StrictlyLogical

As a non mathematical layperson, it 'feels' like all the maths can describe how much and illustrate a lot of the 'how' precisely by delineating the 'much' , but can not answer any 'why' and especially when 'why' s are not appropriate in a query.  

20 years ago, I came back from my internship at the Ayn Rand Institute's OCON conference excited to meet other Objectivists. 
This was a year before Facebook when IRC Chat was still the most popular venue for Objectivists to chat. So I decided to start my own Objectivism Forum - Objectivism (then )
Here is the post announcing the new site:  
 
 
After I graduated college in 2004, I handed off management to a series of admins and moderators, continuing to this day.  I've continued to host the forum over that time, accumulating the following totals:
10,160 members 31,374 discussions 337,656 posts The site was most popular for the first few years, hosting events such as a live chat with Onkar Ghate, all sorts of features like The Objectivist Metablog, hosting for Ayn Rand clubs, event calendars, hosted email accounts, photo galleries, and much more.  At live events, we would have hundreds of people participating and hundreds of posts per day.  After Facebook became popular in 2009, traffic dropped off a lot, but as you can see, the site is still active today.  

Stephen 
 There were hundreds of thousands of people in DC that day and prior. There were numerous rallies and events , there was even a permitted rally at the Capitol , the one Trump mentions in his speech.
Do you honestly believe all the attendees of these events we intent on committing an unarmed insurrection, but only a few in comparison ‘made it in’ , but before they could round up the legislators and fashion the gallows , the dear leader commanded them to stand down? Their murderous plot abandoned? 
 
I don’t doubt there were some in the group who may have planned and carried out creating mayhem , but identifying whatever happened that day as the carrying out of a planned insurrection is more than ‘ a little much’.
No one ‘stood down’ , the riot ended. Two protesters/rioters died , the day’s official proceedings were delayed , it was a shit show , not an insurrection.
 

A funny thing about how we tend to use language, and funnier when we are talking about physicists, “Quantum Mechanics” is sometimes interpreted as referring to what reality does, when it is far more accurate to say QM is something we do, which to the extent it corresponds with observables of what reality does do, is valid and useful.
That paper is more about how we process what reality does, not what attributes and properties which are possessed by entities. 
The third person would point out that a complex number is nothing more than a complicated (not very) combination of real values.  They are absolutely and always reducible to real values. We happen to call them phase and magnitude. But again this is mere characterization of the abstraction which is QM, merely interpretations of the abstractions as more or less complex … when in fact it is all the same and beside the point.
The processing abstraction is not the referent to which its predictions are directed.
Observe there is no absolute phase in the complex coefficients, and also observe that statistical in nature they are not strictly speaking possessed by any single entity, and of course are never observable properties possessed by any single entity.
As such, any assumption about complex numbers, I put to you, is more  of an assumption about our abstractions referring to physical reality than an assumption about physical reality itself.
 
 

Here is the interesting part.
Since the fundamentals of math grows out of concepts which ultimately come from percepts, absolute disconnection is difficult to achieve.  As for entire branches of math... I do not know.
The problem is not that math can get VERY abstract, VERY far from the concretes of reality which are connected to them, but that those who are DOING the math dispense with that connection entirely.  Embracing either the idea that it is a game of the mind disconnected from reality or a revelation of a Platonic Ideal Reality risks the creation of mathematical concepts which do become disconnected in the same way floating abstractions can become disconnected.
Imagine, like some freshman philosophy students, you embrace the idea that what you do need not conform to anything, nothing in reality, none of the axioms, and you can simply create systems out of nothing and with no rules except what you give it.  WE know such creations do not fall within what is VALIDLY to respectively be called knowledge or the love and study of it (philosophy) nor mathematics.  Attempting to "Invent" a "number system" (system of symbols) which represent contradiction as part of a formal system would constitute such an insanity... I'm not sure it was ever done... but a mentality that thinks of it as "fair game" is NOT hinged to reality.
I believe there is a strong case to be made philosophically against various mathematical constructs and even well accepted "profound" conclusions.  Symbolic logic and nonsensical implication (truth tables) and Gödel's theorem are the types of things that require better Objective explication and understanding.

The Dark Ages were a long time ago.  Something more recent is Lysenkoism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
This is the very definition of a "scientific consensus" in Soviet Russia.  It's not so much that correct genetics "stood" during that time, but that it was "rediscovered" when the incorrect "consensus" withered away, as it had to.
Consensus is not science and in fact has nothing to do with science. 
The scientific method, when used by independent individual thinkers is, and always has been, that which shatters ideological based consensus, especially when masquerading as "Truth" or "The Science".
 
 

That approach could be dark, and last for ages.

Perhaps it is as basic an issue as the following.
 
Observe the ability to "think" rather than merely "feel" or "intuit" or impulsively "decide" requires a particular mode of mental function which, is similar to any physical muscle or capability, in that:
1.  it requires some training and discipline to strengthen and develop, current capacity being dependent upon of past practice or exercise, and
2.  when used, is subjectively felt as effort (and correctly so).
Choosing to think is like choosing to act (also, mental labor is an analogue for physical labor) and if the activity is beyond a person's current capacity and even if it only requires a substantial portion thereof it will be "difficult" to do.
 
The answer to:
Why don't some unfit people exercise? 
is arguably the same as
Why don't some habitually unthinking people, avoid rational thought?

AI is the best parrot/yes-man there could be.
See and imitate.
You'll get from AI what you already get, all the time, nothing more.
 

Unintended consequences for the poor F'ker who tries to "instigate" WW3...
He will in fact be setting the spark to wake up and transform of the great masses of Sheeple back into We the People, and instigating in fact the largest Rebellion/Revolution the World has ever seen, by We the People against the corrupt Predator Class and corruption in Global and Domestic Institutions... all throughout the Western so-called democracies. 
BE assured the People won't send sons to die in order to line their pockets anymore.  We will see who gets sacrificed on what alter this time around, if they try to order the People to die in some foreign land for no good reason or if they try to sentence the People to death for refusing to go...  I'd like to see them try.
 
This so-called instigation might be just what is needed to start the purification of the world... albeit a consequence unintended by the so-called instigator.

Unintended consequences for the poor F'ker who tries to "instigate" WW3...
He will in fact be setting the spark to wake up and transform of the great masses of Sheeple back into We the People, and instigating in fact the largest Rebellion/Revolution the World has ever seen, by We the People against the corrupt Predator Class and corruption in Global and Domestic Institutions... all throughout the Western so-called democracies. 
BE assured the People won't send sons to die in order to line their pockets anymore.  We will see who gets sacrificed on what alter this time around, if they try to order the People to die in some foreign land for no good reason or if they try to sentence the People to death for refusing to go...  I'd like to see them try.
 
This so-called instigation might be just what is needed to start the purification of the world... albeit a consequence unintended by the so-called instigator.

So much of culture, society, and its institutions, some of which are machinations of the State, are helplessly flawed, flawed and influenced with error, bias, irrationality, overzealousness, greed and negligence.  They pull in different directions, and strike at different populations of individuals, and yes in times of misintegration/activism they take vengeance in active discrimination of perceived so called groups formerly or presently holding power.  The infringements on individual rights is alarming and disheartening, whether perpetrated by the system on a wide level or by radicals within the system abusing power.  Less government, and proper government are what is needed.
The curriculum and the teachers, in this flawed imposed system, are not always guided by interest in the flourishing of every individual child.  Agendas, causes, regrets, revenge, rebellion, personal biases all... these tendencies and attitudes now too commonly override and cloud the appropriate needs of children..[so caught up with "imbalance" are the progressives, that they fully self-justify keeping some children down, or actively working to squish their spirit with guilt and self-doubt...].
What I see lacking most is an understanding of True Self-love (and individuality), what it really objectively means, and its nurturing and encouragement.  Superficial and political (radical) influence, group-think and categorization of this tribe against that tribe, amplified by social media is now hollowing out the spirit of so many innocent individuals, so that they do not know who they are, why they should make certain choices over others, or what life is.  So caught up with trying to fit in they fall apart.
 
This comes to that junior in college, now to all appearances happy.  There is no reason that anyone should go through the self-doubt, or lack of self-love, as they are, at such a young age.  I think some (not all) less than virtuous high level medical executives ... pharma or surgery - and insurance related... are pushing hard (top down) for wide spread acceptance ... i.e. adoption of the their products (and the attendant flow of money) with insufficient regard for the mental state and maturity of some potential customers, and the  impact that the permanent irreparable and irreversible effects can have on those so vulnerable and young, at an age where making stupid mistakes is notoriously commonplace. The religious and medical communities used to push a cure for being gay, they did not need big tech and institutional influence to push their flawed agenda.
Whether being A or B is a construct or not, I believe that anyone, any "I am that I am" feeling bad about themselves for what they intrinsicly are is utterly a construct, and a horribly tragic one.  One IS utterly unique, and true self-love dictates that whatever one looks like, one looks like what one feels because that is the one that one is, one is not beholden to what anyone else labels one, or what anyone else thinks how looking and feeling should be related.  We are not As and Bs or Cs, which should act or feel or do anything in particular, a person is not something that should not have been.  Self-love supercedes any and all groups and groupings.  Every person, although on a journey, is perfect, as a human being, as a self-soul, an end in themselves... just as they are.  That is what needs to be taught.
 
 

Having looked into it, lived it with my daughters in school and discussed it with many parents, I do not share your doubt.

Quasi-enforced State Education is wrong.  All who are trapped by the system have to deal with the fact of its existence.
 
The main problem with the Socialist Progressives, is that they cannot differentiate between cultural and societal injustice and the political violation of individual rights.  Lying is an injustice, prejudice is an injustice, racism, sexism, sexual orientationism, generally otherisms are injustices... and in a free society some people would not be able to shop in certain places or be able to buy any cake one wishes from every baker.
Whether or not force can lead to an acceleration of the correction of these cultural "inadequacies", violation of rights is never right, no matter how impatient the progressive activists are.  In a proper society, we pay for freedom with the realization such things may never wholly disappear.
Schools are progressively teaching socialist and progressively flawed ideas... churning out little leftists like never before across all western democracies.
 
So here, we have in Florida, like so many other places, a State run propaganda and indoctrination machine, with radical elements running about.  Not everyone agrees what should be taught because everyone has a different poison... like every religion is different.  The first step is to reduce indoctrination and concentrate on education... and if too much poison is found in any particular area... stick to teaching the unpoisoned ones.  The State should be giving up power not taking more power... and so parents might have to address some areas themselves as they see fit... but that is the ideal case anyway. The State has no role to play in raising children, or pushing culture "forward", no more than they would in a proper society without a State education system.

Respectfully I disagree.
Necrove made an assertion that something was "bad" news. 
In all contexts the "good" must be carefully considered, and especially in the complexities of the context of a quasi-enforced State regime.
Where everyone involved is enslaved to an institution it's already bad, when changes are made to that system it can get better or worse (still bad).  To whom in the context is some change in a thing "good" or "bad"? 
I submit it depends on how one's individual rights are affected.
Properly:
No one has a right to education, or a proper education. 
No one has a right to anyone else and certainly not complete strangers, having an education, or a proper education.
No one has a right to teach a captive audience in a State run context whatever you want, in fact no one has a right to teach whatever you want in any privately run context (unless you own the institution yourself)... your boss (if it is not you) will quickly let you know that.
Parents and their children, however, have a right not to be harmed, not to be subjected to indoctrination, or sexualization (at an inappropriate age), not to be misled with extremely dangerous concepts beyond their ability to truly grasp, not to be turned into little Marxists, not to undergo permanent life altering surgery until they have the conceptual capacity and responsibility to make that decision which only comes in adulthood... etc.
 
Now, parents and children are effectively forced to play in a State regime of education, but they are the one's whose rights are potentially and in some cases actually violated.  Unfortunately, sometimes people who are not in the position to experience the violation of those rights do not fully understand the situation.  This you no doubt have experienced throughout your life as well.
 
My question "Are you a parent" is precisely on point.  Particularly given the complexity of the issue and the sheer under-reporting by mainstream media of just how bad schools and teachers colleges have become ... they are rife with Marxist and socialist ideology.  Parents experience these trends on their children first hand.
 
As for "Circumstantial ad hominem", in some contexts I can see how that would apply, I am certainly not saying that any non-parent's reasons are incorrect because they are non-parents, AND I am not stating non-parents could not form logical positions had they the full information parents do, I am of the belief that in many cases, non-parents do not have the information that many parents do.
The technicalities of the law may be awkward, and possibly could be disproportionate, but I think the current reports by progressive media are overstated, and/or some school boards are over-reacting. 
Overall, as a first step this is good news.  Children CANNOT be subject to the whim of every possible kind of teacher, who more and more might include radically Marxist or sexual-activist views... we can only hope in an invalid mixed enforced State system, semi-sane guidelines are provided within that system to educate (not indoctrinate) children appropriately.
 
 

I agree.
 
If it were about you, you would be a parent with a child in school.
 
Individuals acting as agents of the state are not free agents able to do whatever their fancy tells them.. nor in the presence of naive impressionable children should they be allowed to.  Dereliction of their duty which causes harm violates your rights as a parent and your child's rights.

One reason why I am concerned with proper scope of a maxim, or formulation of a principle, or definition of a virtue, is because it is so easy to undermine the propriety of the maxim, principle, or virtue when so called exceptions are required.  Better to have it more properly defined, than defined overbroadly so as to exceed its proper scope.
Such comes up in a conceptually similar manner in the realm of Free Speech... how it is to be defined and conceived of... and Tara Smith does an excellent job arguing for Free Speech being absolute and with no exceptions when conceived of in its proper "domain".  I would say then "Free Speech" is just label for something which has as an essential of its definition a prescription of that proper domain, in which it is absolute and for which there are no exceptions.  The problem with the idea of "exceptions" is that it implies or allows erosion of the boundary of the proper domain, and works to subvert the absolute into the subjective.
So similarly, with virtues, maxims, or principles... if one overly inflates the definition of applicability, misdefines their proper domain, they become open to the attack (quite valid ones) of "exceptions", when in fact, when properly defined, they would be much more stronger as virtues, maxims, or principles.

SL,
By the time of Atlas Shrugged, Rand had for the structure of her ethics that there was the overarching virtue of rationality (recognition that existence exists and that perception and thinking are our only access to existence) and the overarching correct value for each person their own life as human being. There are no contexts of concrete decision or action to which that virtue and that value do not apply. I’d say that their generality in applicability does not make them any more abstract in their relations to concretes than the normative divisions of rationality: independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, and pride. Only one’s own mind can perform the responsibility (the rationality) of judgment and therewith live one’s life. Recognition of that is Independence. Only action as integral with own’s own consciousness (one’s own rational convictions), which can entail courage and confidence, is rational action. Recognition of that is Integrity. Only under absence of delusions is the attainment of real values possible. Recognition of that is Honesty. Only under objective judgment of the character of others, followed with treatment of them according with that character, is one’s mind and action rationally aligned with the Morality of Life. Recognition of that is Justice. Reshaping the earth is the human way of survival. Recognition of that is embrace of Productive Work. Self-made character tuned to ideal Human is crucial to all achievement, happiness, and worthiness of happiness. That is the virtue of Pride. These virtues have outstanding unity among them. They are based on a particular conception of human nature and human successful life. They are all facets of rationality in the Morality of Life. If we start with the arena of a particular virtue, with a situation in which the virtue is salient we see why it is the right way to go by the setting of the virtue within the general ethics and by recognizing that the setting at hand is one for which that virtue’s realm is at hand.
In Kant’s outlook, all issues of morality arise where there is a stake over goodness of one’s will in one’s choices. They only arise there, but that arena is pervasive. The goodness of one’s will is the only moral aspect of each choice situation. Esteem for and conscious motivation by keeping a good will is the thing of human moral goodness. That would be one’s own will that he is talking about, no one else’s. His doctrine includes that one cannot make another human being moral. That is a task possible only for each individual for himself. (Schopenhauer criticized Kant’s ethics as egoism, and that has some sense to it, however much at odds with the egoism of Hobbes, Spinoza, or Rand is the goodness-of-one’s-will ethics of Kant.)
Kant gives plenty of examples eventually for applications of his ethics, but the moral criterion for any situation, which would be human situations, from solitary life (issue of suicide) to social life (treatment of others, including issues of rights). The biblical Commandment against bearing false witness may well have had its origins in tribal proceedings adjudicating conflicts within the tribe, but it gets generalized greatly over time by the moral elucidators such as the contemporary summary here.
For all his effort at secularizing the rationale for truthfulness, Kant never deviates, I gather, from treating bone fide moral principles as completely general commands eliciting action from a sense of duty and respect. Where there is not duty, there is no morality at work. Emerson: “When duty whispers low ‘thou must’, the youth replies ‘I will’.” (That was English grammar as I still learned it in elementary school: simple future for first-person singular would be “I shall” whereas to express a promise, it is “I will”. [Likewise for first-person plural “we”]) (That line is from a poem written in 1863, in connection with the Civil War; that late period of Emerson’s life is called his Hegelian phase, but it fits as well with his earlier Kantian phase.) Duty was not a concept invented by Kant and it was not only he who stressed it. Cicero stressed it. If you visit St. Paul’s in London and go downstairs there is a monument to Admiral Nelson. On its base is inscribed: “England expects that every man will do his duty” which were the last words he had signaled from his ship to the British fleet as they were about to engage the French-Spanish Armada at Trafalgar. That had transpired in 1805, a year after Kant’s death; I doubt the salience of duty for Nelson or his sailors was from Kant.
At Collegium Fredericianum, Kant had excelled in Latin. Among the Latin works he read there was Cicero’s On Duties (De Officiis). Cicero saw virtue in terms of duty. It is no controversy to say, as anyone should, that moral virtue is a performance of or disposition towards what one ought to do. But when a philosopher such as Cicero or Kant undertakes to cast all occasions of doing the morally right thing as performances of duties, he is giving a systematic and controversial slant to the entire moral plane.
Duties are various things owed, usually in various social relationships. In all things, Cicero is on the lookout for bearings on duties. “No part of life, neither public affairs nor private, neither in the forum nor at home, neither when acting on your own nor in dealings with another, can be free from duty. Everything that is honorable in a life depends upon its cultivation, and everything dishonorable upon its neglect” (O 1.4). Frankly, he’d have landed squarely on the truth if in that quotation the word “duty” were replaced by “responsibility.” 
Duties are things owed. I think that to reduce the idea of what ought to be done to what is owed is an impoverishment of the idea of what should be done. A truer way of moral life is to perceive and nurture value. Let value and valuation bring forth virtues and things owed.
Kant’s ethics, like Cicero’s, is an ethics of duty. For Cicero the source of duties is honorableness, which is in contrast to personal advantage. “There are some teachings that undermine all duty by the ends of good and evil things that they propound. The man who defines the highest good in such a way that it has no connection with virtue, measuring it by his own advantages rather than by honorableness, cannot . . . cultivate either friendship or justice or liberality. There can certainly be no brave man who judges that pain is the greatest evil, nor a man of restraint who defines pleasure as the highest good” (O 1.5).
As the source of duties, Kant will replace honorableness with the nature of pure reason and a good will. That replacement understood, the following formula of Cicero will agree with Kant. Ethical systems in which the highest good is personal advantage “say nothing about duty; nor can any advice on duty that is steady, stable, and joined to nature be handed down except by those who believe that what is sought for its own sake is honorableness alone . . .” (O 1.6).
Ayn Rand, writing in Atlas Shrugged and later in an essay “Causality versus Duty” rejected the whole idea of tilting morality in the direction of commands and duties, whether they are from God or from the sources of Cicero or Kant. In her vista, the point of morality is help one live and be happy. That is the proper aim. 
I see in my American Heritage Dictionary that  HONEST is from the Latin HONŌS, i.e., HONOR. One could nearly identify honesty with virtue tout court, and in older usage of the term honest, that was one of its meanings. As we use the term today, the scope of honesty is still pretty wide. Miller 2021 lists as central types of dishonesty: Lying, Misleading, Stealing, Cheating, and Promise-Breaking. Kant eventually addresses all of those areas, applying his general principles to them. I’d like to mention a Misleading communication of Kant’s that suggests he regarded making a misleading promise as all right if it concerns an improper demand made of one. 
“Kant pledged to King Friedrich Wilhelm II to ‘declare solemnly, as Your Majesty’s most loyal subject, that I shall hereafter refrain altogether from discoursing publicly, in lectures or writings, on religion’. Later Kant admitted that his [equivocal] words were chosen very carefully to apply truthfully only during the King’s lifetime (which was quickly coming to an end).” (Sissela Bok, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life [1978]). By the way, I’d like to mention that Ayn Rand lied about why she was breaking off her business and intellectual connection to Nathaniel Branden in 1968. That is, she did not tell the whole truth. In 1976 in Leonard Peikoff’s lecture series The Philosophy of Objectivism, he mentioned that deception to protect one’s own values was consistent with not gaining values by deception. In a follow-on Q&A, he remarked that not volunteering the entire truth is not a lie. If someone asks “How do you like my suit?” one need not reply “It’s ugly” even if that is one’s perception. Rand interjected that in a situation where one agrees to discuss something fully, but then does not tell the whole truth, it is vicious. I think it is a deviation from usual meaning of “lie” for Peikoff to say that a deception to protect one’s own values is not a lie. (Such as telling a bank robber that the safe cannot be opened until some future hour, when really it can be opened right now.) Rather, we should say it is not a wrongful lie.
The scope and context for the general maxims for Kant are any and all decision points in which humans need to figure out what to do and in a moral way. The order of presentation of a philosophical theory would not generally reflect the order in which its elements were discovered. Kant’s presentations can be said to reveal the logical conceptual dependencies in his theory, but in his overall presentation, he starts with a reflection on what is the character of ethical precepts per se, and how they could have that character in purely secular terms. For Kant those are terms purely a priori and purely formal (he wishes!). He then takes on discussing such areas as truthfulness in various particular settings, and the general principles of ethics he already has in hand are used to sort what is distinctively the moral way to go in each case. He arrived at his mature system of ethics, we do know, from long reflection on ethical theory prior to his Critical period. I have written about his early thought in the area and the challenge he inclined to undertake, which he attempted to fulfill in the Critical-period system for which he is famous in ethical theory.*  ("To 1781")

It think it tends to encourage a false dichotomy to claim that honestly (in the context of communication and not introspection) is something you either do for yourself or for the sake of others.  This has been a sort of cultural and social undercurrent when pondering truth telling to others.
It's very similar to the false dichotomy introduced in economics which asserts every transaction has a winner and a loser... that commerce is predation.  We already know this is an incorrect assessment of commerce, and that wealth can be created (for both) according to a trader principle.
Applying a transactional trader principle view to honesty in communicative contexts, helps to dissolve the false dichotomy.  Mutual benefit can be built on voluntary intercourse.  No one has to lose, and in fact you can choose when to transact and with whom. 

In his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785). Immanuel Kant maintained that “thou shalt not lie” is an absolute commandment. It is a moral law, not simply a practical rule, however universally applicable a practical rule might be. Its absoluteness is not due to it being handed down to and for humans by God, in Kant’s more Enlightenment sort of standpoint. Then too, It is not a moral law based at all on the life-nature of human beings and their circumstances in the world. Moral law is not empirically sourced, in Kant’s mature view, but is sourced in concepts of pure reason. Moral law, like Kant’s conception of laws of “pure physics,” is a priori. Moral law is a law for any rational beings, and when we human rational beings apply it, it is sharpened by judgments informed by experience, by relations of ends and the means to them in the world, and informed by cognizance of the many inclinations of human beings (4:389–90).
“The metaphysics of morals has to examine the idea and the principles of a possible pure will and not the actions and conditions of human volition generally {principles of practical reason –SB} which for the most part are drawn from psychology” (4:390–91). His ensuing discussion of lying framed within principles of a possible pure will seems to have in view only lies told to presumptively innocent people. He considers specifically the lie that is told in making a promise that one does not intend to keep (think of borrowing money one does not intend to repay). Leaving the question to decision by practical reason, Kant observes, requires all the calculations of whether the gains from telling the lie outweigh the uncertain future troubles of reputation that may be consequent on the lie. Sticking to the practical maxim of not lying and making that a habit may be safer for oneself than to lie. Yet the practical, prudential maxim leaves uncensured, in Kant’s estimate, an occasional deviation from the maxim. Whereas, if acting purely from moral principle, purely, deliberately in dutiful conformance to reason concerned only with goodness of one’s will, one’s policy with respect to lying would be able to pass a certain test: an act can be truly moral only if one would allow that the act should become a universal law, meaning a law everyone follows, not only a law one follows oneself. This gives Kant’s notion of moral law a patina of objectivity.
If one is truthful only from fear of being found out in a lie, one’s policy is not a distinctively moral one, only a prudential one, according to Kant. It looks to me, however, that Kant’s test certifying, or anyway indicating moral character in one’s honesty is shaky on three counts. Firstly, its is a test by existential life considerations, and Kant has told us that for principles of a good will there must be no such considerations, else the absoluteness is lost, he thought. Such considerations are only allowed to enter into applications of the a priori principles according to his announced program. Secondly, one who has reached a policy of uniform honesty for merely strategic reasons, calculating expected consequences of dishonesty, could pass the universal-law test just fine, and it’s hard to see how that success alters at all the status of the policy as wholly strategic, that is, how passage of the test converts the policy from strategic to moral in Kant’s sense. It looks like Kant really assumes one could not come to such perfect uniformity for a policy. Rather, from mere considerations of expected social consequences of lying, one would come to the conclusion, he might allege, that although one could hope it were a general law that people were uniformly honest, the best arrangement resting on such grounds would be that everyone else is constantly honest, but that secretly, oneself is not. Such a person could not sensibly hope that that policy were a universal law (see also Critique of Practical Reason 5:27–28, 44). True, but I say that that argument would be prejudging the eligibility of strategic, consequentialist policy for being moral. Were Kant thinking along that line, his universal-law sorting mechanism is stacked and provides no traction for sorting the prudent from the moral in the sense Kant aims to have the distinctively moral.
I think Kant’s system in which honesty is to be a virtue and dishonesty a vice without consideration of how dishonesty (say, making a loan you don’t intend to repay) affects others or affects yourself (beyond effects on goodness of one’s will) is absurd and stays outside the arena from which moral principles can seriously be drawn. Kant’s idea that the purpose of morality is to make a good will is wrong-headed and without a good supporting argument. Knowing what is a good will is in truth dependent on experience of good behaviors (contrast with 4:441). (Similarly, knowing what makes one worthy of happiness, a job of morality in Kant’s view, e.g., at 6:482, is in truth dependent on empirical experience in specific causal relations.) Moreover, his replacement of God as the source of the absoluteness of the virtue of honesty by human reason is a joke. He fails to show that a good human will and the nature of human reason are the source of any such virtue of honesty. He assumes they are, and he can’t keep from again and again presuming what needs to be shown throughout his rumination on moral theory in his mature period.
Kant fails in the enterprise of identifying what it is that is the arena of distinctively moral qualities, though he hovers around the correct arena. I was and remain persuaded by Nozick 1981 that that arena is value-seeking selves and responsiveness thereto, which comes to a portion of what Rand took for the arena: choices and actions determining the purpose and course of a human life (1962 – “The Objectivist Ethics”). I hold, with Nozick (and uncontroversially), that value-seeking selves are the fountainheads of the lives they are making. Unlike Nozick 1981, PHILOSOPHICAL EXPLANATIONS, I do not take organic unity as a free-floating basic of reality on which value lies. Rather, organic unity, in making a life or a work of art is a simulacrum of the character of life.
Kant was hovering in the vicinity of the arena sourcing moral aspect in the world in his idea that persons—which is to say rational beings—and persons alone, are ends in themselves. They are ends in themselves, in Kant’s picture, because they are able to pursue ends given to themselves purely by their reason independently of their inclinations tugging them this way and that.Though given to themselves from themselves, principles of objective moral conduct are received as obdurate, given law. Such principles are valid and necessary for all rational beings and for every volition. They are absolute, not conditional, necessities, and they arise from the one thing with absolute worth, and that is: that which is an end in itself. “I say that the human being and in general every rational being exists as an end in itself, not merely as a means to be used by this or that will at its discretion; instead he must in all his actions, whether directed to himself or also to other rational beings, always be regarded at the same time as an end” (4:428).
“Who has it in mind to make a false promise to others . . . wants to make use of another human being merely as a means, without the other at the same containing in himself the end. For, he whom I want to use for my purposes by such a promise cannot possibly agree to my way of behaving toward him, and so himself contain the end of this action” (4:429–30). Excellent point. And it has nothing a priori about it, contrary Kant’s refrain to that effect. The absoluteness is from the circumstance that facts are the ultimate source of all necessities, the fact that selves, lives, and their functioning union are an end in itself (the only one), from the absoluteness of life and death, and from the fact that necessities for purposes are subsidiaries of the absolute necessities of facts. Rand put it this way: “By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man—every man—is an end in himself” (AS ). Further, in rationality one should treat things according to the kind of thing they are; for things human being, that is justice. And the human kind is originative and far-sighted end-in-itself kind of being. Of course in her mature system Objectivism, the end-in-itself character in the world belongs (unlike with Kant) not only to rational beings, but to any organismic life, with the caveat that in rational being, life reaches the highest autonomy.
I’ll not delve into it, but Kant had a notion of lying to oneself, which he analyzed within his moral framework in The Metaphysics of Morals (6:429–30) under the heading “The Human Being’s Duty to Himself Merely as a Moral Being.”
In my next post in this thread, I hope to examine the book Honesty – The Philosophy and Psychology of a Neglected Virtue (2021) by Christian B. Miller.

It think it tends to encourage a false dichotomy to claim that honestly (in the context of communication and not introspection) is something you either do for yourself or for the sake of others.  This has been a sort of cultural and social undercurrent when pondering truth telling to others.
It's very similar to the false dichotomy introduced in economics which asserts every transaction has a winner and a loser... that commerce is predation.  We already know this is an incorrect assessment of commerce, and that wealth can be created (for both) according to a trader principle.
Applying a transactional trader principle view to honesty in communicative contexts, helps to dissolve the false dichotomy.  Mutual benefit can be built on voluntary intercourse.  No one has to lose, and in fact you can choose when to transact and with whom. 

It think it tends to encourage a false dichotomy to claim that honestly (in the context of communication and not introspection) is something you either do for yourself or for the sake of others.  This has been a sort of cultural and social undercurrent when pondering truth telling to others.
It's very similar to the false dichotomy introduced in economics which asserts every transaction has a winner and a loser... that commerce is predation.  We already know this is an incorrect assessment of commerce, and that wealth can be created (for both) according to a trader principle.
Applying a transactional trader principle view to honesty in communicative contexts, helps to dissolve the false dichotomy.  Mutual benefit can be built on voluntary intercourse.  No one has to lose, and in fact you can choose when to transact and with whom. 

These can easily be remedied, although perhaps with the cost of relationship norms.  A refusal to "deal" in a transaction has the analogue of refusing to answer and also refusing to excessively reveal.  The trader principle does not say one MUST always trade (in fact one must not trade if it cannot be one's benefit) primarily it deals with how one trades and why.
 
Transactionally, "evasion" does not exist, but refusal does.  IF an otherwise innocent person asks you point blank for an answer you do not believe is appropriate for you to give, you do not pretend to transact (tell him something, evade and deceive) you refuse to transact.  "I'm sorry but that is private" or "I'm sorry but that is not my secret to tell" or "I'm sorry I do not trust you with that information"
Deception should be morally exercised to prevent someone from immorally gaining a value or causing harm etc.  it would be like fraud if perpetrated on an innocent.   You should deceive the confessed killer out to murder your wife, but not lie to your neighbor for no good reason.
As for revealing or transparency... this seems to be equivalent to your obtaining possession of something which really belongs to someone else.  Private information, ill-gotten secrets, something someone said...
there you can take the side of justice ... or you can choose to take the side of a person.  This is where integrity and courage come in... what is rational should almost always side with what is just.
And information which is simply not someone's business... well they have no business asking, nor you answering.

Good to see you again HD.
What happens when one looks at conversation as transactional?  That in a real sense when we offer statements as true we are offering in a market of interactions something potentially of value and in a real conversation, it is in exchange with other statements.
If a sort of trader principle applies… then wouldn’t offering up something worthless (a false statement) be kind of rotten?  I’m not talking about trading with criminals but innocent citizens.  Should not your offer and your exchange be genuine rather than fraudulent?  Now, it is in your rational self interest not to be rotten for the same reason you want to be a good trader in the world… but in the moment isn’t your immediate concern with the trade going well? 
I’m not sure but I might disagree with both of you.  
Not being rotten is both rationally in your self interest AND shows your concern includes others.  In fact your immediate concern for others can be self AND other interested when you are cooperatively building something.  building wealth or knowledge according to the trader principle seems pretty much win win.
We do not need another false dichotomy here.

Wasn't that Hunter Biden Laptop thing ALL a Russian Hoax, probably linked to that Trump - Russian collusion thing (remember something about a dossier)?
I coulda sworn I heard, from cross-your heart-its-true Government Officials and Media Outlets... whom I believe unerringly, who said at the time that it was Runnian dis... mis.. cis information or something.
Yeah and don't we have a new Ministry of Truth now, can't they clear it up for us?
 
- Eager to be told what to believe and to accept it as truth -
SL