[Rand v. Wolff]

Rand v. Wolff

Christian Wolff (1679–1754) was the most important German philosopher between Leibniz and Kant. His was the dominant philosophy in German lands to the middle of the eighteenth century, and his disciples continued his influence through the time of Kant, whose system cleared the Wolffian edifice away in the last decade of Kant’s life.

For Wolff “philosophy is the science of all possible things, together with the manner and reason of their possibility.”[1] Possibility is most basic, existence being among things possible: the entirely determinate possibilities.[2] “That is impossible which contains something contradictory within it such as, for instance, an iron wood. From which one sees further that that is possible which contains nothing contradictory within it, that is, which not only can obtain along with other things which are or can be, but which also contains only that within it which can obtain together such as, for instance, a wooden plate. For to be a plate and to be made of wood do not conflict with each other but rather both can be at once.”[3]

Possibility for Wolff was freedom from contradiction, and this was something obtaining in the world. Even were Wolff taking possibilities to be potentials subject to physical principles, it is still a marked difference from Rand for whom concrete actualities are the existents upon which all else, such as possibilities, must be framed. “Leaving aside the man-made, nothing is possible except what is actual.”[4] The possible, I say, should be in contrast to the actual. I should therefore amend that Peikoff remark a bit on the side of Objectivism: nothing is possible except what are potentials (co-potentials) of actuals. And potentials, like actuals, are existents. I submit that my amendment is consonant with Rand’s philosophy and with what Peikoff was getting at in that remark.[5]

One big difference between the metaphysics of Wolff and of Rand is that for Rand existence is most basic. Another big difference, akin to the first, is that for Wolff essences of things are metaphysical and eternal, independently of their occasions in existents. “There is nothing that can be can thought of a thing prior to how it is possible, since it is only on account of the fact that it is possible that it is a thing in the first place. Therefore, essence of a thing is its possibility, and whoever knows the way and manner in which something is possible, understands the essence.”[6]

Wolff set out in his German Logic: “By Science, I understand, that habit of the understanding, whereby, in a manner not to be refuted, we establish our assertions on irrefragable {indisputable} grounds or principles. . . .”[7] Wolff’s rules for attaining such a science were to formulate sound axioms and real definitions appropriate to the science, thereon to make intuitive judgments, and make inferences from those by syllogisms, arriving at new propositions that can then be taken into additional syllogisms.[8] Wolff thought that was the way the science of geometry works perfectly and the way needed by metaphysics as a science, which he had provided in the metaphysics he was setting forth. It is in truth not our method of proof in Euclidean geometry nor should it be, and we do not need such a thing as metaphysics as a science.

Wolff: “Ontology or first philosophy is the science of being in general, or insofar as it is being.” “By sufficient reason, we understand that from which it is understood why something is.”[9] One difference between mathematics and metaphysics, in Wolff’s view, is that the principle of sufficient reason (PSR) is sensible and productive in the latter, but not appropriate in the former. By setting results of empirical experience in the context of sufficient reason for them, we comprehend them, as de Boer notes, “in view of the rationally ordered totality of which they are part.”[10] Wolff: “Denial of the principle of sufficient ground changes the true world into a fantasy world, in which the human will takes the place of the ground of that which occurs.”[11] Wolff took PNC and PSR to be rules of thought by which we can be objective, that is, cognize the world. He argued that PSR, and empirical knowledge as well, are grounded in PNC.[12] His arguments for the rules PNC and PSR are along the lines that without them we could not think coherently.[13]

Additionally, Wolff rests our knowledge of PNC and its certainty on our pickup from a particular syllogism: “Whoever is conscious, exists. / We are conscious. / Therefore, we exist.”[14] To the contrary, Aristotle rests the rightness of syllogistic on our assent to any syllogism of first-figure form, whatever the specific terms in its premises and conclusion, and on sure reducibility of all other valid syllogistic forms to that one.[15] In turn, Rand’s metaphysics and conception of the place of logic in identification should rest the rightness of that particular form of syllogism, most basic for Aristotle, on the fact “existence is identity.” Wolff was attempting to impute assurance of the rightness of that particular form of syllogism, thence all other forms, from Descartes’s cogito.

Rand did not defend her axioms and axiomatic corollaries in the Wolffian way. Rather, Rand specified and elucidated them as staying true to fundamental character of existence, the latter being the guiding ubiquitous nature for right cognition. Need for coherence that is lost by denial of those fundamental rules is not the source of their objective validity, only a showing of their correctness everywhere for keeping thought tuned to reality. Character of the world commending these rules is to be shown by illustrative empirical cases: “A leaf cannot be a stone at the same time.” Rand’s law of identity entails that objects come in some exclusive kinds. Leaf and stone are kinds that are exclusive with respect to each other. Objects may be also of kinds that are not exclusive of each other: a leaf is a kind of plant part, it is a kind of light catcher, and it is a kind of drain clogger. Saying that an object is a leaf and a stone violates identity in Rand’s rich sense; it is a contradiction. But to say that an object is a leaf and a drain clogger is no contradiction. Objects come in some exclusive kinds, and it is sensitivity to these sets of kinds that is written into Rand’s conception of noncontradiction concerning the kind-identity of an object.[16]

Unlike Wolff, Rand did not base her metaphysics on PNC, rather, on the fact of Existence and the completely general condition that existence is identity.[17] Rand took consciousness to be most fundamentally identification of existents. This bears a surface likeness to Wolff, who took the essence of the soul to be the power to represent the world. Unlike Wolff, Rand did not take her metaphysics to be a mathematical-deductive sort of discipline.

Rand rejected PSR in its Wolffian scope. That means that Rand should have other ways of distinguishing metaphysics from mathematics. Rand’s way of making that distinction was not worked out. Rand, I should note, does not need the distinction by way of justifying metaphysics “as a science.” Unlike Wolff and his successors, for Rand the distinctive function of metaphysics does not rely on prying actualities from possibilities by joining possibilities with a notion of what is most perfect among a collection of possibilities and relying on the idea that the actual world is the best, most perfect world.

For Rand, rightly I’d say: PSR in the form “For every existent, there is a reason why it exists, rather than not” can apply at most to constituents or proper parts of Existence, not to that comprehensive standing Existence, the all, the whole comprising all actuals and their potentials, all those concrete objects and their concrete actions, attributes, and relationships.[18] PSR in the form “Nothing happens without a reason” applies only within Existence, not to that all-of-alls Existence, which is not a “happening.” PSR in the form “There must be a sufficient reason for every truth of fact” does not apply to the bare truth Existence exists. There is the reality of the fact that that truth acknowledges; there is nothing begetting that fact. Rand’s curtailment of PSR did not diminish one bit the intelligibility of Existence by human reason, I should mention.

Wolff’s 1730 statement of the Principle of Sufficient Ground: “Nothing is without a sufficient ground {reason} why it is rather than not; i.e., if something is posited as being, there will also be posited something from which it is understood why this thing is rather than is not.”[19] Wolff gives an argument for this which maintains that to claim an exception to PSR is to reify a nothing from which the thing is. This argument is circular, for Wolff begins with the premise “were something to be or take place without a reason why it should occur being met with either in that thing itself or something else, then it would come to be from nothing.”[20]

Rather than join PSR to her principle of Identity to further extend her general metaphysics, Rand in 1957 had identity as applied to the existent that is action as giving the necessity of identity, for all existents, to a principle of causality. “The law of causality is the law of identity applied to action. . . . The nature of an action is caused and determined by the nature of the things that act; a thing cannot act in contradiction to its nature. An action not caused by an entity [a thing with identity] would be caused by a zero. . . . [which means] the non-existent ruling the existent.”[21]

Rand’s law of causality is quite like PSR in her 1973 statement of it here: “All the countless forms, motions, combinations and dissolutions of elements within the universe—from a floating speck of dust to the formation of a galaxy to the emergence of life—are caused and determined by the identities of the elements involved.”[22]

I notice that having taken identity, rather than PNC, as deepest base of causality in widest generality, Rand could (but apparently did not notice she could) distinguish metaphysics from mathematics by taking identity (not only PNC) as basis of mathematics; and mathematics, which has not essentially to do with action (only with morphisms and other interrelations of formal objects), has not to do with causality. That is, in contrast to Wolff, she requires no PSR as distinguishing note between mathematics and metaphysics. She can instead take causality as that distinguishing note. Action and causality are not under the subject matter of mathematics as such. Then too, passage of time is not under that subject matter. Rand could say that not only is there the law of identity applied to action. In a thinner sense of identity (genidentity), there is the law of identity applied to things simply existing through time. Application of the law of identity to action and to mere passage in time goes a significant way for distinction of metaphysics, which deals with those applications, in most general form, and mathematics, which does not deal with those applications.

Notes

[1] Wolff, Christian 1713. Vernünftige Gedanken von den Kräften des menschlichen Verstandes und ihrem richtigen Gebrauch in der Erkenntnis der Wahrheit, §1. Rational Thoughts on the Powers of the Human Understanding and Its Proper Use in the Cognition of Truth. London: L. Hawes, W. Clarke, and R. Collins, (1770). This work is commonly known as Wolff’s German Logic, and it is available online https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=pst.000003010372&view=1up&seq=15.

[2] Hettche, Matt, and Corey Dyck 2019. “Christian Wolff,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

[3] Wolff, Christian 1720. Vernünftige Gedanken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen, auch allen Dingen überhaupt, §12. Rational Thoughts concerning God, the World, and the Human Soul, and also All Things in General, In Early Modern German Philosophy (1690–1750), Corey W. Dyck, ed. and trans. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2019), 99. This work is commonly known as Wolff’s German Metaphysics.

[4] Peikoff, Leonard, 1991. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, 28. New York: Dutton.

[5] Rand, Ayn, c. 1970. Appendix – Transcription from Seminar. In Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, expanded 2nd edition (1990), 286. Harry Binswanger and Leonard Peikoff, eds. New York: Meridian.

[6] Wolff, Christian 1720. German Metaphysics, §35, In Corey W. Dyck, ed. and trans., Early Modern German Philosophy (1690–1750). Oxford: Oxford University Press (2019).

[7] “Preliminary Discourse,” §II, in German Logic.

[8] Wolff, German Logic, in Dyck 2019, 99–134.

[9] Wolff, Christian 1730. Philosophia Prima Sive Ontology (1730), First Philosophy, or Ontology, Frankfurt), §§1, 56. Passages I quote from this work are translations of Courtney D. Fugate and John Hymers.

[10] De Boer, Karin 2020. Kant’s Reform of Metaphysics, 30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[11] Wolff, Ontology, §77.

[12] R. Lanier Anderson, “The Wolffian Paradigm and Its Discontents: Kant’s Containment Definition of Analyticity in Historical Context.” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 87, no. S (2005), 22–74.

[13] Wolff, Ontology, §§27–30.

[14] Wolff, German Logic, §6.

[15] Lear, Jonathan 1980. Aristotle and Logical Theory, 1–14, 34–53. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Malink, Marko 2013. Aristotle’s Modal Syllogistic, 86–97. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

[16] Cf. Plato, Sophist 252e–54b. Nicholas P. White, translator. In Plato – Complete Works, John M. Cooper, editor. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.

[17] I capitalize existence when I mean not only existence per se, but additionally, existence as a whole, existence in its entirety.

[18] Rand, Ayn 1973, “The Metaphysical versus the Man-Made” In Philosophy: Who Needs It, New York: Signet, 1982, 25.

[19] Wolff, Ontology, §70.

[20] Wolff, German Metaphysics, §30.

[21] Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1037.

[22] Rand, “Metaphysical,” 25.

[Rand v. Wolff]

~Wolff, Rand~

[Atlas Shrugged]

 

What is the theme of Atlas Shrugged, and why is it important to understand?

[Follow-Up on 9/11/01]

 

In July 2022 Ayman al-Zawahiri was at last killed by USA. Good.

memory

 

 

[What Has the 'Pro-Life' Movement Won?]

that I'm so happy that you're mine

[What Has the 'Pro-Life' Movement Won?]

Just some information from the latest issue of SCIENCE NEWS (30 July 2022):

The "fetal heartbeat" heard at around six weeks of pregnancy are not caused by the opening and closing of heart valves moving blood through heart chambers. The heart's chambers have not yet developed at that time. The ultrasound machine is creating the heartbeat-like sounds upon detection of fluttering of the heart-tube tissue, which is due to electrical activity in that tissue. So the ultrasound is detecting something new in the development that concerns tissue that is on the way to becoming a heart, but not the onset of a beating heart.

 

[What Has the 'Pro-Life' Movement Won?]

5 hours ago, tadmjones said:

Maybe the principle should be based on the fetus as opposed to where it is located ? If 'bodily autonomy' describes a woman's rights as to her individuality , and that a fetus is an aspect or part of 'her' , perhaps we could ask if it is a part or a separate 'thing'?

Tad, I'm not sure it is sensible to hope for it being only one or the other. I mean maybe nature is being inconvenient for such a distinction. If I have a tumor growing in me, it is part of me, and it is also alien. The fetus, thanks to modern medicine, is rarely the death of the mother. But it has had a biologically alien course. The woman's body initially tries to reject the blastomere in an autoimmune response.

Concerning the difference between the fetus the day before it gets born (which is triggered by its own effect on the mother's body) and the live-born, there is a big difference in the kind of adult support required just because afterwards the baby gets oxygen from the air on its own, whereas before, it had to be get oxygen from the mother's blood.

[What Has the 'Pro-Life' Movement Won?]

SL, I think the "basis of your question" the woman referred to in response to the question posed by the man in your video was most likely his assumption (and simplifying belief) that the unborn is an infant. That is, the scene was political, which is rife with gotchas in oral argument. This debate requires written debates and readers, because it takes serious thought. Do not trust any sources of the anti-abortionists such as the one you linked on law in CA. They are going to represent any state that is not outlawing all elective abortions as being overrun with Democrats who want to slice up fetuses late in the term, and if then, want to slice up neonates as well, but for salvation by the anti-abortionists. The usual misrepresenting political circus.

[What Has the 'Pro-Life' Movement Won?]

ET, just to be extra clear: There is no state in the US in which a pregnant woman has a right to procure an elective abortion after the stage of viability has been reached. For example abortion is legally permitted in the State of New York after 24 weeks since fertilization only if the fetus is not viable or the health or life of the mother is at risk.

(I think the condition of not being viable at that stage in a pregnancy means further that it is not going to become viable as additional time passes; I don't know the examples that have come up. My Mom had three live births and one miscarriage. That fetus was known to be dead prior to its removal. [The main thing I remember that was salient to her when telling me of this occurrence decades later was how terribly sad she was on leaving the hospital amid all the other women carrying a baby.] This had occurred in the 1940's. I don't know what law if any was applicable in whatever state they lived at that time, definitely before my time.) 

[What Has the 'Pro-Life' Movement Won?]

2 hours ago, Easy Truth said:

The key word here is "requiring". As in, they have a right to require. I was sympathetic to this view at the beginning of the thread, but right now I will argue against it on the grounds that it is an invasion of the body of the mother. It is at odds with her right of ownership of her body. In practice, it will amount to forcibly, using physical force, to cause the mother to give birth … a certain way prescribed by others. It becomes even worse if it was due to rape or incest.

The position is about the rights of others to take care of the viable human life that is at stake. In a sense, it is a right to "love", i.e. to nurture and take care of, that seems to be the center of the conflict.

When a person says you don't have a right to abort, they are saying you are interfering with my right to love the child.

Does a right to love exist? Meaning should it exist? Or is it irrelevant?

The pregnancy would end when the hypothetical mother wanted it ended. Birth and abortion are a degenerate pair in this situation. On the practical level, she would not really get this termination, for lack of willing doctor, and indeed the situation, so far as I know, has never come up of a pregnant woman seeking an elective termination of pregnancy of a fetus having reached viability. Perhaps it comes up in imagination and political hyperbole and distraction, but the serious moral business is here in the real world, in the case law and in the abortion statistics.

 

[What Has the 'Pro-Life' Movement Won?]

32 minutes ago, Easy Truth said:

Then let us say that at some objective stage in development, it is now viable, and it is inside the mother's body. A right of others to a viable fetus means a right to action. What actions do they have a right to? On one hand they don't have a right to the circulatory system of the mother, but they have a right to the fetus. So others have a right to DO what with the fetus?

They have a right to take possession and take guardianship rights when the fetus is delivered. I am assuming here that the woman has decided to terminate the pregnancy, abort the viable fetus, before full term, and as I remarked in the original article, that is not realistic if there are no medical problems going on because you won't find a doctor whose services for such an abortion would be offered (regardless of law, just considering values of medical profession). And this period was not one in which elective abortions were allowed under Roe. So my thinking was at odds in this way with what was the current law. In the alternative situation in which the mother does not want to keep the infant delivered at full term, then we simply have the adoption rights presently in place and those doings with the infant. But suppose medical help was available for performing an abortion of a viable fetus as elective before full term. Then what the new guardians would be doing with the right is requiring, for one thing, (and paying for it) full effort to deliver the infant live. I do not know what all that entails, and I do not know if ever there has been a pregnant woman who decided that late in the term that she wanted an abortion even though everything was going along fine medically.

 

[What Has the 'Pro-Life' Movement Won?]

7 minutes ago, Easy Truth said:

Then to clarify, a right to a viable fetus, in this context, means a right after it is born. Is that correct? Meaning the right to action, like hold the entity/baby does not extend before birth.

No, a right of others to a viable fetus is simply after it reaches viability, even while still undelivered (the mother, of course, has right of first refusal, but we have assumed that refusal in the cases at issue). At birth, such a fetus makes the big transition we all made to breathing and not relying on the mother's circulatory system. (I think this point of mine is at odds with what Rand thought and what many others against abortion regulation thought.)

[What Has the 'Pro-Life' Movement Won?]

1 hour ago, Easy Truth said:

. . . I simply can't see a justification for anyone without the consent of the mother determining what happens to the potential child by right . . .

Boundaries of bodies fully distinct and organically autonomous, as is usual, is the paradigm situation under which we conceive of rights. And in the paradigmatic case, we throw in as well that the bodies are with sovereign minds capable of voluntary self-regulation and consensual relationships with others. But I don't think it would be correct to transport the resulting character of rights tout court over to cases in which body boundaries are not separated, such as in pregnancies or in siamese twins. Getting to separateness and individuals capable of autonomy could be goal of what should be done, but we'll need some deeper additional moral principles along the way to knowing what should be done along the way to that end.

[What Has the 'Pro-Life' Movement Won?]

1 hour ago, Easy Truth said:

Isn't there a contradiction here? There is no right over the pregnant woman  but over what is "inside" her body.

. . .

A right to the viable fetus, a right held by others, will not give them a right over the woman's circulatory system, another part of her body, nor any part of her body not that fetus.

[What Has the 'Pro-Life' Movement Won?]

Here is my original article on the topic (which was in 1983, not 1984).

 

[What Has the 'Pro-Life' Movement Won?]

20 hours ago, Easy Truth said:

. . .

But the argument I have wondered about is still the issue of viability related to the rights of the adults involved. The moment one person shows up to say I will take care of the potential child, it is viable (philosophically speaking, not legally). And if a potential child is viable, does the volunteered custodian have any rights in the matter before birth?

That would be "physically speaking", rather than "philosophically speaking". Viability is purely a physical condition. That there are parties willing to support the viable fetus does not confer the status "viable". It is rather: passing the point of viability, others can take on the project of support without requiring continued pregnancy of the mother.

To your question, ET: Yes, just as the volunteered custodian (or the agencies for such possible custodians) has rights in the matter of other people's children in the community. Their right is not over the body of the pregnant woman, but over a part of her body coincident with the whole. Specifically, it is a right over what anyone, including the mother, can do with that entity once it is assessed as viable. A right against the killing of the viable fetus,  delivered infant, or young child is not a right those developing little characters hold against all the adults in the community, rather, it is the right of adults in the community against anyone killing those living entities. Admittedly, the right stems from the specialness of the project of making progeny of the human species. (The community would not have a right against our family killing at birth an undesired litter of pups from our dog.)

(This way of looking at the abortion issue I have advocated [since first formulating it in 1984] was built around Rand's idea of what a right is, which partly but importantly included the point that rights are coordinating principles under which each person is left, vis-a-vis others, to their autonomous self-activity. Keeping moral obligations to others tied to potentials or actualities of the others making their own life, composed of certain sorts of projects, is also consonant with Rand's ethics. However, if one lets that idea of Rand's I mentioned above, near the end of her essay "Causality versus Duty" that the only rational obligations between people are those by promise, agreement, and contract, run everywhere; then one cannot go the way I have gone on this. With my outlook, of course, contract cannot be the only way under which governments can be legitimate. I'd like to mention, however, that while I have described all this as "my outlook", that cannot be a fully correct ascription. I have my own metaphysics now, and because of a couple of differences in its most basic part with Rand's in its most basic part, it seems likely that if I were to develop a value theory and ethical theory [partly] upon that new base it would differ from what can be drafted from Rand's.)

[Epilogue for George H. Smith]

Atheism, Ayn Rand, and Other Heresies 

From the publisher:

Quote

In this wide-ranging collection of articles, essays, and speeches, George H. Smith analyzes atheism and its relevance to society today.The featured essay in this volume provides a full analysis of Ayn Rand's unique contribution to atheism, explaining how her objectivist metaphysics and laissez-faire economic principles rested on a purely godless worldview. Several chapters address the evolution of atheism; arguments in favor of religious toleration; the efforts of early Church fathers to discredit Roman polytheism and how these arguments can be used with equal force against later Christian descriptions of God; and a survey of the contributions to freethought made by the deists of the 18th and 19th centuries.With incisive logic and considerable wit, Smith ties atheism to reason and argues that reason itself can be a moral virtue. In one penetrating chapter, Smith salutes three Christian theorists who he believes embody the spirit of reason: Thomas Aquinas, Desiderius Erasmus, and John Locke. This is followed by a philosophical drubbing of his "least favorite Christians" - St. Paul, St. Augustine, and John Calvin. In subsequent chapters, Smith examines religion and education; addresses the 20th century fundamentalist revival; offers suggestions on how to debate atheism with religious believers; critiques "new religions," including pop therapy, est, and transactional analysis; and provides a comprehensive bibliographic essay on the literature of freethought.

 

[Jerry Falwell and the Rise of the Religious Right]

From the essay “Religious Doctrine, Not the Constitution, Drove the Dobbs Decision” by Linda Greenhouse:

Quote

 

Along with the decision about the praying football coach and the one requiring Maine to subsidize parochial school tuition, Dobbs belongs under “religion.”

That assertion invites pushback, I’m well aware. But step back from today’s artificial arguments about originalism and history, and consider the powerful social movement that led consecutive Republican presidents to appoint anti-abortion justices and that then drove the abortion issue through the Supreme Court’s open door.

Is there anyone who believes that if only the Constitution had included the word “abortion,” the anti-abortion movement would have failed to gain political traction? (Although the Dobbs majority treated the absence of the A-word in the Constitution as nearly fatal to Roe all by itself, it is worth observing that the Constitution’s 7,600 words, including its 27 amendments, contain neither the word “fetus” nor “unborn.”)

No one really buys the argument that what was “egregiously wrong” with Roe v. Wade, to quote the Dobbs majority, was the court’s failure to check the right analytic boxes. It was not constitutional analysis but religious doctrine that drove the opposition to Roe. And it was the court’s unacknowledged embrace of religious doctrine that has turned American women into desperate refugees fleeing their home states in pursuit of reproductive health care that less than a month ago was theirs by right.

To be sure, the Supreme Court has not outlawed abortion. Justice Samuel Alito left that dirty work to the states: Who will rid me of this bothersome right to abortion? But during the nearly two months between the leak of his Dobbs draft on May 2 and the release of the official opinion on June 24, it became painfully obvious to all that if Roe fell, abortion would soon be illegal or all but inaccessible in about half the states. That was the point, after all.

Not only did that prospect make no difference to the Dobbs majority — the official opinion was essentially unchanged from the leaked draft except for added sections that responded to, and distorted, the dissenting opinion — but Justice Alito actually had the gall to write that “we do not pretend to know how our political system or society will respond to today’s decision.” Polls conducted before the opinion’s release showing that upward of two-thirds of Americans wanted to retain a right to abortion offered a hint and were perhaps what led to Justice Alito’s self-righteous declaration: “We cannot allow our decisions to be affected by any extraneous influences such as concern about the public’s reaction to our work.”

Justice Alito took pains to present the majority’s conclusion as the product of pure legal reasoning engaged in by judges standing majestically above the fray of Americans’ “sharply conflicting views” on the “profound moral issue” of abortion, as he put it in the opinion’s first paragraph. And yet that very framing, the assumption that the moral gravity of abortion is singular and self-evident, gives away more than members of the majority, all five of whom were raised in the Catholic Church, may have intended.

The fetus is the indisputable star of the Dobbs opinion. That is not necessarily obvious at first reading: The opinion’s 79 pages are larded with lengthy and, according to knowledgeable historians, highly partial and substantially irrelevant accounts of the history of abortion’s criminalization. In all those pages, there is surprisingly little actual law. And women . . .  are all but missing. It is in paragraphs scattered throughout the opinion that the fetus shines.

“None of the other decisions cited by Roe” and Planned Parenthood of Pennsylvania v. Casey, the 1992 ruling that reaffirmed the right to abortion, “involved the critical moral question posed by abortion,” Justice Alito wrote. “They are therefore inapposite.” Further on, he wrote: “The dissent has much to say about the effects of pregnancy on women, the burdens of motherhood, and the difficulties faced by poor women. These are important concerns. However, the dissent evinces no similar regard for a state’s interest in protecting prenatal life.”

This was a strange criticism of the dissenting opinion, signed jointly by Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. They argued vigorously for retaining the 1992 Casey decision, which in fact, in a departure from Roe, declared that the state’s interest in fetal life was present from the moment of conception. Casey authorized the states to impose waiting periods and “informed consent” requirements that the court in the years following Roe v. Wade had deemed unconstitutional.

Justice Alito knows the Casey decision very well. As a federal appeals court judge, he had been a member of the panel that upheld most of Pennsylvania’s Abortion Control Act in the case that became Casey. Then-Judge Alito, alone on the panel, wanted to uphold a provision of the state law that required a married woman to inform her husband of her plan to get an abortion. In affirming the appeals court’s decision, the Supreme Court in Casey emphasized in one of the opinion’s most vivid passages the unconstitutional burden that the spousal notice requirement placed on women: “We must not blind ourselves to the fact that the significant number of women who fear for their safety and the safety of their children are likely to be deterred from procuring an abortion as surely as if the Commonwealth had outlawed abortion in all cases.” Perhaps that aspect of the Casey decision still rankled. In any event, Justice Alito’s attack on his dissenting colleagues for ignoring the state’s interest in fetal life was seriously misguided.

Of course, from his point of view, Casey didn’t go far enough because the weight the court gave to fetal life was well below 100 percent. The Casey decision was five days shy of 30 years old when the court overturned it, along with Roe v. Wade, on June 24. Given that this was their goal from the start, the justices in the Dobbs majority really had only one job: to explain why. They didn’t, and given the remaining norms of a secular society, they couldn’t.

There is another norm, too, one that has for too long restrained the rest of us from calling out the pervasive role that religion is playing on today’s Supreme Court. In recognition that it is now well past time to challenge that norm, I’ll take my own modest step and relabel Dobbs for the religion case that it is, since nothing else explains it.

 

 

[What Has the 'Pro-Life' Movement Won?]

1 hour ago, Boydstun said:

Doug, the idea that people who bring a child into the world thereby assume an obligation to provide what it needs to develop into an independent adult was invoked by Nathaniel Branden in 1962 in his answer, in The Objectivist Newsletter, to the question, What are the respective obligations of parents to children and children to parents?

Concerning the obligations of the parents, Branden took it that it is a moral responsibility to assume responsibility for one’s actions. And he took that responsibility to include bringing the child to independent adulthood. The parents brought the child into existence, like it or not, and therefore they have this responsibility. Easy Truth’s questions are very good.

Ayn Rand later (1974) drew a distinction between what she called “duty” (which is irrational and a concept to be spurned) and “obligation” (which is sane). Her distinction arises in the course of discussing Kant’s ethics as in Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. Once Kant had purged motivation for acts of all factors such as context, consequences, interests, or inclinations, one can get to the purely moral element in a choice, which is from a sort of duty. Rand counters: “Who would want to be loved not from inclination, but from duty?”

In place of the concept of duty in moral reasoning, Rand would put the concept of causality, specifically human final causality. Do not act without knowing the purposes of your actions and the means needed for that end. The goal and its required means are weighed in the context of one’s other goals and values.

Rand does speak to one’s moral responsibility for causal consequences of one’s actions, more generally than N. Branden’s Q&A in the specific case of human offspring years earlier. Rand cast the rational concept of “obligation” as based on contracts, on hypothetical causal imperatives such as “If you want to live, you must eat,” and on "What do I owe my fellow man? Rationality." But near the end of her essay, she based obligation, as distinct from Kantian duty, on rational promises and agreements. Exclusively! And that would make Easy Truth’s questions exactly the right ones, thinking within that constriction of the idea of moral obligation.

I propose, however, that Rand was selling rational obligation short near the end of her essay. Following Richard Epstein’s theory of strict liability in tort law, as I do, one is legally responsible for harms one causes to another even though it was entirely accidental. Conceiving and bearing a child is not entirely accidental, of course. But I want to expose an element of Rand’s value theory that comfortably underlies the Epstein approach to liability in tort, even though his focus was on how much more sensible is his theory for that area of law than the dominant alternative theory. His idea is that if A caused harm to B, then A is required, by force of law, to do what is possible to make B whole again. Epstein never remarked, but I noticed many years ago, that this makes some sense from a moral idea. That idea is that every person is an end in themselves, and they should be left to harm only themselves, not anyone else. That is a moral principle to which Epstein’s legal principle seems to accord.

Having children, of course, is not itself bringing a harm to them. Life is good, notwithstanding life is struggle. In the case of modern humans, they not only have a life, but make a life for themselves. One of the possible important, meaningful, and joyful projects constituting their life they make for themselves is having children. Some of us choose not to undertake the project of making new human life, and we rather take on projects of making brain children. If one takes on the project of bringing about new human lives, even if it was partly accidental; by one’s own taking-on, one is under moral obligation (to one's own rationally valuing self) to muster the means the end requires or beg assistance in doing so. The end has allure for its project-taker, and it is a special allure which is the new adult life, again starting the cycle of human life* at the end of the parents’ project. This allure, of course, does not deprive the project or the decision to undertake it of moral worth. Rather, it is part of the best within us.

That last paragraph is about moral obligations to oneself in this sort of project. I should add the question of rights. For a parent or guardian to breach the moral obligation to themselves in the project by bringing harm to or neglecting the young child (such as not feeding them) is not only a failure of obligation, but an interference with the right of other adults to undertake the project with respect to this child. In cases of older children, injury of the child would be regular violation of the rights of that human person who is that child.

There seems to be some disagreement over how long in life of the offspring support is owed it by the parent. During the last couple of generations, more and more years of formal education have been aimed for before entering the workforce, and I do not know how long parents should be obligated to support that education. When I went to college, my father did not see any responsibility he had to pay for it. I could not get a student loan because my father made too much money. It would seem that lawmakers by that time thought parents were rightly obligated to pay for college education of children if they had the means. (As it worked out in my case, all of my savings from work during my lifetime to college time was spent in the first year. My mother shown in the photo had not raised me and had not been around me since I was in grade school (summer visits to her place in the country). She offered to help pay for my college education, which is how it came about that I got a start on advanced learning.) Once I did earn a college degree, I could find work only at the bottom, working behind the counter of a fast-food place and then at unskilled labor of various sorts for a number of years. In the society-thinking about going to college as part of the process of becoming employable and self-sufficient, there was a mismatch for people like me off studying Physics and Philosophy for the love of it. Economically, for a long time in my life, nothing more than high school, and not even that, was enough for making a living for myself (though not for a family).

[What Has the 'Pro-Life' Movement Won?]

Grames (re your post before last): It has always been part of my position. Viability is variable in case-by-case, and the case law from the Supreme Court in the 70's rightly left the assessment of viability in the individual case to the judgment of the attending physician and excluded the law getting into the room with the doctor(s) to throw in its (its advocates') opinion on the question. There has never been a problem over the possibility of drastic movement of times at which a fetus (or sooner) is viable due to advances in medical technology. (I formulated my position in 1984, and I'm a bit surprised now that the typical times have not shifted so very much in all this time.) The assessment of viability still should remain in the judgment of the attending physician(s). I think you just did not get all the nuances of my position.

On the financial side, as you would expect, I do not approve of funding medical procedures by taxation, but by private, voluntary means.

[What Has the 'Pro-Life' Movement Won?]

Doug, the idea that people who bring a child into the world thereby assume an obligation to provide what it needs to develop into an independent adult was invoked by Nathaniel Branden in 1962 in his answer, in The Objectivist Newsletter, to the question, What are the respective obligations of parents to children and children to parents?

Concerning the obligations of the parents, Branden took it that it is a moral responsibility to assume responsibility for one’s actions. And he took that responsibility to include bringing the child to independent adulthood. The parents brought the child into existence, like it or not, and therefore they have this responsibility. Easy Truth’s questions are very good.

Ayn Rand later (1974) drew a distinction between what she called “duty” (which is irrational and a concept to be spurned) and “obligation” (which is sane). Her distinction arises in the course of discussing Kant’s ethics as in Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. Once Kant had purged motivation for acts of all factors such as context, consequences, interests, or inclinations, one can get to the purely moral element in a choice, which is from a sort of duty. Rand counters: “Who would want to be loved not from inclination, but from duty?”

In place of the concept of duty in moral reasoning, Rand would put the concept of causality, specifically human final causality. Do not act without knowing the purposes of your actions and the means needed for that end. The goal and its required means are weighed in the context of one’s other goals and values.

Rand does speak to one’s moral responsibility for causal consequences of one’s actions, more generally than N. Branden’s Q&A in the specific case of human offspring years earlier. Rand cast the rational concept of “obligation” as based on contracts, on hypothetical causal imperatives such as “If you want to live, you must eat,” and on "What do I owe my fellow man? Rationality." But near the end of her essay, she based obligation, as distinct from Kantian duty, on rational promises and agreements. Exclusively! And that would make Easy Truth’s questions exactly the right ones, thinking within that constriction of the idea of moral obligation.

I propose, however, that Rand was selling rational obligation short near the end of her essay. Following Richard Epstein’s theory of strict liability in tort law, as I do, one is legally responsible for harms one causes to another even though it was entirely accidental. Conceiving and bearing a child is not entirely accidental, of course. But I want to expose an element of Rand’s value theory that comfortably underlies the Epstein approach to liability in tort, even though his focus was on how much more sensible is his theory for that area of law than the dominant alternative theory. His idea is that if A caused harm to B, then A is required, by force of law, to do what is possible to make B whole again. Epstein never remarked, but I noticed many years ago, that this makes some sense from a moral idea. That idea is that every person is an end in themselves, and they should be left to harm only themselves, not anyone else. That is a moral principle to which Epstein’s legal principle seems to accord.

Having children, of course, is not itself bringing a harm to them. Life is good, notwithstanding life is struggle. In the case of modern humans, they not only have a life, but make a life for themselves. One of the possible important, meaningful, and joyful projects constituting their life they make for themselves is having children. Some of us choose not to undertake the project of making new human life, and we rather take on projects of making brain children. If one takes on the project of bringing about new human lives, even if it was partly accidental; by one’s own taking-on, one is under moral obligation (to one's own rationally valuing self) to muster the means the end requires or beg assistance in doing so. The end has allure for its project-taker, and it is a special allure which is the new adult life, again starting the cycle of human life* at the end of the parents’ project. This allure, of course, does not deprive the project or the decision to undertake it of moral worth. Rather, it is part of the best within us.

[What Has the 'Pro-Life' Movement Won?]

On 7/20/2022 at 9:17 PM, Boydstun said:

Whenever the fetus has become capable of sustained survival outside the womb with or without artificial support, it is a living being worthy of adult protections and support (far beyond such worthiness of one's dog, for example). And adults willing to step up and provide that protection and support should have a right against interference with their project by other adults. . . . Rights between various adults are the whole story.

25 minutes ago, Easy Truth said:

These are hard subject to discuss. Having said that, I do in fact agree, although I wish I did not.

This implies that the right of a child (outside of the womb) to exist simply means the right to not be killed/harmed rather than (unanimously) not attended to and allowed to die. Meaning if all adults want to walk away from the child, the child has no moral right to force any of them to take care of it. There is no right of the child to the actions of the parent or parental figure or custodian unless there is a contractual agreement (or declaration/demonstration by a parent) amongst the adults to take care of the child. Meaning there is no inherent "duty" to take care of a child, which sounds heinous to say like that.

Perhaps, fortunately, by nature, adults, amongst ourselves would find it unacceptable to allow the demise of a child unless it was a last resort/a dire situation.

Yes, actually, we youngsters manage those adults fine (photo below). Seriously, adults will want to protect and support the infant/child, and other adults cannot with right prevent that project. I think it is good if a lot of leeway is given to guardians as to decisions about nutrition and upbringing and education of the child, where legal sanction has been given (however conventional) to have that guardian relationship to the child. But no such legal exclusive relationship needs to entail giving the guardian also the right (against intervention by other adults) to harm or neglect the child. 

(My parents with their first child.)

[Jerry Falwell and the Rise of the Religious Right]

~Voting for or against right to procure an abortion in fall of 2022~

Arizona: Has a ban on abortions beyond 15 weeks of pregnancy. At that point the human fetal brain is recognizable as a mammalian brain, not yet as primate, let alone, human brain. Anti-abortionists (Republicans) control both legislative chambers by only two members in each, and either can be flipped to the abortion-rights side (Democrats). Three anti-abortionists judges on the Supreme Court are up for re-election; even with their replacement, the majority will remain with the anti-abortionists. The anti-abortionist Governor and the anti-abortionist Attorney General are seats open in this election.

Georgia: Has a ban on abortions beyond 6 weeks of pregnancy. At that point, the human embryonic brain is recognizable as brain of a vertebrate, such as a fish, not yet as brain of a mammal. Some seats in the state legislature can be flipped to abortion-rights protectors, but not enough to flip either of these anti-abortionist chambers. Governor and Attorney General are up for vote in this election.

Kansas: Has legal abortions up to 22 weeks of pregnancy, which is the point at which the human fetal brain begins make changes that will bring it to the distinctively human form of primate brain. An initiative-question on the ballot this fall would amend the state bill of rights to say there is no constitutional right to abortion, opening the way for the Republican-led legislature to restrict abortion rights.

Other States in which state-directed abortion rights are being voted on this fall, at least implicitly, are:

Michigan

North Carolina

Pennsylvania

Wisconsin

[What Has the 'Pro-Life' Movement Won?]

9 hours ago, Grames said:

The value judgement here is that human life and human rights are good and valuable and should be nurtured and enabled to flourish.  The value judgement applies immediately after the identification has been made that a human life is involved.  Making the identification depends upon the definition of the concept.  Having a clear definition of the concept using other concepts (genus, differentia, essential attribute) versus using an informal ostensive definition of what it means to be an actual living human is the difference between the Objectivist position and other positions.

Whenever the fetus has become capable of sustained survival outside the womb with or without artificial support, it is a living being worthy of adult protections and support (far beyond such worthiness of one's dog, for example). And adults willing to step up and provide that protection and support should have a right against interference with their project by other adults. As to when an infant or child becomes a person, that is a gradual process.

We usually and correctly think of individual rights as belonging to (obtaining between) autonomous human persons and sourced in such personhood. In abortion rights and child rights, the question all along the way is not about rights of the little one not yet autonomous, but about rights of various adults concerning protection and support of the particular little one at all stages of development. Persons not the mother don't have a proper right to control the pregnancy until the fetus is capable of sustained life outside the womb with or without artificial support. It is only then that support-projects by persons not the mother can get underway without impressing the mother into service of their project. In other words, when does the fetus/infant become a person has always been a faulty and distracting way of looking at the rights that are actually in play over Law concerning abortion. Rights between various adults are the whole story.

[Guns in America]

"While the shooter, 20-year-old Douglas Sapirman, fired 24 rounds from an AR-15-style rifle, Dicken did not hesitate to use the Glock handgun he was legally carrying. Sapirman was "neutralized" within two minutes, police said."

Hero

Within that CNN story in the link, is a story of a shooting in Colorado in which police arrived, mistook the private rescuer for shooter and fatally shot him. A thing like that happened in the small country town where my Mom lived her whole life, in southern Oklahoma near the Red River. There had been an armed robbery of the bank going on, a local man wrestled the gun away from the robber and was holding it on the robber when the police arrived from a neighboring, larger town. The police shot the good guy, but fortunately, in this case, it was only a wounded arm, and he lived.