Boydstun

SL, I should think that in law, such as law of free speech or press, the concept is always being made more determinate as cases arise and are reasoned and decided and opinions produced. On the concept of free press, it can mean something new when it is reasoned over in a new case. And that seems not a problem, rather, just the way it is to have a live legal system in service to present and upcoming people living their lives together in social coordination and conflicts. Coming out of New York Times v. Sullivan, free press was more than it had been before because it meant that henceforth damages could not be awarded a public official who had been falsely defamed in relation to their official conduct unless it is proven the false statement was made with knowledge of its falsity or with reckless disregard of whether it was true or false. In morals everyone who comes to think about ethical theory or focus on particular virtues or biblical Commandments will have had prior no-no training from adults, meaning some simple rules and some ability to apply them on one’s own to situations encountered. Indeed most will have internalized the rules and identify with them. Situations in which one is possibly violating an elementary rule such as not telling the truth or of being proud can be recognized and with further question of the impact on wrongness by further conditions that are in the full, actual situation. One might approach life with the attitude that strictly speaking all of the moral rules are only correct to a first approximation and have an unknown bushel of possible if, buts, and maybes and that it is unreasonable to try to formulate in advance maxims that are so detailed in spelling out how the virtue or vice may be correctly applied to every possible circumstance. If one is writing the engineering specifications for making a locomotive that a customer has elected to buy, all the specifications can be made with only a little left to the judgment and know-how of the workers building the locomotive. But living a life and making a life for oneself seems much more organic than that in how it can (and should) proceed. The received maxims are rough specifications in comparison to the full-bodied identity of the situations encountered in one’s actual life. Moral judgment is an “online” process, in contrast to writing up specifications by the moralists. Indeed, I tend to look with suspicion on philosophers whose illustrations or thinking-stimulants on ethical issues are imagined situations, rather than looking at case law and absorbing not only where the law came down in a case or should have come down in a case, but what are the aspects of the case that are moral issues, and then reasoning and judging what is the morally right thing for the parties in the situation. We know and can do life more than we can set down in guidebooks, even taking decades to write such books.

Mathematics and Physics – Penrose

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")

Colonial America began as business, notwithstanding the tale of religious freedom concerning immigration into Massachusetts one was taught in grade school. An early step towards religious tolerance was for an advantageous business environment in the Carolinas, as put to paper by John Locke. The Carolinas The Pilgrims Once the British lost the American Revolutionary War, they stationed more troops in their colonies and made sure there was no repetition of their American mistake.

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.

"A force for good in world history" needs to be taken on to "more a force for good than evil in world history." The Five Civilized Tribes were called civilized because they quickly adopted ways of the European settlers while the tribes were in their earlier areas in southeastern North America. They did not have writing, firearms, or the wheel until exposed to these by the Europeans. They had not reached the Iron Age. An early European visitor to the Choctaw tribe, before European settlement and the Indian Removal, recorded of them that there was no art and no religion. They had the usual human trinity of language and ability to draw and make music, of course. He recorded that they laughed and danced a lot, and he ended his travel log saying "The Choctaw are a happy people." Their sense of property was sharpened by exposure to the European settlers (mostly, English, Scotch, and Irish in this region). That included the ownership of slaves imported from Africa. Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Cherokee owned slaves and brought them along to Indian Territory on the Trail of Tears (1830's). These tribes were instructed by Christian missionaries of course. An enslaved man who belonged to a Choctaw created the song "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" as he looked over to the Red River in the area of the Choctaw Nation within Indian Territory. I have visited the stately Council House of that tribe. They had a written constitution for their government; the tribe had a government there within Indian Territory. (That immediate jump means such peoples don't have to go through the usual bloody transition from tribes to chiefdoms before transition to states.) Ownership of land in Choctaw Nation before late in the nineteenth century was entirely tribal, as I understand it so far. The Choctaw Nation had allied with the Confederacy. Some of the interviews of formerly enslaved persons, interviews conducted in the 1930's under WPA, which are available online from the Library of Congress, are of former slaves to Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Cherokee in Indian Territory. One distinction of the slavery there was that the owners did not separate enslaved families, which seems a little more civilized than European owners in SE America. I think our conception of a force for good in a peoples or in the entire world is a valid concept from a scanning sort of look at things. When we think that way, we are leaving aside all the people who died on account of the progress. I recall that John Hospers once gave an estimation of the population of North America when the Europeans found it and remarked that though so many natives died from the ensuing engagement (mostly lack of immunity I think), the native population of North America was today greater than back then. My half-Choctaw life-partner was quick to notice some moral obscenity in such a remark. But going with usual talk such as "force for good in the world" I'd estimate Yes, on net Yes. By the way, I'd not exaggerate the debt to ancient Greece for the advantages of our living in the present America. The flourishing of science and technology was won as much by the revolt of Galileo and Newton against Aristotle, jettisoning much of him, as by their embrace of parts of him. There are other ancient civilizations to whom the advantages of living in America today are owed. Greek geometry was for our good. Aristotle's discovery of logic was for our good. His shrinkage of the mystical was for our good. His ideas about what we call mechanics or optics and scientific method were impediments to our good. Thankfully overcome.

Repairs and Intellectual Property

American Indian Law – A Beginner's Guide RE, One does not have to be part of a culture of nihilism or any other negative current to criticize four-square some major atrocities of the British Empire in their colonies. An Objectivist should not feel embarrassment over each and every view of Ayn Rand's that was false. One does not need to agree with everything Rand ever thought to be an adherent of Rand's philosophy. One's identification with the philosophy should not, in one's own mind, be an identification with Ayn Rand. Rand's view on colonization, including the history of American colonies is not a philosophic view, but an historical view. Typical views on who was "the" American Indian in earlier times are ignorant, and Rand's views were in that vein. Objectivism is a philosophy. Views of Objectivists on history, including the history of philosophy, are not part of Objectivism because they are not part of philosophy per se. Furthermore, to be an adherent to the Objectivist philosophy is only to be in agreement with the essentials of the philosophy (I am concurring with Peikoff and Kelley on this point). Although Rand's esthetics and her theory of concepts are part of her philosophy, neither are essential to it, for examples. A couple of serious books on the Indian Removal (Trail of Tears) of the Five Civilized Tribes from the Southern States are: Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars (2001), by Robert V. Remini, and Indian Removal (1932, 1953) by Grant Forman. I know most about the Choctaw. One of my great, great grandmothers was full-blood Choctaw (Line –1897). The mother of my first life-partner (man on right) was full-blood Choctaw.

South Carolina Supreme Court strikes down state abortion ban

Ice Age cave art at Lascaux and Altamira contains calendar useful to hunter-gathers who drew them.

Exodus 20:16 “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.” (King James) “Thou shall not give false evidence against your neighbor.” (New Jerusalem) “You shall not give false evidence against your neighbor.” (New English Bible) Those sound like requirements concerning legal proceedings, with the god of the tribe being invoked for authority stamping their validity. The early Christians had it that one should love their neighbor as oneself. From this it might be inferred today that loving oneself entails not deceiving oneself, and that therefore, one should not deceive one’s neighbor. Regarding Jesus as a divinity, the authority stamping the validity would still be God. Perhaps the conception of deceiving oneself was not yet a conception in hand in that era of Christian subculture. Plato, preceding them, had at least the conception that it is lamentable to have falsehood and ignorance in one’s head, although so far as I see, he had no notion of deceiving oneself. By the time of Luther, the scope of Exodus 20:16 seems to have expanded to protecting the civil peace. For his short exposition of this Commandment, Luther still staked its validity on God. And he took love of God and fear of God as the motive for obedience to the commandment, concerning which, he set out: “We should fear and love God such that we may not belie, betray, slander, nor defame our neighbor, but defend him, speak well of him, and put the best construction on everything.” (Further.) In addition to the role of God in the motivation for compliance and Luther’s aim of civil peace and good will among people, this explication of the Commandment seems to be starting to let in the idea that good will towards others (right believers anyway) and responsiveness to an inherent value in others are right aims. In Republic, Plato wrote: “No one is willing to tell falsehoods to the most important part of himself about the most important things . . . . To be false to one’s soul about the things that are, to be ignorant and to have and hold falsehood there, is what everyone would least of all accept, for everyone hates a falsehood in that place most of all.” That passage is sincerely about keeping good reason, but is, by parallel between ideal soul and ideal city, a disarmament for collectivism as in the following passages. “For a private citizen to lie to a ruler is just as bad a mistake as for a sick person or athlete not to tell the truth to his doctor or trainer about his physical condition or for a sailor not to tell the captain the facts about his own condition or that of the ship and the rest of the crew.” “Our rulers will have to make considerable use of falsehood and deception for the benefit of those they rule.” Aristotle praises the inherent excellence of a person routinely truthful in all matters, and he notes that such a person is then trustworthy for truthfulness in financial dealings. And beware anyone boasting of their truthfulness (NE 1127a33–1127b33). (The book by Bernard Williams Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Geneology (2002) looks quite interesting. But I don’t have it and haven’t read it.) The most famous philosophy writings on the virtue of honesty are those of Kant, which I’ll examine and relate shortly.

Kate, Would you say that plagiarism is dishonest and should not be done even if it is not against the law? When you say "preventing man from doing as he wishes with his property," isn't that begging the question at issue by your use of the term property, rather than possession?

I had not made the connection until now, but Christian Miller was the Commentator, at a session of the Ayn Rand Society a few years ago, on Carrie-Ann Biondi's paper "Being Integrated: A Labor of Self-Love." At the Eastern Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association currently underway in Montreal, Tara Smith is one of the Critics at an Author-Meets-Critics session for Miller's 2021 book. The subject at the Ayn Rand Society in Montreal is here. I am unable to attend this year.

One take on lying is dramatized by Rand in her script for the film LOVE LETTERS – 1945. Aunt Beatrice to Singleton: “A lie never works . . . No matter what our motives.” Alan to Singleton: “Nobody can build happiness on a lie, Beatrice learned that. And Roger Moreland and I."

One more strand in that vein is sharing the world and experience of the world with other humans.

These data are from World Bank. Evidently, it takes two years before data of actual performance can be accumulated. ~GDP 2021 (Countries with at least $1.5 trillion GDP)~ USA 23.32 T$ China 17.73 T$ Japan 4.94 T$ Germany 4.26 T$ Britain 3.19 T$ India 3.18 T$ France 2.96 T$ Italy 2.11 T$ Canada 1.99 T$ S. Korea 1.81 T$ Russia 1.78 T$ Brazil 1.61 T$ Australia 1.55 T$ When I gathered the results three years ago, which had been data for 2017, there was little difference between this ranking according to flat Gross Domestic Product Per Capita and a GDP per capita that takes into account purchasing power within the country. ~GDP PER CAPITA 2021~ USA 69.3 K$ Germany 57.9 K Australia 56.3 K$ Canada 52.1 K$ France 50.5 K$ Britain 49.7 K$ S. Korea 47.2 K$ Italy 45.9 K$ Japan 42.9 K$ Russia 32.9 K$ China 19.3 K$ Brazil 16.0 K$ India 7.2 K$

Harrison, I'd think that whether harm brought to the liar or harm brought to the victim of the lie is greater would vary in different cases. Then too, how awful telling a lie to innocent people feels to the liar varies greatly among such liars. However badly it makes the liar feel, what is the source of the feeling bad? Isn't it firstly because the liar knows and feels it is wrong to treat a good person or a presumptively good person in such a way? You mentioned the liar filling his or her own head with nonsense trivia which they know to be false. That is correct, and one aged and sound egoistic strategic reason for not lying to presumptively good people in a generally good social setting has always been that you have to keep track of what lies you've told to keep up the social appearance of a consistent set of what all you have reported. Whereas, making it a general policy to simply tell the truth to the presumedly innocent means you don't have that burden, but can simply center on what you have thought true and by good habit would have reported truly. My claim has been that that is not the most basic reason that one does not lie to the innocent. I've had egoist friends who have spooled out that sort of reason, but that is only because they want to keep their official reason for not lying in harmony with pure ethical egoism. I don't believe it is in fact their first reason for not lying to people, but a rationalization for their practice of not lying to people. The basic reason they don't lie to people is because their human nature at the deepest level stands in a relation to other humans in a way such that to lie is to try to buck that nature. The human is far and away the most social species among the great apes. In evolutionary history as well as in individual child development, the capacity for joint intentions on joint goals is what fundamentally is the distinction between the human species and contemporary great apes and between humans and the apes our species had been before the divergence into the human. Our contemporaries, the chimps and bonobos, lack those social capacities; their behaviors first seeming to show such abilities with their kind have by now been shown to be not the human capacity at all (joint intentions to joint goals), but purely Machiavellian and still locked in only individual purposes. It was with the growing human capacity for authentically joint intentions to truly joint goals, that the human line was able to develop linguistic communication, routine truth-telling in it, rationality (thence its offsprings), and objectivity. And as it happens this trajectory is repeated in individual child development. I'll try to write much more about this in a few months more. This new understanding has come from empirical observation and experiments and reflections on them, as reported in the books by Michael Tomasello, especially in the last decade. Philosophers' ethical theories are necessarily based on what they take to be human nature at most basic level. There are certain sciences that can help get right what is that nature pertinent to ethics. I know there are Objectivist-types who do not think science can inform philosophy; that it can only be the other way around. And I've known a few successful philosophers not Objectivist who also talk as if that were their own outlook as well, even into recent times. But overwhelmingly today, thank goodness, the successful philosophers have come around to engaging in philosophy informed by pertinent results of modern science, which is to say, come around to being fully serious.

Rand’s rational selfishness is reality-seeking and reality-engaging, not reality-avoiding, as is megalomania, nor the reality-avoiding and other-avoiding, the subjectivism, the self-centeredness, of narcissism. Rational selfishness does not presume that others are inferior or stand on lack of empathy for others. Does a narcissist seek to find others she can admire? A person of authentic self-esteem does, according to Objectivist writings. More specifically, does a narcissist seek to be a productive creator and find others with that trait for which she can admire them? A person of authentic self-esteem does. See N. Branden’s The Psychology of Self-Esteem, p. 146.

Dipert & Seddon on Kant v. Kelley/Rand (cont.) ~Dipert on Kelley’s Kant~A (To be followed by Dipert~B, then installment on Seddon on Kelley's Kant.) Prof. Dipert’s paper is not only a criticism of Kelley’s Kant in ES, it is an examination of the theory of perception that is the objective of Kelley’s book.[1] I want to examine both (a) the direct criticisms that Dipert makes on Kelley’s representation and analysis of Kant and (b) the issues Dipert takes up in Kelley’s theory of perception, their fate in subsequent scientifically informed philosophy of perception and how Kant’s philosophy and Kelley’s philosophy fair in light of those developments. Kelley had written that Kant’s doctrines that space and time are forms of the perceptual faculty, subjective things imposed on the manifold of sensations, are applications of Kant’s doctrine that because consciousness has a specific constitution and has specific functional operations, consciousness cannot passively mirror the world outside. I observe that that is not among the arguments Kant gives for the ideality of space and time in the outset of KrV in his Transcendental Aesthetic. Kelley does not deal with those arguments, which is understandable since his book is about philosophy of perception. I should mention, however, that for Objectivism, Leonard Peikoff had argued against a doctrine of Kant’s which Kant had set out within his the prelude to the Transcendental Aesthetic. That is the division of judgments into either synthetic ones or analytic ones. Rand and Peikoff had also argued a point with which Objectivists could sensibly approach Kant’s arguments on space and his proposed source of necessity in geometry. That point is that there is no such thing as strictly a priori knowledge, and those arguments against a priori knowledge would go not only to alleged examples of analytic a priori knowledge (viz., logic), but to the synthetic a priori sort of knowledge devised by Kant specifically to characterize geometrical knowledge, and subsequently to characterize an allegedly “pure” part of physics and any right metaphysics.[2] In order to supersede Kant’s philosophy of mathematics, together with his ideality of space, an Objectivist philosophy of mathematical knowledge must be adduced. No such adequate theory has been forthcoming, and Kelley, like Rand, omitted direct counters to Kant’s arguments in the Transcendental Aesthetic, though he had the tools for setting aside Kant’s own epistemology of geometry. Dipert stresses this neglect in Kelley’s engagement with Kant’s arguments (1987, 60–61, 68–69). It should not be thought, I say, contrary Kelley’s contention, that Kant’s doctrines that space and time are forms of the perceptual faculty, subjective things imposed on the manifold of sensations, are applications of Kant’s doctrine that because consciousness has a specific constitution and specific functional operations, consciousness cannot passively mirror the world outside. Firstly, that is not doctrine correctly ascribed to Kant at all. Kant’s reason for thinking we cannot access things as they are in themselves and the things that are noumena was because he denied we a have a power of pure intellectual intuitions, on which his predecessors had rested our ability to access such things. Unlike the divine understanding, “our kind of intuition is dependent on the object, and hence is possible only by the object affecting the subject’s capacity to present.”[3] Our power of intuition is only sensory intuition. Secondly, Kant has given in the Transcendental Aesthetic his reasons for concluding that space and time are forms of the perceptual faculty, subjective things imposed on the manifold of sensations. Those reasons, as I said, do not include consciousness having a specific constitution and specific functional operations. Dipert disdained Kelley’s and Rand’s fundamental metaphysical constraint of the primacy of existence, taken for manifest in everyday direct perception of the world (Dipert 1987, 61). Just because we do not experience the perceptual scene as being of our own creation is, according to Dipert, no showing that it is not. This attitude strikes me as rationally inverted. Driving along the roadway we can see the objects nearer the road are whizzing by faster than the ones farther away, and we can readily account for this by considering the entire spatial configuration and our movement in it. That is, we can intellectually discern that the perceptual phenomenon, just as we directly perceived, is due in part to our own motion. We can perceive also directly that we are sitting stationary in the seat of the vehicle and not creating that apprehension either. We need not get silly and start with the differential whizzing-speed phenomena and try to demonstrate that configurations in space are independent of the participation of our persons in them nor independent of our conscious registrations of spatial configurations. Nor prove that our apprehension of being stationarily seated in the vehicle is not something constructed and projected from our own heads. We have ways of teasing out particular elements in our perceptions that depend upon our own location, state of motion, or perceptual system. Such would be the enlargement we have of the moon near the horizon in our perception of it. We take a photograph of the witnessed scene, and it shows no such enlargement. Similarly, with the Mach-band illusion we experience when we carefully cut out a particular chit of gray from a number of those color strips you can get at the paint store. Placing the chits of the same grey we have cut out side-touching-side snugly on a table before us, it will appear that the grey darkens near the abutting edges. And we know perfectly well that each of those chits was uniform in its grayness all over its surface. Unlike the moon illusion, science has identified how the Mach-band effect comes about: through the pattern of circuitry (lateral inhibition) of the receptor neurons of the retina. But when it comes to idealism, there has to be a general argument given for it, as Kant provided, aiming to show that all percepts or fundamental facets of all percepts are in some systematic way contributed by the conscious subject. Kant sensibly did not dispute that we experience space as given to us, not created by us and put about us by our minds. The challenge he took upon himself was to argue this impression is not durable under careful examination. The challenge he leaves for us (which he thought impossible to accomplish) is to find a way in which the character of what we do in geometry and the character of the results could be accounted for by some method empirical (e.g. Locke/Feder) or rational (e.g. Aristotle/Wolff), rather than by his own subject-heavy account. Dipert rightly noted that that is a challenge Kant leaves for realists and that Objectivists have not risen to this challenge.[5] I have mentioned two tools an Objectivist should bring to an analysis and critique of Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic: non-existence of a priori knowledge and Peikoff’s way of toppling the mutually exclusive division of knowledge between the analytic and the synthetic, in “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy,” coupled with Peikoff’s remarks therein on necessity in knowledge. Bring along also Kelley’s account of perception, perceptual form, and his account of how percepts are made from sensations. These Kelley accounts are possible replacements and improvements for Kant’s notion of and use of sensory intuition. (To be continued) Notes [1] Dipert, R. R. 1987. David Kelley’s Evidence of the Senses: A Realist Theory of Perception. Reason Papers 12:57–70. Since the time of Kelley’s book, philosophy of perception has been a very active area. A distinguished book defending realism is A. D. Smith’s The Problem of Perception (2002). Other eminent works in philosophy of perception since ES: The Contents of Visual Experience (2010) by Susanna Siegel; Does Perception Have Content? (2014) edited by Berit Brogaard; The Unity of Perception (2018) by Susanna Schellenberg; and Perception: First Form of the Mind (2022) by Tyler Burge. (It would be ridiculous to call Burge's book a milestone work; it is a light-year marker.) Also pertinent to Kelley and to Dipert on Kelley: Hallucination – Philosophy and Psychology (2013) edited by Macpherson and Platchias; Dreaming (2015) by Jennifer Windt; Skepticism and the Veil of Perception (2001) by Michael Huemer; The Case for Qualia (2008) edited by Edmond Wright; The Innocent Eye (2014) by Nico Orlandi; and Explaining the Computational Mind (2013) by Marcin Milkowski. [2] For a thorough refutation of Kant’s (or anyone’s) casting mathematical knowledge as a priori, see Kitcher 1995. [3] Kant, KrV, B71. Further, B139, B153. Lucy Allais, Manifest Reality – Kant’s Idealism & His Realism (2017), pp. 154, 157–58, 167, argues that the singularity and immediacy that Kant takes as essential to sensory intuition guarantees existence of their objects. [4] That innovation of Kant’s had set the stage for the coherence theory of truth bannered by later idealists. [5] From the empiricist side, Philip Kitcher’s The Nature of Mathematical Knowledge (1995) delivers a sophisticated pragmatist replacement for Kant’s account of space and geometry.

Motherese Do not feel like you need to talk motherese. The regular continuous caretakers can give that a whirl. Just be yourself. My husband has one grandchild, whom I have known since he was born. He is now 21. Let your eyes do their natural things with his. You won't need to think about it. He is learning the world and people on his own motivation. Babies around the world develop fine under very different ways, by culture, they are cared for by adults. Relax. babies

You might enjoy reading Tom Rockmore's Fichte, Kant, the Cognitive Subject, and Epistemic Constructivism

Frank, on solipsism, some of my remarks in the immediately preceding post may help (my addition to Rand). Concerning idealism, the burden should be on the idealist to show that the world is not as it is perceived to be, namely, as existing and in the ways it does exist and as independently of our discernment of it. That independence element is part of what is in our perceptions. We have ways of teasing out particular elements in our perceptions that depend upon our own location, state of motion, or perceptual system. Such would be the enlargement we have of the moon near the horizon in our perception of it. We take a photograph of the witnessed scene, and it shows no such enlargement. Similarly, with the Mach-band illusion we experience when we carefully cut out a particular chit of gray from a number of those color strips you can get at the paint store. Placing the chits of the same grey we have cut out side-touching-side snugly on a table before us, it will appear that the grey darkens near the abutting edges. And we know perfectly well that each of those chits was uniform in its grayness all over its surface. Unlike the moon illusion, science has identified how the Mach-band effect comes about: through the pattern of circuitry (lateral inhibition) of the receptor neurons of the retina. But when it comes to idealism, there has to be a general argument given for it, aiming to show that all percepts or fundamental facets of all percepts are in some systematic way contributed by the conscious subject. Then the work of the realist can begin, which is to show what error there is in that general argument. (I think Moore did this with Berkeley, and I presume an Objectivist refutation of the arguments Berkeley gave would differ somewhat from Moore's.)

The context of the Rand quote is humans able to read AS or the Bible or anyway speak and listen and learn in language as a normal adult human. Another thing Rand had said about consciousness was that for those animals that possess it, it is their means of survival. But we should for her view on all that assimilate her further idea that only higher animals discern entities. That would suggest that only higher animals possess consciousness that is identification. It can be that for humans, consciousness in its identification power is the power that is a crucial enabler of the vast accomplishments of humans, including language, drawing, and music. For humans, at least humans, it can be that consciousness, at least paramount consciousness, is identification. That much I express for Rand's view. My own has something else coordinate with and equally fundamental for human consciousness and that is our awareness of other human minds in our company. And one does not have to learn of the latter from zero while learning about the world in early childhood.* Rather, it is more akin to one's ability to already recognize one's mother's distinctive voice the day one reached birth. It is internally reasonable to constrain Rand's statement about animal's consciousness and their survival in this way: For animals possessing consciousness as identification, it is the means of their survival. Humans, of course, are among the higher animals. That constrained thesis certainly has seemed born out in biological neuroscience. So far as I know, there is no consciousness at all in any animal that has a nervous system with a central integration and control center but is not so complex as to have a cerebral cortex in its brain organization. Even such lower animals, innervated and muscular, such as a snail, do have behavioral response hierarchies issuing from the nervous control center adapted to raise the liklihood of individual survival and reproduction, without consciousness. For them it could be said that their nervous system is the master controller for survival of the individual animal and its kind. On up the animal kingdom, the controlling brain comes to have parts and organization that are long-term controllers and these are the substrate of consciousness as identification (and as high power of consciousness for social coordination, such as the sharing of joint intentions, which the [other] great apes come nowhere near).

Those are all serious-thinking good points in this discussion. I'd like to add that when Rand introduced her axiom that consciousness is identification, one function it filled was to say which meaning of consciousness she meant. She took that one to be the most fundamental and took all others, such as in dreams or hallucinations, as dependent on consciousness in her fundamental sense of it: identification. Although it came up as a side point, in her Objectivist epistemology treatise, she indicated that she thought even a honeybee has some consciousness. I imagine that wherever there is an animal with a nervous system and some encephalization, she'd be thinking that that animal had some amount of consciousness. (A sponge is an animal, but without a nervous system.) She was in step with Aristotle in thinking that only some higher animals have powers of memory and of perception to perceive existence in terms of entities. Her definition of consciousness as identification contains 'entity' and is introduced in the duo: Existence is identity, consciousness is identification. That is perfectly fitting with the idea that fundamental consciousness is consciousness of existence. She had some trouble understanding earliest infant development in terms of this metaphysics, including the casting of consciousness in it. As here: To say to someone that consciousness is consciousness of existence, I have noticed, is not something that could be grasped by someone who did not have such an experience in their repertoire already. Like talking to a person blind from birth about the colors on the clouds in this morning’s sunrise. In connection with setting meditation in the context of the Randian setting of consciousness of existence as the primary and focal sense of consciousness, we might add the challenge of setting the awareness of such things as coldness, breathing, and other bodily conditions, which one had inarticulately from day of birth and retains to now. I should mention that recognitions of thinking existence could not happen without such priors as breathing giving sense of self-existence. The cognitive self of I think emerging in the second year (said as “I know,” meaning “I know how to do it”) joins preexisting awareness of bodily and situational self, affective and interpersonal self, and agency self. There is, moreover, no ontological priority of thinking-being over breathing-being in a human being, notwithstanding the greater activeness, facility, and deliciousness of thinking-being. Sidebar on intellectual history I have accumulated for “A consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms: before it could identify itself as consciousness, it had to be conscious of something”, the following: Theaetetus 160b, in Plato; Categories 7b29–30, De Anima 427a20–22, Metaphysics 1010b30–1011a2, 1072b20–22, 1074b35–36, in Aristotle; Ennead V.1.6.46–50, in Plotinus; Abelard ca. 1119 (commentary on Aristotle’s Categories), quoted in Jacobi 2004, 139; Summa Theologica I Q14 A2, Obj. 3 and Reply Obj. 3, in Aquinas; Wolff 1752, quoted in Kitcher 2011, 58; Herbart 1824, quoted in Heidelberger 2004, 32–33; Ortega y Gassett [1928] 1964, 198–99; Sartre [1937] 1957, 40; [1943] 1953, 21–22; 1948; Merleau-Ponty [1945] 2012, 395–96; Edelman 1989, 159. Rand’s talk here of “a contradiction in terms” is effective for directing attention to the meaning of consciousness. In the old technical vocabulary, the contradiction she exposes is not contradictio in terminis, but contradictio in adjecto. More specifically, it is the self-contradiction Rand housed under the rubric “stolen concept fallacy.” See Rand 1957, 1039–40; Branden 1963; Salmieri 2016, 298–99. Jacobi, Klaus. 2004. Abelard’s philosophy of language. In Brower and Guilfoy 2004, 126–57. Brower, Jeffrey E. and Kevin Guilfoy, eds. 2004. The Cambridge Companion to Abelard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kitcher, Patricia. 2011. Kant’s Thinker. New York: Oxford University Press. Heidelberger, Michael. 2004. Nature from Within – Gustav Theodor Fechner and His Psychophysical Worldview. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Edelman, Gerald M. 1989. The Remembered Present – A Biological Theory of Consciousness. New York: Basic Books.

Hobbes had it that wit is ‘quick discernment of similitude in things otherwise much unlike, or of disimilitude in things that otherwise appear the same.” Locke followed up with this: “Wit lying most in the assemblage of ideas, and putting those together with quickness and variety, wherein can be found any resemblance or congruity, thereby to make up pleasant pictures and agreeable visions in the fancy. Judgment, on the contrary, lies quite on the other side, in separating carefully, one from another, ideas wherein can be found the least difference, thereby to avoid being misled by similitude, and by affinity to take one thing for another.” Rand, Peikoff, and Gotthelf express views on judgments concerning concptual-level similarities in an exchange with Nicholas Bykovetz (Prof. C) in the transcripts of her epistemology seminar (ITOE Appendix, 220–22). I want to spend some time digging into texts, KyaryPamyu, to reply to your picture in the preceding post. I had written you a quick complete reply shortly after your post, but I had composed it right here directly, and after a couple of maneuvers, I lost what I had composed. But then I realized it was just as well, because it would be more useful to be exact and dig into texts, rather than relying on memory and inexact expression of positions. So it will be a while yet before I reply, but that is underway in happy harmony with composing the next installment (Dipert v. Kelley) in the paper begun above, which will include (3rd installment) the treatment by Prof. Seddon on similarities of Kant and Rand.