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Comment by tetrometal | Hacker News Reader

Piggybacking on your comment to respond to the quote, not your interpretation...

First, there's no cult. Western civilization protects the rights of the individual, as they should - it's immoral to use aggressive force against anyone, no matter how many people that aggression might benefit (or appeal to).

Second, protecting the rights of the individual denies neither community nor society, it only provides their operating principles. Communities and societies should absolutely work together and cooperate for the benefit of everyone - they should simply do it without using aggressive force against anyone.

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> First, there's no cult. Western civilization protects the rights of the individual, as they should - it's immoral to use aggressive force against anyone, no matter how many people that aggression might benefit (or appeal to).

In an ironically cult like absolutism, you dismiss the moral discussion that transpired within Western philosophical traditions that debate this very topic - of Judeo-Christianity, of consequentialism.

> Second, protecting the rights of the individual denies neither community nor society, it only provides their operating principles. Communities and societies should absolutely work together and cooperate for the benefit of everyone - they should simply do it without using aggressive force against anyone.

This of course necessitates an elaboration on the word “should” in the context of a group of individualist agents where one chooses to not cooperate.

> In an ironically cult like absolutism, you dismiss the moral discussion that transpired within Western philosophical traditions that debate this very topic - of Judeo-Christianity, of consequentialism.

There's a lot of this in online political discussion. Strident but, ah, let's say poorly sourced claims about ethics or morality, with whole castles of charmingly clear and straightforward political philosophy built atop them. I usually "nope" out when it looks like we might end up accidentally re-creating the "what is Justice?" dialogue from the beginning of Plato's Republic, but with only one of us realizing it, which is a situation that comes up pretty often, actually.

Do you mind expanding on that a bit, such as what are the poorly sourced claims used as building blocks? When you talk about recreating the justice part, do you mean the discussion circles back to an already well-explored question?

> Communities and societies should absolutely work together and cooperate for the benefit of everyone

I'm interested in exploring how/why or if at all, the zealous pursuit of one's individual rights have made us lose sight of working together for the benefit of everyone.

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