A commentary by a Langford resident.
Two lead stories in the Aug. 16 edition force us to think about governments and courts doing good.
A firefighter is suspended one day because he told the premier that Victoria council is wrong to spread drug-related social services city-wide; and a Vancouver Island protest encampment lawyer told a B.C. Supreme Court judge that he was wrong in ruling protesters have to disband.
A third wrong appeared in the Aug. 17 edition, with Victoria’s mayor telling the premier he was wrong to comment on the firefighter’s suspension.
These instances of “wrongness” raise the thorny issue of how to abide by one of humanity’s greatest minds — John Locke’s dictum: “the end of government is the good of mankind,” penned more than 300 years ago.
Two threads of thought get entangled in all government decision-making and court rulings where ideas of rights forever and a day override ideas of good.
What seems apparent upon examining these two mental exercises is that ideas of rights resonate from that part of the brain dealing with rational-based mental processing, whereas ideas of good stem from personal subjective-based mental processing.
The inevitable outcome is that “rights” have become the end of all social-generated rules, regulations, policies, court rulings, because ideas of rights are much more easily promulgated across society-at-large.
In the vernacular, who is going to argue with traffic stop signs? (Well, some of us simply ignore them).
Our own United Nations incur the same frustrating dynamic where human rights charters continue to fail in fulfilling their mandates; national human rights charters are forever bogged down having to deal with laws being “reluctantly” enacted.
It’s the all-too-familiar reality of what’s good for you may not be good for me, embedded in elected and pseudo-elected government leaders, perhaps not giving a second’s thought to the reality that rights can justify evil as well as good.
It is generally acknowledged that good satisfies demand, where the good may well be very good or not good at all.
Writers tend to circumvent this dilemma by invoking the familiar, “common good,” which, in reality, is just another cumbersome play on words when used in contexts of religious and political beliefs.
The best single example of just how complex is the rights-good interplay is from Sir William David Ross, acknowledged as the 20th century’s foremost authority on this matter. In his book, The Right and the Good, he devotes 108 pages to specific matters of good; 64 pages are devoted to matters of right.
What all this means is that we must accept the reality that the end of all our thoughts and behaviours, especially when developing government-based rules and laws, are types of good. And all issues of rights are means to those ends.
Victoria council developed a plan designed to enhance treatment of drug-related individuals. Good was clearly intended.
On the other hand, the firefighter does not perceive good, as the plan threatens the welfare of his family.
So he writes the premier (as a matter of last resort?) who sees political gain here, but Victoria’s mayor senses evil-doing.
Meanwhile, protesters at the university campus will pack their bags for another day, developing strategies through human rights charters, not realizing that freedom of speech without responsibility is first cousin to terrorism.
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