| Table of Contents |
Wednesday, August 31, 2005
Today's Arbitrary Lawsuit: French Fries Under Attack (Paul Hsieh)
Evolutionary Psychology (Diana Hsieh)
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
Cats In Sinks (Paul Hsieh)
Genetic Lies (Diana Hsieh)
Monday, August 29, 2005
Aristotle's Catfish (Diana Hsieh)
Sunday, August 28, 2005
Medical Education (Paul Hsieh)
Three "Keynote" Speakers (Diana Hsieh)
Chinese for Firefly Fans (Paul Hsieh)
Saturday, August 27, 2005
Noodly Round Up (Diana Hsieh)
Implicit Vs. Explicit Philosophy: Schwartz on Von Mises (Paul Hsieh)
Friday, August 26, 2005
Christian Hysteria (Diana Hsieh)
Thursday, August 25, 2005
Teaching Dishonesty (Diana Hsieh)
Wednesday, August 24, 2005
2005 Beloit College Mindset List (Paul Hsieh)
Visitor Map (Diana Hsieh)
Killing Us Not-So-Softly (Diana Hsieh)
Tuesday, August 23, 2005
Moral Foundations of Modern Libertarianism (Paul Hsieh)
Blast from the Past (Diana Hsieh)
North Korean Insult Generator (Diana Hsieh)
Monday, August 22, 2005
Imaginary Love Children (Diana Hsieh)
Sunday, August 21, 2005
Nathaniel Branden's Campaign Against Objective Moral Judgment (Diana Hsieh)
Aromatherapy (Diana Hsieh)
Wal-Mart Kicking Major Butt in the Free Market (Paul Hsieh)
Saturday, August 20, 2005
Why Do We Like Magic? (Paul Hsieh)
A Serious Moral Lesson (Diana Hsieh)
Harry Potter Parody (Paul Hsieh)
Friday, August 19, 2005
Ayn Rand on Racism (Diana Hsieh)
Thursday, August 18, 2005
Intelligent Falling (Diana Hsieh)
Robert Garmong on Oil Prices (Diana Hsieh)
The Delights of The Art of Fiction (Diana Hsieh)
Wednesday, August 17, 2005
Atlas Movie News (Diana Hsieh)
Axiomatic (Diana Hsieh)
Tuesday, August 16, 2005
Libertarian Activism: No Parody Required (Diana Hsieh)
2005 Ayn Rand Society (Diana Hsieh)
Monday, August 15, 2005
Our Old Friend Jean-Jacques (Diana Hsieh)
Altruism in Action (Diana Hsieh)
Sunday, August 14, 2005
A Strange Analogy (Diana Hsieh)
A Clarification (Diana Hsieh)
Global Dangers (Diana Hsieh)
Saturday, August 13, 2005
Harry Potter and the Nature of Evil (Paul Hsieh)
Mr Burns on Cheating (Diana Hsieh)
Five Points for Philosophic Detection (Diana Hsieh)
Friday, August 12, 2005
Tertullian Delights (Diana Hsieh)
Cartoon of the Day (Paul Hsieh)
Thursday, August 11, 2005
Lesser Known Movie Prequels (Paul Hsieh)
Another Books-At-Guantanamo Story (Paul Hsieh)
Zoinks! (Diana Hsieh)
More on Sanction in Speaking (Diana Hsieh)
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
GeekPress Cited in the Stanford Law Review (Diana Hsieh)
A Bit of Encouragement (Diana Hsieh)
On Testimony (Diana Hsieh)
Tuesday, August 09, 2005
Robert Garmong, Future Radio Star (Diana Hsieh)
A Proof (Diana Hsieh)
Positive Psychology Conference (Diana Hsieh)
Monday, August 08, 2005
Legal Story Of The Day (Paul Hsieh)
Stinky Garbage on Islam (Diana Hsieh)
Sunday, August 07, 2005
Thank God For The Atom Bomb (Paul Hsieh)
Coffee! (Diana Hsieh)
Empire (Diana Hsieh)
Saturday, August 06, 2005
Reason Papers Archive (Diana Hsieh)
Friday, August 05, 2005
Lies, Lies, and More Lies (Diana Hsieh)
Stinky Garbage on Honesty (Diana Hsieh)
Yaron Brook on the Ayn Rand Institute (Diana Hsieh)
The Politics of Emergencies (Diana Hsieh)
Thursday, August 04, 2005
More On Profanity (Paul Hsieh)
Wednesday, August 03, 2005
#&$*@! (Diana Hsieh)
Tuesday, August 02, 2005
Nathaniel Branden Versus Objectivism (Diana Hsieh)
Privacy Rights and the Korean Dog Poop Girl (Paul Hsieh)
Monday, August 01, 2005
Joss (Diana Hsieh)
Acorns from the Oak Tree (Diana Hsieh)
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Genetic Lies
By Diana Hsieh @ 8:35 AM   
Virginia Postrel recent posted an interesting bit on parents concealing their use of donated eggs from their resulting children, including its ramifications for political debates about paying egg donors.
Somewhat to my surprise, I'm fairly sympathetic to such concealment, so long as it doesn't involve any active deception. In general, I regard the modern concern for "biological parents" as bordering on deterministic obsession. Sure, it's nice to know the source of your physical characteristics. (Personally, I'm blessed with my mother's crooked fingers and my father's bad feet. Paul often informs me that if he had known about these substantial defects earlier, he never would have married me!) And it's sometimes helpful to know your family's medical history. Yet those considerations hardly explain all the fuss over genetic parents.
In particular, I'm baffled by adopted children who desperately pursue their genetic parents. They often do so against the explicit wishes of those genetic parents. Or they claim to love and respect the real parents who chose to raise them, yet end up calling their genetic parents "Mom" and "Dad." Such people often don't seem to regard the real parents who raised them as their real parents. I even remember one person -- someone I barely knew -- blurting out that she was adopted when she mentioned her parents in the course of casual conversation. It was unnerving.
Perhaps such people aren't as happy with the adopted parents as they claim to be, even if not abused or neglected. They wonder whether their life would have been better with their genetic parents. Perhaps they regard themselves as fundamentally deficient due to rejection by the very people who were supposed to love and care for them. They might have been told about the adoption when too young to understand its actual meaning. Perhaps the focus on biological parents is merely a manifestation of general psychological problems like insecurity and self-doubt. Those psychological problems would surely emerge in other ways if the child wasn't aware of the egg/sperm donation or adoption.
In any case, I don't wish to trivialize the damage that a parent can do by lying to a child about his genetic parents. If a child notices that he looks different from his family, his parents ought to be willing to tell him why. To conceal it is to undermine a child's trust in his parents and confidence in his own judgment. However, today's near-obsession with genetic ancestry is probably less than healthy for all concerned.
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| Monday, August 29, 2005 |
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Aristotle's Catfish
By Diana Hsieh @ 9:22 PM
A few days ago, I was searching the wonderfully helpful Non-Contradiction.com for the source text of Aristotle's distinctions between first potentiality (e.g. "I am the sort of being that is able to learn Russian"), second potentiality/first actuality (e.g. "I am able to speak Russian, but I am not presently doing so"), and second actuality (e.g. "I am presently speaking Russian") for my paper on the marginal humans argument for animal liberation/rights. (Really, it's quite relevant!) In the process, I surfed to this page on Aristotle's Catfish. I'd heard the basic outline of the story from someone some time ago, but so I was delighted to read the details about this vindication of Aristotle's biology. However, I was even more delighted to see that the first of the two listed sources was none other than "'Aristotle as Scientist' lecture given by Dr. Allan Gotthelf, August 1989" -- with the link to the Ayn Rand Bookstore.
(Obviously, that lecture is still on my "To Do" list -- now bumped up a few notches! Unfortunately, it's not yet available on CD. Since I've discovered the joyful ease of listening to lectures on my iPod, I don't wish to buy any more tapes.)
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| Sunday, August 28, 2005 |
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Medical Education
By Paul Hsieh @ 10:15 PM
In the comments section, Marnie recently asked,What is Paul's specialty please? How many years out of school is he? Does he still recommend the business? [I start post-bac pre-med classes in 3 weeks.] In response to Marnie's questions:
1) My field is diagnostic radiology, with subspecialty interests in trauma/emergency radiology and orthopedic radiology.
2) My education consisted of 4-years college (i.e., pre-med), 4 years medical school, one year laboratory research at the NIH (National Institutes of Health) in Bethesda MD, 4 years residency in diagnostic radiology, and one year of additional clinical fellowship training in MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) with emphasis in advanced orthopedic radiology.
Since then, I've been in practice for 11 years, both as a faculty member at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis (3 years) as well as 8 years of private practice (3 years in San Diego, and 5 years now in Denver.)
3) I still recommend the field provided that one finds the actual science and art of medicine interesting in their own right. In that case, the various b*llsh*t elements related to government regulations are tolerable, at least for the time being.
I personally find the field intellectually fascinating. Plus the technology is advancing at an exciting pace.
During my daily practice, I get to deal with people who are for the most part very rational (at least with respect to work), goal-directed, and efficacious. Most of my day is a constant use of reason (both induction and deduction), applied directly to issues of ultimate value, namely another person's life. In terms of job satisfaction, it's hard to beat this combination.
Since a lot of people don't know exactly what a modern radiologist does, I thought I'd explain in a little bit more detail what I do and what I like about my job.
There's nothing I enjoy more than solving a diagnostic mystery by taking a set of subtle and apparently disconnected findings from a patient's x-rays, CAT scans, and MRI's, and integrating them in order to arrive at a correct diagnosis.
Similarly, I enjoy performing invasive radiology procedures (so-called "interventional radiology") where I use real-time x-ray imaging to guide a needle to a target within a patient's body (avoiding all the critical nerves and blood vessels), in order to either perform a biopsy or deliver a dose of medication to exactly the right spot in as pain-free and safe a fashion as humanly possible.
Advances in imaging technology allow radiologists to perform procedures in the x-ray suite that 20 years ago would have required much riskier open surgery. Interventional radiology is like playing a video game, but where the stakes are much higher (as are the rewards).
Colorado is a very outdoors-oriented state, and hence a lot of people enjoy activities like skiing, snowboarding, mountain biking, rock-climing, etc. Hence, if you were to take a bad fall on the ski slopes at Aspen or Vail and hurt your knee, it would be me who would interpret your MRI scan and tell your orthopedic surgeon which structures were torn and which were ok.
Or if you were to get into a bad car accident in the middle of the night and were helicoptered to our Level 1 trauma hospital, it would be me who would read your emergency CAT scans and tell the trauma surgeons which organs were critically injured and needed immediate repair, which were less critically injured (and still needed attention, but not immediately), and which structures were ok.
I think I have one of the coolest jobs in the world. It was a long road to get to the point of being able to practice independently as full-fledged board-certified physician, but it was well worth it in the end.
Medicine is an extremely varied field, and there is a branch of medicine that should suit nearly any personality type. For instance, some people enjoy high-pressure specialities that require quick-decision making skills like trauma surgery, whereas other people like slower paced puzzle-solving fields like pediatric endocrinology. Some people enjoy fields with a lot of patient contact like family practice, others prefer fields with minimal patient contact like pathology. Hence, Marnie, you should be able find a field that suits your interests and temperament.
I wish you much success and happiness in your studies, Marnie. If you have any further questions about medical education, I'd be happy to answer them, either here or via e-mail.Labels: Health Care
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Three "Keynote" Speakers
By Diana Hsieh @ 9:09 PM
This spring, Boulder's "Rocky Mountain Student Philosophy Conference" will have not one but three keynote speakers:Linda Martin Alcoff is Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies and the Meredith Professor for Teaching Excellence at Syracuse University. She received her Ph.D. from Brown University in 1987. Linda Martin Alcoff works primarily in continental philosophy, epistemology, feminist theory, and philosophy of race. Her books include Feminist Epistemologies (Routledge, 1993), Thinking From the Underside of History (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), Epistemology: The Big Questions (Blackwell), Real Knowing: New Versions of the Coherence Theory of Knowledge (Cornell, 1996), Identities (Blackwell, 2002). She has written over forty articles concerning Foucault, sexual violence, the politics of knowledge, and gender and race identity, and is at work on a new book forthcoming with Oxford entitled Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self. She has served as Co-Director of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy and Chair of the APA Committee on Hispanics.
Claudia Card received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University and is Emma Goldman Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is also Affiliate Professor in Jewish Studies, LGBT Studies, Women's Studies, and Environmental Studies. She is author of The Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil (Oxford, 2002), The Unnatural Lottery: Character and Moral Luck (Temple 1996), Lesbian Choices (Columbia 1995), and more than 100 articles and reviews; editor of Feminist Ethics (Kansas 1991), Adventures in Lesbian Philosophy (Indiana 1994), The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir (Cambridge, 2003), On Feminist Ethics and Politics (Kansas 1999), and a special issue of Hypatia: Journal of Feminist Philosophy (1992). She has delivered over 100 papers at conferences, colleges and universities and has been featured in 10 radio broadcasts.
Uma Narayan received her B.A. in Philosophy from Bombay University and her M.A. in Philosophy from Poona University, India. She received her Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 1990. She is a Professor of Philosophy at Vassar College. She is the author of Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions and Third World Feminism. She has coedited Reconstructing Political Theory: Feminist Perspectives with Prof. Mary L. Shanley, Having and Raising Children with Prof. Julia Bartkowiak and Decentering the Center: Postcolonial and Feminist Challenges to Philosophy with Prof. Sandra Harding. She regularly offers courses on Contemporary Moral Issues, Social and Political Philosophy and Feminist Theory in the philosophy department. She frequently teaches courses for the Women's Studies program, such as Introduction to Women's Studies and Global Feminism. No comment required, I think.
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| Saturday, August 27, 2005 |
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Noodly Round Up
By Diana Hsieh @ 2:04 PM
Since Don Watkins is gone for the weekend, I suppose that I'll do a round up:
I love making fun of the enemy. (Via GeekPress.)
On a related note, you might think that I named this blog "NoodleFood" based upon the idea that it offers "Philosophical Food for Your Noodle!" However, I think it's time for me to confess my up-to-now secret worship of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. NoodleFood is actually my daily sacrificial offering to the His Noodliness; my unworthy words feed him. So, I hereby declare my total agreement with Bobby Henderson's open letter to the Kansas School Board: If Intelligent Design is to be taught in government schools, then FSM-ism ought to be taught too.
Given that the libertarian movement embraces a diversity of philosophic foundations for liberty, it's hardly surprising to find increasing disagreement about political issues amongst libertarians. I keep an eye out for these disputes, as they make handy talking points when I explain why I'm not a libertarian. Some well-known and standard ones include whether governments necessarily violate rights, whether abortion is murder, whether a defensive war violates the rights of innocents in the aggressing country, whether law should be legislated, whether intellectual property rights exist, whether using my absent neighbor's hose to put out the fire consuming his house violates his rights, and so on. So here's another: libertarian animal rights. Although these rights-for-beasts libertarians are not terribly common at present, they seem to be growing in number. (As a happy coincidence, I'm presently writing a paper on the errors of the argument from marginal humans discussed in that essay. Don Watkins' essay on broken units helped me sort out significant confusions about species normality, I should mention.)
The Charlotte Observer has a short article on BB&T Bank's recent one million dollar donation to UNC Charlotte's College of Business. Happily, Objectivist businessman extraordinaire John Allison has been very successful selling this "moral foundations of capitalism" package to business schools.
I'm quite amused by Dennis Hardin's recent SOLO article "Nathaniel Branden vs. Ayn Rand on Morality." Hardin does not merely fail to anywhere mention that the whole essay is a response to my recent post "Nathaniel Branden's Campaign Against Objective Moral Judgment." He also borders on plagiarism by copying the structure and even lifting some text from my post. He does mention me in passing, but not even by name. He just writes -- totally out of the blue and toward the very end -- that "one observer contends that Branden espouses this notion with the hope others might want to 'take responsibility for his [i.e., Branden's] moral depravity.'" The included link is not even to the relevant post, but to August's huge monthly archive.
Just by way of contrast, I clearly identified and linked to all of Nathaniel Branden's relevant writings in my post. I even explicitly defended that practice as necessary against a stupid, dishonest troll on Objectivism Online -- on the grounds that my readers need to judge the fairness and accuracy of my criticisms for themselves. I'm not afraid that honest readers will reject my criticisms if also given easy access to the primary sources. Dennis Hardin doesn't seem so confident -- and rightly so. Also, the voluminous comments on Hardin's essay are informative: they show an almost universal lack of concern for Ayn Rand's actual views on moral judgment from these supposed "Sense of Life Objectivists."
I have just a few more days to finish up my flurry on posts on the various false friends of Objectivism. Yikes! (I've set myself a deadline of August 31st, as I don't want it drag on and on forever.) Although working through these issues in writing has been very helpful to me, I'm looking forward to focusing on more positive philosophical concerns.
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Implicit Vs. Explicit Philosophy: Schwartz on Von Mises
By Paul Hsieh @ 8:01 AM
As a follow-up to the discussion of libertarians, subjectivism, and Von Mises, I thought I'd quote this interesting excerpt from Peter Schwartz's lecture "Contextual Knowledge".
The basic theme of his talk is that someone who holds the "right" conclusions but for the wrong reasons (i.e., based on the wrong philosophic foundations) actually holds the wrong ideas, despite any superficial agreement with someone who holds the "same" right ideas for the right reasons (i.e., based on the right philosophy). He devotes the lecture to developing and defending this argument, and I won't repeat it all here.
During the Q&A period, two people asked him about subjectivism and the Austrian school of economics. I've transcribed his responses as faithfully as possible, making only minor editing changes (for clarity, and to eliminating words like "um"). Here is what he said:
That's a good question. You ask how do I reconcile my disagreement - my rejection of subjectivism philosophically -- with the Austrian school of economics which has a lot of good things to say in defense of capitalism but is basically founded philosophically on subjectivism. Well, that's a good question. And I would distinguish these two things.
To the extent that the Austrian school of economics, or any school of thought, actually derives their views from subjectivism, those views -- you can't do much with those views. Those views don't mean anything. You can't validate those views. You can't justify them. You can't give logical reasons for them because if they really are dependent on subjectivism, subjectivism means whatever I say is just as good as whatever you say. So who am I to say that, "The law of supply and demand works"; you say, "Well, I don't think it works."
The point is that I don't think they really are subjectivist - philosophically subjectivist -- through and through. There are elements of subjectivism that actually undercuts a good deal of what they say. But if you look at even Mises for example, who is openly over and over a champion of subjectivism nominally - he on the other hand constantly upholds individualism, he upholds absolute principles, he upholds the laws of logic, at times let's say.
Now a subjectivist could do none of this. There's an internal inconsistency. And I think that Mises and others are correct in their economic views despite their (in spite of their) subjectivist orientation, not because of it. And they're not consistently applying their philosophy of subjectivism. It's to the extent that they're deviating from the logical implications of subjectivism - it's to that extent that they're correct and they have very good things to say. And you therefore can incorporate that into a proper philosophic foundation like Objectivism.
To the extent, however, that they do follow the implications of subjectivism, they go off in all kinds of bizarre directions. Dr. Ridpath can give you some good examples of that if you ask him at the break... That's basically my answer.
.....
Someone like Hayek for example -- I do not regard Hayek as a defender of capitalism.
I regard Mises as a defender of capitalism. And the reason is that Hayek consistently applies the philosophy that forms the context for his conclusions.
Mises does not; Mises is mixed. That is, Mises has an explicitly subjectivist philosophy but an implicit rational philosophy to a certain extent. It is that implicit philosophy that he relies on without naming it explicitly as the basis for his views.
So for example, I don't think it's conceivable that somebody could be an arch-defender of the individual against government, I don't see how somebody could be a defender of (or even a definer of) property rights as against state intervention. You could not do that unless you had an implicitly individualistic philosophy, which itself requires an implicitly objective approach to reality. The problem is that he doesn't explicitly realize it, and he's torn in a conflict. And the good things about him I think follow from his implicit philosophy and the bad things from his explicit. But I would not say, and I'm glad you raised that question, because I did not mean to say that, "Well yes, he's a subjectivist but he came up with good things, so it's ok anyways".
To the extent that subjectivism forms the context for his conclusions, he is wrong. The point is that it often is *not* the basis for his conclusion even though he mistakenly sometimes thinks it is.
I've read very little Hayek and Von Mises, so I can't comment on Schwartz's analysis of those two particular cases. But I think he makes some very interesting general points about implicit vs. explicit philosophy, and how someone can therefore be advocating the right ideas if they are derived from a good implicit philosophy, despite a bad explicit philosophy.
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| Friday, August 26, 2005 |
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Christian Hysteria
By Diana Hsieh @ 8:58 AM
Gee, I only wish that Paul and I had neighbors as fantastic as this guy! See for yourself:DEAR ABBY: I live in a family-oriented neighborhood. My problem is my next-door neighbor flies his gay pride flag in his front yard. Because we have a lot of families with young children who do not need to be subjected to that kind of thing, I have asked him numerous times to remove it.
His response is it's a free country and he does not subject anybody to his lifestyle.
I strongly feel that in a neighborhood devoted to children's morals and the way life should be, he should not be allowed to have that flag in his front yard for everyone to see. I threatened if he didn't take it down, I'd call the police. I feel it's harming the children to see that flag flying, especially on a busy street that everyone travels on. What should I do? -- RIGHTEOUS IN NEW CASTLE, PA. Oh, who cares a jot about personal freedom when the morals of children are at stake?!? (What thin and brittle morals those must be, if they are undermined by the mere sight of a flag!)
Abby replied well enough:DEAR RIGHTEOUS: First of all, calm down. Your neighbor is hurting no one, and "young children" will not understand what the flag symbolizes. Unless there are codes, covenants or restrictions in your neighborhood governing the display of flags, your neighbor has a right to hoist his banner. Rather than picking a fight about something so insignificant, you should concentrate on cultivating your own garden and stop obsessing about what's going on in his. The neighborhood might have covenant restrictions on the display of flags, but I doubt that they require homeowners to be "devoted to children's morals and the way life should be" in the fashion of Mr. Righteous.Labels: Religion
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| Thursday, August 25, 2005 |
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Teaching Dishonesty
By Diana Hsieh @ 7:21 AM
Dave Jilk must be trying to ruin the peaceful tranquility of my life. Why else would he send me a link to this horrible article on the supposed necessity of teaching children to lie?!? The title is awful all by itself: "Say 'Thank You': Learning How To Lie." The article -- or rather news release of a psychological study -- is much worse. See for yourself:Although honesty is generally taught as the best policy, around a child's birthday and holidays, the little white lie goes a long way. After all, kids are expected to grin and giggle at an itchy wool sweater as if it were the toy-of-the-moment they had been begging for. After a few years of awkward laughter and whispered scolding from parents, children tend to learn that a forced exclamation of joy earns them more smiles and hugs than the truth does.
Although this landmark on the way to knowing the difference between making grandma happy and making grandma really happy may seem of no use outside the living room, research published in the May 2005 issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the American Psychological Society, shows that there is a strong connection between a preschool child's reaction to an unwanted present and their ability to control other reactive behavior.
In a study funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and Texas A&M University, researchers Jessica E. Kieras, Renee M. Tobin, William G. Graziano, and Mary K. Rothbart found that children's ability to put on a happy face when faced with a gift of an unattractive baby rattle was shown to predict their knowledge of the often-unspoken rules of acceptable behavior in society. The results speak to a child's potential to develop "socially appropriate expressive behavior" and a visibly even temperament, according to the authors.
Children ranging in age from 3 to 5 years were asked how much they liked each toy in a set, and following their assessment, received either their favorite or least favorite toy of the set. After each child received their toy, the tester gauged the child's response based on several observed reactions, including smiling, surprise, disappointment, disgust, and anger.
In order to relate these results to what society tells us about polite behavior, the children were then given a series of small tasks to perform, such as drawing a line at an unnaturally slow speed or holding down a pinball lever for extended lengths of time. The results of these simple tasks demonstrated the children's level of ability to overcome their reactive instincts and fit their actions to suit the needs of their situation - a skill learned throughout childhood and of limitless importance in the adult world.
The results were not altogether surprising. "Children who performed well on behavioral measures of effortful control displayed similar amounts of positive affect after receiving desirable and undesirable gifts, whereas children scoring low on effortful control showed more positive affect after receiving the desirable gift than after receiving the undesirable gift," the authors wrote. The children who were able to react similarly to the toy they wanted and the toy they didn't want were more able to comply with the regulations of the performance tests. So parents, keep nudging your kids to smile and say thank you; it may help them get that date, job, or house a few years down the line. The researchers' delighted exhortation to dishonesty for the sake of tact is pretty disturbing. Politeness does not demand deception, as Miss Manners understands. Yet instead of pausing for a moment of serious thought about the matter, as any good parent would, these psychologists rush to find some quasi-scientific rationalization for the notion that life requires lies.
And that's not even the worst of it!
Their quasi-scientific rationalization for dishonesty wholly depends upon the idea that social conformity is an unqualified good. So functioning as an adult does not require a child to learn to use his reason properly to gain knowledge of reality, but only to accommodate himself to the malleable world of other people's perceptions, emotions, and expectations.
John Dewey would be pleased by such apostles.
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| Wednesday, August 24, 2005 |
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2005 Beloit College Mindset List
By Paul Hsieh @ 10:25 PM
"In the coming weeks, millions of students will be entering college for the first time. On average, these members of the Class of 2009 will be 18 years old, which means they were born in 1987...
Each August, as students start to arrive, Beloit College releases the Beloit College Mindset List, which offers a world view of today's entering college students."1. Andy Warhol, Liberace, Jackie Gleason, and Lee Marvin have always been dead.
2. They don't remember when "cut and paste" involved scissors.
3. Heart-lung transplants have always been possible.
4. Wayne Gretzky never played for Edmonton.
5. Boston has been working on the "The Big Dig" all their lives.
6. With little need to practice, most of them do not know how to tie a tie.
7. Pay-Per-View television has always been an option.
8. They never had the fun of being thrown into the back of a station wagon with six others.
9. Iran and Iraq have never been at war with each other.
10. They are more familiar with Greg Gumbel than with Bryant Gumbel.
11. Philip Morris has always owned Kraft Foods.
12. Al-Qaida has always existed with Osama bin Laden at its head.
13. They learned to count with Lotus 1-2-3.
14. Car stereos have always rivaled home component systems.
15. Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker have never preached on television.
16. Voice mail has always been available.
17. "Whatever" is not part of a question but an expression of sullen rebuke.
18. The federal budget has always been more than a trillion dollars.
19. Condoms have always been advertised on television.
20. They may have fallen asleep playing with their Gameboys in the crib.
21. They have always had the right to burn the flag.
22. For daily caffeine emergencies, Starbucks has always been around the corner.
23. Ferdinand Marcos has never been in charge of the Philippines.
24. Money put in their savings account the year they were born earned almost 7% interest.
25. Bill Gates has always been worth at least a billion dollars.
26. Dirty dancing has always been acceptable.
27. Southern fried chicken, prepared with a blend of 11 herbs and spices, has always been available in China.
28. Michael Jackson has always been bad, and greed has always been good.
29. The Starship Enterprise has always looked dated.
30. Pixar has always existed.
31. There has never been a "fairness doctrine" at the FCC.
32. Judicial appointments routinely have been "Borked."
33. Aretha Franklin has always been in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
34. There have always been zebra mussels in the Great Lakes.
35. Police have always been able to search garbage without a search warrant.
36. It has always been possible to walk from England to mainland Europe on dry land.
37. They have grown up in a single superpower world.
38. They missed the oat bran diet craze.
39. American Motors has never existed.
40. Scientists have always been able to see supernovas.
41. Les Miserables has always been on stage.
42. Halogen lights have always been available at home, with a warning.
43. "Baby M" may be a classmate, and contracts with surrogate mothers have always been legal.
44. RU486, the "morning after pill," has always been on the market.
45. There has always been a pyramid in front of the Louvre in Paris.
46. British Airways has always been privately owned.
47. Irradiated food has always been available but controversial.
48. Snowboarding has always been a popular winter pastime.
49. Libraries have always been the best centers for computer technology and access to good software.
50. Biosphere 2 has always been trying to create a revolution in the life sciences.
51. The Hubble Telescope has always been focused on new frontiers.
52. Researchers have always been looking for stem cells.
53. They do not remember "a kinder and gentler nation."
54. They never saw the shuttle Challenger fly.
55. The TV networks have always had cable partners.
56. Airports have always had upscale shops and restaurants.
57. Black Americans have always been known as African-Americans.
58. They never saw Pat Sajak or Arsenio Hall host a late night television show.
59. Matt Groening has always had a Life in Hell.
60. Salman Rushdie has always been watching over his shoulder.
61. Digital cameras have always existed.
62. Tom Landry never coached the Cowboys.
63. Time Life and Warner Communications have always been joined.
64. CNBC has always been on the air.
65. The Field of Dreams has always been drawing people to Iowa.
66. They never saw a Howard Johnson's with 28 ice cream flavors.
67. Reindeer at Christmas have always distinguished between secular and religious decorations.
68. Entertainment Weekly has always been on the newsstand.
69. Lyme Disease has always been a ticking concern in the woods.
70. Jimmy Carter has always been an elder statesman.
71. Miss Piggy and Kermit have always dwelt in Disneyland.
72. America's Funniest Home Videos has always been on television.
73. Their nervous new parents heard C. Everett Koop proclaim nicotine as addictive as heroin.
74. Lever has always been looking for 2000 parts to clean.
75. They have always been challenged to distinguish between news and entertainment on cable TV.
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Killing Us Not-So-Softly
By Diana Hsieh @ 9:17 AM
I'm feeling a bit ill this morning. I'm not surprised, since I just read Malcolm Gladwell recent article advocating socialist medicine. Apparently, my husband should be sold into slavery so that a few idiots with rotting teeth can smile again.
I'm quite serious about socialist medicine meaning the enslavement of doctors. If our government ever voted itself control over our health care, doctors would not be permitted to practice medicine except under the terms dictated by government bureaucrats. My husband would be told what treatments he could offer, what equipment he could buy, what fees he could charge, which patients he can or must accept, and so on. If any of his patients wanted to pay him more for some safe and effective treatment unacceptable to the government, he could not offer it. (He would be exploiting their need!) If too many doctors refuse to work under those conditions -- as I know Paul would -- the government could follow the lead of Pennsylvania by requiring doctors to ask for permission to quit, retire, or move to another state. Of course, some doctors would welcome socialist medicine, but such happy slaves are still slaves.
Given the well-known disasters of socialist medicine -- like ever-rising costs, long waits for diagnosis and treatment, substantial lags in technology, treatments not offered, and so on -- for an intellectual to pretend that "universal health care" would simply extend our high standard of medical care to all is inexcusable.
Certainly, much is wrong with our current health care system. Yet all the serious, chronic problems are rooted in our decades of government intervention. The government has substantially distorted the market with its massive regulatory schemes and ever-expanding welfare programs. For example, the unprecedented use of employer-provided health insurance to cover normal, expected medical expenses is a direct consequence of government wage freezes during World War II. For example, since insurance companies determine their payments based upon the arbitrary fee schedule of Medicare, doctors are paid very poorly for reading those all-important mammograms, even though they assume a huge malpractice risk in doing so. The solution to these kinds of problems is to eliminate the source government intervention, not to increase it.
My mood was slightly improved upon re-reading Leonard Peikoff's excellent essay "Health Care is Not a Right". Altruism, collectivism, and statism drive the engine of change for socialist medicine -- and so the battle must be fought in moral terms. Economic arguments about the practical effects of socialist medicine are a helpful adjunct, but by themselves, they lapse into absurd irrelevance.Labels: Health Care
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Moral Foundations of Modern Libertarianism
By Paul Hsieh @ 10:47 PM
Given the latest discussion here on libertarians and their views (or lack thereof) of moral philosophy, I thought I'd bring the readers' attention to this recent article by Randy Barnett, entitled "The Moral Foundations of Modern Libertarianism".
For those who don't know him, Randy Barnett is an extremely well-respected academic libertarian. He's the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Law at the Boston University School of Law, specializing in constitutional law, contracts, and cyberlaw. He argued before the US Supreme court in the recent (2004) medical marijuana case Ashcroft vs. Raich.
And although he's most definitely not an Objectivist, he has been a featured speaker at The Objectivist Center Summer Seminars in 1995 and 1999.
Both Diana and I have heard him lecture in the past, and he's an very clear and compelling public speaker. He's an extremely intelligent man, and one of the leading intellectuals of the modern libertarian movement.
Hence, it is with great interest that I read his recent 2004 article, "The Moral Foundations of Modern Libertarianism". I'd like to cite a few key passages below.
From the paper:Libertarians need not choose between moral rights and consequences because theirs is a political, not a moral philosophy; one that can be shown to be compatible with various moral theories, which as we shall see is one source of its appeal. Moral theories based on either moral rights or on consequentialism purport to be "comprehensive," insofar as they apply to all moral questions to the exclusion of all other moral theories. Although the acceptance of one of these moral theories entails the rejection of all others, libertarian moral rights philosphers such as Eric Mack, Loren Lomasky, Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl on the one hand, and utilitarians such as Jan Narveson on the other can embrace libertarian political theory with equal fervor. (Page 6 of PDF file.) This is as clear and explicit a severing of the link between ethics and politics as one can ask for. Of course, Objectivists will completely disagree with this approach, because the Objectivist politics flows directly from its moral theory.
In fact, Barnett revels in the fact the libertarian politics can be defended by both "moral rights" theorists and "consequentialists" (e.g., utilitarians). He states,...[I]f both methods tend to reach the same results in entirely different ways, then each method can provide an analytic check on the other. Because any of our analytic methods may err or may be used to deceive, we can use one method to confirm the results that appear to be supported by the other. Analogously, after adding a column of figures from top to bottom, we sometimes double check the sum by adding the figures again from bottom to top or by using a calculator. Just as we rely upon institutional rivalries between branches of government to protect against error and deception, we may rely upon "conceptual rivalries" between different methods of normative inquiry for the same reason...(Pages 6-7.) Of course, if Objectivists reject the validity of these various alternative philosophical foundations to ethics (such as utilitarianism or consequentialism), does the fact that these theories lead to the same political conclusions really add any certainty? In Barnett's view it does, whereas I must disagree.
There's a huge difference between double-checking one's conclusions by testing them via multiple correct methods (which are based on the same underlying principles and give the same results for the same problems) vs. testing them via multiple incorrect methods (where the underlying principles are divergent from the start and yield radically different results when applied to very simple problems).
Hence (to extends Barnett's analogy), using incorrect and incompatible philosophical methods to double-check the correctness of one's final conclusions would be comparable to double-checking one's arithmetic by using three different broken calculators. If those results happened to agree, would that really give one more confidence in the correctness of the answer, if one already knows that the calculators are unreliable?
(Also, note the implied skepticism in "our analytic methods may err" and the adoption of the equivalent of the "coherence theory of truth" by appealing to agreement between incompatible methodologies to validate one's conclusions.)
Finally, Barnett states,While neither denying morality nor adopting a relativist moral stance, Libertarian political theory transcends different conflicting approaches to morality... Libertarians seek a political theory that could be accepted by persons of diverse approaches living together and interacting in what Hayek called the Great Society. (Pages 23-24.) In other words, this pluralistic or "Big Tent" approach to morality is one of the explicit goals of libertarians, not just an incidental outcome. In my experience, most avowed libertarians are not explicitly subjectivist, in the sense of altogether denying any need for a moral foundation for their political views. But they do adopt this more subtle form of methodological subjectivism, namely the position that underlying moral views are unimportant as long as one supports "liberty" as a political goal.
If one agrees with Objectivists that a proper political theory must be grounded in a proper moral theory, then the libertarian approach is anathema.
On the other hand, if one thinks that holding the correct moral theory is unimportant (and that any one of a number of incorrect and philosphically incompatible moral theories can lead to the correct political philosophy), then this is a direct rejection of the Objectivist approach to epistemology, which states that truth can only be arrived at by a process of reason applied to the facts of reality, integrated with respect for proper context and hierarchy. (This is covered much more extensively in Leonard Peikoff's book Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand.)
As an aside, the folks at the TOC have long been aware of the problems with Barnett's views and the fact that they are incompatible with the principles of Objectivism. In 1998, Eyal Mozes (in my opinion, one of the best of the TOC-aligned thinkers) wrote a review of Barnett's book The Structure of Liberty for the TOC Navigator magazine. In his review "Must Politics Rest On Morality?", Mozes correctly criticized Barnett for failing to "defend liberal justice and the rule of law independently of a specific ethical foundation".
Furthermore, Barnett is an explicit anarchist. As Mozes noted,Barnett argues against what he calls the "Single Power Principle," the principle that the retaliatory use of force must be in the hands of a monopoly organization, i.e., a government. Barnett objects to the "single power principle" on two grounds: (a) enforcing a monopoly on the use of force violates the right of freedom of contract, for those who wish to contract for private use of force to enforce justice and the rule of law; and (b) acceptance of the single power principle makes the problem of enforcement abuse insoluble.
As an alternative, Barnett argues that the effective way to address the problem of enforcement abuse is by a "polycentric constitutional order," with multiple private agencies competing in two separate functions: the power to adjudicate disputes; and the power to enforce the laws, with each law-enforcement agency choosing the body of law that it will enforce. Agencies in both these areas would be required to adhere to "the competition principle": "Law-enforcement and adjudicative agencies should not be able to put their competitors out of business by force" (Barnett, p. 258).
Of the logical problems I see in Barnett's position, perhaps the most glaring is that "the competition principle" is self-contradictory. If law-enforcement agency A adopted a body of law that forbids other agencies from operating, and then tried to enforce its law by forcibly closing law-enforcement agency B, it would be in violation of "the competition principle"; but if agency B tried to defend itself, then it would be trying to forcibly prevent agency A from carrying out its business and enforcing its laws, so B would then itself be violating "the competition principle." Barnett never addresses this logical problem. In a chapter devoted to a projection of how a polycentric constitutional order would operate, he describes a scenario in which corruption in one private agency is discovered by the other agencies, and the agency is then forcibly put out of business; he never considers how this scenario can be reconciled with "the competition principle."
Yet these issues (i.e., his anarchism and his subjectivist defense of liberty) did not stop the TOC from inviting Barnett back as a speaker a year later in 1999; in fact, this was part of the TOC's deliberate outreach to the non-Objectivist libertarian community.
Now to the best of my knowledge, Barnett has never claimed to be an Objectivist, and he has always been fully open and honest about his philosophical views. Hence his inclusion at a conference supposedly devoted to Objectivism should not be regarded as his fault, but instead the fault of the sponsoring organization.
And as a final footnote, when Diana was a TA for the undergraduate Applied Ethics class last semester at University of Colorado, one of the professor's assigned readings was Barnett's article on criminal justice entitled "Restitution: A New Paradigm of Criminal Justice", in which Barnett argues that the primary purpose of the criminal justice system should be restitution for the victim, and that it should specifically not concern itself with punishing the criminal per se.
This is of course, in direct opposition to the Objectivist concept of the purpose of criminal justice. As Don Watkins nicely summarized,
A man who commits a crime against one individual is thereby an objective threat to society as a whole. Society, as represented by the government, therefore has every interest and every right to punish him. The government's aim here is not simply to restore health to the victim, but to inflict painful consequences on the perpetrator: to force him to experience the painful effects of the causes he enacted. Writes Rand:The law should: a. correct the consequences of the crime in regard to the victim, whenever possible (such as recovering stolen property and returning it to the owner); b. impose restraints on the criminal, such as a jail sentence, not in order to reform him, but in order to make him bear the painful consequences of his action (or the equivalent) which he inflicted on his victims; c. make the punishment proportionate to the crime in the full context of all the legally punishable crimes (Rand, Letters of Ayn Rand, 559). (Emphasis mine, not Don's or Rand's).
In summary: Modern libertarians deny the need for the proper philosophical foundation for their politics. This is explictly stated in the works of respected libertarian scholars such as Randy Barnett. Because of the subjectivism inherent in this "Big Tent" approach, the logical consequence is that libertarians will be drawn to any number of conclusions which will be diverge significantly from the Objectivist political and legal philosophy (as well as from each others'). As one example, Barnett is a defender of anarchism and he also rejects the need to punish criminals for their bad actions. Other libertarians may disagree with Barnett on those particular conclusions, but will diverge from the Objectivist position on other important issues (such as intellectual property rights). Yet all are welcome under the rubric of "libertarian", and are regarded as defenders of liberty.
Hence, anyone who believes that libertarianism and Objectivism are compatible (for example those who agree with Nathaniel Branden's article "Objectivism and Libertarianism" in which he argues "Folks, we are all libertarians now; might as well get used to it") would be well-advised to re-examine their views.
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Blast from the Past
By Diana Hsieh @ 11:47 AM
Paul and I first met in St. Louis on this day eleven years ago -- August 23rd, 1994. Earlier that spring, he wrote me a fairly long e-mail about my post to alt.philosophy.objectivism on "intellectual activism." At the time, he was finishing up his MRI fellowship in Los Angeles, while I was a freshman at WashU. He moved to St. Louis a few months later for a job as an attending physician at WashU's teaching hospital. When I returned to WashU in the late summer for the start of my sophomore year, we met for dinner. (Back then, he had uber-dorky glasses, but a cool new BMW.)
Paul was my only Objectivism-interested friend in all my years in St. Louis. Although he agreed with much of the philosophy, he wasn't an Objectivist. I remember many, many arguments about his representationalism and compatibilism. We had a fairly regular weekly ritual in which I'd cook us dinner on Thursday night, then he'd take me out for a fancy meal over the weekend.
After those three years in St. Louis, we both moved to California at about the same time. He took a job in San Diego, while I moved to Los Angeles. (That's when he introduced me to his good friends Cliff and Alexa Brett.) Given the two-hour proximity, we still saw each other fairly regularly.
During all these years, we were just buddies. Given the thirteen-year age gap, neither of us even thought about dating. While I was still in college, my mother would sometimes ask me "Why don't you date Paul?" I'd tell her that she was crazy, since he was so old!
In November of 1998, after much soul-searching and with much trepidation, I decided to ask Paul if he wanted to date. I did so during what was just supposed to be an ordinary visit between friends, for all he knew. He was quite stunned, even speechless for a time. (Paul is often quiet, but never speechless!) He almost said no -- I swear. (He'd seen too many of my other relationships not go so well!)
As you've probably guessed, he did agree to give it a try. Three months later, I moved to San Diego. We became engaged a few days later, then married three months and three days after that. So after more than four years of friendship, it took us just six months to be married!
To celebrate this small anniversary, I've posted my original a.p.o post on intellectual activism and Paul's e-mail reply to me below. It was our first contact, so to speak. For reasons that will become obvious as you read, I cannot possibly endorse all that I wrote those many years ago. (My disagreements concern more than the mentions of David Kelley and Nathaniel Branden, but those are the most significant.) Similarly, please don't presume that Paul agrees with all that he wrote back then -- although I am struck by the continuity of his intellectual interests.
Here's my a.p.o post:Newsgroups: alt.philosophy.objectivism
From: dmbricke@artsci.wustl.edu (Diana Mertz Brickell)
Date: 23 Apr 1994 19:16:23 GMT
Subject: Intellectual Activism (long)
This is an article that I wrote up for Vixie's Objectivism list that I
figured I would post here as well. A thanks goes to Eric Barnhill for
straightening out lots of convoluted sentences. Comments are more than
welcome.
--------------------------------
In order to 'survive' in the realm of ideas, every philosophy needs
proponents, individuals actively advocating its principles and persuading
others of its validity. Without any advocates, a school of thought will
have no effect whatsoever. Without converts, the philosophy will shortly
disappear, probably never to be recovered.
In this regard, Objectivism is no different from any other philosophy, but
Objectivists have two distinct advantages over the proponents of all other
philosophies. First and foremost, Objectivism is true. This advantage is
unprecedented; no other philosophy can compete with Objectivism on this
level. Second, Objectivism precludes any sacrifice by its supporters for
'the cause'; rather individual self-interest determines the level of
intellectual activism. An Objectivist will be philosophically active to
the extent of his understanding of the import of philosophy to his life
and of his available mental and physical resources. The excitement and
passion that inevitably flows from this awareness cannot be matched by
anyone who dully advocates an idea out of duty. But advocating unpopular
ideas in a hostile culture is hardly easy; the resulting psychological
drain stemming can be overwhelming to bear alone. This is one reason why
it is crucial that Objectivists have the emotional support of friends, for
friendship can easily counteract the oft-encountered rancor.
***
Yet the recognition of the value of actively advocating Objectivism does
not tell us how to best pursue this value. We must be reasonably sure
that our actions will be efficacious before we debate. We can neither
lose sight of the fact that most people have given up on our intellectual
leaders and even on ideas themselves, nor can we ignore the widespread
misconceptions about Ayn Rand's philosophy. In short, we must be sure
that our methods are sound and also appropriate to our audience's context
of knowledge.
First, Objectivists must stress the crucial role that philosophy plays in
the life of every individual. The fact that there are answers to be
found, answers of life and death importance, must be (at least) implicit
in every philosophical discussion. Understanding the power of philosophy
in the lives of individuals is necessary *before* an individual can
understand the relevance of Objectivism to his life. The question that
Eric Barnhill raised about how to convince other admirers of Rand to get
"firmly grounded in philosophy" is troublesome, and only means to this end
seems to be offering lots of inductive evidence. Much of this issue is
covered in Rand's essay "Philosophy: Who Needs It," so I do not think it
is necessary to speak of it further.
Considering the advocation Objectivism proper, there are two issues to be
stressed: understanding and integrating the principles of Objectivism and
arguing effectively. Without having a good grasp of both Objectivism and
convincing methods of argumentation, it would be nearly impossible to
convince anyone of Objectivism's veracity.
Rand's writings are the primary source of information about Objectivism,
but secondary sources (like _Objectivity_) also provide enormous benefit,
as does interaction with other Objectivists. Discussion between those who
fundamentally agree provides a non-threatening atmosphere and a common
context. When arguing with an adversary, an error or lack of evidence is
a loss; with allies it is an opportunity for growth. Those who have
communicated with other Objectivists can speak to its aid in understanding
Objectivism and its personal benefits as well.
The gentle art of persuasion is a skill that many Objectivists desperately
need to learn. All too often Objectivists quickly morally condemn those
who disagree with them or even substitute moral condemnation for rational
argument. David Kelley, Nathaniel Branden, and many others have gone
great lengths to reverse this disturbing trend by advocating a more
benevolent attitude towards those with whom we disagree. Care must always
be taken to remain clearly focussed on the issues being discussed rather
than the personalities involved and to express one's passionate certainty
benevolently. One must also be prepared to concede error or ignorance in
debate. Clinging onto disproven ideas out of false pride immediately
destroys the audience's trust in one's rationality and often in one's
ideas as well.
Identifying the context of the debate, particularly the environment, is
also crucial. Different methods are required for different settings, but
the cardinal rule is to avoid provoking hostility or defensiveness. Tim
Starr wrote recently:
"Another question to consider is what one's goal is
with dissenters: to refute them, or to persuade them.
In my experience, refutation of those who disagree
with me has never done me much immediate good...
Refutation comes more easily to me, but whenever
I can stick to persuasion it pays off in spades."
I heartily agree. But because no one can live in a ideological vacuum,
simply revealing someone's errors is not enough; they must be presented
with a viable alternative. People also need time to not only re-evaluate
their old beliefs but also evaluate new ideas. To demand that anyone
instantly accept a new set of idea as true is not taking into account the
nature of human consciousness.
So how can Objectivists learn how to consistently apply good debating
techniques? Debating with other Objectivists (perhaps having one play
the devil's advocate), jumping headfirst into a UseNet group and learning
by trial and error, utilizing the emailing lists, or even just watching
what techniques are effective in convincing others. People like Jimbo
Wales, John Enright, and Will Wilkinson (to name a few) have had a
profound effect on alt.philosophy.objectivism, the result of which has
been a huge increase in the membership of MDOP.
***
One of the primary goals of Objectivism as a loose intellectual movement
has always been promoting the study of Objectivism in colleges and
universities. The reasons are quite simple. Universities are
environments where ideas are deemed important and intellectual
investigation is encouraged, at least superficially. Students are at the
age when the make decisive choices about the role that ideas will play in
their life, and about the specific ideas that will guide their actions.
Moreover, most people read and are inspired by _The Fountainhead_ and
_Atlas Shrugged_ in high school or college, before having lost the
"idealism of youth."
In promoting an intellectual movement on college campuses, two of the most
apparent means of fostering the growth of Objectivism are through campus
clubs and the internet. (I think that there are more ideas to be had
here, so I welcome alternate suggestions).
Campus clubs can be great resources for college students. A good club
would be loosely organized, promote conceptual understanding of
Objectivism, encourage friendly debate, and help form friendships. But
the fact that campus clubs have not been very successful, even declining
in membership in recent years, is a signal that these important elements
are either non-existent or underemphasized. Especially in college, where
the pressure to conform is great and the desire for like-minded friends is
extremely important, a loose, friendly gathering of Objectivists and
admirers of Rand (even if they disagree on some issues) seems to be the
best way to conduct an Objectivist group. With such mutual benevolence
established, dealing with others on campus hostile to Rand's ideas would
not be so difficult.
But there is another resource available to college students: the internet.
It is available to virtually every college student and provides great
opportunities for Objectivists to communicate regardless of location
(which can be crucial for people who do not have other Objectivists in
their vicinity). But because finding other Objectivists on the net who
share one's intellectual and personal interests can be difficult, Will
Wilkinson, Eric Barnhill, Jimbo Wales, and I have been working on a
project to facilitate the establishment of more personal ties between
Objectivists, particularly those in college. We are establishing a means
by which Objectivists with shared intellectual or personal interests can
find each other easily, thus encouraging the three keys to making
Objectivism a real intellectual movement again: integration, debate, and
friendship. This project has the capacity to grow in accordance with the
demand, but for the moment, it will start as an index of Objectivists in
school (high school, undergraduate, graduate). You will be hearing more
about this project from Will soon.
***
Finally I want to convey a few of my personal sentiments about the meaning
of making Objectivism a true intellectual movement again. I was in the
library Saturday, looking through all the old issues of _The Objectivist
Newsletter_, _The Objectivist_, and _The Ayn Rand Letter_. In the early
issues a sense of excitement and efficacy pervaded the writings; implicit
in every article was the idea that the philosophy would conquer the world.
But, when the conflict exploded with the Brandens, the whole tone changed.
Articles were often reactive instead of pro-active; the sense of efficacy
disappeared. For example, the "intellectual ammunition" department, a
section dedicated to giving people the means to fight for the philosophy,
was replaced around this time by the "horror file" department, a pathetic
tribute to the fact that the culture was *not* changing. Rand's articles
concerning the closing of the _Ayn Rand Letter_ were the most
disheartening of all. It was, in essence, a proclamation of her
ineffectiveness, of her inability to change the culture that was
destroying all that she valued.
I want to see the type of optimism and efficacy that I saw in the pages of
_TON_ again. For above all else, it is a belief in the potency of ideas
and the capability of Objectivists to change the world that needs to be
recaptured. We cannot lose ourselves to condemnations of the "swamp of
irrationalism" into which our culture is sinking (according to ARI). We
have to remain firm in the belief that ideas matter, that Objectivism
matters, and that Objectivists, properly armed with knowledge, debating
skills, and the emotional support of friends, *will* change the world.
diana mertz brickell.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Capitalism demands the very best diana mertz brickell
of every man - his rationality - dmbri...@artsci.wustl.edu
and rewards him accordingly." Washington University
-Ayn Rand St-Louis, Missouri
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
And here's Paul's reply:From: Paul Hsieh x3940 Imaging (HSIEH@CSMC.EDU)
To: dmbricke@artsci.wustl.edu
Date: Apr 25 1994 - 12:59pm
Dear Ms. Diana Brickell,
I read with great interest your recent post on
alt.philosophy.objectivism on the topic of intellectual
activism. I've been an admirer of Ayn Rand's works for many
years, but I have had a difficult time finding other people
with whom to discuss her ideas. The friends of mine who have
read her works have either not taken much interest in the
philosophical implications, or have (IMHO) incompletely
understood some of her ideas, making discussion difficult. The
limited exposure I had several years ago in college to people
from Objectivist groups was not particularly pleasant. I found
many of the other Ayn Rand fans to be rigid and dogmatic.
Often when I asked what I thought were good-faith questions
exploring some of the edges of Objectivism, many of them
would become defensive and hostile, substituting insults for
reasoned discourse. Also I noticed that a significant minority
did not seem *happy* -- i.e, they didn't exude a sense of life
indicating that they enjoyed their mental and physical
capabilities and were eager to apply them in their daily life.
The contrast between them and the various protagonists of
Rand's novels was quite striking.
For this reason, I found your vision of an electronic
Objectivist community appealing. I only recently discovered
the alt.philosophy.objectivism newsgroup, so I don't have any
familiarity with participants, recent threads, FAQ's, subjects-
to-avoid-lest-they-start-a-flame-war, etc. However, I hope
that this (as well as whatever index project you mentioned)
can provide a good forum for a collegial interchange of ideas.
I, for one, know that there are many issues and implications
within Objectivism that I would like to clarify within my own
mind, and I would be greatly interested in hearing what
others think. I also agree with you that persuasion is a more
effective tactic than refutation. I recall the Robert Nozick in
his book _Philosophical Explanations_ also deliberately
avoided using what he called "coercive philosophy", centered
around argumentation, forceful refutations, etc, in favor of
an "explanatory approach", where logic and reasoning were
used to construct hypotheses as to how things could be (e.g.,
how was free will possible?). His approach was geared
towards gaining *understanding*, and I think that this
approach can bear fruit of a different sort than the more
tradition coercive approch. (Don't get me wrong -- I love a
good, heated philosophical argument as much as the next
person, trying to attack weak spots in the other personUs
positions, as well as bolstering one's own views with
supporting evidence and deductions. But I've found that
unless all the participants agree on the ground rules ahead of
time, and make a strong conscious effort to stick to logical
arguments only, these discussions can quickly degenerate
into ad hominem attacks and/or can stray wildly off topic.)
More importantly, I also think that the explanatory approach
has greater potential to persuade people who have erroneous
understandings of Objectivist ideas.
Basically, I would like to find and contribute to a forum
where Objectivist ideas could be discussed in a non-
threatening environment, to the mutual betterment of all
concerned. There are a number of topics that I would find
particularly interesting:
1) How can and should Objectivism be applied to various
public policy questions (e.g., health care reform, abortion,
gun control, etc)? In addition to final goals, what are optimal
intermediate tactics?
2) Broader, more theoretical questions about reversing
socialistic trends in a mixed economy -- are there times when
it is necessary to impose (presumably temporary) greater
government controls to correct distortions caused by prior
government controls? An analogy that occurs to me is with
the field of medicine: Normally it is considered immoral and
illegal to plunge a knife into someone's body. However,
during extraordinary circumstances (say, an otherwise
healthy person has been in a motor vehicle accident and has
damaged internal organs), then the appropriate course of
action might be *surgery*, i.e, deliberate and skillful
violation of the integrity of the patient's physical body in
order to correct an abnormal condition. Surgery is not always
appropriate. For certain conditions, the most appropriate
therapy is conservative therapy -- leave the patient alone and
let his or her healing responses deal with the problem. In
that case, any surgery would rightfully be considered medical
malpractice. However, in other situations, the injury is too
great for the body's normal self-correcting mechanisms to
cope with alone, and external assistance is necessary. In
those cases, if a physician did *not* perform surgery, it would
be malpractice. Even so, not all surgeries are appropriate --
some can do more harm than good. And sometimes, even after
appropriate surgery, external medical assistance might be
necessary on a permanent basis (i.e, a patient who has
damaged both kidneys may need lifelong dialysis, if no
transplant becomes available).
Are there any legitimate applications of this analogy to the
socio-economic circumstances of this country? Is it simply
enough to deregulate the economy and let the various self-
correcting mechanisms bring about the desired change? Or
are there situations where an ideal Objectivist government
might need to legitimately maintain temporary (or even
permanent) controls on certain portions the economy in
response to prior government-caused economic trauma? And
if so, how does one decide when and what sort of controls are
best for each situation? Even if additional government
interventions are *never* theoretically necessary, are there
any important universal principles to follow when
deregulating an economy -- are some strategies more
effective than others?
(I recently posed some of these questions to the
alt.philosophy.objectivism newsgroup in the context of a new
South African government. However, these questions can
clearly also be applied to deregulation in the countries of the
former Soviet Union, or even applied to issues in the USA,
such as affirmative action).
3) What are some of the Objectivist positions on various
classical philosophy problems like the free-will problem, the
mind-body problem, and the physical basis of consciousness
(including the old chesnut as to whether it is possible to have
conscious robots/artificial minds)? What would be the moral
implications of creating artificial minds? (I realize that this
is a frequently discussed topic in many science-fiction stories,
including the TV series StarTrek:The Next Generation, where
some scientists wanted to dismantle Data, the sentient artificial
life form. What are the Objectivist opinions?)
4) What are some of the Objectivist positions on the
theoretical metaphysical questions raised by modern physics
(i.e, quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle, Bell's
inequality, etc.)
5) Similarly, are there any implications of Godel's
theorems that have relevance to Objectivism, which is based
on pure application of logic? Are certain statements going to
be true, yet unprovable within the Objectivist system? It is
my understanding that within mathematics, each Godel
statement (true yet unprovable statement) can be used as a
branch point for generating alternative schemes of logic. If
a proposition P is one of those Godel statements, then one can
take the old system of logic and add P as a new axiom to
generate an extended system of logic. Or one could instead
take [not-P] and add it to the old system to generate a new but
different extended system. In either case, both systems will
contain no internal contradictions! (Of course, you cannot
include both P and [not-P] in the same system!) In
mathematical set theory, there are some interesting
propositions such as the Continuum Hypothesis which have
the property that either it or its negation can be included as
axioms, and either way the set theory will still remain self-
consistent. (Another example is the Axiom of Choice). Is
there any counterpart within Objectivism? If so, what are the
implications?
When I've read Leonard Peikoff's writings, he only briefly
discussed some of these issues in (4) and (5), and his discussion did not
reflect a very good understanding of them. (I assume that he
is not a mathematician or a physicist by training.) Are there
Objectivists out there with stronger mathematics/science
backgrounds that have said anything about this?
Finally, I noticed that you had an e-mail address at the
Washington University of St. Louis. I will be moving to St.
Louis in July 1994 to join the faculty at the Wash U Medical
School (in diagnostic radiology). What is the Objectivist
community like at Wash U? Is there a campus organization (or
a St. Louis organization)?
Thank you very much for your time. Any observations or
comments you have would be greatly appreciated. Until June
20, 1994, I will have an e-mail address at:
hsieh@csmc.edu
Starting sometime in July 1994, my address will change to:
hsieh@mirlink.wustl.edu
(But I don't know exactly when my new address will become
active.)
Thank you again.
Sincerely,
Paul S. Hsieh, MD
In retrospect, I find the formality of the letter quite charming!
E-mail Diana Hsieh
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| Sunday, August 21, 2005 |
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Nathaniel Branden's Campaign Against Objective Moral Judgment
By Diana Hsieh @ 10:13 PM
For many years, Nathaniel Branden has openly criticized Ayn Rand's approach to moral judgment. Although I've known those criticisms to be wholly unfounded for some time, I never bothered to identify the essence of his warm-and-fuzzy alternative until a few weeks ago. I'm glad I did, since it's worse than I imagined.
So in this post, I will scrutinize Branden's criticisms of the Objectivist view of moral judgment, as well as identify the core of his proposed alternative approach. To do that properly though, I must first set the context by reviewing some critical aspects of the Objectivist virtue of justice. Beware: This post is looooong.
Justice -- defined as "the virtue of judging men's character and conduct objectively and of acting accordingly, granting to each man that which he deserves" -- is a thoroughly egoistic virtue (OPAR 276). Moral judgments are indispensable for the simple reason that the course of our lives substantially depends upon the people with whom we choose to associate. So one business partner might help me make a fortune, while another will ruin my reputation by cheating clients. One friend will delight in backstabbing gossip, while another wouldn't dream of such disloyalty. And one educational foundation will promote your values with your donations, while another will undermine them. To ensure that our pursuits actually promote the values necessary for life and happiness, we must consider the moral characters of the people involved. So as Leonard Peikoff observes in OPAR: Since morality is concerned with a man's fundamental values, moral judgment enables one to know the essence that actuates him; it identifies the principles shaping his character and conduct. In the Objectivist approach, such judgment penetrates to the root principle, the one covering a man's primary use of his faculty of volition. Moral judgment distinguishes the men who choose to recognize reality from the men who choose to evade it. Such knowledge is necessary on practical grounds, in order to plan one's actions and protect one's interests. If a man is good by the Objectivist standard, if he is rational, honest, productive, then, other things being equal, one can expect to gain values in dealing with him. If a man is evil, however, if he is irrational, dishonest, parasitical, one can expect from such dealing not value, but loss (OPAR 277). Or, as Ayn Rand writes in "How Does One Lead a Rational Life in an Irrational Society?" in The Virtue of Selfishness: "Moral values are the motive power of a man's actions. By pronouncing moral judgment, one protects the clarity of one's own perception and the rationality of the course one chooses to pursue" (VOS 84-5).
As an egoistic virtue rather than a duty imposed from on high, justice does not demand impossible absurdities like the moral investigation of every single person with whom we interact, no matter in how small a way. We need not, for example, check whether a woman embraces reason and reality before holding open an elevator door for her. So Peikoff writes:The time one should devote to inquiry [into moral character] depends on the context. In general, in life as in law, a person is to be regarded as innocent of wrongdoing until proven guilty. If one wants only to buy a quart of milk, therefore, no special assessment of the grocer is indicated; absent information that he is trafficking in illicit or tainted goods, one may legitimately assume that the man is reputable. As the relationship involved becomes more significant, however--if one is a juror in court, say, or wants to invite a person to become one's business partner or the companion of one's child--then, obviously, special study and assessment do become necessary (OPAR 279-80). Ayn Rand offered a similar analysis in "The Ethics of Emergencies":Since men are born tabula rasa, both cognitively and morally, a rational man regards strangers as innocent until proved guilty, and grants them that initial good will in the name of their human potential. After that, he judges them according to the moral character they have actualized. If he finds them guilty of major evils, his good will is replaced by contempt and moral condemnation. (If one values human life, one cannot value its destroyers.) If he finds them to be virtuous, he grants them personal, individual value and appreciation, in proportion to their virtues (VOS 54). Now that we have the egoistic purpose of justice firmly in mind, let us turn to the rational practice of justice in the evaluation of men.
For our moral judgments to serve and protect our lives, they must be objective evaluations of a person's actual choices by the proper moral standard of man's life. Discovering the truth about a man's character requires two basic steps: (1) the identification of "the facts of a given case" and (2) the evaluation of them "by reference to objective moral principles" (OPAR 279). These two elements of moral judgment demand much of us, both epistemologically and morally. After all, we cannot simply peer into the soul of another person to determine whether he is fundamentally a vicious evader or a virtuous thinker. Nor can we safely rely upon our automatic "feelings, 'instincts' or hunches" (VOS 84). Rather, as Ayn Rand repeatedly emphasizes, objective moral judgment requires "the most precise, the most exacting, the most ruthlessly objective and rational process of thought" about a person on the basis of "his actions, his statements, and his conscious convictions" (VOS 84, VOR 28).
Perhaps the greatest challenge of moral judgment is distinguishing between honest errors of knowledge and willful breaches of morality. Because humans are neither omniscient nor infallible, a person can err in his conclusions or actions without any evasion (VOS 88). Such morally innocent errors of knowledge ought not be condemned along with willful breaches of morality (VOS 85, AS 974). Rand explains the crucial difference error and evasion in her Journals as follows:The difference between an error of knowledge and a moral error is that in the first case, a man does not suspend his consciousness (his reason), he is exercising it fully and he merely lacks all the necessary information; in the second case, he acts against his reason, he does not want to know and, therefore, he is guilty of the basic, cardinal sin (which, perhaps, is the one essential sin that embraces and contains all the others): the sin of suspending his consciousness, which amounts to suspending life or destroying the essence of life. In the first case, a man remains open to new knowledge, open to the possibility of correcting his error. In the second case, the man has closed the door to knowledge, therefore closed it to correction, and therefore his error (and his evil) will grow worse and worse (JAR 626). So if a man errs in his ideas, his inferences, or his actions, that is not a moral black mark against him -- so long as he is fully committed to grasping reality by means of his reason. That is not true of the willfully vicious evader.
Notably, Ayn Rand's fictional heroes, particularly Hank Rearden, show that the scope of morally innocent errors is not limited to the particular facts of a situation, as in Aristotle's ethics, but may also concern the relevant abstract principles. However, a man cannot hold any view or take any action whatsoever honestly; the scope of honest error possible to a man is determined by the context of his life and knowledge. This point is most easily grasped in relation to a person's responsibility for assimilating the knowledge required for his chosen career. For example: A doctor is rightly blamed for prescribing two drugs known to interact badly, yet his patient is not blamed for ingesting them. A lawyer ought to know the critical rules of evidence, but his secretary need not. A leftist professor of political philosophy is rightly condemned for teaching blatant falsehoods about capitalism, whereas his students may be innocently bamboozled by them. In all these cases, honest error due to lack of knowledge is possible to the layperson. The supposed expert, in contrast, ought to know better: it's his job to do so.
Similarly, certain philosophic errors are simply not possible to a person honestly struggling to understand the world. For example, in the course of discussing the student rebellions at Berkeley, Ayn Rand notes that "there is no such thing as rejecting reason through an innocent error of knowledge" (CUI 250). Similarly, a person cannot innocently hate the good for being the good (as in hating "a person for possessing a value or virtue one regards as desirable") without evading (TNL 131). In some cases, the possibility of honest error depends upon a person's cultural context. So in "The Monument Builders," Rand writes: "Fifty years ago, there might have been some excuse (though not justification) for the widespread belief that socialism is a political theory motivated by benevolence and aimed at the achievement of men's well-being. Today, that belief can no longer be regarded as an innocent error. Socialism has been tried on every continent of the globe. In the light of its results, it is time to question the motives of socialism's advocates" (VOS 100).
Leonard Peikoff explains the general principle at work here in "Fact and Value": "In all such cases, the [inherently dishonest] ideas are not merely false; in one form or another, they represent an explicit rebellion against reason and reality (and, therefore, against man and values). If the conscientious attempt to perceive reality by the use of one's mind is the essence of honesty, no such rebellion can qualify as 'honest'" (F&V). (For more details on inherently dishonest ideas, I strongly recommend the last lecture of Understanding Objectivism. I was thoroughly baffled by the idea until I heard that lecture in the fall of 2003.)
Of course, even if a person is armed with the proper principles and standards of judgment, the objective application of them to real-life cases of human character and conduct can be a difficult challenge. Ayn Rand herself warns of this problem, writing that "It is fairly easy to grasp abstract moral principles; it can be very difficult to apply them to a given situation, particularly when it involves the moral character of another person" (VOS 84). In some cases, the available evidence about a person's character may not be sufficient for judgment. Then-Objectivist Nathaniel Branden addressed this concern in his Basic Principles of Objectivism course:If you do not know how to judge the character of a person because the facts available to you are insufficient and the evidence of his flaws is inconclusive, you must give him the benefit of the doubt -- not on the grounds of mercy, but on the grounds of justice -- because to let off the guilty is less disastrous than to condemn the innocent, because virtues are more important than flaws, because justice demands that a man be considered innocent until proved guilty. This principle applies in law courts as well as in your personal relationships with people, except that in personal relationships, when you give the benefit of the doubt, you do not dismiss the case: you wait for further evidence to prove the good or bad character of the person before you pass a moral judgment (BPO, "Justice Versus Mercy"). In other cases, our moral judgments are complicated by the fact that people are morally mixed, in the sense that they "hold mixed, contradictory premises and values" (VOS 88). Ayn Rand addressed this problem in "The Cult of Moral Grayness," writing in part:There are, of course, complex issues in which both sides are right in some respects and wrong in others--and it is here that the "package deal" of pronouncing both sides "gray" is least permissible. It is in such issues that the most rigorous precision of moral judgment is required to identify and evaluate the various aspects involved--which can be done only by unscrambling the mixed elements of "black" and "white" (VOS 90). In all of her writings on moral judgment, Ayn Rand stressed the serious demands that justice places upon the rationally selfish man. For example:[T]o pronounce moral judgment is an enormous responsibility. To be a judge, one must possess an unimpeachable character; one need not be omniscient or infallible, and it is not an issue of errors of knowledge; one needs an unbreached integrity, that is, the absence of any indulgence in conscious, willful evil. Just as a judge in a court of law may err, when the evidence is inconclusive, but may not evade the evidence available, nor accept bribes, nor allow any personal feeling, emotion, desire or fear to obstruct his mind's judgment of the facts of reality--so every rational person must maintain an equally strict and solemn integrity in the courtroom within his own mind, where the responsibility is more awesome than in a public tribunal, because he, the judge, is the only one to know when he has been impeached (VOS 82-3). In fact, moral judgment demands so much of us that we can judge others on the basis of their moral judgments. Ayn Rand notes that "objective reality" is "a court of appeal from one's judgments" because a man reveals "his own moral character and standards... when he blames or praises" (VOS 83).
However, whether and how we ought to reveal our moral judgments to others depends upon the context. Ayn Rand writes that "one must make one's moral evaluation known to others, when it is rationally appropriate to do so," then further explains:This [principle] means that one need not launch into unprovoked moral denunciations or debates, but that one must speak up in situations where silence can objectively be taken to mean agreement with or sanction of evil. When one deals with irrational persons, where argument is futile, a mere "I don't agree with you" is sufficient to negate any implication of moral sanction. When one deals with better people, a full statement of one's views may be morally required. But in no case and in no situation may one permit one's own values to be attacked or denounced, and keep silent. Consequently, "the policy of always pronouncing moral judgment does not mean that one must regard oneself as a missionary charged with the responsibility of 'saving everyone's soul'--nor that one must give unsolicited moral appraisals to all those one meets" (VOS 84). Assuming the role of a public moral crusader would not be consistent with the egoistic purpose of justice. Yet if a person chooses to make his moral judgments known to others, he must "be prepared to answer 'Why?' and to prove [his] case--to [himself] and to any rational inquirer" (VOS 84).
Before turning to Nathaniel Branden's views of moral judgment, we should consider one final question, namely: What is the proper response to a person who has committed a breach of morality? In Galt's Speech, when Ayn Rand tells us to distinguish between "errors of knowledge and breaches of morality," she also tells us to "make every allowance for errors of knowledge; do not forgive or accept any breach of morality" (AS 974). So it might seem like any single evasion renders a person eternally vicious, beyond any power of redemption. However, that interpretation drops the context set by the novel itself, particularly the conditions under which Hank Rearden terminates his relationship with his family in the "Concerto of Deliverance" chapter.
At the opening of that chapter, Hank Rearden has not seen his family for six months, although he continues to support them financially. The government recently froze his assets, leaving him without financial means. (That was supposedly a bureaucratic mistake, but actually an attempt to prevent his disappearance upon the announcement of the "Steel Unification Plan.") His mother calls him unexpectedly to request a meeting about their financial plight. (She wants him to request credit with the local stores, but he will not do so, since he cannot honestly promise to repay any such debts.) His family is terrified by his lack of concern for them because, if he does go on strike, all his property will be seized by the government rather than inherited by them.
In the course of the conversation, his mother confesses:We haven't treated you right, all these years. We've been unfair to you, we've made you suffer, we've used you and given you no thanks in return. We're guilty, Henry, we've sinned against you, and we confess it. What more can we say to you now? Will you find it in your heart to forgive us? Hank knows clearly that any such forgiveness would be a lie: His family has nothing of value to offer him in return for it. In fact, his mother even admits that the forgiveness would be unearned, but asks for it anyway because "it would make us feel better" (AS 893). As Philip and Lillian clime in with their own pleas, Ayn Rand narrates, obviously evoking the later passage on forgiveness from Galt's Speech:They were throwing their pleas at a face that could not be reached. They did not know--and their panic was the last of their struggle to escape the knowledge--that his merciless sense of justice, which had been their only hold on him, which had made him take any punishment and give them the benefit of every doubt, was now turned against them--that the same force that had made him tolerant, was now the force that made him ruthless--that the justice which would forgive miles of innocent errors of knowledge, would not forgive a single step taken in conscious evil (AS 894). As the conversation progresses, Hank realizes that their greatest fear is that he will leave them penniless by deserting. He then understands the depth of their evil in asking him to stay:They had known what to fear; they had grasped and named, before he had, the only way of deliverance left open to him; they had understood the hopelessness of his industrial position, the futility of his struggle, the impossible burdens descending to crush him; they had known that in reason, in justice, in self-preservation, his only course was to drop it all and run--yet they wanted to hold him, to keep him in the sacrificial furnace, to make him let them devour the last of him in the name of mercy, forgiveness and brother-cannibal love (AS 895). Finally, his mother asks him, "Are you really incapable of forgiveness?" Hank answers, "No, Mother, I'm not. I would have forgiven the past--if, today, you had urged me to quit and disappear" (AS 898).
Given that context, the warning from Galt's Speech "not forgive or accept any breach of morality" must be understood as a warning against unearned forgiveness of willful evil (AS 974). Too often, people demand forgiveness as a blank check to cover ongoing wrongdoing. To grant forgiveness on those terms is to give a wrongdoer moral license to do you more harm. That is the "sin of forgiveness" against which Francisco warns Hank (AS 142). On a rational moral code, forgiveness should only be granted in exchange for a person's virtue, particularly for his recognition of the wrong done, for his willingness to make all necessary amends for it, and his commitment to act rightly in the future. If Hank's family had encouraged him to go on strike, they would have been doing all of that, albeit in a primitive form. (I can explain that point further, if anyone is interested.) By instead attempting to convince him to stay, they are asking him to further sacrifice himself for their sins. Under those conditions, he does not -- and ought never -- forgive them.
Unsurprisingly, this interpretation of the critical passage from Galt's Speech is consistent with Leonard Peikoff's comments on forgiveness in OPAR:Just as a man's character traits must be given a deserved response, so must a change in his traits. If a good man turns bad, one acknowledges reality by reversing one's former estimate of him. The same applies if a bad man turns good. Just as love must be earned, so must condemnation--and forgiveness.
Forgiveness in moral issues is earned, if the guilty party makes restitution to his victim, assuming this is applicable; and then demonstrates objectively, through word and deed, that he understands the roots of his moral breach, has reformed his character, and will not commit such wrong again. Forgiveness is unearned, if the guilty party wants the victim simply to forget (evade) the breach and forgive without cause--or if he offers as cause nothing but protestations of atonement, which the victim is expected to accept on faith. In regard to minor moral lapses, it is not difficult for a man to demonstrate the necessary understanding and reform. If the vice is sizable, however, such demonstration is no easy matter; in many cases, it is impossible. When a man commits an evil like a major robbery or deception, to say nothing of worse crimes, it is difficult even to know what evidence would be required to convince others of his reform. This problem is one of the many penalties of vice, and it is the responsibility not of the good, but of the evil to solve it; assuming, what is seldom if ever the case, that moral reform is what the evil man is seeking (OPAR 289). In sum: Part of the egoistic virtue of justice in Objectivism is the objective moral judgment of others, i.e. the careful evaluation of their choices according to rational moral standards.
Now let us identify the precise nature of Nathaniel Branden's views on moral judgment by reviewing some of his comments on the subject written over the years. As you read these quotes, notice the ways in which he distorts the Objectivist view, particularly by blaming the philosophy for the misunderstandings of some of its supposed followers. As for his own views, pay particular attention to his views on the proper standards for and response to moral wrongdoing.
In his 1984 Benefits and Hazards article, Branden wrote:To look on the dark side, however, part of her vision of justice is urging you to instant contempt for anyone who deviates from reason or morality or what is defined as reason or morality. Errors of knowledge may be forgiven, she says, but not errors of morality. Even if what people are doing is wrong, even if errors of morality are involved, even if what people are doing is irrational, you do not lead people to virtue by contempt. You do not make people better by telling them they are despicable. It just doesn't work. It doesn't work when religion tries it and it doesn't work when objectivism tries it. Again, from the same article:I recall a story I once read by a psychiatrist, a story about a tribe that has a rather unusual way of dealing with moral wrongdoers or lawbreakers. Such a person, when his or her infraction is discovered, is not reproached or condemned but is brought into the center of the village square--and the whole tribe gathers around. Everyone who has ever known this person since the day he or she was born steps forward, one by one, and talks about anything and everything good this person has ever been known to have done. The speakers aren't allowed to exaggerate or make mountains out of molehills; they have to be realistic, truthful, factual. And the person just sits there, listening, as one by one people talk about all the good things this person has done in the course of his or her life. Sometimes, the process takes several days. When it's over, the person is released and everyone goes home and there is no discussion of the offense--and there is almost no repetition of offenses (Zunin, 1970).
In the objectivist frame of reference there is the assumption, made explicit in John Galt's speech in "Atlas Shrugged," and dramatized throughout the novel in any number of ways, that the most natural, reasonable, appropriate response to immoral or wrong behavior is contempt and moral condemnation. Psychologists know that that response tends to increase the probability that that kind of behavior will be repeated. This is an example of what I mean by the difference between a vision of desirable behavior and the development of an appropriate psychological technology that would inspire people to practice it. In his 1999 memoir My Years with Ayn Rand, after a positive comment on Ayn Rand's notion of justice as including the appreciation of the good, Branden writes:Ayn also urged her followers not "to withhold contempt from men's vices." Hence the violently abusive language with which she and her followers characterized actions of which they did not approve. After our break, I came to understand, more deeply than I had before, that even if what people are doing is wrong, even if they are being irrational and committing errors of morality, we do not lead them to virtue and rationality by projecting contempt. We do not make people better by telling them they are despicable. If the goal is to inspire positive change, a better strategy than scorn and abusive condemnation is required (373-4). In his 2004 interview with Alec Mouhibian for Free Radical:NB: Anytime a client comes to me complaining about their parents, I automatically think of their grandparents, whose behaviors often explain everything. That's the curse of being a psychologist: that you think of such things. It's really nicer to be able to say, "Oh, what a bastard." But being aware of everybody's story, it's much tougher to get mad at people.
AM: But there is a point at which one must assume responsibility.
NB: Absolutely, but I have an answer for that. Everybody has to be responsible. That is why, if we were in a relationship, and you had a terrible father and grandfather, and I don't like the way you deal with me, I might say, "Alec, listen. I need for you to know that you're turning me off. I need for you to know that when you do such and such, it really kills my interest in being a friend of yours. Am I mad at you? No. Am I condemning you as an immoral person? No. But if you feel the need to continue doing these things, there's no place for us to go from here."
Now that's the type of conversation that might terminate a relationship. But I wouldn't feel a need to tell you that you're immoral or that you have no integrity. That's all pointless and destructive. It's just to make me right and to make me superior. Unnecessary. I only have to know that I don't like what you're doing.
I think that's a very important clarification, especially when talking to an Objectivist. Because Rand always says, "Never pass up an opportunity to pass moral judgment." Well I say: "Look for an opportunity to do something more useful instead." Nobody was led to virtue by being told he was a scoundrel. Before turning to the most revealing quote of all, let me pause to comment on a few points.
Branden substantially distorts the Objectivist view of moral judgment in myriad ways. (1) He portrays Objectivism as demanding wild, careless moralizing: Ayn Rand supposedly urges "instant contempt" toward the person for any moral breach using "violently abusive language." (2) He presents the Objectivist standards of morality in subjectivist terms, in that moral condemnation is supposedly required of "anyone who deviates ... what is defined as reason or morality" or "actions of which [Ayn Rand and her followers] did not approve." (3) He falsely describes Ayn Rand's commitment to moral judgment as "the assumption... that the most natural, reasonable, appropriate response to immoral or wrong behavior is contempt and moral condemnation" -- rather than as a well-justified conclusion about the necessity of objective moral judgment by the standard of human life. (4) He wrongly implies that Objectivism requires all moral judgments to be expressed.
In light of Nathaniel Branden's history with Ayn Rand and as a spokesman for Objectivism, these misrepresentations cannot be excused as honest misunderstandings. As we've already seen, Ayn Rand's own writings on moral judgment routinely contradict his claims about the wild moralism encouraged by Objectivism. Also, nothing in the hours of Ayn Rand's Q&As that I've heard in recent years supports the claim that she set a bad personal example on this score. However, Nathaniel Branden's misrepresentations of Objectivism do serve a purpose: they constitute an absurdly unappealing strawman against which he contrasts his own warm and fuzzy approach to wrongdoing. So what is that approach?
The common refrain in the above quotes is that our response to another person's wrongdoing should be governed by concern for the well-being of that person. So when harmed by the willful immorality of another person -- think of a husband's infidelity, a friend's spiteful outburst, or a co-worker's empty promises -- we should not concern ourselves with the real threat that the person's character flaw poses to our values. Rather, we should focus on somehow inspiring the person to behave better in the future. However, that somehow must not include honest identification of the wrongdoing for what it is, since that supposedly just encourages more of the same. We should avoid objective moral judgment entirely, instead stating our complaint in terms of our own personal preferences and boundaries.
That general view is readily apparent in Branden's own words. He repeatedly objects to moral judgment on the grounds that "you do not lead people to virtue by contempt" or "make people better by telling them they are despicable." He describes moral judgment as a "pointless and destructive" method of making us feel "superior" to the wrongdoer. He encourages us to "do something more useful" than moral judgment -- where "useful" clearly means useful to the wrongdoer. He's delighted by the story of the supposed tribe in which a person's wrongs are never acknowledged, explained, or discussed. He recommends objecting to the immoral choices of others in subjective terms like "You're turning me off" and "I don't like the way you deal with me." He even recommends not thinking in terms of objective moral judgments, since "I only have to know that I don't like what you're doing."
In essence, Nathaniel Branden is advocating altruism supported by dishonesty and subjectivism -- toward the very people who endanger our lives and happiness by their own deliberate choices. For just a moment, try to imagine Hank Rearden abandoning his ruthless commitment to justice for the pointless torture of cajoling the brother he knows to be worthless, the mother he knows to be dishonest, and the wife he knows to be vicious into showing his work a bit more respect. (Personally, I'm glad that I cannot even imagine that degradation!)
Branden does qualify his altruistic admonitions in the above passages only once, with "if the goal is to inspire positive change." In some cases -- particularly as concerns basically good people of personal importance to us -- that goal is entirely reasonable. Yet such a person would regard the methods recommended by Branden as degrading condescension, not kindness. A basically good person is more than strong enough to hear a firm moral objection to some action from a concerned friend or spouse -- and to evaluate it objectively. He would know that honest identification of any wrongs is required of him -- not just to make amends to those he harmed, but also to rectify the source defects in his moral character. He knows that if he instead chooses to sink into further immorality, he has no one to blame but himself. In short, he need not be manipulated into superficially better behavior, as Branden claims.
In my experience, only a person with substantial moral defects to conceal from himself would respond to that kind of moral entreaty with the insecure defensiveness, let alone repeat immorality, described by Branden. In fact, his portrayal of that response as natural and normal depends upon his false presentation of objective moral judgment as expressing "scorn and abusive condemnation" and "instant contempt" for the person using "violently abusive language." In fact, such wild moralizing is not consistent with the Objectivist virtue of justice -- as Branden surely knows.
A person with substantial moral defects may well be able to redeem himself, if truly dedicated to change. He may benefit from the substantial help of a good therapist -- or the more limited help of family and friends. Yet ultimately, he must save his own soul by his own choices: no one else can perform that hard task for him, nor even "inspire" it. Until that happens, however, the protection of our values demands clear recognition of a person's ongoing failures. So if your mixed-character boss manages budgets and schedules well but ignores brewing conflicts amongst his employees, you must know that clearly to prevent your projects from being derailed by personal conflicts. (Notably, doing any more than informing your boss of particular conflicts in need of attention in an attempt to "inspire positive change" would be quite inappropriate.) And if your evil neighbor steadfastly denies the overwhelming evidence that her husband is a child molester, you must judge her to be unfit to look after your children under any circumstances, lest she give her husband access to them. (Notably, attempting to "inspire positive change" by presenting more and more evidence of molestation would be pointless, since she will more than likely evade any evidence presented to her.)
To take a more personal example, when I condemned Nathaniel Branden as evil, my purpose was to clearly identify the basic nature of his moral character, so as to guide my actions accordingly. I wanted to withdraw my prior sanction of him as clearly and forcefully as possible, both for myself and for others. I wanted to clearly identify why I would never again trust his claims about Ayn Rand, nor allow him to use my property as a platform, nor again publish in an anthology that included his writings, nor participate on mailing lists with him, nor buy his latest book, and so on. I hope that I did effectively heap "scorn and abusive condemnation" upon him -- as he richly deserves it. I do not care one bit whether that "inspires" him to more or less dishonesty in his criticisms of Ayn Rand and Objectivism. His personal and intellectual dishonesty depends entirely upon his own choices -- and he bears the full burden of blame for it. In fact, I regard him as well-beyond moral redemption. He could not possibly compensate for his years of willful evil in the remaining few years of his life.
So now let us consider one final quote, this one from his 1999 essay "Objectivism and Libertarianism":About ten years ago, I came across a saying from the Talmud that impressed me profoundly. I have not been able to stop thinking about it. I have often wondered what might have happened if I'd had the chance to discuss the idea with Ayn--if there would have been any way to break through. Who knows what might have been different in the years that followed?
The line that so impressed me was: "A hero is one who knows how to make a friend out of an enemy." In other words, Ayn Rand, Leonard Peikoff, and everyone else who sees Nathaniel Branden for the vile scoundrel that he is -- we are somehow responsible for failing to set him on a better moral path. We ought to have transformed our enemy Nathaniel Branden into a friend -- yet we refused to even try! Shame on us!
That demand that others take responsibility for his moral depravity, I submit, is the true aim of Nathaniel Branden's altruistic ramblings on moral judgment.
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Aromatherapy
By Diana Hsieh @ 10:08 PM
Sometimes I wonder whether my writings on NoodleFood clearly convey my personality, particularly for those readers whom I haven't yet met. I also wonder whether my philosophical friends even know about some of the more obscure aspects of my life.
For example, early this morning, I enjoyed a particularly fantastic cross-country ride on my mare Tara, with my devoted dog Abby following close behind. (Truly, to be in the saddle of a good horse is to be in the best spot in the whole universe.) Then, late this evening, Paul and I went out to feed the horses after a long but enjoyable day in Boulder for a 2FROG meeting and FROLIC dinner. While Paul was busy mucking the stalls, I spent a few minutes just leaning up against that wonderfully warm and muscular mare of mine, breathing in her fantastically horsey smell. (That lovely smell should not be confused with the more mixed smell of barn.) It was a perfectly relaxing few minutes.
Now, anyone unfamiliar with the grip of that strange and lovely passion for horses is sure to think that I am completely mad. So be it!
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Wal-Mart Kicking Major Butt in the Free Market
By Paul Hsieh @ 7:08 AM
According to the latest rankings from the National Retail Federation listing US retailers according to their 2004 gross sales, Wal-Mart was a clear #1, racking up a total of over $288 billion last year. This was nearly 4 times the gross sales of #2 Home Depot, and was greater than the combined totals of retailers #2 through #6.
Here's the list of the Top Ten (in billions of $):1. Wal-Mart $288.2 Bentonville, Ark.
2. Home Depot $73.1 Atlanta
3. Kroger $56.4 Cincinnati
4. Costco $47.1 Issaquah, Wash.
5. Target $46.8 Minneapolis
6. Albertsons $39.9 Boise, Idaho
7. Walgreens $37.5 Deerfield, Ill.
8. Lowe's $36.5 Mooresville, N.C.
9. Sears $36.1 Hoffman Estates, Ill.
10. Safeway $35.8 Pleasanton, Calif.
Interested readers can find the full list of the Top 100 here (PDF format, starting page 5). Interestingly enough, one of our favorite stores Trader Joe's (alas not available here in Colorado!) came in at #61, just a couple of slots behind Borders Books at #59. Amazon Books was listed at #40, ahead of both Borders and #50 Barnes & Noble.
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A Serious Moral Lesson
By Diana Hsieh @ 8:50 AM
In the chapter on "The Plot-Theme" in The Art of Fiction, Ayn Rand says:My heroes in The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, Roark and Galt, hold no contradictory values; it is through their friends, or the woman they love, that they are put into inner conflicts. The main line of the inner conflict of each concerns his (proper) love for a woman who, having not yet reached his level, is in some way still tied to the conventional world. Through her, the hero is throw into conflict with a world in which he now has something at stake. In the case of Roark and Dominique, the fault is Dominique's; she is guilty of holding a mistaken, though not irrational, philosophy. Once she comes to hold the right philosophy, there is no clash, and the hero's two values, love and career, coincide. That passage reminded me of a rather funny remark that Paul made many months ago. Although I no longer remember the particulars, we were discussing some conflict of mine about which he had some definite view. After a pause in the conversion, he said, still in a very serious tone of voice, "You know, a common theme in both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged is that the woman went back and forth, but the man was right all along."
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| Friday, August 19, 2005 |
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Ayn Rand on Racism
By Diana Hsieh @ 8:01 AM
At last Saturday's FROG meeting, we discussed the essays from Return of the Primitive under the heading "The Politics." I lead the discussion on Ayn Rand's "Racism" article, also found in The Virtue of Selfishness. In my introductory comments, I contrasted some of the standard arguments against racism offered by philosophers today with Ayn Rand's views. I'm going to do the same here, only in reverse order.
Ayn Rand begins the "Racism" article as follows:Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man's genetic lineage--the notion that a man's intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors. She then analyzes the primitive forms of determinism and collectivism which underlie racism. Regarding determinism, she writes:Racism claims that the content of a man's mind (not his cognitive apparatus, but its content) is inherited; that a man's convictions, values and character are determined before he is born, by physical factors beyond his control. This is the caveman's version of the doctrine of innate ideas--or of inherited knowledge--which has been thoroughly refuted by philosophy and science. Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. It is a barnyard or stock-farm version of collectivism, appropriate to a mentality that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and men. Regarding collectivism, she writes:Even if it were proved--which it is not--that the incidence of men of potentially superior brain power is greater among the members of certain races than among the members of others, it would still tell us nothing about any given individual and it would be irrelevant to one's judgment of him. A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race--and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin. It is hard to say which is the more outrageous injustice: the claim of Southern racists that a Negro genius should be treated as an inferior because his race has "produced" some brutes--or the claim of a German brute to the status of a superior because his race has "produced" Goethe, Schiller and Brahms. Determinism and collectivism are the rotten philosophical roots of racism. The consequence of racism is horrible injustice on an individual scale and mass slaughter on a social scale. That's just a quick taste of Ayn Rand's article, but hopefully enough to jog your memory.
Now, consider the analysis of the evils of racism offered in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy by philosopher James Nickel, under the heading "What makes discrimination wrong?" Just for fun, I'll note the basic philosophic premises of his four arguments in brackets like this [DMH: Oh, how idiotic!].Consider a clear violation of the anti-discrimination principle, such as an employer prejudicially refusing to hire or even consider blacks for work in a restaurant. What is wrong with such an action? First, it is insulting to blacks because of its underlying premise that some racial groups are less worthy than others. [DMH: That's collectivism, since it concerns insults to racial groups rather than to individuals.] Second, it is harmful to blacks because it often reduces self-esteem and produces a sense of inferiority, and because it deprives people of opportunities that would have allowed them to live better lives and make greater contributions to society. [DMH: First, it's subjective concern for feelings, then altruistic concern for the lives of others, then collectivist concern for social contributions.] Discrimination in education and employment will tend to reduce a group's aspirations and productivity by reducing the payoff of investments in education and work experience. [DMH: More collectivist concern for the group.] Third, discrimination is often irrational. It frequently relies on unjustified beliefs and stereotypes, and selects people on irrelevant and arbitrary grounds. [DMH: Oh this sounds promising!] Although it is not in general morally wrong to act irrationally, irrational actions that distribute important goods in ways that harm and disadvantage other people may indeed be wrong because they are unfair. [DMH: Oops, nevermind. Irrationality is A-OK so long as it doesn't harm others. That's altruism again.] Finally, the most important reason why discrimination is wrong is that it is unfair. Victims of racial discrimination in employment, for example, can legitimately complain that as full members of society who have done their part in preparing to participate in and contribute to society it is unfair for them to be handicapped in areas such as education, employment and politics by discrimination flowing from other people's prejudices. [DMH: That's more collectivist and altruistic concern for social contributions, in good Rawlsian fashion.] That's just lovely, no?
Actually, those four terrible arguments aren't all that bad when compared to the egalitarianism of Peter Singer and Tom Regan, both of whom argue that the evils and racism and sexism can only be eliminated by refusing to acknowledge any moral differences between people.
To that kind of irrationality, all I can say is "Thank God for Ayn Rand!"
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The Delights of The Art of Fiction
By Diana Hsieh @ 7:56 AM
I recently read Ayn Rand's The Art of Fiction. It was a delightfully interesting book, even though I have zero interest in writing fiction and precious little time to read it. Like its excellent companion The Art of Nonfiction, many of the general discussions were philosophically meaty. Some of its advice was also surprisingly relevant to writing non-fiction. Perhaps most importantly, I expect that I'll be able to better appreciate The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged when I read them next. (I'm planning to listen to the audiobooks in a few weeks. I hope that the slow and steady pace will help me notice elements of style that I otherwise tend to miss in my usual mad rush of excited reading.)
In short: I highly recommend the book. Go read it now, if you haven't already!
For those of you who have already read it, you might be interested -- in a morbidly curious kind of way -- to read the review of the book written by Russ LaValle for The Objectivist Center. It is supremely typical of the intellectual approach at TOC: The author tosses off snide comments critical of Ayn Rand, as if whatever pops out of his noodle were worthy of consideration. In his case, that subjectivism is buttressed by a second-handed concern for agreement from supposed authorities in the world of literature. Let me offer a few examples.
In the introduction, LaValle summarizes Ayn Rand's views about the need to convey abstractions through concretes, rather than writing in terms of floating abstractions. He notes that "a prime example of this phenomenon [of floating abstractions], Rand believes, is Thomas Wolfe, 'who uses a vast number of words, none of them precisely' (10)." He then adds, without any further explanation: "Many would argue that Wolfe used enough words precisely enough to make Look Homeward, Angel a modern classic. But, that said, Rand's basic principle is unexceptionable." So long as that book is "a modern classic," apparently we need not consider how Thomas Wolfe actually uses language in it.
A bit later, in discussing Ayn Rand's criticisms of the incoherent characterization in Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith, he first accuses her of being "out of touch with young people's behavior" (!) and then says: "Also, she forgets that Sinclair Lewis was primarily a satirical novelist and social critic; indeed, it was this aspect of his work that was cited when, in 1930, he became the first American to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930: Arrowsmith was written as a satire of the medical profession and of its ideals." That's completely irrelevant to Ayn Rand's criticisms, since even satirists ought to offer coherent portraits of their characters. Yet at least LaValle is able to sneak in that all-important mention of the Nobel Prize!
LaValle peppers the review of criticisms of similar quality. He objects to the dialogue in Ayn Rand's novels as "stilted and overly philosophical" without bothering to cite any concrete examples. He claims that "as a historical period [Naturalism] was rather short-lived," even though the avant-garde was hardly Ayn Rand's only concern. He rejects Ayn Rand's rational explanation of creativity in favor of a vague and mysterious appeal to inspiration.
Also, in typical TOC style, he complains that "the tone of her approach to [Romanticism and Naturalism] offers no room for opposing viewpoints." I have no idea what might have inspired that complaint, as Ayn Rand's tone was that of friendly explanation throughout the book. Perhaps LaValle would have liked her to fake meekness and uncertainty. He is also troubled that "Rand often makes harsh, sweeping, moralistic condemnations of Naturalism without supplying sufficient evidence for her own views," since "as other have critics noted [sic: as other critics have noted], such broad over-generalizations and denunciations in Rand's writing and speaking seem undignified and unnecessary." I will not dignify that with a response, except to note that it's part projection, part context-dropping. Oh, but I'm glad he was able to mention that all-important authoritative unnamed other critics!
Perhaps the most awful criticism concerns a single small compliment that Ayn Rand pays herself in the book about her precision in language:Rand's lack of evidence becomes particularly offputting when she feels it necessary to add a personal coda to her wholesale evaluations and generalizations. "In regard to precision of language," she says, "I think I myself am the best writer today." Perhaps. Again, this is a sweeping remark made without corroborating evidence. In 1958, after all, more than a few pretenders claimed the throne of linguistic precision (whatever other flaws they may have possessed): Albert Camus, Isak Dinesen, William Golding, Robert Graves, John Steinbeck, and Vladimir Nabokov, not to mention Ernest Hemingway, whose economy of language was specifically cited in his 1954 Nobel Prize for literature. DEAR GOD, HOW COULD SHE DO SUCH A HORRIBLE THING?!? How dare she express her opinion without considering all those "pretenders [who] claimed the throne of linguistic precision"?!? In fact, Ayn Rand's later analyses of her own use of language show an impressive mastery over every word. Oh, and don't miss the mention of the Nobel Prize -- I hope that you're as impressed by it as I am!
In light of this review, let me suggest a new motto for The Objectivist Center: "Defending Ayn Rand as an Pretty Decent Novelist and Philosopher, Despite Our Many Distortions of Her Work." Actually, that would be a generous interpretation of this hack of a review.
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| Wednesday, August 17, 2005 |
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Atlas Movie News
By Diana Hsieh @ 8:27 AM
Adam Reed sent me this link to the summary of the supposedly forthcoming movie of Atlas Shrugged. (By way of background, I blogged the initial announcement about the movie way back when. In response to worries about the assignment of screenwriter Jim Hart, who seemingly butchered the story of Contact in writing the script, Ian Hamet wrote up some lengthy comments on why Hart might not have been responsible.) In any case, here's the current summary:ATLAS SHRUGGED
Written by: Jim V. Hart
Based on the novel ATLAS SHRUGGED by Ayn Rand
GENRE: Action Drama
LOG LINE: Dagny Taggart, one of the great heroines of modern literature, struggles to fulfill her great-grandfather's legacy as she steers her family's railroad conglomerate through the triple threat of government corruption, international terrorism and a mysterious force that is silencing the great thinkers of the day.
SYNOPSIS: Ayn Rand's groundbreaking novel foresees an American future eerily similar to the future that America faces today. The politics of fear embodied by stringent government regulation and irresponsible foreign policy have driven American society to the brink of collapse. Against this backdrop, Dagny Taggart wrestles her corrupt and dissolute brother for control of their great-grandfather's railroad conglomerate. Determined to live up to her ancestor's name, Dagny steers the railroad through a minefield of government sabotage, domestic disintegration, and international terrorism. All the while the destruction of the American way is hastened by a mysterious force that is silencing the great thinkers of the day. Their disappearance inspires a universal sense of fatalistic dread that is summed up by the new popular catchphrase: "Who is John Galt?"
TIME PERIOD/LOCATION: Near future - United States The reference to "international terrorism" is disturbing, as that could signal a substantial change in the plot. However, I'm far more worried about the multiple references to Dagny as "struggl[ing] to fulfill her great-grandfather's legacy" and "determined to live up to her ancestor's name." Remember Dagny's actual attitude toward Nat Taggart:Dagny regretted at times that Nat Taggart was her ancestor. What she felt for him did not belong in the category of unchosen family affections. She did not want her feeling to be the thing one was supposed to owe an uncle or a grandfather. She was incapable of love for any object not of her own choice and she resented anyone's demand for it. But had it been possible to choose an ancestor, she would have chosen Nat Taggart, in voluntary homage and with all of her gratitude. (Atlas Shrugged: Part I, Chapter 3) In essence, Dagny has the same attitude toward Nat Taggart as Ayn Rand did toward West Point:West Point has given America a long line of heroes, known and unknown. You, this year's graduates, have a glorious tradition to carry on--which I admire profoundly, not because it is a tradition, but because it is glorious. Dagny is motivated by her own life and values in Atlas Shrugged, not by her family tradition. If Nat Taggart were not her ancestor, she would live her life in exactly the same way. His role in the story is to serve as a personal symbol of America's past greatness -- and present loss. To present Dagny as substantially motivated by such ties of blood in the movie would not just undercut her rationality and selfishness: it would undermine the whole theme of the role of reason in man's life. That would be a disaster.
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Axiomatic
By Diana Hsieh @ 7:24 AM
From Don Watkins:I am pleased to announce that I'm currently developing an online magazine, Axiomatic.
Since The Intellectual Activist became almost exclusively a current events publication, there has been no place for Objectivists to publish or read articles that analyze Objectivism, apply Objectivist principles to other fields of study, or help readers integrate Objectivism into daily lives. I've decide to create such a forum.
Axiomatic is a publication for Objectivists who wish to write seriously about Objectivist topics that are inappropriate for mainstream publications, and who do not wish to write for anti-Objectivist publications. (We will also welcome authors who wish to publish anonymously in order to protect their identity - especially individuals pursuing careers in academia, a world often hostile to Objectivists.)
As this project moves forward, I will keep you all informed of its progress. For people who are interested in receiving regular updates by email, please send me an email with the subject line, "Axiomatic: Reader."
To those interested in writing for us: Axiomatic is not affiliated with any other organization or publication, but it is committed to Objectivism and therefore will not publish works by enemies of Objectivism or of Ayn Rand - this includes but is not limited to libertarians, anarchists, "tolerationists," people Ayn Rand condemned or who've condemned Ayn Rand, and anyone who sanctions members of the aforementioned groups.
Additionally, Axiomatic will only publish works that demonstrate a thorough, sophisticated understanding of Objectivism. Anyone may subscribe to and read Axiomatic, but in order to adhere to the highest standards of quality, we ask that those best described as "students of Objectivism" not submit anything for publication.
That said, if you are interested in writing for us, send me an email with the subject line "Axiomatic: Writer," and I will send you a copy of our submission guidelines.
I am also looking for one or two advanced Objectivists who would be interested in a role either as a senior editor or as consulting editor (this latter position would involve intellectual consultation rather than copy editing), so if that interests you, let me know as well.
This is a for-profit venture, so all participants will be paid for their efforts.
One final note: no one is authorized to speak for Ayn Rand or Objectivism - certainly not I. Every author will speak only for himself, and although it is our policy not to publish anything that isn't congruent with Objectivist principles, each reader will have to judge for himself whether we've succeeded at that task.
Thank you all!
Don Watkins
egoist(at)gmail.com I'm a bit worried about this project sucking up Don's valuable time, but I'm also pleased to see such a forum on the horizon.
Oh, and Don's second CapMag article on Killing "Innocents" in War is well worth reading.
Update: Daniel Schwartz comments on the exclusion of libertarians.
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| Tuesday, August 16, 2005 |
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Libertarian Activism: No Parody Required
By Diana Hsieh @ 10:31 AM
My friend Ari Armstrong also recently sent me this e-mail, which he has also graciously allowed me to reprint here, since it was just so damn fantastic. (You might recall that Ari used to be a libertarian activist.)I thought you might enjoy (or at least find perversely humorous) these criteria for earning a Lights of Liberty Award from Advocates for Self-Government.
This is from "Liberator Online: a Libertarian president in 2016?" dated August 9, 2005.
So here are two ways to earn the award:
1) Letters to the Editor: get 3 or more letters published that use the words "libertarian" or "libertarianism" in a positive light.
2) Public Speaking: give 3 or more prepared speeches to a predominately non-libertarian audience, using the words "libertarian" or "libertarianism" in a positive light.
This typifies the activism-without-particular-content strategy popular among many libertarians.
(Imagine if there were a similar award for "Objectivists!")
Here's a hypothetical example of my own design:
"Dear editor, My neighbor is a Christian libertarian vegan who believes it's wrong to murder animals and pollute the environment with industrialization. But my other neighbor is an atheistic libertarian who claims ethics are social standards, and our society likes to eat meat, but he says society should recognize personal desires more. But I think they're both swell, because they both say I'm a great libertarian because I want pull all U.S. troops out of the Middle East and apologize for America's long history of global oppression. Vote Libertarian!"
Such a letter would have to count toward the award, right? And, while the views I describe are caricatured, they are fairly close to views I have heard expressed by libertarians. I doubt that a better example of concrete-bound thinking could be invented than this contest, even by the most imaginative writer of fiction.
As Ari later noted to me, even if some people do write some reasonably good letters, the basic fact remains: the contest has no standards whatsoever. The term "libertarianism" can be given any meaning whatsoever and praised by any standard of the good. It's as if mere mentions of the word have some kind of magic power, regardless of what is actually said. If that's not subjectivism, I'm not sure what is.
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2005 Ayn Rand Society
By Diana Hsieh @ 8:06 AM
Hooray! The 2005 meeting of the Ayn Rand Society looks fantastic! It will be held during the Eastern Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association, in New York City, on Thursday December 29th from 1:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. at the New York Hilton.
Under the general topic of "Ayn Rand as Aristotelian," the meeting will consist of the following speakers and topics:
James G. Lennox (University of Pittsburgh), "Axioms and their Validation"
Allan Gotthelf (University of Pittsburgh), "Concepts and Essences"
Fred D. Miller, Jr. (Bowling Green State University), "Values and Happiness"
Robert Mayhew (Seton Hall University), "Literary Esthetics"
Happily, the announcement contained the following note: "The program will be chaired by Professor John M. Cooper of Princeton University. Professor Cooper is Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton and is a world-renowned scholar of ancient philosophy. He was chairman of Princeton's Philosophy dept. from 1984 to 1992, and was President of the APA Eastern Division in 1999-2000."
If you want to attend the meetings or just receive copies of the papers presented, you ought to become a member or contributor. For those interested in academic Objectivism, it's well worth the few bucks.
Crossposted to The Egosphere.
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| Monday, August 15, 2005 |
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Our Old Friend Jean-Jacques
By Diana Hsieh @ 9:06 PM
I think that Andrew Sullivan's guest blogger Walter Kirn is channeling Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In response to the 1755 Lisbon earthquake that killed tens of thousands, Rousseau wrote to Voltaire:I do not see how one can search for the source of moral evil anywhere but in man's freedom and perfection--which are also his corruption. As for our physical pains: if sensate and impassible matter is, as I think, a contradiction in terms, then pains are inevitable in any world of which man forms a part--and the question them becomes not 'why is man not perfectly happy' but 'why does he exist at all?' Moreover, I think I have shown that most of our physical pains, except for death--which is hardly painful, except for the preparations that precede it--are also our own work. Without leaving your Lisbon subject, concede, for example, that it was hardly nature who assembled there twenty-thousand houses of six or seven stories. If the residents of this large city had been more evenly dispersed and less densely housed, the losses would have been fewer or perhaps none at all. Everyone would have fled at the first shock, and would have been seen two days later, twenty leagues away and as happy as if nothing had happened. But we have to stay and expose ourselves to further tremors, many obstinately insisted, because what we would have to leave behind is worth more than what we could carry away. How many unfortunates perished in this disaster for wanting to take--one his clothing, another his papers, a third his money? They know so well that a person has become the least part of himself, and that he is hardly worth saving if all the rest is lost.
You would have liked--and who would not have liked--the earthquake to have happened in the middle of some desert, rather than in Lisbon. Can we doubt that they also happen in deserts? But no one talks about those, because they have no ill effects for city gentlemen (the only men about whom anyone cares anything). For that matter, desert earthquakes have little effect on the animals and scattered savages who inhabit such spots--and who have no reason to fear falling roofs or tumbling buildings. What would such a privilege mean to us? Will we say that the order of the world must change to suit our whims, that nature must be subject to our laws, that in order to prevent an earthquake in a certain spot, all we have to do is build a city there? Ah yes, if only we humans weren't so corrupt as to gather ourselves into cities, such disasters would never befall us! Consider the similarity of that message to Walter Kirn's recent post on terrorism:TERROR FROM MONTANA: I'll start with something that's been bugging me but that I haven't had a forum to write about: this idea, almost universally agreed upon, that Americans mustn't let terrorism change our way of life. I disagree. Our way of life had its problems before Osama appeared, and we probably could have stood to change it then, but now that we have the added impetus of being collectively attacked in ways that we never dreamed about in past years, I think it's high time that we did a few thing differently that maybe we should have done already
Like, say, spread out a little geographically. I live in Montana, way out in the country, near towns that have been abandoned and depopulated and could use a few resources from the threatened cities that have made themselves sitting ducks for sabotage by building their infrastructures so dense and tall that a pellet gun could knock them over. There's a price for supersaturating small areas with people, wealth, and technology, and now we're paying it by trying to secure in thousands of ways targets that are inviting as they come. This folly of rebuilding the World Trade Center proves that we'd rather be proud and stubborn than safe. Here we go piling up the blocks again just to show how bloodied but unbowed we are instead of learning our lesson and reshaping things. It's not the de-urbanization of the cities that I'm dreaming about here, it's the re-urbanization of the towns -- places where strangers can easily be spotted and people can't be vaporized by the hundreds merely by stuffing a few bombs into some backpacks.
Maybe I don't sound serious. I am. At least in this respect I am: responding to terrorism with inflexibility isn't going to work, I fear, and unless we start entertaining notions as wild and possibly half-baked as situating our treasure and our people in places where they don't invite assault we're not only daring the bad guys to bring it on, we're forgetting that the beauty of our society is that it can mold itself to new realities rather than march in lockstep like the Redcoats toward all-too-predictable catastrophes. Kirn differs from Rousseau in some important respects. Unlike earthquakes, terrorists can be eliminated -- yet Kirn wishes us to accommodate ourselves to them instead, as if they were a fact of nature. So the call to large cities for small towns is not motivated by primitivism but by a cowardly refusal to fight the enemy.
If that's depressing, you can liven your spirits by reading this famous bit from Voltaire, written shortly before the Lisbon earthquake, about Rousseau's essays The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality among Men and The Essay against Civilization.I have received, sir, your new book against the human species, and I thank you for it. You will please people by your manner of telling them the truth about themselves, but you will not alter them. The horrors of that human society--from which in our feebleness and ignorance we expect so many consolations--have never been painted in more striking colors: no one has ever been so witty as you are in trying to turn us into brutes: to read your book makes one long to go on all fours. Since, however, it is now some sixty years since I gave up the practice, I feel that it is unfortunately impossible for me to resume it: I leave this natural habit to those more fit for it than are you and I. Nor can I set sail to discover the aborigines of Canada, in the first place because my ill-health ties me to the side of the greatest doctor in Europe, and I should not find the same professional assistance among the Missouris: and secondly because war is going on in that country, and the example of the civilized nations has made the barbarians almost as wicked as we are ourselves. I must confine myself to being a peaceful savage in the retreat I have chosen--close to your country, where you yourself should be. Ouch!
Update: Mark Wickens was kind enough to alert me to the fact that it wasn't Andrew Sullivan blogging, but rather his guest Walter Kirn.
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Altruism in Action
By Diana Hsieh @ 8:27 AM
This letter got top billing in yesterday's "Dear Abby":DEAR ABBY: An ex-girlfriend from three years ago has asked me to help her work on a project that will further her career.
I am already established, and have been known to help people on occasion. I want her to succeed, but the problem with this particular charity case is the reason we broke up. It happened just days before I planned to propose to her, when I found out that she had been unfaithful to me.
Originally, I didn't want to help her and told her I thought the situation would make me uncomfortable because I would have to spend a lot of time with her. However, when I related this to a friend, he told me to get over it and help her. (My other friends thought I was a sucker for even considering it.)
I am over the heartbreak I once felt with her, although it took a while. I'm dating now, but have yet to meet someone I click with.
How should I handle this? My initial response was "No -- I think I'd feel too uncomfortable." But I keep second-guessing myself. -- WOBBLY BOUNDARIES IN TEXAS Poor Mr. Wobbly Boundaries! His advice-giving friend is clearly a committed altruist. So even though the ex-girlfriend cheated on him and almost ruined his life, Mr. Boundaries is obliged to help her further her career. (It's not a matter of the promise made to her so long ago, since obviously her infidelity eviscerated any such obligations.) Mr. Boundaries seems philosophically disarmed against such altruism. The best that he can come up with is his own subjective feelings: he would feel uncomfortable. He does not even raise the question of whether a woman like her deserves any help from the man she hurt.
This letter is a nice example of why altruism is particularly dangerous to the people who fail to reject it, even if they never embrace it. They are easy prey.
In case you're curious, Dear Abby's reply gave the right advice, but for wholly inadequate reasons:DEAR WOBBLY: I think the woman had a lot of nerve asking you to help her, considering the terms of your breakup.
Please stop second-guessing yourself; listen to your gut and "pass." Because if you don't, MY gut tells me you are going to get emotionally involved and get hurt again. Oh no, not more feelings!
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| Sunday, August 14, 2005 |
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A Strange Analogy
By Diana Hsieh @ 9:52 PM
Is Daniel Libeskind a real-life Howard Roark? Is his Freedom Tower like the fictional Cortlandt Homes? The comparison is absurd on its face -- yet Aaron Margolis' argues just that. The argument is actually interesting, in that it substantially depends upon floating abstractions, rationalism, and non sequitur -- although not always in obvious ways.
Also, I must admit that I found the naked elitism rather funny: "Rather than welcoming the next generation of architectural masterpieces with open arms, the architecturally ignorant are trying to intrude where they don't belong, trying to, in their minds, improve upon the masters."
Ah yes, how dare I criticize my betters?!? I shall go hide in my dank little corner of the universe now, never daring to even gaze upon the architectural wonders of the exalted masters.
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A Clarification
By Diana Hsieh @ 8:33 AM
Last night, I noticed a response to my post (which said "I don't think that I've ever seen so many trademarks violated on a single page before") in my TrackBacks. It is a response by Timothy Sandefur saying (minus the links):Diane [sic!] Hsieh accuses this website of violating intellectual property by selling items with made-up logos for, say, Taggart Transcontinental and whatnot. I was not aware that Ayn Rand had designed such logos...
But see, the implication is that Rand and her heirs own (in a moral sense, no less) anything whatsoever that uses that phrase because it invokes her creation. And if that is the case, then I am violating intellectual property by having used the phrase "Taggart Transcontinental" in the above paragraph. (Oops! I did it again!) This is the sort of silliness that the natural-right-to-copyright argument leads to. The ownership of genres, the eradication of fair use, and the ultimate stifling of perfectly legitimate uses of liberty--which is to say, the initiation of force against those who have done nothing wrong. Unfortunate, to say the least. While I do think that the Estate of Ayn Rand has legitimate intellectual property claims over the characters of Ayn Rand's novels and the like, I haven't thought at all about the form and limits of that kind of intellectual property. (I do regard this protest as quite absurd, as there is no right to "create anything for 'sale' from the fabulous imagination of Ayn Rand.")
However, my point in my earlier post concerned the abuse of the trademarks of the companies whose logos were adapted.
So last night, I wrote Timothy the following letter:Timothy,
You totally misunderstood my point in your entry on "More Intellectual Property Silliness from Objectivists." The violation of intellectual property concerned the trademarks of Coca-Cola, Pittsburgh Steelers, and so on -- not the estate of Ayn Rand. The logos in question were not "made up" -- but adapted from existing sources.
If you wish to argue against intellectual property rights, that's your own business. But there's no need to misrepresent me in the process.
Since the comments are closed, feel free to quote the above in the correction that I hope you'll post on that entry. My plan was to wait and see whether Timothy would post a correction to his post before commenting on it on NoodleFood. (I didn't want to make a fuss if he was willing to issue a correction.) However, since the Benjo Blog seems to accept Timothy's interpretation of my post in the course of objecting to Timothy's criticisms, I thought I should clarify my original intentions. Just from a quick consideration of the matter, I think that I entirely agree with Benjo's argument about the Estate's property rights on this point. He writes:The question here is not who designed (or manufactured) the logos, but who created the value of these physical objects (and thus, who is entitled by right to the profits). The answer to this is clearly Ayn Rand. The images and phrases make obvious reference to Atlas Shrugged, and count on such a connection to promote their sale. The majority of people who would purchase such items are not interested in them qua physical object, but rather qua Atlas Shrugged paraphernalia. The individual(s) manufacturing them are cashing in on the creation of Ayn Rand; if she had never published Atlas Shrugged, they might be found for sale at Dollar Tree. Any value they would have above that is the result not of their manufacturer, but of Ayn Rand.
I further disagree with Sandefur when he states that Ayn Rand (or her heirs) own anything which mentions Atlas Shrugged. Ayn Rand's IP rights do not protect the mere mention of Atlas Shrugged nor any particular phrase contained therein; she could not sue Sandefur or myself for simply writing the words "Atlas Shrugged" or "Taggart Transcontinental" on our blogs. Rather, her IP rights protect any infringement of the commercial value of the story of Atlas Shrugged. My only point here is that the above wasn't the point of my original blog post.
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Global Dangers
By Diana Hsieh @ 12:01 AM
A few weeks ago, I received this astonishing announcement from Wendy McElroy. As you might know, she runs the ifeminists web site. The weekly newsletter in question was a lovely little round-up of stories related to sex, gender, and so on. It was a quick and easy way to keep up with the news on this topic. It was of particular value because it included interesting stories from out-of-the-way sources. Unfortunately, I will no longer be able to read it so easily. Wendy explains why:Hello to all:
I am sorry to announce that I will no longer be sending out the weekly ifeminists.net newsletter. Instead, the exact same content will be featured on a page of the website. Of course, news can also be accessed on a daily basis by browsing the newsfeed or by an RSS feed.
The reason?
On July 1st, new laws regarding e-mailed newsletters went into effect in Utah and Michigan; other states are close behind. Anne P. Mitchell, President/CEO of the Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy and a law professor, calls those laws "a legal quandry in which every sender of commercial email is about to find themselves." (See Groklaw for more information. And please note: non-commercial emailers seem to be included if their newsletters contain URLs that link to commercial sites or products.)
Both Utah and Michigan have created a "child protection registry" for email addresses that belong to children or to which children have access. It functions like a "no call list." Spamfo.co explains, "Once an email address is on the registry, commercial emailers are prohibited from sending it anything containing advertising, or even just linking to advertising, for a product or service that a minor is otherwise legally prohibited from accessing, such as alcohol, tobacco, gambling, prescription drugs, or adult-rated material." In short, e-newsletters (such as ifeminists.net) are not permitted to send to registered email addresses if those newsletters include URLs to news sites that, in turn, link to child-inappropriate commerical information or products such as casino or viagra ads, tobacco or alcohol for sale.
Many credible news sources -- especially British ones, it seems -- offer links to adult-themed sites or products. These links can change constantly, which means that it is impossible to check a URL and "clear" it of so-called objectionable links or ads.
Moreover, e-mailing to registered addresses is illegal even if the newsletter was requested, and the legal penalties for doing so are imposed without notifying the offender so that he/she can rectify the situation. What are those penalties? To quote Prof. Mitchell again, "Under these laws...that email sender faces strict liability which can include up to 3 years in prison, and fines of $30,000 or more. In addition, ISPs and the individuals whose email addresses are on the registry have a right of action against the sender, as does the state attorney general."
The only protection is for the emailer to make sure that a particular address is not "illegal" by matching his/her mailing list against the registries. That process requires at least two things that I am unwilling to do: 1) turn my mailing list over to the government; and 2) pay a per-address fee for the matching process. Moreover, since I cannot easily ascertain whether a hotmail or aol address has a final destination within Utah or Michigan, I'd have to turn over and pay for virtually every address on a monthly basis to two state governments. (There now are two; there will soon be several more and I would have to keep up with the variations in law in each state.)
Being charged under the new laws may seem to be a remote possibility. And I would not suspend publication were it not for two factors.
First, the enewsletter includes links to news and commentary on sexual issues such as pornography and prostitution, abortion and gay rights. It includes URLs to such discussion and, in turn, those URLs are more likely than many to point to sites the child registries would consider inappropriate. And, according to the Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy, you could be in trouble if your email contains "unpermitted materials, links to unpermitted materials, or even links to sites which have information about the unpermitted materials". The law is *that* broad and *that* vague.
Second, it is difficult to over-state the viciousness and dishonesty of some of the people who attack father's/men's rights advocates. Some have crusaded to destroy the careers, lives, and even harm the families of those who advocate positions like the presumption of shared custody. Given that no notification of an inappropriate address is necessary before penalties can be imposed, I believe it is likely that one of these malicious feminists will subscribe to the ifeminists.net newsletter under an inappropriate address and, then, file a complaint when the e-newsletter arrives.
I won't take that risk. Nor will I turn over addresses to the government, let alone pay for the privilege.
I have enjoyed publishing the newsletter. I hope you have enjoyed receiving it and that will continue to follow the ifeminists.net news and commentary by clicking on our website at your convenience. To repeat: The newsletter content that you have received each week by email will now be available on a web page: here. This web page will give you the week's headlines. As other options, you can visit our main index page for daily updates, or subscribe to our RSS news feed. All three options give you the same news items. Choose the form that's most convenient for you.
Best wishes, as always,
Wendy McElroy
P.S. These laws won't stop foreign spam (our ISP is American) or spam from "zombie" PCs. They will mean cash from the large email marketers; and will simply stop small companies and non-profit organizations from distributing email newsletters. Read Declan McCullagh's article for just some of the ramifications. Remember those heady days when the internet was supposed to circumvent any attempt at government regulation? Even at the time, that seemed naively optimistic. By now, it should be glaringly obvious that government regulations imposed on one geographical region can easily reverberate beyond those borders, precisely because the internet is so very global.
At tonight's FROG meeting, we discussed some of the ominously increasing restrictions on free speech, particularly those pertaining to campaign finance laws. (Our general topic was essays from Return of the Primitive.) Now anti-spam legislation is becoming yet another cover for government regulation of speech. (Of course, the children must be protected!)
I'm worried.
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| Saturday, August 13, 2005 |
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Harry Potter and the Nature of Evil
By Paul Hsieh @ 1:47 PM
While reading the latest Harry Potter book (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince), I was struck by the following passage, in which Dumbledore describes the early career of the evil wizard Voldemort, and the first followers Voldemort assembled while he was still a student at Hogwarts Academy:They were a motley collection; a mixture of the weak seeking protection, the ambitious seeking some shared glory, and the thuggish gravitating toward a leader who could show them more refined forms of cruelty (361-362). What struck me was how nicely author J. K. Rowling captured the nature of the kinds of persons drawn towards evil. As Objectivists would put it, they are all second-handers of one variety or another. The "weak seeking protection" reminded me of the lackeys in The Fountainhead who depended on Ellsworth Toohey for career and life guidance, whereas "the ambitious seeking shared glory" and "the thuggish [interested in] more refined forms of cruelty" were the more traditional power-seekers who are dependent on other people (such as their victims) for their self-esteem.
But what members of all three categories lack is the virtue of independence.
Although I'm sure that Rowling is not an Objectivist, I thought it was interesting that her obviously firm grasp of human nature allowed her to reach this very astute observation on the nature of evil.
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| Friday, August 12, 2005 |
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Tertullian Delights
By Diana Hsieh @ 8:11 AM
Leonard Peikoff often quotes Tertullian (ca. 155-230) on Christian faith ("I believe it because it is absurd") to show just how thoroughly the early Christians rejected the ancient Greek and Roman commitment to reason. In the course of reading A Short History of Medieval Philosophy, I found this delightful passage from Tertullian on the Greek philosophers in "De Praescriptione Haereticorum" (or "The Prescription Against the Heretics"). Of course, it's a philosophical monstrosity. Yet it has the virtue of explicitness, as well as some fantastic rhetoric.
CHAP. VII.--PAGAN PHILOSOPHY THE PARENT OF HERESIES. THE CONNECTION BETWEEN DEFLECTIONS FROM CHRISTIAN FAITH AND THE OLD SYSTEMS OF PAGAN PHILOSOPHY,
These are "the doctrines" of men and "of demons" produced for itching ears of the spirit of this world's wisdom: this the Lord called "foolishness," and "chose the foolish things of the world" to confound even philosophy itself. For (philosophy) it is which is the material of the world's wisdom, the rash interpreter of the nature and the dispensation of God. Indeed heresies are themselves instigated by philosophy. From this source came the AEons, and I known not what infinite forms, and the trinity of man in the system of Valentinus, who was of Plato's school. From the same source came Marcion's better god, with all his tranquillity; he came of the Stoics. Then, again, the opinion that the soul dies is held by the Epicureans; while the denial of the restoration of the body is taken from the aggregate school of all the philosophers; also, when matter is made equal to God, then you have the teaching of Zeno; and when any doctrine is alleged touching a god of fire, then Heraclitus comes in. The same subject-matter is discussed over and over again by the heretics and the philosophers; the same arguments are involved. Whence comes evil? Why is it permitted? What is the origin of man? and in what way does he come? Besides the question which Valentinus has very lately proposed--Whence comes God? Which he settles with the answer: From enthymesis and ectroma. Unhappy Aristotle! who invented for these men dialectics, the art of building up and pulling down; an art so evasive in its propositions, so far-fetched in its conjectures, so harsh, in its arguments, so productive of contentions--embarrassing even to itself, retracting everything, and really treating of nothing! Whence spring those "fables and endless genealogies," and "unprofitable questions," and "words which spread like a cancer?" From all these, when the apostle would restrain us, he expressly names philosophy as that which he would have us be on our guard against. Writing to the Colossians, he says, "See that no one beguile you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, and contrary to the wisdom of the Holy Ghost." He had been at Athens, and had in his interviews (with its philosophers) become acquainted with that human wisdom which pretends to know the truth, whilst it only corrupts it, and is itself divided into its own manifold heresies, by the variety of its mutually repugnant sects. What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church? what between heretics and Christians? Our instruction comes from "the porch of Solomon," who had himself taught that "the Lord should be sought in simplicity of heart."
Away with all attempts to produce a mottled Christianity of Stoic, Platonic, and dialectic composition! We want no curious disputation after possessing Christ Jesus, no inquisition after enjoying the gospel! With our faith, we desire no further belief. For this is our palmary faith, that there is nothing which we ought to believe besides. Try as they might, modern evangelical Christians cannot even aspire to such total irrationality. They might revere those early Christians who drank laundry water and sprinkled their meals with ashes to diminish the physical pleasure of food and drink, mortified their sinful flesh by flagellation, and flung themselves into snowbanks to stop their sinful sexual urges cold (so to speak). Yet they do not mimic such insanity.
We should all be grateful for that, I think.Labels: Religion
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More on Sanction in Speaking
By Diana Hsieh @ 7:11 AM
My friend Ari Armstrong sent me this e-mail the other day, in response to my "Stinky Garbage on Islam" post. I asked him whether I could post it to NoodleFood, since I thought it elucided some valuable distinctions on the propriety of speaking in different fora.
Diana, your critique of Kelly's take on Islam is quite good, and for that reason quite disturbing.
There is a subtlety here, though, pertaining to the Libertarian Supper Club, that just struck me.
There is nothing inherently wrong with inviting different speakers to discuss different moral views. An honest person can reasonably consider alternative ethical theories and evaluate them, before reaching firm moral convictions. And so I conclude that there is nothing inherently wrong with speaking to a group that invites speakers of different persuasions (e.g., Rand speaking at Ford Hall).
But the stated, explicit goal of many in the libertarian movement is to create a coalition of people with varied (i.e., incompatible) moral views. Thus, the motive in inviting speakers with different views is not to honestly evaluate different views and adopt the correct views, but rather to advertise libertarianism as a movement that is consistent with any ethical view. The idea is something like, "Look! Objectivists can be libertarians, too!" Next week, the message is, "Look! Christians can be libertarians, too!" And so on. I think that's the thrust of Schwartz's criticism [in "Libertarianism: The Perversion of Liberty"].
The motive of the speaker is relevant, too. If the motive is to show that Moral View X is one of many possible foundations for libertarianism, then that's a problem. However, I do think it's possible to be ignorant of the full motives of the inviting group, and to go into a forum reasonably believing the goal of the participants is to establish the truth. In other words, it would not be appropriate to automatically condemn somebody just for speaking to a libertarian group about ethics; such a condemnation would require additional evidence concerning the goals of the speaker.
To tie this to Paul's example of the surgeon, there is a difference between speaking to a group one knows to be sympathetic to quacks, and speaking to a group one reasonably believes is pro-science but in fact is not. One can be mistaken in one's initial evaluation of a group. On the other hand, surely the speaker has some responsibility in checking out a speaking engagement first.
Yet I still haven't resolved this issue completely. Here are three examples that illustrate my problems.
1. [Example omitted as it concerns unreliable information about a particular person.]
2. Diana is going to the "Positive Psychology Conference," which pertains to a movement that contains some really bad ideas.
3. I am speaking to an economics reading group about Referendum C. It's not a "libertarian" group, but I know some self-described libertarians will be there. Also, while I will not speak to any Libertarian Party group, I have thought that it would be a good thing if members of that party worked against Referendum C.
There does seem to be a crucial distinction between the sanctioning of bad ideas and the formation of appropriate strategic alliances. I feel like I'm starting to get a better handle on what's appropriate and what's not, but I'm still struggling to completely work this out. I really appreciate Ari's comments on the relevance of the basic purposes of the audience and the speaker: Is the goal to make a rational choice about some issue -- or to show that rational choice is unimportant? That's a really helpful way of framing these questions about sanction in speaking, I think. (Even more, I appreciate Ari's thoughtful approach to this general issue over the past few years, particularly since it's so unusual for someone in his position.)
In the case of David Kelley, it was wrong to speak to the Laissez Faire Supper Club -- and as a professional Objectivist intellectual, he ought to have known that. Yet it was his defense of that action in "A Question of Sanction" that really sealed the moral case against him.
I do have some preliminary answers to the questions Ari raises toward the end, but not the full theory that I'd like. Any thoughts?
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On Testimony
By Diana Hsieh @ 10:01 AM
After a quick read of Don Watkins' recent post on the use and abuse of testimony as evidence, I thought I might have some doubtful questions to raise about it. So I printed it out for Paul and me to discuss on the drive up to a dinner party on Saturday. However, after a careful read and some discussion, I realized that my worries were groundless. I'm almost disappointed!
At this point, I am reduced to this footnote of a comment on Don's warning that "early Christian writers... were not objective observers" but rather "believers trying to spread their message": The Teaching Company's course The New Testament by Bart Ehrman does an excellent job of highlighting the various conflicts between the Gospels -- and then explaining why they aren't significant, given that the purpose of each Gospel is to portray the life of Jesus according to a particular theme, not to accurately record the facts of his life. I've only ever read bits of the Gospels myself, but Ehrman presents a compelling case.
Also, I should mention that Don's comments on the inadmissibility of testimony about causes were quite intriguing to me, likely because I've never thought much about this issue. Here's my take on the matter:
Consider a case in which John wishes to convince us that Mary was killed by a lethal dose of poison administered by her Aunt Bertha. John cannot merely assert that conclusion about the cause of Mary's death -- not if he expects us to agree with him. Why not? Because, as Don says...
Testimony, at its best, can only tell us that something happened, not why it happened. This is inherent in its nature: testimony is a verbal report of an individual's perception of an event, and perception by itself does not lead to the discover[y] of causes. To identify a cause is a conceptual discovery, and while it is based on sense experience, it requires more than sense experience. So John can testify as to the concrete facts he witnessed, e.g. that he saw Mary's Aunt Bertha pour rat poison into her drink, then he saw her drink that drink, then he saw her vomit, convulse, and die. Armed with such particular facts -- hopefully also expert testimony from the doctor who performed the autopsy -- we can determine for ourselves whether John's conclusion of death by poison is adequately supported by the evidence. We might confirm his conclusion. Or we might discover that he was lying to conceal his own murder of Mary. Or we might discover that Mary had no poison in her system because Aunt Bertha actually kept vodka in the rat poison jar to hide it from the alcoholic Uncle Bob. In essence then, John can testify as to the facts he witnessed, but to convince us of his conclusion, he must walk us through the reasoning about those facts that led him to conclude that Bertha poisoned Mary, allowing us to check his every step.
For John to try to testify directly as to the cause of Mary's death instead would be an abuse of the proper standards of epistemology, even if he himself is armed with more than adequate evidence for that conclusion. We would be reduced to accepting his conclusion on faith. So how much worse is it for Christians and other religious folks to demand that we accept testimony not just that some wild and strange event happened, but that the cause was the unseen hand of God? As an arbitrary argument from ignorance, it's much, much worse.
In discussing this issue with Paul, it occurred to me that people often magnify certain reasonable epistemological mistakes into sheer absurdities in attempting to rationally argue for their faith. That's a pattern I'll have to watch out for, I think.Labels: Religion
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Positive Psychology Conference
By Diana Hsieh @ 10:08 AM
Don Watkins and I will be attending the 2005 Positive Psychology Conference in Washington DC from September 29th to October 1st. (It will be my second conference; I also went in 2003.) If you also plan to attend, drop me a line!
For those of you unfamiliar with positive psychology, this quick summary will give you some idea of its basic focus:
During its first century, psychology justifiably focused most of its attention on human suffering. Marked progress as been made in understanding and treating numerous psychological disorders - depression, anxiety, and phobias, to name a few. While alleviating suffering, however, psychology has neglected what makes life most worth living.
Positive Psychology is founded on the belief that people want more than an end to suffering. People want to lead meaningful and fulfilling lives, to cultivate what is best within themselves, to enhance their experiences of love, work, and play. We have the opportunity to create a science and a profession that not only heals psychological damage but also builds strengths to enable people to achieve the best things in life.
...Positive Psychology has three central concerns: positive experiences, positive individual traits, and positive institutions.
Understanding positive emotions entails the study of contentment with the past, happiness in the present, and hope for the future. Understanding positive individual traits consists of the study of the strengths and virtues: the capacity for love and work, courage, compassion, resilience, creativity, curiosity, integrity, self-knowledge, moderation, self-control, and wisdom. Understanding positive institutions entails the study of the strengths that foster better communities, such as justice, responsibility, civility, parenting, nurturance, work ethic, leadership, teamwork, purpose, and tolerance. Despite its self-conscious roots in Aristotle's ethics, positive psychology has its share of flaws. For example, Shelley Taylor's work on "positive illusions" (which I criticized in my "False Excuses" and "Dursley Duplicity" papers) is widely accepted -- meaning that self-deception is regarded as often good (if not necessary) for the soul. Positive psychologists usually fail to differentiate pseudo-self-esteem from genuine self-esteem, in part due to the nominalism of their "operationalist" definitions. As a result, the self-destructive psychopathologies of those with pseudo-self-esteem are often attributed to high self-esteem. The concern for the flourishing of individuals transmogrifies itself into utilitarianism in the social realm, presumably via that primitive Millian fallacy of composition. Lacking the required clarity about the foundations of virtue, positive psychologists tend to use Aristotle's method of appealing to widely-held virtues in our culture. Due to the substantial influence of altruism upon our culture, the result is a rather confused mess. Positive psychology also suffers from the same substitution of statistics for rational inquiry as in psychology generally.
Despite such flaws, positive psychology is substantially better than most of psychology, particularly in comparison to monstrosities like Freudianism or behaviorism! If you want to get a sense for some of the better work, I would recommend starting with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. (The insights of book are not just interesting in the abstract; they lend themselves to application to your daily life.) Personally, I find some of the work in positive psychology to be of substantial interest as an adjunct to my work in ethics, in that it often highlights subtle consequences (both existential and psychological) of different principles of action. It's also refreshing to step out of the ingrown world of academic philosophy, even if only into the ingrown world of academic psychology.
Unfortunately, attending the Positive Psychology Conference will prevent me from watching the full Serenity movie (opening on September 30th!) with the folks from Front Range Objectivism with whom I first discovered Firefly. However, I will not despair, since Don is also a fanatical fan.
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| Monday, August 08, 2005 |
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Legal Story Of The Day
By Paul Hsieh @ 2:37 PM
I heard this on NPR as one of the amusing stories of the day.
An Iowa man who was supposed to face trial on criminal drug charges in South Dakota failed to appear as scheduled. Instead, he had apparently been involved in a DUI hit-and-run car accident in another county, and when the police came to investigate, he led them on a high-speed chase that only ended when he crashed his (stolen) pickup truck into a government building.
In an attempt to elude the pursuing policemen, he ran into the building and attempted to barricade himself in a room, which turned out to be the courtroom where his trial was supposed to have been held. The confused jurors were just about to leave, having just been instructed by the judge to go home because the defendant hadn't shown up.
After a brief struggle, he was then arrested "on charges of failure to appear in court, felony eluding and driving under the influence."
Sometimes, justice works out in mysterious ways...
(Here are a few links from the Argus Leader, KelolandTV, and the Des Moines Register.)
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Stinky Garbage on Islam
By Diana Hsieh @ 1:54 AM
On May 14th 2005, David Kelley spoke on "The Ideas That Promote Terrorism" at a "March against Terror" sponsored by an organization called Free Muslims Coalition. Although I heard that Kelley was slated to speak at that event, I didn't notice that his remarks were posted on the web site of The Objectivist Center until an alert NoodleFood reader brought them to my attention. I've grown weary of beating on poor Ed Hudgins, a man seemingly incapable of grasping even my basic criticisms. So I hoped that David Kelley might say something more interesting and revealing in such a speech. I was not disappointed.
Kelley begins by saying:
I am not a Muslim. Nor am I a Christian, or a Jew. My philosophy of life, Objectivism, is a secular philosophy. But we are gathered here to protest the evil of terrorism in the name of values that transcend differences in religion and worldview. Since a person's values are determined by his worldview, whether in the form of religion or philosophy, what values might possibly "transcend differences in religion and worldview"? What values might be consistent with a wide range of positions on the basic nature of existence, the nature and means of knowledge, and the standard of the good? In fact, no such free-floating values are possible, as Ayn Rand certainly understood. That's why the complex abstractions of philosophy matter so very much!
Yet we should wonder: Of what values is David Kelley speaking? He doesn't say immediately, but his last paragraph identifies them explicitly:
I appeal to all those, of any creed or philosophy, who stand for human life and happiness, for freedom, for progress and for its source--the free exercise of reason--to join in opposing those who want to control the mind, roll back progress, stifle freedom--and who are willing to kill and maim to do so. In other words, people of "any creed or philosophy" can "stand for human life and happiness, for freedom, for progress and for its source--the free exercise of reason" -- meaning that any view is compatible with any other, that logical consistency is unimportant, and that philosophy is irrelevant to life.
Wow.
Really though, I shouldn't be so astonished. Those comments just confirm my much-criticized interpretation of the last paragraph of Kelley's "Party of Modernity" article. (In my public statement of disassociation from TOC, I wrote that David Kelley advocated "a pragmatic and superficial approach to political advocacy in which 'allies and converts' to the cause of freedom need not be philosophically grounded in the modernist worldview" in that article.) This latest speech merely offers a clearer and stronger statement of the same basic view.
Of course, most people are inconsistent in their personal philosophies, sometimes due to an honest failure to properly integrate. If we wish to encourage the better ideas of such people, then we must identify the contradictions, argue against the bad ideas, and argue for the better ideas via their proper foundation. We ought not overwhelm people with arguments, but we should take a clear stand in favor of rational philosophy -- all the way down to the roots. That's a necessary part of respecting others as a rational, thinking, honest people, I think. If we instead pretend that the conflicts between ideas don't matter, we thereby encourage irrationality, disintegration, and carelessness. We also leave decent people open to the dangerous influence of the consistent advocate of their bad ideas.
Skipping a paragraph, Kelley continues:
The terrorists claim that violent jihad is the true path of Islam. I do not believe this for a minute. But I am not a Muslim. I have studied Islam and the history of Islamic civilization, but I am not a believer, I have not absorbed its traditions and practices, I do not know it from the inside. So it is not for me to say what is and is not part of Islam. Since 9/11, many people who knew nothing about Islam before have taken to citing passages from the Quran, either to prove that it does call for violent jihad or to prove instead that Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance. But you can't tell what a religion means by citing passages out of context. Christians, too, can cite passages in the Bible to support different ideas about their religion. Like Christianity, and Judaism, and the other world religions that have endured for centuries, Islam includes many different sects and interpretations. Within the broad outlines of Islamic doctrine, the pillars of the faith, the meaning of Islam is a function of what it actually means to those who believe it, practice it, and study it.
The meaning of Islam is for Muslims themselves to determine in their thoughts and actions. If they believe that violent jihad is not compatible with Islam, then they are the ones who have the power, and the responsibility, for making it so. They and they alone must define what the religion means in the world today. But only if they make their viewpoint known. Unfortunately, it is the Islamists who have so far had the loudest voice. That's why it's vitally important for Muslims themselves to speak out against the terrorists and reject their actions as evil--absolutely evil, no ifs, ands, or buts. Too many Islamic spokesmen have taken "Yes, but" attitudes: Yes, the violence is wrong but Palestinians are still oppressed... or Yes, but there is still discrimination against Arab-Americans... or Yes, whatever. Well, yes indeed, these issues deserve our attention. But they do not justify or excuse murder and destruction. The "Yes, but" statements serve only to praise the terrorists with faint damns. In essence, Islam is whatever its adherents want it to be, limited only by its Five Pillars of Faith. Muslims may ignore, reject, or revise any of the teachings found in its scripture, even if their meaning is clear and undisputed. In fact, Muslims positively ought to do so in order to render the religion less hospitable to terrorists. So Kelley does not reject the idea that "violent jihad is the true path of Islam" on the grounds that his study of the sacred texts and history have shown that the religion is fundamentally one of peace and tolerance. Rather, he rejects the very of idea of anything like a "true path of Islam." The nature of religion is to be subjectively defined by its adherents.
As my astute e-mail correspondent observed, David Kelley's subjectivist vision of Islam parallels his subjectivist vision of Objectivism as an open system. If we paraphrase his comment on Islam to apply to Objectivism, it reads: "Within the broad outlines of Objectivist doctrine, the fundamental principles of the system, the meaning of Objectivism is a function of what it actually means to those who believe it, practice it, and study it." That's nothing but the open system in a nice little nutshell!
Absurdly enough, this open system view of Islam isn't even compatible with its Five Pillars. The first pillar states that "I bear witness that there is no deity but Allah, and I bear witness that Muhammad is His servant and messenger." Since the Koran is the word of God as transmitted through the prophet Muhammed, any Muslim who ignored, rejected, or revised its teachings would be violating its basic tenets.
Moreover, Kelley's application of the open system to Islam isn't even consistent with his own discussions in Truth and Toleration. There, he specifically contrasts the open nature of philosophic systems with closed systems like "religions and totalitarian ideologies" (T&T 58). Yet I'm not sure that matters, since Kelley may not even believe this argument about Islam as an open system. (I don't think it has any of the superficial plausibility of his argument about Objectivism.) Perhaps he regards it as the only plausible method of rendering the Islamic world less interested in blowing us to smithereens. (I've heard prominent intellectuals involved with TOC defend intellectual dishonesty about Islam on just those grounds.)
In general, if Muslims wish to persuade their brothers in faith that Islam preaches tolerance, values life, and supports democracy, so be it. I regard such arguments as deeply disingenuous based upon my extensive readings on Islamic doctrine and culture from college. They merely attempt to glue a cheap veneer of secular values overtop the stinking heap of Islamic mysticism, primitivism, and authoritarianism. Certainly, I would never wish to take part in such intellectual dishonesty.
However, the alternatives are not limited to either passive resignation to terrorism or dogmatic preaching to nobody. The proper approach is the clear, consistent, and uncompromising advocacy of reason -- as practiced by Ayn Rand all her life. We cannot hope to persuade a person to choose reason over faith, life over death, happiness over sacrifice, freedom over statism, and prosperity over poverty -- unless we are intellectually honest and clear enough to present those as the either-or options. We cannot hope to change a culture by encouraging people to graft values like reality, reason, independence, and egoism onto a foundation of God, faith, authority, and altruism. At best, the result will be the construction of a mental wall between a person's abstract ideas and his concrete choices, i.e. between philosophy and life.
If we are uncompromising champions of reason, some younger Muslims may be persuaded to abandon Islam for a more rational philosophy. Yet most will not be -- but they may be influenced to varying degrees over the years. If the message is watered down by compromise and delusion, no substantial change for the better is possible.
I won't bother discussing the rest of Kelley's speech, as I think I've said enough already. I did want to comment on this endorsement though:
I salute Kamal Nawash for the absolute, unqualified stand he has taken, and for his courage and commitment in speaking out. I salute the Free Muslims Against Terrorism for sponsoring this rally. I urge everyone to support them and make common cause with them. Mind you, this bit of text constitutes an explicit and wholehearted endorsement of a pro-Muslim organization in a speech that never criticizes Islam, religion, faith, or whatnot. That the "Free Muslims Coalition" is deeply tied to Islam is evident from its web site. On its About Us page, the group describes itself as "promot[ing] a modern secular interpretation of Islam which is peace-loving, democracy-loving and compatible with other faiths and beliefs" and "encourag[ing] Muslims and Arabs to be proud of their faith and at the same time critical." On its Democracy page, the group justifies its advocacy of democracy on the grounds that "Islam is a religion, not a blueprint for the creation of a modern state" such that "the Koran does not contain sufficient guidance for the creation of a state." (If only it did provide such a blueprint, presumably we would be obliged to adhere to it!) On its Terrorism page, the group claims that in "a modern day context... no holy war needs to be waged; there is no clear and present threat to Islam." (If only Islam were threatened, then we could slaughter the infidel!) In other words, Islam governs all, even if only as rationalization.
Of course, I'd rather be friendly with the Free Muslims Coalition than with Hamas or Islamic Jihad. That's not the point, however, since that's not the choice at hand, now or ever. The point is that David Kelley is promoting a pro-Muslim organization in both word and deed. He is thereby sanctioning Islam, albeit only when dishonest enough to deny its true nature and implications.
It's worth pausing for a moment to compare and contrast this explicit sanction of Islam with David Kelley's implicit sanction of the subjectivism of libertarianism in his talk to the Laissez Faire Supper Club so many years ago.
In that talk to the Laissez Faire Supper Club, David Kelley clearly identified reason, egoism, and mind-body integration as necessary to any proper defense of liberty. He openly criticized those who defend liberty on the grounds that we shouldn't force anyone to conform to our inherently subjective notions of right and wrong. Given the content of his speech, it can seem more than a bit strange to say that David Kelley sanctioned subjectivism in giving it. That's pretty much what he says in defense of it in "A Question of Sanction":
The sole purpose of the occasion was to hear my explanation of why individual rights and capitalism cannot be established without reference to certain key principles of Objectivism: the absolutism of reason, the rejection of altruism, and the commitment to life in this world as a primary value. Since I explicitly criticized libertarian ideas that are incompatible with those principles, I was obviously not endorsing them. Understanding the criticism leveled at this talk requires understanding the precise way in which the libertarian movement is thoroughly subjectivist. Obviously, not all libertarians are subjectivist in the substantive sense of opposing the initiation of force because right and wrong are just a matter of personal opinion. After all, many libertarians advocate some particular moral foundation for liberty, whether utilitarian public good, vague common sense, Christian scripture, or even Objectivism. However, that doesn't rescue the libertarian movement from the charge of subjectivism, but only confirms it. The movement is wide open to any claimed foundation for liberty, no matter how absurd. So while each individual person might have his own preferred moral foundation, his libertarian alliance with others simply on the basis of claimed agreement with the principle of the non-initiation of force amounts to an admission that his moral foundation is optional. Even if he claims otherwise, his actions speak louder than his words.
Peter Schwartz makes his general point in his essay "On Moral Sanctions":
If one wishes to reach those who have been defrauded by Libertarianism, it cannot be done by speaking under the auspices of the defrauders. It cannot be done even if one's topic is why Objectivism offers the proper foundation for genuine liberty. Such a talk grants Libertarianism precisely the moral sanction it seeks and thrives on. Libertarians will readily listen to a talk on Objectivism and liberty--and the next day they will invite someone to speak on why the Bible is the only basis for liberty--and the next week they will hear someone argue why only skepticism and amoralism can validate liberty, etc. They lap this up. It is all entirely consistent with Libertarianism. It is consistent with the philosophy that philosophies and reasons are irrelevant to a belief in "liberty." By speaking under the roof of an organization dedicated to purveying Libertarianism, one concedes that Libertarianism does in fact value liberty (and is simply confused about the proper means--i.e., Objectivism--by which to gain that end). Once that fatal concession is made, Libertarianism has obtained the basic moral sanction its survival requires.
The contradiction, then, is this: The handful of Libertarians who may be open to reason need to be told that Libertarianism as such is anti-liberty and that Libertarian organizations should be boycotted. But this cannot be conveyed via a talk which is itself sponsored by a Libertarian organization. Paul also developed an excellent analogy on this point in his Fable of the Cardiac Surgeon.
So over the course of more than 15 years, David Kelley has moved from the implicit sanction of libertarianism to the explicit sanction of Islam. In light of his pragmatist rules of association, I'm not surprised.
However, I am astonished that any claimed Objectivist could sanction such activities by continuing to associate with The Objectivist Center -- whether by donating money, speaking at conferences, or defending their activities. I have some small hope that a few will soon wake up to smell the now-overpowering strench of stinky garbage. I hope they do so sooner rather than later, as they already have much explaining to do.Labels: Religion
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| Sunday, August 07, 2005 |
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Thank God For The Atom Bomb
By Paul Hsieh @ 11:55 AM
Because it's the 60th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there have been a number of recent newspaper articles and editorials discussing the morality these actions. In light of this, I'd like to point readers to this classic essay by literary scholar and National Book Award winner Paul Fusell, who was also a combat infantryman in World War II, entitled "Thank God For The Atom Bomb".
In this essay (written in 1981), Fusell discusses and rebuts the various academic arguments against dropping the atom bomb, then gives his own perspective on why he thought it was morally right. Although I don't agree with everything Fusell writes, there were two passages that I found especially striking:When the atom bomb ended the war, I was in the Forty-Fifth Infantry Division, which had been through the European war so thoroughly that it had needed to be reconstituted two or three times. We were in a staging area near Rheims, ready to be shipped back across the United States for refresher training at Fort Lewis, Washington, and then sent on for final preparation in the Philippines. My division, like most of the ones transferred from Europe, was to take part in the invasion of Honshu...
I was a twenty-one-year-old second lieutenant of infantry leading a rifle platoon. Although still officially fit for combat, in the German war I had already been wounded in the back and the leg badly enough to be adjudged, after the war, 40 percent disabled. But even if my leg buckled and I fell to the ground whenever I jumped out of the back of a truck, and even if the very idea of more combat made me breathe in gasps and shake all over, my condition was held to be adequate for the next act.
When the atom bombs were dropped and news began to circulate that "Operation Olympic" would not, after all, be necessary, when we learned to our astonishment that we would not be obliged in a few months to rush up the beaches near Tokyo assault-firing while being machine-gunned, mortared, and shelled, for all the practiced phlegm of our tough facades we broke down and cried with relief and joy.
We were going to live. We were going to grow to adulthood after all.
And this passage:Experience whispers that the pity is not that we used the bomb to end the Japanese war but that it wasn't ready in time to end the German one. If only it could have been rushed into production faster and dropped at the right moment on the Reich Chancellery or Berchtesgaden or Hitler's military headquarters in East Prussia (where Colonel Stauffenberg's July 20 bomb didn't do the job because it wasn't big enough), much of the Nazi hierarchy could have been pulverized immediately, saving not just the embarrassment of the Nuremberg trials but the lives of around four million Jews, Poles, Slavs, and gypsies, not to mention the lives and limbs of millions of Allied and German soldiers.
If the bomb had only been ready in time, the young men of my infantry platoon would not have been so cruelly killed and wounded.
As I said above, I don't agree with everything Fusell has written either in this essay or many of his other works. His primary argument here seems to be that the experience of a combat soldier gives one a very different perspective on the morality of the atom bombings that future historians critical of the action can't understand, and one can discern a subjectivist thread that runs through his arguments.
For the record, I think that the moral issues are sufficiently clear that one does not need to have served in combat in World War II to be able to arrive at the correct conclusion about the morality of dropping the bombs. Yet Fusell's essay does help broaden one's context, especially for those (like myself) who have never served in the active-duty military during wartime.
Interested readers can find the full essay online here in PDF form or here in HTML form.
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Coffee!
By Diana Hsieh @ 11:07 AM
Paul and I aren't exactly serious coffee drinkers. Personally, I don't much like the bitter taste of coffee, although the smell is fantastic. (I'm a committed and fussy tea drinker instead, usually Earl Grey with whole milk and sugar.) Paul only drinks coffee on occasion. So until recently, our only coffee brewing equipment was a three cup french press and grinder donated to us by friends desperate for coffee at our house.
A few weeks ago, I decided that we ought to get some better equipment, particularly since those coffee-loving friends of ours are now living in Denver and since we need to serve coffee when we host FROG meetings. For a regular coffee maker, I decided upon the Bodum Mini Electric Santos. It uses a vacuum brewing process, so it's like its own little science experiment. I found out about it from my much-beloved and much-respected Cook's Illustrated. Here's what they wrote about vacuum brewing in their review:
Vacuum brewing is, in fact, not new at all; it dates from the mid-1800s. A vacuum brewer consists of two bowls, one sitting directly on top of the other. The bottom bowl--the carafe--contains water, the top bowl ground coffee. When the water boils, steam forces it into the top bowl, where it mixes with the grounds. When the air in the carafe cools and contracts, it forms a vacuum that draws the liquid, now coffee, through a filter that keeps the grounds aloft.
What's new about these machines? Until recent years, vacuum brewers were rather fragile glass chambers that, if they didn't come with their own weak spirit lamp, required a heat source such as a burner. They looked like (and often were) accidents waiting to happen. The Bodum and Black & Decker electric models improve matters considerably, with shock-resistant plastic chambers, strong seals between the top and bottom bowls, and built-in electric heating elements. How was the coffee? Tasters liked the coffee from these units but consistently described it as strong and robust. In short, vacuum brewers make a very distinct style of coffee that will appeal to many (but not all) coffee drinkers. That said, both vacuum brewers made exceptionally hot coffee and had brew cycles nearly within the ideal four- to six-minute range. Without thermal carafes, however, coffee from neither unit fared well as it aged. We felt the Black & Decker had a slight advantage over the Bodum because it was both less expensive and easier to clean. Paul and I made a pot of coffee yesterday morning with the Bodum. It worked perfectly, it was fun to watch, and it made excellent coffee. Hooray!
When I ordered the Bodum, I also bought a surprisingly inexpensive small espresso and cappuccino maker, the Melitta MEX1B. Paul and I used it this morning to make fantastic cappuccinos in just a few minutes. Double Hooray!
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| Saturday, August 06, 2005 |
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Reason Papers Archive
By Diana Hsieh @ 7:44 AM
For quite some time now, I've been wanting to read through various backissues of Reason Papers. I didn't need some particular article for some particular project. Rather, I just wanted to read what caught my fancy. Frustratingly, the journal is not to be found at the University of Colorado, either in Boulder or in Denver.
Given that, I was quite happy to receive this note from Aeon Skoble not too long ago:
I am proud and pleased to announce that Reason Papers <http://www.reasonpapers.com> has a new website, the chief virtue of which is the full-text PDF archives. Reason Papers was founded in 1974 by Tibor Machan, and I took over editorship in 2000. All of issues 1-25 are now available for download or on-line reading in the "Archive" section of the new website. Issues 26 and 27, the most current, are available for purchase, although one or two pieces from those as well have on-line PDFs if you want a sample. When issue 28 is published this Fall, issue 26 will go on-line, and so on (what they call a "2-issue moving wall"). This is a truly exciting event, as some of the older back issues were out of print, and the history of Reason Papers includes many noteworthy contributions by major theorists from philosophy, economics, history, and politics. I am especially grateful to Stephan Kinsella for doing the tedious work of making the PDFs, David Veksler for the site redesign, and Jeff Tucker for volunteering to host the site. Thanks! I encourage everyone to go have a look at the new site, and I hope you find much if value in the archives. As I read through the archive, I'll surely blog on some of the better and the worse articles. So thanks to Aeon for making that possible!
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| Friday, August 05, 2005 |
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Lies, Lies, and More Lies
By Diana Hsieh @ 11:46 PM
In my post on that atrocious New Individualist article on honesty, I mentioned that "although most people say that honesty is good, often that is no more than hypocritical lip service." Coincidentally, today's "Dear Abby" column offered a nice example of the sorts of awful lies that people deliberately inflict upon those they claim to love:
DEAR ABBY: My sister, "Dina," turned 21 last February. She is planning to marry a wonderful, sweet guy named "Steve" in September. While I was at their apartment last week, the subject of children came up. Steve said he wanted three kids and rubbed Dina's belly. My sister just smiled.
Abby, my sister can't have children. She had a hysterectomy when she was 16. Dina apparently hasn't told him. I asked her about it, and she said she would tell Steve after the wedding. Shouldn't this be done before the wedding? -- TRUTHFUL IN TENNESSEE
DEAR TRUTHFUL: Your sister's fiance should definitely be told the truth before the wedding takes place. To do otherwise could be considered fraud, and grounds for an annulment when the man finds out he was misled. Wowowow. The mind boggleoggleoggles.
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Stinky Garbage on Honesty
By Diana Hsieh @ 11:06 AM
Given my well-known views of The Objectivist Center, it's rather strange that they still publicly list my "Objectivism 101" course for sale as part of "TOC Live 2003." (Oddly, the course is not listed under my name; the named author is "The Objectivist Center." I have no idea whether that is intentional or not, given that my name is still mentioned in the description.) It's also rather strange that TOC continues to send me The Navigator, now reborn as The New Individualist. On rare occasion, I do peruse on issue. (Based upon the still-persistent complaints about the sheer boredom induced by the magazine, that probably means that I read them far more often than most staunch supporters of TOC!)
A few days ago, while frantically and fruitlessly searching for a Toastmasters manual, I picked up their March 2005 issue and began reading a commentary on the treatment of honesty in film by Frederick Cookinham entitled "You Can't Handle the Truth!." (The author is unknown to me.)
I didn't manage to read far into the article before being completely confused by its random leaps from one random topic to another. So let me quote the first few paragraphs in their entirety, with a quick comment or two after each.
"You can't handle the truth!" says Jack Nicholson in the climax of the 1992 movie A Few Good Men. This is a good theme for movies because it names a universal concern: that moment when I know a crucial piece of information that I may or may not decide to let you in on. That's a rather bizarre characterization of the theme of A Few Good Men.
It is also an important theme for a philosophy student to think about, for the same reason. It is an issue in which art is doing what art is supposed to do--making us aware and making us care about a moral issue--and philosophy is doing what it is supposed to do--helping us make the right decision. But the purpose of art is not moral instruction!
Generally, honesty is a good thing. Everyone says so, but Objectivists--having a new moral code to explain, defend, and apply--have to come up with convincing new reasons to defend honesty, reasons based on self-interest. The Objectivist position has to cover four different kinds of cases: fraud perpetrated on others for gain, dishonesty toward oneself, dishonesty to defeat the bad guys, and dishonesty toward others for their own good. Honesty is a contextually absolute virtue, not "generally... a good thing." Moreover, although most people say that honesty is good, often that is no more than hypocritical lip service. I wonder: Why do Objectivists have to come up with "new reasons" for honesty? Is what Ayn Rand said about the virtue as the rejection of unreality wrong -- or just unimportant? And why must we cover those four kinds of cases? Shouldn't we understand the general argument for honesty before considering particular kinds of cases? The author offers no answer to such reasonable questions.
D.W. Griffith considered movies a new language. He had a point: we have now had a hundred years to learn the grammar of film--establishing shots, close-ups, reaction shots, fast editing, and so on--and also a common vocabulary of film. Moviegoers all over the world, speaking no common verbal language, all know what is meant by the scene in which Rhett carries Scarlett up the stairs, or Victor Laszlo leads the crowd at Rick's in singing the "Marseillaise," or Citizen Kane's giant lips say "Rosebud!" Ack! I thought we were talking about honesty, perhaps in the context of firm, but now suddenly we're talking about "the grammar of film"? And who is this "D.W. Griffith" guy? Not to worry, this topic will be long gone by the next paragraph.
Films, like any form of fiction, give us more information in their parables than a philosopher's one- or two-line hypothetical, and give it more convincingly. A college seminar can shoot the bull so airily about the hypothetical question: Should the relationship of parent to child be considered one of ownership? I was present at that actual discussion, and the group decided yes, parents own their children. It was just a college seminar question, after all, and they were not in the least bothered by their own outrageous conclusion. But would the same group of students have felt so cool and unattached if they had been watching the episode of M*A*S*H* in which a Korean farmer sends his daughter ahead of him as he plows his field... which is mined? His family is hungry, and he can spare one daughter more easily than he can spare the spring planting, apparently. The student will be more engaged emotionally by a film than by a dry discussion of abstractions, and will therefore take ideas more seriously. As a philosopher, I have a profound appreciation for the philosophic power of art. Students do generally regard philosophic discussions as disconnected from the concerns of everyday life. That's one of the huge failures of contemporary academic philosophy. Yet notice that dismissive disdain in the above paragraph is not just directed at those floating discussions, but at philosophic discussion per se. That's really, really wrong. (And I believe that the proper term is "detached," not "unattached.")
Wall Street is a typical cinematic product of the altruist world. The moral, in a nutshell, is that treed leads to downfall. American capitalist materialism, yadda, yadda, yadda. But the real mechanics of the story focus on dishonesty: if you are dishonest toward others, they are not going to just take it; they will defend themselves, and since dishonesty means pitting yourself against facts and truth, you lose. Wait, now we're discussing altruism in Wall Street? (In case you're wondering, the typo of "treed" for "greed" is in the print version too.) Oh, but now we're back to honesty again, but not in any clear way. Although I haven't seen the movie in years, I suspect that the claimed lesson about honesty is far from obvious, if present at all, yet here it is asserted without any supporting evidence.
In few instances might dishonesty be warranted. Two possible excuses for not telling the truth are that your listener needs to be led to discover this particular truth himself, and that in war no honesty is owed to one's sworn enemy. The first is heard in the familiar words of Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, in The Wizard of Oz (1939). Why didn't she tell Dorothy the simple procedure for getting back to Kansas? "Because you wouldn't have believed me," she explains. "You had to learn it for yourself." That reasoning flies if your listener is a child and you have responsibility for that child's enlightenment, but not if your listener is an adult. Wow, where did that come from? Certainly, people sometimes do need to discover certain truths on their own. Dagny Taggart could not have helped Hank Rearden by lecturing him on the proper relationship of mind to body. Apart from a few hints, she let him sort through the issue on his own in the course of their affair. But that meant keeping silent, not lying! So why is dishonesty supposedly justified in such cases? We're never told. Nor are we told why some truths must be discovered independently, nor what kind of truths those would be. In fact, the only limitation on this license to dishonesty is its application to children. So I guess that it would be just peachy for a wife to lie to her husband to conceal an affair, since he "needs to be led to discover this particular truth himself."
The chilling mirror image of Glinda's "You wouldn't have believed me" argument is President John F. Kennedy's retort when his girlfriend, Judith Exner, threatened to blow the whistle on their affair: "No one will believe you." Young Bill Clinton was taking notes. How is this relevant to the discussion at hand? I have no idea.
The article continues in a similar vein, including little gems like "Here, Rand's morality is revealed as one of positives over negatives, thou shalts over thou shalt nots." The four particular lines of text highlighted in the print version are also interesting, although I should note that they surely reflect the choices of the editor, not the author. Here they are:
"Objectivists defend honesty as self-interested."
"Sometimes dishonesty might be warranted."
"Deception can be acceptable in wartime."
"Need one tell a truth that can make no difference?" Oh, what powerful and exciting statements in defense of the Objectivist virtue of honesty! They are sure to capture attention of the potential reader! Or maybe not.
All in all, the article is pretty appalling. It combines superficial, arbitrary, and just plain wrong philosophic analysis with unclear, jumpy, and confusing prose. Of course, that's just par for the course for The Objectivist Center. The organization can rename itself and its magazine as many times as it pleases -- but rotten garbage by any other name smells just as stinky!
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The Politics of Emergencies
By Diana Hsieh @ 12:02 AM
In her essay "The Ethics of Emergencies," Ayn Rand observed:
It is on the ground of that generalized good will and respect for the value of human life that one helps strangers in an emergency--and only in an emergency.
It is important to differentiate between the rules of conduct in an emergency situation and the rules of conduct in the normal conditions of human existence. This does not mean a double standard of morality: the standard and the basic principles remain the same, but their application to either case requires precise definitions.
An emergency is an unchosen, unexpected event, limited in time, that creates conditions under which human survival is impossible--such as a flood, an earthquake, a fire, a shipwreck. In an emergency situation, men's primary goal is to combat the disaster, escape the danger and restore normal conditions (to reach dry !and, to put out the fire, etc.).
By "normal" conditions I mean metaphysically normal, normal in the nature of things, and appropriate to human existence. Men can live on land, but not in water or in a raging fire. Since men are not omnipotent, it is metaphysically possible for unforeseeable disasters to strike them, in which case their only task is to return to those conditions under which their lives can continue. By its nature, an emergency situation is temporary; if it were to last, men would perish. The principle that the only proper purpose of government is the protection of individual rights is obviously formed in the context of "metaphysically normal" circumstances of human life. So might a government legitimately act to preserve human life by providing temporary assistance (like rescue services, medical care, or food and water) in an emergency like a natural disaster? In theory, I suppose it might. Yet it's worth considering the limited circumstances under which that would be possible.
(For the record, although this post was inspired by some comments on my post on Nathaniel Branden's Free Radical interview, it is not directly related. I am here concerned with the application of Ayn Rand's views on the ethics of emergencies to the nuts and bolts of government action. In contrast, Nathaniel Branden claimed that his muddled proposal for unspecified government aid in natural disasters was a point of disagreement with Objectivism.)
Most natural disasters do not constitute emergencies at all in modern societies. In the US and elsewhere, regular folks can and do prepare themselves for hurricanes, floods, wildfires, earthquakes, and such -- depending upon local risk factors. They plan escape routes, build levees, install fire-proof roofs, secure water heaters, and so on. In addition to such general preparations, people often have more than adequate warning about natural disasters thanks to the glories of technology, such that they can remove themselves from danger in plenty of time, often with their most valued possessions in tow.
Personally, I've been on evacuation alert in two major fires, the first for 24 hours (in Alpine, California in 2001), the second for 14 days (in Sedalia, Colorado in 2002). Although both times were quite stressful, neither constituted an emergency. Human life was still very much possible. In contrast, consider the following news report on the people caught unexpectedly in the first hours of the massive fires in San Diego in 2003:
One victim was found dead in a trailer, one in a motor home and four in vehicles, county sheriff's spokeswoman Susan Knauss said. Three were killed while trying to escape on foot and two were dead on arrival at local hospitals.
"We were literally running through fire," said Lisza Pontes, 43, who escaped the fire with her family after the roar of flames woke them at 3:45 a.m. As they drove off, they saw a neighbor's mobile home explode.
"I was grabbing wet towels. Fire was at our feet," Pontes said. "It was blazing over our heads and burning everywhere." Now that's a genuine emergency! A life-loving person in such a dire situation has only one option, namely desperate flight to safety. Given the wild urgency of such genuine emergencies, however, governments are unlikely to be able to render assistance in flight. Sure, a police officer might give a ride to a stranded civilian in the course of fleeing the danger himself. But such isolated actions of individual government agents are hardly significant in this context.
In many cases, the danger might be pressing but not yet overwhelming, such as when a wildfire approaches a residential neighborhood. In that case, presumably all the resources of the police must be devoted to upholding law and order so as to make a safe and speedy evacuation possible. Moreover, the people in the area are not yet in an emergency. They are responsible for removing themselves from danger, just as a person with chest pain is responsible for seeking medical attention. If a person does not have the resources to do so on his own (e.g. vehicle, money, friends), he must find some benevolent soul willing to help him.
If a person manages to remove himself from the danger at hand, he is once again protected by the comforts of civilization. If need be, he can rely upon friends, family, businesses, and even charity to get his life back on stable footing. Government assistance would be illegitimate.
In some cases, the scope of the devastation wrought by natural disaster may be so great that a person cannot leave the scene of the calamity. Instead, he must make do as best he can with what he has. For example, consider a decent person caught in a massive earthquake. His apartment building, along with his car, is destroyed. His emergency supplies are buried somewhere under the rubble. He needs food and water, perhaps even medical attention. Certainly, such a person is an innocent victim worthy of help. But what assistance might a proper government be able to offer him in those critical first days? Remember, such a government would be limited to the police, the courts, and the military.
Obviously, the courts would be of no help whatsoever. The police would have no supplies to dole out -- but they would need to quickly regroup from their own earthquake damage in order to prevent looting and other crimes of opportunity. Perhaps our man is lucky enough to live near a military base. It might distribute some of the food, water, and other supplies it has on hand. Yet like the police officer who flees a wildfire with a civilian in tow, such help would be totally ad hoc. Once an organized effort could be gotten underway, plenty of assistance would already be pouring in from outlying areas.
Ultimately, our man must rely upon his own good judgment, perhaps in cooperation with other reasonable people, to procure the basic goods he needs to survive the next few days. Such is not terribly difficult in the United States, thanks to its robust infrastructure, advanced technology, and responsive economy. That's why we suffer so few deaths from natural disasters.
Of course, people living in undeveloped countries are far more likely to suffer and die under the harsh lash of Mother Nature. Huts are washed away by tsunamis, mud brick houses collapse in earthquakes, and crops die in drought. Private aid agencies may help out the victims of such disasters on a case-by-case basis. Yet the only long-term solution to the problem of Mother Nature is the freedom afforded by capitalism. Capitalism makes people more resilient to the disasters of nature by making possible the accumulation of wealth, the investment in the long-term, and the unleashing of human creativity. The result is that genuine emergencies become increasingly rare, even in natural disasters.
That's a lesson that far too many countries still need to learn, unfortunately enough.
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| Tuesday, August 02, 2005 |
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Nathaniel Branden Versus Objectivism
By Diana Hsieh @ 4:29 PM
On occasion, I hear people claim that Nathaniel Branden is still very much an Objectivist. For various, I believed that myself for many years, unfortunately enough. (I was stunned to my senses by re-reading his Benefits and Hazards essay.) I certainly hope that Branden's increasingly public professions of mysticism will quiet those claims somewhat, but I'm not holding my breath. Too many people wish to love him unconditionally, I suppose.
For the rest of us, Nathaniel Branden offers quite a few choice examples of the deliberate obfuscation and sloppy thinking required for such a once-knowledgeable man to criticize Objectivism in a recent interview with Alec Mouhibian for Free Radical. (The interview is posted on SOLO in four parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.)
For example, in Part 2, we find this exchange:
AM: You said at the last TOC conference that you've come to differ with Rand on some political issues. Could you elaborate?
NB: Well, it's a subtle issue, and it goes like this: Objectivism says the sole purpose of government is to protect individual rights. I would say the primary purpose of government is to protect individual rights. And any other activities that the government may claim justification for doing must not be of an order that violates anybody's rights. For example, some national weather disaster in which certain problems can arise that the marketplace has no way to respond to quickly enough. Or diseases that travel across borders and don't respect passport laws. I will leave the door open for emergency situations that I just can't imagine being resolved in a market context. If they could be, then they should be. But the fact of emergencies should not be made as justification for violating individual rights, so as you can see, it's a very tiny difference. In other words: A proper government will never violate rights, but it may sometimes act for a purpose other than the protection of rights. I must admit, I was rather baffled by this argument when I first read it many months ago. How could a government act not so as to protect rights without thereby violating rights? Governments are, after all, all about force. So if a government action does not wield retaliatory force against those who initiate it, then it must be initiating force itself. Is anything else possible? I started wondering about a voluntarily-financed government that opened restaurants, doled out blankets to the homeless, and manufactured computer hardware. Would that government be acting not so as to protect rights, but also not violating rights? At this point, I knew that I had fallen into hopeless confusion. So I asked Don Watkins about the matter in private e-mail. As I hoped, he promptly straightened me out:
The fundamental point, I think, is this: what distinguishes a government from other entities is that it has the exclusive right to dictate the terms on which force is used within a geographical area. If what the government is doing is not ultimately reducible to force, it is not acting as a government -- it's acting as a business. So long as it is acting as a government, "protecting rights" and "not violating rights" amount to the same thing. So long as it isn't acting as a government, it's going to do a screwy job. But more than that, as [another person] indicated, if the government is acting in a non-governmental capacity, even utilizing voluntary taxes, I think you could make the case that that is a violation of its citizens' rights, since presumably people paid those taxes for the express purpose of funding a rights-protecting agency: not a not-for-profit corporation. All of that is completely right, of course. Branden's general theory of government action that neither violates nor protects rights is incoherent, as it ignores the basic nature of government as an agent of force. So let us now turn to the two particular examples Branden offers as concrete instances of this theory.
Branden's first particular disagreement is that governments ought to offer some services in natural disasters because they can respond more quickly than markets. Certainly, governments must respond quickly to ensure law and order in case of natural disaster. Yet looting cannot be the problem in question, since preventing that is just the protection of rights. In general, governments lack the incentives for swift and effective action felt by individuals, businesses, and charities in times of crisis. A rights-respecting government wouldn't even have the resources to do anything beyond ensure law and order in a natural disaster. So what on earth does Branden mean by saying that "certain problems can arise that the marketplace has no way to respond to quickly enough." It beats me! It's just an arbitrary assertion, too vague to have any meaning whatsoever.
Branden's second supposed disagreement about disease is equally vague. What exactly is he proposing? Presumably he means to say that we ought to refuse those with communicable diseases entry into the US. But what kind of communicable diseases -- Ebola, smallpox, typhoid, AIDS, the flu? How are these diseases to be detected -- self-reporting, suspicious symptoms, mandatory testing for all? What should be the response -- turning away, quarantine, forced medication? Branden does not even hint, so I cannot hope to comment. (However, I should mention that Ayn Rand regarded quarantines as justified under certain conditions by the principle of rights.)
Such is the clarity and depth of thought that Nathaniel Branden brings to his objections to the Objectivist politics. I'm not impressed.
Branden then continues:
I have a suspicion--I haven't read her essays in many years--that if I reread Rand today I might have differences not necessarily with her conclusions, but with the reasons she gives on her way to getting there. I don't think, for example, that the case she makes for individual rights is strong enough. I think there are things in it I could see an intelligent person questioning. Do I think she could end up answering appropriately and winning? Yes. But it's not in the text, it's in her head. For example, in Atlas Shrugged, Galt says (and I'm paraphrasing) that since man needs his rational faculty to survive, you mustn't suppress his rational judgment. What's tricky about that is, does that mean you do what you want with his irrational judgment? Her theory of rights has to be broad enough to include the right to be irrational, but you don't see that in the way she has formulated it. Branden's hypothetical objection from "an intelligent person" obviously refers to this critical passage of Galt's Speech:
You who've lost the concept of a right, you who swing in impotent evasiveness between the claim that rights are a gift of God, a supernatural gift to be taken on faith, or the claim that rights are a gift of society, to be broken at its arbitrary whim--the source of man's rights is not divine law or congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A--and Man is Man. Rights are conditions of existence required by man's nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, his right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature forbids him the irrational. Any group, any gang, any nation that attempts to negate man's rights, is wrong, which means: is evil, which means: is anti-life. In essence then, Branden is criticizing Ayn Rand for failing to spell out her views with adequate clarity and detail. She said that a person has "a right to live as a rational being," but not that he also has the right to live as an irrational being. Obviously, the proper response to that objection is that you cannot force a person to be rational. Force negates the mind by rendering a person's judgment (right or wrong) irrelevant to his actions. So the freedom to be rational is just the freedom to exercise your reason as you see fit -- and to enjoy or suffer the consequences.
However, the real question to be asked of Branden's criticism is whether it is fair or not. Surely he is right that "an intelligent person" might raise that question. Perhaps such a person might even be confused about it for a while. Is that worrisome? Absolutely not. After all, Ayn Rand has provided that person with more than adequate means to resolve any confusion in the pages and pages of prior philosophic discussion about reason as volitionally exercised by the individual, a man's life as depending upon his independent judgment, force as opposite to mind, and much more. All that the "intelligent person" must do is put two and two together to make four.
In essence, Nathaniel Branden rips this argument out of its rich and detailed philosophic context of Galt's Speech, then criticizes Ayn Rand for failing to offer an adequate philosophic context. A writer who attempted to follow his advice could not make any claim, not matter how well-grounded by prior discussion, without addressing the gaggle of objections possible to someone who, although smart, hasn't yet integrated it all yet. (Just for the record, I haven't bothered to check whether Ayn Rand addresses this particular point in any of her other many writings.)
The tapestry of ideas woven into Atlas Shrugged are daringly revolutionary, rich in complexity, and pregnant with implications. As a result, a person is unlikely to grasp them in a single reading. Unlike Nathaniel Branden though, I do not regard that as a reason to find fault with the book -- or its author.
Then, in Part 3, we find this exchange on moral judgment:
AM: Let's talk about moral judgment. This was certainly essential to Randian Objectivism, as the initial title of your memoir suggests. And much is made of the personal, judgmental nature of our current political climate. According to Rand, one's only exemption from being "evil" is ignorance. You've denounced the harsh moralizing of Rand, yet you're presumably a pretty judgmental man, who's probably made over 7,000 judgments about me already.
NB: Wait, let me check. 6,700.
AM: Either way, what is the proper role of moral judgment? At what point is one immoral?
NB: One of the mistakes that Rand makes is that after she condemns a belief or an action, she goes on to tell you the psychology of the person who did it, as if she knows. I focus my judgment on the action and not on the person. My primary interest is: do I admire or dislike this behavior? And there, judgment is important for me. People often attribute all kinds of things to another person, without ever knowing where that person's coming from. Most of the time, I regard the judgment of people as a waste of time. I regard the judgment of behavior as imperative.
Now, there are some people who are so clearly evil (e.g., Saddam Hussein) that we can't imagine anything mitigating their horror. But even there, I've come to feel the following: if there is a mad animal running around, eating people, I may have to shoot him. I don't think: "Oh, you rotten bad dog, you." There's nothing you can do except shoot him.
But the Saddams are only a small minority. Take the Middle East suicide bombers. God knows, if I had the opportunity, I'd kill them without any hesitation. But I also know, as a psychologist, that they were raised in a culture in a world I can't even conceive of. They were propagandized about the glory of martyrdom since the age of five. Whereas Leonard Peikoff might be hell-bent on calling every one of them evil, I wouldn't. They may or may not be. All I know is: in action, one kills them, rather than getting killed by them. Lots of times, we don't know the ultimate truth about a person. And here's the point: we don't need to know. To start off, Alec Mouhibian misrepresents the Objectivist view of moral judgment in claiming that "According to Rand, one's only exemption from being 'evil' is ignorance." Ayn Rand distinguished between breaches of morality and errors of knowledge, not between evil and ignorance. (Also, I suppose that I should at least mention the omitted possibility of right action.)
It gets much worse with Nathaniel Branden's reply -- so bad that it's probably unnecessary for me to say anything about it at all. I'll make a few quick comments anyway.
First, Branden's explicit focus on particular actions (i.e. "behavior") rather than moral character (i.e. "people") ignores the obvious fact that a person's actions flow from his moral character. We do not reinvent ourselves at every moment with every choice. Rather, all our choices are framed within the context set by moral character, i.e. by our deepest beliefs, values, and commitments as thoroughly automatized in our subconscious by myriad past choices. So to focus upon a person's concrete, here-and-now actions is to willfully blind ourselves to the general character of his future choices. After all, if a person is acting cowardly now, he will continue to do so until and unless he chooses to overhaul his character by deliberately committing to defending his endangered values. Yet such is precisely the sort of consideration that Branden's concrete-bound focus on "behavior" would compel us to ignore.
Second, by likening thoroughly, irredeemably evil people to mad animals in need to bullets not condemnation, Branden explicitly exempts them from moral judgment. Of course, as the saying goes, that's an insult to mad animals everywhere. A rabid dog has no choice in its actions, no capacity for rationality -- but Saddam Hussein did. Saddam deserves to be morally condemned, not in the hopes of magically transforming him into a decent person, but for the sake of preserving our own moral clarity, for the sake of the countless people who suffered and died under his rule, for the sake of warning those like him that they will share his fate.
Third, the tentative free pass that Branden gives to suicide bombers who intentionally kill and maim innocent men, women, and children for the crime of being Israeli is similarly revolting. Of course, the Palestinian terrorists grow up in a deeply irrational culture, right alongside all their non-exploding brothers. That pervasive irrationality is why clear moral condemnations of those who choose to kill and maim innocents is so very urgent. It's not an excuse.
In general, I'm struck by the likeness of these views to behaviorism. Much like the behaviorists he tore to shreds in Psychology of Self Esteem, Nathaniel Branden is now saying that mental states are internal mysteries inaccessible to observation, so we ought to just ignore them and focus instead on discouraging or arresting certain undesirable behavior. (Oy, I'm feeling a bit sick to my stomach now!)
Honestly, I wanted to work through some more examples, but I'm just too disgusted to continue. It's hard enough to slog through Nathaniel Branden's twisted sophistry against Ayn Rand and Objectivism, but with Alex Mouhibian's pathetic bootlicking, it's just too much to bear.
I'm reminded of Ayn Rand's fantastic line from "Of Living Death": "Actually, this is too evil to discuss much further." So it is. Like her, I have a few more observations to offer -- but I'll save them for later posts.
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Privacy Rights and the Korean Dog Poop Girl
By Paul Hsieh @ 8:42 AM
The internet can be used as a powerful tool for public shaming as can be seen in this recent notorious example.A woman and her dog are riding the Seoul subways. The dog poops in the floor. The woman refuses to clean it up, despite being told to by other passengers. Someone takes a picture of her, posts it on the Internet, and she is publicly shamed -- and the story will live on the Internet forever. Then, the blogosphere debates the notion of the Internet as a social enforcement tool.
The Internet is changing our notions of personal privacy, and how the public enforces social norms. Here are the pictures and subsequent parodies.
This episode raises some fascinating and important issues on the concept of so-called "privacy rights" and the reasonable expectation of privacy in the Internet age. I haven't thought these issues through in the depth required, but my suspicion is that the notion of "privacy rights" as is currently discussed is actually a package-deal of a number of somewhat-related issues lumped together under one banner. In some contexts, personal information about oneself can and should be protected, whereas in other contexts there is no reasonable expectation of privacy; and the various situations need to be carefully analyzed in terms of the appropriate underlying principles. (I hasten to add that I don't have a clear idea of how best to formulate these principles, let alone apply them in all the tricky cases. Many of the currently tricky situations would probably also be covered by private contract).
There are a number of resources that describe the state of the current law with respect to when model releases are required for photographs taken in a public setting, and here is one typical website. Based on my reading, here are some factors that could be used to argue that the Korean woman's rights were not violated:
1. She was in a public place, and therefore had a low reasonable expectation of privacy.
2. Her actions were "news-worthy".
3. The photograph did not portray her in a false light (i.e., the photograph was used to illustrate a true claim about her actions).
Of course, if some cretins were to use this information to illegally harass her (such as sending her death threats), that would clearly be a rights-violation -- but the bad act would be the harassers' use of the information, not the dissemination of the photograph in the first place.
(There is the usual mild complicating factor that this particular incident took place in a public subway, and under an ideal system of government such subways would be under private ownership and the owners would be able to establish the rules for use of cameras by customers. But even today, the same issues already arise, for instance in large privately-owned but open-to-the-public shopping malls where the mall owners have not spelled out explicit rules regarding the use of cameras by customers. In those cases, the law assumes a very low reasonable expectation of privacy -- for example, a shopper cannot go to such a mall sporting a bizarre purple hairdo, then get upset when passers-by giggle and point at him or her. The very act of voluntarily going to such a place where one can expect to be in the full view of a large number of other customers, means that one cannot be surprised when one's unusual behaviour is noticed and commented upon.)
In general, assuming that there are no rights-violations involved, I like the use of widespread dissemination of (truthful) information to encourage good behaviour through reputation effects. We already know this works well in the commercial world (i.e., selecting a doctor or an auto mechanic), and this should translate well to non-commercial public behaviour.
But I'd be very interested in hearing how others analyze this issue.
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| Monday, August 01, 2005 |
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Joss
By Diana Hsieh @ 9:15 PM
If you are a Joss fan, this long interview is well worth reading. (Beware of some spoilers in the Serenity section.) I particularly enjoyed the discussions of his roles in various other projects, like Toy Story, Speed, and Alien Resurrection. Regarding that last, this comment was priceless: "So I just gave them dialogue and stuff, but I don't remember writing, 'A withered, granny-lookin' Pumkinhead-kinda-thing makes out with Ripley.' Pretty sure that stage direction never existed in any of my drafts." Good!
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Acorns from the Oak Tree
By Diana Hsieh @ 10:40 AM
When I update my blogroll in a few weeks, The Oak Tree will surely enjoy a high spot on it. His Teaching the Impossible series is just too damn funny to miss. In the meantime, let me recommend this post on three supposed allies of Objectivism: transhumanism, extropianian, or libertarianism. He doesn't analyze them in depth, but the general outline of the argument is clear.
For the record, I am all in favor of political activism, if solidly grounded in philosophical fundamentals rather than lightly tethered to superficial agreements. Otherwise, short-term gains come at the price of long-term costs, in that you are promoting and strengthening your ultimate enemies. (In that case, the apparent gains aren't actually gains at all.)
I am also very much in favor of pushing the limits of technology for the benefit of human life. Yet to rise above the level of idle chatter, such speculations must be based in fact, not functionalist-materialist fantasies about uploading minds and the like. Any speculations must also serve some genuine purpose, such as guiding the investigations of entrepreneurs into possible future creations.
(Since I find absolutely nothing of interest and nothing serious in this description of extropianism, I won't bother with it.)
Finally, I could not agree more with this closing comment by Oakes:
I caution every student of Objectivism not to sacrifice quality for quantity; to sacrifice long-term philosophical change for short-term political advocacy. I'd rather have on my side a single man serious about ideas, than a thousand activists who might share my love of technology or disdain for the welfare state. Hear, hear!
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