On Thu, 16 Sep 1999, J. R. Molloy wrote:
> From: Edgar W Swank <edgarswank@juno.com>
I will simply note, that the term "responsibility" is used a dozen
or more times in the Extropian Principles, in particular:
> >Women can have sex, get pregnant, and have three months to change
> >their minds and get an abortion. Men, even those raped or tricked
> >into fatherhood, do not have a choice about responsibility for
> >any resulting children. See
> >
> > http://www.nas.com/c4m/
> >
> >Men, not women are told, "you play you pay." And persecution of
> >"deadbeat dads" a national mania. "Neutrality," my ass!
>
| Extropians seek neither to rule nor to be ruled. We hold that individuals
| should be in charge of their own lives. Healthy societies require a
| combination of liberty and responsibility. For open societies to exist,
-----------------------------------------
| individuals must be free to pursue their own interests in their own way.
| But for individuals and societies to flourish, liberty must come with
| personal responsibility. The demand for freedom without responsibility
| is an adolescent's demand for license.
I doubt very much that any court would ever hold a man responsible for the support of a child produced in a situation where he was raped. If he was "tricked", then as Forrest Gump observed -- Stupid is as stupid does.
Now, this of course raises an interesting issue. Since extropians would like to operate in a highly free society, exactly *when* is it permissible for a society to force/coerce/punish an individual who violates the generally accepted norms for "personal responsibility".
Take something as simple as how annoyed I get at neighbors pets depositing their business on my property. Given the current legal situation in Seattle, there is little or nothing I can do about this (other than put a very high fence around my property). [Let's not have this decay into suggestions about how to solve this problem, believe me I've thought long and hard and know most of the possibilities.]
[One can obviously draw interesting comparisons between pets and adolescent teenagers with raging hormones or even fully grown adults in the heat of passion...]
Robert