A Moral Order in Times of Change
Jan. 16th, 2007 11:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
franceslievensCross-posted to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
salon_virtuel.
Please move all discussion over there.
Belgium has started 2007 with a ban on smoking in restaurants. They didn't dare to go for completely banning smoking from every area where people are gathering. So you can still smoke in cafés and establishments that get less than one third of their earnings from food. Like most of the Belgian legislation it is rather double. The whole idea of a ban on smoking is a European guideline, by the way. According to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
frenchani France hasn't been able to make it into a law just yet. In the (friends-locked) entry on her LJ where she talks about this, she makes an interesting link to the morals of society as a whole.
Smokers that don't want their habits banned from their dining table start using grand words like "freedom of speech" and "censorship" when they vent their frustration with what they consider to be unnecessary meddlesome behaviour from an already meddlesome government. Parliament is imposing certain values on the citizens. We can argue that such a thing should never be the case, because the basic value of a democratic state is that of tolerance: we give people the freedom to work out their own system of values and live by them. What people sometimes deliberately forget is that our tolerance has boundaries.
It is a curious development in which legislation talks more about values than about rules to let society run smoothly. Every pragmatic decision drags a moral discussion along with it. We can see a constant clash between opposing world views in which one view tries to show its righteousness to the other. The question then is this: Should we search for a newer set of values that all of the inhabitants of this changing society can live by (i.e. look for a different angle on the idea of tolerance), or should we listen to who shouts the loudest?
salon_virtuel.Please move all discussion over there.
Belgium has started 2007 with a ban on smoking in restaurants. They didn't dare to go for completely banning smoking from every area where people are gathering. So you can still smoke in cafés and establishments that get less than one third of their earnings from food. Like most of the Belgian legislation it is rather double. The whole idea of a ban on smoking is a European guideline, by the way. According to
frenchani France hasn't been able to make it into a law just yet. In the (friends-locked) entry on her LJ where she talks about this, she makes an interesting link to the morals of society as a whole.Smokers that don't want their habits banned from their dining table start using grand words like "freedom of speech" and "censorship" when they vent their frustration with what they consider to be unnecessary meddlesome behaviour from an already meddlesome government. Parliament is imposing certain values on the citizens. We can argue that such a thing should never be the case, because the basic value of a democratic state is that of tolerance: we give people the freedom to work out their own system of values and live by them. What people sometimes deliberately forget is that our tolerance has boundaries.
It is a curious development in which legislation talks more about values than about rules to let society run smoothly. Every pragmatic decision drags a moral discussion along with it. We can see a constant clash between opposing world views in which one view tries to show its righteousness to the other. The question then is this: Should we search for a newer set of values that all of the inhabitants of this changing society can live by (i.e. look for a different angle on the idea of tolerance), or should we listen to who shouts the loudest?
