Thursday, June 5, 2008

The blunting of moral sense

The Road to Serfdom, F. A. Hayek:

What are the fixed poles now which are regarded as sacrosanct, which no reformer dare touch, since they are treated as the immutable boundaries which must be respected in any plan for the future? They are no longer the liberty of the individual, his freedom of movement, and scarcely that of speech. They are the protected standards of this or that group, their “right” to exclude others from providing their fellowmen with what they need. Discrimination between members and nonmembers of closed groups, not to speak of nationals of different countries, is accepted more and more as a matter of course; injustices inflicted on individuals by government action in the interest of a group are disregarded with an indifference hardly distinguishable from callousness; and the grossest violations of the most elementary rights of the individual, such as are involved in the compulsory transfer of populations, are more and more often countenanced even by supposed liberals.

All this surely indicates that our moral sense has been blunted rather than sharpened.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Prescient. Clean, crisp and concise. Also chilling. I fear we are doomed to repeat history.

The question is: Which part of history?