On 10/25/2024 at 10:03 AM, Boydstun said:
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The preceding is my proposal for a biological basis of distinctly moral proprieties. As with Rand’s, in my proposal, biological operations as they resulted in the course of nature on earth resulted in such things as needs and functions coming into the world. It is upon the organization that is life and its character we have the fact upon which oughts can have objective ground. Functions had come into the world before humans emerged. We and our ancestors were each of us functioning, more and less well, at any stage of our existence.
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I stress that functions are operating in each one of us in all one’s ontogeny. Rand noted that the pleasure-pain mechanism of the body is the progenitor of what is joy and suffering in organic elaboration and that all of those are indicators for good or evil for life of and proper functioning in the individual animal, including humans. I stress that it is not only other animals in which all of that is part of its overall individual control system. Our high-level, socially instructed conscious control system in maturity remains tied to the automatic one still running.
Rand centered on a choice to live in the case of human life. I think that element is better characterized as a choice to continue living. . . .
On 2/19/2024 at 12:31 PM, Boydstun said:
Additional Thought on the Choice to Live
The choice to live is at hand not only in moments of contemplating suicide. One is in a continuous ongoing choice to think and to value, and these are choices to live. One’s thinking and valuing in one’s actions of the day are operations peculiar to life form, to those parts of the world that are living things. Nonetheless there is a bit from wider metaphysics than living things for consideration, a bit recurring in the question of any rational bases for choosing to live.
There are things within the universe that do not apply to the universe as a whole. Such would be electric potential differences. The universe as a whole can have no potential difference with something not itself because there is nothing but the universe, or what Rand called existence as a whole (e.g. ITOE App. 273). We say that a thing within the universe has no electric potential difference with itself. Whether we think of the concept of a things’s electric potential difference with itself as absolutely nothing or as the limit of a thing’s potential difference with some other thing as the one and the other become the same thing, it is plain, again, that electric potential difference, an existent within the universe, does not apply to the universe itself, as a whole. The universe has no other with which it might have an electric potential, therefore, electric potential difference is not a trait belonging to the universe as a whole.
There are other things within the universe that apply also to the universe as a whole, at least if the universe is finite. These are things in the universe that can be summed over all the parts of the universe: such as electric charge, mass-energy, or angular momentum.
Our question so perennial in Objectivism is whether value and the value of reason within a human form of life are sensibly ascribed in its moments to a human life as a whole. Is the choice to live, carrying in its wake the choice to value and to live rationally, itself a rational choice, a meritoriously rational one? Is talk of one’s life itself being a good thing actually sensible talk?
The outgoing-beyond-itself of life (emphasized by Guyau 1885), the growth character of anything living (as talked of in N. Branden’s old essay “The Divine Right of Stagnation”), and the fundamental agape character of human love and creativity (as I’ve spoken of in the preceding post*****) seem characters extendable from within life to the whole of it. Not by summation, but by the characters of life just mentioned. Those characteristics recommend insistently the rationality and goodness of choosing life in the suicide fork and in the actions in each day of waking life down the river.
Some Objectivist writings on the choice to live and criticisms of those writings:
Leonard Peikoff’s OPAR (1991) 211–14, 220–21, 233, 244–48.
Roderick Long’s REASON AND VALUE which is OBJECTIVIST STUDIES V3 (2000).
Douglas Rasmussen’s “Rand on Obligation and Virtue” in THE JOURNAL OF AYN RAND STUDIES (2002, V4N2).
Tibor Machan’s “Rand and Choice” in JARS (2006, V7N2).
Douglas Rasmussen’s “Regarding Choice and the Foundations of Morality” (2006 in JARS V7N2).
Allan Gotthelf’s “The Choice to Value” in METAETHICS, EGOISM, AND VIRTUE (2011).