On 2005-05-04 21:57:00, Anonymous wrote:
"Just reading the last posts and thought Id weigh in.
Now, in all eccense, saying that you dont care how she felt and you feel her feelings are irrelevent to you and others is basically saying that your feelings are irrelevent and should not be taken into consideration either.
We did go outside and wore our shoes outside for gym and all that. And its irrelevent because now they can wear shoes form day one.
Amanda"
Amanda, my feelings about whatever I experienced as a teen *are* irrelevant to you. You don't have to live in my head, my feelings don't affect you.
I would hope, that my being essentially a stranger, that you would wish me well (like I wish you and Perri well) in the same distant way I wish just about everybody well.
But my feelings have no tangible impact on your day to day life because you don't live in my head.
And one troubled teen's feelings don't make a difference to what we do about *other* teens because they don't live in each others' heads either.
That's what I meant. I wish Perri well, but her feelings about what happened to her are *irrelevant to the issue*---as are my feelings about my own adolescence.
That's the sense in which her feelings are irrelevant--and you are correct, so are mine.
One of my ethical principles is that while I will make my own personal life decisions based on my feelings, and make decisions about interacting with friends and family based on my feelings and how I perceive their feelings, we live in a democracy/republic where policy choices we make affect other people. One of my principles is that I do not use my feelings or any other single person's feelings for making policy choices that involve the lives of other people. I think it's wrong to do that. The only place feelings come into my policy choices that affect others is that I try for the broadest scope for individual choice possible in the rules---so that if the other people directly, individually affected by those rules want to choose something for themselves based on their heart rather than their head, they have leeway to do so.
But just on principle I abhor rules that keep someone else I don't know who doesn't know me from doing something *they* like just because *I* think it's "icky".
When I say Perri's (or some other person's) feelings are irrelevant to the issue, where "the issue" is what rules *other people* should have to follow, that's what I mean---and in the context I was talking about, no, *my* feelings aren't relevant, either.
Timoclea