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epistemologue

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  1. Can you explain what you meant here? I'm not really following. The concretes I offered in my second post in this thread, the value of contemplating things purely in your mind, were chosen specifically to address the most extreme hypothetical I could think of, that you were trapped in your own mind and that's all you had available. That wasn't intended to be a complete statement of what values are and where you can achieve them, as though they are limited to purely those concretes I gave. I tried to clarify my overall point here: The pain of a headache does matter in the sense that it's interfering with the fullest pursuit and experience of positive values throughout the day - and by values I mean either introspectively or extrospectively, the pursuit of life and happiness, and the entire conceptual hierarchy of values that one has as an adult. So this isn't meant to "split" anything along the lines of introspective or extrospective, or to say that either is merely a means to the other.
  2. I'm not suggesting that one rationalistically ignore pain, guilt, or negative feelings as though they don't exist. Pain is information, it's a signal that something is damaging (or interfering or threatening) your life, your values, the fullest good you are capable of achieving. You must actually pay attention to that information and understand where it's coming from and what it means. If you're living a life of self-sacrifice when it comes to relationships and sex, or you're having your limbs chopped off, or your hand is on a stove, the origin of the pain is this improper action, and what it means is that you should stop what you're doing and change course (pursue a fulfilling relationship and sex life, pull your hand away from the stove, etc). The idea that "pain doesn't matter" is to say that pain is not an incentive. As I've described it, it's information, especially it's information about things that are interfering with your values, those positive values which are true incentives. What you do with that information depends entirely on its meaning - if it's a known condition that you are doing everything in your power to cure, then the continued pain is not offering any new information, and it essentially does not matter. In particular, it's not providing, in itself, an intrinsic motivation to avoid the pain - the motivation to avoid the pain comes from your positive values, those positive incentives which are being damaged, threatened, and interfered with by this pain, your inability to achieve everything you want to achieve, to experience the fullest good you are capable of experiencing by nature. There can come a point where someone is overwhelmed by pain, and they switch their ultimate motivation from the pursuit of values, of life and happiness - even seeking to avoid and escape from pain as a means to these ultimate ends - to regarding the escape from pain as the ultimate end instead. And the consequences of this switch are devastating to the ultimate end one ought to have, morally, by your nature as a living organism and as a man.
  3. The word "faith" originally just meant "belief". The Hebrew word for faith, "aman", means "believe, trust in, rely upon". The Greek word "pistis" means "to be persuaded". So belief without evidence is not intrinsic in the concept of faith, which simply refers to belief as such (and thereby normally implies a true belief that you've been convinced of for good reason, not a baseless belief that is believed for bad reason). This is how religious people use this concept as well, they believe in their religion, they are convinced it's true - if they thought it was not true, that it was baseless or without evidence, then they would drop their religion on the spot. The definition of mysticism is the belief in the supernatural. The essence of rationalism is having concepts detached from reality. So these three things can go together, when someone believes in certain mystical concepts that are detached from reality. In particular mysticism seems to imply a certain degree of rationalism, as concepts of the supernatural are inherently going to be detached from reality. But there isn't any necessary connection between faith and mysticism or rationalism, and someone can be rationalistic without being a mystic.
  4. I am most concerned with the future of the philosophy itself. There is a lot of work that needs to be done filling in the gaps, correcting mistakes, and expanding into new territory in metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics, ethics, politics, and the nature of man. The philosophy itself needs to become deeper and stronger, and the arguments need to get better in order to be convincing. Whether this is a continuing development of Objectivism as a system based on its sound fundamentals, or whether the fundamentals of the philosophy need to be improved and its time to close the chapter on Objectivism is still an open question.
  5. To "depend upon the assistance of able-bodied people" is not in itself a problem. You're not "a burden to others" or "living as a fully dependent entity", that's ridiculously disrespectful and inaccurate. There is no force involved, these people are helping because you're a value to them, they either personally want to keep you alive, or are being paid by you or people who value you to do so. You're not forcing or defrauding them, you're getting out of them what you have earned, whether materially or spiritually. Your virtue is still what you're surviving on, if you're in a wheelchair or in a coma or whatever the current situation is. To need help is not a black mark, as long as you're able to get it voluntarily. "Me Before You" did that really well, they showed that the idea of suicide for the sake of your loved ones is a total lie, everyone else in the movie was completely against it. It devastated everyone else. It's up to the people in your life whether they choose to help you when you're debilitated or not. If you opt for suicide sacrificially, for their sake, that's not you being beneficent, that's you taking their choice away. I don't normally have to explain to Objectivists that sacrificing yourself for the sake of others is a bad way to go. I'm not accusing anyone of being cowardly necessarily. The real difficulty with resilience is being able to adjust to a dramatically different context in life. This is not an easy step to make mentally or emotionally. Thinking that you have no values left in the world after a devastating loss can be an easy mistake to make. Realizing that you are still alive and conscious, and that it is a truly priceless opportunity, despite everything else having gone horribly wrong, is not always an obvious conclusion. I can be both empathetic with people and have the dignity to judge them morally. To drop your moral standards because someone is suffering is not doing them a service.
  6. This isn't what I meant. I'm not saying that pain as such is a positive value, but rather experience as such is a positive value, and so the experience of pain is a value as an experience - although because it's a painful experience, that means it's not the fullest, most positive experience that you could be having otherwise.
  7. Are you just asking about a football player who has lost the ability to pursue the career he loves? My answer to that is that he ought to have resilience, he should find other values in life that make it worth living. But that seems distinct from this other idea, that someone is damaged in such a way that the ability to think rationally is limited, which you also add the assumption that they are "dangerous". My answer to that is to seek treatment, even physically restrain one's self to prevent uncontrollable outbursts, take whatever actions are necessary in the context in which they now find themselves in order to seek out the positive achievements that are still possible to them.
  8. In psychology, what Eiuol and I have described is called resilience. It's the ability to live a good life despite tremendous suffering or loss. Resilience is the ability to adjust your expectations and your goals according to your circumstances - even in the face of a dramatic change of your circumstances, as in the case of devastating loss or suffering. It's the ability to stay optimistic and look on the positive side - to seek and to find good things that are within your range. Eiuol used the example of Christopher Reeves: If Reeves committed suicide he would have achieved less than he was capable of - it would have been self-sacrificial. And yet if Reeves held himself to the same standard of being an able-bodied Superman actor, something more than what he was capable of, he would have achieved nothing but failure - and would not have achieved the things he could, which would be equally self-destructive and self-sacrificial. So the fault you would find with a former athlete or actor who decides to commit suicide because they can no longer pursue their previous career, is that they lack resilience (incidentally, watch the movie Me Before You for a dramatization of exactly this issue).
  9. Pulling out a pistol and shooting yourself in the head is not an unconscious bodily function, it's a volitionally chosen act. Morality does apply in such a situation. I haven't seen that particular movie or that scene, but taking the example where you are on fire, the moral thing to do is to essentially stop, drop, and roll - i.e. to attempt to put the fire out and prevent further injury. Morality applies to all situations in which one is capable of volitional action. Among the volitional actions available to you (whether they are mental, such as thinking, remembering, imagining, creating, deducing, etc., or physical, such as speaking, moving your body, etc.), some of these actions will be irrational and some will be rational, some actions will work against your life and happiness, and some will work for it, and some will work for it better than others. The moral ideal is to choose the actions which will advance your life and happiness the most of them all, the optimal actions - to deliberately choose lesser actions instead, are irrational, immoral self-sacrifices in comparison.
  10. Sure, this is my basic point: Suicide is a contradiction to the fundamental moral philosophy of Objectivism. It is the sacrifice of life for death; the sacrifice of the good for the sake of a zero. Even in the example of someone who is suffering extreme loss or torture, the achievement of values and happiness is still possible, life is still worth living, and suicide is still an irrational self-sacrifice.
  11. Read Dagny's words: Or Rearden's: These are fictional examples, but this is a reality for people. People can and do make up their mind that pain does not matter, that pain is not a valid reason for stopping. It is possible to decide that pain is acceptable and quitting is not acceptable. They are at least alive, and they've made up their mind to use that priceless opportunity productively, to make the most of whatever existence they do have, to be everything they can be and ought to be given their condition, because anything less than that would be a sacrifice - a pointless, immoral sacrifice. Even in the most extreme circumstances, if you are alive and conscious, you have the ability to act. Your actions can be virtuous and productive, your thinking non-contradictory, and your conclusions that you achieve true. That achievement will invariably provide you with a feeling of self-esteem - a feeling of self-esteem that is not tarnished, but if anything only enhanced, by the degree to which you suffered in reaching that achievement. This non-contradictory joy, this happiness, absolutely is possible to anyone alive, and so in every case suicide is not a rational or moral option.
  12. I've said this myself previously, but I'd go a lot further than this now. There are no "pleasure receptors". There is no such special "physical sensation of pleasure" - every sensation is pleasurable. Awareness itself regardless of any extrospective sensation, is pleasurable. The sheer state of "being aware", like "being awake", just that sheer fact of having a subjective experience, independent of any object whatsoever - that is valuable in itself. I want to be. I like existing. Even in pain and suffering you can be enjoying yourself. Marie Bashkirtseff: "In this depression and dreadful uninterrupted suffering, I don't condemn life. On the contrary, I like it and find it good. Can you believe it? I find everything good and pleasant, even my tears, my grief. I enjoy weeping, I enjoy my despair. I enjoy being exasperated and sad. I feel as if these were so many diversions, and I love life in spite of them all. I want to live on. It would be cruel to have me die when I am so accommodating. I cry, I grieve, and at the same time I am pleased - not, not exactly that - I know not how to express it. But everything in life pleases me. I find everything agreeable, and in the very midst of my prayers for happiness, I find myself happy at being miserable. It is not I who undergo all this - my body weeps and cries; but something inside of me which is above me is glad of it all." This conclusion is only consistent with pain being a zero. If pain were a negative, commensurable value with pleasure, then it would entirely make sense to trade away a positive value in exchange for the subtraction of a negative, i.e. avoiding pain at the price of pleasure, or a disvalue being negated at the price of a true value. Pain is information. In absolute terms, it's even a positive experience, since every experience is positive to some extent. In relative terms, it tells you that something is wrong, something is interfering with your health, your fullest experience of pleasure, your positive pursuit of life. If you have a headache, the pain is a negative value merely instrumentally toward your other positive ends of the day; you won't be able to think as well because of the distraction. The value of negating that negative is entirely instrumental - it's measured by the increase in positive value you get by freeing yourself of that distraction.
  13. I don't think we're on the same page about this at all. But maybe this should be a separate thread.
  14. "suicide" means you volitionally choose to kill yourself. If the pain is so overwhelming that it completely disrupts your conscious awareness (and by this I mean that conscious awareness isn't even possible, not that you are conscious and thinking, but there's just a lot of pain), then you aren't even "alive" in the sense of being conscious, and certainly cannot take any volition action. I probably shouldn't have even mentioned this sort of case, since it only seems to be causing confusion and giving you an "out" to argue that suicide is "morally neutral" in certain certain extreme/emergency situations, which I completely reject.
  15. Can you explain the difference? I don't understand how "exist for the sake of pursuing values" (paraphrasing Galt, "We exist for the sake of earning rewards.") is any different than "exist to pursue their own happiness". By "values" I just mean life and happiness.
  16. Yes, values are chosen, and the values people choose can be right or wrong in their context according to the objective standard of life. You ought to always be choosing values that are highest pursuit possible to you given your context. If you choose to pursue values either out of your reach, or less than your full capacity, then you will be acting self-destructively and self-sacrificially. When tragedy strikes it changes a person's context dramatically, and it requires clear thinking to adjust to that new context, and to identify what is within your reach. And the achievement of values always is within your reach. To quote from my post above: Affirm life. Stay and fight. Suffering and loss do not matter. You exist for the sake of achieving values, and suicide cannot serve you in that quest.
  17. Let's concretize this issue. Suppose you are in extreme, persistent pain, and the most complete state of suffering possible, but you are still conscious (If you want to talk about pain disrupting the capacity for consciousness in the first place, note that if you are not capable of conscious awareness, then you are in essence already dead. But as long as you are effectively capable of consciousness, no matter how disruptive the pain is otherwise, you are still alive.) Let's essentialize the issue further and suppose further that you are in a kind of hell, trapped in your own mind cut off from the world outside, unable to see, hear, or perceive anything extrospectively whatsoever. Even trapped in your own head and in torturous pain you are still alive, you can still think, you can still imagine and create, you can still reason and come to conclusions. Imagine for example the creative process of writing a story, and the achievements that are possible to you in this activity entirely contained within your own mind: the pleasure of contemplating a plot, a beautifully designed series of events and dramatic conflicts which logically follow one another until they reach a climax, or the enjoyment of contemplating a character and their triumph over evil or a mistake in their philosophy, or the sheer poetic achievement of an idea stated beautifully and perfectly. Or imagine the achievements possible in pure mathematics: the excitement of tackling a hard problem, the triumph of solving a formula, or the joy of proving a proposition. As John Galt said, "the noblest act you have ever performed is the act of your mind in the process of grasping that two and two make four". You can still appreciate your own thinking. The practice of every virtue is still morally necessary, whether it's honesty with yourself about the objects of your thought and the relationships among them, or the productiveness of applying your creative ability to a meaningful end. No matter what torture you are undergoing, even in the worst imaginable level of suffering and hell, the practice of these virtues still leads to the achievements of values within your mind, the pleasure of which is a non-contradictory joy - it is the achievement of happiness. Take another example: the composition of music. From Atlas Shrugged: Even someone who is in the process of being tortured and suffering the worst possible pain, as long as they are alive, there are still values possible to them - in this case a work of art signifying a "great cry of rebellion", a defiant statement of someone who will not accept the necessity of suffering. One can still compose such art, or can at least sing such a hymn, "a hymn to a distant vision for whose sake anything was worth enduring, even this". In life, achieving values and happiness is always possible. Consider Roark, for whom suffering "only goes down to a certain point". Because he can create, because he can achieve positive values, nothing else can seem very important, and ultimately, "it's not really pain". Or consider Dagny: she did not believe in suffering. She would not allow pain to become important. She knew that "it does not count - it is not to be taken seriously" - "even in the moments when there was nothing left within her but screaming and she wished she could lose the faculty of consciousness". As John Galt said, "I know the unimportance of suffering, I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one's soul and as a permanent scar across one's view of existence." We exist for earning rewards. That is what motivates us, that is why we act - not for escaping pain. Pain is not going to make us function; it's not an incentive. To take any kind of positive action like committing suicide purely for the sake of escaping pain - so far from being an affirmation of what life ought to be, it would be a declaration that suffering is necessarily a part of life, that it is important and that it does matter. You are rejecting the belief that suffering is unimportant, and is only to be fought and thrown aside and not accepted as a meaningful part of one's view of existence. To affirm life, even amidst the worst possible torture, is to bow one's head in a silent "amen" to life, amounting to the words: "This is where I shall stay to fight. Suffering does not matter. I exist for the sake of achieving values, and suicide is not going to serve that quest."
  18. I'm surprised, Rand had a lot to say on this issue of the reification of evil. Rand talks about the basic vice being "evasion". This is not a positive "evil action" or "evil thought", but a failure to think. John Galt Atlas Shrugged Evil is a failure, a refusal, a "stop". It's not asserting the truth. There is something you ought to do - complete a thought, acknowledge what you see, pronounce a judgment - and you don't do it. You stop, and you don't do what you should do. Evil acts aren't a commission, they are an omission. Evil people aren't born evil, there is no "original sin", there is no positive "force of evil" out there, there's only the stopping, the absence, the lack of the force of good, that is, the force of thinking. Rand believed that evil is impotent. This theme of evil as a negative concept is absolutely pervasive in Atlas Shrugged: See my quote in the footnote above from John Galt, stating this position explicitly: "Evil, not value, is an absence and a negation, evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from us.", and, "I saw that evil was impotent—that evil was the irrational, the blind, the anti-real—and that the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve it." Dagny was expecting to find an enemy responsible for all the problems she saw, a competent enemy who was evil, but who she could fight and defeat - but instead, all she found was a big, diffuse cloud of incompetence, irresponsibility, and evasion. Wesley Mouch, one of the central people who went about backstabbing Rearden, enacting directive 10-289 and taking over the economy, finding and torturing Galt - was not some evil genius, but the opposite, the most unremarkable, mediocre, amorphous blob of a man imaginable. The entire character of Jim Taggart is a psychological study in evasion. He is constantly evading and refusing to think or to come to any definite conclusions or knowledge. As reality closes in on him, it becomes more and more impossible for him to evade, until the scene when Galt repairs the device they are torturing him with. At that point he can't go on evading the reality that's pressing in on him from all sides, and he shuts down completely. I don't really understand how it could be missed or argued against without taking down the entire Objectivist philosophy.
  19. A negative concept identifies the negation of another concept, its object, on which it logically depends. Negative concepts refer only to an absence of the specific object, not to the presence of anything else - they are merely the logical negation of the object, not the assertion of the existence of some other object. To assert the existence of a negative thing, as a different kind of existent, is a fallacy of the Reification of the Zero, a variant of the fallacy of the Stolen Concept. The concept "nothing" does not assert the existence of something called "nothing" - there is no such thing as "nothing" in and of itself, only the absence of a thing (the word literally means no-thing). The concept "non-existence" does not assert the existence of a "non-thing" - there is no such thing as "non-existence" in and of itself, only the absence of a thing in existence. In the same way, the concept "evil" depends on the concept "good". Evil is a negative concept indicating the logical negation of the good. The concept "evil" does not assert the existence of a "non-good", there is no such thing as an "evil" in and of itself, only the absence or contradiction of a good.1 Pain and fear are innate capacities to alert us that something is wrong, that there is a potential threat to our life and our pursuit of the good, but they do not by themselves offer us any positive value to seek. Pleasure tells us what is good, what is right, but pain can only tell us that something is wrong - it cannot tell us what is good or right.2 Rationally we can identify pain and suffering as a contradiction to the good, as a negative and an impediment, but innately pain simply does not offer us any pleasure, that is, it is a zero. It do not offer us the presence of any incentive to seek, so it cannot logically be the source of any conceptual values, nor can it be the fuel that makes us function.3 Man is by nature faced with a fundamental alternative: identity or non-identity, existence or non-existence – life or death. The concept of value, of "good or evil", is not an arbitrary human invention, but rather is based on a metaphysical fact, on an unalterable condition of man's existence: his life. The ultimate value, the final goal or end to which all lesser goals are means, is man's life. His life is his standard of value: that which furthers his life is the good, and that which threatens it is the evil.4 The choice to live is therefore the most basic moral choice that one faces.5 Only in life do we have any possibility of acting to seek the good or to enjoy happiness. Death offers no possibility of action or enjoyment. Moral action means to act for one's own rational self-interest, but there are no interests to seek in death. Only life can offer us a positive incentive. Death, like pain, cannot offer any positive incentive, but rather it is a zero. Suicide is the act of sacrificing life for death. Suicide is the sacrifice of the good for the sake of a zero. But it cannot be in one's self-interest to destroy one's self. One cannot rationally or morally act to end their life. John Galt Atlas Shrugged Observe the contradiction present in Piekoff's "Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand" (aka. OPAR): and later, On the one hand he says the commitment to life is essentially axiomatic, and that there's no basis for questioning it, and on the other hand that suicide is justified if you're suffering and your condition seems hopeless. This is an apparent contradiction. But Peikoff is not the pope, OPAR is not the Bible, and Ayn Rand is not God. It's possible that this is merely a contradiction. OPAR is not inerrant. Finding such a contradiction does not fundamentally break the philosophy of Objectivism, either. On the contrary, the fundamental moral conviction of the Objectivist philosophy is that life is the ultimate standard. This defense of suicide is inconsistent with the basic moral premises of the philosophy. The mistake here is derivative, not fundamental. The philosophy as a whole is sound; only the position on suicide is not. I submit to you that this position on suicide is a contradiction to the fundamental moral philosophy of Objectivism. If you disagree, let's hear your arguments. I'll start by responding to Peikoff's argument for suicide: can suicide be an "affirmation" of life if it's impossible to achieve happiness? Suicide cannot be an affirmation of life - it's the deliberate choice to destroy life. You cannot affirm your life by destroying it. As long as you are alive, and you are conscious to think and act, then you can either choose to act in the best interest of your life and happiness, no matter how tragically hopeless the situation may seem, or you can choose to sacrifice your best interest for something lesser. Suicide is the sacrifice of all possible interest. Death is non-existence, it knowably has no value at all - it is a zero. You cannot seek values in death. To act on the assumption that happiness is impossible would not be an affirmation of a happy life - that would be in fact be the most damning denial you could make. In such a tragic situation where happiness seems impossible, the way to affirm your life is to continue to seek your happiness despite the tragedy and hopelessness of the situation. In Peikoff's own words: That is an affirmation of life. Footnotes: (1) John Galt Atlas Shrugged (2) - The Objectivist Ethics, Ayn Rand (3) John Galt Atlas Shrugged Howard Roark and Dominique Francon The Fountainhead Atlas Shrugged (4) See "The Objectivist Ethics", in "The Virtue of Selfishness" by Ayn Rand (5) John Galt Atlas Shrugged
  20. Take the principle of egoism as opposed to altruism for example: the fruits of a man's labor are caused by his own actions, and that's why he ought to be the beneficiary. To assign the beneficiary of a man's labor to someone or something else is to desire the effects without the cause. By nature man is an autonomous being, who exists and acts for his own sake; he is the cause of the material products of his actions and thereby the rightful owner of them. So the act of theft (for example from the stealing thread), is literally based on a contradiction. You are ignoring the facts of reality, that you are dealing with a man who is by nature an autonomous being whose property belongs to him. Instead, you are acting as if this isn't true. You are ignoring the fact that what you are taking and drinking is a man's property, and you're pretending, as against the facts of reality, that the water belongs to you. It's a contradiction, and it's irrational and completely unjustified. "Reality is not to be wiped out, it will merely wipe out the wiper" In essence, by contradicting reality, you're contradicting yourself. It's an act of treason against your own nature, as a man who is an autonomous being, who exists and acts for his own sake. You're trading away the nature of your identity, and your right to the rewards of your own effort as a being of that nature, in favor of something else, some identity as a lesser being, who doesn't have such rights, and doesn't deserve the rewards of its own efforts. And pragmatically - if you're concerned about getting the best outcomes in terms of material values, look at the where they come from, what is the origin of material values? Their existence depends on man, a being who creates them for his own sake. To contradict this principle of egoism, this aspect of man's nature, is to contradict practically your ability to reach the very thing which you are aiming at as an end. This is why Rand says: the moral is the practical.
  21. Virtues do allow us to live competently - competent, meaning that your method and manner of living, is sound, rational, focused - competence doesn't mean that you're guaranteed any particular outcome. We don't know for sure that any and all material values we will ever want will necessarily be gained; that is not necessarily under our control. All we do know are the principles of how to act according to our nature, the self-contradiction inherent in violating such principles, and that in the long run, the best possible way to pursue our values is acting according to principle. Sure, the attaining of material values is a good sign that someone is moral and competent, but it's not necessarily the case. Someone could have acted completely irrationally, immorally, unjustly, or even not acted at all, and by some off-chance of their circumstance, or through the foolishness of some benefactor, gotten the material values as a result. Judging based on the outcome is not an appropriate way to define or measure morality or competence. The identification of a virtue is based on the analysis of human nature - whether an action is consonant with or contradictory to human nature in essence - it's not based on the evidence of when such a rule happens to result in some particular outcome or not in any given case. In a tragic situation, it is true that some material values will necessarily be lost, but it's not true that you necessarily have to act against human nature, that is, against your moral principles or your integrity. Keeping your integrity in the face of losing material values is not a lack of integrity! This Roark example is exactly him refusing to clutch onto some material value as against his integrity. He doesn't ignore the material values integrity is paired with, he's ignoring the material values it's not paired with. He doesn't use the loss of this material value as "evidence against integrity as a virtue"; the virtue of integrity is already known to him, it's a certainty he's gained through rational introspection into his own nature as man. Taking his material loss as evidence against integrity as a virtue is exactly what Ayn Rand showed Roark not doing; it was specifically her intention to showcase his moral strength by him not doing such a thing. By "social context", Ayn Rand is simply referring to whether your actions pertain to interfering with another person's life or property. If you are taking such an action, then morally (and legally, in a rights-respecting society), you need their consent. If you don't have their consent but act anyway (whether you're stealing their property or murdering them with a train, for example), then you're violating the moral principle of individual rights.
  22. That is not what Ayn Rand said about morality and ethics. Morality is not just meant for answering the question about how one ought to act in the range of the moment or under "typical circumstances", completely disregarding moral principles, virtues, and individual rights whenever some "emergency" arises. She spends so much effort in Virtue of Selfishness arguing against this conception of a murderous "selfish" brute and their so-called "morality". And she does not have an "ethics of emergencies" separate from ethics or morality in "normal" life. As I explained here, in her essay on The Ethics of Emergencies, she does not say that trolley or lifeboat problems are irrelevant to morality or life, or that they offer no insight: The essay begins with her asking us to consider the implications of someone who begins their approach to the subject of ethics with lifeboat scenarios - which she regards as a disintegrated, malevolent, and basically altruistic approach to the subject, that cannot ultimately yield a rational system of ethics. She did not say that lifeboat scenarios are "irrelevant", that they are the 0.01 of cases that morality is "not intended for", she says exactly the opposite: And she absolutely did not say that moral principles are "intended for the 99.9% of existence": She does not say to act in accordance with your hierarchy of values 99.9% of the time, she says always. Sacrificing a greater value to a lesser one is not okay 0.01% of the time, it's never okay. She did not say that moral principles apply to 99.9% of one's choices - she says they apply to all choices. She then goes to take those principles of ethics that apply in the 99.9% of existence in which one is not in an emergency, and proceeds to apply those very same principles to emergency situations: As we can see in this example, the virtue of integrity, which applies in the 99.9% of existence in which one is not in an emergency, also prescribes what one ought to do in the 0.01% of life in which one is in an emergency, too.
  23. Objectively, yes. We all have in common human nature, and we all share a common cause, our rational self-interest.
  24. Dustin, People can have deeply mistaken beliefs morally, politically, etc. But that doesn't mean they can't be persuaded rationally. They are still rational beings. Ideas do matter. They are still people, and we all share the same values, and while some people are mistaken about what things are, how things work, the best way to achieve their values, etc., if you can show them the nature of their mistake, that they are holding a contradiction, that reality doesn't conform to their expectations, that they aren't achieving their values by the methods they believe in, and show them the right ideas and the right way, then you can change their mind. There are many, many stories of this happening, and a video of some irrational protesters running around doesn't change the basic reality.
  25. You are arguing that principles originate from and are justified by their purpose, by their consequences in some outcome, such as your physical survival. This is the reason you're willing to commit theft or even murder, because you judge - shortsightedly - that it's in the best interests of your survival. But this is not the Objectivist theory on the origin and justification of principles. A principle is not a "generally pragmatically useful heuristic"; it is an objective truth about the nature of reality and of man. Saying that one "lives in service to principles" is no different than saying one "lives in service to truth" or "lives in service to reality". It's just a fact that you are beholden to reality, to truth, and to principles. You can live and act on the basis of truth or on the basis of contradiction. That is the most basic difference between being principled and unprincipled, and between moral right and wrong.
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