In general I would not say the individuals are obligated to hold the common good above their own interests. But the world would be a lot better off if at least more people gave some consideration.
I wouldn’t propose the two as mutually exclusive from the outset though. For most people the needs are interwoven because humans exist and define themselves in relation to others
It seems that your general thrust might be communism vs the free market, is that a fair summation?
I think your ie. should read authoritarianism is bad. Granted, true Marxism would almost certainly involve repression of personal choice, but they cannot be taken as simple equivalents.
As a utilitarian I advocate a system which minimises suffering, ie. maximises “the good”. Now, suffering can be caused by poverty and so “the common good” is served by ameliorating the worst effects of poverty. But suffering can also be caused by injustice and denial of personal choice; indeed, I would rather be on minimum wage and free than wealthy in a police state. And so I would hold that the common good encompasses both welfare and freedom.
Now, as to precisely where that line ought to be drawn, I believe that a welfare system which ameliorates the effects of homelessness, treatable ill-health or inability to afford food, prevents far more suffering than that caused by forcing all housed, non-ill, non-starving people to pay for it. Indeed, I would not really call what they experience “suffering” at all; inconvenience is perhaps a more accurate term.
I think far_born hit on something. What exactly is the “common good” as opposed to the good of individuals? If you institute a policy which is good for the “common”, but bad for individuals, who is the policy good for?
I think it is a matter of how the individual sets his/her limits
we have:
materialism
greed
stupid greed
insane greed
I don’t have a problem with greed. It is the stupid and insane greed that make things ridiculous. Charging up credit cards so in the long run a person has less than he should because he is wasting so much money on interest is stupid greed. A lot of insane greed is based on taking advantge of other people’s stupid greed.
This society promotes stupid and insane greed. When do we crash?
Technology makes this funny sometimes. The 21st century needs a new commandment.
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbors underengineered trash for he is a technomoron and doesn’t know what he is buying.
A $500 Apple iPod can hold the equivalent of 444 90 minute cassette tapes of music. Who needs that much portable music? Make a HVM (Hand Von neumann Machine) commonly called a PDA with a 20 gig drive. Reserve 3 gig for MP3 music. Enough for 30 tapes. Have portable music and a useful programable machine too. Linux of course.
Hang out on Slashdot sometime – you’ll find die-hard audiophile geeks who insist they need 80, 120, even 200 gigs of storage before they’ll buy a portable music player. But yes, they are out there.
(Don’t look at me, I’m barely over 5 gigs myself…)
I think that the ultimate good for the individual and the ultimate good for the society are one and the same. There is no conflict between the two, if there is conflict, then it is not the ultimate good for either.
As far as the iPod goes, I don’t own an iPod as they are prohibitively expensive, but for me, having 30 gigs of music has more utility for me than a programmable machine would. Though I agree with you on the PDA front, it should just be an open HD that I can put as many or as few mp3s as I want on it. It needs WiFi, cellular, and bluetooth in it so it can go to my bluetooth Sennheuser hands free. ;p
Oh you mean you just wanted something that holds a lot of music so you can have freedom of choice on the road without carrying a lot of CDs? Get an iPod.
Which choices would you be referring to? There’s a pretty wide variety of individual vs common good decisions to be made. Some are pretty easy for us to agree on (at least in the West):
Should we let people kill other people in retaliation for verbal insults?
Should we let private citizens have their own nuclear weapons?
Should government control what people say in their own homes?
Others are obviously more difficult and controversial:
Should the public pay for housing, employment, food, and medical treatment for everyone who cannot afford to pay for it themselves?
Should we allow doctors to assist suicides?
And so on…
As has been pointed out, the common good and individual good are not completely separable; clearly the common whole is composed of individuals, each with their own different needs. If one’s concept of good as applied to the whole fails to take into account the good of the individual, or vice versa, then that concept is inherently flawed.
Come to think of it, I think the common/individual dichotomy lacks a potentially crucial distinction. There is the common good, which is composed as the sum of all individual goods. There is the individual good, which is the generic individual as a unit. And then there is the self good, which is the individual set aside from the whole in his own little id-based world. The first (possibly intractable) problem in deciding the general question at hand is isolating what is good for the generic individual from what I personally desire–particularly when my specific desires set themselves up as the best possible standard and become the indisputable common good in my own mind. Unless one is able to detach oneself from one’s own specific self-interest, particularly in the realm of preconception, there is going to be an entanglement of sorts that will tend to prevent the arrival of a synchronized good between the one and the whole.
I think the best way to answer this question is to define ‘individual’ as the self-individual, not the generic individual. Because pretty much, the will of the generic individual is the same as the will of the common people, and the two scenarios at hand would lack differentiation.
The way I see it, to cater to the will of a community is to take a sort of extreme utilitarian point of view; to disregard self-ambition and try to minimize suffering for all people, basically bringing everyone’s happiness level -to a common medium.
(Trying to define the question at hand, to make sure I answer it correctly…)
So… under those terms, I would much rather live in a more self-serving environment, because I think it * is* more natural for us. It seems as if a community- centered system would make the world somehow more monotonous, and less human. We shouldn’t put community above the self; besides, for the most part, seeking a good life for yourself depends on some degree of participation with the community anyway.
I think there is a subtle but important distinction, but I realize I did not make it very succinctly. I’ll try again…
When we observe society from the point of view of the group, we see things in generalizations. When we observe society from the point of view of the self, we see exceptions to the rules in terms of getting what we want. But when we observe society through a disinterested, generic view of the theoretical invididual(s), we can see the exceptions that otherwise do not apply to us and therefore can answer the dilemmas that arise from the fairest possible perspective.
Actually I agree to this, that complete utilitarianism tends to miss some crucial aspects of human experience–namely the individual passions and variety of preferences to achieve happiness. Indeed, defining the “happiness” a society should try to produce from the group standpoint can get very problematic.