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A while ago I saw somebody complain somewhere on the internet about a bunch of young Amish guys causing some annoyance to him. I don't remember the exact details, but something like they would take a shortcut over his property with their buggies and it would destroy some grass or something. Again, my memory isn't clear about the details, I seem to recall the poster put up a sign saying its private property or something and it was ignored and he was asking for advice on what to do. Multiple highly upvoted comments suggested he go find a local elder and tell him about it and the elder would make sure it would stop. Everybody in the thread seemed convinced that this would be pretty much guaranteed to work. If Amish youngsters are causing problems you can apparently just talk to an elder in their community and the problem is solved.
Personally, I would like the Western world to stop being individualist liberals who don't feel any responsibility for their communities and would rather have them act like the Amish in this regard. If the Amish elder in the anecdote above would have replied "people are morally responsible for the things they actually do, why are you coming to me? I didn't do anything", considering the subject of this anecdote already put up a sign which got ignored, he would have to escalate to the police or something. I think people should be in communities and communities should hold their members responsible to a moral standard. If somebody from a community does something bad and they can get away with it without getting into trouble with their community, that says something about their community.
Of course, this reasoning presupposes people actually are in a healthy community. In some specific cases I think the above logic does permit some sort of group judgement. In other cases people might have innate communal intuitions which might not do their job properly in the current unnatural hyper-individualistic societies we find ourselves in where we offload any responsibility for our fellow men unto the government.
Talking about communities is missing the point. The groups in question "men", "women", "migrants" aren't communities at all, can't be and shouldn't be.
For example, most healthy communities contain both men and women, but two men living on opposite sides of the country and have never met aren't part of the same community.
Demographics aren't the same as community, and unlike a community, there's zero sense in assigning a moral identity to a demographic that makes it members beholden to each other.
I don't see how it's missing the point. Men and women tend to act in pretty distinct ways, and healthy communities tend to recognize it,and set up social rules that take the differences into account. This becomes doubly impossible under individualism, first because it forbids you from even recognizing there's a difference between the groups, and secondly because it dissolves the community structures that would allow for setting up these social rules.
It's missing the point because the post it was responding to wasn't about communities. As an independent criticism of individualism it's fine. As applied to groups that aren't communities (but are sometimes thought of as communities when considered as identity groups, like "men" or "women" or "blacks"), it goes in the wrong direction.
That doesn't mean at all the group of "men" is a community. You can have communities that are all one gender, like maybe the boy scouts or girl scouts, but you can be male without being in the boy scouts.
Remember, the top-level post was about the responsibility of group members for the behavior of other group members. If the group is just something you are born into and says nothing about your relation to other group members, this doesn't make sense.
An example of something that can be a community, is so less often in modernity and arguably should be more so, is a neighborhood. A gender is not.
I don't think I agree. The first time I went abroad my parents told me to be on my best behavior, because I won't be just representing myself, I'd be representing my entire nation. Were they wrong to tell me that? Or is an entire nation analogous to a community?
That's you taking (additional) responsibility for your own behavior, and therefore categorically different from you taking responsibility for other people's behavior.
"You're representing your country" is part aspirational, part practical, not moral. If you misbehaved abroad and then another countryman of yours comes in, the locals might distrust him (because you represented your country in the minds of the locals), but if they try to hold him to account for what you did, he'd be right to point out that you don't actually represent him.
My parent's statement rested on the assumption that other people are responsible for my behavior. If we accept that no such responsibility exists, what they said is nonsensical.
"Part aspirational, part practical" is pretty much what morality is.
In my opinion the OP is about the former, not the latter. He didn't say "I don't get why people do this thing where they hold someone legally liable for crimes they didn't commit, just because someone from their group did it".
Which other people? Your parents? Yes, we accept that parents specifically have some responsibility for their behavior of specifically their children. This doesn't imply a man is responsible for the behavior of other men. It's personal relationship, not group membership at play there.
That's wordplay and has nothing to do with my point. "Aspirational" here means "you should should consider this as a way to aspire to high standards for yourself", not "you're actually a representant". And "practical" means "behaving badly might ruin your country's reputation and therefore hurt your countrymen", without having to take a position on whether the locals are morally in the right to stereotype on your example.
OP is very clearly about the latter, and they did say:
Not just them, my fellow countrymen in general. Otherwise they'd be giving me the "don't bring shame to the family name" talk, which I also got on completely separate occasions.
I don't see how. Morality is very often the exact same combination of exactly the same kind of aspirations and practical matters that you just described.
Doesn't "retribution" mean the kind of distrust that you've been talking about? Otherwise I haven't a clue what he's talking about. Reparations? That's the only issue I can think of that fits a stricter interpretation of "retribution", and it's a niche issue which to the extent it has any support, it's to a large part from self-styled liberals.
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