Swift on Community

(From Swift, pp. 133-155. We'll read 155-175 for Thursday)

1. From your reading of Tawney, Nisbet, and Ehrenhalt, what are conservative-traditionalist-communitarians concerned with, if they are not so concerned with the “freedom and autonomy of individuals”?
2. “Liberals have no problem believing that people should be responsible for the outcomes that result from their own free choice.” Do we have any duties that do not result from our own free choice – just duties that are imposed on us? Are liberals right in saying that we are all born with rights, but then we acquire duties? Or are we born with duties?
3. Compare Swift, p. 147, with Friedman, p. 12.
4. From your reading of Tawney, Nisbet, and Ehrenhalt, would conservative-traditionalist-communitarians say something like, “our values are socially constituted, a fruit of our social relations. This is good. The state should protect them and enforce traditional teaching: it should fund parochial schools and Islamic madrasahs. Society should discourage heresy and enforce conformity”? What would liberals say?
5. Liberals promote democratic society as a “community of communities,” the ultimate community because it appeals to universal (unanimous) values. Can a community be non-unanimous, meaning that it enforces values that not everyone shares?

(To answer those questions, go back to your reading and consider this passage from Edmond Burke; emphasis added)

Government is not made in virtue of natural rights, [...]. By having a right to everything they want everything. Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human [lacks]. Men have a right that these [lacks] should be provided for by [government]. Among these [lacks] is to be reckoned the [lack], out of civil society, of a sufficient restraint upon their passions. Society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body, as well as in the individuals, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection.

This can only be done by a power out of themselves, and not, in the exercise of its function, subject to that will and to those passions which it is its office to bridle and subdue. In this sense the restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights. But as the liberties and the restrictions vary with times and circumstances and admit to infinite modifications, they cannot be settled upon any abstract rule; and nothing is so foolish as to discuss them upon that principle.