It is wrong to force the grasshopper to work, but it is OK to force the ant to help him.
That sounds similar to a question on the test (something like "If someone is able to work and chooses not to, s/he shouldn't expect help from the gov't").
That's indeed a tough one. On the surface, yes, anyone who can work should, and I have little sympathy for those who are too "laid back" to work and still expect to live on the public dime.
However, life is rarely that clean-cut. "Bowling for Columbine" had a particularly good example of a situation where forcing someone to work for their benefits was actually a worse situation than the alternative. (Single mom leaving her young kid with irresponsible family while she worked, where the kid eventually found a gun, took it to school, and shot a classmate.)
I tend to agree with the sentiment, but feel a simple-minded application of that sentiment can be negative in the real world. As with many social policy questions, people's perceptions (of welfare queens driving Cadillacs to pick up their checks) are often more powerful than real-world experience.
In the online test, I think I chose "agree," but not "strongly agree."
Becoming a smoker, or not fastening your seat belt, is your own business because you hurt no one but yourself.
Definitely agree.
There are caveats in both those cases, though. For smoking, I'm against public smoking because it harms others. Even if you set aside secondhand smoke (which I think is becoming convincing, but still with some doubts), there are many who are simply allergic or asthmatic for home public smoking does real harm.
For seat belts, it could be argued that not wearing seat belts drives up insurance costs. That can be addressed within the insurance system, though.
Bad people weren't born bad -- their environment made them that way.
Wow, if I knew the answer to that...
While I don't believe that people are complete "tabula rasa" at birth, it seems foolish to say that their experiences and upbringing don't play a huge part in the way they behave as adults. At root, though, the question seems to imply a desire to place blame somewhere -- on the person or on "society." A favorite straw man of the right seems to be the liberal who lets criminals off the hook by "blaming society."
People have to be responsible for the their actions, but not to ignore the influence of poverty and racism (to name two factors) on crime is short-sighted.
The world would be a better place without people who have strong religious beliefs.
Would the world have been better off without Mother Teresa? I doubt it (although there are those that claim her anti-contraception dogma increased suffering in the areas she worked in). Would the world have been better off without Martin Luther King, Jr.? Without Gandhi?
Strong religious beliefs in and of themselves aren't bad -- it's what one chooses to do with them. If one uses them as inspiration to try to help people and create a better, more just world, that's one thing. If one instead tries to "save" everyone else by forcing them to behave in certain ways that benefit no one but a particular God, that's another.
Ryan
