Alone points out that humans create institutions to make their environment safer, and then offload their own responsibilities onto these institutions. He accuses us all of shirking our Heroic Responsibility. I’m not sure this is fair. An individual human can only do so much. I’ve avoided vulnerability to a somewhat silly degree in the past (avoiding caring for others or owning much more than I can carry at a dead run… caring for too much makes you vulnerable). Turns out too much independence can be far more harmful than not enough, because individual humans are weak and small, and we can do things of Power only by combining our efforts. To do something noteworthy, we much focus on our specialty and trust others to do focus on theirs. To create a strong meta-individual, we cannot all be completely responsible for everything – we need some specialists in responsibility as well. Not every cell in the human body can fight off hostile invaders, most of them have other vital tasks.
Oh, I agree, at least to a certain extent. Don’t be so green and blue. We really are shirking responsibility. If your morality has responsiblity as the highest virtue, than it might be bad to have a nanny state, but there a serious advantages to having one, such as, as you point out, specialization.
The libertarian in me says it’d be ideal to have a third party, like an advocacy group, or a religion or whatever, taking that responsibility for those who need it while the government did the minimum against fraud and such. But as long as people don’t realize they’re Beyond the Reach of God, that’s going to have problem of it’s own.
Alone points out that humans create institutions to make their environment safer, and then offload their own responsibilities onto these institutions. He accuses us all of shirking our Heroic Responsibility. I’m not sure this is fair. An individual human can only do so much. I’ve avoided vulnerability to a somewhat silly degree in the past (avoiding caring for others or owning much more than I can carry at a dead run… caring for too much makes you vulnerable). Turns out too much independence can be far more harmful than not enough, because individual humans are weak and small, and we can do things of Power only by combining our efforts. To do something noteworthy, we much focus on our specialty and trust others to do focus on theirs. To create a strong meta-individual, we cannot all be completely responsible for everything – we need some specialists in responsibility as well. Not every cell in the human body can fight off hostile invaders, most of them have other vital tasks.
Oh, I agree, at least to a certain extent. Don’t be so green and blue. We really are shirking responsibility. If your morality has responsiblity as the highest virtue, than it might be bad to have a nanny state, but there a serious advantages to having one, such as, as you point out, specialization.
The libertarian in me says it’d be ideal to have a third party, like an advocacy group, or a religion or whatever, taking that responsibility for those who need it while the government did the minimum against fraud and such. But as long as people don’t realize they’re Beyond the Reach of God, that’s going to have problem of it’s own.