Should individual freedom or preservation of culture be valued more highly?

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

I know many will just say this is a false dichotomy, but I'd argue in many cases it's not. And it's not just the abandoning an ethno-religious identity thing.

For one example imagine someone from Quebec who moves to Anglophone Canada, starts only speaking English, and then marries an Anglophone and raises a family speaking only English. Said person has undeniably left behind part of their culture and upbringing, but it's hard to argue that it's "wrong" for them to do so without effectively violating their personal freedom. After all this is fully legal in Canada and no one would dispute it shouldn't be, but I'm sure many might argue it's still wrong or immoral on some level and societal pressure should discourage it.

Or someone from an agrian background who opts to not live on their family's farm and moves to the city. Or conversely imagine someone from a black family who's lived for generations in inner-city Detroit or Newark and has many who basically believe this is where they belong and shouldn't leave, but then moves out to the suburbs anyway. Etc. Plenty of cases where one effectively ends a part of their culture in taking an action that just about everyone agrees would be wrong to legally deny but should be discouraged perhaps.

[Alcon]

Easy vote.  I think the individual's freedom to preserve their culture should be respected, not that it's often at risk.  I have a huge problem with the idea that cultural preservation should ever trump the individual righ to choose culture (or to choose most things).  I think that's a scary idea that's oftentimes just trumped-up self-interest by people who can't stand the idea that others might prefer different things than they do.

I actually would take this further.  I think that cultures have some obligation to audit themselves.  Particularly, when a cultural practice/belief is damaging by its mere existence (homophobia to name an easy, modern one), I think culture should adjust itself to remove the stigma.  There is some "frictional" damage caused by obligating people to change cultural values and practices.  However, I think intentionally perpetuating a practice/belief that causes net damage is wrong, and can't be totally mitigated just by letting people have a choice over their culture.  It's wrong to pressure people into adopting malignant cultural values, even if you give them the choice of rejecting them (at personal peril).

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Easy vote.  I think the individual's freedom to preserve their culture should be respected, not that it's often at risk.  I have a huge problem with the idea that cultural preservation should ever trump the individual righ to choose culture (or to choose most things).  I think that's a scary idea that's oftentimes just trumped-up self-interest by people who can't stand the idea that others might prefer different things than they do.

I actually would take this further.  I think that cultures have some obligation to audit themselves.  Particularly, when a cultural practice/belief is damaging by its mere existence (homophobia to name an easy, modern one), I think culture should adjust itself to remove the stigma.  There is some "frictional" damage caused by obligating people to change cultural values and practices.  However, I think intentionally perpetuating a practice/belief that causes net damage is wrong, and can't be totally mitigated just by letting people have a choice over their culture.  It's wrong to pressure people into adopting malignant cultural values, even if you give them the choice of rejecting them (at personal peril).

First paragraph is a great summary of why Quebec's Law 101 is an abomination.

While I completely agree with the general premise of the second paragraph it often leads to a type of attitude that someone born into a culture has an obligation to remove the unpleasant elements instead of just dumping them, which needless to say I despise. If you're born in the Deep South you should try to change the attitudes of those around you, not just move to a liberal northern state. If you're born in a Catholic family and find the church's views on women and birth control abhorrent then you need to work to fight to change those instead of just converting to something else or identifying as "none". Etc. I'm actually of the view that if you're born into a culture with very unpleasant elements, then dump it. You have no obligation to it or anyone else, you are your own person. F[inks] your culture and f[inks] your heritage. Being born into it doesn't mean it has any inherent value and doesn't mean it should be completely discarded if it's morally offensive.

[Alcon]

While I completely agree with the general premise of the second paragraph it often leads to a type of attitude that someone born into a culture has an obligation to remove the unpleasant elements instead of just dumping them, which needless to say I despise. If you're born in the Deep South you should try to change the attitudes of those around you, not just move to a liberal northern state. If you're born in a Catholic family and find the church's views on women and birth control abhorrent then you need to work to fight to change those instead of just converting to something else or identifying as "none". Etc. I'm actually of the view that if you're born into a culture with very unpleasant elements, then dump it. You have no obligation to it or anyone else, you are your own person. F[inks] your culture and f[inks] your heritage. Being born into it doesn't mean it has any inherent value and doesn't mean it should be completely discarded if it's morally offensive.

Right, I totally agree.  If I did disagree, it would make no sense, since that would be treating culture like it has some right to exist that obligates people to reform it instead of dumping it.  I don't think that.  Bad culture should either die or change, and there's no reason why changing it would be intrinsically better than dumping it -- and lots of pragmatic reasons why it wouldn't be (like the one you give).  I can imagine some instances in which a culture is so powerful and intrusive that you could argue it's practically superior to reform it, and from there argue it's morally superior to be practical (since it will reduce the suffering imposed on others), but that's a very different question than what you're asking.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Reform is absolutely preferable (in most cases) to rejection, not so much for one's own sake or for the sake of the culture as an abstract idea as for the sake of the people who are going to have to continue living there. This is not to say that everybody has a universal obligation to choose reform over rejection, only that a lack of any internally reformist elements at all coupled with the complete disengagement of people who would otherwise fill that role is essentially the worst possible outcome because it leads to either a robust radicalized version of whatever elements were wrong with the culture in the first place--which is obviously bad--or an ossified, dying version of the culture in which people who are unable to just metaphorically 'move to a liberal northern state' at the drop of a hat (because they have sentimental reasons to stay or because they simply lack the resources) will still be trapped until it or they die.  The death of a culture alone and unmourned is a bad outcome because even if cultures aren't intrinsically valuable in and of themselves independent of context, cultural diversity, a multiplicity of mirrors through which people apprehend the world, is intrinsically valuable, and cultural diversity requires cultures to, in the first place, exist (preferably in as morally unproblematic a form as possible--stipulating which, admittedly, raises further questions). The death of a culture with people still trapped inside it is an even worse outcome for reasons that should be obvious.

[Tetro Kornbluth]

Culture is just a term to indicate what people do, so the false dichotomy is false and a dichotomy.

[Alcon]

Culture is just a term to indicate what people do, so the false dichotomy is false and a dichotomy.

I don't see how that necessarily turns this into a false dichotomy, as much as a tension that doesn't always exist