I began this blog in 2018, and have developed theses on the fundamental importance of informed individual consent.  I have been led by what I have learned in cited works.  Now, seven years on, I realize that few readers are likely to look back to my earlier works to get the whole of my thesis (there are some side-trips).  So it is time to extract from the earlier posts the portions of my thesis which have developed atop each other over the seven years, and perhaps to update them (reconsidering, eh?).  As I do this, I will footnote the post from which I have extracted material, so that today’s reader will be able to see the entirety of a particular essay, along with all the resources.  I will update this on the basis of new material.

In the same blog¹ as cited in my last post, I wrote this:

We must be educated in order to exercise informed consent in a democracy.  This seems a true enough statement on its face, but what’s involved? Is it a matter of going through several graded levels of schools, getting a certificate, and being deemed “educated”? That’s probably very useful, not only for what we learn academically, but also what we learn about people very different from ourselves (though perhaps only in public schools in a heterogeneous neighbourhood). But these are not the only ways.

Education can be found in watching TED talks, reading outside schools, listening to some podcasts (careful of mis- and dis-information), legacy news, some social media, and talking with people.  There are other efforts as well which we should pursue (you may find these repetitive from the previous post, but I’m learning that repetition is sometimes stays in the mind better than offering only new ideas).

One is to push ourselves to understand things which appear complicated and outside our normal interests and pursuits.  This can be done by reading outside our usual areas of interest and education, and by following the next suggestions.

The second is to be aware of context.  Nothing can be understood accurately outside its context, that is, when it was said or written, what was going on at that time, who said or wrote it and why, to what was it a response (all thought is a response to something else), what did the author or speaker mean in their own life situation?  Googling something is inadequate because it answers your question as simply as possible – you should read the source from which the answer is taken, and read the context.  An example will be found in the third suggestion.

The third is to seek out different opinions, viewpoints (how things look when standing in different physical locations or different places in life)  or different ways of understanding a matter.  Example of a different viewpoint:  I,  White and in my twenties, living in Denver, and a Black friend looked together for an apartment.  We were continuously arriving at a landlord’s door in response to a vacancy ad, and told it had just been rented. My friend finally told me to go out by myself – it was clear where he was standing in life,  that they didn’t want to rent to a Black. I hadn’t a clue.  That taught me a significant thing about some Denverites, and a lot about the high quality of my friend’s character.  

There is context for this, too:  the Civil Rights Act had been passed only two years earlier;  Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka had been decided by the U.S. Supreme Court twelve years earlier than that.  Not a lot of time for peoples’ attitudes to change.  Points of view, i.e., the place in which you stand now and how you came to this place and life-view, continue to matter.  They must be engaged respectfully – anyone else’s life path is as valid as yours, no matter what the comparative accomplishments and challenges.  I suppose that a criminal past might be an exception, but there are many acts which are crimes in the eye of the beholder of a particular ideology, and not crimes in the eye of another ideology.

Being educated is not enough, though.  You must examine and understand not only your place in the landscape of life, but also why and how you have come to be here. There are ways to do this.

One way is to immerse yourself in myth.

Mythos is the foundational belief upon which we stand as we explain life to ourselves. It is to some extent based upon history, particularly our own living of it, and upon faith (the hope which is validated by our experience so far). When we have not accurately perceived the past, finding or forming a personal or cultural foundational myth is as difficult as being sure of the reliability of the literal ground upon which we stand [one thinks of sinkholes]. So now I find that I must not only work very hard to learn about what is new, and consider whether to give informed consent to it as part of the framework of my life; I must also re-learn some of the past, and consider whether to give informed consent to that as well. Additionally, I must examine the potentials in the future through the lens of a re-worked past. “Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it,” wrote (or said) Edmund Burke. Perhaps this is an impossible expectation.²

Engage in interpersonal relationships.  As Agnes Callard writes (Open Socrates:  the Case for a Philosophical Life)

We navigate our lives by way of answers as to what things matter or have meaning.  …Most of the answers that anchor our agency in the world concern our relationships to the people we are close to.

…My reputation is not something I can ever have in my own possession:  it is located outside me – outside my body—in the minds of other people in the community.

Seek these ways not only in writings, but in discussions while physically present with other people. The meaning of “seek out different opinions” is obvious. “…ways of understanding” are listening to peoples’ life stories about how they came to this point and these opinions.

And finally, speak in these ways to others. Make yourself available to be examined and appreciated for your life, for your ideas, for your knowledge, for your abilities to understand things which perhaps are difficult for others. By asserting yourself in these ways as someone on the other person’s landscape of life, you resist having your own thinking overwhelmed by another’s proximity. Yet you open yourself to all these types of discussion.

These you must do to protect yourself and Democracy.

¹ Informed Consent in Our Lives – Upon reconsidering…

²  I grieve for the present and for the future. – Upon reconsidering…