From: Matt Gingell (mjg223@is7.nyu.edu)
Date: Tue Aug 31 1999 - 21:19:19 MDT
----- Original Message -----
From: Patrick Wilken <patrickw@cs.monash.edu.au>
To: <extropians@extropy.com>
Sent: Tuesday, August 31, 1999 9:11 PM
Subject: Re: Tough Questions
>Many people on this list rightly fear and loath the tryanny of the majority
>over that of the minority. One aspect of this is the tryanny of government
>over peoples lives. The counter-problem has not had as much air time
>(perhaps because the rights of an individual are seen - rightly in my
>opinion - as so important).
> ...
This is a very good point and one that I think has been missed in some of these
discussions. There is a tremendous tension between individual freedom and the
common good. This has always been true, and the Western political tradition has
in large part been a search for a principled line between the two. It’s a
fundamental question of political philosophy with a broad range of defensible
answers: you can imagine a spectrum with fanatic libertarians towards one end
and die hard socialists towards the other. The dialectic has been going on at
least since Rousseau and Locke.
The wonderful thing about the free market is that it aligns individual and
common interest across a wide variety of domains. It isn’t perfect though, no
matter what the lunatic fringe would have you believe. Society certainly has the
right to say you can’t burn an undiscovered Shakespeare, no matter what value
you personally derive from seeing it destroyed. It seems insane to me to suggest
an individual should be able to own a weapon of mass destruction, no matter what
the utility is for that individual.
-matt
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