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Jebadiah Moore wrote:
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<div class="gmail_quote">Hi, I'm new here. My name is Jebadiah
Moore, pleased to meet you.</div>
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<div class="gmail_quote">2010/8/2 samantha <span dir="ltr"><<a
moz-do-not-send="true" href="mailto:sjatkins@mac.com">sjatkins@mac.com</a>></span><br>
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<div class="im">The "community" is only a collection
of individuals. It has no special rights that trump those of the
individuals it is composed of.</div>
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<div>I'm not going to go into rights or how they should be assigned,
but I think your assumption that a community is "only" a collection of
individuals is faulty on two levels.</div>
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<div>First, you can look at "the principle that the good of the
community takes priority over that of the individual" as saying that
whenever a decision must be made where one option aides many and one
option aides only one, the "right" choice is the one which aides the
many. I don't think this is quite how Hitler meant it, but it is quite
possible to create a rule favoring the community (= a group of
individuals) without recognizing any special status of a community
separate from its constituents.</div>
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This is the wrong way to look at it. Either individuals have rights
just on the basis of being human beings or they do not. If they do
then it does not matter how many may benefit from violating those
rights. It is still wrong. It is also wrong in that it implies that
any numerically more numerous group may do whatever it wishes in
principle both to every individual in that community and to the
community itself. By such reasoning if it seems to the majority of the
world more beneficial to destroy the US and parcel the assets thereof
and of its citizens to everyone else then you would have no moral
objection. <br>
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<div>Second, and more importantly, a community ought to be thought of
as an entity in its own right, not just as a collection of individuals.
Saying that a community is only a collection of individuals is like
saying that a human is only a collection of cells. It's true, in the
sense that a community is composed entirely of individuals (well, plus
perhaps some cultural artifacts, memes, etc.), but it's a bad way of
looking at things because it makes you miss the forest for the trees.</div>
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It is your assertion it ought to be thought of as not only an entity
but as an entity with more rights than possessed by the individuals
that comprise it. And no, it is not the same thing as the cell-body
analogy does not accurately map to the relationship of an individual
human being to a community.<br>
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<div>Now, whether or not you want to assign value to the community
separately from individuals is really your call. But it's pretty clear
that it's worthwhile to view a community as an entity (due to various
emergent phenomena), and that a lot of people do view communities this
way, and that people *value* communities this way. In particular, they
seem invested in trying to maintain the stability, influence, and
"essence" (as they perceive it) of the communities they belong to, both
during their own lifetimes and into the future. Perhaps this is a
social simulacrum of the evolutionary drive to support your gene pool.</div>
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<div>Regardless of whether you value communities separately or not,
it seems quite possible to make the argument that, at least in many
forms, the assignment of value to communities and the resulting
behaviors work to decrease individual happiness. Of course, I can also
think of ways in which valuing the community increases individual
happiness. I'd love to hear your arguments, since you seem to feel
strongly about this ("<span class="Apple-style-span"
style="font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 13px; border-collapse: collapse;">The
widespread belief that it does is precisely what makes horrors such as
Nazism possible. It is what is destroying even that one time symbol of
deepest appreciation of the individual and individual rights,
America.").</span></div>
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You have already heard the core argument. It is not a mere topic for
debate.<br>
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- samantha<br>
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