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Individual Rights vs. Community Rights
Dagrabbit
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I was reminded of this by something that was said in the abortion thread, and was interested in getting some opinions on it.
America was certainly founded on promoting indvidual freedom. Free speech, freedom of religion, freedom to waste hours watching dumb Youtube videos. The other side of this country is promoting a stable society that protects its citizens. Often these two aspects are at odds with one another, individual rights vs. what I would call community rights.
To better define what I mean by community rights, some examples might be in order. Security restrictions at airports, traffic laws, zoning laws, import/export regulations, libel and slander laws, and more in this vein. It's effectively the second half of "My right to swing my fist ends at your face", or protecting citizens from themselves. They're laws that keep our individual rights/freedoms (I'll use the words interchangeably) from destablizing society and infringing on other people's rights/freedoms.
The political side of this is that, on social issues, I usually think of the Left as erring on the side of expanding personal freedom, and the Right defaulting to protecting community rights. Abortion, gay marriage, and legalizing drugs all increase personal freedom, while many of the causes of the right are about perserving the community and protecting the citizens.
This is a generalization, but helps to quickly dump me into the mindset of both sides of an issue. It hasn't been very rigorously tested though, so I thought it would be fun to put it through the paces on D&D.
To that end:
1. Does the distinction between individual rights and community rights really exist, and does it already have a better name that I don't know about?
2. Is there a mapping between perferring one side or the other and social political ideology?
3. What are the downfalls of straying too far in one direction? For example, the extremes would be anarchy for the first, and totalitarian dictatorship for the second, but are there more subtle effects?
4. Does a similar trend exist in economics, or is it reversed? For example, the Right loves Free Market individual power, the Left protects the community through environmental action and social programs.
I'm still putting the idea through the paces, so any discussion is welcome.
America was certainly founded on promoting indvidual freedom. Free speech, freedom of religion, freedom to waste hours watching dumb Youtube videos. The other side of this country is promoting a stable society that protects its citizens. Often these two aspects are at odds with one another, individual rights vs. what I would call community rights.
To better define what I mean by community rights, some examples might be in order. Security restrictions at airports, traffic laws, zoning laws, import/export regulations, libel and slander laws, and more in this vein. It's effectively the second half of "My right to swing my fist ends at your face", or protecting citizens from themselves. They're laws that keep our individual rights/freedoms (I'll use the words interchangeably) from destablizing society and infringing on other people's rights/freedoms.
The political side of this is that, on social issues, I usually think of the Left as erring on the side of expanding personal freedom, and the Right defaulting to protecting community rights. Abortion, gay marriage, and legalizing drugs all increase personal freedom, while many of the causes of the right are about perserving the community and protecting the citizens.
This is a generalization, but helps to quickly dump me into the mindset of both sides of an issue. It hasn't been very rigorously tested though, so I thought it would be fun to put it through the paces on D&D.
To that end:
1. Does the distinction between individual rights and community rights really exist, and does it already have a better name that I don't know about?
2. Is there a mapping between perferring one side or the other and social political ideology?
3. What are the downfalls of straying too far in one direction? For example, the extremes would be anarchy for the first, and totalitarian dictatorship for the second, but are there more subtle effects?
4. Does a similar trend exist in economics, or is it reversed? For example, the Right loves Free Market individual power, the Left protects the community through environmental action and social programs.
I'm still putting the idea through the paces, so any discussion is welcome.
Dagrabbit on
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I've tried to focus on the more tangible aspects of the community rights side in the OP where there is a direct benefit to society through restricting personal freedom. There is certainly a moral component to that side as well that would include things such as abortion and gay marriage; the idea of building a moral society that they're happy raising children in.
That is, depending on your point of view, a potentially negative aspect of the community rights side. I tried to focus more on the positive aspects in the OP.
But think about it from another angle. When you get down to it, a lot of the things Democrats in America today stand for, like gun control and universal health care, seem to limit personal freedoms.
So basically, I think a blanket categorization fails. If anything, this is how I see things:
In matters of morality and personal expression, Democrats are firmly in the individual rights camp, whereas Republicans are in the community rights camp. In matters of social programs or right to bear arms, the roles are reversed; now Republicans paint themselves as defenders of personal freedom and Dems as enforcers of community standards.
You're right, I'd forgotten about gun control; all of the individual freedoms championed by the Right I had thought of were economic. I'd actually lump health-care as an economic issue, though the lines are certainly blurred. Your distinction may be a better one to use, rather than lining along social/economic lines.
That change there scares the living fuck out of the NRA. Because of it, they can no longer really play the boogeyman card, and hunters are starting to realize that the NRA actually doesn't have their interests at heart - a lot of the Congresscritters the NRA love do not like the whole idea of conservation. An environmentalist-hunter coalition can really get these guys scared.
Usually because it just so happens that the alleged community rights match up exactly with whatever the person espousing them thinks should be done.
Which is to say, it is most often just a sledgehammer to throw around and justify your opinion being more important than other people's.
I usually agree with thier rationale more than the GOP's "family" values. but to pretend the Dems are champioons of individual freedom is wrong. The GOP also has a worse record of trying to hamfistedly trying to legislate thier morality than the Dems.
"Family Values" is basically code for "We can't find a real reason to justify restricting your rights so we'll just say it's for the children"
Angel, many if not most of the fist conservation groups were hunters. Much of the grass roots conservation movement is still made up of people trying to find a balance between being allowed to hunt and having something to hunt in 50 years.
If you ever need to talk to someone, feel free to message me. Yes, that includes you.
That has absolutely nothing to do with 'your right to swing your fist ends at my nose.' I didn't know that you meant community rights to include the right to enforce its moral precepts on minorities. I thought you meant something much more defensible, like the right of the community to interfere with individuals in order to promote the common welfare, through things like tax, public service, and regulation.
This is true. But at the same time, groups like the NRA tried to drive a wedge between the two factions. The problem is that their wedge doesn't work anymore, and the hunters are realizing that the NRA was screwing them over.
The Left has its own share of cracking down on individual rights in favor of community "good". Here in NYC (which is pretty liberal) a number of laws have recently been passed - banning smoking in all restaurants/bars and banning trans-fats in all restaurants. There's also mandatory recycling, etc. Not that these are necessarily bad, just that they could be seen as imposing on individual rights for the sake of the common good.
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anyway that's not quite OT anyway. My belief is that community rights should mean nothing more than the rights of multiple people. the common useof it by fundies and such is a form of rule. I don't think the mob should have the right to EVER trample the rights of the individual. However if you take large numbers of people's right's into consideration there is going to be some kind of group legislation. Like the rights of all the people around you not to be endangered by a deadly firearm will sometimes be more important than your right to have said firearm. Likewise with public works. Your right to your property may be outweighed by many individual's right to public transit.
Rather than the protection of discrete inalienable rights, I believe in the maximization of individual liberty. Every individual should have the ability to live his or her life in the way he or she sees fit as much as possible without putting undo restraint on other people's abilities to do the same. Sometimes this requires the absolute (or nearly absolute) protection of individual rights, as in free speech. Sometimes this requires that some individual rights be slightly curtailed, as in labor laws.
Rephrased as a bumper sticker: Rights are the means; liberty is the end.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
As I said, it's something I try to leave out, but as Shinto said, it's often lurking in the background. I consider what you mention to be a case of community rights taken too far.
EDIT: To make it more clear I was talking about:
with being a bad misappropriation of the usefulness of community rights.
A concrete example is that I feel the safety provided by traffic laws is more valuable than my ability to do donuts in an intersection. Passing a law to protect my city from the presence of gingers because a majority in my town don't trust them is not more valuable than their freedom to live wherever they want.
I'd say gay marriage bans are a pretty good example.
Are "community rights" simply the democratic form of government?
What I mean is, the community exerts its "right" to determine the rules that will govern the community in democratic decision-making bodies, and the "individual rights" counterpart is the set of individual rights enshrined in law, e.g. the US Constitution.
The moral aspect of community rights (passing laws to protect a community from immoral people/actions/things that are bad) is less relevant because it's a self-justifying stance that doesn't really interact with other points of view that don't share the same morality. It just keeps shouting how right it is.
If you ever need to talk to someone, feel free to message me. Yes, that includes you.
As with most things in life, there must be a balance. For instance, in my home state, we have some pretty strong field and stream access laws (basically, if your land blocks access to public land, people accessing have the right to cross your land within reason.) The idea is that public land must be accessible to the public, so the individual must make a concession. The balance is fair (people can cross your land, but must do so in a manner that least impacts you). A while back, several out of state people (including, IIRC, Tom Brokaw) tried to get the access laws changed to restrict the right of the public to cross private land blocking access. The populace was outraged, and the proposed changes died on the vine.