WW--We Should Only Care About Things That Directly Affect Us

~You only have standing in the law when you’ve been harmed.
~People only take your complaints seriously when you’re personally the victim.
~The Bible teaches us to be at peace with our fellow man.
~The Bible teaches us to not be busybodies.
~Most of the major issues in the culture wars could be resolved if people would just stop trying to tell other people how to live their private lives.
~How does some 14-year-old girl having an abortion directly affect you?
~How does two people in a committed gay relationship wanting to be married affect you?
~If someone wants to use marijuana in the privacy of his own home, how does that affect you?
~If someone wants to gamble his money on football games, how does that affect you?
~If someone wants to hire the companionship of a prostitute, how does that affect you?
~If some school in Wisconsin, or Tucson for that matter, wants to allow its students to have a moment of prayer, or prohibit the same thing, how does that affect you?
~If some third-world nation is having problems with human rights or economic hardship, that’s none of our business because it’s not an American strategic issue. We can’t be the world police.
~People should just take care of their own lives and stop worrying so much about controlling everyone else’s. Besides, isn’t concern about all these things just a distraction from the real opportunity you have to improve your own sphere of concerns?
~There’s so much stuff in the world to compel me, but most of it I have no control over anyhow.

Post-Show Thoughts: There are two ways to respond to these arguments. The first is to show how many of the things mentioned do, in fact, affect me. The best paradigm for this is the concept of a "moral ecology," which means that there is a common moral environment we inhabit. In this ecosystem, when one pollutes it by their immorality, we all suffer the consequences no less than when an irresponsible corporation pollutes a lake or a landfill. What one does, others see. What others see, they come to view as normal once they've seen it enough. What many come to see as normal becomes normal. These things must be dealt with before they proceed too far down this process.

But the danger with such an approach is that it grants the premise of libertarianism: every man for himself. It tries to make social action look good because it benefits me. But social action is good because it's right, not because it benefits me. Egoism is not the reductio of all values. Instead, I prefer love. And if love has any definition, it means to care enough about others to put their needs and welfare above or at least on a par with my own. When I love others, I will inject myself into their lives for their benefit. This must never become tyranny, but if you have to err on one extreme or the other, living in a world where everybody's always "up in your business" is at least a world where you know you're loved in contrast with a world where everyone cares so little about you that they are indifferent to your self-destructive behaviors.

There's still an importnat caveat. Many people who say they love others, really only love to project their notion of "the good" onto others in a kind of idolatry to their own beliefs turned into interpersonal tyranny. That's not love, except of their own views. Until and unless you are willing to make sacrifices for the people you claim to love, you shouldn't be telling them what to do. Authority and influence must be earned, at least earned by the willingness to be more than merely one who orders others around.

But there's even another major error here. Libertarianism, the view which this argument represents, is a colossal error about the nature of human beings. We are neither purely individuals, nor are we purely social. We are both. It's neither every man for himself nor a communistic vision denying the individual his rights. Socialists deny our individuality, and libertarians deny our communality. Even the Bible talks about the sins of one polluting all because we are connected together as one Body. Unlike that murderer Cain said, I am my brother's keeper.