It's not about Spanish literature... but it's about school. On Friday night a there was a protest, and some students started a fire on the sidewalk. When firemen tried to put it out, several of them got in the way and some were arrested. Following this, many of them surrounded the police car preventing it from moving. I want to consider the ethical the grounds for the students interference with the police and firemen.
I assume that the fire itself was a part of the protest, and the students interfered with the firemen/police because they believed that the police, in tampering with their fire, were also unfairly infringing on their right to protest. The fire was big, on busy walkway.
So it was a little dangerous.
But a little potential harm shouldn't be enough to limit the right to protest. Especially I imagine if the protest is designed to draw attention and prevent some far greater actual evil. So the questions I think are whether or not the importance of the protest justified the degree of potential danger, (which it probably did, the fire wasn’t that dangerous), and secondly we should consider to what extent the factor responsible for the danger was actually necessary for the protest. I don’t see how removing the fire would necessarily take away from their ability to express whatever their concerned about, and because of this I don’t think they had reasonable grounds to interfere with the police…
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A little off the wall, Paul, though I've also been following this story a little bit.
But here's a question that ties us back to the class: do you think we have anything to learn from dictator novels in our (supposedly) modern, liberal democracies? Or this semester have we just been learning about things are over "there" sometime in the dark and uncomfortable past?
And if you say "yes" to that second question, a follow-up question might be to ask you whether it relies on something like Sarmiento's dichotomy between civilization and barbarism: civilization = democracy and barbarism = dictatorship?
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