Last night I went through almost all this thread. I got down Emerson and looked up his essay on Self-Reliance and started to write out a response. Then I read Doug and Catherine's cites of exactly the same essay and laughed. I moved on down the list of responses to Miles Jackson's very clear and plain response to these two cyber-libertarians. Sure, that's it, Miles J. nailed it so why am I bothering with all this.
In order to deal with either Chris or Matt's nonsense on private property, I got down Rousseau's discourses and on the social contract and leafed through them. I had just been reading an essay on Saint-Just, inspired by something that Yoshie posted from last week on the Jacobins. So a wrote a response on rights and property taken from the French Revolution, Saint-Just and the Reign of Terror.
Just before going to bed, I looked and saw Michael Pollak's post covering the early American history of natural rights. So why am I bothering with all the French history, I thought.
So that's the end of it. Well, one thing that Chris posted early on were words to the effect, why should I care what the fuck happens to other people? This is obnoxious, but it was never really answered.
It was a typical and rather arrogant question and it seems to intimidate any response in advance. Then I came across this from Rousseau, which addresses exactly this kind of arrogance.
Here is Rousseau, from Book II On the Social Contract, On the Right of Life or Death:
``The social treaty has as its purpose the conservation of the contracting parties. Whoever wills the ends also wills the means, and these means are inseparable from some risks, even from some losses. Whoever wishes to preserve his life at the expense of others (consider Chris's statement here), should also give it up for them when necessary. For the citizen is no longer judge of the peril to which the law wishes he be exposed, and when the prince has said to him, `it is expedient for the state that you should die,' he should die. Because it is under this condition alone that he has lived in security up to then, and because his life is not only a kindness of nature, but a conditional gift of the state.''
So, when in arrogance, Chris asks ``why should I give a fuck'', I am certain, it never occurred to him, that there is a reciprocity to his question that can be posed from the point of view of the state. The institutionalized and legal answer to his question is framed in Rousseau's quote, On the Right of Life or Death.
Chris lives at the pleasure of the state, and his disregard for the fate of others, has its answer as the disregard of the state for his continued existence among the rest of us. Since Chris has no interest in the conservation of others who compose the state, the state has no interest in his conservation. That is the moral reciprocity that results from his question, why should I care?
Just read this from Matt, ``For that matter, why is anyone worth saving?''
Consider the reciprocity of the social contract that dismisses your continued existance, if you don't concern yourself with the fate of others.
Chuck Grimes