Nate,

Thank you for your thoughtful response to my comments. I really appreciate when individuals take the time to share their ideas, especially philosophical ideas.

If I am understanding you correctly, the essence of your position is that individuals have a “collective responsibility as fellow members of the human family.”

I disagree, but I would first like to offer you some common ground that we both might share.

First, I view all human beings as potential values to my life. So I’m a big fan of the Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

I don’t love my neighbors unless they earn my love, and thus my expectations are reciprocal.

This nicely leads to my other favorite biblical verse: “you reap what you sow.”

Second, I love Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments. However, Smith only shows us empirically and psychologically why individuals act morally. I have not found that Smith offers us a practical philosophy for our use. Instead, Smith’s meditations on morality essentially demonstrates that individual moral behavior is influenced by our desire to conform to societal norms.

Adam Smith’s most practical and moral philosophy is Capitalism, derived from his best known work: the Wealth of Nations. Perhaps the most quoted sentence by Smith and its core takeaway: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest”.

Finally, I will address your essential assumptions. You “believe that some problems are not (or not just) the result of individual failings, but (also) of inequalities inherent in structures and systems (and even states and hierarchy itself).”

You gave an example of an immoral president who acts to benefit himself and some immoral businessmen and to harm the poor and homeless.

I agree that government intervention is always evil and immoral because it is founded on coercion. Your example includes raising taxes, laws against individual liberty (stopping the collection of rain water, homelessness, and panhandling). This is not a “capitalist state.”

When you say the “failure of a system to address issues like hunger and homelessness,” what you’re not saying, but it’s implied, is that the state should take other people’s money (by taxing) to “address” these issues.

You “believe that there is such a thing as collective responsibility and collective progress through combining our efforts.”

Individuals are no longer members of tribes. This is a great development, if for no other reason than to avoid genocide and rape. Of course I am not saying that civilization and its institutions brought about individual rights (the history of civilizations is littered with genocides and inhuman treatment of women). Not even the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution brought liberty and freedom for everyone, but it got the ball rolling.

Individuals have no collective duty of responsibility in any domain. However, individuals should be responsible for their families, but not because of collective responsibility, but because individuals choose to make families and thus should value each family member accordingly. At some point children take responsibility for their own lives and thus the cycle of rational individualism proliferates.

When individuals join a group outside of their families, it should be a voluntary association: friends, schools, sports, jobs, benevolent organizations, etc. These groups become individual values, but only because individuals choose to associate and value common objectives.

Worldwide progress has not come from collective action (and there is no such thing as collective progress) but from the voluntary trades made between millions and millions of individual traders (see the Wealth of Nations). The inequalities you referred to in structures and systems have lifted and continue to lift individuals out of abject poverty. If you truly believe in kindness and compassion, you should consider writing more about the immoral state acts against individual rights and coercion against real capitalism.

We always need more bakers, brewers and butchers to feed human beings, but it’s the Sam Waltons (and Walmarts) of the world that make our lives better.