kramer@utcsrgv.UUCP (Bryan M. Kramer) (07/04/83)
Some thoughts about rights:
The species survives iff individuals survive:
Therefore any decisions by an individual must take into
account the survival of the species, and collective decisions
must allow the survival of individuals.
There can be rights only if everyone agrees that everyone has rights.
In the jungle, if Joe is stronger than you and decides that
you do not have the right to exist, he is correct. The fact that
your friends might gang up on Joe after his act makes no difference
to you.
A society cannot afford to grant rights to all humans. Rights must extend
only to those who in fact grant these rights to other members of the society.
People who consistently violate the rights of others must be removed
from that society by whatever means are effective. People who are the
agents of such removal must not be said to be violating rights --- the
person being removed has given up his membership, hence any rights.
Some thoughts on governments and economies:
A society will not work if at assumes that each individual will act in his or
her best interest.
No one knows what actions are in fact in his or her own interest. It is
presently impossible to compute even most of the consequences, especially
in the long term, of any act. Secondly, most people do not consider the
long term. Thirdly, most people don't even act rationally --- if they
really wanted reasonable government, they would get together and elect
reasonable people. The rules of the game allow it. Other examples are
the fact that most people buy flavourless square tomatoes, that they
drink expensive orange drinks rather than the cheaper concentrates etc.
etc.
I think that the solution lies in a constitution (this has to be at the world
level) that limits the size of everything: governments, corporations, unions,
cities, cooperatives etc.
The reasoning for this is that in a group of small organizations, a bad,
irrational, selfish, near sighted decision by the leaders of one
organization is not likely to drastically affect the survival of the
species. Also, it is possible that a lot of different decisions by small
groups who are to some extent acting in the hope of improving things
will average out to behaviour that does improve things.
Contrast this with the large: a few people running a large country can
by their acts destroy the species; a large corporation can leave entire
towns unemployed by changing location of operations; through the acts
of organized agribussiness we are losing the germ plasm of many plants
that might be valuable, and the concentration on the use of a very few
species of food plants is risking a famine that could wipe out
civilization (these are only a few dangers of shortsightedness);
consider the incredible waste of resources that lies in planned
obsolescence (the automobile industry) etc.tim@unc.UUCP (07/05/83)
Here's a proposal that was posted to this group recently:
I think that the solution lies in a constitution
(this has to be at the world level) that limits the
size of everything: governments, corporations, unions,
cities, cooperatives etc.
Surely I am not the only one who sees the contradiction here.
What about the agency that enforces and maintains the world
constitution? I do agree that many of the woes in the world come from
overly-large and powerful groups of men, though. There just is no
good way to prevent these groups from forming.
______________________________________
The overworked keyboard of Tim Maroney
duke!unc!tim (USENET)
tim.unc@udel-relay (ARPA)
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill