More about Peter

I've written about myself several times on this blog, but this time I want to relate my ideas to the article "The Right Job for You" on pages 26 -7 of Quest (Hartmann & Blass, 2007). First, what do I do best? I think that I'm good at critical thinking. I enjoy thinking things through, and I like to understand things, especially questions about ethics, justice and the nature of human beings. Although my earliest interests were science and mathematics, I ended up with a major in philosophy. At university, I studied philosophy along with mathematics and a few other subjects. I did well in these, and I enjoyed them. I still read philosophy today. I think this also shows my values. One of my values is a concern for the truth. I want to know what is true and what is false. This is not always popular with other people: some of my opinions upset people, and although I don't want to do that, I think it's usually better to upset people than to accept lies. Lies and ignorance are not solid foundation for a healthy society. One example that often shocks people is that I am sure that most counties' drug laws are both immoral and very bad for society. It would be better for drug users, addicts, ordinary people, families, politics, the economy and Thai society if, for example, Thailand legalised all drugs and started treating drug abuse as a health problem, not a criminal problem. The facts all support this, and so does justice. It is very sad when the law is unjust and harmful to society. It is worse when that injustice is so popular, as anti-drug laws are in Thailand and other countries. One example is that even people who don't like Taksin Shinawatr still think his evil wars on drugs were a good thing! They were not. They were legal murder on a large scale. I've expressed my ideas on this matter and usually the response is surprise or shock, so I've tried to explain why this very unusual opinion is in fact better than the policy still adopted in most countries and believed in by many people. Usually, people don't agree with me, even though they don't have any good reason for thinking that drugs such as heroin, marijuana, alcohol, cocaine and so on should be illegal.

How about you? Do you think my concern for critical thinking and justice has led me to a wrong opinion about drug laws? Why? Another thing I value is free speech so that these sorts of questions can be discussed. The only way to correct false or unjust beliefs is to discuss them critically. If a topic is censored, then speech is not possible and knowledge about that topic is impossible.

Now I've written a lot more than the five sentences suggested in exercise F. on page 40, so I'll stop here. This is not an academic writing, so I didn't worry too much about organization or sticking to a topic. I just wrote down the ideas that came into my head. It's also obvious that I haven't worried too much about providing the strong support that my opinions need, but if you would like to disagree, please add a comment explaining why you think I'm wrong, and I will then defend my opinions.

__________

References

Hartmann, P. & Blass, L. (2007). Quest 1 Reading and Writing (2nd. ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill