YourFutureDentist

I'm pretty sure that I have a (moral) right to defend myself from the initiation of force. And if I base my ethics off of what is in my rational self-interest, then killer aliens would certainly be evil (ie. Anti-Me!)

The reason I phrased it that way is because I'm writing an assessment of Einstein's essay. He says that (my synopsis) from food and shelter to language and the content of his thoughts, society provisions the individual in all aspects of his existence. One can no longer think of man “outside the framework of society” (p. 3). I disagree with it of course, and that's why I put "depend" in quotations. The fact that we benefit from interacting with one another doesn't make society the starting point for ethics and rights. Right?

I think I may have it. Maybe it is not as epistemological as I thought--obviously the professor's objection is, but I don't think that my answer has to be. Rights are concepts "that preserve and protect individual morality in a social context" (OPAR, 351) We need morality because we have *choices* to make. If rights only apply to moral (meaning morality-utilizing) entities, and morality only applies to entities that have to make choices (volitional ones), then only volitional entities can possess rights. We can't think for each other just as much as we can't eat for each other. It's only the people in a society that make the choices. So regardless of how much we "depend" on (benefit from) each other, society is not a primary to be considered for ethics or rights. Right?

I don't know what free will has to do with distinguishing the individual from society. I just want to know how I can say that, "a society cannot have more rights than the individuals that comprise it" without having this refuted by someone else saying that, "an individual cannot have more rights than the cells or atoms that comprise it." Meaning that men have no rights, just like atoms don't. Can someone please help?

I'm writing a paper (that's due Monday!) in an ethics course at the University of Illinois. My paper is an assessment of Einstein's essay "Why Socialism". I'm going to try to show that bestowing upon society rights beyond those of the individuals that comprise it is making a grave mistake. I'm having a hard time with my professor's objection to this. I'll just paste a part of his argument below: ------------------------------------------ "Why are the rights and goals that Einstein describes for society "pseudo-rights"? Why can't there be rights and obligations for a society as a whole? What, conversely, is the source for "individual" rights - and how are these intelligible without appeal to the social? It will be interesting to see what you do with your paper, but if you try to argue for this by insisting that there are individuals first and foremost, and that these end up comprising the 'parts' of society (which is a typical way to attempt to argue this), then consider the following kind of claim: BOTH the idea of an individual, as well as the idea of a society, are value-laden concepts and descriptions of relationships and identity (the self related to the self, the self related to other selves, the self related to society, etc) that we etch onto the world and its natural phenomena: they are not natural categories. In other words, they are not an immutable fact of how things are, but rather ways of description that we arrive at. The world in its raw form just has bundles of cells, organic matter, drives, and so forth. On this view, the idea of "individual" is not more primary or more of a building block than the concept of "society": they are both quite abstract and conceptual ways of carving up the natural world. No matter how much we may, through habit, want to dig in our heels and insist on ourselves as "individuals" this may not be any natural category at all, but some way we have become habituated to describe phenomena." ----------------------------------------- So what do you guys think? I understand that describing a man as being made up of cells or even atoms doesn't negate the fact that he is still a man, but how can this not be applied to describing society as being made up of individuals?