Observations and inanities by a second-shift assistant supervisor in the Puppy-Grinding division of the Evil Atheist Conspiracy® (our motto: "Sure it's cruel, but think of the jobs!"), your host, Brent Rasmussen.
RickU and Objectivism Part II
I'll address Rand's major points from the essay I posted earlier in essentially the format in which they were presented (give or take). For the original transcript see my earlier post. Let me start with this quote: “My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.” Ayn Rand
This is what I see as the flaw in applying this philosophy broadly. While there are people that are heroic not every man or woman is. I'll start by amending the statement to suit my purposes. My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man with his or her own happiness as the main moral purpose of their lives, with productive achievement as their noblest activity, and reason as their only absolute. The idea of happiness being the main goal of humans lives hearkens back to at least Socrates. Rand's way of achieving happiness differs greatly but the end goal remains the same.
I've taken Objectivism and modified it to my own needs. It still is my philosophy for living and interacting with the people and the world around me. At this point in the essay I posted it says, “ Ayn Rand first portrayed her philosophy in the form of the heroes of her best-selling novels...” Again, I'll point out the flaw..heroicism. If people act as “heroes” any idealistic system works. Socialism works with heroes as well as lassaiz-faire capitalism or even monarchies. While Objectivism fails as the ethical equivalent of the “Theory of Everything” (as does every other ethical system I've encountered) I feel that it works for me in most situations. Moving on.
more beyond the fold
My take on Objectivism standing on one foot:
A. Metaphysics: Objective Reality
B. Epistemology: Reason
C. Ethics: Enlightened Self-Interest
D. Politics: Well regulated Capitalism
1.I don't stray from Rand here. I think here definition is more than adequate. “Reality, the external world, exists independent of man's consciousness, independent of any observer's knowledge, beliefs, feelings, desires or fears. This means that A is A, that facts are facts, that things are what the are-and that the task of man's consciousness is to perceive reality, not to create or invent it.” In other words, the world turns whether or not humans perceive or see it. A tree falling in the woods DOES make a sound even if there are not any humans around to hear it. If a person IS there to hear i
2.Epistemology: “Man's reason is fully competent to know the facts of reality. Reason, the conceptual faculty, is the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man's senses. Reason is man's only means of acquiring knowledge.” I do not disagree with this statement, but I do disagree with the statement in the essay. I'd revise it thus: Objectivism rejects mysticism (any acceptance of faith or feeling as a means of knowledge). I end it there because the definition of skepticism given, “the claim that certainty or knowledge is impossible) is ridiculous. By that definition a skeptic would have to dismiss without compunction things that they could not conceive as possible outright. In my opinion, this is not the crux of skepticism.
3.Human Nature: From the essay, “Man is a rational being. Reason, as man's only means of knowledge, is his basic means of survival. But the exercise of reason depends on each individual's choice. “Man is a being of volitional consciousness.” That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call 'free will' is your mind's freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom. This is the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and character.” Thus Objectivism rejects any form of determinism, the belief that man is a victim of forces beyond his control (such as God, fate, upbringing, genes or economic conditions.)
Ah...one of my caveats... Perhaps it should read, “Man is optimally a rational being. Reason, as man's only means of knowledge, is his basic means of survival.” Anyway, this is where the strict interpretation of Rand's philosophy starts to fall apart. Not only do I think that individuals are not born equally capable but “fate”, upbringing, genes and economic conditions have all been shown to have an impact on a persons development. I still reject determinism, but only to a point. What I believe is most important is that man can move beyond determinism. One can indeed change their status in life in most cases.
4. Ethics: “Reason is man's only proper judge of values and his only proper guide to action. The proper standard of ethics is: Man's survival qua man – I.E., that which is required by man's nature for his survival as a rational being (not his momentary physical survival as a mindless brute.) Rationality is man's basic virtue, and his three fundamental values are: Reason, purpose, self esteem. Man – every man – is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others; he must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; he must work for his ration self-interest, wit the achievement of his own happiness as the highest moral purpose of his life.” Thus Objectivism rejects any form of altruism – the claim that morality consists in living for others or society.
This section gets complicated for me. I don't outright disagree with the assertions. In fact, the last assertion seems clear to me. I do not believe that altruism exists. Let's define it. [Altruism: (from m-w.com) 1 :unselfish regard for or devotion to the welfare of others 2 :behavior by an animal that is not beneficial to or may be harmful to itself but that benefits others of its species ]
Altruism is supposed to be an act that gains the giver nothing. Every act that I have heard of or seen from a human benefits that person in some way. Even the instinctual protection of one's companions falls in to this category. If the sacrifice of one's life leads to the potential of saving another's life in the end, the life giver achieves their goal and thus has not committed an altruistic act.
That being said, I believe that a person's rational interest can and does go beyond the immediate view of the self. It goes to the well-being of the environment in which man lives and the well-being of the environment that man leaves to future generations. It should be evident how this is in a persons self-interest when taking the long view.
5. Politics: The basic social principle of the Objectivist ethics is that no man has the right to seek values from others by the means of unethical force. Please note that this is a significant change from the original. Physical force is not the only force that can be abused in any system. I do agree though that, “ [Capable] Men must deal with one another as traders, giving value for value, by free, mutual consent to mutual benefit.” I'll not go on to say that the only social system that can achieve this is “laissez-faire” capitalism. It's clearly not the case. I will say though that the best system that I've been exposed to is still a fairly regulated capitalist system. I would also agree that people need to recognize individual rights, including property rights, and that the main function of government should be to protect the rights of people.
It's not perfect, but I use it as a my guide. Have at it!
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Thanks Rick, Michael, and Jim
Rick: I very much look forward to more of your earnest online exploration of Objectivism and the proliferation of thoughtful responses it should continue to generate. It will surely help me with my own exploration of the same. And I am quite old enough to realize that life is messy; all the same, I like to roll around in it.
Michael M.: Great job in your patient and principled attempts at answering point by point. I agree with you.
For me, if anything shows the beauty of Objectivism as a philosophy for life, it’s the last exchange between Rick and Jim. Once you understand, through your own perception or by persuasion that the ideas you hold are wrong, you adjust your thinking to match objective reality. In this case, as Jim showed, there are rational reasons for suicide. Rick changed his mind to be in accordance with reality.
Sometimes, it is that simple.
If anyone here is so inclined, reading Man's Rights, Collectivized "Rights", and The Nature of Government - 3 essays totaling 26 pages taken from Ayn Rand's Virtue of Selfishness may address some of the more complicated questions in this and Rick’s last two posts that mention Objectivism.
You're welcome
You are welcome, and thank you very much for your comment. We've got "Virtue.." and I've been meaning to bite in to it.
The other foot
Rick, your differences with Rand seem to arise when you take something she said too literally and you become concrete bound.
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"man as a heroic being"
Heroic here does not mean perfect. It means capable of being perfect. It means capable of being moral, capable of courage, capable of nobility, capable of achievement, capable of earning happiness and admiration. Being a hero is not being something concrete and specific. It is being something in principle: to be a hero, one needs only to maximize one's potential. That is what the heroes of her novels did. This is the opposite view of man that dominated the Dark Ages -- the Augustinian view, a miserable creature begging his creator for mercy and forgiveness for being whatever he was. And, socialism does not work with heroes. Heroes constitute a threat to socialism so it always seeks to destroy them.
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"man is a rational being"
Nowhere does Rand ever even hint that this means that they will be rational. The capacity (and necessity) for reason is innate. The use of it is a matter of choice. That capacity can be diminished by deficiencies resulting from genetic factors or physical damage. But these are specifically recognized as anomalies and do not invalidate in any way the original statement. In fact, you have to acknowledge the validity of man's rational faculty to discuss discrepancies from it.
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You said, "Altruism is supposed to be an act that gains the giver nothing. Every act that I have heard of or seen from a human benefits that person in some way."
Again, you are trapped into the concrete mechanics of the exchange. It goes without saying that acts of giving are not all altruism. That is not the important aspect of altruism. The damage done by altruism is rather to your moral standard -- your life. You use your reason to identify values for your life as a human, arrange those values in a hierarchy and avoid sacrificing a higher value in order to get a lower value. That is how you maximize your life.
Altruism reverses this, The standard of your moral choices may not be your life. It has to be the life of others. Whatever you give or get is not as relevant as whether or not you did it as a duty, accepting the need of others as a claim on your life.
Practicing that is self-destructive.
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Your politics is a mess!
Human life is action. We must choose in order to act. Choice implies alternatives, so the success or failure of our life depends on our ability to choose actions that advance our life and not diminish it. As capable as we are to make right choices, we are also capable of making wrong ones, i.e. we are all fallible. Consequently, when making arrangements to live together in a confined region, we need more than anything else to retain our autonomy over our own choices. That is to say, we need to protect ourselves from the fallibility of others.
Your assertions notwithstanding, the only force that can destroy our autonomy over our own choices is physical force. In positing other kinds of force, do not confuse undue influence with coercion. They are not the same thing. Relinquishing a value under the pressure of the most extreme cases of "economic force" or "social force" is a still a choice. Being murdered or robbed or taxed is not.
You said, "I will say though that the best system that I've been exposed to is still a fairly regulated capitalist system."
You are concrete bound once more, because you are trying to judge the efficacy of radical capitalism on your feelings about perceived results. That is an impossible task at the outset when you are judging a system that has never before been wholly operational. And even if it were in existence, it would be wrong to so judge it.
A political system is not valid because it "works" by somebody's measure. No matter how desirable the results may be or seem to be, a system is only valid if it can be demonstrated to be moral. (If a system is not moral it can never be said to "work", because it is immoral.) The morality of a system supersedes all other considerations. Why? Because politics is by definition the application of individual human ethics to the interrelationships among many human beings living within a particular defined region. It is the set of principles that if institutionalized in the form of a government will duplicate for each individual the autonomy they would have if no one else existed.
If your ethics is valid and your politics is consistent with it, it will work perfectly. That does not mean that the people who operate it and live under it will become infallible. It does not mean that they cannot screw it up (look what they did to this government). It does not mean that they will not commit criminal acts.
It means only that to the extent that they choose to legislate and enforce rationally and consistently it will be the best that can be. It will perhaps help you to keep in mind here that a capitalist government will be rather small and not complex. It would have only one function: to remove the use of physical force from human interaction.
How to respond?
I'm not sure how to respond to your comment because I didn't find it altogether cogent. Please don't take this as an insult. You've only written a few paragraphs to explain your position.
Let me start though with your last statement, "Your politics is a mess". Firstly, it should be written, "Your politics are a mess." I agree with you that we need to protect ourselves from the fallibility of others. That is indeed, the entire point of regulation in my opinion. That being said, my politics are certainly not a mess. Complicated yes, but not a mess.
Let me clearly state though that the only force that can destroy our autonomy over our own choices is physical force. Again, this is where regulation would need to come in. A market force can become powerful enough to exert force to squash their competition, no matter how great the competition's product is. This is, or can be, an unethical use of force not included in physical force.
You're wrong to say that I can't predict the efficacy of radical capitalism as well. I think you're still thinking that all humans can be heroes. Humans, not all humans, but many, tend to abuse the power they have if not constrained by societal rules.
A political system is valid because it "works" by not one persons measure but because the system is perceived to work by those participating in the system. And since morality itself is subjective, by your definition no system could ever be valid.
If you'd like a point by point explanation for the rest of why I think you're wrong in this section, by all means engage again...for now, I'll leave it and move to the beginning of your comment.
I agree again. Heroic in this context means capable of being perfect. I would disagree that ALL humans are capable of being perfect. As you said yourself we have to protect ourselves from the fallibility of others. I have a problem specifically with this, "nd, socialism does not work with heroes. Heroes constitute a threat to socialism so it always seeks to destroy them." I think you're showing a bias. I recognize that pure socialism (In my opinion like pure capitalism) is a pipe dream. If everyone were (or even if they were capable) of being heroes socialism would work as well as capitalism. With everyone contributing to the best of their ability in the role that best suited both the individual and the community socialism is an ideal. The same runs true with capitalism. Communism is not socialism. It's an attempt to attain the socialist ideals with a political system, which has failed miserably.
I have to be done. It's getting late here. I may address more of your comment at a later time.
One step at a time
"Usage Note: Politics, although plural in form, takes a singular verb when used to refer to the art or science of governing or to political science: Politics has been a concern of philosophers since Plato." [thefreedictionary.com/politics]
There are other contexts that call for a plural verb and yet others in which the use of singular or plural is optional.
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I spread out that array of brief comments to ensnare our deepest difference. I did, and it is not your politics, it is your ethics:
Morality is the set of principles one defines to serve as a guide for one's choices of the actions that are his life in order to maximize his life in the context of what he is, a human being. If a human being existed alone on an otherwise uninhabited island or deep within a wilderness he would be completely free to live by his moral code and would have no need for a politics. Politics is the set of principles one defines to extend that state of freedom into a society of men who may choose to have differing codes of morality. In short, politics is the application of individual ethics to the context of a society.
The only thing "subjective" about morality is that men are able to choose differing codes of ethics and do. But the standard for measuring the validity of those codes and the validity of the principle that men must be free to make those choices has to be an objective standard. That is so, because while your consciousness can objectively grasp and identify the nature of man and the rest of existence, it cannot create the nature of anything to suit its own subjective whims.
Furthermore, the term "human" refers to a specific type of being the fundamental nature of which is universally the same for all humans. Therefore, for every two opposing definitions of the nature of man, at least one is invalid. There can be only one accurate definition of the nature of a human being. That definition can be accessed only by applying reason and logic to experience. Consequently, it does not make any difference how many men perceive that a particular system "works". The only way you can validate a political system is to demonstrate that it is consistent with a system of ethics that is valid for each and every human being.
The ethics of Objectivism identifies individual autonomy -- independence -- as a prerequisite for a proper human life. In a politics consistent with that principle, you may not regulate transactions to impose at the expense of someone's autonomy a result that others perceive to be better. Autonomy and regulation of that sort are immiscible, aka, you cannot have your cake and eat it too. The only ethical regulation is the one that prevents, removes, and punishes the interruption of individual autonomy by physical force.
Morality is not subjective. The moral is not what one or many happen to perceive it to be. The question " who says that this is true (or good)?" is an invalid question that presupposes an invalid answer. It's not about who, it's about what. The moral must be consistent with what a human (in principle) actually is, which is accessible by but independent of our perceptions.
Several things
We fundamentally disagree on the basis of morality which makes our perspectives hard to reconcile.
Please address, if you would, my comments on force and how physical force isn't the only force to be guarded against.
I will think about and try to address your treatment of subjective vs. objective morals soon.
physical force, economic force, ideological force ...
Rick
When you compose your ideas on the subjective vs. objective morals, be sure to identify your ideas about the nature of man and reality on which you base your morality so we can compare and contrast our differing views.
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Government may not concern itself with any kind of force other than physical force.
Due to time constraints at the moment, I am going to cheat a little and quote myself from assorted posts made elsewhere. Needless to say, they are repetitious, but I am hoping that you can discern in them the most important principle on which we disagree. Then you could explain how and why you differ and perhaps throw in one example of an instance in which the exercise of non-physical force should be countered by the use of physical force by the government:
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Power refers in each context to some kind of capacity, and without a context, it has no normative implications. If you are going to use it in analyzing political principles and situations, you need to be very careful to make the context within which you use the term very clear and avoid at all costs borrowing emotional connotations from its use in one context to achieve an effect in another. For instance:
The power to obtain a value by offering to exchange wealth for it in a consensual transaction is not the same thing as the power to take that value by means of physical force.
A consensual transaction absent physical force is inherently an exercise of political freedom, and there is not in the most extreme disparity of wealth and need between transacting parties anything that can alter that. In such cases, there may be an infinite range of moral judgments one could make about each party, but those judgments are relevant only to the character of the parties and are not relevant to the validity of the principle that freedom from coercion is a prerequisite for humans by their nature.
Capitalism is the only politics that recognizes man needs only one primary right: the right to his life. And that right means only the right to be free from physical compulsion.
You cannot invalidate that right merely by citing the outcome of a consensual transaction that you do not like. Nor can you validate it by citing one you do like. In the hierarchy of outcomes from any socio-economic transaction, Rand places freedom at the top. She did not put it there because she liked a bunch of outcomes. It was a necessary consequence of her ethics that identified it as a fundamental requirement of human beings.
By what standard is it not?
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There is no such thing as "economic coercion". "Economic" refers to the production and exchange of values (scarce resources). "Coercion" refers to the use of physical force. An exchange of values effected by the use or threat of physical force cannot be "economic" unless you are willing to include extortion, theft, slavery and fraud as normal categories of economic activity instead of considering them disruptions thereof. "Coercion" in your usage is only a metaphor dishonestly used to slander exchanges involving extreme needs and influences with connotations of physical force where it is actually not present.
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You are reifying a metaphor. Within the context of a government's assigned task to remove force from human interrelationship, there is no such thing as ideological force. There is also no such thing as economic force. The force that is the concern of politics is physical force. Radical capitalism does not concern itself with your susceptibility to the ideologies others preach. You have a mind like everyone else, use it, and succeed or fail accordingly.
It is also not allowed to interfere with your personal standards for measuring the values offered to you in the free market of men. How much those values satisfy you or not and whether anyone offers them to you or not for whatever reasons they may have is not the concern of the government. Every person is free to establish the price and terms for exchanging any value they create or earn.
A good that is not offered and a price that is too high is not an act of physical force, no matter how much or why you may want it or need it. It is only in the moral province of thieves that need or desire can be regarded as a rightful claim against others. So pick your intellectual bedfellows carefully.
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Economic force is exercised by offering a positive -- a potential enhancement of one's life and motivates an exchange with values. Physical force is exercised by threatening a negative -- a destruction of some piece of one's life and motivates an exchange with fear.
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The most important point to understand is that the word "force" has different meanings when used in different contexts. When discussing it in a political context, it means "coercion", and economic or ideological "coercion" are nonsense. Outside of that context, one may use the terms "economic force" or "ideological force" to legitimately refer to a strong influence combined usually with weak resistance. But those raise issues solely with the value system of one party to a voluntary exchange, and cannot be grounds for interference by a government.
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The exercise of economic force or ideological force cannot be regulated by a government without violating property rights. And conversely, the government must regulate the exercise of physical force or it will violate property rights.
Economic force that is considered reprehensible by many involves the offer of great value to someone in great need. But in every case, the great value offered is the property of the one offering. Intervention by the government to fulfill part or all of the need of the other party would implicitly obliterate the concept of property altogether. The needs of man are infinite. Property is finite. The mere fact of need does not alter the status of a value from earned and owned by one person into a resource for another person who did not earn it and does not own it.
The exercise of physical force to effect transactions is different. In every case the perpetrator is not offering a value he owns to the other party, but rather is offering only to allow the other party to keep something he already owns. In this case, if the government chooses not to interfere, it would be in violation of the victims property rights.
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Okay
So how does all of that prevent the inevitable storming of the Bastille and the slaughter of the grain monopolists? Because I can pretty much guarantee that the needy will eventually decline to accept their lot as starvation vs. enslavement. Because that is what happens in monopoly and that is what people eventually do. The oligarchs start by carefully determining exactly how much blood to extract, but they grow lazy and eventually try to take it all. And why not? They pay the government, since they have all of the money. They will--as they always have--distort the law into a vehicle to ensure their continued dominance, by, for instance, outlawing the import of competitive products.
And having the government shoot the rioters is seldom a good long term plan.
Steve "But neither is unrestricted capitalism." James
Morality
I have some fuzzy ideas that there are things that transcend specifically human morality.
I'm curious what you think about, oh, whether wilderness areas have any innate value outside human evaluation, and whether dogs have (or perhaps should have) any inalienable rights.
Moral values and political rights
Hank,
"Value" has meaning only in the context of living beings who must act to attain a goal and face an alternative in the process. While one could identify things and conditions in the wilderness that are beneficial and harmful to each of the living plants and creatures there (and like man, life is their goal), such "values" are only the objects of actions that are biologically preprogrammed to select the most beneficial alternative detectable. Therefore, in the sense we normally use the word, wilderness areas cannot have value except in the context of their value to human beings to add to or detract from their life.
Note now how this notion of value becomes relevant to your other question about the rights of dogs:
For human beings, life, held as an end in itself, is the ultimate standard for all values. Without that, no values can exist. Values are the tools of our ethics. We codify them in the abstract and imbed them in our minds as guidelines to aid us in our choices of the actions that are our life. They then manifest themselves in the form of our emotions that spontaneously motivate us to immediate actions or serve as resources to temper our deliberations of actions yet to come.
As I pointed out in my comment above ("one step at a time") a proper code of values for an individual human being is the foundation on which one's politics must be built. The latter must preserve the former in the societal context. Radical laissez-faire capitalism is the only political system that can achieve that. It takes the values we have identified as necessary prerequisites for human life and defines them as rights that serve as negative mandates to the government that they may not use defensive force to "protect" others from an individual's exercise of those rights.
The right to life recognizes that man's life is the standard of all values and that we may hold it as such. The right to liberty guarantees that we may act in accordance with the values we define. The right to property guarantees that we may use and retain the values that are the product of our actions as we see fit. And the right to the pursuit of happiness guarantees that we may pursue our values for our own sake and never be forced to do so for the sake of others.
Rights can only have meaning in a society of human beings, because only they can define and hold the values on which rights are based. And because these rights are human, all rights we claim for ourselves must be granted by us to all other humans. Likewise, all other humans must reciprocate and grant them to us. The right to life is inherent (inalienable), but one may waive one's own rights by choice. Consequently, when someone does not reciprocate and violates the rights of another, he implicitly forfeits (waives) his own rights and may not continue to claim them for himself. (That is the moral justification for self-defense.)
It is not possible to apply the concept of political rights to animals other than human beings. All rights are inherently and exclusively human rights. Animals are preprogrammed by their instincts. They cannot make the choices implied by rights to life, liberty, property, or the pursuit of happiness. They cannot reciprocate and honor those rights for humans or for each other. A human being has nothing to gain and a lot to lose from granting rights to animals. Consequently, in a laissez-faire capitalist government, animals do not have rights.
In both cases, the values of and the rights to wilderness areas and animals belong solely to their owners just as the rights to any other property do. As property, they would be protected from abuse by others by the government as any other property would. They would be protected from abuse by their owners by the market.
In a laissez faire society where there is no public property and there are no public services of any kind, the interdependence of men on the goodwill of each other would play a primary role in the regulation of behavior. Anyone who wasted the precious asset that a wilderness area is or who treated other living animals with unnecessary cruelty could very quickly find themselves cut off from all interrelationships with other men who disagree with such behavior and without access to the means to sustain their own life. Thus, regulation would occur without the use of force, initiated or defensive. It would result solely from the voluntary withholding of values.
A dog in the woods
That is an elegant explanation of rights and values, Michael M. – thank you.
I would add to anyone (not just you, Hank) who feels aggrieved by the very ideas that wildlife areas have no intrinsic values and animals, despite signs of cognition, have no rights, can and should, if possible, donate some of his time or money to the multitude of private agencies which seek to preserve wilderness areas through ownership and those which attempt to provide humane conditions for unwanted animals or which study to better understand the cognitive abilities of animals. While I no longer feel so aggrieved, I continue to donate money toward preservation and goods to animal shelters. This charity is in concert with my values, not forced servitude to the values of others through regulation.
Because man can direct his efforts through both short- and long-term focused thinking, he is able to change his environment to suit his needs. This encompasses not only the ability to purposefully plant, domesticate animals, use trees to build houses, but also the ability to find cures for diseases, make once uninhabitable areas habitable, and begin to understand how the universe works. Treating the earth as untouchable, or giving animals sovereignty over any man, in short, suggests running hungry, naked, and scared back into to the caves. If and when disaster strikes (which is generally the next stop on “the hubris of man” line of reasoning), I have no doubt but that the ability of men’s minds to work freely on solving the problems will be the only thing which could possibly save mankind.
Values
"Values" are what? They are partly individual and partly social. "a proper code of values for an individual human being is the foundation on which one's politics must be built" is too limited because values are also social.
"Rights" are just a social convention. People in some groups accept the concept for the group because it can be useful. True, rights are granted. They are granted by the body politic. Without social cohesion there are no rights.
"The right to liberty guarantees that we may act in accordance with the values we define." If "we" means a social group, then that is probably right. If it means an individual it is not.
"Animals are preprogrammed by their instincts. They cannot make the choices implied by rights to life, liberty, property, or the pursuit of happiness. They cannot reciprocate and honor those rights for humans or for each other."
"Choices" is again a throwback to the myth of free will. Humans are also programed their instincts. ("pre" is not necessary).
"Property" and "owners" don't exist in nature. "In both cases, the values of and the rights to wilderness areas and animals belong solely to their owners just as the rights to any other property do." These too are just conventions that some social groups have found useful. I don't think they are very useful.
In a laissez-faire society, there is no society. In fact there is no property or ownership either, except for the strongest and most vicious. How did property come about? Some people got a momentary advantage, call them kings or priests or whatever, and seized land and said it was theirs. Then they made other people work for them.
Then they claimed that they could give it to their descendants. Over the eons, ruling classes have maintained that privilege and inherited property rolls on. So-called property is bought and sold. When the Europeans arrived in the New World, what property did they have? None. But they followed time honored tradition and seized what they wanted.
If the Indians had had some inkling about what the Europeans were like, they would have prevented them from landing or massacred them when they found them. Apparently they may have forced out the old Norse discoverers of the new continent that way.
"Thus, regulation would occur without the use of force, initiated or defensive. It would result solely from the voluntary withholding of values." I am sure that "withholding of values" is going to discourage a predator who sees an advantage.
You would do better to read B.F. Skinner's "Walden Two".
Some caveats for reading bernarda's "Values"
Society is a collective noun. It refers to a group of individuals. The individuals that make up a society neither think nor value alike. There is no such thing as "the good of society" or "the will of society". A society is not an entity that can think, choose, value, or grant rights. Only its individuals can. A society can have no traits other than the traits of its individuals.
Free will: See "The determinist dilemma: If it is true, it can't be" below.
Property: The right to own property is the right to own the product of one's own mind and body. It is only the addition of value through the application of ideas and/or physical labor that can make an unowned object or resource property by right. In the transfer of property, its improved value is exchanged for the product of another's mind and body. Without the right to property -- the right to keep, use, and dispose of that which one adds to existence -- no other rights are possible. Denial of that right is no less evil than an attempt to murder.
Jesuits
I responded to you, but apparently my post didn't take and I forgot to save it. It doesn't matter, because talking to you is like talking to a Jesuit. But Jesuit would not say something so ridiculous as that denial of property "rights" is an attempt to murder.
In fact, Proudhon understated the case in his question "What is Property?" and his answer, "Property is theft". Property is the real attempt at murder because those without property are left to die.
But I have no longer the desire to respond to your obfuscations.
To those still thinking
This is not a criticism of bernarda. He does not believe in free will. He feels that his actions are the product of instinct like those of dogs and cats, etc. I disagree and prefer to hold him, along with the rest of us humans, in higher esteem, even after he posts a reply like "Jesuits". But he insists.
Consequently, the content of his "Jesuits" reply is like puppy poop on a brand new carpet. You can't really blame him for it. It is just instinct acting. But poop is poop nonetheless, and innocent minds need to be warned lest they read it and leave with some of it clinging.
By the poop metaphor, I mean that this post contains no nourishment -- no content. Posting opposition without content is self-degrading. It does you more harm than your opponent. To wit:
1) What does it mean to call someone a Jesuit with no indication of which traits of Jesuit style discourse are meant? What can anyone learn from that? The comment is nothing but a big net trying to catch every negative connotation any reader might entertain. Who, witnessing the use of this tactic, would be drawn to a discussion of ideas with the one who uses it?
2) Speak to what your opponent said, not what you wish he had said: I did not say that denial of property rights is an attempt to murder. I said that it is as evil as an attempt to murder. Big difference. Property is our only means to sustain our life and flourish as humans. The justification to deny one property right justifies denial of all. The right to property is the most important of the rights that comprise the right to life.
3) Use of the word "ridiculous" without showing precisely why it is so, is a confession of intellectual impotence identified by Ayn Rand as the argument from intimidation, which is a special variant of ad hominem.
excerpted here: http://www.aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/argument.html
Few people now living have escaped the bad habit of using this logical fallacy. It can take years to retrain yourself to kick it. Until one does, however, one does not fully operate an "honest mind".
4) When replying to a point made, please dissect it first and then draw your different conclusion accordingly. The maxim that "Property is theft" is interjected as a reply without relating it to the point it replies to. Namely, that ownership of values accrues rightfully to those who create and/or earn them -- those who add value to existence.
There is no attempt to examine any perceived error, or explain a different relationship. Just a blanket damnation of creating and earning value embellished with an attached phrase with not enough relevance to be anything more than a special effect.
5) Finally, an accusation of obfuscation without specifying how and where is an insult to the reader, who is expected to agree without evidence on the mere strength of the fact that it was said.
------------------------
The point is this: unexplained accusations and naked statements of disagreement, are the waste product of an empty mind. Only ideas are efficacious. Be then a compulsive formulator, a merciless self-critic, and skilled at compacting them into comments of relatively few words.
After all, the goal in an intellectual exchange is not to bludgeon your way to victory, but rather to think your way to the truth.
Ahem.
Michael, how you do go on. I appreciate how long it takes to write these posts, but ... dang, they're dull.
I wonder if I'm the only one not reading them. This statement alone "Only ideas are efficacious" is fairly off-putting, just from the level of language. Language like that raises the bar so high on understanding the rest of what you write that every time I see one of your posts I’m not sure I want to bother climbing over it and diving in. And mostly, I haven’t.
Probably out of sheer laziness, I decided early on not to engage you. I'm sure my earlier posts sounded feeble as hell, but they were half-hearted approaches to something I knew was going to take an immense amount of time and effort. I'm busy with several projects right now, facing some serious economic deadlines, and I don't want to take the time to advance counterarguments to some of the things you've said. But another thing that discourages me is that I also get the very strong feeling, from what I have read, that there's a whiff of the religious behind what you're saying, and the way you're saying it.
I agree with your point above, that I'm sort of cheating you and I both (and possibly other people reading here) by not explaining in detail why I say this. But ... I use the word "religious" above as verbal shorthand for the much bigger (and probably greatly more insulting) idea that I'm not sure it's any use in talking to you.
I sort of think that's why the previous poster used the word "Jesuit." Picture someone who carries extreme skill in argument, but little ability to actually listen to what's said and consider it on any level other than "How can I most effectively counter this?" And possessing also a complete inability to consider himself occasionally wrong.
These long, long lectures of yours only support that tentative conclusion.
You sound bright to me, and I'm sorry we can't carry on this conversation in person, so I might get a better feel for who and what you are. But here we are in this place, in this medium, with all its limits.
Having said all that, I'll end by teasing you with this statement: I think there are some very basic things you're getting wrong. Some things you haven't thought out. And possibly even some life experience that you lack that might show you different new – but still highly rational – ways to look at things.
My first statement to you, "I have some fuzzy ideas that there are things that transcend specifically human morality," is based on a great deal of thought about wilderness, while living in and around it for decades, and trying out a variety of experimental viewpoints from which to study it and the wildlife within it.
My own approach to life is as completely non-mystical as I can make it, and I started out with an extremely mechanistic view of life – so much so that I’m still predisposed to see relationships in terms of forces and vectors rather than feelings, often even with other humans.
But I also happen to know, from my own experience with both animals and humans, that one of your earlier statements, "Animals are preprogrammed by their instincts,” is so limited in breadth as to be more false than true.
The statement might reflect basic principles of Rand’s work or the Objectivist philosophy, but it leaves out decades of study of animals since then. It also reflectively cheats the reality of the human animal, drawing a sharp line between humans and animals where only an extremely fuzzy one exists, with both parties lapping over generously into the other’s domain.
Animals have personality, feelings, even thoughts. And most of us humans, pat ourselves on the back as we will, still do most of our relating to the world at the level of “instinct” – our own beastly impulses which most of us think we don’t possess, and so are defenseless against.
Couched almost as a mild afterthought in a much longer post, your statement about animal instincts nevertheless attracted my attention. For this reason: The statement is so two dimensional in the face of a three-dimensional reality, that it immediately worries me. If it forms some sort of foundation for larger arguments, all of what comes later is shaky.
Earlier in my life, I deliberately avoided studying philosophy. I read everything I could by Ayn Rand, but that was only incidental to discovering her novels. Other than that, I mostly couldn’t tell Kant from Cantinflas.
What turned me off to it was this: There was immense knowledge in the field, but also an uncountable number of mistakes. Given the state of their knowledge about the real world, being wrong was understandable, but still wrong. And I just hated the idea that every philosophy course I ever came across approached philosophy as a matter of history. Every time, all I could seem to hear was “First, children, we’ll learn the wrong ideas of Philosopher A. Then we’ll learn the laughable ideas of Philosopher B. We will then proceed to learn the wild suppositions of Philosopher C.”
Why couldn’t we just learn the right stuff, the true stuff, the stuff that they got right, and ignore all those dead ends and silly mistakes? I was pretty sure I didn’t want to clutter my head up with masses of wrong stuff just to get at little kernels of the right.
Some part of all this was pure teenaged cussedness, but another part was the deep suspicion that the real world was the real world, that all the facts and forces were visible and naked, and that anyone could understand them if they only looked. In other words, if Aristotle worked out something that I was capable of understanding, I might be capable of working it out on my own without Aristotle’s help. And there might be value in this individual approach.
I know that I missed a lot by doing it this way, but I’m not that worried by it. At this end of my life, it seems to me that the things that I HAVE learned on my own are understood in ways that a lot of people I’ve met don’t understand them. I think I have a certain odd advantage in that my understandings, whatever I do have, are not colored by the opinions and words and conceptual formulas of dead philosophers. Making observations on the world based on my readings in science and psychology, and day to day observations of the way things work in light of those things, I came up with my own mindstuff that, mostly, pleases me very much.
Lacking any sort of formal education in the classy, high-toned field of philosophy, I think I also have the advantage that I know very well how dumbass wrong I can be, and how often.
Anyway, here’s a thing I discovered on my own. Don’t bother telling me what philosopher or great thinker of the past already discovered it – I already know that almost nothing that goes through my head is completely new.
But here it is:
When you create reasoning sequences in your head, chains of logic or argument that you build up into solid bulwarks of inescapable seeming trueness, you have one more step to take before you accept them as something you proffer to others as inarguable absolutes:
You check your results in the real world.
You can have all the internal consistency and adherence to strict rules of logic in the world, but if the conclusion you reach doesn’t have real-world congruency, you made a mistake somewhere along the way.
It’s an error religious people frequently make. True things are true not because they were arrived at by the principles of thought of this school or that, or this holy book or that, but because they’re true in the real world. Religious people live in their heads, huddled up to the “truth” of their religion, and never never never come out into the real world to check the results of their religious reasoning. (And so for never-ending decades we send food to starving Africans, rather than contraceptives and the concepts of family planning. And so we teach kids nothing about sex except “Don’t do it,” rather than give them the whole box of factual tools they need to keep them safe. And so religious people hear mild expressions of disbelief as an active assault, an aggressive effort to destroy them and their “faith.”)
I suspect I’m seeing some of this same mistake in you, and in no small degree.
Anyway, dammit, now I’ve gone and written this whole long rambley thing, and it’s 3:45 a.m. Argh. Curse you, foul, seductive Objectivist! I cast you out, fiend!
I’ll leave you with a quote from The Sting, where the two main characters are talking about running a con on the gangster Doyle Lonigan, who’s made it clear he’s a threat to both of them.
Robert Redford (heatedly): He’s not as good as he thinks!
Paul Newman (laconically): Neither are we.
I’m off to bed.
Oh,
I'm reading them, Hank.
But I may give up, myself. It seems pointless. Michael, like many religious obsessives, cannot discern the difference between 'is' and 'ought' and between people and ideas.
Indeed, his basic point seems to be a blind determination that they are.
Oh, Mike, and before you spend four hundred words decrying my ad hominem, you might examine perhaps if it's actually just a criticism based on your posts.
He has never yet made any attempt to explain how any of this is supposed to work in the real world, populated by humans. what safeguards can exist to prevent the inevitable corruption of the ideas on the manner typical of actual people. He just goes on and on "debating" about nothing--lately it seems like nothing more than how we aren't paying attention to how sincere he is, as if that adds any weight to his argument.
Remember when the revolution begins--the people don't want equality. They want to be in charge for a change.
Steve "Liberte, Fraternite, Objectivism!" James
My main objection
And there, Steve, you've hit the nail on the head with regard to my need to tailor Objectivism. In its original (by my concrete bound reading) form it won't work in society because everyone doesn't play by the same rulebook.
Reason -- call it irresistible
No doubt about it Hank -- talking on, well past the midnight hours on a snowy night by a crackling fire -- we could achieve a lot of talking and thinking. Unfortunately, WYSIWYG. And while we obviously harbor some serious disagreements, we are less different than you have assumed.
I took a university elective course in philosophy once, but within a few months thereafter, I could not remember how to define the word "philosophy". It was not evident from the course that the subject was in any way relevant to life. After being set onto "the straight and narrow" by Rand, I familiarized myself with the history of philosophy and the works of the philosophers, but I have not read any of those works myself. And with time so short, I will not read them unless someone can point to some idea in the works of one that could compete with Rand's razor sharp reasoning.
As for wildernesses, I live on an island over-occupied by big houses and condos, but nevertheless set out on a quest many years ago as a community volunteer to eradicate the decorative vegetation dragged in from Australia, Africa and Asia over the past century and replace it with a re-creation of the native maritime forest that would have been here pre-Columbus, and/or would be here today if none of us had ever come here.
The intent is to give the island a National Park kind of beauty, albeit with houses and roads that would seem to have been dropped into clearings by helicopters. This thread will probably perish soon when I pause for two weeks to write my speech for a seminar at the state Native Plant Society convention on how to persuade communities to go native with an argument that is entirely aesthetic and considers environmental gains as just fringe benefits.
You may fairly conclude that the above is every bit as Quixotic as my dull, drawn out posts. But about those, you have failed to consider my motives: 1) Debate is my teacher. 2) Debate is my chess 3) Debate is my search for that person who can prove me wrong and lead me to better truths than Rand -- ongoing for 42 years and I'm still searching. 4) Debate pays my debt to Ayn Rand who gave me so much more value than she demanded in return. The efforts I cannot give her because she is dead, I instead give to those she held in highest regard: open, honest, searching minds of the next generation. A post filled with content that is too long for one settled in his ways is not long enough for a hungry youth who just recently tasted reason for the first time.
I call this principle the "cross-generational exchange". It is immanently Objectivist, because we never just give or receive, but rather always exchange. I first caught myself in one when a local retiree would not include trees in his landscape. He said he would not live to see them grown. So I explained to him that we have to repay those who planted trees just before they died in the past -- the trees we enjoy today -- by planting trees now for the next generation. Later I found the ancient Greek proverb that captured it this way: A society grows great when old men plant trees in the shade of which they will never sit.
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On your tentative critique of my content:
The Jesuit analogy is an ad hominem and as such, truly does more harm to your case than mine. Ideas stand on their own, or not at all. If I speak a truth, it is still true, even if I sound like Hitler.
And it only occurred to you to agree with that analogy because of an error of your own. You are unable to distinguish between certainty and dogma. The Jesuits sound certain and are dogmatic. But only the latter is a negative, so saying I sound like a Jesuit was a cowardly way to call me dogmatic. And I'll bet you cannot cite anything I have posted or anything that Ayn Rand has ever written that is dogmatic.
Thus, you equate the certainty that Rand and I exhibit with the certainty of religions -- the certainty of faith -- even though you acknowledge that our certainty is the product of reason and logic and you know that faith is not knowledge, but rather arbitrary feelings. You either skipped or have not yet come to Rand's unrelenting insistence that concepts are abstracted from reality and must at all times and in all manifestations be consistent with it. And that every action inconsistent with one's own nature and/or the nature of reality will result in a diminished life. Her very definition of wrong and bad is "inconsistent with reality." Accusing an Objectivist of being divorced from reality is simply a result of being grossly uninformed (that's my most polite euphemism for "ignorance":-).
Now about those animals: you are personifying them. Their personality, feelings, and what appears to be thoughts are not the same as ours. Animals can only respond by instinct. We can create with free will. Whatever your anonymous studies show (which have a value of zero without citing them), they do not show that animals are capable of grasping and abiding by the terms of a contract. That is what rights are. I think it is time for you to reassess your own "real-world congruency".
And at the same time, please stop and ponder the error of the idea that humans have instincts. You cannot have right and wrong and instincts too. You cannot have responsibility and instincts too. And there is no point in arguing that some ideas are instinctual and some are the product of free will. You would have no way to tell them apart. What you call "beastly impulses" is not something you possess. It is something you choose to think and choose to act out. To regard oneself as "defenseless against them" is a cop out. Don't underestimate yourself so.
After all, if I remember correctly, Hooker and Gondorff were, in the end, every bit as good as they thought -- maybe even a little better.
Reply
To save Brent's bandwidth, I've posted my reply over on my own blog, www.HankFox.com. It seemed silly to shove another 2,000 words into this thread.
I should warn you, I don't carry on lengthy arguments over there. It's just my place to post occasional thoughts, for whoever wants to read them.
Values & Rights
I sense many holes in your reasoning -- the one most important to me has something to do with the exclusively homocentric nature of your arguments -- but I'm not able to describe it in this moment. With a few hours sitting and thinking/writing, I might be able to tease it out into words. But ... I'm not sure I have the time right now to devote to it. Then again, it's important to me. Hmm.
Before I forget this...
Beyond the basic is/ought problem wil Objectivism, it occurs to me that its problem is its failure to acknowledge that in any free market, force has a value--and a high one, albeit generally as a reverse commodity (Give me gold and I won't kill you).
Saying that force is bad and should be excluded is no different than saying that property is bad and should be excluded. It is deleting a market factor that exists.
It is all very well to suggest than one should die rather than submit to force, but thousands of years of experiment seem to suggest disagreement. If value-for-value worked, then farmers would be kings. That they haven't is not due to supply and demand but to the unique vulnerability of farmers to force. You can't hide a wheatfield.
Thus, as the only way for an objectivist government to control force is to use force, it is clear that force has high value and can never be excluded from any market or society. It will always be considered available if fair trading--from a subjective perspective--fails. Few people will agree to quietly starve if the price of food is too high for them, even if that value is fair and their inability to afford it is based on their own shortcomings.
They will feast on the bones of the food traders.
Steve "If it was that easy, we'd have kept doing it." James
capitalist forces
In a nutshell, "is" means the nature of man and reality, "ought" is the prerequisite to think and act consistently with both. There is an abundance of information about the Objectivist position on this if anyone is interested. Start at aynrand.org
---------------------------------
Force is not bad. Force is not good. Force, sans context, is neutral.
Force is the only means by which anyone can interfere with your freedom to choose your own thoughts and actions or by which anyone could take from you the product of your thoughts and actions, your property. The force that is exercised to that end is called "initiated force" and it is bad.
Force is also the only means to defend that freedom from those who would violate it. The force that is exercised to that end is called "defensive force" and it is good.
The goal of a capitalist government is to remove initiated force from all human interactions. This is achieved by making the government the sole agent of defensive force and restricting it to that sole task by enumerating specifically and objectively in what situations and how force may be used. Also required is a system of powers and procedures to prevent the use of that force in any other way (aka a system of checks and balances).
The success or failure of such a government depends entirely and only on the ability of some group of men to understand this, to become the dominant influence in the choice of government in some definable region of the universe, to successfully define the proper use of that force, and to consistently and effectively apply it.
Success does not require that everyone living under such a government be rational. Irrationality would be, in fact, a protected right, so long as it did not result in the initiation of force against others.
Force is the only means by
Force is the only means by which anyone can interfere with your freedom to choose your own thoughts and actions or by which anyone could take from you the product of your thoughts and actions, your property. The force that is exercised to that end is called "initiated force" and it is bad.Force is also the only means to defend that freedom from those who would violate it. The force that is exercised to that end is called "defensive force" and it is good.
Yet, who gets to define the difference, exactly? Pre-emptive defense is certainly very common in human thought, as is the rationalization that the non-force actions of others are equivalent to force. Like eviction, for instance.
Historically, whenever a group of folks pick up a dogma and use it to govern, they end up having to either A) change or violate the dogma on the fly to meet circumstances (The Law of Exceptions*) B) dropping the whole concept as an abject failure, usually keeping the labels as a means of denying that they are doing so or C) Use monopoly of force to pound the square peg into the round hole, usually with disastrous results.
But hey, the fact that it's never really happened anywhere before successfully is no reason not to try, right? Mind you, every successful system of government has started somewhere, and generally failed immediately before being later resurrected with tweaks and failing again. Eventually, things go back to the principle of "Let's just force the bastards to do what we want."
Probably because, as a race, we have a remarkable ability to frustrate each other, individually and collectively.
Steve "I doubt bees piss each other off so much." James
*The Law of Exceptions: There are always exceptions. Exceptions always multiply. They always apply to 'me', whoever 'me' happens to be.
Ayup.
Ayup.
I liked Rand, when I was young. Still do see positive aspects of Objectivism and the various related philosophical constructs about how society *should* function.
But that's not how society *does* function, because that's not how people behave. Just as with the sub-thread about free will: "it ain't as simple as that".
Something I learned early has proven more and more true with age and experience: life is messy. Fine distinctions in judgment are called for. Marginal improvements are sometimes all that is possible. You can never completely understand everything about the situation.
That doesn't mean that you can't understand enough, though. Nor that you can't benefit from a marginal improvement. Or that good judgment can make a big difference. Learning to live comfortably with ambiguity is a very good skill, and knowing when to try and make radical changes is an even better one.
Jim Downey
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Like Science Fiction? Read *or listen to* my novel, Communion of Dreams, for free.
That doesn't mean that you
That doesn't mean that you can't understand enough, though. Nor that you can't benefit from a marginal improvement. Or that good judgment can make a big difference. Learning to live comfortably with ambiguity is a very good skill, and knowing when to try and make radical changes is an even better one.Yep. That's how governments and societies have evolved into such gigantic ramshackle clots. Because everything else is worse, at least for somebody. And the somebody it's worse for will only take so much of that before breaking out the pitchforks and torches. Major changes in government are almost always associated with an awareness of an approaching such breaking point, or the actual breach itself, depending on how stupid the current rulers happen to be.
Very seldom is it better to let the breach occur. The oppressed govern badly.
Steve "No practice, I suppose." James
Getting worse
Ted Turner says we'll be resorting to cannibalism in the not-so-distant future. (If civilization falls, I'm taking along some forks.)
I like to think that all the rich and powerful who have screwed over the rest of us, the Bushes, the Roves, the Limbaughs, the Cheneys, the Coulters, the O'Reillys -- all those who thought that wealth would protect them and that it was okay to say anything, do anything, kill any number of innocents, in order to get it -- will eventually be living in armed compounds while roving bands of the hungry lurk outside.
And if just occasionally one of those walled compounds is breached, and a feast ensues, I think God will look down and smile gently to himself.
In their last moments, I hope the people inside have time to think "Oh, shit. Gutting the U.S. for our own personal benefit, breaking the economy, killing justice, wrecking the environment, destroying public trust in government, may have been a mistake."
Because then God will laugh out loud.
I'm bringing hotsauce.
Man, if I have to eat Shank of Limbaugh, I'm bringing along the strongest hotsauce I can find to kill the taste.
Jim Downey
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Like Science Fiction? Read *or listen to* my novel, Communion of Dreams, for free.
You know what they say
You don't eat a pig like that all at once.
Just remember to cook very thoroughly. It is not meat I would trust. And it's not like he wouldn't be the first to resort to cannibalism as soon as he was short a meal. Doubtless it's the Godless Liberals who want to keep Good Americans from eating the Useless Mouths infesting the country, just as Our Founders Intended, and the Bible tells us in [cite random verse].
If we're lucky, we could hole up in a shopping mall to fight off the ensuing Right Wing Zombie Holocaust.
Steve "You know, it was Darwin and the Nazis who stopped us eating the weak" James
And, socialism does not work
And, socialism does not work with heroesAgreed, but I think you mean Marx-Engels Communism rather than vanilla socialism. Communism, like Randism, is another concept that falls apart when dealing with actual people. Socialism is just the use of state power to enforce certain desired traits in societies, which is an aspect of every government everywhere. Like Liberalism, the word has been demonized, but the concept is one that most people actually favor.
The trouble with heroes, of course, is that they have limited utility to everybody else. Traditionally, they have tended to end up in power, where they continue to act in heroic self-interest until everybody else gets out the torches, pitchforks, and guillotines. More modern societies have evolved equal protection of law to limit the power of heroes. And the counterexamples are obvious, such as the other flavors of Communism.
Nowhere does Rand ever even hint that this means that they will be rational.Which obviates the utility of the whole edifice. Those with less capacity than the heroes will reach a point at which rational acceptance of their lesser state is less attractive than irrational force. And they come in mobs.
'Every man for himself' is not how we are wired, evolutionarily. I don't mean we have an innate tendency towards altruism so much as that we are pack hunters. We innately see the value of splitting a large pie over monopolizing a small one. But altruism towards your allies is a common aspect of that. Modern societies have increased the size of the pack, that's all.
If your ethics is valid and your politics is consistent with it, it will work perfectly.Another strike against dealing with actual people, who are nothing if not flexible in rationalizing their ethics.
You also claim that pure capitalist governments have never existed. They have, of course. We just don't consider them much of a model. They consisted of a self-interested hero with a monopoly of force ruling over others and no restrictions whatever on commerce. The governments were small and noncomplex and mainly focused on preventing the use of force by anyone else. They were quite common during what we call The Dark Ages. The leaders had titles like 'Baron', Duke', or 'King.'
Happily, they tended to get absorbed by larger Barons, Dukes, and Kings, and eventually the nation-state was born.
Steve "Now they have to call themselves 'President-for-life'" James
Total misunderstanding
Say what? "socialism does not work with heroes". Socialists have probably glorified heroes as much as any other group. From the French Revolution to labor struggles in the 19th century to authoritarian socialist systems like Stalin and Mao's examples of heroes have been widely propagated.
You confuse altruism with self-sacrifice. "Whatever you give or get is not as relevant as whether or not you did it as a duty" What does "duty" have to do with altruism? One can do altruistic acts without it being a duty.
I thought that randians were supposed to value logic.
"We must choose in order to act." That seems to be the old myth of "free will".
"That is an impossible task at the outset when you are judging a system that has never before been wholly operational." No system has ever been wholly operational, including socialism. You have a double standard. You say that, oh, my system has never truly been implemented. The socialist can say exactly the same thing.
I stop. It is too tiring to continue to go through such a line-by-line refutation.
an idea that self-destructs
I did not say socialism did not have heroes. I said that having them did not make socialism work. Rick had said that it did. Their heroes did not help them reach their goals, because they were exactly the opposite of Rand's heroes. Their glory was not that they achieved their own potential as humans for their own sake, but rather that they sacrificed their potential to the collective.
Confusing altruism with self-sacrifice is like confusing oranges with citrus.
And the second you regard free will as a myth it is time for me to stop replying too. Without free will, your ideas could not have been chosen by you. They can be no more than a random conglomeration pre-determined and imposed upon your brain by your genes, your parents, your peers, your ancestors, teachers, blogs, neighborhood, the weather and who knows what else. To whom or what would I be replying?
Free will?
Apparently you are quite young to still believe in free will. Numerous scientists have debunked that idea. You might try Daniel Dennett. The evidence from evolution indicates that there is none.
But I am not going to get into an umpteenth debate about this. Just do some serious research on the net even for yourself. Just for a beginning, try this article from the NYT.
http://tinyurl.com/yen653
"Einstein, among others, found that a comforting idea. “This knowledge of the non-freedom of the will protects me from losing my good humor and taking much too seriously myself and my fellow humans as acting and judging individuals,” he said.
How comforted or depressed this makes you might depend on what you mean by free will. The traditional definition is called “libertarian” or “deep” free will. It holds that humans are free moral agents whose actions are not predetermined. This school of thought says in effect that the whole chain of cause and effect in the history of the universe stops dead in its tracks as you ponder the dessert menu.
At that point, anything is possible. Whatever choice you make is unforced and could have been otherwise, but it is not random. You are responsible for any damage to your pocketbook and your arteries.
“That strikes many people as incoherent,” said Dr. Silberstein, who noted that every physical system that has been investigated has turned out to be either deterministic or random. “Both are bad news for free will,” he said. So if human actions can’t be caused and aren’t random, he said, “It must be — what — some weird magical power?”
People who believe already that humans are magic will have no problem with that."
the determinist dilemma: if it is true, it can't be
[Correction of typo in title below]
Fixed that.
Fixed that for you, since not everyone sees things presented in the same order. Two advantages of the free registration: the ability to customize the display; editing your own comments.
Jim Downey
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Like Science Fiction? Read *or listen to* my novel, Communion of Dreams, for free.
the determinist dilemma: if it is true, it can't be
I repeat:
"Without free will, your ideas could not have been chosen by you. They can be no more than a random conglomeration pre-determined and imposed upon your brain..."
Proclamations that the causes of human ideas (identifications of reality) and human actions are externally determined or merely random physical occurrences need to be viewed in full awareness of their implications.
The most important and immediate consequence to such claims is that they cannot be offered as true. The concepts true and false presuppose the existence of free will. Truth is the status of an identification of the nature of reality that is consistent with reality as it is -- independent of whether we recognize it or not. If all ideas are determined and/or random, not only is the relationship of every idea to actual reality automatically suspect, there is simultaneously no way to validate or invalidate them (or anything else). The thought that ideas and actions are determined can itself be no more than random or determined.
If there is no truth, there can be no good, because defining the good for humans requires definitions of human nature that are true in order to define proper human goals and means to achieve them. So, human motives are also rendered arbitrary, and values are not possible. That leaves the concept of responsibility equally useless. Faced with the threat to life itself of theft, murder, and mayhem, the only reaction one could have per determinists is "hey, stuff happens."
The first question that should spring into your mind is: why on earth would a determinist ever want to comment in a blog? What point would there ever be to argue with anyone over anything at all? After all, according to them, a conviction that humans are volitional animals is determined in the same way as the assertion that they are not. That is, they are equally irrelevant.
Determinists, however, are never consistent. They skirt their own self-contradictions by using the logical fallacy of the stolen concept. Specifically, they steal the validity of the concept of truth in order to destroy it. Note the citation of Dr. Silberstein's claim that, "every physical system that has been investigated has turned out to be either deterministic or random."
In the context within which this claim was presented to us, it was presented as true that the investigations did so turn out, and to support determinism it would have to be presented as implicit that such investigations would continue to so turn out. This statement is on the hunt for shallow and passive minds that cannot recognize the hidden self-refuting contradiction: if the contention were true, it could not be. An honest determinist should precede all comments with: "nothing I say here is necessarily true or false."
Determinists do not do that, however, because, also in self-contradiction, they have an ulterior motive. There is a lot to be gained by persuading the world to buy into determinism. The biggest prize is the freedom to evade the work involved in thinking, just sit back and accept the ideas that flow in. There is also the luxurious equivalent of infallibility when every argument can be refuted by merely saying, "that's just your opinion." With that comes also the freedom to evade responsibility for your thoughts and actions. Guilt cannot exist.
When determinism obliterates the efficacy of the mind, what means is left to men to obtain in human interactions that which they need to survive? Brute force. Deep within every determinist lurks a sympathy for tyranny.
Tilt not Bingo
"Determinists do not do that, however, because, also in self-contradiction, they have an ulterior motive. There is a lot to be gained by persuading the world to buy into determinism. The biggest prize is the freedom to evade the work involved in thinking, just sit back and accept the ideas that flow in."
So all those scientists who are convinced of determinism evade the work of thinking, like Einstein, Dennett, and almost all the rest. The people who just sit back and let "the ideas flow in" are the religious people.
Anyhoo, "ulterior motive" is just a variation of the "free will" argument. So you use you own beliefs - and they are nothing more than that - as a basis to criticize those who don't hold them. You attribute "motives", which in fact don't exist. They are just a convenient figure of speech.
Scientists are not immune to self-contradiction
"So all those scientists who are convinced of determinism evade the work of thinking, like Einstein, Dennett, and almost all the rest. The people who just sit back and let "the ideas flow in" are the religious people."
Scientists often evade thinking. Look how many are religious.
The thinking Einstein, Dennett, almost all the rest, and you are evading is in the realm of philosophy. Determinism is not an issue of science, it a philosophical issue. Scientists who try to prove determinism with science are on the same wrong track as scientists who try to use science to prove or disprove the existence of god.
Here is an excellent article on that subject:
http://ergosum.wordpress.com/2008/03/14/deriving-atheism-from-philosophy...
Yawn
As I said, I am not going to get into another argument about the illusion - well, delusion - of "free will". I read through that nonsensical article. What a waste of time. People can look up serious discussion without too much trouble. Maybe I already mentioned it, but here is an interview with "lazy" Daniel Dennett.
http://meaningoflife.tv/video.php?speaker=dennett&topic=freewill
Unfortunately the interviewer is a bit thick. Look up the other links there too.
Bingo.
Bingo.
Jim Downey
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Like Science Fiction? Read *or listen to* my novel, Communion of Dreams, for free.
Already there is the problem
Already there is the problem of definition. What is meant by "happiness"? Then "moral purpose" is not at all clear.
Do other animals, or even plants, search for happiness and moral purpose? I recently saw a couple of documentaries about octopi and sharks. In one male octopi battled until one was too tired to continue for the possibility to couple with a female. In the other, two sharks spent hours coupling, which seems to be a complicated affair for some sharks, and were left seemingly quite exhausted.
Are they following their happiness? Or how are we different than them?
"Productive achievement" and "reason"? The first for intellectuals makes sense, but for most it just seems to be taylorism. If you go further back, say to the Luddites, what were they fighting about? They were being forced from their farms and towns to work in the factories in the growing cities. Apparently they felt that their new situations were worse than the previous ones.
As for the second, it doesn't seem to be a requirement for success in society, whether it be economic, social, sexual, or whatever. It seems basically to apply to a small group of inquiring researchers.
Suicide as beneficial