From: dave@alex.uchicago.edu (Dave Griffith)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc,alt.activism
Subject: Re: Libertarianism...
Date: 31 Dec 92 16:47:13 GMT
Organization: University of Chicago

In article <1992Dec31.145222.10532@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU> prs9k@brain.med.virginia.edu (Phil Scarr) writes:
>In article <168CE38F.PA146008@utkvm1.utk.edu> PA146008@utkvm1.utk.edu (David Veal) writes:
>>In article <1992Dec31.025407.21682@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU>
>>prs9k@brain.med.virginia.edu (Phil Scarr) writes:
>>
>>>In article <PA146008.588.725735293@utkvm1.utk.edu> PA146008@utkvm1.utk.edu (Davd Veal) writes:
>>>>In article <1992Dec30.121703.12761@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU> prs9k@brain.med.vrginia.edu (Phil Scarr) writes:
>
>
>>        And in some cases, they are just bad people.  In some other
>>people bear part of the blame.  To simply place the blame on "society"
>>cheapens the victims, triviales the crime, and shifts the blame from
>>the individuals which are responsible to the faceless mass which can
>>neither take the blame, nor understand the problem.
>
>Why does blaming society cheapen the victim and trivialize the crime?
>If anything it does the opposite!  Look at the Rodney King beating and
>tell me it was just 6 "bad individual cops" who did the beating and not
>a series of social ills which generated the beating and the response
>which followed.  What you saw in Los Angeles were individual actors
>engaged in perpetrating a social crime.
>
>>>>
>>>>       "Society" and all the individuals thereof certainly have had an
>>>>effect on me.  Did they make me?  No, they didn't.
>>>
>>>You underestimate the power of society.
>>
>>         I am not a programmed automaton.
>
>Actually you are.  We all are.  There is not much use in denying social
>reality.  The Highlanders of PN-G are programmed, the Maya in Guatemala
>are programmed, the Nuer in the Sudan are programmed.  But we are all
>also the programmers!  That's the point.  We are both programmer and
>programmed.  I like that analogy.  Kind of self-writing software.  We're
>all big CASE tools!!!  :)  But I digress.
>

The view of human nature as that of self-programming software does solve
quite a number of problems, but it results in others.  The main one that it
exacerbates is that of free will, and by extension responsibility for ones
actions.  If the six individual cops are indeed "programmed automatons", 
what in them is capable of being responsible for their actions?  What in them
is deserving of punishment, or even fit to stand trial?  Viewing them as 
socially programmed beings, one might justify sanctioning them based on the 
idea that they social phages, which must be sanctioned for society to 
continue.  This slope is quite slippery, however, and recent history gives us
any number of instances where people become classified as phages and thus
sanctioned that are abhorrent to all moral beings.  (Yeah, it parses, but just
barely.)

In fact, the "socially- and self- programmed" view provides ample opportunity
and excuse for any number of atrocities.  I'm usually not much of a Kantian,
but this is one place where he got it right.  Even if we are programmed
beings without free will, _we must act as though we all are_.  Otherwise
we create a hell upon this earth.  Society may very well be capable of 
acting, if we view societal action as the sum of its individual member actions.
Society is not, however, capable of taking responsibility for its actions.
Only individuals are, and there is no mechanism for individual responsibility
to sum to societal responsibility.

The libertarian slogan, "Society doesn't exist, only individuals do" is 
seen, at least by this libertarian, as shorthand for the above argument.  To
this libertarian, the essence of human existence is the ability to take
responsibility for one's actions.  Society doesn't possess this ability,
and thus does not exist in anything like the same way.  

Do the actions we take affect society?  Of course. Should we take positive 
social actions, as opposed to merely abstaining from negative social actions? 
Of course, and most libertarians I have met do so, voluntarily.  

It is true, biologically, that we are social animals.  It is also true, 
biologically, that we are sentient animals.  Just as we cannot exist as
individual animals, neither can we exist as an undifferentiated mass. 
Libertarianism is in many ways reaction to the forces over the last century
that have driven Western society closer toward the "ideal" of the mass.
As with any reactive movement, it's has supporters that tend toward the
fanatical.  Judge the movement by its heart, not its fringes.


-- 
Dave Griffith, Information Resources, University of Chicago,
Department of Surgery                       dave@alex.bsd.uchicago.edu
A man's best friend is his dogma.