Reification and Suicide

Metaphysics and Epistemology
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On 12/13/2016 at 9:04 PM, dream_weaver said:

To declare the act moral/immoral posthumously would come across as disingenuous barring mitigating factors that could actually be known in advance (rather than simply possibilities and/or presuppositions).

 

Yes. There’s a difference between errors of ignorance and moral failures, which we’d be very wrong to omit. Even if suicide could be shown to be universally immoral, no such posthumous judgements would follow; like any other moral principle, one would have to carefully apply it to the context of every individual’s life.

You’d also be absolutely correct if you’d said that my entire epistemic argument revolves around “possibilities and presumptions”. It does. That’s not a bug, but a feature.

 

Morality is about making choices. When we speak of moral principles, we’re speaking of standards by which to judge our own choices and methods for improving them (according to those standards).

We don’t automatically know the consequences of our choices, in advance; if we did then neither epistemology (with which we predict such consequences) nor morality (with which we weigh them) would have any meaning, whatsoever. All we know about the future are possibilities and presumptions, in varying degrees of clarity and accuracy, and the aim of all such sciences is to improve them (since their quality is literally a matter of life and death).

Although I’m usually not comfortable with dividing human inquiry up into separate areas which obey different rules, it does stand to reason that the distinguishing characteristic of “philosophy” is in the identification of those possibilities and presumptions which are universal to every man, in any possible situation. That’s our cognitive gold standard.

 

Now, if you were to deny that I’ve established the universality of some of my claims, you’d be completely correct. That’s what I have left to debug, however; not their speculative nature.

 

On 12/15/2016 at 4:29 PM, epistemologue said:

Can you explain what you meant here? I’m not really following.

Certainly.

 

You posited that someone who was completely cut off from reality could still enjoy contemplating the contents of their own cognition, but that content could only be drawn from their experiences in reality. They may choose to rearrange, integrate and restructure it however they pleased, but all of the raw material would have to come from their senses. If all they had to build with was pain and fear then no amount of thinking would transform it into anything else; they would have nothing to contemplate except more pain and fear. Garbage in, garbage out.

This is what it means for an experience to provide “spiritual fuel” and what it means for such fuel to run out.

 

Now, the process of burying a mind under such muck is a long, slow, gradual one, which can be resisted for a while; in this sense you’re completely correct. But morality (and Egoism in particular) is not about what happens on this or that day, but over the course of an entire lifetime; all of the things which render “lifeboat scenarios” irrelevant also apply to however long a person can choose to be happy in spite of any external torment.

Furthermore, if taken as the rule and not as the exception, your scenario amounts to a denial of the relationship between sensation and cognition. Hence the soul-body dichotomy. And to your credit, that error lines up perfectly consistently with quite a number of your statements on this thread (which leads me to suspect that it’s an honest mistake, but not an isolated slip of the tongue).

 

I completely agree with the spirit of those statements; that each of us is fundamentally in control of our own destinies and happiness; the masters of our own fate. But that control is not total or unilateral (not even within our own minds) specifically because it’s connected to so many external things in so many ways.

We accomplish nothing by pretending that the issue is simpler than it really is.

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On 12/14/2016 at 7:39 AM, DonAthos said:

This isn’t (or it oughn’t be, at least) any sort of pissing contest. There’s no award for having endured the most pain, either physical or mental. And personally, I thought it was strikingly bold of you to relate such distressing experiences so directly. As someone who regularly invokes details of his personal life in order to help describe his beliefs, I know how difficult it can be. Yet if I had endured what you have, and felt as you did, I’m unsure that I would be willing to discuss it.

Beyond that, I don’t know about this talk of “extraordinary.” We each of us, individually, only ever deal with the circumstances of our own life. And when we’re discussing our relationship to suicide – or anything else, actually – we can only ever really understand it in terms of our own experience… though it is crucial to try to understand the experience of others, and this is why we share. So thank you for sharing your own.

No problem.

 

And I realize that it’s not a pissing contest. I was not trying to point out that I’ve endured more than MisterSwig (which, in light of the nerve pain he mentioned, would almost certainly be false) but that I’ve explained what I did endure, in order to better ground this discussion in reality. In light of his nerve pain, I’m sure his experiences would be infinitely more useful here than my own.

 

I have read the article you linked to. I’m not sure what to say about it, yet; there are a few more things I’m still chewing on.

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On 12/17/2016 at 1:03 PM, epistemologue said:

That’s not a moral reason to avoid pain - to avoid pain just because it hurts, for its own sake, is to place the avoidance of pain on the level of an ultimate end!

In one sense, yes.

 

If I take Advil in order to cure my headache, simply because I have one, I am not necessarily dedicating my entire life to the avoidance of pain. I am not saying “I’ll never strive for virtue or greatness again”; all I am saying is “this specific thing hurts, so I’ll take this concrete action to fix it”.

Yes, that’s an “ultimate end” in that it is an end in itself, and I see nothing wrong with that. It is not my “ultimate end” as the meaning of my entire life, which would be extremely wrong.

 

Even Howard Roark would put his architecture aside, from time to time, to have sex with Dominique (although he refused to give it up permanently).

This is why I keep coming back to the distinction between how we treat our highest, most important goals, and those we hold as part of everyday life. For pain to count in both of these areas would condemn us to a life like Keating’s; for it not to count in either, the Black Knight’s. Yet those cannot be our only options, and they aren’t - so long as we mind that distinction.

 

On 12/17/2016 at 1:03 PM, epistemologue said:

There are many pains you ought to endure because you have some positive goal you are pursuing. If instead your hand is burning because you’re being tested with gom jabber (the Bene Gesserit torture test from the book Dune, for which the penalty of failure is death), you had better not avoid the pain just because it hurts. That’s exactly the moral failure for which the test is designed.

Absolutely.

 

To endure some pain in order to reach some goal, however, does not mean that the pain doesn’t count; if that were the case then there would be nothing to endure; it only means that one holds a pair of mutually exclusive values (or, in this case, a value and a disvalue) and must give the lesser one up for the greater one.

 

Furthermore, if pulling your hand out of a box of pain simply because it hurts constitutes a moral failure, then it’s a sin every single human being on Earth has probably committed. I know I have; I suspect you also have.

There are people to whom pain truly doesn’t count because their ability to sense it was stunted from birth. We don’t praise them for it, nor hold them up as moral exemplars; we give them medical attention. It’s not a pleasant or happy thing.

 

Now, in one sense it is true that avoiding pain does further one’s own happiness, to the extent that it usually prevents damage and injury to one’s body (which happens to be my entire point about the Black Knight). However, this is an abstract and conceptual connection, and to assert that every child and anti-conceptual mentality is aware of it is wrong; just as wrong as calling them wrong for removing their hands from hot stoves.

 

Your position, taken as an absolute (as you seem eager to make it), is not tenable. You must either isolate and identify its literal and absolute grain of truth or else continue preaching an overgeneralization which no organism should ever attempt to practice.

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On 12/17/2016 at 2:21 PM, DonAthos said:

If I ever sit down to write my analysis of Objectivism – as I sometimes imagine that I may one day attempt – remind me to hire you as my editor.

Hell, yes!

 

I have a thought experiment for you, though.

 

Suppose someone wanted to blow themselves up, along with a number of innocent civilians. Let’s say they aren’t Muslim (so there isn’t necessarily anything crooked in the reasoning behind it); they aren’t doing it for 42 virgins, but simply because they want to kill and die. There’s no reason for them to think about their own self-interest (since they want to die) nor to respect the rights of anyone else (since they want to die).

What, if anything, would be immoral about blowing themselves up?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQMYWll74Hk

At the end of this song, Todd declares that he’s alive and full of joy… But is that true?

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21 hours ago, Harrison Danneskjold said:

I have a thought experiment for you, though.

I will attempt a response to it. I will attempt it, in part, because I pride myself upon a willingness to explore (almost) any line of sincere argumentation. Also because you are asking, Harrison, and no other.

But if I otherwise seem a bit reluctant, it is because… this is the kind of question – or thought experiment – that seems to me potentially to be at least as contentious and complicated as the main topic of discussion. I expect that several separate threads could be launched trying to deal with what you’ve described (plus one for Sweeney Todd, to boot). Furthermore, my own views on this subject are still developing and evolving, and I haven’t tried explaining them before, or even elaborating upon them for my own benefit; I fear that my rhetoric is going to be much rougher and more opaque than I would otherwise prefer.

It is uncharted territory, and I ask for your patience while I explore it.

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There’s no reason for them to think about their own self-interest (since they want to die) nor to respect the rights of anyone else (since they want to die).

This reflects a common – but mistaken – Objectivist understanding, in my opinion:

That understanding is that the desire to live (or to die) is “pre-moral” and consequently amoral. One cannot argue to choose life or death, that one is better than the other, but only that, when one chooses life (howsoever this is managed, left as a mystery), we can then develop/assess an ethics to help one achieve it.

So if one has chosen death (or otherwise rejected “life as the standard,” which is held to amount to the same thing), there are no more ethics to discuss. A funny thing, that, almost like a loophole. Any apparently “immoral” behavior can be reassessed as “amoral,” if it’s concluded that the actor does not hold life as the standard of his ethical choices; if the actor doesn’t seek life in the first place, then how could his actions be said to be “wrong” by that standard?

In other words, it is as “good” for Maynard to end her life quietly, surrounded by the people she loves, as it is for her to detonate a nuclear device in the middle of town, surrounded by the people she loves. We suppose these to be equivalent – equally amoral (or immoral) – because neither allow for her survival, which is what all moral action is supposed to be oriented towards.

Yet I don’t agree with this understanding. I believe that it removes “whim” from the whole of ethical decision making only to return it to the very heart. Rather, I believe that men intrinsically want life, which relies upon, but is broader than, “survival.” Life is instead the experience of living, in totality. And we are able to conceive of the good, ultimately, accounting to that which I’d discussed earlier: that pleasure is positive (that which we desire; that which draws us) and pain negative (that which we wish to avoid; that which repels us), according to the nature of what we are. We know “good” because we have experienced pleasure; we know “evil” due to pain. We can then conceptualize these pleasures and pains long term, and over the course of a human life, and we can assess our calculations emotionally, resulting in “happiness” and “sadness.”

What we want is positive experience: happiness and pleasure and every other variant on that theme, and as much of it as we can get, for as long as we can. Negative experience also exists, and we seek to avoid it in like fashion.

I consequently believe that men always have a self-interest, which is to maximize this experience of life, making it as “positive” as possible, given our context, and that “the good” is that which serves our self-interest. The trick is to discover the nature/mechanism of this self-interest and how best to achieve it, and our means for doing this is reason. I believe that the rest of the Objectivist Ethics roughly follow. (And further, that this accounts for apparent “contradictions” within, such as an apparent allowance for suicide in certain scenarios, a willingness for “self-sacrifice” to save certain loved ones from destruction, and etc. These cannot be understood when we hold “survival” alone as the standard of value, but they can be understood when we conceive of “life” in terms of maximizing our experience of it.)

For Maynard, wanting to die (because of pain, or anticipated pain, and etc.) does not mean that there remains nothing else in her self-interest. So long as she lives, and so long as she has the capacity to experience that life (meaning: taking pleasures or pains in it, whether physical or emotional) – regardless of whether she intends her own death – to have a positive experience of life, the most positive experience possible, while possible, remains in her self-interest. There is potentially a world of difference for Maynard between knowing that what she chooses will not harm the ones she loves, versus causing them harm, even in a final few seconds of conscious existence.

And that experience matters. In a sense, it is the only thing that does.

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What, if anything, would be immoral about blowing themselves up?

If they love, if they value, then the immorality is in the knowing that they are destroying that which they love, that which they value (and the concomitant negative emotional experience of this knowing). Immorality, here as everywhere else, is ultimately self harm.

If we posit a person who has no reason to wish to live (let us say due to brain cancer, a la Maynard), and no love for anything else, who finds no value in anything, such that he could watch the world burn and not care… or even take a kind of pleasure in it – and perhaps it is possible to pervert an unfortunate soul so – then there is nothing left to argue against actions which would harm others, is there? (Outside of inventing an eternal hell, and trying to convince them of it, I suppose. :wink: ) Such a person is already so benighted and so lost that further self harm isn’t possible.

At such a point, and with such a being, our recourse is no longer to ethics, but self-defense.

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At the end of this song, Todd declares that he’s alive and full of joy… But is that true?

I do not believe so. Do you?

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Don, as far as extreme, I am not arguing that IF one has pain to such a degree that one is not at all able to direct attention to positive values, THEN suicide is okay. I agree with that as I stated it. My idea is that such situations do not exist, as long as you are able to have positive values and focus on them. The reason “pure” pain is nreal is that there are a multitude of experiences available. People who are literally tortured for years and have also had reasons to live in spite of the horror of that torture. Life still supercedes the pain as a whole. No pain overwhelms the inherent pleasure of life - the right attitude makes the difference.

You haven’t addressed though how one is going to decide, objectively, that Maynard’s or anyone else’s pain is severe enough to make life a zero, to make life into suffering. If I were in her position, I’d avoid treatments that ruin my mind, but I’d never kill myself or try to die as fast as possible. Perhaps the obstacle cannot be cleared. So what? There are other things to do, a lot to think about, a lot to experience. It’d look awfully weak and cowardly to stop there. Hardships happen. People often surprise themselves at how much they can handle.

Happiness matters, except the Objectivist idea is that being virtuous always brings happiness. In that way, I am not arguing that one must suffer for the sake of morality. As long as you take the steps to think rationally, improve yourself, develop grit, and all that, you will be happy on the whole, or on the way to getting to the ideal state. Pain will exist, but it will not become an existential pain.

As far as I read, Maynard made a decision based on subjective standards and only feelings. She is an example of giving up on life and therefore morality.

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1 hour ago, Eiuol said:

Life still supercedes the pain as a whole. No pain overwhelms the inherent pleasure of life - the right attitude makes the difference.

There is no “inherent pleasure of life.” Pleasure and pain are both constituent elements of human life; they are real things with actual causes, pleasure being inherently pleasurable and pain being inherently painful. A life that is mostly filled with pain is mostly filled with pain, “inherent pleasure” and “attitude” notwithstanding.

1 hour ago, Eiuol said:

If I were in her position, I’d avoid treatments that ruin my mind, but I’d never kill myself or try to die as fast as possible.

If you were in her position, you would be privy to new information. I wouldn’t be surprised if that new information altered your current perspective.

1 hour ago, Eiuol said:

Perhaps the obstacle cannot be cleared. So what? There are other things to do, a lot to think about, a lot to experience. It’d look awfully weak and cowardly to stop there. Hardships happen. People often surprise themselves at how much they can handle.

Maynard is well aware that there is “a lot to experience” vis a vis her terminal diagnosis; indeed, that’s the problem – she does not want to experience it. She rejects the notion of “morality” which would have her suffer through things that she does not wish to endure. This rejection is not a cowardly act.

1 hour ago, Eiuol said:

…the Objectivist idea is that being virtuous always brings happiness.

For anyone else following along, this is precisely what “rationalism” looks like: “You can be tortured… and happy! The definitions make it so!” (Oh, and note the charming corollary – if “being virtuous always brings happiness,” then unhappiness must imply a lack of virtue. Not only wrong, but a perfect recipe for emotional repression and dishonesty.)

1 hour ago, Eiuol said:

As far as I read, Maynard made a decision based on subjective standards and only feelings.

What “subjective standards” are you talking about? What are you talking about, at all?

She is taking her feelings into account, yes. Insofar as she is honest with herself, and understands herself, those feelings exist. They are real. She should take them into account in her decision making; that’s rational.

1 hour ago, Eiuol said:

She is an example of giving up on life and therefore morality.

She’s not giving up on life. She has brain cancer. She’s not rejecting life, she’s rejecting the pain and degeneracy that she expects – that it is reasonable for her to expect.

On morality, Rand writes (via John Galt):

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The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.

But Maynard is no longer in a position to enjoy herself. She expects that the last six months of her life will bring the very suffering morality is otherwise meant to help us avoid. And so, in taking action here to avoid it, she nonetheless acts morally, taking what she determines to be the best possible action for herself amidst a lousy set of circumstances.

I am certain that Maynard wishes that she did not have brain cancer. Short of that, I am certain that she wishes she could have brain cancer – and live (so long as possible) happily with it. But she does not believe that she can have either of those: she does not believe that she will be happy while suffering through the last few months of her brain cancer. And so, she opts for the course of action which will bring her the most happiness available to her in reality (via the peace of mind that assisted suicide brings her, prior to that final act).

This is exactly how a rational ethics is meant to operate. You assess reality and then you make the best choice for yourself that you can, in whatever context you happen to find yourself, for the sake of your own, personal happiness.

But you would have her choose a greater suffering instead, in the name of “morality”? That is not Objectivism and it is not moral.

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I see three basic positions on this thread:

  1. Pain doesn’t exist. It’s a zero.

  2. Pain exists, but it doesn’t matter.

  3. Pain exists, and it does matter.

Does that about sum it up?

Number 1 is flat-out wrong. Pain is not the absence of pleasure. It’s the very real presence of a disruptive sensation on the physical level, and a discouraging emotion on the psychological level.

Numbers 2 and 3 are a false dichotomy. Pain can matter in some instances, and not matter in others. It depends on the context, because pain can only tell you that something is wrong. It doesn’t tell you what exactly is wrong or what to do about it. In some cases, you might want to endure the pain. In other cases, you might not, depending on your options for dealing with it.

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4 hours ago, DonAthos said:

For anyone else following along, this is precisely what “rationalism” looks like: “You can be tortured… and happy! The definitions make it so!” (Oh, and note the charming corollary – if “being virtuous always brings happiness,” then unhappiness must imply a lack of virtue. Not only wrong, but a perfect recipe for emotional repression and dishonesty.)

Would you expand on this part before I say more?

A few parts I think need to be addressed still:

What is the difference between pain as a stimulus and existential pain? Is this a difference of degree, or a difference of kind?

If a difference of kind, which kind does a moral suicide apply to?

If a difference of degree, how does one measure when pain is something  to work through or something to stop working through? We’d need details here, that it feels daunting or not worth the effort doesn’t mean it really is daunting. So far, you didn’t bring in details in addition to feelings.

If you live by your nature, as in, virtuously, would you always be happy (as in, the overall state of well-being)?

What makes one unhappy (not momentary, but an overall state of well-being) if not a lack of virtue?

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12 hours ago, MisterSwig said:

I see three basic positions on this thread:

  1. Pain doesn’t exist. It’s a zero.

  2. Pain exists, but it doesn’t matter.

  3. Pain exists, and it does matter.

Does that about sum it up?

Number 1 is flat-out wrong. Pain is not the absence of pleasure. It’s the very real presence of a disruptive sensation on the physical level, and a discouraging emotion on the psychological level.

Numbers 2 and 3 are a false dichotomy. Pain can matter in some instances, and not matter in others. It depends on the context, because pain can only tell you that something is wrong. It doesn’t tell you what exactly is wrong or what to do about it. In some cases, you might want to endure the pain. In other cases, you might not, depending on your options for dealing with it.

We are agreed that Number 1 is flat-out wrong. Number 2 – as expressed in this thread – has meant: “pain may exist, technically, but it is moral to treat it as though it is a zero” or “it is a zero for practical/moral/ethical purposes.” I hold that this isn’t some half of a false dichotomy, but equally as wrong as Number 1. Number 3, in the sense that I would mean it, would be something like an application of Peikoff’s central “Fact and Value” thesis, that “every fact bears on the choice to live.” More specifically, when we make choices for ourselves in our lives, it is both moral and ethical to take pain into account; it is further right to want to avoid pain, all else being equal (being that it is a “disruptive sensation” and “a discouraging emotion,” which I describe as “negative” in character); finally, it is possible to be in a situation – such as the example I’d introduced in Brittany Maynard – where pain (both physical and emotional) is such, in context, that it is rational and moral to wish to commit suicide.

This is not to suggest that a person might not rationally or morally choose to endure some level of pain for a specific purpose. But acknowledging this does not mean that “pain doesn’t matter” or that “pain is a zero,” not even in those cases. It is still a meaningful factor (which is again to say “it matters”), and if someone has made a reasonable decision to endure some pain, it can only be that they have found something of sufficient value to make that experience of pain worthwhile, not that they have ignored the pain, as such. (Opting to ignore the facts of reality when making decisions is precisely how we get ourselves into such trouble.)

10 hours ago, Eiuol said:

Would you expand on this part before I say more?

You’ve decided that “thinking rationally brings happiness” (or something like that), that “it is possible to think rationally while in pain” and therefore concluded that “it is possible to be happy while in pain” regardless of further context, regardless of what it is about rationality or virtue that allows a person to be happy, regardless of the nature or degree of the pain, or anything else. It is akin to working out a word problem and deciding that the answer is 2.3 children, not keeping in mind that children only actually come in positive integers.

You have “deduced” that a person can be in the worst possible torture, yet still happy, yet I contend that your results have nothing to do with reality. That this is an opportunity for you to “check your premises.”

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A few parts I think need to be addressed still:

What is the difference between pain as a stimulus and existential pain? Is this a difference of degree, or a difference of kind?

“Existential pain” is not a term I’ve introduced or used – it is your own, which has seemingly been used to strawman and misunderstand and garble and impede, with reference to “nihilism” among other things. Pain is a negative physical sensation, and then there are emotional analogues to pain, such as sadness, misery and despair. These are not illusions or “zeroes” or etc., but actual human experiences in reality.

If you want to try to translate all of this into your own personal idiom, or any other, you’re welcome to do so, but I’d advise you to keep things straight in your mind. Some pains (meaning actual, real pains) are chronic. Which is to say that they are not fleeting, and moreover they can be very powerful. “Torture” – which, again, exists as a real thing on planet Earth – is a method of causing human persons intense physical pain. Again, such pain does not have to be “fleeting.” (And in epistemologue’s introduced example, it is not.)

If you feel the need to try to conceive of this in terms of “stimulus and existential pain,” for whatever reason, can you please try to retain both the meanings of these real phenomena and the context of the ongoing discussion?

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If a difference of kind, which kind does a moral suicide apply to?

If a difference of degree, how does one measure when pain is something  to work through or something to stop working through? We’d need details here, that it feels daunting or not worth the effort doesn’t mean it really is daunting. So far, you didn’t bring in details in addition to feelings.

What happened to the conversation we had just been having, Eiuol? You’d been asking about Maynard and I responded, and… bloop! It’s all seemingly vanished here, replaced by a fresh set of questions! (Is “bloop” an onomatopoeia suited to that experience?)

So, so frustrating.

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If you live by your nature, as in, virtuously, would you always be happy (as in, the overall state of well-being)?

No.

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What makes one unhappy (not momentary, but an overall state of well-being) if not a lack of virtue?

Error. Ignorance. Circumstance. Results.

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1 hour ago, DonAthos said:

“Existential pain” is not a term I’ve introduced or used – it is your own, which has seemingly been used to strawman and misunderstand and garble and impede, with reference to “nihilism” among other things. Pain is a negative physical sensation, and then there are emotional analogues to pain, such as sadness, misery and despair. These are not illusions or “zeroes” or etc., but actual human experiences in reality.

Right, it is my term, to detail my position as based on distinguishing two kinds of pain. I don’t know if you agree these are kinds of pain, or if you see this as a pointless distinction.

“You’d been asking about Maynard and I responded, and… bloop! It’s all seemingly vanished here, replaced by a fresh set of questions! (Is “bloop” an onomatopoeia suited to that experience?)”

I honestly don’t know or missed how prior answers answered this part.

“Error. Ignorance. Circumstance. Results.”

Error is not a hindrance to virtue; virtue is a method, not a result. It may turn out that the method was not virtue. But if it is virtue in fact, you won’t be unhappy. To not try to fix error is vice.

Ignorance, if willful, is vice. Otherwise, it is error.

Circumstance only alter how to apply or discover virtue. It is not the cause of happiness. So, we go back to error.

Results are either error or vice.

Any disagreement there?

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13 minutes ago, Eiuol said:

Right, it is my term, to detail my position as based on distinguishing two kinds of pain. I don’t know if you agree these are kinds of pain, or if you see this as a pointless distinction.

I don’t understand your terms, or the manner in which you use them, to the point where I could say whether they are a “pointless distinction.”

If “existential pain” is “a nihilist’s sense of life” or etc., then that has nothing to do with this thread (or my participation in it, at least). If it is used to refer to the sadness that a rational human being might experience, being diagnosed with brain cancer, then it can be meaningful to that degree – but then why not simply refer to sadness?

If it is meant to conflate these very different sorts of things, as I suspect you have done, then it does much more damage.

And your use of “stimulus” seems worthless at best. If we are discussing pain (e.g. “physical pain,” like “torture”), why not use the word we already have for it? – Pain.

And what’s more (and worse), “stimulus” seems to capture part of pain, but not all of it. By describing pain as “stimulus,” we are losing vital information. Only a Nazi “doctor” would think to describe the sensations of the thumbscrew he administers as a “stimulus,” but at least there I can understand why; he seeks to hide himself from reality…

13 minutes ago, Eiuol said:

“You’d been asking about Maynard and I responded, and… bloop! It’s all seemingly vanished here, replaced by a fresh set of questions! (Is “bloop” an onomatopoeia suited to that experience?)”

I honestly don’t know or missed how prior answers answered this part.

It’s not my intention to “answer this part.” It is to express my frustration that I answer your questions and receive no feedback that relates to my responses, but only more questions. It seems an endless pit.

And moreover, your questions are increasingly abstract and vague. Why shouldn’t we go back to discussing Maynard? Or the spies that MisterSwig introduced in… another thread? Or anything concrete?

This is a familiar pattern to me, Eiuol, and I have less and less patience for it.

13 minutes ago, Eiuol said:

“Error. Ignorance. Circumstance. Results.”

Error is not a hindrance to virtue; virtue is a method, not a result.

You did not ask whether error was “a hindrance to virtue”; you asked “what makes one unhappy…if not a lack of virtue?”

One answer to that question is “error.”

Let’s work from something (Rand via Galt, again):

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Happiness is the successful state of life, pain is an agent of death. Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values.

If “happiness is the successful state of life” or “happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values,” then another way of phrasing your initial question is “what can keep one from ‘the successful state of life’” or “what can prevent one from the achievement of his values”?

Potentially, error can. As can “ignorance,” “circumstance,” and more generally, “results”:

I attempt to achieve my values, acting virtuously, BUT…

…I make an error in my calculations, or
…I am ignorant of relevant information, or
…circumstances are unfavorable, and thus, in result…

…I fail to achieve my values, and thus I do not experience “that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values.”

“Virtue is a method, not a result”? Yes. But happiness (as “success” as “achievement”) is a result, and while virtuous action is a method of achieving happiness – the best we can devise, and the only I would recommend – it does not guarantee that result.

13 minutes ago, Eiuol said:

It may turn out that the method was not virtue. But if it is virtue in fact, you won’t be unhappy. To not try to fix error is vice.

Ignorance, if willful, is vice. Otherwise, it is error.

Circumstance only alter how to apply or discover virtue. It is not the cause of happiness. So, we go back to error.

Results are either error or vice.

Any disagreement there?

This is utterly mind numbing. Let’s get back to discussing concretes, please.

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1 hour ago, DonAthos said:

And moreover, your questions are increasingly abstract and vague. Why shouldn’t we go back to discussing Maynard? Or the spies that MisterSwig introduced in… another thread? Or anything concrete?

This is a familiar pattern to me, Eiuol, and I have less and less patience for it.

Then ask for clarifications; I admit, I am sometimes too abstract. I am trying to connect principles to concretes, ideally what a person like Maynard ought to do, and how to address pain. I was going to mix in concretes next big post.

Anyway, you write so much that I sometimes miss what you say, or I leave unanswered what is inessential to my response. I posed questions that would add detail to the part I wanted you to expand. I held off on a full response to your prior post until you could expand.

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1 hour ago, Eiuol said:

I am trying to connect principles to concretes

Instead, try inducing them from the facts of reality. Objectivism is not a deductive philosophy. 

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37 minutes ago, MisterSwig said:

Instead, try inducing them from the facts of reality. Objectivism is not a deductive philosophy. 

I did; I have talked to Don enough on many topics that we don’t need to start from scratch about Objectivism’s take on virtue - part of a philosophy we largely agree on in terms of essentials. Deduction is fine as long as the premises are valid. It helps for spotting what the premises are. By too abstract, I didn’t mean ungrounded thought, I meant how I talk with people.

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7 hours ago, DonAthos said:

Number 3, in the sense that I would mean it, would be something like an application of Peikoff’s central “Fact and Value” thesis, that “every fact bears on the choice to live.”

Yes, but how does this relate to the choice to die? If I want to live, then the pain in my leg matters. I need to figure out what’s wrong and do something about it. If I want to die, for whatever reason, then how does the pain in my leg, or much else, matter? It only matters if it’s relevant to my choice to die.

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3 hours ago, Eiuol said:

Then ask for clarifications–

I don’t always get what I ask for, Eiuol.

Here, I repeated questions, in dubious hope that you would answer them:

On 12/11/2016 at 0:39 PM, DonAthos said:

Anyways, I’m not certain – have you answered the questions I’d asked, pursuant to that thought experiment? Here they are again:

On 12/11/2016 at 8:46 AM, DonAthos said:

Is the pain worth taking into account when making her decision? Or does the extra three months outweigh every other consideration?

Because I wanted to focus on the existence of pain, I didn’t raise other matters which potentially would exist in a real life scenario. For instance, the proposed operation could come at a great cost; suppose it would bankrupt her family, or endanger their owning a home, or something similar – should that matter? Or is it survival – as long as possible, regardless of pain, regardless of cost – which is necessarily the good?

Ideally, I would like your answers to both sections (which is why I’ve typed, and now copied, them both). Is “life-as-survival” the good, such that every other thing may morally be “sacrificed” for its sake? Or is there a moral standard higher than “life-as-survival,” and if so, what?

It did me no good; my questions drew no reply. And as I’ve said, these patterns are familiar to me, and my patience for them has worn thin.

If you would like to be a better dance partner for me, I’m open to the idea that you have it within you. You can start with answering those questions that I’ve now put to you three times. Or you could refer back to this post, and provide some substantive response to it, or any portion of it. If I’ve written too much for you to respond to all at a go, fair enough – but don’t simply ignore the whole of it to pepper me with new questions instead. That makes me feel as though I’ve completely wasted my time in responding to you in the first place.

Why not focus on just the first paragraph, first? We can work through things slowly. Leisurely, even. You’d made an implicit claim for something called “the inherent pleasure of life,” and I said in response that no such thing exists. Before we spiral down the unending rabbit hole of more and more questions, why not try to pin that down? “The inherent pleasure of life.” Defend that proposition (if you can), or amend it, or concede the point, or something – but a response!

17 minutes ago, MisterSwig said:

Yes, but how does this relate to the choice to die? If I want to live, then the pain in my leg matters. I need to figure out what’s wrong and do something about it. If I want to die, for whatever reason, then how does the pain in my leg, or much else, matter? It only matters if it’s relevant to my choice to die.

But the choice to die – if it is in reason, and if we allow such a choice potentially to be moral – depends upon the facts of reality as much as any decision undertaken when wanting to live. (And that choice to die may itself also be subject to revision, if the facts of reality change significantly.) And so it is still best policy to take those facts into account when making decisions – which is what it means to say that they “matter.”

And also, someone who decides to die may yet make any number of meaningful decisions. If your spies had chosen to kill themselves for the sake of escaping the pains of torture, that wouldn’t necessarily mean that they would be willing to spill their guts to their captors just beforehand. Their secrecy, and all that it entails, may yet matter to them, even in their final moments. Though Brittany Maynard has chosen to die, that doesn’t mean that she’s suddenly willing to spend all her family’s money – and leave her husband with nothing – because “how does much else matter”? That still matters to her, even as she has chosen death for herself. And indeed, even a day before her appointed death, if she had a pain in her leg – one that she could tend to – I’d bet you she would. The attitude would not be, “Well, I’m going to die tomorrow… so I may as well let this hurt, even though I could alleviate it in the meantime; it just doesn’t matter.”

Pain matters not because it is pain, but because it is factual, and when we make decisions – if we want those decisions to be good ones – the facts matter. Even if one has decided to die.

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16 minutes ago, DonAthos said:

But the choice to die – if it is in reason, and if we allow such a choice potentially to be moral – depends upon the facts of reality as much as any decision undertaken when wanting to live. (And that choice to die may itself also be subject to revision, if the facts of reality change significantly.) And so it is still best policy to take those facts into account when making decisions – which is what it means to say that they “matter.”

I’d like to narrow our focus to the time period in which the person is acting on the choice to die. Maynard moved to Oregon and got her pills in preparation for the choice to die. But wasn’t she still choosing to live at that point? Indeed, wasn’t she choosing to live right up until she decided enough was enough and took the pills? After she took the pills and was waiting to die, what if she suddenly developed a pain in her leg? Would it have mattered to her?

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Don, I answer many questions in long form. Maybe that’s why it seems like I didn’t answer. I think you don’t quite realize that some familiar patterns may be due to your own approach. Anyway, I said I wasn’t going to respond before you said more, so you wouldn’t think I was ignoring you.

My new “set” of questions were just one question with more to help you with my remaining questions about your position. It wasn’t an argument or  a list of demands.  

*

I know I said that flourishing is good, not survival itself per se. Flourishing and being dead isn’t good or even possible. So as far as three months of living life in comparison to dying willfully, three months matter more. Then the rest is that if one lives by one’s nature, they will necessarily be flourishing. Even more, flourishing occurs with happiness and not any other state of mind. No one who is virtuous would suffer, by definition. So if one suffers, either virtue is a lie, or one is in error. By being in error, one would know to fix it or do something about it.  Working to fix it would be flourishing, allowing one to be happy as a whole. Not fixing it would be vice, evasion.

The stuff of flourishing is value. If virtue did not allow one to find value, it’d be meaningless. Similarly, if one was not able to harness virtue, value would not be attainable, thus one would have no way to be happy. The logic here should make sense and be familiar. It just doesn’t fit well to also say virtue won’t always lead to happiness - the whole point of virtue is that it is part of your nature, and living with virtue is pleasurable for this reason.

When I said inherent pleasure of life, I should’ve said the inherent pleasure of living virtuously. Nothing about virtue is displeasurable, and does not cause suffering. For the most part, pain is a stimulus, itself value-neutral - or zero-worth. Pain is part psychological as well. When people kill themselves, they speak about psychology - feeling bad, expectation of what to come as being bad, that there’s no reason to live. They speak of pains besides the stimulus - about existing. I’ve been a counselor on a crisis hotline, I’ve spoken to suicidal people many times.

Pain itself is itself a negative, as in all that Epist spoke of pain providing information to overcome or avoid something.

So then we have people like Maynard. Is she even talking about pain? Not really! Just an evaluation of life’s worth. She only explained why more treatment was not desirable at all. I don’t see how this logically translates to ending your life. Sure, it’d seem scary, but in practice, it isn’t. POWs being tortured manage, as do people after getting in accidents. People who get PTSD don’t always manage - except PTSD is sometimes so bad those with it aren’t really able to think rationally. Maynard wasn’t a PTSD patient. Apparently, she still waited to kill herself, so we don’t actually know if she was able to think any more, so at least here, we’re talking about when she wrote the article.

*

Strictly speaking, happiness proceeds from achieving vale, that is, this is one way virtue works. It’s a path to value, and this will always allow one to attain some values in the near-term.

*

If I stop responding, I just have nothing additional and will need to let it all “marinate” for a while.

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On 12/20/2016 at 8:43 PM, DonAthos said:

But if I otherwise seem a bit reluctant, it is because… this is the kind of question – or thought experiment – that seems to me potentially to be at least as contentious and complicated as the main topic of discussion. I expect that several separate threads could be launched trying to deal with what you’ve described (plus one for Sweeney Todd, to boot). Furthermore, my own views on this subject are still developing and evolving, and I haven’t tried explaining them before, or even elaborating upon them for my own benefit; I fear that my rhetoric is going to be much rougher and more opaque than I would otherwise prefer.

It is uncharted territory, and I ask for your patience while I explore it.

Of course. I am, in all likelihood, about to do the very same things.

There’s a time to take great, cautious deliberations in these things and a time to “take chances, make mistakes and get messy”, and I believe we’ve arrived at the latter. Besides, I’m no stranger to ‘rough rhetoric.’  :twisted:

 

On 12/20/2016 at 8:43 PM, DonAthos said:

I do not believe so. Do you?

No.

 

What Sweeney Todd experienced was not ‘joy’ in the sense we mean it; it was not a healthy or life-affirming thing, nor is a life devoted to revenge a true and flourishing life. In a sense, although his heart beat until the very end of the movie, I believe he died in that scene - and this is the very sort of ‘suicide’ which I am condemning (the fundamental thing).

 

Hold on.