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energy123today at 8:03 AM0 repliesview on HN

The individual vs community dichotomy is a can of worms. The proponents of these terms often misunderstand each other.

The "individual" is short-hand for negative freedoms, and from this you can derive many of the same values as the "community" types want.

For example, you can say that carbon pollution is an infringement of an individual's negative freedoms. You can also say that it's bad for society's functioning and public health. This is one example where the lens of the individual and community give the same result.

Typically these two words point to different resolutions of analysis, one concerned with a unit of analysis that can be more easily understood and more credibly ascribed rights (the single suffering human), the other concerned with the global system dynamics where the analysis is more difficult but can also reveal some emergent phenomena (sociology, economics).