--- enoonan <enoonan@kent.edu> wrote:
Wim's ideas of individual and collective morality
seems the best route to getting at what Roger
describes as a win-win situation. I don't think
embracing this is sacrificing the right of the
intellect to social rights either. Individual morality
benefits you directly and collective morality benefits
you indirectly. I think the more we embrace a global
community the more the individual freedom we will
have.
Then...
> I can't tell if you are asking about the existence
> or importance of the
> collective.
> The intellectual level is higher then the social
> level but that doesn't negate
> the existence or importance of the social level. I
> think I need you to expand
> more on this before I respond
Scott:
Both. One is a derivitive of the other. The
collective is not an extension of the individual. It
is an utter rejection of the individual. The reason
is that the collective is a purely fictitious body
(groups of individuals do not act in truly collective
ways - there is simply too much diversity - only in
statistically observable ways - patterns of behavior)
and completely disregards individual as a
non-entities.
One could even argue that the collective is an utter
rejection of the individual/intellectual in favor of
the biological. Read Nobel laureate, F.A. Hayek's
"The Fatal Conceit", in which he argues that
collectivist values are really tribal/primitive (i.e.,
biological) values. The altruistic sharing of
resources was a matter of biological survival in
hunter-gatherer bands (people who spent most of their
time in pursuit of the biological), the primary social
unit of humans throughout the vast majority of the
evolutionary development of our species. One
individual's decisions could very well mean life or
death for the entire group. Ergo, you act with/for the
group or you are out! Collectivism, pure and simple!
While this works well for small groups (i.e., the
hunter-gatherer band who are heavily dependent on
group cooperation), it does not for groups composed of
literally millions of people, where systems of
exchange and division of labor have spontaneously
developed. F.A. Hayek's (same book) "spontaneous
human extended order" is exactly that, social
institutions (markets, etc.) built on DQ!
Which leads back to the Middle East...
Wim said (and this is what I was responding to)...
they were intended as suggestions for collective
morality. E.g. Dutch/European Union government could
stimulate co-operation between Palestinian and Jews by
requiring imports from Palestine/Israel to be produced
with both Palestinian and Jewish labor. If they want
to restrict imports of certain products that compete
with Dutch/Western European industries anyway (I don't
want them to, they do it anyway), then they'd better
make sure that this restriction has some positive
effect also: by discriminating against production
processes in which the groups making up a
society don't properly co-operate.
Scott:
F.A. Hayek's other great work, "Road to Serfdom",
highlights the central problem of collectivist
thinking - "Who? Whom?" Who decides? And whom do
those decisions affect (or Who gets the shaft)? Wim's
solution is that a collective body (i.e., the
Dutch/European Union governments) must now be
responsible for deciding what is "proper co-operation"
between the groups involved. Isn't it up to the
Israelis and Palestinians (the groups involved) to
'decide' what proper co-operation is. Or does the
collective entity (Dutch/EU gvmnts) make decisions
(presumedly benevolently on behalf of both parties)
that may affect either or both of those parties in a
poor quality manner (from the perspective of the
respective parties)?
Erin said:
I think the more we embrace a global community the
more the individual freedom we will have.
Scott:
If global community here is meant in the sense of
'collective' that we have been discussing - we
ultimately end up with less individual freedom!
Unless you had something else in mind?
Scott L Berry
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