Ethics and Such

This Post doesn't have an explicit policy point and is just a musing on the different ways people think about things.

In general it seems the arguments about health classes and primarily sexual education are misstated on both sides. The conservatives generally it seems believe that to teach about sex will lead young people to have sex and if we just paper over it then every one will go back to having Archie and Betty dates at the local soda shop rather than schlep off to the bridge, ingesting drugs, and engage in sex those conservatives wish they had had when they were young. Or something like that.

Liberals wonder what all the fuss is about because its not like teenagers learn about sex from other people as a concept but rather decide that they want to do things with those of the opposite or same sex that they haven't done before even if they aren't quite sure what it is they want to do. Once they have done it they will realize that it was perfectly fun and should try and do that again and again and again. Better that they have condoms because God knows we can't stop all of them.

The problem is that Health Class is the modern form of the old Ethics class. Health is held up as the necessary condition for happiness. If a person does what the health class tells them then they will be happy. Liberals generally don't see this as an ethics class because they buy into the the basic presupposition. Not that any liberal would say that Health by itself is happiness but that yes to be healthy is better for happiness than to be unhealthy so doing these things is better than doing other things. Ethics is the science of correct action, thus this is ethics.

Conservatives on the other hand don't really believe that health is a good in the same way that say being saved by Jesus is a good. And that good health is in no way a necessary condition for the true good. They then do not have a concern for the possible consequences of sex such as STD's and pregnancy because teenagers shouldn't be having sex in the first place. If they do and the girl gets pregnant then everything is fixed if they get married.

Liberals argue that this is madness if you actually look at what happens when teenagers get married too soon or a girl gets pregnant when she is a teenager. Conservatives say that the facts need to be changed. If they didn't have sex then none of this would be a problem.

So the problem seems to be that liberals don't believe that health class is an ethics class when it is, while conservatives have a completely different conception of ethics.

If we had actual ethics classes in school then health would merely be a subset of that the general ethical teachings. It would be subordinated underneath the actual teaching of true ethics. This is why conservatives believe that schools should teach the bible.