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 | Tuesday, October 7, 2008 at 23:30:45 mst
Comment ID: #1
Name: Sajid
Great post Diana. But I have a follow up question. What about two utilitarians (or Islamofascists, Neonazis etc.) who are equally consistent in their views but only one of them has the courage to actually act according to his philosophy. I guess the other just tacitly supports his more courageous counterparts while doing what is necessary to ensure his survival in his own life. In this case who is more immoral and who is more dangerous? |
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| Wednesday, October 8, 2008 at 6:44:36 mst
Comment ID: #2
Name: Steve D'Ippolito
Good post; it clears up an-often-not-made distinction between "more evil" and "more dangerous". I suspect a lot of people worrying about this question or arguing over it in regard to a specific instance are failing to make that distinction.
For example, I suspect a lot of the anti-McCain vs. anti-Obama argument turns on this. I see an argument that boils down to "Obama is more evil" answered with, in essence, "no, he's not, McCain is more dangerous" (or vice versa). The people essentially end up talking past each other. In essence one must decide which is more important in an election (good vs. safe) and figure out who fits the bill best (or more accurately in this instance: Least badly). |
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| Wednesday, October 8, 2008 at 9:15:56 mst
Comment ID: #3
Name: Jason Crawford
E-mail: jasonc(at)alumni.cmu.edu
URL: http://www.jasoncrawford.org
Thank, Diana. I had the same question as Thomas when I read the post on Dani.
In the case of the utilitarians you describe, I agree with you. Regardless of philosophy, anyone with common sense ought to see that lynch mobs are evil.
In the case of Dani and her views on abortion, though, I'm not sure I agree with you. What are the horrible consequences that she endorses? Women who get pregnant should be forced to bear the children; women who get abortions should be tried for murder and go to jail. If you believe that a fetus is a person, or that every living thing has rights, then these are perfectly reasonable and logical consequences.
After all, what if someone asked you: "You believe in the morality of capital punishment for convicted murderers. Do you think a convict should be killed in even if he repents and embraces God?"
Or: "You don't believe government welfare programs. Do you think a homeless person should starve to death if no one is willing to voluntarily help him?"
In each case, you would say: Yes, I reject your moral premise, and I accept the consequences of my views--even when it means that someone dies.
I'm not arguing here about who is more evil or more dangerous. I'm just questioning the idea that Dani's acceptance of, e.g., jail time for abortion is the *proof* of her evil, vs. someone who doesn't accept that notion.
In my view, the proof of Dani's evil is this quote from her: "I am also a right-wing fanatic on assignment from God to be a good helper to my husband and to train up my children with the Fear and Admonition of the Lord!" Anyone who truly believes she is on an assignment from God, in my opinion, has to be evading. I don't think there is any honest or rational way to believe that. And to deliberately and explicitly raise one's children in *fear* is the kind of consequence that anyone with common sense should reject.
On the other hand, I think it's strong evidence of evasion when someone is asked "Should women who get abortions go to jail?" and their response is "I haven't thought about that." Those people on the street in those interviews were, I believe, acting on emotion or out of a desire to conform. |
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| Wednesday, October 8, 2008 at 9:24:58 mst
Comment ID: #4
Name: PMB
Jason,
I think part of the point is that even people who are honestly confused by the issue of whether a fetus has rights see the horrific injustice of putting a woman in jail for having one. In general, they seem to have a woozy understanding of rights (at best), and when this floating abstraction comes up against the hard reality of a young women going to jail for MURDER makes them flinch.
It's precisely the DISHONEST defender of abortion, who is motivated by hatred, who does not flinch at such consequences. |
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| Wednesday, October 8, 2008 at 9:25:47 mst
Comment ID: #5
Name: PMB
Sorry, should be "the horrific injustice of putting a woman in jail for having AN ABORTION." |
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| Wednesday, October 8, 2008 at 9:50:57 mst
Comment ID: #6
Name: William H. Stoddard
E-mail: whswhs(at)mindspring.com
URL: http://whswhs.livejournal.com/
That's a well stated argument, and in common sense terms it's perfectly reasonable. But I'm not sure how it can be reconciled with all of Ayn Rand's statements about evil. Perhaps I'm not looking at them right.
As I understand Rand's position, she says that the ultimate moral choice is to think or not to think, or in other words to focus or blank out, to identify the meaning of your beliefs or to evade it. In her view, it seems, people who advocate altruism or collectivism are evading the meaning of their choices (immediately, the harm done by specific altruist/collectivist policies; on a larger scale, the horrors that they inflict on a society that lives by them; ultimately, the fact that both are philosophies of death). The more altruistic someone is, the more they have to evade to survive and function at all. So it would seem that someone who explicitly identified the consequences of their altruistic principles would be less evil than someone who avoided thinking about them, because that explicit identification would leave them no hiding place: if they didn't choose egoism, they would end up dead, or catatonic, like James Taggart at the end of Atlas Shrugged.
But it seems that in the real world, we are dealing with many people who adopt destructive ideas but don't choose to think through the logic of their own positions, but also with some who do think it through and embrace the conclusions. They don't decide that altruism or collectivism is a horror; they don't become catatonic; they simply accept the evils as desirable and necessary. They are, perhaps, more like Ellsworth Toohey than like James Taggart.
But if it's possible to choose evil, and fully identify the consequences of that choice, and desire them, then is Rand's view of "to think or not to think" as the ultimate moral choice wrong? In what way is someone who advocates putting women who have abortions to death choosing not to think, or blanking out the meaning of their beliefs? Or if they're not, does their evil consist in something other than choosing not to think, and are there other domains of moral choice?
In the realm of politics, of course, we can straightforwardly say that the person who advocates taking away people's freedom of choice is evil, and the depth of the evil is greater if the extent and intensity of the coercion are greater. In that domain, you're clearly right. But my understanding is that Objectivism does not view politics, or political evil, as primary, and indeed that the heart of the Objectivist argument against libertarianism is the belief that it's wrong to treat it as one. This judgment of positions on abortion sounds as if it could be taken as treating politics as primary. I'd like to see an explanation of why it's not doing so. |
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| Wednesday, October 8, 2008 at 10:32:00 mst
Comment ID: #7
Name: Diana Hsieh
E-mail: diana(at)dianahsieh.com
URL: http://www.dianahsieh.com/blog
Jason -- Dani does not think that women should be incarcerated for abortion. (That view is wrong, but it's not inherently dishonest.) She advocates *the death penalty*. Anyone who advocates killing women (and their doctors) for snuffing out a zygote -- a mere clump of cells without even the rudiments of consciousness -- is very, very evil. That's not a position that a person can hold honestly, in my view.
William -- You seem to think that the inconsistently evil person evades more than the consistently evil person. I deny that. The inconsistently evil person must evade some facts, including conflicts between his various ideas. The consistently evil person must evade the major conflict between his whole worldview and the actual world. |
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| Wednesday, October 8, 2008 at 15:50:04 mst
Comment ID: #8
Name: Jim May
E-mail: seerak(at)gmail.com
"Now, the consistent utilitarian is useful in a certain way: he shows others the ultimate end of the utilitarian position, while the mixed utilitarian conceals it."
This is the same distinction that I make when I refer to the "core" of both conservatism and the Left, versus their less consistent outer layers. This is the grain of truth in the anti-concepts of "extremists" versus "moderates"; the extremists are the "core" of a movement, the consistent ones who know full well what their end-of-road is, and the moderates are the inconsistent ones, the "useful idiots" of their respective movements, who evade their knowledge of the truth in order to pretend that their movement's end-of-road is the same as its professed goals.
That evasion manifests itself in a general unwillingness to acknowledge the extremists' existence, and moral disarmedness in the face of such extremists in those rare occasions where they attempt to assert themselves. Thusly, the role of both Leftist and conservative moderates is as camouflage, to conceal and obscure the ultimate end-of-road of their own movements -- from others and from themselves.
This explains the pattern we see as each "side" waxes and wanes; if the extremists of a movement become too visible, turning people away from them, the "damage control" process consists of hiding them (sometimes even purging a few of the most radioactive ones) and pushing the moderates forward. Conversely, if a movement is gaining the upper hand, it's extremists begin to flex their muscle, shoving aside the (morally disarmed) moderates and becoming as visible as they think they can manage without tipping people off too much.
If either side gains complete power, the extremists purge the moderates completely, leaving them in the ditches screaming "But I didn't mean or want THIS!" (but deserving no absolution) as they consolidate power. |
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| Wednesday, October 8, 2008 at 15:58:00 mst
Comment ID: #9
Name: Paul
E-mail: ultraupper(at)gmail.com
"So who is more evil? I'd say the second person, without a doubt. If given power, "
The method employed to arrive at your conclusion is a lame hypothetical about consequences. While consquences matter, this is not a principled way to make the argument. |
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| Friday, October 10, 2008 at 9:39:20 mst
Comment ID: #10
Name: Dan
E-mail: llydsmith(at)alltel.net
"The truly and deliberately evil men are a very small minority; it is the appeaser who unleashes them on mankind; it is the appeaser's intellectual abdication that invites them to take over. When a culture's dominant trend is geared to irrationality, the thugs win over the appeasers. When intellectual leaders fail to foster the best in the mixed, unformed, vacillating character of people at large, the thugs are sure to bring out the worst. When the ablest men turn into cowards, the average men turn into brutes." [Ayn Rand - "Altruism As Appeasement" - The Objectivist â€" January, 1966, pg.6
Diana states,"After people have adopted the moderate view, [the}fully evil person can press those people to adopt his more consistent position. However, that doesn't make the moderate person more evil: it just means that he's very dangerous too: he's a helpmate of the fully evil person, even if unintentionally so.", and ends with, "That being said, it's certainly true that -- in some contexts -- the person embracing evil in part is more dangerous than the person embracing evil in full. Yet that's only because the partial-evil person serves as a stepping stone to the greater evil of the full-evil person. In other words, even that danger presupposes that the fully evil is morally worse."
The position Dani holds, and Dani, are much more evil than one who holds a more moderate anti-abortion position, but all such irrational thinking (if you can call it thinking) is anti-reason and evil. However, the Dani position does not scare me nearly as much as the hoards of more moderate, hangers-on of all such irrational thinking. THAT'S where the DANGER comes in. Dani IS EVIL, but in a primarily rational society, she'd be laughed out of the culture. It's the hoards of people who at least partially swallow the crap who present the real danger. Dani = moral evil, the millions of minions = danger.
In AR's quote above I see Dani as the "thug". The more moderate appeasers, the (potential) "brutes".
The entire article "Altruism As Appeasement" should be read, or re-read if its been some time. |
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| Friday, October 10, 2008 at 10:47:44 mst
Comment ID: #11
Name: Andrew Dalton
E-mail: andrew.s.dalton(at)gmail.com
URL: http://witchdoctorrepellent.blogspot.com
Paul wrote: "The method employed to arrive at your conclusion is a lame hypothetical about consequences. While consquences matter, this is not a principled way to make the argument."
The purpose of principles is to project the future consequences of ideas and actions in general, in a way that would never be possible when dealing with specifics. A person who is consistently evil, if given free rein to put his ideals into practice, will destroy human life more quickly and thoroughly than would a person who is inconsistently evil. And human life is the proper standard of morality.
So no, Diana's argument is not "a lame hypothetical about consequences." |
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