Grames
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Posts posted by Grames
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That everyone is going to die someday is irrelevant to the question of whether anyone must necessarily perish today. True, before too long, we're all going to meet our maker — so what? The fact of eventual death is no moral criteron; if it were, there would be no reason for anyone to live morally under any circumstances.
The fact of imminent death is no moral criterion either. Death is never a moral criterion.
It's interesting to see so many people putting forth what amounts to a fatalist view of moral action. Reality never dictates that anyone must suffer and die; no one is obligated to "accept" a given situtation just because things happen to be that way.Not all situations are 'given' in the same way and some are to be accepted because they preclude moral action. I urge you to re-read Ayn Rand's article "The Metaphysical vs. The Man-Made." In the hierarchy of Objectivist principles, metaphysics come before ethics and value judgements. This is why if an emergency situation is going to change what you think is ethical, it had better be a metaphysical emergency, a situation that makes the existence of man in accordance with his identity impossible and originates in nature not in other men's deliberate actions. Even during an emergency the identity of man's nature does not change.
For clarity I will attempt to relate this thread back to the original Rand essay "The Ethics of Emergencies". In that essay it was concluded one ought to render nonscarificial aid to others in an emergency. Here the question is, "if I am the one in an emergency, and others do not render aid, I have the right to kill them and take what I need. I can disregard others judgements of what is nonsacrificial aid for them, even though I would expect them to honor mine." I hope this draws out the hypocrisy clearly enough for everyone to see.
"God grant me the serenity to accept things I cannot change, courage to change things I can, and wisdom to know the difference."This remarkable statement is attributed to a theologian with whose ideas I disagree in every fundamental respect: Reinhold Niebuhr. But—omitting the form of a prayer, i.e., the implication that one's mental-emotional states are a gift from God—that statement is profoundly true, as a summary and a guideline: it names the mental attitude which a rational man must seek to achieve. The statement is beautiful in its eloquent simplicity; but the achievement of that attitude involves philosophy's deepest metaphysical-moral issues.
The faculty of volition gives man a special status in two crucial respects: 1. unlike the metaphysically given, man's products, whether material or intellectual, are not to be accepted uncritically—and 2. by its metaphysically given nature, a man's volition is outside the power of other men. What the unalterable basic constituents are to nature, the attribute of a volitional consciousness is to the entity "man." Nothing can force a man to think. Others may offer him incentives or impediments, rewards or punishments, they may destroy his brain by drugs or by the blow of a club, but they cannot order his mind to function: this is in his exclusive, sovereign power. Man is neither to be obeyed nor to be commanded.What has to be "obeyed" is man's metaphysically given nature—in the sense in which one "obeys" the nature of all existents; this means, in man's case, that one must recognize the fact that his mind is not to be "commanded" in any sense, including the sense applicable to the rest of nature. Natural objects can be reshaped to serve men's goals and are to be regarded as means to men's ends, but man himself cannot and is not.
In regard to nature, "to accept what I cannot change" means to accept the metaphysically given; "to change what I can" means to strive to rearrange the given by acquiring knowledge—as science and technology (e.g., medicine) are doing; "to know the difference" means to know that one cannot rebel against nature and, when no action is possible, one must accept nature serenely.
In regard to man, "to accept" does not mean to agree, and "to change" does not mean to force. What one must accept is the fact that the minds of other men are not in one's power, as one's own mind is not in theirs; one must accept their right to make their own choices, and one must agree or disagree, accept or reject, join or oppose them, as one's mind dictates. The only means of "changing" men is the same as the means of "changing" nature: knowledge—which, in regard to men, is to be used as a process of persuasion, when and if their minds are active; when they are not, one must leave them to the consequences of their own errors. "To know the difference" means that one must never accept man-made evils (there are no others) in silent resignation, one must never submit to them voluntarily—and even if one is imprisoned in some ghastly dictatorship's jail, where no action is possible, serenity comes from the knowledge that one does not accept it.
One never accepts injustice but what nature does to you is not unjust or evil.
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This means something along the lines of "it follows (or came after) this, so it must have been caused by this", right?
Exactly right.
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Is there a specific method Ayn Rand uses when arguing for the axioms? Doesn't she use concepts that haven't been validated in her philosophy in order to prove the axioms? For example, she doesn't argue Hierarchy until after she establishes that Existence has 'Primacy' over Consciousness.
According to Ayn Rand's theory of concepts, you can't form a concept until after you have referents for the concept to integrate. So there has to be at least one example of hierarchy before she forms the concept. She got it exactly right.
The special method she uses to argue for the axioms is called observation. It is not really an argument at all, which is probably why you missed it. Unlike some rationalist philosophies, in Objectivism eyeballs and eardrums actually count for something. What she does argue for is the axiomatic status of those three statements. It is a short argument: these statements are axiomatic facts because they are logically prior to and implicit within all possible other statements including even false and invalid statements.
Just for convenient reference :
An axiomatic concept, writes Ayn Rand, is
the identification of a primary fact of reality, which cannot be analyzed, i.e., reduced to other facts or broken into component parts. It is implicit in all facts and in all knowledge. It is the fundamentally given and directly perceived or experienced, which requires no proof or explanation, but on which all proofs and explanations rest.The 3 basic axioms themselves are:
Existence exists.
Existence is identity.
Consciousness exists, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving existence.
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I don't follow. What do you mean by a "good background"?
Just that it is good background explanation for those who don't already know of what Objectivists think open-mindedness means and why they consider it a poor practice.
Good point. And I should think so; it's the point that I make as well. But it's an easy fix, so I don't take to be such a devastating adjustment of her account of open-mindedness.Just on the principle of everyday ethical justice and giving credit where credit is due, this fix is entirely your doing not hers. Gratitude to Nomy Arpaly is in order for being the occasion of the evening, but of the part of the benefit of the talk seems to be the understanding you brought to it.
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... As the question is posed this is an emergency, is a lifeboat scenario, and must be treated as such.
I discern two differences between this scenario and a typical lifeboat scenario. First, only one party (you and your child) is in danger. There is no general large scale disaster or predicament making life impossible for your neighbors. Second, although the illness is time-limited, unlike a lifeboat scenario the story is not going to be resolved after you save your child's life. Oh no, you aren't out on the raging main or on a trackless mountainside, this story takes place in the middle of civilization. The other child will have relatives, lets say a father who will want vengeance. Being a poetic sort he doesn't kill you, he kills your child. Of course, you kill him. Now three people are dead and you are imprisoned. This is where blind irrationality can take you.
It is no good to claim that the vengeful father is being irrational. His rebellion against the injustice you have intentionally imposed upon him is far more justified than your rebellion against the mindless microbe that infected your child.
Sometimes life is a bitch. Take it like a man qua man.
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"Indians got all that for free."
What makes this statement ironic is utter absence of indians in the country where Columbus Day is celebrated. They got a lot of other things for free too.
Columbus was a pivotal figure who merits commemoration, but lets not honor him for the beneficial results which he never envisioned and had no control over, just as we should not condemn him for the slavery and deaths of millions of native americans.
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So would the implication then be that the derivative ideas, specifically rationality/egoism in ethics, and individual rights/lasseiz faire capitalism, ought to be at least pretty well accepted if someone has enough of the method down to understand it??
More complex topics notwithstanding, I can't see you disagreeing with these and having any clear grasp of the underlying topics you mention.
Yes. Objectivism rejects rationalism and skepticism. Ultimately no one can ever claim to understand anything without getting past these two fallacious doctrines, even (especially?) Objectivism itself. I believe that once a person can get over that hump they are truly "open to reason". And then it is only a matter of time and further integration to reach Objectivism's "higher mysteries".
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I don't know that he can be refuted.
He makes a good argument supported by valid historical references. But even had the U.S. had no tariff, realistically how many tons of imports of foreign manufactures could be brought into the U.S. by sailing ship? Not enough to support the wild growth rates in the U.S. of the 1800's, so we would have had our industry anyway. Also, everyone was on a gold standard monetary system back then, so sending gold out of the country for manufatures would have restricted the domestic money supply. The tariff funded the government before the income tax existed, a good reason for it to exist at some rate even in the absence of Hamilton's theory. So Chang is vulnerable to attack on grounds of making a "post hoc, ergo prompter hoc" fallacy.
However, there are alternative explanations as to what is missing in south-central america and sub-saharan africa that is responsible for their poor economies. The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else by Peruvian economist Hernando De Soto.
The "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" section is filled with good reading on this topic.
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The question here is not "What is Objectivism?" but rather "What makes an Objectivist?"
There is no list. Objectivism is a method, a way, a tao. Learn the method.
The core is to learn how metaphysics, epistemology and ethics relate to each other.
What is distinctively and uniquely Objectivist is the theory of concepts. It makes possible a resolution of the problem of universals and inductive reasoning.
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That's clearly not the open-mindedness being discussed here.
Agreed, but it makes good background and I refer to it again below.
If Nomy meant to say "open-mindedness is rationally valuing truth more than any cognitive state" then why didn't she do so? My theory is simple, she did not want to go there, possibly because she fancies herself a virtue-theorist and doesn't want to get involved in epistemology. Her actual formulation as you reported it was "Open-mindedness, then, is to value others more than any cognitive state." If she thinks morality and virtues are primarily about how we treat others, her formulation would seem to stay safely within the confines of her chosen specialty. Did she actually talk about truth or was that all your speculation?
Some cognitive states are the product of an accurate evaluation (are truthful). Presumably in those circumstances we should value others more than the truth.
Having a good epistemology is virtuous, but how can ethics specify what a good epistemology is? She looks to the consequences of actions on others. This is the pragmatist style of reasoning. The conventional open-minded vs. close-minded dichotomy serves to sever thought from action, and Nomy's pragmatist version of open-mindedness is subject to the Objectivist critique of Pragmatism which is that it severs action from thought. This is hardly an improvement.
The reformulation that "open-mindedness is rationally valuing oneself more than any cognitive state" is better because the word 'rationally' brings in a lot of context. One has ideas and emotions, and should not equate oneself with ideas and emotions. Keeping this idea in mind ought to make it easier to jettison false ideas and contradictions when they are discovered. This could be an application of the Objectivist virtue of self-esteem.
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Is this slogan actualy an attempt to remove conceptualisation from understanding?
No, its meaning is very similar to "Think twice" and "Check your premises". It is an admonition to be active-minded.
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I wonder if you EC, are up to it. Remember that you can't just go round writing CAPITALISM!! on blogs and comment forms, you have to take the time to explain things and that can be maddeningly frustrating.
Teaching people to be rational is like teaching people to do math. It won't do to give people the answers, they have to learn the method of solving problems for themselves. In this analogy, quoting Rand early and often is like giving away the answers to the homework questions too early, people won't learn anything that way. They have to work through all the steps and validations of major ideas.
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A quote war? You're on!
An emergency is an unchosen, unexpected event, limited in time, that creates conditions under which human survival is impossible—such as a flood, an earthquake, a fire, a shipwreck. In an emergency situation, men's primary goal is to combat the disaster, escape the danger and restore normal conditions (to reach dry land, to put out the fire, etc.).By "normal" conditions I mean metaphysically normal, normal in the nature of things, and appropriate to human existence. Men can live on land, but not in water or in a raging fire. Since men are not omnipotent, it is metaphysically possible for unforeseeable disasters to strike them, in which case their only task is to return to those conditions under which their lives can continue. By its nature, an emergency situation is temporary; if it were to last, men would perish.
People getting sick and dying is normal. It is a continuous threat, but happens rarely enough that life goes on.
The principle that one should help men in an emergency cannot be extended to regard all human suffering as an emergency and to turn the misfortune of some into a first mortgage on the lives of others.Poverty, ignorance, illness and other problems of that kind are not metaphysical emergencies.
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I disagree. Assuming you don't read in anything into the scenario (eg. the kid can get well on his own or you are Alexander Flemming and you can engineer your own cure), there are only two options:
1) You steal the rare medicine thereby saving your dying child, violating the property rights of the medicine's manufacturer, and killing an unknown child.
2) You don't steal the medicine, thereby allowing another child to live (whose family can afford the medicine) and preserving the property rights of the medicine's manufacturer.
The clause about killing a stranger absolutely makes this a lifeboat scenario. I'm assuming of course that as a parent your child would be an irreplaceable value, more important than even your own life, and not just some other important value like your car, etc.
Having an irreplaceable value does not give you a license to do whatever is needed to achieve or maintain that value. What is this child going to think when he grows up and learns his father killed another child?
Regardless of whether or not this is technically a lifeboat scenario it is definitely not an emergency situation. Illness is a part of the normal risks of living. It is an unavoidable fact of life that some people get ill. Changing this metaphysical given into a man-made fact by stealing a rare medicine is irrational, violates rights, substitutes another child's death for your own child's, and transmutes mere misfortune into active evil.
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I agree. Also, this comment made me think of something. To simplify the situation into a model, let's assume we only have ten people. If nine of them didn't vote, then all ten would be at the mercy of the last one who did. That person would have the most power, because they alone would get to choice who to give our government too.
Do we really want that kind of decision to be made by a small number of people?
If there is a one party system then there no decision being made. This election in particular is becoming more and more like a Crips vs. Bloods election, meaningless unless you are a Crip or a Blood. Neither Crips nor Bloods give a damn about individual rights when committing their crimes, and neither do McCain or Obama.
The whole point of having a gov't at all is to delegate power to only a few people. If "fewness" is a bad thing is gov't invalid? If the 10 person electorate were evenly divided then one or two people decide the election. Are close elections less valid than landslides?
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He's now started off about "gray areas" and has come up with another dumb scenario of his own in an attempt to "foil" Objectivism. In his scenario, my child is dying and needs some medicine which is out of my price range and in very short supply. His question: Would it be moral to steal that medicine for my child, knowing that stealing is wrong and that another child who needs that medicine will die from lack of it?
This is not an emergency situation despite the high stakes involved. Emergencies are described as metaphysical by Rand to point out that all men are threatened in an emergency. A predicament where only one person is threatened, even if it is your sick child, fails to be a metaphysical emergency. If it was considered to be then no one on earth could live a normal life until everyone else's loved ones were safe, healthy, housed and fed because of the constant attacks by the self-righteously needy. This is exactly the altruist version of morality.
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I'm not convinced that open-mindedness requires any positive action. I think someone can be perfectly lazy and still be open-minded, though being active certainly proves open-mindedness.
My understanding is that open-mindedness is a prejorative term because it is the flipside of skepticism. If anything is possible then nothing is impossible, including contradictions. If contradictions are possible then identity does not exist and certainty is impossible.
Open-mindedness is passive in that it grants credulity to any and all ideas. If there is no obligation to investigate any of these ideas, then the resulting inaction exactly parallels the results of close-mindedness. An open ended obligation is impractical. Either way, the false dichotomy of open vs. closed succeeds in divorcing thought from action.
Active-mindedness is selectively attending to issues depending on context and values and permits immediately dismissing the arbitrary as well as that which contradicts what is certain. Active-mindedness is posited as an alternative to being open-minded not a way to be open-minded.
From the OP:
For example, take the person who hears a rational argument about how humans do not cause global warming, agrees to the rational argument, and still buys the gas-electric hybrid car on the basis of preventing global warming. This person is not close-minded because he has not denied or acted against rational evidence.Actually I would say he has acted against rational evidence. The words of agreement are contradicted when global warming is cited as a reason to buy a hybrid car. Regardless of whether this is open- or close-mindedness, thought and action are contradictory.
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And as the original post makes clear, the notion of open-mindedness presented here does not recognize the idea of "open-mindedness to false propositions" as intelligible (at least, on a de dicto reading).
Interesting original post.
"Open-mindedness" as presented here would require investigating new propositions to determine their truth or falsity, "close-mindedness" means not having to bother. This is clearly a false dichotomy because no one has the time and energy required by open-mindedness to address every potential new proposition, and close-mindedness prevents all learning and progress.
Rand's "active mind" is the solution, and that is a facet of rationality.
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David Weber, Patrick O'Brian
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I think objectivism also rejects the idea of innate knowledge. Your first sentence might essentially boil down to, "everyone intuitively gets the point of living." This isn't much different than a religionist who says we have an innate sense of what's good.
Its not an innate sense of whats good, its learned from the world before language. Only after language is it possible to learn in an adult manner, and to err in the adult manner by holding contradictions.
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I too am an Objectivist veteran. (Navy)
(and no revolutions have ever happened in countries which have strong systems of state surveillience such as in Nazi Germany or North Korea).East Germany and the Berlin Wall. Poland. Romania. Soviet Union.
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I'm not sure I fully understand you here. I think the question is valid enough to warrant the responses already given in the above posts - but your claim intrigues me. Can you please explain further why life does not need to be justified?
The responses above addressed what the purpose of life should be. I understood the question "what is the point of living?" as "life is pointless, why bother?" The question as phrased begs to be answered with some kind of external motivation which one never noticed before but which when grasped provides one the strength to grimly continue dutifully on toward the bitter end of your natural life despite one's losses and sufferings. This whole context is false.
Objectivism rejects the idea of duty (duty entry in the Lexicon). Furthermore, since "to justify" means to prove or show to be just, right, or reasonable it presumes the possibility of being wrong. But no one chooses to be born. In the absence of choice there can be no right or wrong, only an acceptance of what is. Thus, one's own life is a metaphysical given and cannot be considered contingent upon having a 'point' as presumed by the original question (see The Metaphysical vs. The Man-Made in the Lexicon). That one's own life is a metaphysical given is the metaphysical basis of freedom from duty and guilt.
The continuation of your life is not a given, and your life should have a purpose but those are different issues.
The other falsehood that the original question smuggles into your mind is that is life is all about suffering, that pain and suffering are important, that you should decide to continue living or not on the basis of avoiding suffering instead of enjoying the values you have or may attain. Objectivism has the Benevolent Universe Premise which states that "... reality is “benevolent” in the sense that if you do adapt to it—i.e., if you do think, value, and act rationally, then you can (and barring accidents you will) achieve your values. You will, because those values are based on reality."
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Everyone is born with an enthusiasm and passion for their own life. It takes a long process of philosophical and psychological corruption to undermine the vitality that is everyone's birthright. The question "What is the point of living?" is invalid because of its false premise that life needs to be justified.
Dealing with non-objectivists in an objectivist society
in Political Philosophy
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Stop right there. If they are free people operating under mutual agreement, and not coercing anyone else to join, then they have not set up a government.
Economics will determine if the arrangement succeeds or fails and over what time span.