iwpoe wrote:

...why would we ever suppose that we have to help society? That society has an imperative 'for itself' doesn't mean that we are obliged to help society do anything.

 
And who's saying we are obliged to help society to do anything? Has anybody ever been obliged to marry? Hasn't bachelorship or heremitic monkhood always been an option?

This precisely highlights how marriage is important for society, not (only) to individuals. It's important for society, but society cannot make everybody follow it - and indeed hasn't. Marriage has symbolic value to individuals, not compulsory value. But the symbolic value is vital to society - namely, the symbol is about the survival of society.

For the survival of society, everybody doesn't have to breed. It suffices when a critical mass of individuals breeds. In order to ensure that a critical mass of individuals breed, certain symbolic social values must be established, institutionalised or ritualised.

To compare with eating - eating ensures your survival, but you don't have to do it. Eating is not strictly compulsory. Eating is not an agent so that it would force itself on you. You are completely free to abstain. Try it, and in three days try to repeat your argument that there's no imperative going on here.

As far as I have seen, nobody here ever said that society imposes marriage on us and we must obey. Instead, there's mutuality between society and the individual. There's an intricate two-way relationship that can be termed causal, but it's not linear. Society has its will and individual has her will, just like any two people may have conflicting wills and for one to push her own will through, she must bend or break the will of another and the other must allow it be bent or broken. Or the wills may be in accord, aiming at the same goal, mutually reinforcing. Such are the conditions and dispositions to consider in mutual relationships that make the relationships non-linear.

Last edited by seigneur (8/18/2015 8:26 am)

If being ‘atomistic’ means only to attribute primarily value to the flourishing and interaction between individual substances God very much included then I’m happy to accept that label. As I said before I am also happy to admit that societies, whatever ontological status they have, also have a form of derived value though this is based only on the good of the individuals involved.

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

Is procreation not good, in part, because it is our natural end? No doubt there is far more to it than that, but does that not suffice from a natural law perspective?

I think I said this before somewhere but I would take that as a reason to be suspiciues of Natural Law at least in this area. That the creation of a divine being, one which is of its essence an image of God, should come about premairly for the same reason a dog has puppies strikes me as rather suspect.

For what it's worth I'm going to develop this point elsewhere but I would argue the atheist who endorses the POE (and thus implicitly the claim that moral values exist independently of God) must also endorse the subsequent claim that we are ethically obliged not to procreate.

seigneur wrote:

DanielCC wrote:

seigneur wrote:

But the argument is not that marriage is important because the clan designates it so. The argument is that procreation (a specific biological fact) ensures survival to the clan --> survival is important to the clan (if existence is not important, then what is?) --> the clan institutes marriage as a recognition of the importance. Where is the circularity?

Because the clan is being treated as an actual substance/biological entity which has survival and makes moral decision in the same sense that proper substances do. On this view people end up serving, in fact living and creating more leaving beings for the service of, odd emergent entities.

I am trying hard to assume that you don't mean to say something like "society does not exist", but what else are you saying? Do you mean to say "society exists, but everything that is going on in it has no consequence to us"? In brief, I don't see any objection.

How about this: Society exists and survives subsequent to the existence and survival of its actual members. It exists for their flourishing and not they for its. We have no obligation to ensure its survival beyond our own survival and that of our fellow men.
 

Last edited by DanielCC (8/18/2015 8:49 am)

iwpoe wrote:

seigneur wrote:

To compare with eating - eating ensures your survival, but you don't have to do it. Eating is not strictly compulsory. Eating is not an agent so that it would force itself on you. You are completely free to abstain. Try it, and in three days try to repeat your argument that there's no imperative going on here.

There is a moral and biological imperative to eat in the case of the individual.

Says who? The imperative only exists if you want to live. Not everybody wants to live, so the rule is subject to exceptions, and inasmuch as it has its exceptions, it's not an imperative. It's more like a guideline or suggestion. It's a biological instinct, but instincts are not always strictly causally binding.

But if you grant that the imperative exists insofar as the survival instinct is to be considered, then the same applies to society - marriage must be established insofar as society is to survive.

Moreover, were I to wager granting to you that eating is "imperative" upon individual, I can only do so while pointing out that we don't eat all the time - and shouldn't. Gluttony is evil. Sure, we have to eat to survive, but we have to eat the right things and eat them moderately. Similarly, marriage comes with its restrictions. Marriage is best institutionalised by clan/society/state, but in its proper sense, i.e. to denote procreative function, and it cannot compulsory for everybody.

iwpoe wrote:

seigneur wrote:

Instead, there's mutuality between society and the individual. There's an intricate two-way relationship that can be termed causal, but it's not linear.

Perhaps this is, in fact, true, but the whole question has been, "Why *must* we help society?"

Since it's a non-linear two-way relationship, the question is not "Why *must* we help society?". Something like this can be asked, but it's not the *whole* question and not the *only* question.

iwpoe wrote:

Also, just secondarily, are you laboring under them impression that there is a factual imminent danger to society in the form of the loss of a sufficient reproductive population? You've never been clear to me on this.

Actually, I have been quite clear on this. Any tribe, language or civilisation that ever went extinct in history serves as a factual example of what happens when the society doesn't regenerate effectively enough. There may be many reasons why cultures and languages subside and go extinct, but the common point here is that the relevant values get supplanted when the last members of the group fail to produce offspring that would carry on the same values.

iwpoe wrote:

seigneur wrote:

Society has its will and individual has her will, just like any two people may have conflicting wills and for one to push her own will through, she must bend or break the will of another and the other must allow it be bent or broken.

Really? I await a stern letter from society admonishing me for my neglect of her needs.

Doesn't take much. Forget your tax declaration or such. If you say tax authorities are not society, then you are effectively saying that society doesn't exist - again.

iwpoe wrote:

seigneur wrote:

Doesn't take much. Forget your tax declaration or such. If you say tax authorities are not society, then you are effectively saying that society doesn't exist - again.

Do you understand the distinction between:

X is *in* Y.

and

X is Y

?

 
Sure I do. But what is your point? Tax authority is *in* society, but not (representative of) society? We are all part of society, but society itself has no will, has no life, does not do anything, etc?  How can you assert it when society, just like an individual body, has iron arms that it can use to crush you to death like a bug? In fact it is doing it (to some people) as we speak.

I see no sense in what you are saying.

Last edited by seigneur (8/18/2015 3:14 pm)

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

 But I largely agree with you that society doesn’t have a separate being or substance to the individuals that make it up.

I.e. society is nothing but the individuals that make it up. Can someone explain how this is not reductionism, atomism, and/or nominalism?

(Yes, I noticed that you immediately contradict this in the next sentence by saying "society does seem to be, in some sense, something more than the individual members that make it up" but this is just that, a contradiction that you don't resolve. As a minimum, it looks like you are undecided in your commitments in this area.)