| Tuesday, June 09, 2009 |
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The Not-So-Forgotten Woman
By Diana Hsieh @ 12:01 AM   
This spring, I enjoyed reading Amity Schlaes' new political history of the Great Depression, The Forgotten Man. Although I disliked the meandering, narrative style of the book, I learned much of value about the politics that created and sustained the Great Depression for it. I definitely recommend it.
Given that background, I was very interested to read this Bloomburg column by the same author on Atlas Shrugged: Rand's Atlas Is Shrugging With a Growing Load. (It was published last week, but I only read it yesterday.) The column isn't particularly deep: it reads Atlas on a purely political level. Here's a sample:
Rand knew that government tends to drive the most- productive economic figures away even as it pretends to utilize them. Today's shortage of primary care doctors serves as an example. Various administrations, Democratic and Republican, have tried to nudge more medical students into primary care. Young doctors simply haven't complied. That is in part because of the higher compensation of specialties. But it is also because the great charm of being a primary care doctor -- autonomy to work in a range of areas -- has been removed.
Rand foresaw this: "Let them discover the kind of doctors that their system will now produce," says one of her characters. "It is not safe to place their lives in the hands of a man whose life they have throttled."
Long before managed-care existed, Rand was describing doctors' frustration with it. Back in March, Greg Salmieri wrote the following about the tendency to focus only on the political lessons of Atlas:
Most of the recent discussion of Atlas has focused on its political themes, creating the impression that the novel is essentially a condemnation of government intervention in the economy. However, its scope, its relevance to the current crisis, and the reasons for its enduring appeal go much wider and much deeper than this. Galt goes on strike not simply against high taxes and unjust regulations, but against the morality of altruism, which Rand identifies as the cause of such measures, and against the world-view of which this moral code is an expression--a philosophy that denies the efficacy of reason and the absolutism of reality.
Atlas Shrugged is a novel about the role of the mind in man's existence. In it, Rand diagnoses not only political and economic trends, but also much of the frustration, injustice, and pain that we experience in our personal lives, tracing them all back to the mind-stultifying ideology that has come to dominate western culture and has replaced the Enlightenment ideals on which America was founded. As a prescription for the rebirth of America, and as a guide to anyone who seeks to make the most of his life, Atlas offers a revolutionary philosophy of reason and egoism.
First and foremost, however, Atlas Shrugged is a literary masterpiece: Rand presents her ideas in the form of an ingeniously plotted mystery, with unforgettable characters, heart-wrenching conflicts, and an inspiring resolution. The thousands who have picked the novel up as a result of the financial crisis are getting more than they bargained for, and they're in for a real treat. Dr. Salmieri recommends Robert Mayhew's new anthology, Essays on Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. I've not yet had a chance to read it, but based on the quality of the prior volumes and the contributors, I definitely recommend it to anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the novel.
In any case, I do not mean to complain about Amity Schlaes' focus on the politics of Atlas in her column. Reasonably accurate and positive reviews -- particularly of a book published 50 years ago -- are always welcome. As Salmieri observes, most readers will find more to interest them in the book than just commonality with current political trends.Labels: Objectivism, Politics
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| Friday, May 15, 2009 |
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Playboy Interview
By Diana Hsieh @ 12:01 AM
Ayn Rand's interview with Playboy is now available on the Playboy web site. I was going to select just one or two particularly good exchanges to reproduce here, but too many struck me as interesting. You'll just have to read the whole thing -- but here are two on emotions to whet your appetite:
PLAYBOY: Couldn't the attempt to rule whim out of life, to act in a totally rational fashion, be viewed as conducive to a juiceless, joyless kind of existence?
RAND: I truly must say that I don't know what you are talking about. Let's define our terms. Reason is man's tool of knowledge, the faculty that enables him to perceive the facts of reality. To act rationally means to act in accordance with the facts of reality. Emotions are not tools of cognition. What you feel tells you nothing about the facts; it merely tells you something about your estimate of the facts. Emotions are the result of your value judgments; they are caused by your basic premises, which you may hold consciously or subconsciously, which may be right or wrong. A whim is an emotion whose cause you neither know nor care to discover. Now what does it mean, to act on whim? It means that a man acts like a zombi, without any knowledge of what he deals with, what he wants to accomplish, or what motivates him. It means that a man acts in a state of temporary insanity. Is this what you call juicy or colorful? I think the only juice that can come out of such a situation is blood. To act against the facts of reality can result only in destruction.
PLAYBOY: Should one ignore emotions altogether, rule them out of one's life entirely?
RAND: Of course not. One should merely keep them in their place. An emotion is an automatic response, an automatic effect of man's value premises. An effect, not a cause. There is no necessary clash, no dichotomy between man's reason and his emotions--provided he observes their proper relationship. A rational man knows--or makes it a point to discover--the source of his emotions, the basic premises from which they come; if his premises are wrong, he corrects them. He never acts on emotions for which he cannot account, the meaning of which he does not understand. In appraising a situation, he knows why he reacts as he does and whether he is right. He has no inner conflicts, his mind and his emotions are integrated, his consciousness is in perfect harmony. His emotions are not his enemies, they are his means of enjoying life. But they are not his guide; the guide is his mind. This relationship cannot be reversed, however. If a man takes his emotions as the cause and his mind as their passive effect, if he is guided by his emotions and uses his mind only to rationalize or justify them somehow--then he is acting immorally, he is condemning himself to misery, failure, defeat, and he will achieve nothing but destruction--his own and that of others. Labels: Ethics, Objectivism
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| Friday, May 01, 2009 |
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NRO on John Allison
By Paul Hsieh @ 10:00 PM
The April 30, 2009 National Review Online published an excellent article on banker John Allison (former CEO of BB&T Bank), including an extended discussion on how his success in business was a consequence of following Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism.
Here are a few excerpts:Objectivist Philosophy for Fun and Profit
How a banker avoided ruin by cleaving to Ayn Rand's system of ethics
By Mark Hemingway
...The fact that BB&T didn't dive head-first into the shallow pool of subprime mortgages certainly goes a long way toward explaining the relative health of BB&T as an institution. But how was BB&T able to resist chasing after all that new mortgage money?
The answer is simple: Subprime mortgages were bad for the people who took them out. That went against BB&T's philosophy -- not for reasons of altruism but because it would have been poor strategy. "We're obviously a for-profit company, but we don't think that it's good business in the long term to do bad things to your clients, even if you make a profit doing it," Allison said. "So we chose not to do negative-amortization mortgages because we knew it was going to get a lot of people in financial trouble."
In retrospect, the wisdom of this approach might seem obvious. However, Allison navigated through the overheated mortgage market and the ensuing banking crisis by relying, in large part, on a philosophy that many others are now turning to: "I got interested in [Ayn] Rand in the late 1960s. I read Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. I had already been interested in economics, and as I finished college, I got interested in finance. I saw the banking system as central to a capitalist economy." Allison understands the tie between abstract philosophy and real-world business success:..."A lot of people miss the fact that Rand has a very strong ethical system," he observes. "Rand says you can derive ethics from reality. If anything, Rand is more rigorous in her ethical system than most codes are. If you’re dishonest, you are disconnected from reality, and that has consequences."
However, simply because Rand doesn't endorse altruism for altruism's sake, many people misconstrue her to be amorally selfish. Rand "doesn't view ethics as self-sacrificial," Allison says, "she views ethics as a rational means to success and happiness. If you described her in principle, she would say that you shouldn't take advantage of other people because that is unethical behavior and self-defeating. But you also shouldn't self-sacrifice. What you really need to do is run your life in relationship to other people in context to what she calls the trader principle. The trader principle is about what I call creating win-win relationships. We trade value for value and we get better together, and we find these common grounds where we can get better together."
If that can be said to be BB&T's guiding principle, the empirical evidence would suggest that the bank's customers and shareholders are better off for it. In fact, it was misguided altruism that got us into the current financial crisis, and Allison has no problem identifying whose economic philosophy was flawed. "I think that government policy is the primary cause" of the financial crisis, he says. "Government policy set up the problems we have in the real-estate market, and it is the Big Kahuna in the room." (Read the whole article.)
Objectivists will recognize BB&T's core values as the keys to success in business and life:* Honesty
* Integrity
* Justice
* Reason
* Independent Thinking
* Reality
* Productivity
* Teamwork
* Self-Esteem
* Pride How well did that code of values work out for BB&T shareholders?
When John Allison became CEO of BB&T in 1989, the bank had 187 branches in two states, with $4.7 billion in assets.
When he retired as CEO at the end of 2008, BB&T operated over 1500 financial centers in 11 states (plus DC), with $136.5 billion in assets, a track record Allison can be proud of.Labels: Business, Objectivism
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| Tuesday, April 14, 2009 |
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Amit Ghate: Ayn Rand as Prophet?
By Paul Hsieh @ 12:01 AM
Congratulations to Amit Ghate for his recent essay on Ayn Rand which was just published by PajamasMedia. Here's the introduction:Ayn Rand as Prophet
April 13, 2009 - by Amit Ghate
In recent months there has been a surge of interest in Ayn Rand's works. Fifty-two years after its first publication, her novel Atlas Shrugged is once again topping best-seller lists. As businesses are "bailed out" and quasi-nationalized; as one regulation leads inexorably to the next; and as the productive and innocent are increasingly burdened with the sins and failures of the guilty -- many people recognize the haunting resemblance to the world depicted in Atlas. Some now characterize Rand as a "prophet.”" Others, as seen on placards at "tea parties" nationwide, simply observe: "Rand was Right." But that she was right is, in some respects, less important than why she was right... Read the rest here.
I'm glad to see Rand's ideas receiving the attention they deserve. And I'm glad to see Objectivists stepping up to help promote those ideas in venues like PajamasMedia.
Here's the comment I left in response:Thanks for a terrific essay, Amit!
The original Tea Party protesters were not just fighting against higher taxes but *for* something positive -- the idea of individual rights. And in the process they helped create the greatest nation on earth.
Similarly, today's Tea Party protesters need to do more than just oppose bad government bailouts. They also need to support the positive case for limited government and capitalism. Fortunately, Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged provides us with precisely the positive case we need -- a philosophy that defends the morality of rational self-interest and the importance of freedom in allowing honest men and women to pursue their own happiness.
Ayn Rand's ideas provide the necessary intellectual foundation that Americans need to save America. Let’s hope more people read her books and debate her ideas. The future of our country may well depend on it! Once again, Amit -- thank you!Labels: Activism, Objectivism
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The Obligation to Render Assistance
By Diana Hsieh @ 12:01 AM
Right around the time of the CU Boulder "Think!" debate on Ayn Rand's ethics between Onkar Ghate and Mike Huemer, I listened to a very interesting discussion of the obligation to offer minimal aid to a person in distress in one of Leonard Peikoff's podcasts.
Kevin McAllister -- of the blog Logical Disconnect -- was kind enough to transcribe the question and answer for me. Here it is:
Episode 41: 10:25 - 11:37
Q: Am I morally obligated to call for help if I see someone in a car accident or experiencing a heart attack?
This is obviously from someone who does not know what the Objectivist view of selfishness is. Absolutely yes, you are morally obligated. If you have chosen to live in a society of human beings and your mode of survival depends on your trade with them then you have to value human life so far as it's not guilty or criminal to your knowledge. In that case if you know no evil about a person and no sacrifice is involved then only a psychopath would turn away from such cases. And that would mean besides all the psychological things a direct contradiction of the value of human life. You can't value your life and decide to live with others of your species and say, "They're nothing to me, I don't care if they live or die." That's self-contradiction. Dr. Peikoff's analysis is substantially Aristotelian, I think. (That's a compliment, in this context: Aristotle's moral psychology is superb.) It's not a cost-benefit analysis: the point is not that the person might reward you with cash, that he might be a talented neurosurgeon who might someday save the life of your dear mother, that he might invent some widget that you'd like to buy, or whatnot. Rather, Dr. Peikoff focuses on the kinds of attitudes and dispositions toward other people required to live and live well among other men. That's the right approach to these kinds of cases, I think.
Kevin also transcribed the relevant portion from another of Dr. Peikoff's podcasts -- one I've not yet heard -- on the validity of "lifeboat" scenarios in ethics:
Episode 48: 12:30 - 15:48
Okay, do you know what a lifeboat question is? You know, what do you do when there [are] more people in the lifeboat then there is food and someone has to die, what does Objectivism say? And why those questions are completely illegitimate, because morality is for the circumstances when it is possible for men to coexist. If they can't, then you can't have any morality.
Now, this is a lifeboat question, which I normally wouldn't answer but it's from a high school student from another continent. So I'll read it. This is a really... Okay I won't comment, just listen.
He made this up, it's not true: My wife is extremely sick she is my greatest value, but she will die in 24 hours if I do not acquire a certain medicine for her. I leave the house and go to the pharmacy and find out that the last bottle of medicine has been sold to the man in front of me. There is no other place I can get this medicine. By coincidence the man who purchased the medicine is walking home in front of me. I approach the man and explain to him my situation and request that he give me the medicine. However, he says no, as his wife is in the same situation as mine. He turns around and continues to walk away. I know that if I wanted to I could easily overpower this man and steal the medicine. Now my question is, what is the moral thing to do?
Now, I'd like to know some things about the realistic possibility of this example. For instance, she is only going to live for 24 hours. Who long did you know that? Who told you? And why did you wait? How many other pharmacies have you tried? How many websites? Did you try the manufacturer? I mean this whole thing, point after point, is a completely unreal situation. You are just setting up, two men, for no reason, with no plausibility, want the same thing desperately, should they kill each other? Without the faintest expectation... at least in the life boat, you know that they're there you know and ... but here, there is no reason at all. So, what you have to do, before you ask moral questions, is figure out are they realistic, and what should the characters in them have done, what could have done that would have eviscerated and wiped out the very possibility of the situation. Notably, Objectivism does not oppose reasoning from lifeboat scenarios in ethics merely because a person is unlikely to ever encounter such circumstances in his lifetime. I'm very unlikely to ever be propositioned with large sums of money by a student seeking an undeserved grade, yet we can certainly say that my accepting that offer would be grossly immoral.
Rather, as can be seen from Dr. Peikoff's remarks, the problem with "lifeboat ethics" is that the proposed scenarios are concocted so as to produce irresolvable conflicts between people. By various artificial constraints, they make life in society impossible. They preclude any rational solutions to the problem at hand. Is it then any wonder that the results are unseemly? Of course not.
The simple fact is that lifeboat scenarios do not reflect the most basic facts about human nature, namely our distinctively human methods of producing and trading the values required to sustain life. Consequently, moral principles cannot be applied to such scenarios, nor induced from them.Labels: Ethics, Objectivism
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| Thursday, April 02, 2009 |
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Does the Economy Need Ayn Rand?
By Diana Hsieh @ 3:05 PM
In the "Debate Room" of Business Week, Onkar Ghate debates whether the economy needs Ayn Rand. As you might imagine, he's on the "pro" side.
Comments are welcome. Here's what I posted:
On reading this short debate, I was immediately struck by the vast difference in the intellectual maturity of the two sides.
Dr. Ghate clearly articulates a serious position, based on the theme that Ayn Rand offers the necessary the philosophical foundation of Declaration of Independence. In so doing, he conveys the depth and substance of Ayn Rand's ideas in a way that would naturally arouse a person's curiosity to learn more. (I recommend starting with Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged.)
In sharp contrast, Christina Patterson's remarks are shocking juvenile. She offers nothing better than ill-founded insults and vague accusations. She has no positive views of her own to offer, nor any substantive criticisms of Ayn Rand's views. By her superficial and obviously ignorant sniping, she conveys contempt for her readers.
Patterson claims that hers is the mature view, but her own words show the very opposite. Whether you ultimately agree with them or not, Ayn Rand's ideas deserve serious consideration. It's delightful to see the left's dismissals of Ayn Rand's ideas wearing thin.Labels: Objectivism
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| Friday, March 27, 2009 |
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Atlas Is #1
By Diana Hsieh @ 3:35 PM
Great news from the Ayn Rand Center:
The Ayn Rand Center is pleased to announce that Atlas Shrugged, which ranked #3 in the U.S. Literature and Fiction category merely a week ago, has now climbed to #1!
According to Dr. Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Center, "The explosion of interest in Atlas Shrugged and Ayn Rand's ideas that we're seeing right now is remarkable. As the United States' economy deteriorates and the free market takes the blame for the disastrous consequences of government policies, Americans are increasingly turning to Atlas Shrugged, whose parallels to the current crisis are truly breathtaking.
"Anyone genuinely concerned with the expanding role of government and the accelerating erosion of freedom in this country should pick up a copy of Atlas and read it. In Atlas they will find the deeper philosophical explanation for what is going on today and, more important, they will find the revolutionary philosophy needed to guide us to a brighter future." Wow. For a book that was published over 50 years ago, that's damn amazing.
Also, two other editions of Atlas are ranked #7 and #8, The Fountainhead is ranked #14, and the Atlas Shrugged Cliffs Notes are #24. Amazing!Labels: Objectivism
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| Tuesday, March 10, 2009 |
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Good News/Bad News on Atlas Shrugged Publicity
By Paul Hsieh @ 12:01 AM
We're currently in the middle of a "good news/bad news" situation with respect to Objectivism.
The good news is that there's tremendous interest in Ayn Rand's ideas.
At OCON 2008, Yaron Brook said that one of ARI's goals was to reach the point that Ayn Rand's ideas were being discussed everywhere -- in the newspapers, in line at the local Starbucks, on talk radio, etc. He hoped that it could happen in 10 years.
It's taken less than 10 months.
The bad news is that there's a lot of misinformation about Objectivism being circulated out there, either knowingly or unknowingly.
Hence, if you think that some people are not accurately portraying Rand's ideas, feel free to set the record straight by leaving your own comments on the various blog or news article sites.
The single most important thing you can do is to encourage people to read (or re-read) Rand's books for themselves, so that they can make up their own minds on these issues (rather than just taking the word of some random author or online commenter).
Another thing you can do include post a link to the ARI website's, Introduction to Objectivism.
The free online CliffsNotes for Atlas Shrugged are also pretty good (although of course not a substitute for the book itself.)
Or if I can plug myself, link to my PajamasMedia article, "Ayn Rand and the Tea Party Protests".
Or if you're feeling ambitious, write up your own blog post or OpEd on what "going John Galt" really means.
Other promotional methods (t-shirts, bumper stickers, etc.), can also play a part as long as they get people interested in studying Rand's ideas.
And think about "upping your game" by one notch. If you're a blogger and you've written an especially nice post on the topic, think about also sending it to your local newspaper as an OpEd. If you've composed a good online comment, think of sending it to your local newspaper as an LTE, as well as leaving it as a comment on more than one blog or article website. If you've read a good article on Rand, forward it as appropriate to your friends, family members, co-workers, and elected officials.
We have an unprecedented opportunity right now to promote Rand's ideas. If we let her opponents and detractors frame the debate on their terms, it could harm our cause for years to come. On the other hand, if we frame the discussion on our terms, we could advance our cause by several years or possibly decades.
From personal experience, a single individual can have a disproportionately large effect in this battle of ideas, if he or she is willing to speak up and willing to articulate their ideas in a way that makes sense to the average American.
But we don't have a lot of time to spare. Hence the importance of taking advantage of this golden opportunity.
Of course, there's no "duty" to advocate and defend Rand's ideas. But for many of us, it's enjoyable and in our self-interest. If this is something that appeals to you, then please do so in whatever fashion is most suitable within the context of your life.
Thanks!Labels: Activism, Objectivism
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| Thursday, March 05, 2009 |
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Audio of Debate on Ayn Rand's Ethics
By Diana Hsieh @ 11:50 AM
The audio recording of Monday's debate between Onkar Ghate and Michael Huemer entitled "Making a Virtue of Selfishness? A Debate about Ayn Rand's Ethics" is now available on the "Think!" web site. You can download it directly from this link.
I'm pleased to report that the event was the most popular in the three-year history of this "Think!" series of philosophy lectures for the general public. We've had a packed room -- of 214 seats -- with prior events, but we're never run out of standing room. But that's what happened on Monday. I can take some credit for that: I've gotten very good at promoting these lectures. (It was my seventeenth! Just one more to go!) However, I was working with an excellent topic and speakers -- and a debate format always draws a substantially larger crowd than a mere lecture.
As for the debate itself, I was very pleased. It was a substantive discussion, not mere showmanship. As expected, Dr. Ghate presented the Objectivist view of morality very well. Dr. Huemer was an excellent opponent. He was not casual or dismissive of Ayn Rand's ethics. He presented his views openly, without any kind of pretense or hoopla. While I disagree with his criticisms -- particularly with their epistemological foundation -- he was an honest, informed, and forthright critic. For that, I'm very grateful, as it's quite rare in academia.
The Objectivist philosopher known as "Noumenalself" attended the debate. His general analysis is worth repeating:
I think it's important to give credit to both debaters for an event like this, and that includes giving credit to Huemer. Many of us may disagree with things he said, but he did far better than most other academics who try to analyze and critique Objectivism. Just open most any of the secondary literature on Rand written more than five years ago and you'll see what I mean. I went up after the debate and extended him my thanks. I think others should do so, as well, perhaps by sending him emails thanking him for his participation.
Huemer did not misrepresent the Objectivist position once in the entire debate, and displayed a genuine understanding of its basic principles. That is rare and commendable. Huemer is in the unique position of being a professional philosopher who takes Objectivism seriously, even though he disagrees with it. ... From what I've seen so far, we need more critics of Objectivism like Huemer. Also, regarding Dr. Huemer's proposed counter-examples to egoism, Noumenalself rightly observed:
It's easy to say in response to [Huemer's] examples that we think we shouldn't shoot the fellow because it would violate his rights. He knows that Ayn Rand and Objectivists don't think rights-violation is consistent with Objectivism. He made it very clear that he knew this, and so he was not misrepresenting what we think. His point was that we are wrong to think of this as a logical implication of egoism: if self-interest is our standard, then he doesn't see how, logically speaking, our self-interest alone could rule out exploiting/killing other people. That's not a misrepresentation, but a disagreement about whether our view has a particular logical implication.
And, it's a hard point to establish that egoism doesn't have this implication. Huemer's response (along with many other philosophers) to you would be: why should we care about whether we violate his rights? Why is it in our self-interest not to violate rights, or even to assist someone in an emergency? Huemer is correct that the answer to that question is not obvious. Indeed this was part of Onkar [Ghate's] point: because what's in our self-interest is not obvious, we need a science of ethics to help us discover it.
The burden of proof is on Objectivists to show whether or why these examples illustrate implications of self-interest. And I also think Huemer is correct that we have to have an answer to his admittedly unlikely hypothetical examples. We need to be able to explain why we think such cases are impossible, when and if they are impossible. That is, we need to explain why it would never be in our interest to kill someone for a dollar. Or, if it ever is in our interest, we need to explain why such killing would be outside the scope of morality (as in emergency situations). Onkar [Ghate] did a good job explaining the fundamental principles we need to provide these explanations: he noted the general value we derive from other people (we value them as creative producers, not as material to be exploited), and the general conditions for the applicability of moral advice (it's for guidance in non-emergency situations). But he didn't draw out all of the implications from those two points that are needed to provide the full Objectivist answer here (and given his time limits, he couldn't).
To give one last point of credit to Huemer: the problem of accounting for how the interests of others fit into our self-interest is probably the hardest problem for the Objectivist ethics. To the extent that he focused his criticisms on this issue, he did an honest job of focusing on a legitimate problem that Objectivist philosophers have to address. I'm not saying it can't be addressed. I think Ayn Rand has already done all of the important work to do so. But it's difficult to synthesize everything she said on the matter, so much so that I've been grappling with it for years and still don't quite have it organized in my mind in terms of essentials. If we were wrong about anything, this is where we would be wrong, and thinking honestly about whether Objectivism is true means examining this question carefully. Noumenalself had some further comments well worth reading in that ObjectivismOnline thread.
I would urge you to consider these points your assessment of the debate, particularly in any comments that you post on it. As before, you are welcome to post critical comments about the arguments presented in the debate in these comments. However, I will not permit personal attacks of any kind. Such comments will be deleted, and if outraged enough, I will ban the commenter without a moment's hesitation.
In part, that's because I'm the graduate student organizer and promoter of this series. It would be unseemly for me to willingly host nasty remarks about any participant in the series, let alone about a faculty member in my own department. However, my reasons are more personal: Michael Huemer has been a valuable friend to me in my seven years in the Boulder philosophy department. He has never shown anything but respect for me and for my views. Moreover, he is my dissertation advisor, and I am highly grateful to him for his diligent work and support in that capacity. So if you personally attack him, you are doing him a serious injustice and you are seriously disrespecting me. I will not take kindly to that.
I'm sorry to be so stern in this warning, but I've found that some supposed Objectivists seem more determined to indulge their angry feelings than respect me or my property.Labels: Objectivism
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| Tuesday, February 24, 2009 |
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Atlas Selling Like Hotcakes
By Diana Hsieh @ 5:33 PM
Here's some very good news from the Ayn Rand Center:
Sales of "Atlas Shrugged" Soar in the Face of Economic Crisis
Washington, D.C., February 23, 2009--Sales of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" have almost tripled over the first seven weeks of this year compared with sales for the same period in 2008. This continues a strong trend after bookstore sales reached an all-time annual high in 2008 of about 200,000 copies sold.
"Americans are flocking to buy and read 'Atlas Shrugged' because there are uncanny similarities between the plot-line of the book and the events of our day" said Yaron Brook, Executive Director at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights. "Americans are rightfully concerned about the economic crisis and government's increasing intervention and attempts to control the economy. Ayn Rand understood and identified the deeper causes of the crisis we're facing, and she offered, in 'Atlas Shrugged,' a principled and practical solution consistent with American values." Yeah!Labels: Objectivism
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| Friday, February 20, 2009 |
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Making a Virtue of Selfishness?
By Diana Hsieh @ 12:01 AM
The Center for Values and Social Policy in the Philosophy Department of the University of Colorado at Boulder is pleased to announce a "Think!" debate on Ayn Rand's Objectivist ethics.
- What: Debate on "Making a Virtue of Selfishness? A Debate about Ayn Rand's Ethics"
- Who: Dr. Onkar Ghate (Ayn Rand Institute) and Prof. Michael Huemer (CU Boulder, Philosophy)
- When: Monday, March 2nd, 7:30 - 9:00 pm
- Where: Old Main Chapel, CU Boulder (Campus Map)
About the debate:
Dr. Onkar Ghate will argue: "Ayn Rand challenges the idea, dominant in the West since Christianity, that morality consists of commandments. Even though this conception of morality has often been secularized, its essence has remained: the source of morality is something external to the self, to which the self owes obedience. In sharp contrast, Rand argues that the nature and purpose of morality is to teach one how to achieve one's self-interest."
Dr. Ghate is a senior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute where he teaches at the Institute's Objectivist Academic Center. He lectures on philosophy and Objectivism throughout North America. Dr. Ghate received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Calgary.
Dr. Michael Huemer will argue: "Ayn Rand champions an excessively egoistic ethic, one in which individuals must place themselves before everyone and everything else. This ethic can lead one to hurt, exploit, or simply ignore the needs of others, when it suits one's own interests to do so. Rand's ethic of selfishness clashes with the moral sense of philosophers, spiritual leaders, and ordinary people the world over. These people are not all wrong -- Ayn Rand is wrong."
Dr. Huemer is an associate professor of philosophy at CU Boulder. He has written on such topics as philosophical skepticism, the problem of induction, ethical intuitionism, free will, and deontological ethics. Dr. Huemer received his doctorate in philosophy from Rutgers University in 1998.
All "Think!" events are free and intended for the public. For more information, please visit the "Think!" web page.
For further information on the series, please contact Dr. Alastair Norcross at Alastair.Norcross(at)Colorado.edu. For announcements of upcoming "Think!" events, e-mail Diana Hsieh at Diana.Hsieh@colorado.edu with that request.
Upcoming "Think!" Events:
- Tuesday, April 14th: Prof. Ajume Wingo, "Politics as an Alternative to Violence," 7:30 - 9:00 pm, Old Main Chapel
"Think!" lectures are sponsored by the Center for Values and Social Policy in the Philosophy Department of the University of Colorado at Boulder and funded through the generosity of The Collins Foundation.Labels: Announcements, Ethics, Objectivism
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| Tuesday, January 20, 2009 |
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Circumcision as Mutilation
By Diana Hsieh @ 12:01 AM
I've been catching up on my listening of Dr. Peikoff's excellent podcasts (available via iTunes) over the past few weeks. I have been enjoying them immensely -- although I definitely prefer his solo podcasts to the group discussions. The questions have become increasingly interesting, and his answers are often a bit surprising. I don't always agree with him fully, and I find our minor disagreements of great interest. All in all, I think these podcasts are a fantastic contribution our understanding of Objectivism -- particularly its application to the ordinary problems of daily life. So if you're not listening to them, you're missing out!
A few weeks ago, my ears perked up in his discussion of circumcision in Podcast #34. I am adamantly opposed to that practice -- on the grounds that it inhibits a man's natural potential for sexual pleasure. Admittedly, I was a bit petrified to hear what Dr. Peikoff might say. (What if he didn't think it was a big deal?!? Yikes!) But I need not have worried: he knows his stuff. Here's the transcription, courtesy of Flibby:
Question: Medical issues aside, what right does a parent have to alter a child's body? On one end of the spectrum, I could imagine a parent wanting to remove an abnormal but benign growth, say, a sixth, non-functioning finger. On the other end of the spectrum is circumcision, which I regard as mutilation.:
Peikoff: By the way, I agree with that 100 percent. There can be no legitimate reason for anyone to circumcise a boy. It's either primitive religion, abject conformity, or the evil of destructiveness. Now this question goes on.
Question: Aside from from those two extremes of the sixth finger and circumcision, somewhere in the middle of the spectrum are things like ear-piercing on which I am undecided.
Peikoff: Now, my view would be this: If there is no violation of the biologically normal, then a parent may make changes. He may make changes in that which is abnormal or that which is required by the health. For instance, I do not think parents should have the right to withhold blood in the case of a child who is going to sicken and die for lack of a transfusion. That should be absolutely mandatory on similar grounds on what I said on the further question. But aside from this, I think anything else that would be permanent should be left to the child once he's 18, forbidden by the parent until he's 18. For instance, even piercing ears to wear earrings, piercing the tongue, having indelible tattoos -- all of that I think should be prohibited by a parent and impermissible to a parent to do when the child is their ward and doesn't know well enough what to do.
So that's a pretty old-fashioned view but that's definitely my view. I was allowed to get my ears pierced after I graduated from 8th grade. That seemed way too late to me at the time, but in retrospect, I'm glad that I was mature enough to make my own decision and to care for the wound as required. (A friend of mine who got her ears pierced some years before me was so grossed out that she couldn't touch them.) I don't think that was problematic -- but only because ear piecing is such a small thing, without any negative implications for a girl's life. I wouldn't say the same about a tattoo, piercing another area of the body, or a boy piercing his ears. I think those should be forbidden by the parents while their child is still a child.
What say you?Labels: Objectivism
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| Monday, January 19, 2009 |
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OCON Registration
By Diana Hsieh @ 12:01 AM
A few days ago, Paul and I registered for OCON -- the Ayn Rand Institute's summer conference -- in order to take advantage of the discount for registering before February 1st.
As for the general sessions, I'm particularly eager to hear Tara Smiths two lectures, No Tributes to Caesar: Good or Evil in Atlas Shrugged and "Humanity's Darkest Evil:" The Lethal Destructiveness of Non-Objective Law, John Allison on Principled Leadership, and Onkar Ghate on The Separation of Church and State.
As for the optional courses, Paul and I registered for the following:
Session One:
- A: Eric Daniels: Religion in American History
- B: Yaron Brook: The Moral Defense of Capitalism: A History
Session Two:
- A: Craig Biddle: Moral Rights and Metaphysical Law
- B: Pat Corvini: Limits and the Universality of Mathematics
I really wish we could also take John Lewis' course The History of Ancient Greece: The Archaic Period, but we're otherwise booked in the "B Block." So we'll definitely order that one on CD.
As for the other events, Paul and I will be attending the opening banquet but not the closing banquet. We always go out to a fine dinner with friends instead of the closing banquet. We never much enjoy the random good-byes, the overly loud music, and the overpriced food of the closing banquet. Unfortunately, some of our usual friends will be otherwise occupied or absent from OCON. So, friends, if you'd be interested in dining with us on that July 11th, just drop me an e-mail sometime in the next few months.Labels: Objectivism
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| Saturday, January 10, 2009 |
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Rand Discussion on Secular Right Blog
By Paul Hsieh @ 7:30 PM
The conservative blog Secular Right has started an open thread on Ayn Rand. Some of the contributors to this blog include high-profile conservative intellectuals such as Heather Mac Donald, John Derbyshire, Walter Olson, and Razib Khan who are sympathetic to secular ideals. Hence, this is an excellent opportunity for Objectivists to leave thoughtful, polite comments supporting Rand's ideas.
Here's the comment I left:Ayn Rand's greatest contribution to the realm of political philosophy was her explicit moral defense of capitalism. Too many defenders of capitalism on the political right are lukewarm on capitalism. They argue that it "works" (in the sense of delivering material prosperity), but regard the essential element of capitalism (the pursuit of one’s self-interest) as morally suspect. For instance, Irving Kristol only gives capitalism "two cheers" in his famous book by the same title because he regards capitalism as lacking an essential moral dimension.
In contrast, Rand argued that capitalism is moral precisely because it allows men to pursue their self-interest. At an implicit level, most Americans understand this. They want to be happy, prosper, and pursue goals and values that are important to their own lives.
And this country is a beacon of hope to millions of people around the world precisely because it promises an "American dream" where honest, hard-working people can make a better life for themselves. It is this promise that drew my parents to America from Taiwan over 40 years ago. They came over to this country with little more than the clothes on their back. But they worked hard, prospered, sent two children to medical school, and are now enjoying a happy and well-earned retirement.
Many thinkers on the right do a very good job defending capitalism on economic grounds. But capitalism needs a moral defense as well. Right-leaning thinkers too-often find themselves losing the political debate to leftists who claim the moral high ground by attacking capitalism as "selfish" and promoting socialism as noble precisely because it isn't selfish. Americans want to "do what's right", so if a leftist tells them that capitalism is immoral whereas socialism is moral, they'll keep falling for leftist demagogues even though socialist ideas never work in practice.
For this reason, intellectuals on the right need to proudly and unabashedly defend capitalism as moral -- not despite the fact that it allows men to pursue their self-interest but *because* it allows men to pursue their self-interest.
Ayn Rand was the first thinker to make this fully moral defense of capitalism to the American people. For our sakes, I hope she's not the last. (BTW, much of what I've said is straight from Eric Daniels' superb lecture, "The Morality of Capitalism".)Labels: Activism, Objectivism
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| Friday, January 02, 2009 |
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OList and Activist Mailing Lists
By Diana Hsieh @ 2:47 PM
Here's a reminder about mailing lists potentially of interest to NoodleFood readers -- particularly appropriate if one of your resolutions for 2009 includes more actively promoting respect for reality, reason, egoism, and rights.
First, OList.com is the home of three specialized e-mail lists for Objectivists. All aim to help promote Objectivist ideas in the culture at large:
- OActivists: OActivists is an informal e-mail list for Objectivists committed to fostering positive cultural and political change. Its purpose is to facilitate and encourage effective advocacy of Objectivist ideas in non-Objectivist forums by facilitating communication with other Objectivist activists. Posts to the list alert subscribers to opportunities to speak out, recommend sources of information, discuss effective arguments and principled strategies, reproduce op-eds and letters written by subscribers, announce events, and more. Click here for a full description of this list and its membership requirements.
- OBloggers: OBloggers is an informal mailing list for Objectivist bloggers. Its basic purpose is to facilitate communication about matters of mutual interest, such as upcoming events, posts of interest, best blogging practices, and the like. Click here for a full description of this list and its membership requirements.
- OAcademics: OAcademics is a forum for Objectivist academics to discuss teaching, research, coursework, dissertations, job prospects, publication, and all other aspects of life in (or after) academia. The list is basically a means of sharing knowledge and experience as ever more Objectivists enter academia. Click here for a full description of this list and its membership requirements.
Please feel free to join if you're interested, provided that you meet the criteria for membership.
Second, I heartily support the following activism-oriented e-mail lists. They do not require agreement with Objectivism, but they do require support for the mission statement of the organization.
- FIRM Activists: An unmoderated, low-volume mailing list for activists for free market medicine with Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine (FIRM).
- CSG Activists: An unmoderated, low-volume mailing list for activists for government solely based on secular principles of individual rights with the Coalition for Secular Government (CSG).
- FA/RM Activists: An unmoderated, low-volume mailing list for activists for agricultural and health policies based solely on the principles of individual rights with Free Agriculture - Restore Markets (FA/RM).
- Colorado Free Marketeers: Ari Armstrong's new list for free-market activism in Colorado. He describes the list as follows: "Colorado Free Marketeers is a moderated list for activists looking for information and inspiration. Membership is open to any person committed to the principles of free markets and willing to engage in activism involving public speaking or writing at least every three months. While the list focuses on Colorado activism, those outside Colorado may join the list to track activism in the state and pick up ideas for activism where they live."
Please do join if you're interested.Labels: Activism, Objectivism
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| Monday, December 15, 2008 |
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Objectively Speaking: Ayn Rand Interviewed
By Diana Hsieh @ 4:09 PM
This forthcoming-in-February book of Ayn Rand's interviews looks like a gem. Here's the announcement from the Ayn Rand Bookstore:
Objectively Speaking: Ayn Rand Interviewed
Edited by Marlene Podritske and Peter Schwartz
Preorder now for expected delivery in early February
Half a century of print and broadcast interviews of Ayn Rand are included in Objectively Speaking. This collection includes print interviews from the 1930s and 1940s, and edited transcripts of radio and television interviews from the 1950s through 1981. Ayn Rand's unusual and strikingly original insights on a vast range of topics are captured by prominent interviewers in American broadcasting, such as Johnny Carson, Edwin Newman, Mike Wallace and Louis Rukeyser. A remarkable series of radio interviews over a four-year period at Columbia University are also included. An appendix provides a transcript of a radio program of Leonard Peikoff discussing Ayn Rand's unique intellectual and literary achievements.
(276 pages)
Softcover: $29.95
Hardcover: $34.95 I was pretty interested in this book when I saw this announcement last week. Then I read an excerpt from it in the latest issue of Impact yesterday. (That's the newsletter that the Ayn Rand Institute sends to its donors.) In it, Ayn Rand compared the life of Olga, a young woman working in the USSR, with the life of Kitty, a young woman working in the US. It was awesome. Now I can't wait to read this book!Labels: Announcements, Objectivism
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| Thursday, December 11, 2008 |
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Advice on Objectivist Groups
By Diana Hsieh @ 7:39 AM
Back in November, Amy Nasir posted some good advice for people looking to create a local Objectivist group. Based on my experience with the highly successful Front Range Objectivism, I think such groups should focus on discussing Objectivism -- particularly essays by Ayn Rand -- with the goal of understanding how the principles of the philosophy apply to their own lives.
Such groups have three major benefits, in my view:
- They can help people deepen their understanding of Objectivism. Personally, I find it enormously helpful to be committed to reading and discussing two or three essays by Ayn Rand (or another other Objectivist philosopher) each month in FROG. I learn something new each time I do that, and I know I'm not alone.
- They can be a great resources for friendships with like-minded people. Paul and I have a really fantastic slew of friends in Colorado, almost all found through FROG. Not everyone has been fantastic, but the few real duds have made themselves scarce.
- They can be a springboard for local activism. Not everyone in a discussion group will become an activist. But a few might be inspired to do so in a serious way, and some others might be willing and able to contribute on occasion. And given #1, they'll have the requisite knowledge to do that relatively well.
If you want to see how we conduct our FROG meetings, see this page.Labels: Activism, Objectivism
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| Monday, November 17, 2008 |
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Reminder: G. Gordon Liddy on Ayn Rand
By Diana Hsieh @ 12:01 AM
Don't forget!RadioAmerica's G. Gordon Liddy is devoting a Special Broadcast of his nationally syndicated three-hour talk radio show to Ayn Rand, her philosophy, and understanding the current state of events through the lens of Objectivism.
The broadcast will air live on Monday, November 17, 2008, beginning at 10 a.m., Eastern Standard Time.
The Ayn Rand Center's Yaron Brook, Onkar Ghate, Elan Journo, Thomas Bowden and Eric Daniels will be the exclusive guests for this extended broadcast. They will discuss the financial crisis, Bush's claimed defense of capitalism, today's challenges to free speech, and the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan, among other topics.
The broadcast will air on 200 radio stations across the country as well as on XM satellite radio (on a delayed basis). Live streaming audio will be available on RadioAmerica via this link.
G. Gordon Liddy encourages call-in questions from listeners across the country. Remember, if you're a sensible person with a question or comment of general interest about the application of Ayn Rand's ideas to today's culture, please consider calling into the show. This great opportunity shouldn't be passed over with a shrug, but used to its full potential.Labels: Announcements, Objectivism
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| Friday, November 14, 2008 |
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G. Gordon Liddy on Ayn Rand
By Diana Hsieh @ 10:33 PM
Wow, I'm super-excited about this news:RadioAmerica's G. Gordon Liddy is devoting a Special Broadcast of his nationally syndicated three-hour talk radio show to Ayn Rand, her philosophy, and understanding the current state of events through the lens of Objectivism.
The broadcast will air live on Monday, November 17, 2008, beginning at 10 a.m., Eastern Standard Time.
The Ayn Rand Center's Yaron Brook, Onkar Ghate, Elan Journo, Thomas Bowden and Eric Daniels will be the exclusive guests for this extended broadcast. They will discuss the financial crisis, Bush's claimed defense of capitalism, today's challenges to free speech, and the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan, among other topics.
The broadcast will air on 200 radio stations across the country as well as on XM satellite radio (on a delayed basis). Live streaming audio will be available on RadioAmerica via this link.
G. Gordon Liddy encourages call-in questions from listeners across the country. If you're a sensible person with a question or comment of general interest about the application of Ayn Rand's ideas to today's culture, please consider calling into the show. This great opportunity shouldn't be passed over with a shrug, but used to its full potential.Labels: Announcements, Objectivism
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| Monday, November 03, 2008 |
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Participating in Religious Rituals
By Diana Hsieh @ 12:31 AM
Ramana Reddy e-mailed me the following question a few days ago. I am reproducing it here with his permission:
I am 22 and my dad passed away almost 10 years ago. Every year a gathering is arranged in his memory. This is where the whole thing starts getting weird. According to Hinduism (which my family subscribes to), the son is obligated to perform a ritual every year. The ritual presumes the notion of an afterlife and is filled with the stuff of idealism.
I have recently read OPAR [Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand] and have decided to live according to Objectivist principles to the best of my knowledge. In the present case, I have absolutely no problem with a gathering in his memory, but I stand opposed to these customs which believe in the afterlife and the like.
I will probably take a lot of heat for my decision considering the faith of Indian's in God or whatever. It's not the heat that am really worried about (although it makes me a little nervous sometimes), but the correctness of my decision. I would like to be very sure of my decision before I stand trial. I do not know anybody better to ask this question to. Please feel free to answer in any manner you choose to.
If possible, also do elaborate on stuff like marriages in Church or a funeral conducted by a Catholic priest. I wrote the following very hasty reply:
I don't have time to write much, but I would say that you should not -- as an adult -- actively participate in a ceremony contrary to your beliefs. It's not a problem to attend such a ritual, but to actively participate in it implies that you agree with it. Some of your family members may be angry, but if you don't assert yourself on this point, how many other compromises will they be able to wheedle out of you? Plus, the better family members -- namely those who respect you as an individual -- will get over any initial feelings of anger or resentment. I'm posting this in the hopes that others will chime in with further remarks in the comments, as that was really far too brief.Labels: Objectivism, Religion
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Fleeting Freedom: The Indecent Assault on Broadcasters
By Diana Hsieh @ 12:21 AM
Don Watkins, former NoodleFoodler, recently published an excellent op-ed via the Ayn Rand Center on prohibitions on indecent speech. Here it is:
Fleeting Freedom: The Indecent Assault on Broadcasters
The fleeting expletive case before the Supreme Court is about more than broadcasters' ability to air dirty words--it's about whether "community standards" should be allowed to override free speech.
By Don Watkins
As the Supreme Court prepares to hear arguments Nov. 4 in the so-called fleeting expletive case, Federal Communications Commission v. Fox Television Stations, it's clear that much more hinges on its outcome than broadcasters' ability to air dirty words.
The FCC has had the power to fine broadcasters for "indecent" speech for decades. But following Janet Jackson's infamous Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction in 2004, the government declared all-out war on indecency. Congress increased the maximum penalty per infraction tenfold, from $32,500 to $325,000; the FCC started issuing fines left and right; and Congressman James Sensenbrenner went so far as to recommend jail time for broadcasters who violated "indecency" guidelines. At the same time, the FCC began issuing fines for fleeting expletives. Suddenly a star's offhand comment on live TV could cost broadcasters hundreds of thousands of dollars.
In the midst of all this, one question never got answered: just what is "indecency"? The Supreme Court had defined it as speech that "depicts or describes sexual or excretory activities and organs in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards." But which Americans count (and don't count) as part of the community? Why are they king? And how are broadcasters to divine their supposedly shared standards? In response to these unanswerable questions, the FCC issued a hodgepodge of rulings in specific cases and told broadcasters, in effect, "You figure it out."
Multiple uses of expletives in Martin Scorsese's PBS documentary The Blues? Indecent, said the FCC. Multiple uses of those same expletives in the movie Saving Private Ryan? Not indecent. Suggestion of teenage sexual activity on CBS's Without a Trace? Indecent. Graphic discussion of teen sexual practices on Oprah? Not indecent. Bono's use of the "F-word" during the 2003 Golden Globe awards? Even the FCC wasn't sure about that one. Initially it said the word was not indecent, but later changed its mind and started handing out the fleeting expletive fines at issue in FCC v. Fox Television.
So what is a broadcaster to do? Engage in self-censorship, cutting any material that regulators might declare indecent.
Defenders of the war on indecency admit that the FCC's regulations are murky. But without such restrictions, they say, Americans will be helpless against the stream of offensive programming pumped into their homes: either we allow the government to wield arbitrary power over broadcasters, or we give broadcasters arbitrary power to subject us to filth.
What this argument ignores is that broadcasters' power is not arbitrary. They must earn their market by offering programming Americans choose to consume. We choose to buy a TV (or not). We choose to pay for cable (or not). We choose which channels we and our children watch. Broadcasters can't force us to watch offensive programming any more than an author can force us to read an offensive book.
This is the meaning of free speech: people have the right to say whatever they want, no matter how offensive--and we remain free to listen or not. We don't have to abide by the opinions, prejudices, and errors of our neighbors, but can judge for ourselves whether something is true or false, art or trash, insightful or indecent.
But once the government becomes the enforcer of "community standards," no speech is safe. How long until, say, the Bible Belt declares that the theory of evolution is offensive, corrupts young minds, undermines community values, and must be suppressed? This question is not academic. Bolstered by the indecency precedent, efforts are already underway to regulate "excessively violent" broadcasts.
And if the government can suppress speech "the community" allegedly deems offensive, then why can't it force broadcasters to engage in speech "the community" allegedly regards as good? In fact, it already does so: Univision was recently fined $24 million for failing to air a sufficient amount of educational children's programming. On the anti-indecency movement's premises, judging the value of programming is not the prerogative of broadcasters, who decide what to air, or viewers, who decide what to watch--it's the prerogative of "the community" (and its self-appointed spokesmen).
This is what is at stake in FCC v. Fox Television. The question is not whether fleeting expletives are indecent, an issue that individuals have a First Amendment right to decide for themselves. It's whether the Constitution grants government the power to trample on freedom of speech, using non-objective laws to dictate what we can say and hear on the airwaves. The Supreme Court should take this opportunity to respond with an emphatic "No!" Anything less would be indecent.
Don Watkins is a writer and research specialist at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights. The Ayn Rand Center is a division of the Ayn Rand Institute and promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead."Labels: Free Speech, Objectivism
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| Monday, October 27, 2008 |
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OList Mailing Lists
By Diana Hsieh @ 11:24 AM
A few days ago, I realized that I ought to occasionally post a reminder about my various OList mailing lists. So without further ado...
OList.com is the home of three specialized e-mail lists for Objectivists, all to help promote Objectivist ideas in the culture at large:
- OActivists: OActivists is an informal e-mail list for Objectivists committed to fostering positive cultural and political change. Its purpose is to facilitate and encourage effective advocacy of Objectivist ideas in non-Objectivist forums by facilitating communication with other Objectivist activists. Posts to the list alert subscribers to opportunities to speak out, recommend sources of information, discuss effective arguments and principled strategies, reproduce op-eds and letters written by subscribers, announce events, and more. Click here for a full description of this list and its membership requirements.
- OBloggers: OBloggers is an informal mailing list for Objectivist bloggers. Its basic purpose is to facilitate communication about matters of mutual interest, such as upcoming events, posts of interest, best blogging practices, and the like. Click here for a full description of this list and its membership requirements.
- OAcademics: OAcademics is a forum for Objectivist academics to discuss teaching, research, coursework, dissertations, job prospects, publication, and all other aspects of life in (or after) academia. The list is basically a means of sharing knowledge and experience as ever more Objectivists enter academia. Click here for a full description of this list and its membership requirements.
Please feel free to join if you're interested, provided that you meet the criteria for membership.Labels: Activism, Objectivism
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| Monday, October 20, 2008 |
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Getting Rand Wrong
By Brandon Byrd @ 12:01 AM
As someone who takes ideas seriously, I've always found it frustrating when philosophers take it upon themselves to offer judgments on subjects they haven't bothered to devote serious time and attention to studying. The charge that philosophers (academic or otherwise) sometimes judge where the epistemically virtuous would fear to comment isn't new. (For instance, it isn't rare to hear someone claim that speculation from the philosophical armchair is a poor method of settling some contentious issue.) What makes this phenomenon -- the venturing of unwarranted opinions -- especially pernicious in the case of philosophers is that philosophers are supposed to be the guardians of rationality, revering the mind by sacrificing hasty conclusions at the altar of the well-formed argument. Philosophers are supposed to love wisdom and shun mere belief; when they make assertions that betray culpable ignorance, they sin against their profession as well as the truth.
I don't know what it is about Ayn Rand that makes many philosophers think they can get away with saying whatever they damn well please about her without having studied her work carefully and honestly. I suspect that the real explanation has less to do with Rand and more to do with personal biases on the part of her critics. But whatever the cause, the phenomenon is nevertheless real. It isn't just that many philosophers dislike Rand. We philosophers are an opinionated bunch; we dislike all sorts of things. Rather it's that many philosophers will attribute all sorts of nonsense to Rand without actually considering what she has to say.
To offer an example, below is a passage from Rosalind Hursthouse's On Virtue Ethics. This work, published relatively recently by Oxford University Press, is intended to be used as a textbook on, unsurprisingly, virtue ethics.
"We can interpret Thrasymachus, and more obviously Nietzsche and Rand, as saying that, rather like hive bees, human beings fall, by nature, into two distinct groups, the weak and the strong (or the especially clever or talented or 'chosen by destiny'), whose members must be evaluated differently, as worker bees and the drones or queens are." Um... what? Anyone with even a cursory familiarity with Rand's ideas will realize that she believes no such thing. Rand's philosophical anthropology -- her theory of human nature -- does not recognize a distinction between types of human beings. Her ethical theory evaluates individuals on the basis of their choices, not their unchosen attributes, and she appeals to a univocal standard of moral evaluation -- not to distinct standards for distinct types.
Hursthouse does not provide any sources that might justify her 'obvious' interpretation of Rand's philosophy. But this totally wrongheaded interpretation of Rand was good enough for her editors and peer reviewers at OUP (as well as the numerous philosophers who gave her editorial comments on the final manuscript). Apparently that group of distinguished professors found nothing objectionable in Hursthouse's characterization of Rand. Of course, realizing Hursthouse's error would have required reading Rand.
(On a grimly ironic note, the above passage comes from chapter 11 of On Virtue Ethics. The chapter title? "Objectivity.")
Hursthouse isn't the only person who presents Rand's views incorrectly in a way that betrays ignorance. Chandran Kukathas's entry on Rand in the otherwise excellent Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy is another example. No, Kukathas... Rand didn't think that integrity was "at the root of the idea of freedom," her "real concerns" were not "the defence of the value of integrity (to the point of self-sacrifice) in the face of evil and moral despair," and The Virtue of Selfishness was not a novel.
So far, we've seen a philosopher attribute views to Rand that she 'obviously' didn't hold, and we've seen another philosopher misunderstand the fundamentals of Rand's politics and misconstrue her central concerns. But Gerald Dworkin, a professor of philosophy at UC Davis, has recently exemplified yet another way of getting Rand wrong: saying that her ideas lead to catastrophe.
The forum in which Dworkin makes this charge is Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog -- a blog featuring "news and views about philosophy, the academic profession, academic freedom, intellectual culture... and a bit of poetry." The blog is run by Brian Leiter, currently John Wilson Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, and Director of Chicago's Center for Law, Philosophy, and Human Values. Leiter is also the editor of The Philosophical Gourmet, which ranks the top philosophy departments in the English-speaking world. I read Leiter Reports semi-regularly, as it is a good source of professional news related to academic philosophy (faculty hires, moves, deaths, retirements and whatnot). In addition to this valuable material, the blog also features occasional leftist cultural commentary of more dubious value. Of extremely dubious value is Dworkin's post "Blame it on Ayn Rand" in which he claims Rand is a cause of our economic troubles. Dworkin doesn't really provide much of an argument for this claim, so I'll attempt to provide him with a charitable reconstruction (a courtesy I'm not so sure he deserves... but for the sake of argument...).
Dworkin quotes a recent New York Times article on Greenspan's involvement in the current financial crisis. (That article seems to get Rand wrong too; Rand didn't have "a resolute faith that those participating in financial markets would act responsibly" but that's beside the point.) The article implies that Greenspan's positions on regulation -- specifically the regulation of derivatives markets -- were causally relevant factors in producing the recent financial crisis. Why did Greenspan hold his positions on regulation? Here, Dworkin invokes Keynes:
"...the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back." (I can't resist noting that Rand held a similar view to Keynes about the importance of philosophy in history, though her insight was deeper than Keynes. Rather than viewing history as being primarily driven by political philosophy, Rand viewed metaphysics and epistemology as being much more influential. For more on Rand's insights here, consult the title essay of For the New Intellectual, as well as the title essay of Philosophy: Who Needs It. Peikoff develops Rand's insights on the philosophical motor of history in Ominous Parallels, the epilogue to Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, and in his forthcoming book on how epistemology shapes society.)
Greenspan was a student of Rand, and Rand argued for the principled separation of the state and economics, and thus for an absence of government interference in voluntary economic exchanges. She was a categorical opponent of governmental regulation in financial markets. Greenspan opposed regulation of derivatives markets. The current financial crisis was supposedly brought on by an absence of regulation in these markets. Thus Dworkin claims that Rand is "an important cause of the catastrophe we are in."
Let us examine this argument.
This argument gets its force from the claim that Greenspan was practicing what Rand preached. In an update to Dworkin's post, Leiter snarkily remarks that "Greenspan was not only a friend of Rand's, but a lifelong devotee of her ideas and her 'philosophy,' such as it is." While it is true that Rand and Greenspan were friendly toward one another, it is demonstrably false that Greenspan was "a lifelong devotee of her ideas." It doesn't take a hell of a lot of legwork to discover this; thanks to Google, I didn't even have to leave my armchair.
In The Age of Turbulence, Greenspan's recent autobiography, Greenspan discusses the important formative influence Rand had on his intellectual development. In his discussion, he talks about how Rand encouraged him to look beyond mere economic data and more deeply into the values and ideas that move history and influence human action (including economic action). She was credited with broadening his perspective on the world and helping him reject logical positivism. He even describes himself as "writing spirited commentary for [Rand's] newsletter with the fervor of a young acolyte...". But this enthusiasm was not to last; Greenspan's autobiography claims that Rand's philosophy has inherent contradictions, and that his "fervor receded."
So Greenspan isn't an Objectivist. His policies, as we shall see, reflect this fact.
We're in the midst of a recession, teetering (some might say) on the precipice of a depression. What were Rand's views about recessions and depressions? Well, Dworkin doesn't say. His blog post doesn't even bother to discuss which of Rand's ideas were supposed to get us into this mess. He doesn't explicitly discuss her ideas at all. If one consults Rand's Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal to discover her views on the causes of recessions and depressions, one is directed to the works of Ludwig von Mises. It is important (for getting Rand right) to recognize that while Rand found Mises's economic analyses convincing, she had substantial philosophical and methodological disagreements with him. Mises was a Kantian who viewed economics as a primarily deductive enterprise (and thus was inclined toward epistemological rationalism). He also attempted to do economics in an ethical vacuum, divorcing economic analysis from any underlying normative framework. Rand, of course, rejected Kantianism, rationalism, and a strict division between morality and economics. But despite his errors, Rand thought that Mises's economic theories represented a significant achievement.
At this point, I don't want to provide a lengthy, detailed summary of Mises's views on the business cycle. I may write something in the near future about the causes of our current economic woes, but I'll hold off for now. The following short summary should provide a general indication of the economic views Rand found most convincing.
The most salient aspect of the Austrian theory of the business cycle is that implicates central banks as the fundamental cause of depressions and recessions. Ah! The plot thickens! Wasn't Greenspan the head of our central bank? He was indeed. How do central banks cause recessions?
In a free market, the interest rate (the price of money) is determined by the law of supply and demand. Roughly, the supply of loanable funds that banks have (our savings) determines the interest rate, when taken in conjunction with the overall demand for money and the riskiness of potential debtors. Central banks, such as the Federal Reserve, distort this market mechanism by setting artificially low interest rates (interest rates below the market rate). What happens next? I defer to Wikipedia:
Low interest rates tend to stimulate borrowing from the banking system. This expansion of credit causes an expansion of the supply of money, through the money creation process in a fractional reserve banking system. This in turn leads to an unsustainable "monetary boom" during which the "artificially stimulated" borrowing seeks out diminishing investment opportunities. This boom results in widespread malinvestments, causing capital resources to be misallocated into areas which would not attract investment if the money supply remained stable. A correction or "credit crunch" -- commonly called a "recession" or "bust" -- occurs when credit creation cannot be sustained. Loose monetary policy by central banks leads to people taking on more debt than they otherwise would. Artificially low interest rates allow more credit to be extended to risky borrowers. In our current case this lead to skyrocketing real estate values, since there was an increased demand for houses (made possible by banks extending credit to more and riskier debtors). This effect is obvious enough in the case of commercial banks, which more than doubled the amount of real estate loans they made (thus allocating large amounts of resources into the real estate market -- allocations that wouldn't have occurred in a free market for money and credit.
And then there's the welfare state. Don't let's forget about Fannie and Freddy. The former is a holdover from the New Deal; the latter is a "government sponsored enterprise" created by the Emergency Home Finance Act of 1976, and designed to increase home ownership. Both of which did their part to screw us all by spurring on the housing bubble... and they were able to borrow money at a (de facto, if not de jure) subsidized rate in the marketplace because the public viewed them as being low risk (since the state would presumably bail them out, should the need arise).
All of a sudden, everyone's in debt and no one wants to lend. Small wonder. Small wonder that risky investors are defaulting on their mortgage payments. Small wonder that the derivatives markets are screwing up (I'd argue that we can only make sense of the kerfuffle in the derivatives market in light of monetary policy). Small wonders that major financial institutions are losing their credit rating because they took on too many risky debtors.
We frequently hear that that the market got drunk. What was it drunk on? Cheap credit. Who was the man behind the bar? You can probably guess.
In May of 2000, the Fed Funds rate was 6.5%. By June of 2003, Greenspan had slashed it to 1%, and it stayed there for more than a year (and remained ridiculously low for much longer). Would Rand have found this type of monetary policy commendable (or even tolerable)? Of course not. She'd read her Mises. Moreover, she regarded central banking as morally repugnant and politically unnecessary.
There's much more to be said about our current credit crunch and how to evaluate it in light of Rand's moral and political philosophy. But it should now be evident that Dworkin (and Leiter) are wrong on all counts. They were wrong about Greenspan; they were wrong about Rand. Their errors on these subjects betray a culpable ignorance. One needn't do much research to figure out Greenspan's real views on Rand, or Rand's views on economics. Twenty minutes with Google and Wikipedia would probably have gotten the job done. If a philosopher is going to assert, in a public forum, that another philosopher's ideas lead to disaster, then they have an obligation to carefully consider that thinker's ideas, to understand them, and to show how (in practice) they would result in catastrophe. When a philosopher fails to do that, they do a disservice not only to the thinker they criticize, but also to the truth, to their profession, and to themselves.
Academic philosophers often get Rand wrong. They often have only themselves to blame.Labels: Academia, Economics, Ethics, Finance, Objectivism, Politics
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| Wednesday, September 10, 2008 |
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Another Objectivist at Ford Hall Forum?
By Greg Perkins @ 1:01 AM
The Ford Hall Forum is a longstanding and prestigious platform for speakers with interesting things to say (like Objectivists Ayn Rand, Leonard Peikoff, and Yaron Brook). The Forum sent out an announcement that Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales of Wikipedia fame will be speaking on September 11 in Boston. This caught my eye, not only because I fondly remember Jimbo from Objectivisty circles many years back, but also because it advertises that he is going to talk about how "Objectivist philosophy guides his vision":
Free Speech, Free Minds, Free Markets: Competition and Collaboration
Across the globe we are building, editing, and contributing to a growing body of knowledge and tools at everyone's fingertips. Volunteers in leaderless organizations contribute to online initiatives and articles. Software developers spend their free time collaborating with complete strangers. Amazingly, these efforts are creating products of extraordinary quality, sometimes better than that of large for-profit organizations. Why do we do it? Why does it work? Join us tonight as Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales joins journalist Christopher Lydon to address these questions, where "web 2.0" will take us next, and how Objectivist philosophy guides his vision. I would love to ask some questions about how Objectivism guides his vision, but I can't be there. Maybe someone in the NoodleCaboodle could go and ask questions for us and report back! Here are the ones I am curious to hear addressed:
- You refer to Wikipedia as a way to give people free access to the sum of all human knowledge. Yet Wikipedia doesn't even aim to express what is true—it is focused on documenting what people believe, carefully including all the patently silly and downright vicious things people think. That is, Wikipedia strives for neutrality rather than objectivity with regard to the truth of what is claimed. Wouldn't Objectivism inspire you to characterize Wikipedia more accurately as a vast snapshot of what people currently think, good and bad?
- When you ask for contributions to Wikipedia, you seem to frame or at least decorate the appeal in altruistic terms. How does that square with the ethical egoism of Objectivism, which flatly rejects altruism as immoral?
- In your appeal for contributions, you wrote that "This is a radical strike at the heart of an increasingly shallow, proprietary and anti-intellectual culture. ... I hope [my daughter] will grow up in a world where culture is free, not proprietary... We're already taking back the Internet. With your help, we can take back the world." (Emphasis added.) Just what is bad about being proprietary? Wouldn't an Objectivist be supportive of the creator who chooses to profit from the sale of his work, rather than fight against him? And "taking back" seems to imply that something was unjustly taken. The Internet is physically composed of private property (computers, connections) and wasn't taken from you; the information communicated using it wasn't taken from you, either. Wouldn't Objectivism inspire clarifying and reinforcing the intellectual and physical property rights involved—including how they recognize and foster a deep harmony of interests—rather than this talk of "taking back" something that wasn't taken in the first place?
- You recently announced your launch of a Green Wiki. That site explains, "In light of the climate crisis and other ecological challenges increasingly facing us," that it hopes to serve the "people who want to inform themselves and live in a more sustainable way," because "the threats to our environment are real and that they require action." It will be "written from a green point of view," and will focus on detailing such helpful actions as "How to reduce your carbon footprint." How can this initiative of yours be informed by Objectivism, which repudiates the Environmentalist movement as epistemologically, morally, and politically corrupt?
Obviously, I don't understand how Jimbo's actions can be reconciled with Objectivist principles, so I'm surprised to hear that he thinks the philosophy guides his vision. It would be great to see how he addresses this.Labels: Objectivism, Technology, WTF
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| Thursday, September 04, 2008 |
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Objectivist Roundup #60
By Diana Hsieh @ 6:14 PM
Welcome to the September 4, 2008 edition of the Objectivist Roundup. The Roundup showcases the best posts by Objectivist bloggers each week. Objectivism is the philosophy of Ayn Rand. According to Ayn Rand:
My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute. ("About the Author," Atlas Shrugged, Appendix) ...drumroll please...
Peter Cresswell presents Time for an Olympian razor posted at Not PC, saying, "Too many sports at the Olympics? Time to apply an epistemological razor!"
Noah Stahl presents Enforcing 'Constructive Behavioral Change' posted at The Undercurrent, saying, "This post points out a fundamental error in nearly all public policy discussions today: choosing policies according to which policy will bring about 'constructive behavioral change' in people. Lost from discussion is any consideration of individual rights."
Burgess Laughlin presents Study Groups for Objectivists (SGO) posted at Making Progress, saying, "Study Groups for Objectivists (SGO) offers an opportunity to study a certain history or philosophy text or lecture more productively--using a slow, scheduled pace, optional study questions, and trading problems and insights with other students of the same text."
Stephen Bourque presents The Obsolescence of the Fifth Column posted at One Reality, saying, "There may have been a time when to weaken a free country, it was advantageous to infiltrate the workings of its government, to steal its military secrets, to quietly sow ideas that could destroy it from within, and to break its laws and escape detection. But that sounds downright old-fashioned today."
Myrhaf presents Republican Convention Day 2 posted at Myrhaf.
Andy Clarkson presents The Sun, The Climate, And Other Things posted at The Charlotte Capitalist.
Ari Armstrong presents Why Harry Potter Fans Should Read Ayn Rand posted at FreeColorado.com, saying, "Despite their differences, Ayn Rand and J. K. Rowling share some intriguing similarities in literary style and themes."
Nicholas Provenzo presents The Conservatism of Robert W. Tracinski posted at The Rule of Reason, saying, "In this post, I critique Robert Tracinski's essay on Barack Obama's speech accepting the Democratic nomination and the illogic of Tracinski's tacit call to people to vote for conservative John McCain."
Valda Redfern presents Nothing new under the sun1 posted at Valzhalla, saying, "The ancient Greeks have always been ahead of us."
Paul Hsieh presents Panhandling 2.0 posted at NoodleFood, saying, "Why are panhandling techniques suspiciously similar in major American cities? Find out why in this blog post."
Edward Cline presents Demagogues and Circuses posted at The Rule of Reason, saying, "Whether McCain or Obama wins the White House in November, there would be no "change" and no "new direction," but more of the same movement in the same direction, which is statism."
Adam Reed presents Sarah Palin: Still a Reality-Proof Advocate of Abstinence-"Education" posted at Born to Identify.
Shea Levy presents Lack of Specialization Within Academia posted at Cogito's Thoughts.
That concludes this edition of the Objectivist Roundup. Objectivists, submit your blog posts to the next edition of the Roundup using the carnival submission form.Labels: Objectivism
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| Wednesday, July 30, 2008 |
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Individualism, America, and Ayn Rand
By Paul Hsieh @ 1:00 AM
The following letter appeared in the online edition of the July 13, 2008 Denver Post, with negative reference to individualism and Ayn Rand. Since her name doesn't frequently appear in our local paper, I took this as an opportunity to set the record straight.
Here is the original letter:It wasn't individualism that settled the West
Re: "The Cowboy Myth," July 6 Perspective article.
There are two problems with Jeffrey Lockwood's support of the Cowboy Myth. First, we are constantly told that it was reality, that cowboys were the essential ingredient in the winning of the West. Truth is, the average cowboy was about as significant as today's parking lot attendant.
Perpetuating the Hollywood/dime fiction image of the cowboy propagates the false belief that Ayn Rand individualism was the historical way and will be the best future way to solve our nation’s problems. Truth is, the sodbusters were the key, the heroes: risking all, sticking determinedly in their forlorn shacks to raise their crops and banding together to raise their barns, build their schools and defend their homes.
The key to our nation's past successes was Americans joining together in common cause, not individualism. Working together will also be the key to our future.
Bill Belew
Boulder, CO My response was as follows:America was made by great individuals working under a system which (albeit imperfectly) protected their right to use their rational minds to create value and advance their lives. Where would we be without the likes of Thomas Edison, Westinghouse, and Henry Ford? This was a key insight of Ayn Rand and she deserves tremendous credit for promoting a philosophy that celebrates individual achievement -- the philosophy that underlies the positive and optimistic "can do" American sense of life.
Of course individuals can and should band together voluntarily when it suits their purposes. I have no problem with "working together" with others for mutual benefit as a voluntary arrangement, as many did in the Old West.
However, this notion is too-often corrupted into a vicious morality which preaches that the collective should take precedence over the individual, that individuals should be coerced to help one other, and that therefore we need massive government intrusions into the economy (such as “universal health care”) to automatically provide for everyone’s needs at taxpayer expense.
This approach will destroy the sorts of individuals who made America great, and will eventually destroy America. We need to celebrate and support the individuals who embody the American spirit and work-ethic, not punish them.
Paul Hsieh
Sedalia, CO Labels: History, Objectivism
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| Friday, July 25, 2008 |
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Reminder: Objectivism Seminar Resuming This Sunday
By Greg Perkins @ 3:00 PM
Just a reminder that The Objectivism Seminar will be resuming its tour of Dr. Leonard Peikoff's seminal book, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. We're about to begin Chapter 2, so if you aren't already participating, now is a great time to catch up and join in!
(From last time:)
Veteran or newbie, fan or critic, here's your chance to enjoy a real upgrade to your personal understanding of Rand's philosophy, your ability to live like ideas matter, and your facility in helping change our culture for the better!
I have to say that I'm really pleased with how our new meeting format is shaping up. Everyone seems to be growing and sharpening their understanding -- newer and more experienced students of the philosophy alike. Basically, we have been discussing just one section of the book each week (maybe 5-15 pages of reading), and then working over the material from several angles in discussion. Each meeting runs for about an hour and a half, and if you want to see (hear) what it is like, just visit the Objectivism Seminar's page at TalkShoe to listen or even subscribe to the podcasts for past sessions.
If you want to jump in, now is a great time: all you have to do is read Chapter 1, hopefully listen to the podcasts of the sessions for it, read at least the first section of Chapter 2, and show up for the next session this Sunday!Labels: Announcements, Objectivism
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| Thursday, July 17, 2008 |
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The Objectivist Roundup: First Anniversary Edition
By Diana Hsieh @ 11:25 AM
 Welcome to the First Anniversary Edition of the Objectivist Roundup. Yes, the Objectivist Roundup -- the weekly review of posts from Objectivist bloggers -- is one year old. The very first Objectivist Roundup was hosted on Kim's Play Place on July 19th. It was a small beginning, with just four submissions. Now, one year later, the Roundup has more submissions than I care to count. (I'll let the HTML do the counting for me.)
So without further ado, it's time to whack the birthday piñata to see what Objectivist goodies burst forth:
- Jeff Scialabba presents The Next Hot Career Choice: Self-Immolation posted at The Undercurrent.
- Guy Barnett presents Ending Racism through Racism posted at The Undercurrent.
- Gideon Reich presents Armchair Intellectual posted at Armchair Intellectual, saying, "Here's my review of the Summer 2008 issue of The Objective Standard."
- Paul Hsieh presents A Conversation With My Dentist posted at We Stand FIRM, saying, "It's important to spread good ideas. And it's equally important to give our moral sanction and support to others who spread good ideas. In both cases, you may make more difference than you realize."
- Burgess Laughlin presents Quality Control in Movements? posted at Making Progress, saying, "How have movements of the past--such as the movement to abolish slavery in the USA--succeeded? One element of the answer might be quality control. Did members of successful movements of the past attempt some sort of quality control? This article offers preliminary notes for such an investigation."
- Monica presents Environmentalists vs. The Environment posted at Spark A Synapse, saying, "This week, I discussed the Objectivist view of environmentalism and contemplated the question, 'Are hard-core environmentalists really pro-environment or are they are just anti-man?' I concluded that hard-core environmentalists aren't pro-environment any more than hard-core animal rights activists such as PETA are pro-animal, as evidenced by their desire to destroy all domesticated species. Likewise, hard-core environmentalists are nihilistic. Rather than seeking a positive value, they seek a negative: the complete absence of man's influence on the world. This is why viable solutions to the putative problem of global warming, such as nuclear power and forestry, are rejected."
- Khartoum presents Enforcing Vegetarianism posted at Philosophy, Law and Life.
- Ari Armstrong presents Denver Post's Crack Economic Team Strikes Again posted at FreeColorado.com, saying, "I poke holes in the claim that energy controls and subsidies are responsible for Colorado's economic success."
- Stephen Bourque presents The Rescue of Ingrid Betancourt posted at One Reality.
- Roderick Fitts presents The Importance of the Subject posted at NoodleFood, saying, "Tara Smith's paper, 'The Importance of the Subject in Objective Morality: Distinguishing Objective from Intrinsic Value' elaborates on philosopher Ayn Rand's view that the individual (the "subject") plays an important role in the generation and the instructions of an objective morality."
- Myrhaf presents Sui Generis posted at Myrhaf, saying, "In this episode Myrhaf is asked to name authors who write like Ayn Rand, but fails to think of any."
- Ken presents To the Republican Platform Committee posted at Ad Hoc, saying, "Here's my advice to the Republican Platform Committee regarding the religious right's threats to the separation of church and state."
- Gus Van Horn presents Prager's False Equation posted at Gus Van Horn, saying, "The religionists are trying to keep us from realizing that the gay marriage debate is really about individual rights."
- C. August presents Book Review: The Sparrowhawk Series posted at Titanic Deck Chairs, saying, "Do you long for new novels that live up to and reflect your sense of life? Are you tired of modern fiction that wallows in the mundane and profane, as if that's all there is in the world? Read this review to find out if you should add Sparrowhawk to your reading list."
- Valda Redfern presents The Solution to the Food/Energy/Whatever Crisis posted at Valzhalla, saying, "'In the house of the wise are stores of choice food and oil, but a foolish man devours all he has' (Proverbs 21:20)."
- Peter Cresswell presents Chrysler Building - William van Allen posted at Not PC, saying, "New York's Chrysler Building is now Abu Dhabi's Chrysler Building -- an unintended consequence of Keynesian economics and environmentalist anti-development policies."
- Nicholas Provenzo presents Five Great American Paintings: Part III: Lincoln the Railsplitter posted at The Rule of Reason, saying, "This post discusses "Lincoln the Railsplitter," one of five paintings that I consider to be among American painter Norman Rockwell's greatest artistic achievements."
- Edward Cline presents John McCain: Pseudo-Maverick II posted at The Rule of Reason, saying, "Senator John McCain is a political pseudo-maverick because, in reality, he subscribes to every major fallacy at large in contemporary Western culture."
- Darren Cauthon presents Radio Royalty Rates Jumped? In Comes the Free Market! posted at Darren Cauthon.
That concludes this Anniversary Edition of the Objectivist Roundup. Now that you've gotten your fill of 19 (!) posts, it's time to pack up the birthday cake and head home from the party. On your way out, remember to give all due congratulations and thanks to the women of Kim's Play Place and Rational Jenn for creating and sustaining a fantastic carnival every week for a whole year!Labels: Objectivism
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| Sunday, July 13, 2008 |
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The Importance of the Subject
By Roderick Fitts @ 6:04 PM
The January 2008 issue of the journal Social Philosophy and Policy had numerous papers focusing on the "Objectivism, Subjectivism, and Relativism in Ethics."[1] Among them was Objectivist philosopher Dr. Tara Smith's "The Importance of the Subject in Objective Morality: Distinguishing Objective from Intrinsic Value."
In this paper, Dr. Smith elaborates on philosopher Ayn Rand's view that the individual (the "subject") plays an important role in the generation and the instructions of an objective morality.
To appreciate what Dr. Smith is pointing out, consider the following examples:
(1) Tiger Woods and his accomplishments. Woods has deliberately sought a particular type of life as a professional golfer, and as we can all attest, has had an extraordinary amount of success in his efforts. He paid attention to facts relevant to his goal as a great golfer, such as the value of practicing his golf swing and buying effective golf equipment (or even changing his swing when it injures him).[2]
(2) John Allison, the chairman and CEO of BB&T bank. Allison drove towards a particular career, and, like Woods, is also very successful in his field, the banking industry. He identified certain business actions as practical, and engaged in them, including teaching his employees his personal value system, and funding courses and organizations in support of Capitalism.
These examples illustrate that seeking life makes certain actions, objects, and positions objective values or disvalues relative to certain facts of life's requirements and to an individual's goals and purposes. Not adequately practicing before an upcoming golf championship would be a disvalue for Woods, because it would decrease his chance of winning, possibly lessen his endorsements, and reduce his general ability as a golf player--which means: all things considered, it would be bad for his life. Increasing the economic value of BB&T's products would be a value for Allison, by contrast, because it would likely increase his company's success, increase shareholder value, and allow his company to buffer any future losses--meaning that it would be good for his life, fully considered. Objective values are needs that we should pursue because they are conducive to our lives, and they allow us to succeed at our chosen goal of living--this is Rand's basic depiction of objective values.
Another element of the objectivity of values Smith points out is that it is relational: while things or practices can benefit us, such as a better golf swing in Woods' case, they can only function as values if the person identifies them as beneficial--as worth the effort of gaining. This relational aspect of objective values highlights the crucial role that our free will plays. Certain biological facts make certain things beneficial and other things harmful regardless of our own thoughts and opinions towards them, but our thoughts do matter in regards to considering some benefits as "values," because our conclusions will determine if we act towards what we believe to be values.
We need to seek beneficial objects to enhance our lives, and many of these beneficial things can only be gained by our deliberate choices and actions--meaning that in order to be successful, we must know how to choose and what to choose. In Smith's (and Rand's) view, this is precisely why we need morality. "A moral code," Smith writes, "identifies the kinds of ends that a person should seek (values) and the kinds of actions that he should take to secure values (virtues)."[3]
This understanding of how the individual's choice to live and his pursuit of identified beneficial things is (partly) what gives rise to objective values (and morality) is one of Smith's points in the essay.
The other point highlighting how pivotal the individual is in an objective morality centers around the concept of "objectivity" itself.[4] In short, our thoughts and choices don't automatically conform to reality, and so we discover that it is necessary to identify methods of thinking which take the facts into consideration (objective) and contrast them with methods which ignore or evade relevant facts (non-objective). For example, Woods changing his swing when it injured him is a professionally objective approach insofar as he paid attention to relevant facts (his physical condition, his previous golf approach, negative consequences of not changing his swing, etc.) in order to succeed in his goals.
The need to pursue values, coupled with the facts that we don't automatically pursue them and don't automatically know how to succeed, are the grounds for an objective morality--a morality that makes possible systematic guidance in determining if our actions conform to the facts and our goals, or if they don't.
It is the deliberate choice to live, the identification of certain beneficial things which one should pursue (objective values), and an objective approach to one's life-decisions that demonstrates the importance of the subject in an objective morality.
Before concluding, I'd like to point out one of the implications of this view of moral objectivity.[5] Namely, that Smith-Rand's view of morality places its function solely in the advancement of one's own life--it is egoistic.[6] This moral code is concerned with one's self-interest and how to realistically accomplish it. As Smith notes:
The question that a person faces, in aspiring to moral objectivity, is not how to escape his vantage point, either literally or figuratively, but how to make his view conform with reality. What is the nature of this thing that I am considering? And what sort of impact is it most likely to exert on my life? These are the principal questions that a person must address.[7] A very illuminating essay, which may be of particular interest to those who think of an "objective morality" as a set of duties to be fulfilled in total disregard to one's interests.
References and Notes
[1] All of the essays in the January issue are available for free
viewing, and no registration required.
[2] The Truth About Tiger
[3] Tara Smith (2008). The Importance of the Subject in Objective Morality: Distinguishing Objective from Intrinsic Value. Social Philosophy and Policy, Cambridge University Press, 25: p. 132.
[4] For more on the concept of "objectivity," the Ayn Rand Lexicon entry on objectivity.
[5] Another implication Smith points out in the paper is that Rand's view of moral objectivity rejects a single list of values, identical for everyone (which is usually a characteristic of the moral objectivism position in philosophy). Many of the things Tiger Woods pursues in connection to his profession as a golfer are values for him, but probably are not values for John Allison, since he is in a different line of work. Similarly, the values they both pursue (organizations they support and career) legitimately differ. By "legitimate," I second Smith's remark that the "parameters defining the permissible range are themselves objective insofar as they are grounded in the natural requirements of human life" (Smith, "The Importance of the Subject," p. 143).
[6] See more on egoism in chapter 6 of Smith's book, Viable Values: A Study of Life as the Root and Reward of Morality, and in this Ayn Rand Lexicon entry on Selfishness
[7] "The Importance of the Subject," p. 146Labels: Ethics, Objectivism
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| Thursday, July 10, 2008 |
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Think You Understand Objectivism?
By Greg Perkins @ 5:48 PM
Veteran or newbie, fan or critic, here's your chance to enjoy a real upgrade to your personal understanding of Rand's philosophy, your ability to live like ideas matter, and your facility in helping change our culture for the better!
The Objectivism Seminar is currently working its way through Dr. Leonard Peikoff's seminal book, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. After wrapping up Chapter 1, we took a little break for OCON and assorted schedule interference, so now is a great time to catch up and jump in! Our next session will be Sunday July 27, 7:30pm Mountain.
I have to say that I'm really pleased with how our new meeting format is shaping up. Everyone seems to be growing and sharpening their understanding -- newer and more experienced students of the philosophy alike. Basically, we have been discussing just one section of the book each week (maybe 5-15 pages of reading), and then working over the material from several angles in discussion. Each meeting runs for about an hour and a half, and if you want to see (hear) what it is like, just visit the Objectivism Seminar's page at TalkShoe to listen or even subscribe to the podcasts for past sessions.
If you want to jump in, now is a great time: all you have to do is read Chapter 1, hopefully listen to the podcasts of the sessions for it, read at least the first section of Chapter 2, and show up for the next session in a couple of weeks!Labels: Objectivism
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| Thursday, July 03, 2008 |
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OCON: Q&A Session with Leonard Peikoff
By Paul Hsieh @ 11:01 PM
As many readers know, Dr. Leonard Peikoff gave a special Q&A session for attendees of OCON 2008 on July 2, 2008. I've chosen to summarize a few selected questions, not necessarily in the order that they were asked. These are paraphrases from my notes and not verbatim quotes, so any errors or inadvertent inaccuracies are purely my own, not his. He took a mixture of nearly 40 written and spoken questions. The session lasted 90 minutes, with a 5 minute intermission halfway through.
He and the ARI established a few ground rules ahead of time. In particular, he stated that he wouldn't comment on the 2008 Presidential election. He also gave an update on the status of his forthcoming book on the DIM hypothesis as well as his podcasting activities. Overall, he was in an cheerful benevolent mood, and there were many touches of humor that I can't easily capture in this blog post. His mind was razor sharp, and it was good to see him at his best.
I don't know if an audio recording of this session will be subsequently released as a CD from the Ayn Rand Bookstore or on his podcast. If I learn more, I'll post an update.
My own comments will be in square brackets ("[]").
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Book update: The book is going both "badly" and well. It is going "badly" in the sense that he has completed a preliminary draft of the entire book, but now has to do a lot of heavy editing of the earlier chapters.
It is going well in the sense that he is now fully convinced of the correctness of his DIM hypothesis, based on the research he has done. And he is enjoying the writing process and is happy with the quality of the work. The book should be completed by Christmas 2010 at the very latest.
Podcast update: He enjoys doing the podcast tremendously. He is pleased with the quality of the questions and believes that the questions submitted are of better quality than in the past. He is also happy with the improved audio quality. He hopes that his answers are spurring his listeners to pursue some of these ideas in greater depth by looking for more information in the rest of the Objectivist literature. Also, he finds the podcasting to be a nice break from his book writing.
The podcasts will now be available on iTunes, which any users can subscribe to for free!
[I think this is terrific news, since this will make it easier to transfer files back and forth from my iPod, rather than having to do the downloads through the Peikoff.com website.]
Q) What philosophical or cultural trend is the most dangerous?
A) Religion.
Q) Will the rise of environmentalism and the subsequent loss of freedoms bring us to a society like that portrayed in Anthem?
A) Yes and no. Environmentalism does pose a danger to our freedoms. But the society depicted in Anthem is a fictional one which projects the idea of collectivism in its purest form. In our case, he believes that a different bad outcome would be more likely -- one in which we are ruled by a Pope rather than a "Council of Scholars".
Q) Who are the "low hanging fruit" most likely to be receptive to Objectivist ideas, i.e., the best targets to reach?
A) In his experience, young people between ages 17-29. Before age 17, they are generally too young and not ready to digest these ideas. After age 30, they are more likely to stop thinking as they will have finished deciding their basic values. With respect to specific professions, he's noticed that engineers, computer people, and doctors seem to be disproportionately represented in Objectivist circles.
Q) What are your favorite artworks in the following specific categories -- novel, play, painting, sculpture, and song?
A) His favorites are:Novel - Atlas Shrugged
Play - Cyrano de Bergerac
Painting - The Creation of Adam (Michelangelo)
Sculpture - The Dying Slave (Michelangelo)
Song - He doesn't know which is his favorite, but it's not "God Save the King" (the first song title that popped into his head when he heard the question). Q) As a gay Objectivist, there seem to be a disproportionate number of other gays in the Objectivist community relative to the population at large. Is there an explanation for this?
A) "Is that a problem?" [Lots of laughter, and the questioner said, no that wasn't a problem at all for him.] Basically, it's hard to know if there actually is over-representation or under-representation given the small numbers. Perhaps if there were 20 million Objectivists we could ask the question and attempt an answer. But the numbers are currently too small to attempt to answer this question or even to know if the premise is true.
Q) Is there a proper role for government in environmental issues where there are collective action questions -- for instance, issue of pollution where no single source causes a provable harm, but the aggregate of millions of polluters is a source of harm?
A) If a single polluter can be shown to be the cause of a provable harm to another, then this should be addressed through the courts -- i.e., the polluter can be sued for damages.
On the other hand, in the cases where an industrial society inherently generates in aggregate a level of pollution that may cause harm, but no single individual's pollution is a provable source of harm, then there is no role for government intervention. A person can't take the benefits of living in an industrial society (such as advanced medical technology that lets people to live to age 75 rather than dying at age 25), then also complain that the government should stop the Los Angeles smog that causes his eyes to water.
If you don't want to live in LA, then the proper response is to move away, not ask the government to impose environmental regulations.
[Obviously this opens up a number of interesting secondary issues, but he did not pursue this further.]
Q) Is the word "Shrugged" in "Atlas Shrugged" a verb or an adjective?
A) It's a verb. "I can't imagine a sentence in which 'shrugged' would be used an adjective."
Q) Is it legitimate for a person to make a career of theoretical science, without regard to practical application? Or must there be some attempt at application for this to be a legitimate activity?
A) As an individual scientist, this can be a totally legitimate activity. This can be part of a division of labor where someone pursues advances in theory without necessarily concerning himself with how it can be applied, whereas others use their minds to develop applications.
In a free society, someone concerned purely with theory might find it difficult to obtain funding, since most businesses would want to pay for research with some eventual practical applications. But if he had his own source of private funding or if that was how the division of labor was made, then this is fine.
From the perspective of man as such, it is not a legitimate endeavour to pursue pure theory without regard for any practical application that would benefit man's life in some way. But from the perspective of the individual scientist, a division of labor into theoreticians vs. applied scientists can be entirely legitimate.
Q) What is your favorite episode of The Twilight Zone?
A) The episode "A Nice Place to Visit", because of the deep philosophical content presented in an engaging way accessible to all viewers. He also likes the Twilight Zone series as a whole due to the good dialogue and characterizations, as well as brilliant plot twists.
[Larry Salzman notes that the full 30-minute episode can be found here on the CBS website. Thanks, Larry!]
Q) Do you have any advice on how to achieve cultural change for the better?
A) Nothing more than Ayn Rand has already said in her essay, "What Can One Do?". Namely, to write, speak out and advocate good ideas in the appropriate contexts.Labels: ARI, Objectivism, OCON
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| Sunday, June 22, 2008 |
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Happy Birthday to Gus!
By Diana Hsieh @ 11:50 AM
Congratulations to Rational Jenn and her husband Brendan on the birth of their son, Sean Riordan Casey (aka "Gus")!
Jenn has done a great job of creating and maintaining the very active and like-clockwork Objectivist Roundup, a blog carnival highlighting the best posts from Objectivist bloggers each week. She created it shortly after I created my OBloggers mailing list.
I've not linked to these weekly carnivals, for the silly reason that I've not gotten in the habit. I'll try do so from here on out, however. (In fact, I'm sure to do it from here on out, as I just added it as a recurring Thursday task to Entourage. Thanks again, GTD!) You can find the full list of past carnivals from this page. (Just click on "past carnivals".) Last week's carnival can be found at The Crucible & Column.
Ah, but all of that is of minor importance compared to the health of mom and baby! Congratulations again to Jenn and Brendan -- and little Gus!Labels: Objectivism, Personal
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| Monday, June 09, 2008 |
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Why the New Atheists Can’t Even Beat D’Souza: Morality and Life
By Greg Perkins @ 7:35 AM
(Previous in the series: The Best and Worst in Human History, Science vs. Miracles, and The Gap in Religious Thought.)
In one of his debates with the "New Atheists," Dinesh D'Souza talked about how religion demands that we move outside of ourselves and sacrifice, and alleged that atheists chafe under the moral rules of Christianity that hold them accountable. He went on to say atheism is a rebellion against that—that atheism is not really an intellectual revolt against unsubstantiated ideas, but a moral revolt against rules they simply don't like being held to. While the New Atheists have a few sharp things to say to religionists on the moral front, their response has lacked the clarity and broad force of the fundamental response that needs to be delivered.
Values vs. Subjectivism
To begin with, D'Souza's charges do have some merit because his opponents stumble badly with respect to the issue of values. Most secular thinkers subscribe to the idea that values are somehow arbitrary, relative, based in emotions like empathy or in "intuitions," subject to a collective agreement of society or to the wishes or whims of the individual. In all its varieties, such subjectivism is open to criticism because there is, in fact, an objective basis for values: What makes something good or bad is that it furthers or frustrates the goals of some agent, and the most fundamental alternative any organism can face is life or death, existence or nonexistence as a living being. This is to say, life is the ultimate yardstick by which all subsidiary goals and alternatives are measured for their value-significance.[1] Sunlight and water are valuable to the plant, which turns its leaves and grows its roots to gain those things and maintain its existence. Nuts and shelter are valuable to the squirrel, as is avoiding hungry predators. And the same is true of people: the good is that which ultimately furthers our lives.
This perspective makes it clear that values are a factual concern, not a matter of arbitrary opinion or feelings or loose "intuitions." Merely hoping, feeling, or asserting something is good can't make it stand in a positive relationship to a life, any more than declaring 2+2=5 would make that so. The true and the good are determined by the facts of reality, and we avoid grasping the facts and acting accordingly at our peril. This is why any inwardly-focused, subjectivistic conception of values is necessarily bankrupt, a threat to human life.
But for those accused of rebelling against the moral absolutes of God, there is a silver lining to be enjoyed in this lesson: the religionists are themselves guilty of the sin of moral subjectivism. The essence of subjectivism is acting on whim—wishing, assuming, feeling, or declaring that facts will align themselves with thoughts and lives. Of course, this gets it exactly backwards: thoughts and lives must align themselves with the facts because facts are absolutes to be discovered, not declared. Merely hoping or asserting something is good doesn't make it so, and it doesn't matter whether we're talking about the whim of a lone subjectivist deciding what is good or bad, the whim of an entire civilization voting on it, or the whim of a "supernatural" mind decreeing it. So the religious who claim to have an absolute morality are really only subjectivists of a supernatural stripe. The trouble for them is that their sort of subjectivism is just as false as any other: God telling Abraham that it is good to slay his innocent son Isaac doesn't make it good. His ordering the enslavement of entire peoples in the Old Testament doesn't make that good. On and on—the bottom line is that calling poison "food" doesn't make it nutritious, and pretending otherwise is to court destruction.
Determinism vs. Morality
Next, consider that we humans don't automatically act in support of our lives like squirrels and plants do. We have the power to freely choose to harm ourselves, to do the wrong thing, to not pursue the values we know are required for our existence as living organisms. We don't have instincts to tell us how to build shelter or to guide us in choosing food over poison—we have to learn those things, whether it means building a lean-to or erecting a skyscraper, and whether it means avoiding the wrong mushrooms or properly cooking a gourmet chicken dish to ensure it is not just tasty but safe. In fact, being the rational animal born without conceptual knowledge to act by, we have to learn everything we need to know about what furthers or harms our lives—and we have to choose to abide by that knowledge or perish.
This is especially important in the case of the most abstract, most fundamental knowledge that guides our choices and actions—the overarching principles which can help us to consistently pursue the values needed to maintain our existence and flourish over the span of an entire lifetime. These are moral principles like honesty, productiveness, justice, and integrity. Essentially, a proper morality consists of grasping these kinds of principles for the support of human life: i.e., recognize these basic facts and flourish, or evade them and suffer. Indeed, we need morality because we are conceptual animals. This is why moral codes have appeared wherever and whenever humans have appeared; the impact of moral values (both proper and improper) is tremendous precisely because of how fundamental they are to our existence, guiding us in myriad concrete circumstances great and small.
Just like any other matter of fact, we can approach morality rationally and scientifically, working to discover, validate, and teach each other about the relevant fundamental principles. Such a project is just as feasible—and just as challenging—as discovering and sharing the fundamental principles of engineering or economics. But of course this kind of development is only possible if we recognize the nature of the field in the first place, and this is another terrible weakness in the New Atheists and their scientific friends that prevents their giving a robust answer to the likes of D'Souza. The fashionable but unnecessary materialism and mechanistic determinism that is prevalent among them leads to the denial of the very fact that gives rise to morality in the first place: that we have volitional minds and our choices have life-and-death consequences. This denial has hobbled the scientific study of morality, leaving them looking in the wrong place and for the wrong thing. Notice the categorical error in such prominent programs as "evolutionary morality," where researchers look for moral behavior in the actions of nonvolitional, nonconceptual animals like mice and birds. And in how they search for the roots of morality in evolved behavior "modules" in brains, neglecting the basic fact that the moral is the learned and chosen—not the inbuilt and determined.[2] A sound philosophical foundation would help them be more productive and less prone to these sorts of distractions and blind alleys.
Sacrifice vs. Life
Finally, there is the most disastrous error confusing the scientific study of morality and stopping the New Atheists from knocking D'Souza out of the intellectual ring: they may challenge the existence of God, but they uncritically accept the moral standard that Christianity has injected into Western culture. That is, they accept the moral standard of altruism, literally "other-ism," a moral standard of sacrifice. This can be seen in various facets of their struggles to explain secular morality: they restrict the domain of morality to the social, they uphold sacrificial sentiments and principles of conduct, and they cite scientists who work to understand the biological basis for morality by searching for altruistic behavior in animals. (Though the scientists muddy the sacrificial core of the concept by also reflexively labeling life-serving, nonsacrificial social behaviors better characterized as cooperation, investment, and trade as "altruism." Sacrifice means surrendering a higher value for a lower one or no value at all—not giving up a lesser value to gain a greater one.) Having assumed an altruistic standard of morality, the New Atheists and most secular thinkers are likewise led to the conclusion that determining the good merely comes down to determining who or what one has a duty to sacrifice to: neighbor, family, tribe, race, society, nation, leader, species, environment, god.
But sacrifice can't be the proper standard of morality. In fact, it represents the inversion of a proper moral code because giving up values is inimical to life. Fully and consistently adhering to such a standard means a swift death, so anybody accepting the moral standard of sacrifice lives only through the inconsistency of compromising and diluting it, mixing in elements of its antithesis. But managing to survive poison by mixing it with food doesn't render it part of a healthy diet, much less a central staple. Sacrifice per se is the opposite of the good, and seeking it is irrational, so the New Atheists will forever flail in trying to scientifically support or rationally justify such an approach to morality.
Genuine virtue consists in creating values, not in surrendering them—in focusing on reality and discovering a vaccine, in searching our spiritual nature and producing a play, in building a stadium, in raising a loving family, in digging a canal, writing a textbook, cooking a meal. This understanding drives the proper response to D'Souza's charge of rebelliousness: Any healthy person armed with the correct perspective would reject the subjectivist moral code of Christianity and its enshrinement of sacrifice because it is fundamentally set against human life and happiness. Instead, we should seek a morality that is truly absolute, reality-based, scientific, and which rejects human sacrifice in its every form and degree as irrational.[3] We should seek a genuine morality of life.
Notes:
- Ayn Rand demonstrated this in her essay, "The Objectivist Ethics," which is explored in depth in the book, Viable Values: A Study of Life as the Root and Reward of Morality by Dr. Tara Smith.
- This is certainly not to say that evolutionary biology should stand mute on morality—values are rooted in the phenomenon of life, after all. I am arguing that scientists must take care to recognize the difference between the slate and what is written on it. For example, they might profitably investigate the evolutionary basis of what gives rise to and enables morality: the phenomenon of volitional, conceptual minds.
- For further investigation of such a morality, I recommend the bite-sized introductory book, Loving Life by Craig Biddle and its scholarly yet accessible big brother from Cambridge University Press, Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist by Dr. Tara Smith.
Labels: Atheism, Objectivism, Philosophy, Religion
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| Monday, June 02, 2008 |
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Why the New Atheists Can’t Even Beat D’Souza: The Gap in Religious Thought
By Greg Perkins @ 12:56 PM
(Previous in the series: The Best and Worst in Human History and Science vs. Miracles.)
In his op-ed, "Taking aim at God, and missing," Dinesh D'souza continues his counters to "New Atheists" such as Christopher Hitchens. This time we find him saying that "Thanks to the astounding discoveries of modern science, I think the God hypothesis has a lot more going for it today than it did in the eighteenth century." What he considers convincing on this front is telling, so I'll quote him at length:
Modern science has discovered that the universe, far from existing eternally, had a beginning. Not only matter but space and time itself came into existence around 15 billion years ago in the fiery burst that scientists term the Big Bang. The laws of physics themselves originated at that point, and those laws were inoperative "before" the founding moment. So what is the secular explanation for how the universe and its laws came into existence? Is there a natural explanation for nature's own origin? If so, what is the evidence for it? Hitchens supplies no such theory and no supporting evidence. His rejection of the God hypothesis seems nothing more than an assertion of atheist dogma.
In recent decades, scientists have found innumerable ways in which our universe—not just our planet but the entire universe—is narrowly tailored to permit life. Change the variables of nature by an infinitesimal amount and this would be a very different universe without observers to perceive and study it. As physicist Freeman Dyson puts it, with an intended mystical touch, the universe behaves as though it knew we were coming! So why are the laws constructed in such a way that we are here to discover them? It's possible that there is a convincing natural explanation, but Hitchens certainly does not produce one. Once again the God hypothesis seems unavoidable.
Now consider man, undoubtedly a product of natural selection, but also possessing qualities such as the ability to tell right from wrong that are unexplained by Darwin and his followers. ... There is within us all a moral law that speaks to us gently but firmly, urging though not compelling us to do what is right... If natural selection cannot account for this moral law, where does it come from? I am not saying that science will never explain this, I am saying that science cannot explain it now. It seems much more reasonable, based on existing evidence, to believe that moral laws derive from a divine legislator than to embrace Hitchens' promissory atheism: one day we'll figure out a natural way to account for all this.
If only his opponents had the philosophical foundation to resist all those temptations for distraction in debate. In response to this sort of thing, they should be asking a simple question to expose a pervasive methodological problem in religious thought: Since when did not knowing the answer to a puzzle entitle us to go and make one up?
In fact, these sorts of arbitrarily asserted "explanations" pulled out of thin air should be simply dismissed out of hand—a principle long recognized in logic and law. When someone brings a baseless charge before a court, it is to be dismissed as beneath consideration (and could even earn penalties for wasting the court's time). Likewise, when someone brings a baseless idea before a rational mind, it should be simply dismissed as beneath consideration. And D'Souza consistently relies on the logical fallacy of the "argument from ignorance," taking peoples' lack of knowledge around this and that as evidence in support of "the God hypothesis." That is exactly the error that dishonest magicians rely on to convince gullible people that they are psychics and mediums and instruments of God. Not knowing how the guy did it is not itself evidence that he is actually a psychic or some sort of divine instrument—just as our ignorance of why the laws of nature seem so exquisitely fine-tuned is not evidence that "God did it." In all such cases, our ignorance only constitutes evidence that we don't yet understand something.
Sadly, D'Souza has a lot of company in these errors: history is littered with examples of something "supernatural" being arbitrarily asserted as the explanation, only to be retracted later as our knowledge expanded. Every gust of wind and bolt of lightning was a direct act of God. But then came Ben Franklin, and we no longer think about meteorology that way. The same thing happened with tornadoes and earthquakes: the Acts of God that insurance policies exclude used to be divine punishment, but with our current understanding the term is really a euphemism for natural disasters. And today, most people don't consider themselves impious or afflicted with demons just because they catch the flu or get a nasty infection—they know it's because of germs. The history of mankind has been one long account of religious explanation being crowded out by scientific discoveries and rational understanding. This pattern of poor thinking is so common that it even has its own name: the "God of the Gaps," where a supernatural agent is cited as the reason behind something we do not understand. Here's the clincher: just notice how it always goes one way—natural, rational explanations are never displaced by supernatural "explanations."
What's a bit humorous about D'Souza's point is that we can even predict that advances in science will make this sort of sophistry all the more enticing and common. After all, you can't wonder about the design of the inner workings of the cell until you find out there are cells and that they contain marvelous machinery, and you can't explore the delicate interplay of cosmological constants until you have discovered those constants in the first place. So sure, if you let your thinking be corrupted by arbitrary God of the Gaps arguments from ignorance, then you'll believe "the God hypothesis has more going for it today" in our impressive explosion of scientific progress.
D'Souza is a bright and scholarly fellow who certainly understands the basic principles of logic. And he is obviously well-read in the history of Western thought, which has seen the fundamental errors in these religious arguments exposed countless times through the ages. Yet he presents them again with a straight face. His opponents and fans alike should be asking another question as well: Why would the truth need the support of false arguments?
(Upcoming in the series: Morality and Life.)Labels: Atheism, Objectivism, Philosophy, Religion
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Harvard Law Review Article on Charity
By Paul Hsieh @ 6:11 AM
The Volokh.com legal blog had an interesting post critical of an appalling article that was just published in the Harvard Law Review entitled, "NEVER AGAIN SHOULD A PEOPLE STARVE IN A WORLD OF PLENTY".
They also quoted one typical paragraph:You have now read this Note and you are equipped with the knowledge that $200 can save a child’s life. No claim of ignorance can be supported at this point. In fact, if you would like to make a donation, the toll-free number for UNICEF is 1-800-486-4233. They take credit card donations over the phone, or you can go online at www.unicef.org. Here is some time to call right now. **** The author of the article, Harvard Law student Phil Telfeyan, has also created a blog with the sanctimonious title of "Do the Right Thing at Every Moment" to promote and defend his notions of morality.
Apart from the issue of whether such an article has any place in a law review, there is the more interesting broader question of the proper role of charity in man's life.
I left the following comment on Telfeyan's blog and the Volokh.com blog post:I think a far better approach towards the broader issue of charity is from Ayn Rand (which incidentally is not the same as the popular misconception of her views of "never help anyone"):
"My views on charity are very simple. I do not consider it a major virtue and, above all, I do not consider it a moral duty. There is nothing wrong in helping other people, if and when they are worthy of the help and you can afford to help them. I regard charity as a marginal issue. What I am fighting is the idea that charity is a moral duty and a primary virtue."
http://www.aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/charity.html
I completely agree. I've gladly helped others in need on multiple occasions (1) when I could afford it, and (2) when the recipient was worthy.
But life isn't about putting bandages on other people's sores; it's about creating value, achieving goals, and pursuing a happy full existence in accordance with our nature as rational beings. Charity towards others is a secondary aspect of life, not the primary purpose. I also left the following second comment on Telfeyan's blog:...I'd like to also explicitly challenge the primary thesis that there is any kind of a moral *obligation* to help those less fortunate.
My contention is that even if an innocent child in Africa could be saved by my giving him $200 of my salary, his need (genuine as it may be) does not create any sort of mystical *obligation* for me to part with that money for his behalf. In other words, I don't see any basis for the sort of moral calculus being proposed. In fact, to adopt it means that one's own life energy ends up being drained perpetually in a race to the bottom. One can never claim the fruits of one's labor as rightfully one's own - not when there is someone in greater need (and there will always be someone in greater need).
This nightmarish moral outlook is not conducive to life at all, and only leads to an unnecessary, undeserved moral guilt. For similar reasons, I reject Peter Singer's moral philosophy.
In contrast, when charitable giving accords with my own values and priorities, then I am happy to donate, because it furthers *my* values. And I do give freely to numerous charitable organizations (predominantly educational groups as well as various organizations like FIRE which defend freedom of speech and other individual rights) for precisely those reasons.
In one respect, Phil is quite right -- one should do the right thing at every moment. But the key issue is *what* exactly is that "right thing"?
I contend that it's furthering one's life and values as a rational productive being. (Note this does not imply screwing over others -- I don't believe there are any inherent conflicts of rational interest between humans in normal contexts).
For further information of this view, I'd like to point towards the excellent book by University of Texas professor of philosophy Tara Smith entitled, "Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist".
Professor Smith discusses how a policy of rational ethical egoism is compatible with (and in fact the only consistent basis for) classical virtues such as honesty, integrity, justice, rationality, etc.
It dispels the notion that egoism must imply screwing other people. In fact, it shows that the exact opposite is true. Labels: Ethics, Objectivism
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| Wednesday, May 28, 2008 |
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Why the New Atheists Can’t Even Beat D’Souza: Science vs. Miracles
By Greg Perkins @ 12:39 AM
(Previous in the series: The Best and Worst in Human History.)
Taking on "New Atheists" such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, Dinesh D'Souza explains that he wants to strip away a kind of pose: atheists, he says, present themselves as men of data and evidence, merely following where it leads, when in reality they are faith-filled dogmatists who only assume that there are no gods and that miracles are not possible. In his debate with Hitchens, he drove this home by asking his opponent to name just one scientific law which he knows has no exceptions. Hitchens admitted he couldn't and had to stand there sheepishly while D'Souza crowed that he was leaving room for miracles even while denying them without investigation—that the atheist stance for science and against miracles is only based on faith in certain "metaphysical assumptions." In his view, the real difference between scientists and theologians is that religious people have enough integrity to admit their beliefs are rooted in faith.
D'Souza's effectiveness in exposing confusion and sowing skepticism illustrates how the New Atheists and most scientists lack an objective philosophical foundation. With a little training in the actual relationship between philosophy and science, they could explain how science is not perched atop blind faith in "metaphysical assumptions," and they could articulate exactly why miracles should not be dismissed as merely improbable, or even as inherently unverifiable, but as outright incoherent. In fact, they would know the issue is as stark as this: if miracles are possible, then science isn't.
To see why, let's begin by looking at what a miracle has to be. We are not talking about just any improbable happening, and not even something which violates our current understanding of the world as expressed in scientific laws, like D'Souza tries to argue. The entire point of miracles is to provide evidence of divine intervention, and surprises which may only reveal a current lack of understanding can't accomplish that: by that measure, even the tricks of magicians would count as miracles. Indeed, much of what we enjoy in our modern world would have been considered miraculous in previous times, from vaccines and medications, to cars, and the Internet and on and on. Yet none of these prove or even suggest a possibility that there is a God. No, a meaningful miracle is not merely something which would violate the laws of nature as we currently understand them, but something which would be a violation of any such law we could ever discover. That is, it would have to be a violation of lawfulness itself. That's a tall order.
Causality and Identity
When we talk about how things act and what they do and why, we are talking about causality. As Aristotle observed some 2500 years ago, things act according to their natures (their identities). They act the way they do because of what they are—balls roll when pushed, and piles of dirt don’t. Eggs break when dropped because that is an expression of their identity as things with a brittle shell and goo inside, crashing against a hard floor. Action is an expression of identity, and to understand why and how things act the way they do, we seek to understand what those things are. We seek to understand their identities. So if an egg broke into song instead of a messy puddle, it wouldn't be a normal egg—it would have to be something else. Because identities include capacities for action, we know and classify things by what they do, too.
The crucial thing to keep in mind about action being an expression of identity is that everything has identity merely in virtue of existing, not because of any dictate. Think of this as a law of existence, something true of Being itself. As Ayn Rand observed some 50 years ago: to be, is to be something—to be something particular, to be this and not that, to be capable of these actions and reactions and transformations, and not those. Or from the opposite perspective: to not be anything particular, is to simply not be. And this is not any article of faith or merely a "metaphysical assumption." This is a philosophical axiom reaching below any will to the bedrock of existence itself, a self-evident truth that lies at the base of all truths and all thinking, a fact so absolute and inescapable that it is actually reaffirmed by any attempt to deny it.
It is this ironclad law of existence that tells us there are scientific laws to pursue in the first place. It is how we can have absolute confidence that we are in a position to plumb the depths of the world, that we can seek to understand the identities of the things which are acting and interacting in nature, and that it is worth working to understand it all in terms of ever broader and deeper principles. The fruitfulness of this pursuit can't be denied: just look around and marvel at how our striving for a rational, scientific understanding of the world has improved our lives in countless ways.
And it is this very same law of existence that also guarantees there can be no miracles for us to pursue. If we were to somehow experience an "egg miracle," it isn’t that we would have found something we thought was a regular egg that surprised us and needs more study. No, the very idea of miracles requires violating causality. It requires that a normal egg break into song. Or picking something from the Christian tradition: it requires a normal loaf of bread to break into 1000 servings. In short, a genuine miracle requires a thing to act against its own identity—to have a contradictory identity—to literally not be what it is, which is incoherent. Everything is what it is, and contradictions can only exist inside peoples' confused thinking.
Either-Or
That is why it is one or the other, science or miracles. Accepting the possibility of miracles means rejecting the very basis of science; accepting the basis of science means rejecting any possibility of miracles. Indeed, to the degree that scientists entertain the possibility of miracles, they tragically undercut their own psychological motive and ability to pursue such knowledge: there is no point in looking for the laws of nature when existence isn't actually lawful and there is no real understanding to be found. Even if scientists think they can be "practical" and approach the world as being "almost always lawful," they are still fatally compromised because every surprise they meet could be a clue that an idea is in need of refinement or correction—or it could be an inexplicable miracle from the arbitrary will of God. The harder and more important the puzzle, the harder it will be to resist that nihilistic pull to simply throw up their hands and give up being a scientist to blindly assert that it must be an arbitrary intervention.
All of those potential advances lost to scientists giving up on science are a tragedy—and any effort spent repelling that call to give up is a waste. At the dawn of science, Francis Bacon said that "nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed." Knowledge is power precisely because existence is in fact lawful, and every advance we've achieved up through the wonders of modern civilization is a brilliant testament to this simple truth.
(Upcoming in the series: The Gap in Religious Thought and Morality and Life.)Labels: Atheism, Objectivism, Philosophy, Religion
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