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Dante

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Everything posted by Dante

  1. I've already spoken about the suicide bomber example, I believe, where I tried to make the distinction between consciously valuing life and implicitly valuing life in some respect. I'll try to be more clear and connect that point with what I just said. For any person that has any purposes at all, any whatsoever, they implicitly place value on their own life, if only as a means to whatever their end is. So, if I have purposes, I implicitly value life. It is possible for my conscious purposes to conflict with the implicit value I have placed on life. This is the case of the suicide bomber. Here, the suicide bomber holds a contradiction in his thinking and in his hierarchy of values. Any person who does not wholly and explicitly value life holds a contradiction in their hierarchy of values. We still must have a reason, as people, to care about such a contradiction. For people who explicitly value life (albeit inconsistently), there is a basis for caring about the contradiction. If they wish to remain alive, they must deal with the contradiction, because their values must be realistic in order to attain their explicit goals (remaining alive), and reality contains no contradictions. Someone who does not explicitly value their own life in any respect wishes to die. He or she still holds a contradiction but has no reason to care. There is no way to reason this person into choosing life or rejecting the contradiction between implicit valuation of life and explicit rejection of it. In all of the cases above, we are dealing with people with purposes. People who implicitly value life in some respect. If that were the only possible theoretical case, you might just successfully argue that life has intrinsic value. However, that is not the only possible case. Someone devoid of any purposes, disinclined to take any conscious goal-oriented action whatsoever, places no value on life, implicit or explicit. I have never met someone like this, and never expect to. However, the case is theoretically possible. Adoption of goals is a conscious choice, and as such, either option is possible. Everyone who avoids this state of being devoid of purpose has done so by, consciously or unconsciously, accepting the value of life. They have accepted purposes and thus accepted life in some implicit fashion. Without this acceptance, life has no value. Thus, simply because everyone you have ever met has placed instrumental value on their own life does not mean that it is theoretically impossible for a person to exist who places no value whatsoever on their life. Just because everyone ends up placing some value on life does not mean that they had no other choice. They did have another choice; it is possible to fail to adopt any purposes; the value is not intrinsic; it depends on a choice which everyone makes. You essentially say this yourself, in your "getting sick" example. He would seek treatment, because he has adopted some purpose (blowing himself up) which he needs to be alive for. Without this purpose, he would have no reason to seek treatment.
  2. Okay, so when you say "life-values," you mean life. Well, I agree that other values derive from the ultimate value of one's own life, but if that's the only life-value, I'd drop the term in favor of just life. Why should someone who rejects the value of life care about such a contradiction? We all agree that contradictions cannot exist in reality. Thus, if we want to remain in reality, we should purge contradictions from our thinking as well, in order that our knowledge and values become more in line with reality. We would do this because this is a good strategy for remaining alive, when it is given that reality has no contradictions. However, there is only a reason to do this for people who wish to remain in reality; i.e., remain alive. If one wishes to die, there is no reason to care that you must use your life in order to die. It is the choice to live, the choice to remain in reality, which makes morality and reason binding on us. This is why the choice to remain in reality provides the foundation of the importance of reason and morality; it provides the reason that we should care at all.
  3. How are "life-values," which you seem to define as values which sustain life, different from the "other values" on which they depend? Objective values are always life-promoting; that's why they're values.
  4. The Objectivist conception of justice is not axiomatic, insofar as it depends on certain facts about reality (e.g. that life is conditional, that we must distinguish what is good for us from what is bad, including when examining other people, etc). Objectivism is not a rationalistic system; the axioms only go so far as to establish the validity of sense perception and concept formation. After that, all of Objectivism, including the Objectivist ethics, is no longer axiomatic, but based on observable facts of reality. Remember Rand's characterization in Galts speech of each virtue as "the recognition of the fact that..." (e.g. "Justice is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men..." etc etc). It's a small point, but I think this is a frequent confusion of people, to think that Rand's system is entirely rationalistic or axiomatic when in fact much of it is based on data about the world.
  5. You must be careful, when making this argument, to be very clear that you mean that sending corn over to Africa for free is bad for the African economy. If you don't make this distinction, your point becomes an incorrect argument for protectionism. There is nothing wrong with putting African corn workers out of work, per se. If Africa freely trades with the rest of the world and foreign corn happens to be cheaper than corn grown in Africa, the African corn industry will shrink and possibly disappear. There is nothing wrong with that, provided that we're not giving them the corn for free. If we're requiring them to buy the corn from us, then we are in essence requiring them to produce something else of value that they can use to trade with us, if they want our cheaper corn. This will encourage their economy to develop in other industries (specifically, if trade is free, it will encourage growth in those industries in which Africa is most efficient). If we give it to them for free, however, we are not encouraging economic development at all. We are instead encouraging economic dependence. This is why it is important to distinguish between international charity and international trade when bemoaning our putting Africans out of work. International trade shifts them to other industries, while international charity puts them out of work altogether.
  6. In what ways? I would argue that in almost every case, changes in laws which move the economy further towards a free market make the economy more just and more efficient. There are better and worse ways to mix markets with government control, of course, so particular policy discussions can become quite complicated. However, incremental shifts in policy towards free markets are, in general, positive policy moves. Now, I would certainly not claim, and you will find few Objectivists who do claim that any and all "deregulation" is always a good thing. For example, much of the banking deregulation which has occurred in the past few decades has decreased oversight of people who remain able to socialize their risk and their losses. When deregulation allows people more freedom to play with other people's money, it is not necessarily a good thing. Nevertheless, in general, decreasing government control and more fully recognizing property rights, even if done only incrimentally, makes the economy more functional.
  7. Not that it doesn't matter, but it's not the proper starting point for lasting change. Change cultural mindsets, and politics will follow. Get a few better politicians in office without changing the prevailing ideas in society, and they'll be voted back out soon enough.
  8. Many people have attempted to confront the problem of voluntarily supporting the activity of a protective agency or government. Ayn Rand proposed a few ideas, mostly in her essay "Government Financing in a Free Society." Others have also worked on the issue. Most of the others have been anarchists envisioning what an anarcho-capitalist environment would look like. Rand most definitely disagreed with the anarchist view that a just government has no right to maintain a monopoly over the use of retaliatory force in a society, but I'm sure some of their purely logistical methods of financing voluntary protective agencies aren't without merit.
  9. Maken, I think your point is well taken by most Objectivists today. This is one of the reasons that many Objectivists are skeptical about activities such as political activism; simply trying to change the people who are in office will not be an effective means to a stable, just government if people's prevailing attitudes towards morality and political rights shift. Thus, while bodies such as the Ayn Rand Institute have much to say about politics today, they are more fundamentally oriented towards cultural and social change. Most Objectivists believe that a proper moral foundation must be adopted by many more people before lasting political change can occur. From ARI's website: "ARI seeks to spearhead a cultural renaissance that will reverse the anti-reason, anti-individualism, anti-freedom, anti-capitalist trends in today’s culture. The major battleground in this fight for reason and capitalism is the educational institutions—high schools and, above all, the universities, where students learn the ideas that shape their lives. Ayn Rand’s philosophy—known as Objectivism—holds that historical trends are the inescapable product of philosophy. To reverse the current political and economic trends in America and throughout the world requires a reversal of our society’s fundamental philosophy. Victory in this war of ideas will ultimately mean the defeat of the widely held, pernicious ideologies that dominate contemporary culture and threaten our liberty—ideologies such as collectivism, moral relativism and multiculturalism." After all, the United States was founded with a government which was much closer to ideal than today's government. Of course, the structure of the government set up in the Constitution was imperfect, but by and large it has been cultural shifts towards various forms of collectivism which have caused the deterioration of our government, more so than flaws in the original design. No Constitution can stand for long against a collectivist or altruist populace.
  10. I took him to mean the "Hands off!" obligation.
  11. He does seem to be asking the right questions, and his concern with objective well-being and human flourishing is quite encouraging. However, it sounds like once we go beyond the bounds of this talk to what he thinks flourishing consists of, we get to altruism pretty quickly. It seems to me that the key fact that his answers to moral questions is missing is that each individual can only truly attain human flourishing for one person: himself (or herself). He seems to be missing the fact that each person's first obligation is to their own well-being. This we learn from the very nature of life as a process, maintained by actions which benefit oneself. Each person is placed in charge of their own life first and foremost by the very nature of existence. Not only is our primary moral obligation to ourselves, but we couldn't significantly promote the objective flourishing of another human being even if we tried. Ultimately, each person must be able to maintain their own life; their mental health and happiness depends on them controlling their own lives and being capable of sustaining themselves. The self-esteem component of human flourishing demands of an individual that they feel competent to maintain their own lives. We can refrain from harming others, but we cannot truly help them to flourish; each must do for him or herself. This, in short, is what his perspective on human flourishing is missing; that human flourishing is inherently self-oriented.
  12. No, I have simply argued that for any individual person, their life is their core value, provided that they have some form of goals or purposes. People must choose to value their own lives, with purposeful action, in order to concretize the obligations of ethics. Ethics only applies once a person has chosen to live. Rights do not arise from this same choice which forms the base of ethics. Rights are a political notion, which comes at a later stage in the chain of reasoning. This is because your choosing to live only confers value on your own life. At this point in the argument, other people haven't entered into it at all. Once we establish that their own life has ultimate value for any rational being that adopts goals or purposes, we can then look at what people need to do in order to gain the value of their own lives. We find that pursuing the value of life means more than simply ensuring that we will be breathing for the next five minutes; it requires a person act with long-term goals and purposes, be able to produce the values his or her life needs; it requires someone who values themselves completely and consciously (this is not the same as placing some implicit value in your own life by virtue of having purposes; here we're talking about having a strong and complete sense of self-worth)... all the things that the Objectivist ethics elucidates. Once all of that stuff is established, we can then ask about interaction with others. We find that in order for people to gain true values, they must consciously choose to pursue those values and understand how they relate to life. No person can be sustained, long-term, by another. Each requires the freedom to think for himself and bring his thoughts into physical reality in order to flourish. Thus, each person needs rights as a necessary condition for sustaining life long-term. Thus, there is a long chain of reasoning separating the initial choice to live, which forms the basis for ethics and establishes each individual's ultimate value, from the conclusion that human beings need rights as a necessary condition for gaining values in a social context. You cannot simply jump to rights by saying people "choose to value others' lives." That is not the basis for rights. I have rights whether or not psychopaths and evil men choose to value my life, because objective human flourishing requires the presence of rights. I've given an incredibly abridged version of the logic that leads from the choice to live, through ethics, to the political concept of rights. If you wish much more detail, I suggest The Virtue of Selfishness, and Tara Smith's works Viable Values (which is about the basis of ethics) and Moral Rights and Political Freedoms, which establishes the basis for rights from an Objectivist point of view.
  13. I don't know about that. If you're saying that any time there is a foregone opportunity in me making a choice then it can no longer be morally evaluated, I would disagree. If I choose not to save someone I care about who is choking because I would have to forego some small thing, that would still be immoral. I agree that in such a situation, he must choose which is more important. However, once he figures out which is more valuable to him, he must pursue that value or commit a moral breach. The opposite argument, that whenever there are both costs and benefits you can't blame the actor for choosing either course, quickly breaks down into the conclusion that almost no choices can be morally evaluated, because there are always costs to each course.
  14. Dante

    How'd I do?

    Yeah, I don't think it's necessarily that the person you love has to have the same virtues as you, but they must have virtues which you think are important and positive. Generally, people who want to be virtuous try to work for those virtues that they find important, so it's probable that if you find something you admire in someone else, you've been trying to cultivate that virtue in yourself. However, cultivating virtue is hard work, so it's certainly possible that you meet someone who has virtues that you admire but don't yet share to the same extent. The important thing is that your evaluation of their virtues is positive and you respond favorably to their character. Overall, I think your explanation of love is very good, and well explained in a way that non-Objectivists can relate to.
  15. When Ayn Rand differentiated her view on value from intrinsic value theory, she clearly stated that she was defining the idea of intrinsic value as "possessing value regardless of the purposes and goals of the valuators." She would not have disagreed with the proposition that the presence of the value "life" always requires an organism which is alive, in which such "life" inheres. Your argument and her own are in agreement that life is automatically pursued by the biological workings of organisms (excepting man's rationality, which is subject to volition); you choose to call this type of value "intrinsic" for some reason. Okay... but you're no longer arguing with her; you're no longer defending the "intrinsic" value concept which she opposed. You're simply renaming a property of some values, such as life, from "self-generated" to "intrinsic." I don't understand the motivation behind this redefinition, but you've left the intrinsic-subjective-objective value debate for a different debate, one about how some values are always present when there is a valuator (namely life), while others are more easily separable from a valuator (I can lose a material value without losing my ability to value). That's an important distinction to make, but it's not usually referred to as a distinction between "intrinsic" and non-intrinsic in Objectivist discussions. Additionally, intrinsic value has been used quite commonly to refer to a different concept. I'd find a better word than intrinsic to refer to a value which must always be present in any given valuator.
  16. If this is supposed to provide evidence that everyday moral decision-making is not dependent upon people's choices... it doesn't. The only way that we could determine that a brain under the influence of magnets makes abnormal moral decisions is by contrasting that with a normally functioning moral center. Showing that magnets bend people away from a fully functional state implies that they would otherwise operate in a fully functional state. This research offers no reason to believe that "the norm" in terms of moral decision-making is not a choice-driven process subject to volition. In fact, it underscores such a conclusion, by showing that normal moral decison-making depends on a normally functioning brain. Moral decision-making, like any process, only works under conditions that the brain is suited for. We can see a parallel between this and vision, for instance. It is possible to trick one's eyes by putting them in abnormal circumstances (bending light, optical illusions, etc). This does not, however, violate the principle that eyes function properly in normal circumstances. Because eyes have an identity, and work in a certain way (and only in that way), it is possible to trick them; but there is always a reason that one's eyes don't function properly. There is always some element making the circumstances abnormal. If no such element is present (if we have no reason to believe circumstances are abnormal), we are justified in relying on our vision as accurate. In the same way, if I know that I don't have magnets taped to my head, I am still justified in treating my moral-decision making as under my own control, despite the fact that there are things in the world that could interfere with my moral center. This research adds one more thing to the list of stuff which can interfere with moral decision-making (in addition to drugs, brain damage, etc), but none of that invalidates the conclusion that in an environment where none of that stuff is present, people control their own moral decisions and are able to choose right or wrong.
  17. Any simplification of Objectivism into a single symbol or a single concept is going to suffer from mischaracterization. That problem is not unique to the dollar sign. Images simply mean different things to different people.
  18. But it is precisely the case that for man, not all such mechanisms for self-preservation are automatic. Specifically, his rationality is not, and this is what makes man special, and what creates the need to choose to value himself.
  19. We're not talking about the dominance of Western nations over other nations in some sort of power relationship. Capitalism isn't about raising one country's relative position to another. Capitalism is a generator of absolute wealth. There are certainly accidental historical reasons that one side or another prevailed in many wars and conflicts throughout human history, but the generation of wealth on an absolute level can easily be linked to the degree of respect paid to individual rights, including property rights. It's not about dominance, but raising the standard of living, and all we're saying is that that's happened more in some countries, and much of the difference can be explained by the economic systems instituted in those countries.
  20. I cannot argue against the value of my own life without implicitly accepting some value in my own life, if only for the purpose of argument. I value arguing, I therefore must value the life that I do it with. I have implicitly accepted the value of life for a particular purpose which I have placed value in. So... how exactly do I have to assume that life is intrinsically valuable (i.e. without reference to a purpose) by using it for a purpose (to argue against intrinsic value).
  21. Phi, the symbol, is often used to refer to philosophy at large, which is why it was proposed earlier in the thread.
  22. Just sitting there isn't complicated, and that will eventually bring about one's death. That is exactly why we don't consider suicidal people to have consistently placed no value in life; it is only one who adopts no purposes at all, and therefore takes no purposeful action (killing oneself included) that life truly has no value. This argument presupposes that man has some purposes, even if they involve killing himself. However, purposes are chosen. They are adopted through volition. One need not take any purposes at all. It is this adopting of purpose which gives value to life; it is not intrinsic to man, valuable regardless of whether he adopts purposes or not. He must adopt some purpose to make life valuable for fulfilling that purpose.
  23. A suicide bomber has chosen to accomplish something with his death. He has chosen some purpose which involves being alive. "Someone who does not choose life in any respect" doesn't just mean someone who chooses to bring about their own death; that suicidal someone has placed some value on their life as an instrument to achieving something. "Someone who doesn't choose life" means someone taking no actions, accepting no purposes, valuing nothing. This person is theoretically possible, and life for them would have no value. Life is only valuable to those with purposes, and purposes are chosen, so life is not intrinsic.
  24. Well, there's a reason that there are millions of homeless people in Africa while there are far fewer in developed nations like America. Individual rights and the ability to pursue profit is the reason that rich nations are rich. You just have to look, not at the poor countries, but at those who have lifted themselves out of poverty to see that charity writ large is not a viable solution to poverty. EDIT: Also, I would inquire who exactly is investing this money. Is it western corporate sponsors who earned the money, or is the South African government taxing money away from its people in order to host a lavish event to raise its standing among world countries? Because the second would most definitely be an injustice. However, the person would still be off base, because taxing money away from citizens isn't only wrong if they're starving and homeless; it's wrong simply because the money belongs to them, no matter what you'd judge their need for the money to be.
  25. No, life is not good simply because it is life. Life is only good if you have some value you wish to pursue with your life. Similarly, death is only bad if you have chosen some values, because death would impede your pursuit of them.
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