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The Objectivist ethics holds that the rational man only feels guilt when he has "misuse[d] [his] tool of survival" (OPAR, 307). The problem is that a failure in some area that results from a lack of intellectual capacity is, in most cases, indistinguishable from a misuse of one's tool of survival. Many genuine failures (i.e., failures that are not moral failures) result from a lack of innate intellectual capacity. This may mean that the Objectivist ethics is as much a source of unwarranted guilt as the altruist ethics is - more so, because the altruists generally do not claim that their ideal is achievable, and Objectivism does.

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The moral failure would be in not knowing one's self and his capabilities enough to know one's limitations. Although, I find it hard to believe that anyone that isn't mentally retarded wouldn't be able to eventually comprehend the material assuming he had done the appropriate requisites.

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The Objectivist ethics holds that the rational man only feels guilt when he has "misuse[d] [his] tool of survival" (OPAR, 307). The problem is that a failure in some area that results from a lack of intellectual capacity is, in most cases, indistinguishable from a misuse of one's tool of survival. Many genuine failures (i.e., failures that are not moral failures) result from a lack of innate intellectual capacity. This may mean that the Objectivist ethics is as much a source of unwarranted guilt as the altruist ethics is - more so, because the altruists generally do not claim that their ideal is achievable, and Objectivism does.

What defines the proper or improper(misuse) of mans tool of survival? I ask that as a rhetorical question, it's well answered in the pages you refer to in OPAR.

It's about either focusing on or evading reality. This has nothing to do with the individuals intellectual capacity; failing because you made errors in thinking or in knowledge is not immoral and not the same thing as evading.

The moral failure would be in not knowing one's self and his capabilities enough to know one's limitations.

That's an error of knowledge and not immoral.

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Misuse of your mind has to be deliberate in order to qualify as misuse. It is not the same thing as using your mind correctly and failing.

The first planes built by the Wright brothers didn't fly. Should they have felt guilty over that? Should we blame them and say they were immoral, that they wasted time and money, perhaps because they failed to know their own limitations?

I say "Hell no!" Your limitations have to be discovered in reality, not arbitrarily imposed. Sometimes the only way to find out what your limitations really are is to test them.

On the other hand if the Wright brothers had decided to defy the scientific knowledge they had, and use witchcraft, the resulting failure would have been something blameworthy. Guilt over that would have been earned. That is a misuse of the mind because it can honestly be said that they knew better.

A primitive tribe with no knowledge of science would not be morally blamed for trying to use witchcraft to make things fly; but if they are taught a more reality-oriented approach, and reject it in favor of witchcraft, then they can be blamed.

The only reason for a rational man to feel guilty is that he made a choice that he knew to be wrong (or even potentially wrong) at the time he was making it. That's what constitutes misuse as opposed to merely a failed use (e.g., due to ignorance).

This is the same reason we might forgive a teenager for being a Marxist more easily than a professor. A teenager, confronted with the truth, might realize he did not investigate thoroughly, and can plead ignorance. A professor who pleads ignorance is admitting that he hasn't done his job. But once his ignorance is corrected, one could expect him not to be a Marxist anymore. Most professors cannot plead ignorance, because they have done their jobs. They will not change their views no matter what evidence you present them with, because they already know what you are telling them, and they have chosen to ignore that evidence.

You always know whether you are lying to yourself or not. Others discover it by seeing your reaction when confronted with the truth. If you "get" the truth and it makes you change your strategy, you were ignorant, and that is forgivable. If the truth does not make you change your strategy, because you already knew the truth, then you are evading, and that is wrong.

I suppose there can be a case where someone shows a person the truth and the person doesn't understand it. That's forgivable but it may look like evasion to some people. This is one reason why it's important to present the truth many different ways; a person who fails to understand one presentation of it may understand another.

However, there is really no difference in how you should treat an incurably ignorant person as compared to an evading one. They both present the same danger.

As for yourself, you will never know if you are incurably ignorant, so the issue of guilt doesn't come up... but if you are evading, you will know it, and you should feel guilty.

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You always know whether you are lying to yourself or not. Others discover it by seeing your reaction when confronted with the truth. If you "get" the truth and it makes you change your strategy, you were ignorant, and that is forgivable. If the truth does not make you change your strategy, because you already knew the truth, then you are evading, and that is wrong.

This is a really good and useful perspective, thanks.

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The Objectivist ethics holds that the rational man only feels guilt when he has "misuse[d] [his] tool of survival" (OPAR, 307). The problem is that a failure in some area that results from a lack of intellectual capacity is, in most cases, indistinguishable from a misuse of one's tool of survival. Many genuine failures (i.e., failures that are not moral failures) result from a lack of innate intellectual capacity. This may mean that the Objectivist ethics is as much a source of unwarranted guilt as the altruist ethics is - more so, because the altruists generally do not claim that their ideal is achievable, and Objectivism does.

Not in the full context, which is.

The only choice you have is to think or not to think [written many times]

This is a "forced" choice. it is not the case that not thinking is the default setting. We have "drivers" for this. notably curiosity, sense of life and the knowledge that we might need this to survive. So the act of "choose to think" returns +1, later or -1, there is no null. when I come upon something, my mind goes after it without being told to and it's hard to stop it from doing so. If I'm not careful, I can be consumed by the matter. In that sense, I have not "grown up".

The choice to think explains itself. Next comes the choice of focus and that's more complex.

The choice not to think is active evasionn; specifically the "blank out" that Rand referred to so often, as in RM.

Now if you are not damaged psycho-physically. not mistrained or mistreated and if you are an adult. you pretty much know when you're playing around the edges. Even non-adults kinda of get when they are not using it all.

One of Rand's questions was could the process be semi-automatized. From how I understand it, she was never 100% certain of the answer but she seemed to think it could.

It can. Curiosity impels us toward it and sets the template. However, we spend most of our intellectual effort to disable that function so that its proper use is not understood.

As to intellectual capacity. There are two ways to go at it; wide scope or narr-band. A guy with a 140 IQ, if he uses it over a wide scope will outperform a guy with a 160 IQ (sometimes even in his own area of specialization) that is narrow-banded. A person with one working eye at 1/14th function can reach mid-level reading skills.

To get an image of wide-scope vs narrow-band, think of a graphic equalizer or multi-track audio mixer with sliders. Narrow-band means that all the sliders are pretty much near the bottom with one or a very few of them raised significantly. Wide socpe or wide-band is with all of them pretty will up the scale to a greater or lesser degree.

The reason for the former is that in wide banding his use of his mentality a person may (almost will) discover the key in one category of action that solves a problem in another that the narrow-banded mentality, not straying from its specialty, missed because it was not sent there. For the latter it's "Where there's a will there's a way": It you want it, and you are let, encouraged to and the dffort is asked of you and rewarded, you will find or devise a way to get it.

There is a third aspect; association. If you hang out with all kinds of persons and be aware of what is going on, you'll wide-band your mentality and learn to know the smart from the dumb. As you reach and proceed through adutlhood, you will learn to be selective about your friends.

Intellectual capacity is not entirely static, only 70% is genetically "determined" so you can kick it up another 30%. Learning how to use it effectively and the will to do so are force multipliers.

And guess what the root of the best set of force multipliers is.

Let me quote Rand "...philsosphy will not tell you if you are in Zanzibar, but it will tell you how to find out..."

Poeple think of philosophy as a set of static ideas. It is not. It is more like a download om the order of mentality_setup.exe. when you engage the ideas into your "operating system" (double-click "mentality_setup.exe") they becomes an active component. specifically the epistemology.

And guess what the best phiosophy is.

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What defines the proper or improper(misuse) of mans tool of survival? I ask that as a rhetorical question, it's well answered in the pages you refer to in OPAR.

It's about either focusing on or evading reality. This has nothing to do with the individuals intellectual capacity; failing because you made errors in thinking or in knowledge is not immoral and not the same thing as evading.

Right, but you could be led to think that you had evaded. For example, suppose you were in a very difficult class, and you were the only person in the class without the capacity for the material. Suppose further that everyone else at least passes the course. In this case, you could be led to think that you had not studied hard enough, no matter how hard you in fact studied. In short, it would appear to you that you had failed morally by evading the responsibility of studying, producing unearned guilt.

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Necrovore,

Really great response. My issue with it, though, is that you don't always know if a particular misuse of your mind was deliberate or not. You may forget what information you had available to you, for example, producing unearned guilt or lessening deserved guilt. Or perhaps the contents of your mind were not totally clear to you at the time (or you are no longer totally clear about what they were) so you don't know whether you should feel guilty or not.

You say that we always know whether we are lying to ourselves, but introspection calls that into question. It takes a lot of work to sort out what my desires, values and beliefs are, even apart from the validation of those desires, values and beliefs. If I act against a desire, value, or belief that is only partly clear to me, then it is difficult to say whether I have lied to myself. For example, I may "really" want to become a physicist, but my mind be sufficiently muddled that this desire is only partly clear to me. In this case, am I lying to myself if I decide that I want to become a doctor? You could say that because I lack an unequivocally clear desire to go into any particular field, I really need to introspect more, so I am lying to myself in choosing any particular career. But if it is not even obvious to me that further introspection would reveal any deep set desire to go into any particular field, then that argument is harder to make.

The sort of case my OP brought up, errors due to lack of intellectual capacity, is also relevant here. By its nature, we cannot know when we have struck an intellectual limit. My being unable to comprehend advanced physics is indistinguishable (both from my perspective and from the perspective of an external observer) from my just not putting in enough time or not approaching the material in the right way. Not being able to comprehend the material is not something I should feel guilty about, true, but not putting in enough time is. And I am likely to interpret any intellectual limit as my just not having put in enough time, producing unearned guilt.

You seem to agree with part of this, because you say: "As for yourself, you will never know if you are incurably ignorant, so the issue of guilt doesn't come up." I agree that it would be unreasonable for a person to feel guilty about an intellectual limit that he has. However, people are very likely in fact to assign themselves guilt as a result of the existence of an intellectual limit within themselves, for reasons like those in the last paragraph.

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My issue with it, though, is that you don't always know if a particular misuse of your mind was deliberate or not.

Then this is something that you have to learn to resolve if you want to be free of unearned guilt. Introspection is a skill. Nobody said it was easy, just that it can be done and thus you are not inevitably at the mercy of mental processes you can't control.

Your hypothetical about "not having the capacity for the material" is nonsense because human capacities aren't that finely grained. If you didn't have the capacity for the material (due to conflicting values and hence an unwillingness to study or a simple lack of brainpower/focus), you would have been getting poor grades LONG before it came to the difficult course. People who study hard don't get all A's and then suddenly fail at the bar. It's the people who are coasting on minimal work who suddenly fail when they find themselves required to put forth more than the minimum effort.

It is always possible to learn whether you are limited or evading. It may take time, but only idiots expect either instant success or failure.

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Necrovore,

Really great response. My issue with it, though, is that you don't always know if a particular misuse of your mind was deliberate or not.

I don't think it's possible not to know.

You may forget what information you had available to you, for example, producing unearned guilt or lessening deserved guilt.

Did you forget on purpose?

Or perhaps the contents of your mind were not totally clear to you at the time (or you are no longer totally clear about what they were) so you don't know whether you should feel guilty or not.

You say that we always know whether we are lying to ourselves, but introspection calls that into question. It takes a lot of work to sort out what my desires, values and beliefs are, even apart from the validation of those desires, values and beliefs. If I act against a desire, value, or belief that is only partly clear to me, then it is difficult to say whether I have lied to myself.

Self-knowledge is not really any different from any other kind of knowledge. If you fail to know something about yourself then you are no more morally guilty than the Wright Brothers would have been for failing to know something about flight. If on the other hand you refuse to know something about yourself, then you can say that you are wasting your own time and resources, and there is ground for moral condemnation.

For example, I may "really" want to become a physicist, but my mind be sufficiently muddled that this desire is only partly clear to me. In this case, am I lying to myself if I decide that I want to become a doctor? You could say that because I lack an unequivocally clear desire to go into any particular field, I really need to introspect more, so I am lying to myself in choosing any particular career. But if it is not even obvious to me that further introspection would reveal any deep set desire to go into any particular field, then that argument is harder to make.

People often change majors for just this sort of reason. The question in deciding whether they should feel guilty is: did they choose the wrong major deliberately? Were they perhaps stacking the deck in favor of being a doctor, perhaps because they wanted to appease or impress someone?

I don't think it's really possible to make a choice and not know about it. It's a contradiction in terms.

The sort of case my OP brought up, errors due to lack of intellectual capacity, is also relevant here. By its nature, we cannot know when we have struck an intellectual limit. My being unable to comprehend advanced physics is indistinguishable (both from my perspective and from the perspective of an external observer) from my just not putting in enough time or not approaching the material in the right way. Not being able to comprehend the material is not something I should feel guilty about, true, but not putting in enough time is. And I am likely to interpret any intellectual limit as my just not having put in enough time, producing unearned guilt.

I don't believe there are any "inherent intellectual limits." Even if you don't have enough time or you don't know the right way to approach the material, this isn't necessarily a moral fault. There is such a thing as wasting time, but you will know if you are skipping study in order to go to parties. Similarly, you will know if there is a book that you refuse to read. Maybe you should read it; it may contain an approach you haven't tried.

You seem to agree with part of this, because you say: "As for yourself, you will never know if you are incurably ignorant, so the issue of guilt doesn't come up." I agree that it would be unreasonable for a person to feel guilty about an intellectual limit that he has. However, people are very likely in fact to assign themselves guilt as a result of the existence of an intellectual limit within themselves, for reasons like those in the last paragraph.

You should only assign yourself guilt over your choices, not your characteristics. If you can honestly say that you made the best choice, given all the information you had at the time, then there is no grounds for guilt. Regret, maybe, which takes the form "If only I'd known!" but not guilt, which is more like "I should have done what I knew was right!"

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