An individual's obligation to society ought to outweigh society's obligation to the individual?

Question

this is the UIL debate topic, what could be a negative value or voting criteria for it

Answer 1

How do you separate the two?

Answer 2

That is the recipe and justification for dictatorship.

Think it through. A society is composed of a group of individuals. Saying a person "has an obligation to society that outweigh's society to the individual" ultimately boils down to saying that some individuals are going to be priveleged over others. And you will find no examples in which this is not the case--provided of course, you leave particular ideologies out of the discussion.

A society exsts to benefit the individual members--and can have no other rational or moral justification for it's existance. As long as the society does that more or less consistantly, the individual who is a member of the society does have an obligation to obey the society's rules--or leave and live elsewhere. And has no other "obligation" whatsoever. If the individual doesn't like the rules, he/she can work to change them--but that is their choice also.

Imposing any other obligation on the individual amounts to dictatorship, no matter how you dressit up or try to excuse it.

Answer 3

Seeing the general in the particular. These two go hand and hand. We live in a social society where it goes both ways. You would have to take the individual out of society or the society out of the individual. I would think this is impossible.

No person is an island...

Answer 4

Emile Durkheim would say that yes, an individual's obligation to society ought to outweight society's obligation to the individual. His point of view was that if we could just learn to be happy with our position in society, society would be a lot better off.

Answer 5

No. Society's "obligation" to the individual is to DO NO HARM. No provide a safe, free and healthy environment for the individual to pursue life, liberty and happiness. An individual's obligation to society is to NOT be anti-social, sociopathic or psychopathic. Society has ways of dealing with people like that.

Recently -- with the euphemististic adoption of the Bush "surge" in lieu of calling it what it really is: the escaclation of a war without end -- we came to realize even more that our nation is being driven by one person's psychiatric problems, not concerns for our national security.

How ironic that a man touted for his affability and outward empathy is devoid of any inner empathy, the true ability to feel the pain of others.

That is why he keeps sending GIs -- including young women and grandmothers in the reserves -- to their deaths.

Bush feels only self-righteousness and that nothing will prove him wrong, even if others must die for his mistakes. His face must be saved at all costs, including the deaths of others.

We tend to think of Christians from the Midwest and South -- as far as stereotypes -- as regarding pschoanalysis as some kind of self-indulgent weakness. It is viewed by many of the fundies and red staters as the nefarious territory of that cosmopolitan Jew, Dr. Freud. Texans don't need psychological self-exploration; they just need guns and wars to blow away people who get in their way.

Such is the case of one George W. Bush. President Bush and his new military chiefs have been saying for nearly a month that they would "surge" an additional 21,500 troops to Iraq, in a last, grand push to quell the violence in Baghdad and in Anbar Province. But a new study by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office says the real troop increase could be as high as 48,000 -- more than double the number the President initially said.

That's because the combat units that President Bush wants to send into hostile areas need to be backed up by support troops, "including personnel to staff headquarters, serve as military police, and provide communications, contracting, engineering, intelligence, medical, and other services," the CBO notes

According to the study, the costs for the "surge" would also be dramatically different than the President has said. The White House estimated a troop escalation would require about $5.6 billion in additional funding for the rest of fiscal year 2007. Of that, about $3.2 billion was supposed to go to the Army and Marines for their escalated activity.

But that figure appears to have been grossly underestimated. The CBO now believes "that costs would range from $9 billion to $13 billion for a four-month deployment and from $20 billion to $27 billion for a 12-month deployment." There's a more detailed analysis of the numbers on pages 3 and 4 of the study, which was sent to House Budget Chairman John Spratt today.

These are all examples of the sociopathic, psychopathic leader of the free world. Society's obligation to THIS individual is subject to debate.

Answer 6

Then who or what are we caring for?The product?