Some people really belong in an institution for their own protection, so families commiting their “loved ones” is fine. But have “the society” commit people and you’ll have more harm than good coming out of it.
I agree with KCF. There is not much difference between “the society” and “the family.” Both are convenient constructs, yet are not mandated by some natural physical force. It’s not the purpose of a legal-ethics system to promote a family-centric society where your new master becomes the person who happened to be born related to you.
First of all, when it comes to natural physical forces, you undoubtedly were pinched out of the body of your mother. You are only alive today because somebody took control over your entire life the same way as somebody is hypothetically taking control of this crazy aunt.
Second, the fact that the natural world is governed by laws which make it so that the procreation of the species REQUIRES that everybody at some point in their lives is totally submissive to an other person, usually a relative, may be a more convincing argument in support of a family-centric system of ethics if ever there was a convincincing argument for any legal system. Leastways, for me it is.
It’s pretty obvious, when a person dies, if he had written no will, his family decides how he is going to be burried, probably by trying to figure out what he would have wanted. If he ends up on life support with little if any chances of revival and he left no instructions of his own, it is again his family that makes the decision whether to unplugg him. If a person is murdered, again if he had left no instructions on how to punish the perpetrator, his family decides. Not because I said so, but because in our society, with our culture and our traditions being what they are, it is reasonable to believe that the dead/coma person would have wanted his family in charge, not some random people. Well if a person loses his mind it is exactly the same as a person on life support, in a coma. Unless he left specific instructions it is up to his family to decide whether to have him commited. Having a family in our culture is pretty much like having a contract with people that should you develop schizophrenia so severe you would not be able to tell reality from fantasy and would be a constant danger to yourself that they would restrain you in some way even if you having lost your mind objected to it. Obviously there is more to family, but these types of implicit contracts are one aspect of it.
This has nothing to do with relatives mastering over you, any person is free to leave instructions that should they go mad they want to be left alone even if they have a 50/50 weekly chance they will end under a train. Any person is also free to start their own kind of culture where it will be reasonable to assume that these people don’t trust their family to decide these things, but some other people, or maybe no one at all and will thus be left unmolested and free to get themselves killed.
I agree with Marko. The law should be family centric in most cases because in most cases that’s what most likely in line with the wishes of the individual. If a person wants someone else to care of him, or no one at all, he can specify this in contract. Otherwise the default is being assumed.
So I think with non rational agents such as kids and crazy people, the law should do what that individual would have wanted to do in a rational state. That’s how we minimize aggression and approach voluntarism. We always ask, what would that person have wanted?
yeah, but you see, that’s a problem with a state, where only one institution, the state, can decide “what’s best” for them. Anyway, I agree with you more or less.