Frances to Derek and others...
My insistence on the need for some relevant communal group to make tentative determinations about what might be good and best in regard to the issue at hand is based on the pragmatist assumption that the determinations made by a sole individual person alone or a sole communal people alone is simply not reliable, at least when it comes to issues of some import in say religion and art and tech and polity and philosophy and science. It is an agreed consensus of contingent opinion amongst reasonable experts that will be held as good, which they ought to eventually arrive at via consistent and persistent inquiry. The group may not always get it exactly right every time, but then that is evolution for you. Human thinkers who are rational and reasonable make good guesses most of the time, and in groups this natural inborn tendency is exemplified. The good after all is as it is given and found and as they get it and take it, rather than what they wish or will or want or even need. What the members of any group must resist among other things is the risk of becoming proud to be a member of that group. This kind of intolerance often excludes others to the detriment of wise determinations. The trick is to cleanse and purge rigid dogmatic beliefs from the minds of groups, and do it well and often. One way to do this is with semiotics via the ongoing interpretation or deconstruction of engrained paradigms. On my using the primitive example that the least of a "group" may simply be the buddies of a sick person who is suffering a mental disturbance and afflicted with imaginary fantasies or deluded illusions that are real enough but that he wrongly considers as factual and actual and concrete, is not to suggest that a deference or preference on the part of a well person indicates they may be suffering from a mental disturbance, but it is to suggest that the individual adopted choice may be communally agreed as bad or wrong. The best example that the most a group might be seems found in the realm of science, which activity in its presence is an evolutionary exemplar of what is basically good. In other words, all humans are genetically related as one systemic family, therefore the task of making smaller groups to serve specific functions that are wise ought not be difficult.
