denoir

I have been thinking about the morality of government lately and I've come to the conclusion that the basic principles of anarcho-capitalism are the only ones that can be consistently moral. At the same time I don't think that there is a chance in hell that it would work in practice. So there is a very nasty conclusion to be found there that I really dislike which would imply that for a political system to function it has to be immoral. The reasoning behind it is relatively simple. The fundamental rule, and one that objectivists should agree with is the principle of non-initiation of force. A government by classical definition violates that agreement because of three things: 1) It has to be financed. (Voluntary financing is as unlikely to work as the anarchist models) 2) It has to enforce its laws - regardless if the individual it is applied to approves of the laws. 3) It declares a monopoly on a number of things ranging from justice to force. A monopoly can only be maintained by force. In essence a government cannot operate unless it it enforces an agreement that is not voluntary. By its form and actions it blatantly violates the rights of the individual. I think that Rand makes an excellent argument to why the non-initiation of force is a fundamental moral principle. Yet I can't see a justification for the glaring contradiction of granting the government automatic right to violate that principle. That conclusion seems to me as bad as saying that a practical government must be immoral. The only approach I see as possible is a voluntary contract with the/a government through which one accepts the laws in exchange for the services that the government provides. It can't end there though - the government can't force a monopoly so you would have a free market on the choice of government as well. In other words anarcho-capitalism, and as I said unlikely to work in practice. I'd be very interested to hear about the objectivist view on this - perhaps I've missed something.

In the broadest sense, I'm saying that anarcho-capitalism is the only moral base line assumptions that you can make when it comes to government. It is very unlikely to be the end result as a government is likely to be created on a voluntary basis. However if you still don't understand the principles, I suggest you read my posts again - I don't feel like wasting time repeating myself. Really? On what grounds do you claim that? In the majority of historical and current cases of rebels/terrorists/etc they are generally not the initiators of violence but respond to some prior injustice that they think they have been subjected to. They will emphatically deny that they are the aggressors. Of course they go way beyond self-defense which is unjustifiable in all cases. You seem to have difficulties in differentiating the "should be" and "is" from the text. The fact that the current 'social contracts' are forced and changed by the rule of the mob doesn't change what it should be. And that is a voluntary agreement between an individual and the government. A government is a very practical thing to have and I do think they are a good idea. I am however not willing to be forced to accept one at any terms and with a gun pointed to my head. Really? Says who? Who gives the government the moral sanction of violating an individuals right? Who decides what the government is entitled to do? If it has the right to torture a terrorist, why not the right to torture a common criminal to give up his fellow criminals? Hell, why stick to criminals? Why not just kill all elements that we agree on are anti-social? It's the government and according to you has the right to do it? And please, I'd really like to know what answers you give to the questions I asked: 1) Do you think it is morally justified to force an agreement or economic transfer at the point of a gun? 2) Do laws override the rights of the individual? 3) If you answered no to the questions above, I would like to know how you would organize a government (no matter how small) without it being based on a morally corrupt premise.

Oh dear. No. Your rights are not there because a government grants them to you (well unless you are a willing socialist, but then again it is you who grant them the right). You have the right to life - i.e not to be killed. So of course you do not have the right to murer people and steal their property, government or no government. That's the whole point. Look, I'll state it once more - this is really not rocket science - it's quite a simple principle. You do not have the right to initiate violence. You have no right to violate the rights of another individual. This applies to the government as well. A police force is immoral if it is financed by loot from unwilling victims. It is plain evil if it initiates violence against people that have not agreed to its laws and principles. Without your agreement the policeman is just another thug with a gun. Now, since you seem to imply that a government is mandated regardless of the consent of the citizens, I'd like to hear how you justify it morally. A social contract works the same way as a business contract - you can't accept it for somebody else. Individual rights are not a question of some law granting them to you. If the government passes a law saying that it is ok to murder you, would you say that removes your right to live? If they have not accepted a social contract then they do not have a right to the services offered by society. They do not have the right to any form of protection, legal or otherwise. If somebody tries to kill them or rob them the police and the courts will not try to stop it or to punish it. It doesn't mean that you have the right to kill them or to rob them, only that the society will not provide any services to them. All other rules - including self-defense - apply. Now, to ask you a few questions: 1) Do you think it is morally justified to force an agreement or economic transfer at the point of a gun? 2) Do laws override the rights of the individual? 3) If you answered no to the questions above, I would like to know how you would organize a government (no matter how small) without it being based on a morally corrupt premise. I'll give you a few hints to the problems: Who will decide and on what basis the laws that the police (and military) will enforce? Who will pay for it?

Ok, perhaps I didn't express my self clearly. Let me try again. As I said, the default answer is no in both cases. A government does not have the right to impose anything on the individual unless prior consent has been given. That is the base line. Now as it happens individuals have an interest in living in an organized society and can through a voluntary agreement delegate some functions to a common organization. For instance one may choose to have a common set of rules of interaction (judicial system) and organizations that you outsource your self-defence to (police and military). By delegating those functions to a common organization you also accept being subject to the laws of that organization. You should have the choice of not entering that arrangement, but then you will not get the services that are provided. That would be the essence of a social contract. In practice it doesn't work that way today and the social contract is forced upon you and subject to change at any time by others. In the second part I answered the questions from a personal perspective - what kind of social contract I would accept. I would not accept a legal system that tries to force me to testify - mostly because of the absurdity of the concept of trying to force something that requires voluntary cooperation. If I feel that it is not in my interest to testify then the only way to comply is to knowingly work against my own interests. If it is in my interest to testify then I'll do so by my own choice. In the second case - arresting suspected criminals, I would agree to it within some very strictly defined boundaries. The price for that would be that if I was suspected of a crime I would have to accept potentially being arrested before a trial as well as being punished if found guilty. Is such a system possible in practice where you individually choose which services to buy from a government? I don't know - you'd have to have to have a free competition so that you would actually have a choice. In that case the government monopoly would be eliminated and they would operate like regular corporations. I see a lot of problems with such a system but I can't really see an alternative if you accept the fundamental freedoms of man and that it is immoral to initiate the use of violence. All current and historical forms of government are based on the monopoly of violence and the threat of use of force - and actual use of force, something that I can't see as anything but immoral. Because they obviously don't accept the contract or they wouldn't be trying to blow the country up. You can lock them up if you have sufficient evidence that releasing them will mean them attacking you again - the same way an individual is entitled to physically restrain an attacker that tries to hurt him. In the same way that an individual is not entitled to torture a subdued attacker for information a government is not entitled to torture a captured enemy.

No, that's a logical warp. The equivalent would be that if you claim the right to jail people you grant the others the right to jail you. It's really not rocket science - the principle is very simple. You can't set a special set of rules for just yourself and magically expect others to respect them. In the case of torture of terrorists or soldiers you are trying to preemptively extract information in general that will help you in your fight. For instance US soldiers captured in Iraq might have information about future planned raids or bombings. Is it self-defense to torture them for information that might save lives? Even if you knew that it could, what gives you the right to sacrifice one man for the sake of others? Given the replies here, I'm starting to think I'm in a socialist forum... From the site it seems that the author is an objectivist that resents the ARI and comments on their statements. Rand says much more that troops should not be punished for saying something disgraceful under torture. Rand says: You will never be able to reach an agreement with your fellow Collectivists on what is a “good” cause for brutality and what is a “bad” one. Your particular pet definition may not be theirs. You might claim that it is good to slaughter men only for the sake of the poor; somebody else might claim that it is good to slaughter men only for the sake of the rich; you might claim that it is immoral to slaughter anyone except members of a certain class; somebody else might claim that it is immoral to slaughter anyone except members of a certain race. All you will agree on is the slaughter. And that is all you will achieve.” This is the key, and your next question is valid albeit the answer should be self-evident. Incidentally, it's not a coincidence that in AS Rand put the torture of Galt as the ultimate depravity of the looter government. To quote an objectivist favorite expression: "A is A". Torture is torture regardless of context. If you think that life is the principal moral value then is should be self-evident for you that violence is immoral. In the case of a moral choice you have to evaluate the morality of the actions available to you against your moral values. If somebody attacks you and you kill him in self-defense you have made a correct choice as your life is your highest value. You are only acting morally if you give a higher priority to a higher moral value. It doesn't change the reality of the action - it is what it is and context free. Can you torture in self-defense? No, torture is a deliberate planned action done for sadism or for extracting information. For the latter one it is notoriously unreliable even if we assume that you have strong evidence (which you don't or you wouldn't have to resort to something as crude as torture). Torture is the most despicable form of violence - it is violence for the sake of inflicting pain. It is the distilled art of inducing suffering. It is the final method of the thugs. Look through history and see what kinds of regimes have used torture. It has always been the regimes of the mindless brutes that only understand force as a method. DavidOdden: The question of government vs. citizen is tricky as you might make a case for a social contract existing where the citizens grants the government certain powers - including the monopoly on the use of force against the citizens. I'm not of that persuasion so my answer is that they by default don't have a right to it. If you accept a minimal form of a social contract (which I would do) then the answers would be no on the first one and yes on the second one. Government/citizen relations are a bit more complex topic, but I don't think it is really relevant here. The terrorists or captured soldiers generally get tortured by a third party and not by their own government/organization. So there is nothing that could be seen as a social contract in play.

If you torture your enemies then you are granting them the right to torture your soldiers in return. It's as simple as that. Can torture for extracting information be considered self-defence? No. Preemptive violence is not self-defence, it is the initiation of violence. When you torture somebody you are just a thug using violence to appropriate something that isn't yours. Your need for information does not give you the right to torture another man. You have no right to fulfilling your needs at the expense of sacrificing somebody else for it. This might be an interesting read ("Ayn Rand on torture"): http://ariwatch.com/AynRandOnTorture.htm In my opinion the author of the article got it right and Rand did as well. If you talk about "good" and "bad" dictatorships, you've already accepted the immoral premise of a dictatorship. If you talk about "good" and "bad" torture, you've already accepted the immoral premise of torture. Or to quote Rand: “... thus endorsing the moral premises of thugs who regard torture as a legitimate method of inquiry.”

I agree, and it's a bit in that direction I wanted to go with the evolutionary discussion. In essence, my point is this - we are optimized for survival in a reality that at least to some degree doesn't exist any more. The rules for survival of hunter-gatherers are in some respects different than for a group of people that live in a modern metropolis. So our brains may be very good at some today rather useless stuff and pretty bad for stuff that would be useful. Yes, the foundation is the same based on the laws of physics etc, but that's just a very fundamental level and there are many above it. If you have ten people or ten million people living in one place makes a big difference for instance. That doesn't mean that everything is relative and that we can't say anything about the world. Not at all - reality is still absolute. The difference is that we are facing other aspects than the ones we were biologically optimized for. The way our minds work may not always be optimal for our current context. While the brain is a magnificent adaptive system, it is also a product of evolution which means that it is full of quick fixes, shortcuts and rules of thumb. Evolutionary changes are very slow while our change of environment has been extreme, both in speed and in quantity of change. So rational decisions in context of the aspects of reality we face today may go against our biological disposition - including the operation of our brain.

It's not quite that clear cut. From a point of view of practical ethics you are correct - at the point of making a decision you cannot expect omniscience. However that isn't enough. When you make a mistake you must get feedback in order not to repeat it - that's the basic concept of learning. For a mistake the feedback must be negative in order for you to realize that it was a mistake that should not be repeated. Now you may say that the feedback will be the consequences of the action you have taken. But that doesn't hold as in many cases the consequences won't hurt you, but somebody else. With the lack of explicit feedback, implicit one is needed - i.e. condemnation of the actions. No, it's not contradictory as it isn't one or the other. The fact that I can't see ultra violet doesn't diminish my capacity to see the colors in the visible spectrum. Not complete or not entirely correct doesn't mean incorrect and useless. Our conceptual model of the world is good enough for elementary survival - that is what it has been shaped to handle. It doesn't mean that reality is relative or subjective - just that we operate against a limited subset of it and we use approximate models to guide our interactions. To give a practical example - I cut my finger pretty deep yesterday. I was slicing a lemon and the knife slipped. Could I have predicted it? No, the trajectory was too complex and there were another bunch of factors such as the bluntness of the blade, the texture of the lemon etc that my brain was inadequate for calculating. My internal model and prediction was that the knife was going through the lemon and not through my finger and it ended up being dead wrong. Let's take another more general example: sexual desire. The genetic reasons for it are obvious - your genes encouraging you to reproduce so that the continuing survival of the genes is ensured. You can however still feel sexual desire even if you are using contraceptives. It's a misfiring of a rule of thumb that was built into you at a time when contraceptives didn't exist. Reproduction is the rational reason for sex and the enjoyment we get from it is false feedback. We're not bothered about it though although we know it is a misrepresentation of reality and in fact irrational. We're aware that our mental model of it and the biological reality behind it and we know that they are in contradiction - and we don't care. To be consistent we'd have to renounce sex without reproduction as an unearned enjoyment (as the enjoyment is given to us by our genes as an encouragement to help spread them). It is a fraud against our biological reality but we accept it because frankly not many people would think that life with sex would be very fun to endure. (Come to think of it - had Rand been consistent she would have damned sex without reproduction as immoral. It could be framed something like this: We depend on our genes for our survival and how do we reciprocate? By preventing their survival.) Another example is of course kin altruism which makes sense genetically as your kin share your genes. Helping them is like helping yourself from the genes' point of view. While altruistic behavior may be a reasonable rule of thumb when your world consists almost exclusively of family members (as it was for humans for hundreds of thousands of years), it is a terrible idea in a society where you are surrounded by strangers. We stopped being hunter-gatherers living in family bands only about 15-10,000 years ago, so of course we still have those rules built in and we operate according to them although they don't make much sense today. You may see a moth spiraling into a candle flame and ask why it is suicidal. But it's the wrong question to ask. The moth has rules of thumb for navigation based on the assumption of using stellar objects as points of reference. They are in optical infinity and the navigation system works quite well in that scenario. It fails however miserably when you have artificial lights and the moth kills itself by the misfiring of the otherwise useful rule of thumb. Anyway, the point is that our biological systems, including our brain have evolved to survive in a very different context than the one we are living in today. We can still adapt to a large degree, but there are many systems and rules that made sense in pre-historic times but are bad in a modern society. Our priorities and internal models are optimized for survival.. back then and may or may not be applicable today. It doesn't mean however that we are completely blind to reality and that we can't say anything about it. Not so at all - our minds are powerful and flexible devices that can adapt to different situations and can generalize. I agree, Rand does not.

First, let me apologize for the late reply. I'm pretty busy with RL work right now so I didn't have the time to give a proper reply. Call it omniscience - I call it reality. If you decide that a lion is a cuddly animal you´d like to hug, it will still eat you no matter how noble your intentions were. Nature is devoid of any morality - it is what it is. We derive our values from nature and not the other way around. In my opinion there needs to be a feedback loop - your actions need to be judged by their consequences. If you don't condemn mistakes as bad, you'll repeat them. Is it unfair to condemn a man when he did the best he could? No. It's neither fair nor unfair - it's reality. Nature has no sense of fairness or unfairness and it is the ultimate judge of our actions. How is it willful ignorance if you have been indoctrinated from birth? In each step they did good according to the only standards they had been taught? As for Jenni's post, I thought that it was covered by our discussion and I didn't want this to branch out to parallel discussions. I thought it was pretty obvious, but sure, I can state it more explicitly: Saying that rationality includes a necessary link to actual reality at best says nothing and at worse is a circular reference. You are forgetting that you are operating against a model of reality. You get feedback from actual reality, but that also is processed through your conceptual model of it. The same thing that defines your reasoning defined the model. The model is limited by both our senses but more importantly by our brains' computational capacity - we can't make good predictions except for some very trivial cases. Your reasoning, be it rational or irrational are both a part of the model and a function of it. So, how good approximation of reality is the model? If we eliminate all the solipsism nonsense and the noumenon irrelevancies we get down to our biological hardware. We are apes - African apes to be specific. Humans have changed little in the last 50,000 years in terms of intellectual capacity but our societies have changed greatly. Our technological and social progress are side effects of the capabilities we evolved that increased survivability when we roamed the plains of Africa in small family hunter-gatherer groups. To assume the resulting information processing system (the brain) would the ultimately optimal solution for anything else is not justifiable. How we see the world and how we reason about it is a consequence of our biological past. Our reasoning and our conceptual model of reality are the result of our brains. To claim that our reasoning is only acceptable if our model of reality is accurate says nothing. The two issues are linked: our reasoning forms our model of the world and our model of the world forms our reasoning. It isn't evasion if they don't know that they don't know. It's only if they are aware of their ignorance that you can accuse them of anything (according to your principles). It's meta knowledge - knowing that you don't know or not knowing that you don't know. I think in the case of most religious people - especially the fundamentalists and fanatics it is a case of not knowing that they don't know. It's not willful ignorance. Well, this is your assertion of what Rand was doing, and I don't think you can back out her intent by looking at her method. You understand she thought Kant was one of the most foul philosophers on earth and the categorical imperative a heinous idea? Yes, she showed what would happen if these ideas were practiced consistently, but her justification for incorporating them into her ethics is NOT Kant's categorical imperative. The principle is only immoral because the consequences are disastrous. And most religious people have presumably not thought through what the system they are advocating would lead to. Hence they are ignorant - and not willfully so but because they have been taught the religious dogma since birth. They don't know their ignorance to the extent that they don't even think of questioning the auto-destructive system they adhere to. According to your principles they would be excused. Thanks, I will. And I'm saying that his intentions are irrelevant as long as they are incompatible with reality. Nature doesn't care about good intentions and honest mistakes. A mistake is a mistake regardless of the mindset behind it. Does it prevent a man from being 100% good? Sure. Does it prevent differentiation between good and evil? Not the least. Our internal model of reality has to correspond to reality on average. Those whose brain doesn't give an adequately accurate model will not survive and their genes will not stay in the gene pool. From that we can derive some principles that on average increase our survivability and protect our primary value: life. It is still however on average. We encourage people to follow those principles because on average they will produce good results. It does however not excuse them from the consequences. And blindly approving of actions that are good in general but fail in a specific case is a receipt for disaster. Adaptation is the prerequisite for life. If we do not continuously adjust our ethics to fit reality we are just creating another mindless religion. What was once an exception can become a new principle that on average produces good results. New scientific discoveries and new technologies typically prompt the need for an update of the ethical framework. Otherwise you get into absurd situation - like today when people use bronze age philosophy (the bible) to analyze the ethical implications of biotechnology. Guilt or not is not in dispute, but degree of guilt is. Suppose you are playing Russian roulette for a huge reward. Is one bullet in the chamber ethically equal to five? Hardly. In the first case there is a 1/6 probability of disaster and 5/6 probability of reward. In the second case the odds are reversed. The first case is still very dangerous but the second is positively suicidal. Are the two cases equally "black" or "white"? Suppose I want to buy a t-shirt. I can choose a white one or a black one and I don't care which. Is one choice moral and the other immoral? Or is the choice completely without moral implications? While extreme, the first example is a very typical decision scenario: risk/reward analysis. Usually you're guessing the odds and in many cases your information is at best incomplete of both the risk and the reward. A binary true/false good/bad analysis is impossible. And this is not just willful ignorance of the situation but simply because humans are not omniscient. The only thing that is possible is a) an a priori probabilistic assessment of the situation and the choices (which includes previous knowledge and previously derived principles) and an a posteriori analysis of the consequences. Both are necessary components for a stable ethical system. To use an analogy from engineering: You start by actualizing your idea by following known rules, natural laws and past experiences. When you have the model of what you wish to build the work is not complete. You validate the model by running simulations to make sure that it works. If the validation fails then no matter how good you were at following the rules, the model was not good. And if it fails in the real world the model was not good. You failed to take into account something that happened and that is not an exuse - even if you were not aware that you hade omitted something. A failure is a failure regardless of the package you wrap it in. Reality is the ultimate judge.

No, no - I'm not saying that internal reasoning is disconnected from reality. I'm saying that it is correlated but not a 1:1 mapping. The internal model of reality that we have is not arbitrary but it is incomplete. Due to that incompleteness there are situations where a prediction will not match reality. Why? I don't see the difference. Why would you excuse ignorance just because a rule is not codified? And in that case, how would you treat immoral laws? Which issues? And I'm not aware that I have advocated a system one way or another - I'm just questioning Rand's views on ethics as I understand them. If a man consistently makes evil choices he cannot get only "good" results. There may bee unforeseen circumstances on occasion, but on average the results will be bad. The other side of the coin is more interesting - an ignorant man making the best choices he can and ending up doing evil. A typical example would be religious people that do atrocities. They got indoctrinated as children - they didn't know any better. They listened to their mystic - they didn't know any better. They were told that killing unbelievers was a virtue - they didn't know any better. According to the ethical system you are suggesting their chain of actions were all "white". They did the only way they knew how to do "good". Would you claim that when they start killing people that their choices are morally "white"? By my book choosing not to kill would be white, killing out of ignorance would be dark gray and killing out of evil would be black. I would sooner excuse an ignorant man for his error than the one that does errors knowingly. I would however not equate the man that does good with the man that does evil out of ignorance. No, I don't have any philosophical training - I'm an engineer - so I'm sorry if I use the wrong terminology. I'll try to explain what I mean. An important theme in AS is the self-destruction of society because it chose to adhere to a bad set of rules. An important theme in FH is the self-destruction of Peter Keating by his following a corrupt ideology. Rand's approach in both books was to illustrate what would happen to a society or a person if the logic of altruism was followed through to its full extent. Her argument is: look at all the bad things that would happen. That makes her a consequentialist. The link to Kant's categorical imperative is by her following through the logic of altruism ideal to its conclusion. The Kantian imperative is: "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." Rand shows what would happen if a society acted as if altruism was a universal law that was followed to the letter. Example: Is religion moral? Randian answer: No. Religion attacks reason and rationality and demands that we give it up for faith and mysticism. At the same time the religious people are dependent on food, water etc that can only be provided by a rational approach to the world. If they had their way and we destroyed reason and rationality and substituted it for faith, we would all starve to death - them included. Hence religious ideology is self-destructive and thus immoral. Well, I think we've reached the core of the issue here. Your position is that moral judgement is done only at the moment of the choice while I'm saying that the moral judgement comes after the consequences are known (regardless if any other choices were available or not). You make a good point about ethics being about "shoulds". From that perspective, I would say that you are right. But I'm not sure it's quite that simple. Laws for instance are typically codified morality and they are applied after the fact. If you run over somebody with your car, you get punished even if it wasn't intentional. Would you say that there are just black and white in a situation where: a) doesn't run over a pedestrian runs over a pedestrian by mistake c) runs over a pedestrian by mistake because he was drunk c) runs over a pedestrian because he wants to kill a pedestrian Was the one that did it by mistake behave ethically? Was the drunk just as unethical as the murderer? In your case the one that didn't run over a pedestrian's and the one that did it by mistake's decisions would be classified just as "white" and the drunk's and the murderer's decision "black". And to say that an action that kills a man by mistake and an action that doesn't kill a man are morally equivalent seems odd to me.

It's not the omniscience that is the standard of value but reality. Our moral values have to be derived from reality - not just our model of it. It is not the internal process of decision that is relevant, it is the action or more precisely the consequences of the action that one takes. Otherwise anything goes as long as you can justify it in terms of internal reasoning. I do not subscribe to that kind of ethics although it seems to be popular today (hate crime legislation is a trivial example). In that case ignorance is treated like a moral blank check - a permission to do anything as long as you keep yourself ignorant. Since the consequences of your choices are the end result, I can't see how they could be excluded from the moral evaluation. I'd say that Rand's approach to it is a form of consequentialism paired with a generalization of Kant's categorical imperative. Her way of analyzing an ethics system is to do an reductio ad absurdum of it demonstrating the disasterous consequences of a flawed system should it actually be fully implemented. In that regard it is entirely consequentialist - her ultimate argument are the effects of accepting for instance altruism as an ethical system. I have no problem with that - on the contrary, that perspective is the most valuable that I've gained from her work. But being a consequentialist tied to objective reality through an often inadequate model of it is not without its share of problems. As you operate against the model while you get the results from the real thing. On average the model has to at least resemble the real thing or we wouldn't be able to survive. From that average we can derive certain principles that if applied consistently on average produce good consequences in the real world. However that doesn't say that those rules are guaranteed to produce a good result each time as the real world is far more complex than what can be captured with a simple set of principles. If you recognize a situation that doesn't fit with the knowledge that you have - i.e if you know you can't predict the consequences then at best your action will be morally neutral until the consequences are known. And in the case of pre-emtive action, it gets even more complicated as an a posteriori evaluation of the choices that you have may not be possible. Again, I have difficulty seeing how the consequences could be decoupled from morality. The fact that you will have to face the consequences of an action has a direct moral implication. Otherwise anything goes. Sure you'll face the consequences but you'll be able to claim to have acted morally. Unless the consequences are considered morality loses all meaning as it can be anything. What I am saying is that there are scenarios where there is a true-false statement but it is unreachable through the limited model of the world that we have access to. Since we make our choices based on that model we can't a priori determine the choice. What is worse, in many cases we can't even determine it after the fact as one chosen action may prevent us to analyze or predict the consequences had we taken a different action. Given our approximate model of reality the ease of reaching a true-false statement will range from trivial to impossible - and thus the shades of gray. In the trivial case where the consequences are predictable and a simple rule fits the problem, it will be black and white. In the cases however where you operate with incomplete information against an approximate model of a very complex system you can't do a reasonable moral assessment as you can't predict the consequences. The less you know and the more complex the issue is the smaller is the probability that you'll blindly make a good decision. And just blindly making a choice can hardly be considered moral although perhaps not as immoral as knowingly making a wrong choice. In between are all the shades of gray.

I think they have to be if you want to maintain a link to reality. The foundation of moral values has to (according to Rand and which I agree with) be linked to the fact that in order to survive we just can't take arbitrary actions. Or to put it a bit differently, your model of reality matters. If you start off with a strange model of reality, you can make perfectly rational choices and end with disaster. There are two variables in play: your model of the world and the actions that you take. You can even imagine having a consistently wrong world view combined with taking consistently wrong actions and have a system that produces good results. Granted it's not likely, but my point is that I don't think you can limit moral evaluation to internal reasoning but that there needs to be a link to reality - which is internal model of the reality that you have. Well, yes if reality is reasonably known and our predictions of the consequences of certain actions are reasonably accurate. And I do think her arguments apply to a wide range of commonly held views. I would however not categorically dismiss the problem of knowing reality in terms of predicting the consequences of one's actions. To me the value of Rand's position comes from her highlighting the inevitable auto-destructive principles of popular value systems. What is remarkable there is more that those people have not thought at all what would happen if they consistently practiced what they preached and how strongly they are advocating to saw off the branch that they are sitting on. There is however a range of less obvious ethical problems that I think Rand ignores. Even when you come to the conclusion that it is in your interest not trying to destroy the world, yourself included it is far from obvious in a number of cases how you should go about not destroying yourself. I think that this forum is a case in point - people that agree that rational selfishness is a good idea discussing ethical issues. If a true/false statement was obvious for each moral dilemma then there would be no need for such discussions. Thanks

I've just finished reading The Virtue of Selfishness after having read Atlas and Fountainhead and there is one argument that I keep coming back to that doesn't make sense to me. It is her concept of a necessary "black" and "white" dichotomy that I think is an extremely oversimplified model. She equates "gray" morality with an arbitrary one which seems very odd to me. In "The Cult of Moral Grayness" Rand writes: My objections are as follows: 1) Yes, there is an objective reality but men do not operate directly on its premises but on their internal model of it. Not only do we operate with incomplete information, reality is a very complex non-linear thing and we can only make educated guesses about the actual consequences of our actions. Making radically different choices may lead to indistinguishable results while indistinguishable choices may lead to radically different results. Rand seems to agree with that, at least in part as she says: As such a rational “white” moral choice that has bad consequences cannot be as “white” as a choice that apart from the right motivation also has good consequences. Hence shades of gray. It isn’t moral relativism or the rejection of the concept of values to have shades of gray and no black and white. On the contrary, I’d say that the relevant thing is the relation between choices – it’s seldom “good” or “bad” but rather “better” and “worse”. 2) Since we are operating with unknowns and have limits on our predictive capabilities there are obviously cases where we really can’t distinguish between two choices. But there is more to it – there are an infinite number of situations where there is truly no way of evaluating a choice. We may agree that it is a moral necessity to do things based on our self-interest. But what when we don’t know what our self-interest is? Suppose you have several choices with different risk/reward ratios. If you don’t know the ratios you can’t evaluate which choice to make. Rand says: Uncertainty is part of reality and reason that is incapable of taking account of uncertainty is not worth much. And the absolutism of reality is never the final word as we are not omniscient. The consequences of one’s actions will be according to an absolute reality, but the choices that we make will be made on an incomplete and simplified model of that reality. 3) Interactivity limits our ability to evaluate the validity of our choices. We are not just reactive creatures – we make predictions, plan ahead and make choices based on those plans and predictions. Once a choice is made it both limits future choices and prevents us to see the consequences of having taken some other action. Having a reason for doing something is not enough – it has to be evaluated against reality (otherwise anything goes) and once we take a pre-emptive action (which we do all the time) we can no longer say (with differing degrees of reasonable uncertainty) what another choice would have led to.