Seeker

What to make though of how easily the very notion of "physical survival", for a human, is given a serious thought? Conceptually this should be easy to dismiss, but somehow the point is raised again and again (and answered here, again and again). One common explanation is to point to "The Objectivist Ethics" and its alleged "leap" from living organism to qua man (i.e. blame Rand for the mix-up), but this simply won't do. TOE is very clear provided one is capable of grasping conceptual hierarchies - which any child capable of knowing that a dog is a type of animal, can do. I suspect something much more wicked: the acceptance of the Marxist idea that humans have certain basic survival necessities like food, clothing, and shelter, while anything more is a luxury: survival is only physical and momentary, and man is a mindless brute. In a way, just entertaining the idea by asking the question is a striking confession of one's own errors: a serious intellectual mistake at least, and probably much worse when one continues to fail to grasp the point even after it's been repeatedly explained. It is absolutely essential to grasp that flourishing qua man is every bit as necessary, for man, as the "basic" needs the Marxists would approve of - that "physical life", for humans, is not a basic necessity upon which the rest is a nice add-on, but an oxymoron, the equivalent of asking "living death vs. life as a man?". If I could get mb121 to grasp just one idea here, it would be that.

This is an excellent point which ties into another important point about choosing values. It is, that such choices derive from discoveries about our own metaphysically-given natures. To put it another way, our choices matter in the context of circumstances that we cannot choose. So for example, since we did not choose to be human as opposed to plant or other animal (that being a metaphysically given fact of our natures), our choice of values must be proper to life as a human, that is, qua man. Or, as Ayn Rand put it, "nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed". Objectivism in no way commands anyone to live a life-by-machine, sacrificing one's own values and rational self-interest in the process, contrary to what human nature requires. A gross misunderstanding of human nature and its central role in Objectivist ethics seems to be the root of the problem. One may argue (incorrectly) that a life-by-machine is consistent with human nature, but not to say that Objectivism compels that result!

It certainly does imply unpredictability. It has to, or else it isn't "free". In fact the only reason that I am able to accept that human choices "could have been otherwise" - which on its face would seem to be an arbitrary statement since nothing that ever was can be shown to have actually been otherwise - is to treat the issue as epistemological, i.e. it is the unpredictability of human choice that enables us to say with any sense at all that such a choice could go either way. Take away the the unpredictability, and you've taken away free will altogether. When critics of Objectivism quibble with the notion that human free will somehow creates a loophole to causality, what they fail to see is the epistemological nature of the problem. As far as I know, metaphysically, human neurons obey the laws of physics like anything else. I do not believe (though someone may correct me) that Objectivism claims that human minds have any metaphysical special rights to operate free from causality. To the contrary, it claims that everything acts according to its nature. The concept belongs to epistemology. You don't need quantum mechanics to explain free will. All you need is to understand that the issue relates to our inability to *predict* human choices, that that is fundamentally what makes free will "free".

What, in your view, would constitute *earning* the higher paying job in this context? (I actually think the question of earning and qualifications are the same thing, the difference seems to be that the only way you think you've earned the job is if the *principal* knows you are actually the best qualified and concurs in your judgment that you are -- at this point I'm not in a position to agree or disagree, since this principal seems to be a sort of hack. So let's clarify what you think earning this job entails and why)

Actually what you describe is *not* equivalent to playing a piece for a friend. Let's go back to the days of LPs and consider whether it would be the equivalent of playing a record that you own for a friend on your record player to make a copy of the record and send it to him in the mail, provided he destroyed it after one playing: of course it is not equivalent, and it violates the copyright. Now for some reason, that straightforward conclusion gets mucked up when you throw in the word "electronically", as though the *invisibility* of the electric signals opens an ethical loophole. Since that is false, and there is no equivalance, all that remains is your quite correct point that a copy has been made, which (applying ethics) we can easily say is wrong.

*cough* Am I allowed to laugh yet or is that verboten?

If by "states rights" we're simply discussing the distribution of governmental powers between state and federal along the lines envisioned by the Tenth Amendment, then the issue isn't a right to violate people's rights per se but rather dividing the potential for abuse -- the issue is not of "rights" but of possible wrongs. In this context, to say that "it's better to let the states have the power to violate rights" is nothing more than asserting the value of such a division of power. I don't think anyone was asserting that states ought to have a "right" to violate rights. Rather, federalism would require that some rights be secured in state constitutions and laws rather than the federal constitution. Such a division would not be the cause of such rights violations as might occur any more than leaving an individual to be free to fail would be the cause of his failure. The proximate cause would not be federalism, but the failure of the people with a given state to properly secure their own rights. It is important, when the people fail, to blame the people, not the system of government that reflects their mistake. Federalism cannot be the cause of rights violations any more than can bicameralism, separation-of-powers, the Electoral College, or any of the other myriad tools designed in a complementary fashion to constrain abuse and preserve individual liberty. Secession is another subject altogether -- the citizens of the United States in a given territory can no more properly leave the United States than citizens of a town or street could secede from the state in which they live and become their own "government". That would be chaos and contrary to the need for government to have a monopoly on force within its jurisdiction.

I disagree with the focus on Great Falls first of all. Your focus should be on making yourself happy. If that means having more people and more productive activity around, then maybe the answer isn't attracting more people to Great Falls. Maybe the answer is for you to go where the people and activity are. A great thing about this country is you get to choose. You can have anything from New York or Los Angeles to Mupples or Butt and everything in between. I grew up in a small town and my preference is for big cities with lots of people, and since I know I'll never duplicate what I find in a big city in a small town, it doesn't trouble me that the small town hasn't got it. I just don't choose to live in a small town. It isn't necessarily a bad thing that not all towns grow. Some towns dying out or stagnating strikes me as perfectly normal. A dynamic economy means that the centers of industrial and productive activity change as industries themselves change. My home town (situated on the Great Lakes for shipping) was all about lumber and steel a century ago, now it's "tourism", i.e. it's dying. It doesn't trouble me. The growth is simply elsewhere. My family back there is ambivalent: they want growth for certain things, but they also appreciate the quiet and serenity of where they live and don't want it to change. They don't value big cities like I do so it's fine for them.

On the question of collaborative works such as movies and now video games I find the Objectivist definition of fundamental characteristics (ITOE) to be most useful: "Metaphysically, a fundamental characteristic is that distinctive characteristic which makes the greatest number of others possible; epistemologically, it is the one that explains the greatest number of others." We can apply this to the creative process. A classic example would be auteur filmmaking in which a single person conceives, writes, directs, and perhaps even performs in the lead role. Such an individual is the fundamental contributor. All others are subordinate to that creative mainspring, and the film's distinct characteristics depend upon that individual. Suppose for example that the movie is a musical. The writer-director may write the lyrics and melodies, and then direct a composer to flesh out the score according to a particular style. Although the composer delivers the actual music, fundamentally the work belongs to the writer-director whose abstractions determined the distinctive characteristics that made the rest possible. We can then identify a single individual as the artist, because that individual defined the work; all others had fundamentally subordinate creative roles. The way movies sometimes get made, so-and-so wrote the novel, somebody else adapted the screenplay, yet another person directs the actors, the actors takes liberties with the script, the studio execs demand rewrites and cut scenes without the director's consent, and on and on until what you have is a terrible mishmash because no single person defined the work. It makes me sick to think about. I don't know whether Rand would have called that art or not, but I know it's not my ideal. The ability to identify authorship according to fundamental contribution makes it possible to say that a work of art having multiple contributors nonetheless truly belongs to a single individual. So I am not prepared to say that there cannot be a single artist on account of a medium's collaborative nature. There can indeed be a single ego defining the work of art. This also applies to video games or any such collaborative creative endeavor: the artist's contribution must be fundamental – it must be the defining characteristic, i.e. that which makes the greatest number of others possible.

On this question I agree with Inspector. As I understand it, Objectivism is, quite simply and by definition, the philosophy of Ayn Rand. That it is (or indeed, whether it is) fully integrated and rational is not part of that definition. To know what that philosophy is we look to the statements by Ayn Rand that had philosophical import because they illustrate her philosophy. The passage in question undeniably has philosophical import - as such it illustrates Objectivism. It may or may not fully explain it, but the essential thing is not whether the statements are integrated or rational but that they are philosophical in nature. You are free to decide that the principles illustrated are not fully intregrated and rational, but not to say that this makes them non-Objectivism. So, it's Objectivism, and we have to treat it accordingly. Others apparently do see connections that integrate it to the rest of her philosophy and think that it is rational, and I am trying to explore those connections with their help and give the benefit of the doubt as long as there are further grounds for clarification and validation. The disagreements on the question of public decency (not epistemology and forum rules) are most helpful in raising issues and steering the discussion, so I appreciate the substantive contributions by both sides, though not the rancor. Ultimately I may or may not agree with this part of Objectivism, but I think that the purpose of this thread is a free-ranging inquiry on the subject in question for all those who are open to it.

Excellent! Then we're making headway. I think that "the right to seclusion in regards to sex" correctly states not only the pro-right position, but also the essential view of Ayn Rand: That's the important part: sex requires privacy. Sex is part of man's life, so we have now tied his requirement for privacy (or seclusion) in regards to sex to his needs qua man. That is the connection to leading a rational life, the connection to individual rights, the essence of the Objectivist argument favoring laws against open displays of sex including sexually arousing materials, i.e. pornography. What remains is to confirm the validity of the right itself as well as the inclusion of pornography and sex acts. Here there are two parts: 1. It is right for man to experience sex only in seclusion 2. Seeing pornography or sex acts is a sexual experience #1 is correct in my view. To agree to the validity of #2, however, one must agree that man is not free to choose to not be aroused in response to seeing pornographic materials and sexual acts, and that such arousal fits within the category of experiences requiring seclusion, regardless of intensity, e.g. minor or momentary arousal. One must accede to the following argument by Capitalism Forever: I contend that if #1 and #2 are valid, then the right is valid and we have established a sound basis for public decency laws. Thoughts?

As the person who inadvertently began this raging debate on epistemology, I respectfully ask that it be taken to a new and proper thread - it's cluttering things up and it is irrelevant to the actual topic here. Thank you!

Maybe this was done earlier and I missed it, but from what I have read so far I am prepared to define the right in question. Here it is, based on my understanding of the pro-right position. It is not the right to have social conventions followed as default presumptions, nor is it the right not to look and listen, nor is it the right to be free from disgust, loathing, or offense. It is: The right to seclusion in regards to sex. Does that sound correct to everyone? If it is right for man to experience sex only in seclusion, and seeing pornography or sex acts is a sexual experience, then it follows that open displays of pornography and sex acts can be banned. (Note that for clarity I have replaced "private" with "seclusion" and "public" with "open" to avoid the nettlesome and irrelevant issue of property ownership). The first part of the argument is rather easy to accept, the second I am still chewing on ("seeing pornography or sex acts is a sexual experience"). Edited - for clarity.

I see. The problem then is not that it's a dead head, it's that it's not something for which we can fashion of presumption of desirability. On that score, the dead head is the equivalent of junk mail, which we also cannot presume that anyone desires (now try making an argument for presuming that junk mail is desirable for its recipient!). Or used tires, to use your latest example. I actually have no problem with the existence of such a presumption. The problem only begins when the legislative power is exercised as a means of enforcing such presumptions. At this point, I tend to find the rationale that "all that matters is that the presumption exists, whatever it is" to be unsatisfactory. I also want the presumptions to be demonstrably rational, if laws are going to be made based on them. I also want specificity - the idea of a judge asking a defendent in a court proceeding "now come, Mr. Jones, you didn't really think that Miss Smith wanted your advances?" and off to jail he goes - sends shudders down my spine. I actually don't think that this is a terrible hurdle to overcome. All we need to do is to make explicit what is typically implicit in the argument - as we have started to do with the example of unwanted tire delivery - by demonstrating how the violation actually interferes with the pursuit of a rational life. The same goes for touching the hair of the girl you're sitting next to on the airplane, the deliveryman bringing the package to your front door, or whatever other example of default presumption you can come up with.

Absolutely I agree that interference with a rational life is a necessary condition. The question was whether certain emotions (especially strong emotions of disgust, loathing, and offense) can ever of themselves interfere in such a way. Sometimes extreme emotional reactions can actually induce nausea, for example. Seeing that severed head might do the trick. It's easy to just say "humans have volition, you can choose your response" but I wonder whether in some extreme cases that might be untrue. Okay, but here my thought is: they want it, and the wanting is an essential ingredient. If you don't want to be turned on, don't let yourself be turned on by what you see. Don't give yourself permission. Exert some self-control. Ignore it. The idea that you won't be able to enjoy sex later on in private, because of the nude poster you saw in public earlier that day doesn't make sense, unless you're completely out of control. The solution is better discipline and control of yourself, not others. The problem I see here is that Rand chose to use specific words in making her argument. Those words illustrate her reasoning. To say that we are free to ignore what she said, and after our excision of her words say that her reduction didn't involve the very things we excised, is a feat of intellectual gymnastics I'm just not capable of.

Except that the reasoning is incomplete. It simply isn't enough to observe that "the head of a corpse is one of those deliveries where you do have to ask the recipient for permission" - particularly after one has just expressly disavowed "psychological assaults, bad emotions, need for pleasure, or anything like that" as justification. While the social conventions may be wholly arbitrary, we are right to demand an objective justification for why consent ought not be presumed, lest the laws passed be equally as arbitrary.

The connection to emotions is one's mind, which could certainly be descibed as an "existential value" every bit as much as one's sex life, could it not? This is setting aside whether or not seeing a depiction of sex is, in fact, part of one's own sex life - a contention that has always struck me as tenuous at best. Also, Rand did not seem (in my view) to advance that argument exactly, referring to the fact that "many people regard a public representation of sexual intercourse to be disgusting" as well as "the need to protect people from being confronted with sights they regard as loathsome" and also "protecting the rights of those who find pornography offensive..." - disgust, loathing, offense are all mentioned. Why, if the argument rested solely on the identification of the existential value of one's sex life, was that necessary?

Rand was not referring primarily to ownership but rather to "the public", meaning all of us who go places. Here again is the passage by Ayn Rand: Here you can see "public" being used in a consistent way that does not involve ownership. First, to characterize types of representations and displays: this means "viewable by all", irrespective of ownership. Second, to characterize a type of street: this means "open to all" (though distingushed from privately-owned streets). Third, to characterize types of places: here again this means "open to all". Fourth, to describe the populace, i.e. "the public", meaning all of us. So it is not (or not so much) an issue of ownership as one of access: specifically, if the place or display is accessible to everyone, regardless of ownership, then warnings may be required to protect the unconsenting. Thus, the issues Rand raises would be still be issues even if the anti-concept of "public property" were done away with. These issues would still exist in a perfectly capitalistic society because some places would still be open to all.

Yet there are outstanding questions that suggest a need for further inquiry to clarify the basis of the disagreement.

At the outset I agree, and if the matter is indeed this simple, then that's the end of the matter: there is no rational foundation for public decency laws. Yet for me, this leaves a couple of problems: one, Ayn Rand did see a basis for laws to protect minors and unconsenting adults, though without a detailed explanation as to why; two, others here vehemently disagree, which makes me wonder if they might have a point. I'd like to see what it is by plumbing the depths. Since the subject is psychological and psychology is complicated, it's worth the effort to try and understand these opinions better. What of the idea that public spaces involve the equivalent of physical force inasmuch as you can't avoid being there, so warnings are needed to protect the unconsenting?

Don't forget about minors. They might need wider protection than adults from certain things. If you thought trying to find a razor for protecting grownups was hard, wait until we drag kids into this ...

Ok ok, let me try this then. We know that man qua man needs pleasure. But, it may not necessarily follow that every instance of displeasure violates his right to life. Indeed we could say that dealing with displeasure is a normal part of man's life. So if the need for pleasure isn't the correct positive formulation that mirrors the negative formulations of disgust, harm, and psychological assault, then what is?

What about the nude poster in the store window? The sidewalk owner has no property right to take it down. This is why I concluded that Rand was not referring to public ownership but rather to "the public", meaning all of us who go places, that the need for regulation arises not from public "ownership" but from public interaction. I see this as an argument for a prudent exception. It's not that government couldn't justly regulate anything displeasing, it's that it would be really, really hard (nay, impossible) to regulate everything. But then, we should still push for as much restriction as is feasible, because a failure to regulate disgusting things also makes life untenable for all the people who have to go places having their need for pleasure denied them by displeasing sights and sounds without their consent. The end result is regulation of as much displeasing sights and sounds as is practical, not just those relating to sex.

Oh, I don't contest that Rand's statement applies only to sex. But that may simply have been because she chose to address only the topic of pornography in the essay, which isn't a philosophical razor, just a writing decision. To be clear, I am not basing this particular reasoning on that essay, although I do think it is consistent with either the wide or narrow interpretations of "the freedom not to look and listen" mentioned therein. What is logically wrong with the position I outlined? As I said, "if the chain of logic was valid, then that's still got to be the correct result".

Hopefully someone will take on this question. After reviewing the thread, the principles used in debate include such things as disgust, harm, and psychological assault, and typically the lines of reasoning end there. I would like to focus on the positive, to know what the negative is - I have posited the notion that life qua man has certain psychological requirements, the forcible denial of which would amount to the disgust, harm, or psychological assault that has heretofore been the end-point of the argument favoring laws on public decency. Instead of the negative forumations (i.e. the right to not be harmed, to not be assaulted, to not be disgusted) I would like to see what positive formulations we can arrive at (i.e. the right to life, which includes [include your positive formulaton here]). One approach is to start with the "life is not morgue avoidance" position. The psychological need for pleasure, for instance (see Virtue of Selfishness), is a positive formulation of man's needs qua man. Displeasing sights and sounds, publicly (which is to say forcibly) viewable, thus deny man his right to life and may be justly proscribed (which is to say, hidden behind barriers with warnings to the unconsenting). The end result is cold comfort with those who wanted an objective razor, I'm afraid - individuals vary so widely as to what pleases and displeases them that there is no limit to restraints on everything that anyone finds displeasing. In the end, those things that we thought were "merely annoying" and those that "rational men cannot tolerate" are really the same thing. But then, if the chain of logic was valid, then that's still got to be the correct result. In addition, we might conclude that certain types of freedom ought to exist notwithstanding the displeasure to others they engender, like freedom of speech. The prudential need to allow citizens to publicly voice disagreeable points of view may justifiy exceptions to the rules on public decency. We might also choose, as a prudential matter, to decline to set very high standards of decency in favor of tolerance. These things are exceptions to the general principle that public regulation of anything that displeases anyone is proper. So if you want to set a low bar for decency that's fine, but not because the bar cannot justly be set very high.