It's one of the greatest questions in Law and Politics- do the rights of a citizen take precedence over those of society or can an individual's rights be suspended in order to protect the state.
For example:
In the lead up to the 9/11 terrorist attacks the FBI suspected an Arab-American of having terrorist connections and being involved in a plot to harm thousands of Americans. They wanted to seize his laptop which they believed contained detailed plans of an impending attack. However they were denied a warrant because there was not enough evidence to prove the man was a terrorist- the FBI could not search the laptop. Three weeks later two planes went into the World Trade Center- the Arab-American was arrested and it was found that his laptop did have the plans...9/11 could have been averted.
In cases of terrorism and other emergencies should State Officials be able to ignore normal legal procedure in order to protect the interests of the majority or must the Laws always be protected no matter what?
the many do not have rights, aside from the accumulated rights of the individuals who comprise the many
the right to safety is an individual right that all people in given democracies have.
also, given the intelligence that the German, Israeli and South East asian intelligence agencies gave the American government, 911 could have been averted with no need of comprimising an individual's rights.
Individual rights are not the cause of, at the very least, the 9-11 attacks
Its a tight balancing act, and that is the problem.
If you want total freedom then theres going to be a price to pay, there will always be some nutters who don´t want you to be free, who want to force their beliefs and ideals on you.
They will use your freedom against you by killing folk and doing nasty things.
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As someone who is not embarrassed by people seeing my hobbies (porn.), and I haven't done anything wrong... I personally feel that giving up some of my securities is a worthwhile trade-off if it serve to protect me in the long run.
You never need a reason not to fight, but you always need a reason to fight. Eliminate the reasons and there won't be violence. Scarcity is usually the main one.
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Well, it's just a different view of things, I'd say. I understand inimalist though, there is violence for not scarcity sake...and just violence sake, which would be hard to abolish, even if you had abundance of everything.
that line really only makes sense in light of my other point
personal freedom and violence in a society are not positively correlated, and violence in a free society cannot be attributed to it being free. People will be violent is simply recognizing that there is no form of government that will eliminate violence, even the most oppressive of personal freedom (that Saudi Arabia and other middle eastern nations have more terrorist activities than North America is a fairly good indicator of this).
I would need to see considerable evidence that personal freedoms do actually prevent criminals from being prosecuted. From my experience, police officers usually do first and make excuses for violating rights later.
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Dec 6th, 2008 06:26 PM
