epistemologue

Please see my response to his article here:

If you are placed in the hypothetical "trolley problem", where a train is barreling toward a group of people tied to the tracks, and you happen across a lever with which you could divert the train onto another track on which only one person is tied to the tracks – do not pull the lever. Do not take an action in which you direct a train toward a person to cause their death, because intentionally taking an action to kill an innocent person is murder, and murder is morally wrong. If the train simply continues on its prior course without any intervention and a tragedy happens, there is no moral responsibility for the person who happened to be at the lever; tracing the chain of causality back from the tragedy, there is no point at which you can point to the person at the lever causing what followed: they made a choice, but they took no action to cause this tragedy, and they are not morally responsible for what happened. An example of this kind of "moral jurisdiction" is in Atlas Shrugged, in the scene where Ferris talks to Galt:

Tracinski states, This is not what Ayn Rand says in her essay "The Ethics of Emergencies". 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. I started a separate thread answering what one ought to do in the trolley problem here:

I was referring back to Dustin's post earlier in this thread. I started a separate thread on this issue:

Dustin explained issues he has had in another thread: Issues like these are so common they are almost epidemic among Objectivists. See for example what Nathaniel Branden wrote, in 1984: http://web.archive.org/web/20120106060148/http://www.nathanielbranden.com/ayn/ayn03.html An Objectivist popped into the chatroom just the other night discussing their psychological issues with me. They were seeing a therapist because they were overloaded with stress from work, essentially because they were over-valuing material independence, and the therapist was having trouble helping them. What I had to say to this person is this: The virtue of independence doesn't pertain to material independence primarily. Virtues are about how you think and act, not about your material circumstances. It doesn't make sense to describe material independence as a "virtue"; that's a consequence, not an action. Virtues describe principles of action. If you read Rand's description of independence, she's talking entirely about judgment and the mind: "yours is the responsibility of judgment", "no substitute can do your thinking", she rejects "the acceptance of an authority over your brain" - these do not comment on material dependence, or say anything negatively about relying on others, but rather they are focusing in on a particular issue of how you use your own mind. When she talks about independence, she's talking about that virtue of using your mind, acquiring knowledge the best you can, thinking the best you can, and being able to come to judgments based on that thinking and knowledge. In essence, she's focused on how to think and act to the best of your ability. That does not preclude either material dependence, or relying on others in general. Virtues are not negative principles, they aren't there to instruct you what not to do, they are there primarily to talk about what you should do, based on what's possible to you simply by nature. By nature we are all capable of thinking, acquiring knowledge, and forming judgments - and morally, we should. Independence as a virtue is a matter of sound mind and sound action, not a matter of a trade-off of material values. And if material independence were held as high in one's mind as a virtue of character, that could lead one to make bad trade-offs in one's life, such as pursuing material independence at the expense of other values like a good social life. If one holds material independence - the outcome - to the standards of a virtue of one's character - which pertains to one's actions - that could lead to some serious distress and guilt, because one's esteem becomes tied to the material outcomes rather than to one's actual virtue and character. Imagine if Roark took working in the quarry as fault of his integrity; he wouldn't have made it out of there. Virtue needs to be completely separate from outcome. Consider this quote from Peikoff's lecture on "Certainty and Happiness": "Let’s consider here a moral man who has not yet reached professional or romantic fulfillment, an Ayn Rand hero, say Roark or Galt, at a point where he is alone against the world, barred from his work, destitute. Now such a person has certainly not “achieved his values”. On the contrary he is beset by problems and difficulties. Nevertheless, if he is an Ayn Rand hero, he’s confident, at peace with himself, serene. He is a happy person even when living through an unhappy period. He does experience deprivation, frustration, pain. But in a phrase that I think is truly memorable, from the Fountainhead, it’s pain that “goes down only to a certain point”. He has achieved, not success, but the ability to succeed. In other words, the right relationship to reality. So the emotional leitmotif of such a person is a unique and enduring form of pleasure: the pleasure that derives from the sheer fact of a man’s being alive, if he is a man who feels able to live. I’ve described this particular emotion as "metaphysical pleasure". Now metaphysical pleasure depends on one’s own choices and actions. And in that sense virtue does ensure happiness- not the full happiness of having achieved one’s values in reality, but the radiance of knowing that such achievement is possible." I think this quote from Peikoff is helpful because it illustrates what it means to have self-esteem based on your character, independent of where you actually are in life - that is, independent of the outcomes. --- Dustin is by no means alone in the issues he's having. Objectivists have had these issues for decades, and they still do even today. In Understanding Objectivism, Peikoff identifies another cause of this psychological problem in Objectivists: a concrete-bound mentality. As an Objectivist, one might hold themselves to the concrete elements of Rand's heroes instead of to the abstract moral principles the heroes exemplify. Since, objectively, one might not (and need not) value any of the particular concretes that her heroes value, the fact that one's emotions are not in line with such concretes can mistakenly lead one to the idea that one's emotions are out of control and must be repressed, which can lead to a great deal of distress and suffering. Here's an excerpt from lecture ten of Understanding Objectivism describing the issue: There is a similar issue known by the term "Howard Roark Syndrome", essentially the issue of taking Rand's heroes too literally, and thereby holding oneself to an impossible (or even an improper) standard. This was discussed previously on this forum: Another post: The consequences of this kind of problem can be an inability to act appropriately when dealing with other people (in the case of the second quote), or even broken relationships (in the case of the first quote), or in general, an under-valuation of other people, which can be a major factor in these psychological problems common to Objectivists.

The original question in this thread is assuming an implicit, fundamental premise: that goodness or badness is measured by the quality of one's experience (happiness or suffering, respectively), and transitively, on the likelihood of such experiences in the future. If one were to assume this premise, which we can call "utilitarianism" (and may be of the collectivist or egoist variety), then there are three fundamentally different ways to approach the question, depending on what kind of experience you hold as having moral weight: 1. Negative utilitarianism, which holds that only suffering is what counts, morally. This is the Epicurean view and is anathema to Objectivism. 2. Positive utilitarianism, which holds that only pleasure is what counts, morally. I don't know of this view being endorsed explicitly anywhere besides in my own essay on the subject entitled "positive utiltiarian egoism" (which I still favor, but no longer endorse; for my position, see the end of this post). 3. Utilitarianism (unlabeled) of the regular variety, in which pleasures and pains are held as commensurable values, morally. This is the traditional utilitarian view held by many. If you hold the first view, then death is an inherently good thing, as it permanently ends suffering, and puts a stopper on any continued negative experiences that could have otherwise come after. If you hold the second view, then death is an inherently bad thing, as it permanently ends pleasure, and likewise puts a stopper on any continued positive experiences that could have otherwise come after. If you hold the third view, then death may be a good or bad thing, depending on your evaluation of the likelihood of the overall weight of continued positive or negative experiences that may come in the future. The second view has been represented in this thread by Boydstun: and (astutely, though perhaps mistakenly) by dream_weaver: I'd add to these the following: "Should man's primary concern be a quest for joy - or an escape from suffering?" "Philosophy: Who Needs It," Philosophy: Who Needs It, 4 "You seek escape from pain. We seek the achievement of happiness. You exist for the sake of avoiding punishment. We exist for the sake of earning rewards. Threats will not make us function; fear is not our incentive." ... "Do you ask if it's ever proper to help another man? No - if he claims it as his right or as a moral duty that you owe him. Yes - if such is your own desire based on your own selfish pleasure in the value of his person and his struggle. Suffering as such is not a value; only man's fight against suffering, is. If you choose to help a man who suffers, do it only on the ground of his virtues, of his fight to recover, of his rational record, or of the fact that he suffers unjustly; then your action is still a trade, and his virtue is the payment for your help. But to help a man who has no virtues, to help him on the ground of his suffering as such, to accept his faults, his need, as a claim - is to accept the mortgage of a zero on your values." ... "It's not that I don't suffer, it's that 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." John Galt Atlas Shrugged "I'm not capable of suffering completely. I never have. It goes only down to a certain point and then it stops. As long as there is that untouched point, it's not really pain. "Where does it stop?" "Where I can think of nothing and feel nothing except that I designed that temple. I built it. Nothing else can seem very important." Howard Roark and Dominique Francon The Fountainhead "She was seeing the brand of pain and fear on the faces of people, and the look of evasion that refuses to know it–they seemed to be going through the motions of some enormous pretense, acting out a ritual to ward off reality, letting the earth remain unseen and their lives unlived, in dread of something namelessly forbidden–yet the forbidden was the simple act of looking at the nature of their pain and questioning their duty to bear it." ... "She survived it. She was able to survive it, because she did not believe in suffering. She faced with astonished indignation the ugly fact of feeling pain, and refused to let it matter. Suffering was a senseless accident, it was not part of life as she saw it. She would not allow pain to become important. She had no name for the kind of resistance she offered, for the emotion from which the resistance came; but the words that stood as its equivalent in her mind were: It does not count - it is not to be taken seriously. She knew these were the words, even in the moments when there was nothing left within her but screaming and she wished she could lose the faculty of consciousness so that it would not tell her that what could not be true was true. Not to be taken seriously - an immovable certainty within her kept repeating - pain and ugliness are never to be taken seriously." Atlas Shrugged and by Harrison: And the third view is represented by the much-beloved (though morally abhorrent) post of Nicky: Objectivism as expressed by Ayn Rand in her fiction and nonfiction does not accept the fundamental premise of the question, namely: the moral weight of good and bad is not found in one's experiences in Objectivism. Objectivism is not utilitarian at all. In Ayn Rand's philosophy, existence does not precede essence; good and bad are measured with respect to one's virtue, to one's integrity, and not to the likely effects on one's merely physical survival. Death is regarded as bad in Objectivism because Existence is Identity. The "good" is that which has kept its integrity. From Roark in The Fountainhead: "An honest man has to be of one piece and one faith; what constituted the life source, the idea in any existing thing or creature, and why - if one smallest part committed treason to that idea - the thing of the creature was dead; and why the good, the high and the noble on earth was only that which kept its integrity." The "bad" is not merely physical death, but rather the morally corrupt, and the self-contradictory. Rand writes in "The Inexplicable Personal Alchemy": "If named, the driving motive of the dissenters would be an appeal which, to them, is irresistible: “But don’t you see? It’s *true!*”—and they would speak, regardless of circumstances, regardless of danger, regardless of their audience, so long as the audience had a human form, they would speak in desperate innocence, knowing that a life-or-death imperative compels them to speak, not knowing fully why. And, facing a firing squad, if necessary, they would still feel it, with no time to learn why and to discover that they are moved by the noblest form of metaphysical self-preservation: the refusal to commit spiritual suicide by abnegating one’s own mind and to survive as a lobotomized automaton. While her husband was being tried and sentenced to a prison camp, Larisa Daniel said, supporting him: “I cannot do otherwise.” As a human being, she could not." This is the Objectivist justification for why death is bad. We are by nature living beings, and through our actions we can either choose life, that is, to keep our integrity, or we can choose death, that is, to sacrifice our integrity, and to contradict our metaphysical identity.

It's actually so common among Objectivists it's almost epidemic.

The matter of whether someone's looks are "good" is a matter of aesthetics, and as such the evaluations are ultimately purely objective. Different people can have different evaluations based on their philosophical premises, sense of life, or level of knowledge, and the degree to which they've misintegrated contradictions into their prior thinking and value judgments. People's subjective evaluations of looks can thus change accordingly, if they change their minds on any of these issues because they've been convinced by reasonable argument. Aesthetic philosophy describes objective standards of beauty in visual form with standards such as symmetry, proportionality, harmony, etc. The ultimate standard is the idealized form of man - the fundamental elements of human nature projected into a bodily form, following perfectly (without lapse or contradiction) the standards of aesthetic beauty, and, when it applies to the volitionally chosen aspects of a person's looks, following perfectly also the standards of rationality and morality. When all of these elements are projected out from the metaphysically given in human nature, with perfect consistency and without contradiction (either metaphysically, aesthetically, epistemologically, or morally), that resulting image is the standard against which good looks are measured. To the degree a given example of a person's looks is consistent with this image, their looks are objectively better, and to the degree a person's looks are inconsistent or contradictory to this image, their looks are objectively worse. As for Brad Pitt vs. Jared Leto, I'd say Brad Pitt is objectively more good looking due to having a more masculine face.

Welcome, drop in the chatroom sometime!

My opinion on this statement is that Rand meant that, in that moment during a live Q&A for a totally different topic, she could not possibly imagine how to grapple with such a moral dilemma. This answer was really poorly done on her part (I don't think she's perfect in everything she says all the time), and I don't see any reason to take this as a contradiction of her written philosophy, or as her conceding some inherent limitations in her philosophic or artistic ability in general, as she's grappled with many other difficult problems before without throwing her hands up and saying philosophy cannot say what to do. So, you're confirming my basic analysis of your morality, that "morality is defined as choosing actions that are most likely to lead to these outcomes", and you're simply noting that virtues are helpful rules of thumb for one to follow, which we've induced to be moral rules from experience, because they generally lead to good outcomes - that is, outcomes where the real moral value is located. Dogs aren't moral agents, and their choices are not moral choices, because they are not rational beings (which I've already said is part of the context of morality). Again, I fundamentally disagree that Rand's morality was consequentialist in the way you're describing. She did not regard values as these outcomes, of one's physically being alive or feeling happy, and she did not regard virtues as rules of thumb induced from experience according to how frequently they lead to positive outcomes.

The context of morality is this: a conscious, rational being acting in the face of an alternative. There is no distinction between "emergency situations" and "lifeboat situations" as far as the context of morality is concerned. You are still in the same reality*, you are still conscious and rational, and you are still facing alternatives in which you can act. * quoted from an earlier post: Your claim is still essentially the same: life and happiness must be possible outcomes of one's actions in order for morality to make any sense - because morality is defined as choosing actions that are most likely to lead to these outcomes. That is consequentialism. That is not Objectivist morality.

The justification for not stealing is based on the concept of individual rights which derive from the nature of man. It is not based on what seems most likely to support one's physical survival in the range of the moment; the ends do not justify the means. Now as a separate issue, suppose your goal is to support and prolong your physical life (a very fine goal to have), what is the best way to go about that? Should you stomp all over the consent of other men, steal what they produce, negate their mind, and treat them as slaves? Is that actually going to be effective in the long term? It might be effective in the short term, just as cutting a man's throat to steal his wallet might buy you a meal today, but no, that is not going to be effective in the long run. In the long run to be successful you will need to trade with other men, voluntarily, and to mutual benefit, as rational producers who share a common nature (a rational mind), and a common cause (rational self-interest). The creative work of free men under capitalism, the political and economic system of individual rights, has done more than anything else could possibly do to extend the life expectancy and quality of life of man, through the advancement of knowledge, science, technology, and economic productivity. In the face of physical death, the only hope for man to rely on in the very long run is the nature of man's mind, and the benevolently lawful and intelligible nature of the natural universe. If man continues to choose to advance his creative work to the limits of what's possible in reality, and continues to hold the moral system which such work depends on, then, and only that basis, we may find that even overcoming of physical death (through some kind of resurrection) is possible in reality. So the best way to pursue this goal of supporting and prolonging your physical life in the very long run is to hold to the moral and political principles of individual rights and capitalism by refusing to steal from another man.

Sorry, I need to clarify... my argument has not been that "not-stealing" is the right thing to do because it's the best way to live, in the long term. My argument was just that, supposing your goal is to live, then not-stealing is the best way to do that.

I'm not really following this. Why can't a rule be prescribed? StrictlyLogical made the point quite clearly that you can, just as Rand described in Ethics of Emergencies, and I don't know how you think you've refuted this: "In an emergency a man faces better and worse choices... particularly in consequence to his life and values...only a nihilist or a skeptic would say the choices are ALL EXACTLY EQUAL ... In the end there still is an objective morality" ... "the question becomes rather uninteresting as it is the application of known principles in a particular context" I think you're wrong to suggest Rand based her ethics on the idea that physical survival is the ultimate end, and actions are justified causally according to the likelihood of their effects on that end. That wasn't her claim in The Objectivist Ethics, that isn't the position she defends in her non-fiction, and it's not the motivation of the characters in her fiction.

That was not her answer. See from my post linked above... Why aren't you presenting the unequivocal statements of Ayn Rand in her original, definitive work, "The Ethics of Emergencies", written to address this very question, featured in the canonical book of Objectivist ethics, "The Virtue of Selfishness"? Why instead have they taken these other comments - which are highly contradictory to the canonical position of the Objectivist ethics, from an obscure Q&A session given years later, on a lecture concerning a very different subject - as not only the more important and more defining, but apparently the only position that you even bothered to consider here? As Ayn Rand states in "The Ethics of Emergencies" very explicitly: morality always applies, to all of one's choices. When one is dealing with the circumstances of an emergency, that is merely another instance where one must apply their moral principles. You can always have a "long-term outlook of flourishing" and act accordingly, regardless of what situation you find yourself in currently. Devil's Advocate makes great points - How can you say that morality applies on a desert island - and that it doesn't apply on a lifeboat? StrictlyLogical also points out the reality that emergencies are still situations where man has a choice and must act - and therefore where morality must apply:

Take a look at my post in the stealing thread:

From the intro to The Fountainhead: I think the emotion of worship *is* necessary, at least in general, it is the highest level of man's emotions that we are talking about here, and to sacrifice those would be suicidal. Ayn Rand does specifically talk about this emotion referring to man himself, however, but not to reality as such. I believe I've heard the same sentiment from her as Repairman has expressed, that reality is simply neutral, and not an object of reverence, though I can't place where I've read it. Rand also expressed reverential feelings about the world in some places, too:

I think the current "opt-out" system is flawed, you should have to volitionally choose citizenship in order to get it, but that doesn't change the fact that the system is fundamentally based on consent, and always has been.

It seems like you've answered your own question. If you can leave at any time, then it's voluntary.

then nothing you said applies

So would you say that there will be a rational cure for this ill that besets us, due to our momentary ignorance of it... namely, the ill of *death*? I would agree, that's exactly my position, but I'm curious if you are willing to stand by your statement to its logical conclusion or not.

Supposing reality were consistently set upon the termination of my existence, that would be pretty harsh.

It is important, but you can always convert people by persuading them of your positions.

Well, which is it? Is there a reverence for reality in Objectivism or not?

Citizenship is a contract between the government and the individual. How is forcing one party to sign a contract a "right"? They can set whatever terms they want - i.e. the legal process of immigration.