Invictus2017

I absolutely do believe that happiness is fundamental to the good life (but that the good life is not the experience of happiness alone); I utterly disagree that this is "something like hedonism." I meant "fundamental" in the sense of "the logical foundation of". I agree that happiness is essential to the good life, but not fundamental in the logical sense. To avoid a possible misunderstanding, I want to emphasize that logical priority is not the same thing as value priority. So, for example, if seeking happiness is down the logic chain from seeking material values, that merely means that the academic exercise of validating happiness as a value requires first validating material values. But that does not entail the proposition that material values are more important than happiness. The Randian position and, I think, yours could probably be better stated as "happiness is central and essential", rather than "happiness is fundamental". "Central" because everything leads to and is involved with happiness, and "essential", because an ethics that does not validate and elevate happiness would necessarily be worthless. As you've noted, your position and mine are not all that different. It's likely that many of the perceived differences aren't real but are instead an artifact of our differing usages of words. Anyway, to rephrase what I said earlier: Some things you have said suggest that you think that happiness is logically prior to ethics or that happiness is the value for which all other values are the means. Either of those views would amount to something like hedonism. However, most of what you say is not really consistent with either proposition. (I'm off to reread The Objectivist Ethics and will post a summary of my understanding of it in the other topic. Then I'll do the same with the relevant part of Kelley's work. Then I'll essay my own views. The point of the first two is not to start an argument about what they say, but to sharpen my understanding of the issues.)

You bypass my express disinterest in trying to determine what Kelley's views are, specifically, to make an argument about Kelley's views? A significant choice. That wasn't what I meant. What I was trying to convey was that your explanation of what Kelley said has made me want to reread the relevant part of his discussion to see whether I had misunderstood him.That's why I kept qualifying things, as in "I don't take", "I understand", and "as I recall it". I wasn't trying to start an argument about it. I might do that after I have done my rereading.

I've read that, and I didn't take it as advocating survivalism. That said, I'm goiing to reread the relevant parts of LSO and also Rand's essay, whose links SL kindly posted in a new topic. I'll also post my substantive thoughts there; I'd only been posting here because, "when in Rome...." Is anyone here actually arguing that mere quantity of life is the goal of ethics? I haven't seen that from anyone. Certainly not from me! I don't take that as arguing survivalism; I understand it to mean merely that life/death is at the root of values, not the whole of values. The rest of his discussion doesn't support survivalism, at least as I recall it. I'll be rereading it shortly. You have said things that suggest that you think that happiness is fundamental. If you did think that, your view would be something like hedonism.

The page 2 link points to page 6. I'll be posting substantive posts here instead of over in the consequentialist topic, since this is a far more appropriate forum.

Based on what? Based on a comparison of what a reasoned consideration of the situation would conclude. So, if history demonstrates that your emotions generally prompt you to the same action that your reason does, you are emotionally healthy. (Again, it's a bit more complicated than that. But for present purposes, this suffices.) Of course. That is why emotional health must be defined in relation to one's reason.

I didn't get that from what I read. But then, I have read very little from him specifically on Objectivism. What's your source? I've decided that I should prepare anything of significant length in a text editor I'm familiar with and then paste it over here. It's awkward, but there are fewer bugs to deal with........

It's fairly easy to frame the hypothetical in this case. Our Hero has been given the opportunity to pursue his life-long dream, which he expects to bring immense happiness. The gotcha is that the experts tell him it'll likely cut five years off his life. Other experts tell him that he'll likely suffer from severe depression if he doesn't go, and this will likely knock off a year or so from his life. As you say, the survivalist, going with the best knowledge available, will stay home. The proper analysis is different, though, and leads to a different conclusion. Before that analysis can be undertaken, your hypothetical needs an additional assumption. This assumption is that of emotional health. There's no need to get into the details of what constitutes emotional health. Rather, a definition suffices: Emotional health is that state where one's emotions are generally a reliable indicator of ethical action. That is, as a rule, one gets positive emotions from acting ethically and one's positive emotions motivate actions that are ethical. (And conversely with negative emotions.) On this assumption, Our Hero goes through his life seeking happiness, only occasionally checking to see that doing so is really the right thing. In this hypothetical, Our Hero could actually just follow his emotions and end up doing the right thing. But he would be acting unethically were he to do so; when the possible consequences are so serious, he needs to reason things through. The reasoning is fairly simple, though. His goal is not simple survival, but continuing to live. He does not ask what will keep him alive longest, because he does not live an abstract "life" where the only factor of significance is whether he continues to carry out the process of life. The question he asks is, instead, what constitutes "continuing to live" for the particular life that is his. In essence, what he seeks is not longevity but health, in the broadest sense. Health, basically, is the state where each part of an organism carries out its function of contributing to the organism's life. (It's a little more complicated than that, but the difference doesn't matter here.) Our Hero's choice, from this perspective is to go, satisfying his emotions, or to stay, setting them against himself. In either case, he will still be able to effectively carry out the other processes of life, so that isn't a factor. But there are situations where following one's emotions would not be right. I implied one earlier, where one's emotions are not healthy. An example of another such situation would be one where the trip was expected to be one that would damage his ability to pursue his dream. In that case, his immediate sense that taking the trip would bring happiness would have to give way to the rational conclusion that it would not.

The problem is not yours, but that reader's. I had no trouble at all understanding your position or that you were agreeing with me. No other interpretation was possible. At some point, one must conclude that a particular reader is either too sloppy or too hostile to understand what one is saying. At that point, further attempts at persuasion are irrational.

Certainly. I merely meant to exclude hypotheticals involving literal impossibilities or unknowables Absolute certainty about the life shortening effects of eating ice cream would be one such hypothetical. OTOH, I might entertain a hypothetical about life on other planets; there is evidence that life does evolve on planets, after all. The point, as I said earlier, is that such hypotheticals cannot lead to conclusions about reality.

It's foreign to pretty much everyone's experience However, it is important to distinguish between the psychological and the philosophical. As a matter of day-to-day life, one does not ordinarily ask "what do I have to do in order to live" and conclude that one should seek happiness in order to live. If your daily life has you asking what you need to do in order to live, you've got bigger problems than finding happiness! However, if that's not your position, you treat happiness as an end-in-itself. What Objectivism basically says is that, from a philosophical standpoint, treating happiness as an end-in-itself is an error. BUT, with a little care, it is a perfectly valid way to live one's life. The caveat is that one must make an effort to ensure that what constitutes happiness for you really does further your life as a human being. But this does not have to be a part of your daily life. You give it thought at important moments or when something suggests to you that following your happiness might cause you grief, but most of the time you seek happiness as if it was an end in itself. You'll find the answers to all your questions on merriam-webster.com, wherein you will discover that it is an actual expression meaning just what you think it does. (They're my favorite dictionary people because they're descriptivists and because I worked with them at one time, so I know that they know what they're doing.) Anyway, I prefer the dribs and drabs approach when a post addresses more than one point. When I respond, I don't have to invest as large a block of time on each piece as I would in answering one big message on multiple topics. Also, my system isn't very reliable, so the longer the post, the better the chance of something going gnorw.

(My browser confused itself, so I sent my last message before it went totally haywire. Is there a way to save draft messages?) How could it be otherwise? No organism lives an abstract "life"; it lives its particular life, which has a particular nature. So, to hold life as the standard of value is necessarily to have one's particular life as the standard of value. Rand's answer is different. She observes that man is the creature that survives by means of his rational faculty, and concludes that it is life as a rational animal that is his proper goal. Strictly speaking, that is one's penultimate goal. The ultimate goal is simply life, but since one is a human being, that entails the goal of living as a rational being. In her view, emotions are secondary -- but they are not unimportant therefore. Emotions motivate and reward, and a person whose emotions did not motivate and reward rational action would be a cripple. Thus, in order to be rational and to act for one's life, it is necessary to act for one's happiness. (I agree with this, BTW.) Way more than the majority. Aside from things like walking in front of a bus or not eating, it is essentially impossible to determine the survival consequences of an action. No doubt a survivalist would point to probabilities, but that would evidence only a complete failure to understand probability. Survivalism can counsel avoiding death, but it provides no guide to living.

*snicker* I had noticed some dissing your ice cream example as unimportant. But even on a survivalist theory, pleasures can enhance one's ability to function and hence be ethical. BTW, I've decided to abjure hypotheticals that are based on things that are not true, such as human omniscience. So, no more of this "I know for a certainty that...." Such hypotheticals assume that which is not real, so any conclusions drawn from them say nothing about reality. Even in your example, not going to space could have the psychological effect of destroying the guy's will to live and thereby shortening his life. Of course, you can contrive an example where the consequences of both alternatives are easily determinable. But you'd have to contrive it; life is almost never so clearly defined. True. My point was, basically, that both examples call into question the basic premise of survivalism, that survival is the only thing that really matters. Life/death is the connection between is and ought, and it is essential to what constitutes ethics, but it is not the whole of ethics (all else being commentary). In my view, both quantity and quality of live are ethically relevant. Exactly how is the issue I want to nail down. I don't think it does, either. Life "faces" existence/nonexistence and so human beings need ethics. But it is "life", not "survival", that is the ultimate end. They aren't the same. (More to come.)c

(I'm still formulating my general argument on this topic, and will post when I have something coherent to add to what I said before.) This is not materially different from the ice cream discussion. In both cases, the essential question is whether a benefit now can ever justify the shortening of one's life and, if so, how does one decide when. My view on this, in abstract, is that "benefit now" and "benefit later" are incommensurable and therefore it is logically impossible to balance one against the other. This makes it necessary to resolve issues such as you describe by some means other than the cost/benefit analysis that survivalism would seem to require.

Nope. I was merely making a logical point --- that a goal and the consequences that flow from achieving the goal are two different things. Objectivism's ethics is both a consequentialist and a virtue ethics. It is consequentialist in that one is to act to continue one's life. It is a virtue ethics in that acting in accordance with certain principles is the way to do so. (But, as I said earlier, I really don't have much use for such academic terms. What does it matter -- outside of academic circles -- where the ethics falls in the academic classification of ethics?) This may be reasonable for millenials. But for me, the odds are very much against life extension techniques advancing enough that I can hope to live indefinitely. So, I make my plans with the assumption that I have about even odds of being around in 20 years. For me, simply because of my age, it is likely a metaphysical fact that my life has a point beyond which it will not extend. An ethics based around the idea of my living indefinitely would, if that is a metaphysical fact, be based on a falsehood, and would be necessarily invalid. In any case, the Objectivist ethics isn't concerned with dying, it's concerned with living. Death is merely a fact one must deal with by, for example, not picking goals that one cannot accomplish within one's life. (I don't even recall any official Objectivist pronouncements about death. Anyone have references?)

Look harder.... If an entity invariably succeeded in achieving the goal of continuing to live, it would live forever. But that does not make "living forever" its goal. It makes living forever a consequence of success at its goal.

Actually, I would say that "survival appropriate to man" entails "flourishing", as opposed to "flourishing" being something added to "survival appropriate to man". That also appears to be Kelley's position in TLSO, though I'd have to reread to be sure. Anyway.... I haven't been getting enough sleep the last few days, so I haven't been able to properly organize my thoughts for writing on this topic. However, there is one point I think I should bring up, because it identifies a central error in this and similar discussions. A living entity enacts a goal-directed process, with its goal the continuance of itself. It's important to keep in mind that this goal isn't "to live forever" or even "to live a long time", it is "to keep on living". An action that supports the goal, supports the goal, even if there is an alternative action that would result in a longer life. (This is consistent with the fact that living beings evolved; in evolution, organisms are selected, not for longevity, but for reproductive effectiveness.) All entities have the future possibility of not existing, and this is what gives rise to the concept of value in relation to living entities, as Rand pointed out. But indefinite life is not the goal of life, rather the goal is merely life's continuation. So, in forming one's value hierarchy, the top is not indefinite survival, it is continuing one's life. This is a seemingly hair-splitting difference, but it is a real and important one. Were living as long as possible the proper ultimate goal of one's actions, mere survival -- survival regardless of one's circumstances -- would be one's target. On that view, a cheerless, pointless existence as a comatose vegetable tended by hordes of well paid medical experts could be better than a life full of happiness -- and risk. I don't think any of us accept that conclusion. I don't think any even semi-rational person, except maybe a drug addict, would accept that conclusion. I'd go further: If that's all that ethics had to offer as its view of the proper life, I (and I expect you) would say, be damned to ethics. But that isn't the proper ultimate goal. It also isn't merely continuing one's life. Were that the proper ultimate goal, a life of "just getting by" would be moral.... And that's where I leave off, too sleepy to do a proper job of expressing my thoughts. I will say that this is where Rand's "man qua man" enters the picture.

You misread my post. I'll try again, with more detail. During the plea bargaining process, my lawyer (a public defender) suspected that I would not plead guilty to what I had been charged with, as I had told him that I had not done what I was accused of. So, he went to the prosecutor -- without my knowledge -- and suggested that I plead guilty to a different crime. The prosecutor then wrote my lawyer to say that the facts of the case would not support a plea to that different crime, so I could not plead guilty to it. To make this clear: The prosecutor said that I had not committed this second crime. I note that I have since exhaustively researched the law and discovered that the prosecutor was unarguably correct. I have also discussed what happened with five different lawyers and all have agreed that the prosecutor was correct. Five days after that letter was sent, I put my foot down and told my lawyer that under no circumstances would I even consider pleading guilty to the original crime. To make a long story short, he left me, talked to the prosecutor, and returned the same day with a plea offer -- to the very crime that the prosecutor had five days earlier told my lawyer I could not plead guilty to. My initial response was to reject the proposal, as I did not see how I had committed this different crime. My lawyer gave me a bogus explanation for how my actions in fact constituted this different crime. Believing that I was in fact guilty, I agreed to enter a plea to that different crime. I then went to a plea hearing. At this plea hearing, I had to do two things. First, I had to demonstrate that I understood what things I had to have done to in order to be guilty of the crime I was to plead guilty to. Second, I had to admit to actions that added up to that crime. I did neither. The reason I did neither is that the prosecutor and my lawyer BS'd the judge into thinking that the things I admitted to were a crime when, in fact, they were not. The prosecutor did this absolutely knowing that she was lying to the judge. My lawyer should have known but, I presume, had never bothered to check for himself. The judge was negligent; she did not actually know the law herself and let herself be led by the lawyers. There was no trial. There was no evidence put in front of a factfinder. The entry of my plea was done with a complete denial of due process, perpetrated by a corrupt prosecutor, a willfully blind, if not actually corrupt, defense lawyer, and a negligent judge. Again, this is not just my own opinion. There are just two ways a person may be legitimately convicted of a crime in this country. The first is a trial, in which a jury (or sometimes a judge) hears facts and determines that those facts prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant committed the crime. The second is by the entry of a guilty plea by a defendant who is fully apprised of the nature of the crime he is pleading guilty to and of how his conduct violated the law. Neither of them happened in my case. And, in case I wasn't 100% clear, the actions I admitted to at my plea hearing did and do not constitute a crime. Not the one I thought I was pleading guilty to, nor any other.

I intend to respond to this -- it is the heart of the discussion -- but I probably won't get to it today. It's taking some work to get a coherent explanation of my position.

The person who chooses to laze in bed in instead of going to work might improve the felt quality of his life, but screw his life over by losing his job. Since pampering doesn't necessarily improve the actual quality of one's life, it was necessary to add the qualifier "felt".

Yes, it was mine. I understood eating ice cream as an example of a minor action intended to improve the felt quality of one's life. There are many things that would qualify, and not all of them involve pleasure Things that relieve pain, save time, etc., would also qualify. Consider NSAID's; they relieve pain, but can have nasty and occasionally lethal side effects. When taken to relieve minor pain, you get the same ethical problem as with eating ice cream, but pleasure isn't part of the equation.

I wasn't aware that they were.. I read one of Harris' anti-religion books (The End of Faith? I've forgotten the title) in which he declared that only actions that benefit others can be moral. I have no use for avowed altruists, so I haven't bothered to look at anything of his since.

As I pointed out elsewhere, longevity is simply not the standard. So, even absolute knowledge that a particular action would shorten your life does not suffice to make it immoral. (Never mind that such knowledge cannot exist.) Ultimately, it is whether that ice cream supports the process that is your life that determines whether it is moral. That, in turn and when considered as an example of a species of moral question, is one of the things that would go into "flourishing". I happen to agree, but is your "worth more" an ungrounded emotional evaluation or can you justify it. If so, how? I, for one, do not take such pronouncements seriously. History is littered with "expert" pronouncements that have far more to do with politics and political correctness than with science. E.g., those concerning salt and fat. I'll take the life-affirming sense of contentment after eating a good steak dinner over any alleged negative effects on my health. If, somehow, I was persuaded that they effects were real, I'd seek out some equally gratifying but less risky form of pampering. So, we're basically in agreement about the conclusion, but not about its justification. Well, my view is not that happiness promotes survival (although it does), but that it is part of the process that is survival, and that this is what makes it moral. I agree. In fact, as I made my illustration, I gave some thought as to whether I had a better way to make the point. In any case, I definitely do not accept the notion that because it was good enough for our ancestors, that's how we should live today. Nevertheless, any ethical argument does need to take into account human nature. But actual human nature, not a rationalization. The nature of your experience is part of your continuing existence. In the process that is your life, you experience emotions, etc., that contribute (or not) to an existence that is appropriate to what you are, and in doing so contribute (or not) to your life. Among the goals of morality is to make your experience of life actually contribute to an appropriate existence. This, in my view, is why your ice cream is moral, because the pleasure you get from it, in the broad sense, is appropriate to your life. This would remain true even if there were minor deleterious effects from eating the ice cream. With good reason, considering how these terms have been abused. But they're necessary terms. What is essential is to derive their meaning by a rational process rather than by appeals to history...or feelings. Agreed. Also agreed. And happiness is both part of and a sign of a successful life, one appropriate to a human being, and one that is most conducive to survival. These are not different standards. (And with that, I've run out of time for now. Otherwise, I might add a bit more.)