Quinn Wyndham-Price

Having stepped into this discussion, after this post I will step out. I have now seen what happens when a reasoned argument is presented to Betsy Speicher. In another forum, she accuses my post of being a "long, nasty personal attack." If you read my post carefully, you will see that the post is indeed long, but you will search in vain for evidence of a personal attack. I stated specifically that Betsy's statement resembled Kelley's view that objective moral judgment is possible, and then proceeded to spend most of the time explaining why I thought that. True, I suggested that the similarity may help explain the deepening breach in the Objectivist movement, but I said nothing about Betsy's intentions or character. But perhaps I should have, because Betsy's first impulse was to turn to speculating about my intentions ("did you come here just to dump on me?"), and to permit members of her forum to speculate about the same. The attention being thrown to me and my mysterious identity, my actual arguments were then easily brushed aside. You will notice that Betsy hardly deals with my actual arguments, and when she does, she fails to understand their significance. I gave a direct quote of Betsy's view about moral judgment. Let me give it again: I said that this view nearly amounts to rejecting the possibility of objective moral judgment. "Nearly amounts" is a statement about logical implication, not about explicit statement. I'm sure that Betsy is quite unwilling to state explicitly that objective moral judgment is impossible. My point is that she does not seem to realize that the ideas contained in the quotation above imply that it is impossible. In her response, she does nothing to explain away the implication. She digs up an old quote in which she says "when judging others . . . we must judge, given the evidence we do have, as carefully and as rationally as we can." Fine, but this quote is completely consistent with the kind of moral agnosticism that I am saying Betsy's first quote implies. It may very well be that we should judge people carefully and rationally according to the evidence, but everything Betsy has said in this thread suggests that there is never enough evidence to say anything definite about whether someone is in error or evades. Yes, of course it can be difficult to gather evidence about another person and judge them morally. But Betsy is saying more than that. Look again at the first quotation. She says "When it comes to judging others, all we can do, and what we should do, is judge whether their actions and statements are (1) true or false and (2) good for us or bad for us" (my emphasis). Now look, I'm reading Betsy literally here. To say that all we can do when judging others is to do X is to say that the only thing we can do is X. Betsy says that we can only judge others statements as true or false, and as beneficial or harmful. But this is not moral judgment! Simply to judge a statement as true or false is not yet to judge the moral character of the person making it. That is why an error of knowledge is not necessarily an error of morality. And simply to judge an action as beneficial or harmful is not necessarily to judge it as moral or immoral. The sun is beneficial to us, and hurricanes are harmful, but these judgments are not moral judgments. Sure, we need abstract moral principles to judge whether something is beneficial or harmful to ourselves, but that does not yet involve objective moral judgments of others. A moral judgment of another person necessarily involves a judgment about the knowledge, intentions and/or character of the person. Knowledge of these is what helps us to predict a person's long-range course of action, and therefore determine what his long-range effect on us will be. This is why it is so important that objective moral judgment of others requires being able to distinguish between their evasion and mere error--which Betsy doesn't seem to think is possible. Notice that all of this is discussed in "Fact and Value," the essay by Peikoff which explained why David Kelley was wrong. So if all Betsy can offer in defense of her belief that objective moral judgment is possible is the fact that we can judge statements as true or false, and that we can judge actions as beneficial or harmful, this is not a defense of objective moral judgment. Notice that I charitably attempted to find another reason (a "last refuge") Betsy might still cite for the possibility of objective moral judgment of others: "because it is possible for the other person to confess his own introspections to us." But Betsy suggested that this was a misattribution, even though, once again, in the very first quotation, she says: "it would take . . . the other person's reported -- and reliable -- introspections to know if someone else is mistaken or evading." And Betsy does not answer my objection that such reports would not be reliable if they are coming from a person who is evading. So her last refuge does not work. Lost in all of this discussion are my three responses to Betsy's points about mindreading, free will, and "possibility." Choosing only to contest my interpretation of her conclusion, Betsy never saw fit to defend her arguments for it. But I will leave that for others to assess, as I now must bid you all adieu.

Betsy's statement nearly amounts to the claim that it is impossible to make an objective moral judgment of another person. Since mindreading is impossible, it is obviously not a source of objective data. Presumably Betsy thinks moral judgment is still possible because it is possible for the other person to confess his own introspections to us. But if this is the last refuge for objective moral judgment, we're in trouble, at least if we're talking about judging another to be an evader. Such a confession would amount, in effect, to the liar's paradox: "I am lying to you right now." How can we treat as reliable the testimony of a person who is telling us that they are evading? No, if objective moral judgment is possible, it will have to come from somewhere else. But Betsy doesn't think it can come from anywhere else. This is why she says "all we can do, and what we should do, is judge whether their actions and statements are (1) true or false and (2) good for us or bad for us." Betsy's statement is a stunning admission that puts in perspective much of the debate from the last year over Peikoff's politics and the direction of the Objectivist movement. I say this because the position Betsy takes above—and elaborates in detail in the remainder of this thread—is almost indistinguishable from the position taken by prominent supporters of David Kelley in the debates about moral toleration in the early 1990s. Betsy's position uses one of the same premises (that moral judgment is like mindreading) and comes to one of the same conclusions (that we can only judge ideas as true or false, and resulting actions as good or bad) as Kelley. Betsy used to claim to oppose Kelley and support Peikoff. But it is now no big surprise that Betsy is receiving such enthusiastic support from Kelleyites over at the Objectivist Living forum. Betsy uses three separate arguments to reject the possibility of objective moral judgment of others. Each of them fails: 1) The argument from the impossibility of mindreading. Betsy says we cannot read minds, we cannot divine the innermost thoughts of others, we can only introspect our own thoughts. Therefore we cannot decide whether others are evading or merely mistaken. It is of course true that we do not have access to others' thoughts in the same way that we have access to our own. But it does not follow from this that we cannot make objective judgments about the thoughts of others. Mind and body, after all, are causally integrated. A person's words and actions provide evidence for what they are thinking. Indeed, if a person does not act on what they believe, it is almost incoherent to say that they really do believe it. From this perspective, we "read minds" all the time. Sure, we don't do it with a crystal ball or by any powers of intuition. We do it by looking at the evidence of a person's behavior. There are all kinds of situations in which evidence can point to what a person knows or does not, and what a person intends or does not intend. If we have every normal reason to think that a person has normal color vision, and we have no special, independent evidence that he is color blind, we have every reason to think he can see the difference between red and green, and as such, we know that he should know that not all apples are red (if he is older than 3 years old). So if he continues to claim that all apples are red even after we find no evidence of color blindness, then if we have no special reason to think he's pulling our leg, we can know, without having to consult his own confessions of evasion, that he is evading. Of course no one would probably ever evade about the color of apples, so consider a more real-life example. A woman's husband is cheating on her. She finds lipstick on his collar, she notices that he's out late at night and comes home with lame excuses, she notices that he's not interested in sleeping with her anymore, etc. Lots of standard evidence piles up. Suppose we know the husband and know who he's sleeping with. We confront the wife with the evidence, but she refuses to believe it. On what grounds could we say she couldn't actually know? Not only has she seen the evidence first-hand, but she's gotten testimony from a reliable friend. And on what grounds could we say that she doesn't actually intend to be lying to herself? It's clear that she does: she finds the pain of acknowledging the truth to be too much, so she willfully blanks it out. 2) The argument from free will. Betsy says that the reason we judge others morally is to know what they are likely to do in the future, whether they will be good or bad for those of us who have to deal with them. This is true. But she then says that because human beings have free will, it is always possible for them to choose unpredictable things. "A man who is honest today can, and might, choose to become a liar tomorrow." Notice that if this is true in the way she means it, we can never judge someone to be a bad person or a good person. But if that's true, then what use is moral judgment after all? If we need moral judgment to predict the future concerning other people, but we can't predict the future concerning other people, then it seems that moral judgment doesn't serve its purpose. Betsy doesn't even try to explain what other role moral judgment might play, e.g. by making judgments of probability about the future. She just leaves the implication that unless a person confesses to his own immorality, we can never judge them ourselves (without noticing that this loophole is paradoxical). There are all kinds of problems with this argument. First, and most obviously, you don't need to judge with certainty to make a moral judgment (although I think it is still possible). This is true of thought in general. Much of what we get by with in life is mere probability, but that does not make it any less of a guide for action. Objectivity is not the same as certainty. A judgment can be objective, as long as it is based on the evidence, even if it is not certain. So even if it is true that people might act uncharacteristically, it doesn't follow that we can't make judgments of probability about their character, pronounce them, and act on them. Second, the fact of free will means that it is metaphysically possible for men to act unpredictably. But this does not establish epistemologicaly possibility. When we make character judgments, we are depending on the fact that some metaphysically possible options would never occur to certain people, because they have subconsciously automatized certain thinking habits. Ayn Rand had free will, but would we say, in 1960, that maybe some day she will rob a bank and join the communist party? No, there would have been no evidence for that possibility. This means that the fact of free will does not generate a genuine epistemological possibility for us to have doubts about. It does not establish that certainty is impossible in the realm of moral judgment. 3) The argument from arbitrary possibility As in the example concerning free will above, Betsy's argument continuously trades on the ambiguity between metaphysical and epistemological possibility. When we judge something as certain, we are declaring it to be free from the possibility of doubt, i.e. free from the epistemological possibility. But the confusion is not restricted to the free will question. Betsy makes the same mistake in her discussion of the colorblindness example. She says that a person who denies that all apples are red might be innocently mistaken, because he might be color blind. Yes, colorblindness is metaphysically possible. But when we make judgments about the truth of particular propositions, the question we face when considering these metaphysical possibilities is: is there any specific evidence to believe that this possibility is actualized in this circumstance? To excuse someone morally for the denial about apples, we would need to have specific, independent evidence of their color blindness. In the absence of that evidence, this possibility is arbitrary, and no grounds for doubting that this person is evading. Simply to dream up a possibility that would excuse someone's actions, rather than citing specific evidence for its possibility, is to engage in the arbitrary. But the possibility of arbitrary doubt does not dismiss the possibility of objective judgment, and that includes the possibility of objective moral judgment. == I can't fully understand how someone who considers herself to be an Objectivist can ignore some of the basic epistemological points mentioned above. I also can't fully understand how someone who was an active participant in the 1990s debates about toleration could fail to see how these points were relevant in refuting Kelleyites--or how she can think they might not apply to her own statements. It is interesting that the Kelley split also originated in a debate about politics. At the time: whether or not to support libertarians. Now the same kind of debate is arising about whether or not to support conservatives. Once again, the question is about the influence of basic philosophy on derivative political positions. And once again, basic epistemology helps to resolve the question. Why don't we learn?