Society and the Individual...

The individual created society for its benefit.... Does that make society more important than the individual?

Society created business for its benefit... Does that make business more important than society?

Similar questions but there is some more work to be done... I will start with the following... what does the society owe the individual? It is clear that the individual owes society discipline, sacrifice.. give up freedoms in exchange for an increased probability of survival. What about the other way around?

The society MUST provide an increased probability of survival to the individual. Aha... the question then is which individual?

We have earlier defined society as the present set of contributing individuals.

What about the poor, the weak, and the helpless? What about the children? The set of non-contributors that is....

Children are the PV of the future survival, so yes, the set of present contributors bears their burden.

The old were the set of past contributors... does society owe them anything? The metric being future survival... I will propose a theory here.. the set of present contributors wants (I am not using needs here) to survive.. if it terminates its old, then soon it will be their turn... hence they must take care of their old so that their children will do the same... thus society MUST care for its elderly...

{It is clear that as much as possible, I do not believe in moral arguments... I am a strong believer in the fact that morality is a survival mechanism}

Now the generic set of non-contributors... the poor, socio-economically disadvantaged... what is society's responsibility towards them?

I will stop this post here... since in 6500 BC, I do not believe there were any non-contributors... they were discarded. Life was hard. I will get back to this set of people in a little while since this is at the core of my discussion...