mockbee wrote:I would have to study up more on Kant, Hobbs etc to know exactly the argued implications of justice and worthiness. I do know I hate Ayn Rand, I was intrigued with her in college. But I suppose I am more inclined to think of worthiness in an individual sense, like enabling the ability for one to live up to their own potential, which in most cases would spur them to care and provide for others....if that makes sense. I don't know how that would be measured, and suppose it does sound Randian but I do realize that there are so, so many things beyond peoples control that have to be accounted for, which is not Randian.
Rand is an interesting case, because she was a really mediocre thinker (she had an undergraduate philosophy degree from a Russian university -- I know people with degrees in philosophy who are complete fucking morons who can't think their way out of a paper bag.) But she was also widely misunderstood and appropriated by even dumber people. She disavowed any connection to the Libertarian political movement (and good on her for that), and I also give her credit for being, unwittingly, deeply rationalist, in that she refused to accept religious beliefs as worthy of respect (but she never advocated not respecting PEOPLE -- she was actually pretty explicit about doing so.) So really, I think 'Randian' or 'Rand-esque' is probably the right word, because it's not really Rand herself that believed a lot of this really stupid shit.
I'll try and explain where my view actually originates though.
So it's not so much an obligation I feel people should have to provide for others that would make us all TOOLS, as you put. But a community in place to provide the opportunity for individuals to realize the potential in themselves, which would most likely follow that they would provide for others, but not expected, though strongly encouraged. I don't know....... Are you, Hype, saying there should be no expectations?
I think we agree that societies exist to do at least two really basic things: the first is to provide a mechanism for resolving disputes and keeping contracts that doesn't bottom out in the "strongest" (i.e., in the irrelevant sense of mere brute force) always winning, as would happen in anarchy (or in at least some iterations of the Libertarian ideal)... this really means: a way of making things as fair as we possibly can. The second basic thing societies exist to do is not merely to make things as fair as possible, but to make things, on the whole, BETTER for every member of the society, as much as we possibly can.
The problem with couching this in terms (which evoke JFK's famous "ask not what your country can do for you..." spiel) of trying to make everyone useful (or more useful) to society/everyone else is that this doesn't necessarily push forward either of the two basic ideals above. The reason it doesn't necessarily do this is that it seems to be based on a view of human beings as somehow "special" or independent of nature/causality, in that if only we could remove overt obstacles, people would somehow be super-efficient producers and consumers and that's what would make a society great. In actual fact, empirically, there are millions of people who not only have overt obstacles, but IN-BUILT irremovable limits on their capacities, and if we ignore this, and don't try to foster a society in which we try to limit the negative effects of ALL these things, we are essentially sticking our heads in the sand and delusionally wishing that things will somehow get better if only those OTHER people would stop being so lazy, since we already gave them the option of doing better.
In a way, I am saying that there shouldn't be any BRUTE expectations. That is, expectations without any consideration of whether what those expectations expect is actually POSSIBLE for the people the expectations are of. In many cases, our expectations are simply ignorant of the empirical, factual, statistical, lived realities of people.
I think that we can say "Given policy X, we should expect an increase of y% in social value z." And if what actually happens doesn't match our expectation, we should seek explanations and revise our policy. It could be something like: Given the "No Child Left Behind" policy of George W. Bush, we should expect an increase of 10% in students graduating from high school after 8 years. Then we can look at the data and ask: does it match our expectations? Why/why not? Now what do we do?
