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From: friesen@psivax.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Newsgroups: net.philosophy
Subject: Re: THe Moral Value of Conformity
Message-ID: <748@psivax.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 24-Sep-85 16:09:27 EDT
Article-I.D.: psivax.748
Posted: Tue Sep 24 16:09:27 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 28-Sep-85 05:51:58 EDT
References: <1622@pyuxd.UUCP> <1472@umcp-cs.UUCP> <1647@pyuxd.UUCP> <97@l5.uucp> <734@psivax.UUCP> <1747@pyuxd.UUCP>
Reply-To: friesen@psivax.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Organization: Pacesetter Systems Inc., Sylmar, CA
Lines: 26

In article <1747@pyuxd.UUCP> rlr@pyuxd.UUCP (Rich Rosen) writes:
>
>This sounds like a good excuse for encouraging conformity, but surely
>not a very good reason for doing so.  Sounds like a rationalization to me.
>Because we need "reassurance and affirmation", we "should" be like
>other people in order to get those things.  Why do you ignore the fact that
>people learn the process of accepting, reassuring, and affirming people
>"like" them, when they could just as easily learn to accept people on an
>individual basis?  All you are saying is that the current status quo is
>that "being like other people" is a positive social survival trait because
>people have learned to value likeness in other people rather than individuality

	You have misunderstood what I was getting at. I did not intend
imply any *moral* justification here, I was trying to specify the
*cause* of the tendency to conform in people. We tend to conform not
because we *ought* to but because our emotional drives make it very
difficult *not* to adjust behavior to other people's expectations. I
was saying that eliminating conformity is essentially impossible
because the drives towards it are built right into our emotional
structure. No moral judgement was intended.
-- 

				Sarima (Stanley Friesen)

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