If you say that there is no inherent value in life whatsoever, then what worth is there in society, and what harm is done with threatening society?
Indeed, with accepting the inherent value of life comes society as we know it; if life and thus humans are considered worthless, what reasons are there not to kill somebody if he or she bothers you, or has got something you'd like?
Also Jackrabbit, psh. It's a good derail. ^_^
There is value in the stability of a society because one exists in society. If it is unstable, and the
basic tenets, "rights", laws, or whatever you want it to call them are not followed, it becomes dangerous. Threatening someone's life over
money is destabilizing; you don't want muggers running around because they might mug or kill you or someone that matters to you. Breaking into homes, where someone should feel safe above any other place, destroys that faith in safety that people have to rely upon to go about their business without fear. Both of these are violent actions that there is no rational or acceptable reason to engage in, and which cause significant harm to ideals upon which society relies to exist in a stable state.
What is good for a stable society is over all good for the individual. As we are all individuals within a society, we benefit from stability and safety. We
might benefit more from ignoring the tenets of society, and acting without regard to what consequences our actions have on others, on an individual level, but even then only if society is itself stable, because the negative repercussions that can easily become lost in the scale of a modern society reappear en masse when significant proportions of the population ignore those tenets too.
To put in (slightly) less "oh fuck it's 5:30am, what am I doing still awake?" words: a thief in a city mostly full of upstanding citizens will thrive (as we can assume there are enough corrupt or flexible individuals that he can fence goods and whatnot, they're just either a very small part of the population, or not thieves themselves); an upstanding citizen in a city of upstanding citizens will thrive to the best of his ability, safe in the knowledge that his life and the possessions on which he relies to maintain his standard of living are safe, or at least extremely unlikely to be stolen, but will perhaps thrive less than the rare thief; a thief in a city of thieves must constantly watch his back, and for every dime he steals he may well lose a dollar; and an upstanding citizen in a city of thieves will suffer and struggle greatly.
It may be better for the individual to ignore the rules to the best of his ability when others do not do so as well. When everyone ignores the rules, everyone suffers but the barest handful. Therefore, it can be said that the optimal situation for everyone is a society wherein the basic tenets are followed. To be realistic, we cannot trust that people will never take the self-serving route, nor that we can always deter them before they can act. I only bother to add that last sentence for the sake of completeness, not because I think many will disagree with its premise.
TL;DR: A stable, safe society is desirable because we live in that society, and we don't want bad things to happen to ourselves. While we may gain more by acting solely in our own interests, we ultimately lose if everyone starts to think that way. It follows from that that we must act to prevent people from thinking that way, or if nothing else from being able to reap the benefits that selfish and anti-social behavior can bring so as to dissuade others from taking the same path.
I suppose I can try tie this all back, more or less, to the topic of the thread by saying that this is basically why I feel I must condemn rioters, revolutionaries, and "benign" terrorists like PETA or "Anonymous" (or really, not-so benign ones too, though they can fall more under "revolutionaries" in most cases): they, forming a small minority of society as a whole, take it upon themselves to inflict mob (a small minority can still be a large number of people, after all, considering the size of modern societies) justice in line with their personal worldview, often against established power structures. Sometimes, those power structures should be brought down, altered, or replaced, but a small number of frequently violent (in one way or another) reactionaries are sure as hell
never the ones who should replace all but the most batshit insane of power structures, and almost as rarely are they even able to do anything but piss off their targets or hurt innocent bystanders. Whether you like their targets or not, it's not hard to like them even less.
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Topic: Egypt and the world and Libya - Now without Ukraine! (Read 373440 times)