Boydstun
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Posts posted by Boydstun
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Our Governor got elected to office running on keeping the Toni Morrison book Beloved away from the high schoolers. To win that many votes, you have to get a lot of votes from people who don't have children in public school. Lots of voters who were simply Republican anyway or who just wanted to vent their hatreds of this or that sort of person without the honesty to say it outright. I have not read Morrison's book, and I don't intend to. I heard it got a bump in sales once talk of its banning became the highlight of the campaign for Governor. We did not have economic issues at that time because the incumbent Democrat had the Commonwealth of Virginia in budget-surplus. Unsurprisingly, our present Governor has made statements to some segments of his supporters along this line: "I believe that life begins at conception." Talking his position on when abortion should be illegal. Talking that way and no doubt praying for the sake of his Party that no such bill arrives on his desk. Now the election is over and the Republicans got their man in on protecting the children from Morrison, we hear nothing on the topic. They won the election, and that was the point. They had had higher, deeper hopes, of course: to ban abortion and get rid of same-sex marriage. But their real God is getting power and keeping it and what with the view of the electorate in general elections and all, they'll have to tread lightly on those.
I don't know that what children are being taught in school concerning sexual orientation and gender identification is the most important source of influence on children today on those issues of life. The wider culture and exposure to it by children might be the more important source (Putin is protecting his country on that front). The other evening, on our anniversary, we went out to dinner at a nice restaurant where we had asked for the waiter who had served us when we first moved here and on the evening of the day of our wedding 7 years ago. He is a single parent with two sons. We hadn't seen him for a long time because he had sustained serious injury from falling down a stairs in their home. A few years ago, he had been telling us of his elder child's conflicts at school over his coming into a period of thinking he wanted to become the opposite sex. He wasn't getting support at school, but derision and hostility. Getting caught up with the father, our waiter, the other night, he mentioned that that son is now a junior in college, is happy, and has a girlfriend.
My husband had always been bisexual. He and his former wife raised the children and on through college. Both of their sons turned out to be straight. They got some pain in school back in their youth over vicious remarks being made concerning gay people. They knew it was baloney, but it hurt to hear such stuff because their father was gay. Fact is, we too, are the American family. I became part of that family 27 years ago, and the grandson, now age 22, has always known me as Grandpa Stephen. You don't need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. We simply have won the wide culture war in which the enemy tried to keep who we are invisible or seen as evil or mentally defective. The power of economic boycott now overruns the decisions of the Resistance US Supreme Court, they being very far out of step with wide respect and love for gays and lesbians in this culture that we helped make more decent.
On literature being read by high schoolers, the poetry also bears watching for banning:
How beautiful are your sandaled feet, princess!
The curves of your thighs are like jewelry,
the handiwork of a master.
Your navel is a rounded bowl;
it never lacks mixed wine.
Your waist is a mound of wheat
surrounded by lilies.
Your breasts are like two fawns,
twins of a gazelle.
Your neck is like a tower of ivory,
your eyes like pools in Heshbon
by the gate of Bath-rabbim.
Your nose is like the tower of Lebanon
looking toward Damascus.
Your head crowns you like Mount Carmel,
the hair of your head like purple cloth—
a king could be held captive in your tresses.
How beautiful you are and how pleasant,
my love, with such delights!
Your stature is like a palm tree;
your breasts are clusters of fruit.
I said, “I will climb the palm tree
and take hold of its fruit.”
May your breasts be like clusters of grapes,
and the fragrance of your breath like apricots.
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Quote
Stephen, do you know if Kant's argument about a 'universal grammar' has been adressed in O'ist literature? I'm curious how this could be tied to Rand's argument about axiomatic foundations. I mean this argument:
1. Human experience is comprised of two kinds of appearances: sense perception and concepts
2. Sensations are passively received.
3. Concepts are actively formed. Essences (distinguishing characteristics) are epistemological, not metaphysical.
4. 'Experience' is a freely formed concept; sensations do not exhibit an essence of 'experience', much like chairs do not exhibit 'chairness'.
5. Just as adding 'chairness' to observed phenomena makes it look as if 'chairness' actually exists out there, adding 'experience' (along with the implied notion of experincer) to raw sense data does the same thing.
6. All conceptual thought follows the universal grammar of quality, quantity, relation and modality. E.g. the sentence 'if lightning strikes, thunder will sound' exhibits:- The quantity of universality: the statement applies to every possible instance of lightning.
- The quality of affirmation: it affirms (rather than denies) that property of lightning.
- A hypothetical relation ('If-then'), as opposed to the simple declarative or disjunctive ('either-or') relation.
- The modality of necessity: a certain event (thunder) will follow upon another, based on a rule.
7. All perception is colored by this universal grammar. The table of categories is simply the table of judgements applied to sense data.
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The above argument rests on the notion that thought has an innate, fixed structure - as long as you're a human being, no thinkable thought is exempt from a universal grammar. Putting this in Randian terms, you must use this grammar to deny it. I've been wondering lately whether Rand's metaphysics, in a similar vein, starts by identifying the limits of thinkability (for example axiomatic concepts and innate faculties like measurement) and simply runs with it.KyaryPamyu,
So far as I recall, Kant did not write of his categories of the understanding as a universal grammar. He did write of general logic being analogous to a universal grammar.
From the Jäsche Logic:
“[We] set aside all knowledge that we can only borrow from objects, and reflect simply on the exercise of the understanding in general, [and] then we discover those rules which are absolutelay necessary, and independently of any particular objects of thought, because without them we cannot think at all. These rules, accordingly, can be discerned a priori, that is, independently of all experience, because they contain merely the conditions of the use of the understanding in general, whether pure or empirical, without distinction of its objects. . . . The science, therefore, which contains these universal and necessary laws is simply a science of the form of thought.” (Cf. KrV A52–55 B76–79)
“Hence, also, it follows that the universal and necessary laws of thought can only be concerned with its form, not in anywise with its matter. The science, therefore, which contains these universal and necessary laws is simply a science of the form of thought. And we can form a conception of the possibility of such a science, just as a universal grammar which contains nothing beyond the mere form of language, without words, which belong to the matter of language.”
That last sentence gives us some idea of what Kant means by saying that reflection on the exercise of the understanding enables us to discern absolutely necessary rules of our thought such as the constraint against contradictions. This reflection, then, is Kant’s replacement for Aristotle’s ‘intuitive induction’. Before school age, we follow elementary grammar in speaking our native language. We conform to that language’s grammar a good deal, and it has become habitual. We learn expressly what grammatical forms we are following and should be following from grammar school (after we have learned to write). Some earlier humans had to have reflected on the language, such as Latin or German, to have discovered its grammar. Kant’s analogy on the use, express statement, and normativity of grammar with the use, express statement, and normativity of logic that Jäsche and Abbott here publicize is corroborated as standard in Kant’s lectures on logic by student notes, the Bloomberg (early 1770’s), the Dohna-Wundlacken (1792), and the Vienna. The D-W notes indicate that because logic must contain a priori principles, “logic is a science and grammar is not, because its rules are contingent” (page 432 in Young 1992). I should mention that in Kant’s various remarks on logic, talk of the necessary v. the contingent is shorthand for (what is earlier stated as) the absolutely necessary v. the contingently necessary.
Kant’s own logic lecture notes compiled by Jäsche were always available to German readers from 1800. Kant therein, in his Introduction to the discipline of logic, made an analogy between logic and grammar. (I see now that Capozzi and Roncaglia have also drawn attention to this analogy in the third chapter, p. 143, of The Development of Modern Logic [2009, L. Haaparanta, editor].) Logic is the form of thought, with contents of thought its matter; as grammar is the form of language, with particular words its matter. A book of Kant’s in 1798 includes his view on the relation between thought and language. That book is Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, which was always available in German, but did not come into English translations (two) until the 1970’s. From the Anthropology in a third translation, the Cambridge translation (2007) by Robert Louden:
“All language is a signification of thought and, on the other hand, the best way of signifying thought is through language, the greatest instrument for understanding ourselves and others. Thinking is speaking with oneself . . . consequently it is also listening to oneself inwardly (by means of the reproductive power of the imagination). . . . Those who can speak and hear do not always understand themselves or others, and it is due to the lack of the faculty of signification, or its faculty use (when signs are taken for things, and vice versa), that, especially in matters of reason, human beings who are united in language are as distant as heaven from earth in concepts.” (300)
Kants drew an analogy also between how logic is discovered and how grammar is discovered. This analogy is mentioned Jäsche Logic. The parallel of grammar-logic discovery is set in further parallel, in Kant’s Prolegomena, to how fundamental categories of the understanding (necessary factors in making percepts [“appearances”] in experience into that experience) are discovered. Kants proffers a notion of the reflective act by which one could (mainly Aristotle, who did) originally discover the rules of logic together with their character of absolute necessity and normativity.
We are able to violate logical rules. Can Kant account for that under his conception of the nature of logic? One cannot succeed in holding onto the absolutism of logical rules while saying also that we can violate them and that they are due only to the constitution of the mind.
One kind of error Kant mentioned in the Anthropology was the error of mistaking linguistic signs for things they signify and vice versa. Such signs, Kant calls artificial, in contrast to natural indicators such as smoke for fire. Kant observed that people having common language can yet signify in their vocabulary concepts quite different one person to the next. He implies that this variance is due to infirmities in the faculty of signification, which rather suggests that if we were all working correctly in our linguistic significations, we should have no variance among persons in concepts signified by a word. I seriously doubt that, given the variance in individual backgrounds of experience and education and given the creativity in thought, especially in more abstract thought. Were Kant’s rigid connection between vocabulary and right concept correct, infirmity of word-concept powers would yet not explain how errors of logic or grammar are possible. The same goes under my denial of the word-concept complete rigidity of right signification, for then there is utter incommensurability between the would-be explanation and the thing to be explained, since the rules of logic and grammar are fixed, in Kant’s view, in all the heads talking and thinking to themselves and with others. Error of signification and its source (source pretty vague in Kant) does not help to explain error in logic or grammar.
The Objectivist conception of logic is contrary that of Kant. Rand’s conception of logic was as a tool of identification. All existents possess identity. That is a full-bodied identity, including both (i) which among existents is this particular one and (ii) what sort of thing is this existent. The identities of existents are what they are in the world whether or not a mind discerns them. What are the proper ways of forming concepts, forming their definitions, and making inferences are ways tuned to identities in the world and getting and holding fast to those identities. Rand rests logic on an axiom “existence exists.” Logical maneuvers are maneuvers of consciousness, and consciousness is identification of existents, all of which have identities.
Rand’s axioms are not established as true because they cannot be denied without falling into contradiction. No, that is a necessary condition for adopting a truth as an axiom, but the truth has to be established by observation and dealings with empirical reality. The wrongness of contradiction also has to be established in that empirical way. Not by enumerative induction in the case of PNC. Not by abstractive induction in the case of PNC. Rather, I say, in the way one picks up necessary form from empirical engagements. I’m thinking of necessary forms in the world, which forms can be grasped as necessary when they are grasped. Such would be apprehension that anything shaped like my left hand will have one less space between its appendages than there are appendages. Or that turning a left-hand glove inside-out makes a right-hand glove. Or that any object having the shape of an apple can be quartered with only three cuts of the knife. One knows those truths by experience, and one knows they are necessarily so of the world, so that empirically testing them for possible falsification would be stupid.
I call such formalities in the world waiting to be discerned belonging-formalities of my metaphysical category situation. Rand did not take note of such forms in the world, and doing so might make one nervous of regression to Aristotle’s ideas on form. There is no such regression to Aristotle in this idea of forms in the world belonging to concretes. And the idea can boost Rand’s idea that identities in the natural world are not put there by the mind and that necessities in the formalities for right logical thought get their ultimate necessity from the world and get their normativity from aiming to identify correctly. (My working conjecture so far is that the belonging-formalities of the world underlying the tooling-formalities of logic are simple likenesses, differences, sameness, and repetitions in the world.) On the Objectivist view of logic, errors in logic are simply because one can run afoul of rules for success in the purpose of logic. The necessity of logic is not the incapability to think otherwise than logically, but the necessity of following the rules to get the prize insofar as that aim is facilitated by logical rules. In another sense of necessity, logic has its necessities from some of the belonging-formalities in the world (in my metaphysical categories passage and character, I expect).
Objectivism agrees with your 2 in that sensations are not constructed by or made into percepts by activity of mind such as conscious or unconscious inference (see Kelley 1986, 61–62, 75–78, for example), but need not deny the established science showing receptors to be active sensors, nervous tissue, which is living (an activity) and excitable. Under your 4, Objectivism holding that essences are epistemological rather than metaphysical means only that what truths of the world should be taken for essentials in one’s definitions of things depends on one’s present context of knowledge of the world and in particular one’s present context of knowledge of what depends on what in the world among classes of things in the world. That is in contrast to the Ancient and Medieval essences, which were not a function of one’s context of knowledge at all, and which possessed causal powers (formal causes) in the world.
In your 7, I think offhand it would be better to say "applied to the schematized categories" and to say "sensory experience" or "sensible intuitions" rather than "sense data."
Rand thought of cognition in terms of measurements both in perception (e.g. perceptual similarities) and in conception. But she thought of measurements as mind discerning magnitude relations actually in the world. Because magnitude relations (she called "quantity") are in the world, discernment of them is useful to us (and the other high animals) for successful life and exactitude of fit of the human mind to the world.
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necrovore had written in response to a post by SL:
QuoteSounds like you're trying to set up an ad hominem.
This isn't about me.
To which SL responded:
QuoteI agree.
If it were about you, you would be a parent with a child in school.
SL, that response indicates you are going with the informal fallacy of relevance that is known as the Circumstantial ad hominem, specifically: because your interlocutor is not a parent with a child in school, his position is false. That does not logically follow.
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There are about 16,800 school districts in the USA. Cases of "inappropriate" books in school no doubt get outsized political media attention in comparison to what is mainly underway each day at school in those districts. I doubt the incidence of "inappropriate" books in schools warrants the criminal statute adopted by the Florida county. Sounds more like using one's criminalization powers to make the problem look big enough for outraging voters and getting certain politicians elected on the basis of the hyped issue.
I came to a juncture in life at which I considered becoming a high school teacher, getting qualified for that in physics/chemistry/mathematics. But my life-partner dissuaded me, because of the hot issue at the time of legally barring gay people to be public school teachers. (Gov. Reagan's opposition to that initiative in CA in those years was one shining moment for him in my book.) Criminal penalties for selecting wrong books in teaching sounds like a pretty big discouragement for entering teaching.
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6 hours ago, StrictlyLogical said:
. . .
A State body must be held accountable to the parents, and if individual agents of the State are abusing or misusing their position to indoctrinate or groom children, with Marxist or oversexualizing/inappropriate materials for a children of a certain age, then those parents are owed a duty to remove those materials and those teachers and ensure it does not happen again.
. . .
There is no monolithic "the parents". When I was in grade school and high school, overwhelmingly, parents of children at my public schools would not have wanted the students exposed to the theory of evolution in the classroom. My own parents included. Some parents would have disagreed with the majority. And there were wise educators who would favor teaching objective science to the students, rather than bolstering the dogma of religion (majority, power-wielding religion) in public schools.
My parents certainly would not have wanted students in public schools being exposed to the idea in class that there was something wrong with the position White Supremacy. When I was in high school, and a young practice-teacher selected the recent novel "To Kill a Mockingbird" for our literature class, that was a controversial selection. Tax payers in the Deep South wanted it banned from public school, and there were politicians ready to make hay by cozying up to those bigots. Today, there are some parents, taxpayers and voters, and some politicians who want it kept under wraps that the USA is populated with millions of bigots still committed to White Supremacy (with respect to Black Americans). I grew up in Oklahoma. It was maybe a dozen years ago, thanks to the internet, that I first learned of the White torching of a prospering Black district of commerce in Tulsa, now known as the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. More recently, some of my white high school classmates learned of this atrocity, and some, the decent ones, were livid over never hearing of it in our Oklahoma State History class, which the State required for all public high schools. Many of we students were dedicated in the 1960's to the cause of racial equality under the law and to racial desegregation, notwithstanding the racism of our parents. From my neighborhood outside the city limits, you could go to the nearest city high school, which was being integrated, or you could apply for an exception to attend some unintegrated city high school on account of wanting to take something like German or swimming, which were not offered at the nearer school. Some of the students in our all-white neighborhood insisted, to our parents' chagrin, on going to the integrated school precisely because it was integrated.
One fortunate situation of students today is the internet for getting information. Even if the schools went back to the way it was in my childhood and youth, where gayness was never mentioned, the young folks could learn what they want to know about it from online information. I could only go to a dictionary or encyclopedia entry, which were really quite opaque. As far as sex and school goes nowadays, whether public or religious, I gather that things are more iron-fisted puritanical threatening due to the meddling from the adults in the society. It is now criminal (fines or imprisonment) for students in high school to have consensual sexual intercourse with each other. That is not at all how it was back in the day. Dating (heterosexual) and steadies were about sexual relations, and adults not your parents could just pound sand.
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Eiuol, another book on your territory would be, in its early parts: Capitalism in America – A History (2018) by Greenspan and Wooldridge.
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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.
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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")
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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.
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.
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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.
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On 1/9/2023 at 9:54 AM, RationalEgoist said:
. . .
Ultimately, it comes down to one's view of the following: were the colonists who came to America a force for good in world history? I would unhesitatingly answer in the affirmative. The philosophy of the Enlightenment, which the British colonists exported to the American continent (not without contradictions, of course), was fundamentally good.
. . .
"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.
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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.
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Ice Age cave art at Lascaux and Altamira contains calendar useful to hunter-gathers who drew them.
- tadmjones and dream_weaver
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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.
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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?
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On 10/28/2022 at 10:05 AM, Boydstun said:
. . . I want to examine the book Honesty: The Philosophy and Psychology of a Neglected Virtue (2021) by Christian B. Miller.
. . .
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.
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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."
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7 hours ago, Easy Truth said:
. . .
A major pleasure in life is in fact "playing" with others, i.e. having fun interacting. Add to it productive work
emanating from that activity, and it becomes very fulfilling activity.One more strand in that vein is sharing the world and experience of the world with other humans.
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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$
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On 12/29/2022 at 10:21 PM, Harrison Danneskjold said:
. . . .
Still, I think an egoistic argument certainly can be made against lying to good people. It's not just that lying harms the person who believes your lies; lying primarily harms the liar. Lying feels awful and forces you to fill your own head with nonsense trivia which YOU KNOW to be false. That, alone, is a good reason not to do it unless it's absolutely necessary.
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 and Kant Being Friends
in Metaphysics and Epistemology
Posted
More precisely, that should be: ". . . logic has its necessities from some of the belonging-formalities in the world (belonging-formalities of, in my metaphysical categories, passage and character, I expect). So: logic having it roots in belonging-formalities within those categories of existence, in parallel with mathematics having its roots in belonging-formalities in the category situation.