From: slagle@lmsc.lockheed.com (Mark Slagle)
Subject: Re: [misc.activism.progressive] Clinton Office Requests Comments
Reply-To: slagle@lmsc.lockheed.com
In-reply-to: mrh@centerline.com's message of 21 Jan 93 00:51:09 GMT
Organization: You wouldn't ask this if you'd seen my desk.
	<1jf4ceINNpfd@armory.centerline.com>
	<SLAGLE.93Jan20003058@sgi417.msd.lmsc.lockheed.com>
	<1jks1tINN3tt@armory.centerline.com>
Date: 23 Jan 93 00:09:44

In article <1jks1tINN3tt@armory.centerline.com>, mrh@centerline.com (Mike Huben) writes:

> Let's rephrase and group the sentence (hopefully without changing the
> semantics):

> If individuals (don't have a right) then communities (don't have that right).

> Hey!  Look!  The fallacy of composition!

Your hope for retaining the semantic content of the sentence is a
vain one.  Regardless, the complementary fallacies of composition
and division are subsumed by the fallacy of equivocation, of
which it is you who are guilty.  In this case the community,
viewed as an aggregate of individuals is equivocally confused
with its collective use as a unitary whole.

But you are still missing the point.  What has been asserted is
not that the community fails a claim to some particular right
because individuals don't have it either.  Rather the correct
assertion is that communities have no rights at all, except as
the rights of individuals in the aggregate can be construed to
inhere to community considered as that aggregate.

To put it as simply as I can manage, the rights of individuals,
and accompanying responsibilities, arise from the fact of the
self-consciousness of the individual.  That self-consciousness
results in the free will of the individual to knowingly act in
one or another way.  It is that free will that allows the
consideration of the individual as a volitional entity.  Since
the consciousness of a community resides, if at all, in the minds
of the individual members of that community, the community has no
such requisite consciousness of self or anything else.  I know
about my community, but it is nonsense to say that my community
knows about me except insofar as some members know of me.

On that count then, we do not, except for the purposes of verbal
economy, ascribe blame or responsibility to a community either.
In common parlance we may say, for example, that we blame and
hold responsible the state of Germany for the crimes of the
Holocaust, but by that we don't mean that the corporate state is
to blame.  Rather we mean that the people, the citizens and
leaders, of the German state are responsible for allowing or
causing, respectively, the horrors of mass extermination to
occur.

Until you can demonstrate unequivocally that the community has
consciousness and free will, your claim of rights for the 
community is groundless.

>>Also, you're playing fast and loose with the meaning of the word
>>derived.  That one should be in your pocket catalog of fallacies, also.

> I used it only in the manner used by the person I was responding to.
> Pardon me for not attacking all of HIS fallacies at once.  :-)

There were none to attack except those that you cut from the whole
cloth of your fertile imagination.  You did not even pay attention
to his meaning of the word, much less did you respect that meaning
in your usage.

> [Assorted criticisms which presumed that the above statement was meant to
> be rigorous, rather than an overview of my position, omitted.]

Nonsense.  You're ducking and feinting.  I don't require rigor.
I only require accuracy, truth and logic.  Tall order for some to
fulfill evidently.

>>But the prisoner's dilemma
>>does not exemplify anything whatever about the fallacy of
>>composition.  
>>
>>> Separated individuals are not faced with the dilemma, and can't
>>> even play the game.  As soon as they are together, the game
>>> emerges.

> I love when people state the opposite of what the next sentence
> shows, and without any support.  Could you try to look a little
> more foolish, please?

I would never presume to even attempt to look as foolish as your
eminently qualified self.  As for your claim, the "next sentence"
provides no such demonstration as you adduce.  That was my point.
The burden is on you to show that there is even the remotest
connection to the topic.

>>> Human social behavior is a very advanced technology, produced by natural
>>> selection acting upon human communities.  Mike Huben
>>
>>Human social behavior is not any kind of technology.  Your
>>statement is a categorical error.

> Definition 2 of technology from a Random House Webster's College Dictionary:
> "the application of knowledge for practical ends".

> By this definition, to the extent that human social behavior is learned
> (not innate), it is technology.  Technology is not limited to hardware.

No, behavior is not technology, regardless of any irrelevant
assertions with regard to whether it is innate.  To say so is an
error of categories.  Technology is not in the act of applying
knowledge, it is in that to which the knowledge is applied or,
alternatively, it is the knowledge itself.  But neither knowledge
nor the application of knowledge is behavior.

> Why would I want to try to defend something as stupid as social
> Darwinism?  Sociobiology is much more up my line (as a matter
> of fact, I am an evolutionary biologist working in the same lab
> as E. O. Wilson.)

How nice for you.  I'm sure your mother is very proud of you.

> "Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the
> evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species."
> Konrad Lorenz in "On Agression" 1966.

Other writers have pointed out that cultures do, in fact, evolve.
With this I have no quarrel.  The contention is clearly correct.
I do submit, however, that ascribing this evolution of cultures
to the mechanism of natural selection is purely absurd.  It is a
misunderstanding of the fundamental nature of the mechanism to
suggest that it can act on such entities as cultures or
communities, no matter how many social scientists you may trot
out in support of the notion, and there are far too many in that
category.

The reasons for this are several, and I will not burden the net
with a complete discussion of this matter.  It may suffice to
point out at this juncture that cultures are not in a position to
compete for a niche in the environment and they have no mechanism
of transferring modified traits occurring by random mutation (or
random mutation for that matter) to their offspring (assuming the
word offspring can even have meaning in this context).  In any
case, fitness in an evolutionary sense does not imply goodness or
rectitude in the moral sphere, the more important point on which
you manage to equivocate yet again.  Exploiting the multiple 
meanings of words makes for good poetry, but very bad science,
and much worse social policy.

For the interested reader I recommend the writings of Darwin
himself for original sources, and the more recent, voluminous,
and highly entertaining writings of Stephen Jay Gould on this
topic.

=Mark
--
----
Mark E. Slagle                                 PO Box 61059
slagle@lmsc.lockheed.com                       Sunnyvale, CA   94088
408-756-0895                                   USA
Newsgroups: alt.politics.libertarian