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From: baba@spar.UUCP (Baba ROM DOS)
Newsgroups: net.philosophy
Subject: Re: Morality: Personal or Not?
Message-ID: <486@spar.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 25-Aug-85 15:10:58 EDT
Article-I.D.: spar.486
Posted: Sun Aug 25 15:10:58 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 28-Aug-85 09:24:43 EDT
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Organization: Schlumberger Palo Alto Research, CA
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> Why would we value things like freedom or conformity?  Because they would
> maximize something in our lives.  Freedom maximizes our own lives, enabling
> us to make our own choices, to do what's best for us and our wants and
> desires.  Conformity maximizes benefits to that nebulous thing called
> society.  It makes it easier for society to do its business, whatever that
> may be.  It makes it easier to categorize us, to perform (what's the word
> I'm looking for?---sociometric?) studies, to exercise marketing strategies,
> and maybe to deal with other people ourselves without bothering to think of
> them as individuals.  Benefit to individual people?  Hardly any worth
> speaking of.  It all boils down to the old question:  which is more important,
> the society or its members?  Clearly if society is more important, then let's
> get rid of us people, we only get in the way of the proper functioning of
> society by merely being people. If not, I think it's clear what the answer is.
> Society exist to perform functions for its members, not the other way around.
>
> Rich Rosen

Society is a set, not an individual entity.  Benefits accrued by "society"
are not swallowed up into some inhuman void, but are spread thinly across
the members of that society, with annoying pseudo-thermodynamic inefficiencies.
Society does not perform functions.  People do.  The issue is not "who whom",
but how we evaluate social rules.  If we consider "negative" conformities - 
those that proscribe certain courses of action that we might otherwise want 
to undertake as individuals - it seems reasonable to argue that *something*
should prevent an individual from performing an act that benefits himself
at the expense of others, where the expense is spread out among so many people
as to be too small to be worth individual action by each person affected, yet 
the aggregate cost incurred is out of proportion to the benefit accrued by 
the original actor.  If the distribution of victimization is such cases is 
anywhere close to random, it is pretty evident that the possible benefit
I am denied when I conform to the rule against such an action is outweighed
by the cost that I *don't* have to bear for others, so long as *they* too
conform to the rule.  Thus conformity, and the enforcement of conformity,
*can* be optimal for individuals.  This is not to say that it always is.
Not by a long shot.

					Baba