's only when the "freedom to" and the "freedom from" are legitimately at least somewhat evenly stacked in how it affects people that it ought to be an issue given careful consideration.