[BTR] Locked to Sam Tyler
Nov. 13th, 2009 06:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eelseason{{Backdated to a day or two after Aftermath Day, around, oh, 4:15 AM.}}
What are your opinions on insane asylums?
{{...about 40 minutes later...}}
That might need elaboration.
So, assume we make a big deal about free will and self-determinism. And assume someone's self-determinism works directly against their own best interests and, as far as we can tell, the best interests of any reasonable goal. (That calls in to question our standards for reasonable, but that's almost my point.) At some point, some functional societies decide that they're perfectly justified in plucking these people off the streets and isolating them. Ignoring for the moment the truly staggering array of systemic abuses in ...well over half of all mental-health policy implementors I know of, actually, and dealing purely in abstracts, is that good? Is it a necessary evil? Or is it just an evil?
So far as I know, no one's arguing against removing people who are a danger to others from the company of others. They've violated the social contract, society has a right to defend itself, and if it doesn't, it has no less right as the aggressor to take aggressive action, so on so forth, but when it comes to the "oneself" part of "danger to oneself or others," is it logical to give more weight to a society's preference (in principle if not specifics) for this hypothetical person to exist than to this hypothetical person's indifference or preference not to?
And when it's a matter of emotional hardship on the people around the subject in question, at what point does "prurient interest because someone's feelings are getting hurt" cross into "society defending itself" again?
There's certainly an argument to be made for people incapable of functioning in society, but why does society get to decide to evict them rather than letting them fail to function on their own free will? And when it comes to treatment and rehabilitation, to what extent is society right in rewriting the processing capabilities of someone's brain? And is there any moral difference between setting it as terms of release (which may or may not be fulfilled, according to a subject's free will) and involuntary treatment?
Does anyone have any business dictating how someone else goes through life, at all?
What are your opinions on insane asylums?
{{...about 40 minutes later...}}
That might need elaboration.
So, assume we make a big deal about free will and self-determinism. And assume someone's self-determinism works directly against their own best interests and, as far as we can tell, the best interests of any reasonable goal. (That calls in to question our standards for reasonable, but that's almost my point.) At some point, some functional societies decide that they're perfectly justified in plucking these people off the streets and isolating them. Ignoring for the moment the truly staggering array of systemic abuses in ...well over half of all mental-health policy implementors I know of, actually, and dealing purely in abstracts, is that good? Is it a necessary evil? Or is it just an evil?
So far as I know, no one's arguing against removing people who are a danger to others from the company of others. They've violated the social contract, society has a right to defend itself, and if it doesn't, it has no less right as the aggressor to take aggressive action, so on so forth, but when it comes to the "oneself" part of "danger to oneself or others," is it logical to give more weight to a society's preference (in principle if not specifics) for this hypothetical person to exist than to this hypothetical person's indifference or preference not to?
And when it's a matter of emotional hardship on the people around the subject in question, at what point does "prurient interest because someone's feelings are getting hurt" cross into "society defending itself" again?
There's certainly an argument to be made for people incapable of functioning in society, but why does society get to decide to evict them rather than letting them fail to function on their own free will? And when it comes to treatment and rehabilitation, to what extent is society right in rewriting the processing capabilities of someone's brain? And is there any moral difference between setting it as terms of release (which may or may not be fulfilled, according to a subject's free will) and involuntary treatment?
Does anyone have any business dictating how someone else goes through life, at all?
