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Comment by asark | Hacker News Reader

Well, I'm just coming at it from the perspective of observed efficacy in the real world. It's fine in a Kantian moral sense or whatever, if your goal is personal ethical edification. If your goal is to make things better it's a poor tool to rely on.

The problem's not so much that they can fail—any method can—as that they can fail with anything short of overwhelming and sustained support, that is, they can be wildly popular and still have no long-term effect at all. Better to look elsewhere—no amount of "if we'd all just do it, we could fix this!" will change that.

Again, as a personal choice, fine. As an alternative to more-effective means, no. It's not "arrogant", it's an outcome-focussed stance fitting with observed reality and current scholarship.

[EDIT] "They" being "movements mostly based on changes in personal behavior patterns, at some significant personal cost or risk"

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I do not advocate individual change as a tool to rely on to solve problems, so this is a straw man. That would disregard other effective and efficient ways to approach problems. I also don't think it's about "personal ethical edification". That is again a rather condescending spin you are giving to it.

My point is about recognizing the individual influence one has. Often that is avoided by the statement I'm criticizing.

> My point is about recognizing the individual influence one has

How is that not essentially zero, in most political circumstances and for non-extraordinary individuals? That's my point.

[EDIT] and further:

> That is again a rather condescending spin you are giving to it.

I think I'm giving it a pretty fair shake by acknowledging there's any laudable purpose to actions of personal behavioral choice on large political problems. There is, but it has little to do with effecting change, if that's the part that's important.

We are one in many. That means we just share the influence. Many issues are not binary, and often the individual contribution to a problem can be canceled out completely by individual change. The influence may be small compared to the sum of all, but still the responsibility for the individual contribution lays completely with the individual. The comparison must be between the individual cost and the individual contribution to the problem and it's solution, not falsely to the complete problem on the scale of the society.

Even when the problem is binary, the argumentative position becomes much stronger by individual change. For example, if Europe became fully carbon neutral, it's stance would be much more powerful when it comes to these questions compared to if it continued to build new coal power plants and told other countries to stop doing that.

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