Wrong. Governments isn't about giving up a single speck of freedom in exchange for services. Government is about protecting our freedoms without infringing on any of them.

By all means give me an example of of how a group has a responsibility?

You seem to have been mentioning the military. In the military each individual voluntarily takes responsibility onto themselves by taking an oath to do such. Without an oath accepting personal responsibility to do certain things, they don't have those responsibilities.

Responsibilities are to be taken on INDIVIDUALLY. All government power, all responsibilities, and all rights are from individuals. There is no such thing as a collective right or a collective responsibility.

Whether you like it or agree with it doesn't matter. You're wrong. :)

I don't think Radar is being a pain. I think he's putting forward an interesting perspective on this. The whole point of the thread was to explore different approaches to politics.

Radar, leave government out of it. In place of the word government put society.

Does the individual have any responsibility to society? Here are some moral questions to ponder to make the point.

If your neighbor is planning to shoot up a major university, and you overhear him planning it, do you have a responsibility to let somebody know?

You have 100 gallons of sewage left over from your last big shindig. You can't move it, but you find you can easily dump it down a hill where people walk to work every day. At the least it'll make people retch; at most it'll make somebody sick. Nobody will know you did it. Do you have a responsibility not to?

You live on the 35th floor of a condo complex because they ensure your private property rights. The guy on the 36th floor accidentally falls off his balcony, and saves himself by snagging your flagpole. The only thing saving him from certain death is your flagpole and he is now hanging off it. As you know, private property is one of the centerpieces of your approach. So is it perfectly moral to take a hammer to his fingers because he is trespassing on your pole?

Well I'd just like to ask - if Gov't has a responsibility to its citizens? OR if as a member of an organization, does that organization therefore have a responsibility to me?

UT, Society is nothing but a bunch of individuals. The only responsibility any individual has to other individuals is to not to endanger them or violate their rights.

If I overhear my neighbor plotting to shoot up a major university, I most certainly don't have a responsibility to tell people, though morally it would be the right thing to do.

Dumping Sewage onto the property of others is trespass. It's a violation of the rights of others and endangers others. I don't have a right to do this. As I said, the only responsibility I have toward others is that I don't endanger them or violate their rights.

As to the flagpole. I don't have a responsibility to save the man, but I do have a responsibility not to further harm or endanger him. Taking a hammer to his hands is wrong, but asking him not to hang from your flagpole again is not.

All "society" really is, amounts to a bunch of individuals who have agreed not to fuck with each other and to offer a "common defense". When there were no governments, villages rose up because murderers or thieves would prey on those who were alone. By sticking together and agreeing to not fuck with each other, but to defend each other when someone attacks, they were able to live longer. There is strength in numbers.

Government absolutely has a responsibility to its citizens but not a responsibility to give them food, clothing, shelter, education, medicine, or morality. The citizens are the creators of the government. Government is their servant, and the citizens are its masters. Government may only have the powers that we, as individuals, on our own if a government didn't exist, and only those which are specifically granted to the government. Government is never above the citizens.

And people wonder why the Prophet Mohammed's requests that a woman dress "modestly" a century ago have led to women virtually imprisoned and treated as chattel in some Arabic countries.

All intentions can be corrupted, and the more you adhere to the letter of the law the less you percieve the wrongs it was intended to address.

OK, well if we go ahead and say that everyone is an individual and as such acts on their own behalf and no one elses, that's fine. I then put it to you that every individual weighs up what benefit they're going to get from making a collective decision and then cuts their losses on the option which will give them the least benefit.

So, sure we're all individuals and make individual decisions, but some of us have more of a social conscience and are motivated by different things, so what one individual might see as a benefit of collective decision making, another will just see it as someone trying to force their way of thinking on them.

Of course there's a line, but for everyone it's different. We all weigh up the pros and cons of every decision we make (unless we really don't care about anyone except ourselves, and even then we still consider what is going to be the greatest benefit to ourselves), and most of us do think about how our decisions will affect others, even if it's only our nearest and dearest which we consider. Some people have a broader world view though, and might consider that our actions will affect people that we don't even know. That is what collective responsibility is all about in my opinion.

Each and every thing humans do or don't do is motivated by self interests. We do things either to gain pleasure, or to avoid pain. More often the latter than the former.

Kohlberg suggested sex stages of moral development and your statement is locked at stage two.

Everything breaks down to level 1, though within level 2 I agree with number 4. The only difference between me and many others is that I don't recognize the government as my authority. I know that I am the authority over the government and that no legitimate laws infringe on the rights of people.

As to level 3, I disagree that there is an unwritten social contract, though I do believe in universal ethical principles. I believe this principled conscience occurs at an individual level. We each have our own conscience, we don't have a collective one.

I think when you say "break down" you're thinking more of a hierarchy of needs situation, which is addressed by Maslow, who says that people don't consider their higher-being needs until their lower-being needs are met:

http://cellar.org/2008/maslow.png

Kohlberg is more of a developmental stages matter. For the most part, when you're a child, you're in level 1 morality. As you move to adolescence and adulthood, you move to more of a level 2 morality. And so forth.

I disagree. At every stage of your life from birth to death, everything comes down to the avoidance of pain or the desire for pleasure. This just gains more facets as you get older. For instance, my desire to avoid pain would not preclude endangering myself to save my family, because I would find the idea of my child being harmed as more painful than myself being harmed.

Even charity comes down to this. People give to charity for the good feeling they get inside when they do it. It is purely a selfish act, as is having children in the first place. I readily admit it.

I suppose where we disagree is that I don't consider morality to be in opposition to protecting your self-interests. They aren't mutually exclusive. One can fulfill their own self-interests while still maintaining a strong morality.

I'm not lacking in anything on your pyramid. I have been at various times in my life, but right now things are really clicking for me. I'm doing well in my personal life, my career, etc. I'm getting along with everyone in my family and personal circle. In fact if I had to pick one area where I needed more focus, it would be my physical conditioning.

I'm so busy with the other stuff, I've slipped in this area. I'll eventually find balance there too.

UT, you should know Kholberg is wrong. Radar says so.