hernan

I am not challenging Rand's defense of the right of man to exist for his own sake nor her accusations against those who assert that we have a moral duty to live for others and deny ourselves. But I am suggesting that trade is not a good general model for the reasons I cited in the OP. The goal of benevolence is mutual benefit but the lines blur in the context of uncertainty.

Well, that's my point. I was carful to present the definition to avoid just such confusion. Suffice it to say that it's not easy, in an uncertain world, to distinguish.

I don't think I had a single issue in mind. Partly I wanted to check my argument. For example, it does seem to me that Rand was not making the distinction that libertarians do. But I think there is a one-sentence claim that might help get the discussion going: In an uncertain world, being altruistic is useful. It's useful to think about other people's needs. It's often useful to err on the side of giving.

As I was rereading Atlas Shrugged, I came across a passage that reminded me of an issue that I had never really clearly resolved: Rand's view of altruism. The passage is: Now in order to discuss this and avoid confusion we need to agree on terms and I'm more than happy to use Rand's terms. I'll offer these (feel free to correct): Altruism: The welfare of other people is the measurement of ethical action. Sacrifice: The surrendering of a greater value for a lesser value. Selfishness: Using one's own welfare is the measurement of ethical action. Benevolence: Mutual respect for the values of the self and of other people. Now, to my point: I have argued in these forums and elsewhere with objectivists and libertarians of various stripes about what Rand meant in her condemnation of altruism and whether she was right to condemn it. The reason that I gave the above definitions is that often people criticize Rand on the basis that she was opposed to helping others. A moderate position that many (e.g. libertarians) take absent force, there is nothing wrong with altruism, often called charity. I believe that the passage quoted above suggests that Rand was opposed to more than forced altruism. Altruism, as defined above, applies whether or not someone is forcing you. If you are simply evaluating two options it is wrong, Rand says, to weigh the choice on the basis of the welfare of others irrespective of whether there is a punsihing authority involved or not. An ethical choice, she would say, must be made on the basis of value to one's self. This include's not just the beggar on the street but one's own wife and children who must pay their own way in some sense. To give the starkest example, if you had to choose between your own life and that of your wife or children it would be immoral to sacrifice yourself for them. Now there is a lot of wiggle room in the area of happiness (I prefer Tara Smith's flourishing concept). As the saying goes, when momma ain't happy, ain't nobody happy. This, then, leads to a lot of complicated analysis of mutual benefit and domestic harmony. Things can be even more difficult when we are considering charity. If I give to a beggar on the street am I being altruistic? What if it gives me the warm and fuzzies? More importantly, it is often prudent in social situations to be the first to give and to develop a reputation for benevolence absent mechanism to enforce mutuality. Which brings us to the problem of benevolence. Often it is stated as a condition: I will respect your rights if you respect mine. Otherwise, my respect for your rights is unconnected to your respect for mine. I can't control your respect for my rights. At most I can respect your rights conditionally. People often imagine enforcement mechanisms where none exist. The real choice is often between giving without certainty of getting or not giving. Without an enforcement mechanism benevolence can look a lot like sacrifice and altruism. (There have been some older threads on this topic but none were focused where I intended to focus so I decided not to hijak them.)

So how might Rand's insights about the sanction of the victim be applied to Obamacare? (I think if ever someone wanted to play the John Galt role this would be the opportunity. One can easily imagine rewriting Atlas Shrugged to be a story about medical practiioners going on strike.)

I think Obamacare is much closer to a reliance upon the sanction of the victim than other familiar government programs. The Supreme Court approved it on the basis of a tax finding no power to otherwise compel. Some wish to go full socialist with single payer but they lacked the political strength at the zenith of popularity and are unlikely to get it as the problems snowball.

Watch what happens with Obamacare. It has some interesting parallels including the pretense of voluntariness and reality of perpetual failure and adhokery.

Precisely. Similarly, we can say that slaveholders do not need the sanction of slaves so long as they are wiling to be absolutely brutal. It's true, of course, that dead slaves don't till soil and that citizens in jail do not pay taxes. But that they do serve as warnings to others.

That's what I'm getting at. Does the IRS rely on "saction of the victim"? By contrast, Lilian (and the family generally) does rely on sanction of the victim as Rearden discovered. That was entirely realistic.

Yes, and this makes sense from a literary perspective. As I noted originally, she was telling a story and guding events toward a selected climax. Nowhere does her story include the violence of, say, the Bolsheviks, with which she was very familiar, but not even the velvet fist of the IRS, that we are all so familiar with. It was her literary choice to give the court no real power over Rearden. (Note that defendatns often pull the kind of stunts that Rearden did and courts are very capable of dealing with them. If, for example, a defendant refuses to enter a plea the court will enter one for him.) Note that while it is not my intention to rewrite Atlas Shrugged, we can imagine a Strike succeeding even in the face of raw state violence; look at the collapse of the Soviet Union. That's simply not the way she chose to tell her story.

I think she is saying more than this.

Surely you are not saying that Rand's insight was merely that. A simple majority would be sufficient to abolish the IRS by ordinary politics. My impression was that Rand was claiming that individuals had more control.

I'm trying to tease apart Rand's art and philosphy. Jaskin seems to imply that they are one and the same. I am skeptical and here is why: Let us suppose that someone refuses to sanction the IRS. What should we expect to happen? I claim that they would be crushed without the slightest hesitation or regret. The idea that that the IRS needs our sanction seems laughable. Now I think Rand's portrayal of Lilian is entirely plausible. She has no power over Rearden other than what he grants her. Not so the IRS. Is there any reason to believe that, in the long run, taxation will fail? Not really. Nations may come and go but not because of any reliance upon the sanction of the victim. Many speculate that slavery would eventually have died out, that the Civil War was unnecessary. Perhaps. But it endured throughout the ancient world for centuries, milliniea really.

I'm currently rereading Atlas Shrugged with an eye toward certain questions that have nagged at me. Among them is this: Why do good things happen to bad people? Is slavery profitable? How does a looting elite maintain itself? Ayn Rand struggled with this question. Her answer is generally described as the sanction of the victim. Throughout the novel, Dagny, Hank and others are constantly sideswiped by politicians. They are willing to move mountains to stay on schedule when building the Rio Norte line and related promises, but are ignorant of politics and regard it as beneath them. And, needless to say, there is never an armed insurrection. But, interestingly, neither do we see any jackbooted thugs. There is no mention of taxes, confiscatory or otherwise. To some extent this is merely artistic license. Rand has a story to tell and she guides events and characters toward a designed climax. But as Rand was not merely a fictiin writer and as this was her magnum opus, I wanted to open a discussion to explore Rand's thoughts and to better understand how the world works. I'm trying to sort out Rand's artistic license from her philosophical and political views on the question. Any assistance would be welcome.

Well, that's one approach, but it is a rather self-limiting one. Essentially that suggests that you are unable to form bonds of trust with non-Objectivists. While I do not consider myself an Objectivist it is one touchstone that I go to in dealing with challenging philosophical questions. No, I don't think that Objectivists are, by and large, pacifists, though as I noted in the other thread, the language of Objectivism creates a bias in that direction. And, yet, that seems to be the realistic alternative to pacifism.

We could deal in examples all day but to make progress we need to reach a more general understanding. Examples are useful for mapping out the territory (e.g. refuting the claim that one must always be truthful) but they are not a general solution. Surely, but this is the path that leads to factional honor, at best, or, at worst, bilateral or even unilateral honor. That's a very realistic view but something of a dog-eat-dog world. This is a shift in criteria, from theft to need, which is more consistent with Objetivism but, as noted above, a rather bleak outlook. Let's explore this further by asking how we might enlarge our "circle of trust." First, can we trust Objectivists? Well, in another thread, the question was posed wether it was moral to work for the government. I would presume that there are Objectivist government employees. Can you trust them? Can you trust your family? We discussed above the case where that was not possible but usually it is. Can you trust your spouse? This seems the best place to start building trust but who is totally honest even with their spouse? Another approach is to ask who has a right to know what? If someone asks for information that they don't have a right to then they have no right to expect a truthful answer. But this may be another case of replacing one hard problem with another. There is, I suspect, something of a continental divide on this issue. Step in one direction, conditional trust, and the logic leads to factional honor and human judgement. Step in the other, universal honesty, and the logic leads to pacifism and martyrdom. I didn't mean to entirely dismiss your reference to learning how markets work, or more generally, learning how the world works, this is certainly an important element of judgement and it may be that if one chooses not to be a pacifist and martyr then one must do one's best to improve one's judgement. The better the judgement the better the decisions about who to trust and when to misrepresent the truth.

I understand the distinction you are making but the whole direction of the argument is suspicious because it entails determining the worth of an individual by his contribution to others, i.e. to society as a whole. I don't need manicurists therefore manicurists are thieves. Joe thinks stock traders are parasites, etc. Now to determine whether someone is a thief, to decide if it's rational to deceive them, we have to answer grand economic questions about people's contributions to society? You might as well say, ask God. My claim is that whether or not it is morally correct to deceive someone should depend on facts readily available to a reasonable person, allowing for reasonable error.

Here Rand is using a specific test: that of dependence. I'm not especially fond of that test since we are all dependent on each other in a complex economy. But I get her meaning anyway. And, yes, I am intersted in it as you describe though I think it's safe and more general to simply observe that law and principle can, and often do, conflict which is nicely illustrated by theives in government. You introduced a great linguistic distinction before: legal thief vs. princple thief. Perhaps that will be useful here.

Well, yes, I found his answer to be in the nature of "use reason". Now granted, focusing on the "underground economy" gives a much clearer picture than my initial attempt (though the subject is more general, I had included legal evasion, e.g. papa johns limiting employees to less than 30 hours, about which there was no dispute, and violent resistence, which I then took off the table). Nevertheless, focusing on the "underground economy" is very clarifying. It is ubiquitous and significant economically, though of course it is difficult to measure by its very nature. The underground economy stands nicely for the general subject. So rather than revisit all the prior posts, I would be curious to get everyone's take on the Objectivist view of underground economic activity. Although I doubt those who are primairly engaged in undergound economic activity would be posting here, I would not be surprised if everyone has participated in some small way. (Most cash tips go unreported so if you give tips in cash you are probably contributing to the underground economy.) (I was hoping, though, to hear more from you in our previous discussion. My last response to you is here: #215)

Your response is amgibuous on the key point: there is the question of what is honesty (e.g. your defintion) and whether dishonest is ever justifiable (your example). I can't quite tell if you are suggesting that if it is not immoral then it is not dishonest. But your first sentence does not define dishonesty in terms of the justifiablness of faking reality.

Well, sure, but that's a pretty vague and general answer, essentially "use your own judgement." But this is a difficult question not owing to circumstances but more to the differentness of the things being compared. Not you, others. And not all others, only a couple posters. I wish I'd thought of framing the quesiton initally as about the underground economy. That is the clearest way to present the question.

Well, it's an interesting question whether that is justifiably dishonest or not dishonest at all. But certainly they both entail being untruthful and this may lead to other untruthfulness. For example, is it dishonest to lie to somone you suspect to be a robber/SS or to anyone who might unwittingly help said robbber/SS? The tangled web of deceit. It does, though, entail making distinctions about who you are honest with. In the extreme case (e.g. under totalitarianism) you become quite paranoid, not even trusting your own children. I had intentionally avoided giving a hard definition of "thief" exactly so that we might explore the various interpretations. But you describe it well here: thief in law vs. thief in principle. And this is, of course, exactly the sort of consquence that one would expect when law and principle conflict. I'm trying to resist drawing a conclusion here in order to explore the various consequences.

That's more or less the answer that I would have expected but it's hard then to understand some of the answers given earlier in this thread. Of course, given the practical constraints that you correctly cite, there is a difference between saying it's ok in theory and saying it's ok in a particular situation. That is, I think, an important subject for discussion. What you left unaswered is how to go about balancing the risk/reward and making a good decision. The risk is pretty low for the poor, it's hardly worth the the tax collector's time and effort to chase them down. So, at a minimum, this seems like a good anti-poverty policy. Now this does bring us back to the question I raised here and especially in the ethics thread Can there be honor among thieves?. Operating in an underground economy requires, at a minimum, being dishonest toward the government.

Yes, there are certianly many practical issues and that makes them, of course, moral issues as well. So one question to consider is how Objectivism balances the risk of getting caught against the value of avoiding regulations and taxes. I have not thoroughly researched this topic, I have not read the books I listed. I only know vaguely about the "underground economy" (sometimes also called the "informal economy" by economists) mostly from what I read in the papers. It is a very significant chunk of the economy in the Mediterranean and Latin American countries, though. If you glance through the book descriptions you will get an idea how big this already is. Now obviously there are many who regard the existence of the underground economy to be a travesty of justice (e.g. the Germans are quite upset with the Greeks and Italians over this because they are subsidizing the Greek government budget deficits). I gather from your response that this is not the case with Objectivists?

Thinking further about this topic, I think the place to focus is the "underground economy". The question I want to turn to now is very specifically: what is the Objectivist position on the underground economy? Here is a list of books with a mix of observation and "how to": http://www.amazon.com/Off-Books-Underground-Economy-Urban/dp/0674030710 http://www.amazon.com/Ragnars-Underground-Economy-Ragnar-Benson/dp/1581600119 http://www.amazon.com/Deep-Inside-Underground-Economy-Practising/dp/1893626490 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307279987 http://www.amazon.com/Guerrilla-Capitalism-Practice-Enterprise-Economy/dp/0915179164 This book sounds a bit over the top but it is interesting nonetheless: http://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Resistance-Tyranny-Insurgency-Increasingly/dp/1581603088 Note that I have not read any of these books and offer them only to illustrate the issues of the discussion. It's worth nothing that generally underground economy is practiced at the lower end of the economic spectrum which has important implications.