[Qilin]

Originally Posted by Triple_R

I'm not sure if you're getting my point here. Yes, Gino has good reason to be concerned over his Psycho-Pass level... and that's why it says a lot that he never flinched over getting to hear classified information that might have been dark and troubling.

Humans are curious by nature. If someone offers to tell us some secret, our ears tend to perk up, even if the secret is something that we might later regret knowing about.

I mean to say that Gino isn't a good representative of an average citizen in this hypothetical society.

Originally Posted by Triple_R

But even responsibility is not strictly a burden. Responsibility entails both "credit" (positive) and "blame" (negative). If you take responsibility for something, and you do a good job with it, you get "credit" for it. That's a good thing. It gives people a higher sense of self-esteem and personal self-worth.

I'd argue that it is a burden. But a burden can be seen as a positive or a negative, I'm sure. What you say is true, but on the other side of the fence, it can also decrease that same sense of self worth depending on the situation. Freedom can be a good thing, but it is not an absolutely good thing as several generations of existentialist philosophy would contend.

Originally Posted by Triple_R

Balderdash. Why, what you're describing is the very opposite of arbitrary! If a concept is carefully developed over time by a large number of societies, to the point that people largely agree upon it, it is not at all arbitrary.

"Arbitrary" is random, whimsical, and impulsive by nature. The modern world's understanding of "humanity" and "freedom" is not at all those things.

I meant that it was arbitrary in the sense that it is, in essence, a human invention. The modern world's understanding of "humanity" and "freedom" is simply a dominant paradigm, a matter of consensus. Anything that is left to human judgment or value is, by definition, arbitrary. While you may disagree with me, I see human values and morals to be relative things. There may be factors that influence correlation and commonalities in the foundation of societies, they are by no means cultural absolutes.

For example, the society you describe is one that values the individual over the society as a whole. Why can't it go the other way around? What about societies that eschew the traditional laissez faire economic model and opt for moderate government intervention? What isn't arbitrary about that?