A Philosophy Professor Discusses Ayn Rand in his Ethics Class

[Myriad]

Perhaps I'm missing something about the role of the police system in an Objectivist society.

Let me ask this: is there anything that is currently legal for a private citizen or private corporation to do in the United States, that would be illegal (and thus subject to police intervention) in an Objectivist system?

(The qualifier "for a private citizen or private corporation" is to avoid wasting time with trivial answers like "it would be illegal for a government agent to enforce law X" where law X would not exist in the Objectivist system.)

Respectfully,
Myriad

 

[Mister Agenda]

First, you missed the rest of my posts about that.

That's likely to continue to be a problem if you can't be more objective in your responses.

Second, it's completely nonsensical to say "Objectivists do this!" when none of them do.

How do you know none of them do? Because you haven't personally watched them do it?

The absence of data is no more data than anecdote.

That is true, and a very ironic observation to make when juxtaposed with the claim immediately preceding it.

Have you considered taking my comments less personally? I think Myriad is probably wrong on this matter, and I tend to think you would be correct on it if you added a couple of qualifiers to your knowledge claims. I'm just being honest in stating that none of us is in possession of information that would prove Myriad wrong, and all we can honestly say is that Myriad doesn't seem to have evidence to support his claim and our experience has been otherwise.

 

[Akri]

Perhaps I'm missing something about the role of the police system in an Objectivist society.

Let me ask this: is there anything that is currently legal for a private citizen or private corporation to do in the United States, that would be illegal (and thus subject to police intervention) in an Objectivist system?

Not that I can think of.

 

[Mister Agenda]

Often the option is pay, or starve.

And where would one go where there would be no cartels? They'd be everywhere.

Since you used the term 'often', would you be kind enough to point to a real-world example of this actually happening? It would be very helpful to not be working completely on speculation, and I confess my Google-fu has not been up to the task of finding a strongly analogous situation: a merchant or company buying up all the food in the region and turning their customers into indentured servants.

 

[Zelenius]

Evolution used to be the long-term (and only) solution to infectious disease. Over a few dozen generations, as more vulnerable individuals died more frequently of the disease, and as more infectious strains of the disease killed more of their victims and so limited their own spread, the surviving population would evolve to become more resistant as the disease evolved to became less virulent. (A population resistant to an endemic pathogen could even end up using the disease as a weapon against other populations not previously exposed. Though usually unwittingly.)

Now we have vaccinations, antibiotics, therapeutic treatments (such as ORT), and sanitation instead. The old way, evolution, is mean but it's right and natural, so we should go back to it. Yes?

Respectfully,
Myriad

Brilliant! Your unassailable logic has floored me. I am now a convert to Objectivism. Screw Hume and that is/ought nonsense. Let evolution take care of this "problem"(for 99.9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% of history, this is how it worked!). All those people who are unable to work due to illness or disability, they are not my responsibility; they shouldn't have gotten sick in the first place, it's their own damn fault.

They ought to just do us a favor and die. Anything else means having a system that undermines personal responsibility. The government taking money from a productive person like me so these sick people could live is not just annoying, but is also highly immoral! The biggest, most important lesson to be learned from evolution is that life is not fair. Therefore, evolution should be our ultimate guide for how we live our lives!

 

[Mister Agenda]

This.

This is why Objectivists aren't people you can productively engage in a philosophical discussion with.

Anyone who reads that tortured nonsense and says "Yup, that seems like a totally watertight logical argument to me, no room for skepticism or disagreement after that!" is someone who isn't capable of logic as we know it.

I'm going to read between the lines and assume that the tortured nonsense you're referring is not the linked article, but Rand's work, unless I hear otherwise.

 

[Merton]

If you're an O'ist, it would be because your fundamental moral principle is to refrain from inititiating force or fraud against others.

What I'm trying to tease out of this discussion is how you get to this step. So...

1) Rational self-interest
2) ??????
3) Can't initiate force or fraud

What is it about rational self-interest that necessarily leads to inviolable rights?

 

[Mister Agenda]

It's a problem because, as has been repeatedly pointed out, it puts any practical public implementation of Objectivist principles into the fatally flawed "requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once" category.

Respectfully,
Myriad

O'ism provides a complete justification for overthrowing such a dictator.

Although I disagree with the philosophy, I tend to find other people's 'reasons' for loathing it with a passion bizarre.

 

[Myriad]

Have you considered taking my comments less personally? I think Myriad is probably wrong on this matter, and I tend to think you would be correct on it if you added a couple of qualifiers to your knowledge claims. I'm just being honest in stating that none of us is in possession of information that would prove Myriad wrong, and all we can honestly say is that Myriad doesn't seem to have evidence to support his claim and our experience has been otherwise.

Regarding that claim, I thought I had more evidence than it turns out I did. The last time I got involved in a discussion like this was in late 2011, and when I looked at Google Trends at the time, there had been a huge spike in U.S. searches for "Objectivism" and related terms the previous April, peaking during U.S. income tax filing deadline week. That made it appear likely that recent interest in Objectivism had come largely from the anti-tax politics of U.S. conservatism, especially the burgeoning (at that time) "tea party" movement.

However, that spike was not repeated in April 2012. An even larger spike occurred last October, apparently as a result of Paul Ryan being named Mitt Romney's running mate in the Presidential election.

So, while I can make a case that (in the U.S. at least) political events spark interest in Objectivism, I can't quantify how much of the interest in it (especially ongoing long-term interest) ultimately stems from that relative to other sources. If you can point out some comparable spikes occasioned by, say, the publication of a major scholarly book on Objectivist philosophy, that would go a long way toward defeating my claim.

The rest of my experience comes from general-interest discussion forums like this one. This thread is the first I've seen that focuses initially on the philosophy itself. What I usually see is the opposite, beginning in political discussions: "Taxes/unions/zoning laws/carbon agreements/equal opportunity laws/tenant rights laws/handicapped parking spaces suck, and by the way, let me tell you about this great philosophy that explains why."

I still consider the hypothesis, that most interest in Objectivist philosophy is driven by interest in Objectivist politics rather than the reverse, plausible though not proven. Supposedly, I'm entitled to observe the world with my senses and draw conclusions from that, without being expected to be omniscient. So, there you go.

Respectfully,
Myriad

 

[Akri]

What I'm trying to tease out of this discussion is how you get to this step. So...

1) Rational self-interest
2) ??????
3) Can't initiate force or fraud

What is it about rational self-interest that necessarily leads to inviolable rights?

Just in case I didn't say this before, I'm not sure that the principle of inviolable rights is derived from rational self-interest in Objectivism. I think part of the justification is that humans are naturally equal (in that there are not different "classes" of humans the way there are for, say, ants).

There's a scene in Game of Thrones that kind of illustrates the concept (minor season 2 spoiler here) where Joffrey gets upset that Tyrian would dare to insult a king. Tyrian slaps him and then says "Now I've struck a king. Has my hand fallen off?" Being a king or a peasant is a matter of social status, not any fundamental difference between people.

 

[Mister Agenda]

What I'm trying to tease out of this discussion is how you get to this step. So...

1) Rational self-interest
2) ??????
3) Can't initiate force or fraud

What is it about rational self-interest that necessarily leads to inviolable rights?

I don't think O'ism can do that in an ultimate sense. I think one of it's flaws is insisting it can start with 'humans depend on reason' and derive an indisputable array of natural rights purely from that. It could appeal to Utilitarianism that most people are better off in a society where force and fraud can't be initiated against them with impunity, which I think is sufficient reason to seriously consider it as a principle; but O'ists tend not to be fans of Utilitarianism, which is why they prefer the 'what society would you want to live in if you didn't know what your status in it would be?' veil of secrecy to get to their conclusions.

 

[Mister Agenda]

Myriad, I would agree that hearing about Rand and Objectivism in the news is lkely to spark interest in it that would result in more people being exposed to O'ist ideas. I submit that most people who find out about O'ism that way still will not adopt O'ism unless the ideas appeal to them. I might be over-generalizing from my own experience with philosophies though, but there seems to be a strong personality component to what philosophies appeal to different people.

So I think a complete philosophy would at least account for it being a fact that people inherently are going to have widely varying personalities, or it should be constructed in a way such that it is largely irrelevant that people have very different needs and outlooks. Marxism and 'Randism' come to mind quickly when I think of philosophies deficient in this regard.

 

[Cain]

Just in case I didn't say this before, I'm not sure that the principle of inviolable rights is derived from rational self-interest in Objectivism. I think part of the justification is that humans are naturally equal (in that there are not different "classes" of humans the way there are for, say, ants).

There's a scene in Game of Thrones that kind of illustrates the concept (minor season 2 spoiler here) where Joffrey gets upset that Tyrian would dare to insult a king. Tyrian slaps him and then says "Now I've struck a king. Has my hand fallen off?" Being a king or a peasant is a matter of social status, not any fundamental difference between people.

This is tonally inconsistent with Rand's language of moochers and looters vs. producers. Rand's egoism -- which can be stretched and pulled to cover behavior that almost all non-Objectivists would describe as "altruistic" -- sometimes takes the form of unwitting utilitarianism (as mentioned above).

It's quite difficult to derive any principle from the pursuit of rational self-interest. Non-aggression should be considered a general rule: it's OK to exploit others through force and fraud, but be smart about it. Plato tackled this stuff more substantively in book I of The Republic, where Thrasymachus observed that lying/cheating/stealing was not wrong on principle, but could lead to bad reputation. "Objectivism" will always find itself susceptible to "prudent predator" scenarios where exploiting others yields the greatest expected personal benefit. In the real world, some people "get away with murder" while others are "honest to a fault." These things happen so often they're cliche.

 

[Foster Zygote]

I'm curious--if someone was complaining about how Evolution is often "mean", and the response was "yes, we know, nobody is trying to say otherwise" would you be responding the same way? The people arguing for Objectivism aren't doing so on the grounds that it's nice, but on the grounds that it's right (that is, on the grounds that it's internally-consistent and consistent with reality). If that's the truth--if Objectivism is correct--then it being mean is completely irrelevant.

Ironically, altruism is a product of evolution.

 

[Akri]

Ironically, altruism is a product of evolution.

I'm pretty sure the form of altruism seen in nature is perfectly in line with Objectivist principles, so I'm not sure where the irony is.

 

[Foster Zygote]

I'm pretty sure the form of altruism seen in nature is perfectly in line with Objectivist principles, so I'm not sure where the irony is.

Which forms of altruism are those?

 

[Akri]

Which forms of altruism are those?

Altruism done voluntarily, rather than by force. Many creatures evolved to want to help others, but I don't know of cases where animals evolved to force other animals to help each other.

 

[Merton]

Just in case I didn't say this before, I'm not sure that the principle of inviolable rights is derived from rational self-interest in Objectivism. I think part of the justification is that humans are naturally equal (in that there are not different "classes" of humans the way there are for, say, ants).

I believe you did say something like that, but I felt like we weren't really getting to the heart of the matter, so I just let the conversation fall away. If rational self-interest describes the Objectivist's ethics, then it seems to me there should be some connection between that and natural rights. Stating that humans are naturally equal is rather dubious as well: I think we'd both agree there are things you do better than I, and vice versa, but there's also the handicapped/disabled people who do not have the mental or physical abilities that you and I do. So in what regard are all humans naturally equal?

P.S. It seems like the answer is going to be autonomy, but if that's the basis for natural rights, then why claim an ethics based on rational self-interest? I'm sorry to be an annoyance, asking the same question over and over, but there appears to be a fundamental disconnect here.

I don't think O'ism can do that in an ultimate sense. I think one of it's flaws is insisting it can start with 'humans depend on reason' and derive an indisputable array of natural rights purely from that. It could appeal to Utilitarianism that most people are better off in a society where force and fraud can't be initiated against them with impunity, which I think is sufficient reason to seriously consider it as a principle; but O'ists tend not to be fans of Utilitarianism, which is why they prefer 'what society would you want to live in if you didn't know what your status in it would be?' veil of secrecy to get to their conclusions.

I think that's my problem: Objectivism sounds like it should be a utilitarian ideology, not a deontological one, so where are inviolable rights coming from? And if it's deontological, then where does an ethics of self-interest come into play?

I really do like rights-based ethics (I adhere to them myself), I just want to know how Objectivists get there.

 

[Akri]

Snip

Dinwar would probably be much better at addressing this than I am. The foundation of rights is one of the issues I never fully understood with Objectivism.

 

[Dinwar]

Rational self-interest is derived from the metaphysical view of all humans as equal in Objectivism. Note that this is metaphysical, not existential--meaning that we're all CREATED equal, and there's no human INHERENTLY superior to others. The principle of justice (ie, that actions have consequences) is sufficient to justify treating different people differently, based on their actions. So while humans are metaphysically equal, we are not equal in all things. (Bear in mind what Objectivism means by "metaphysical"--we're not talking mysticism here, but the nature of reality.)

Rational self-interest derives from the same roots: since all are metaphysically equal, there's no justification for sacrificing anyone to anyone else. Altruism presupposes metaphysical inequality. Rational self-interest does not.

Rights that cannot be violated also derive from this root, and amount to standards of behaviors that must be maintained in order for a society to say they recognize that all are metaphysically equal (again, justice demands we treat people differently based on their actions--until one acts, however, all are equal). On a deserted island morality is emphasized to a degree few of us can comprehend, but the concept of rights is inapplicable (you cannot, by definition, violate your own rights).

Rights and morality stem from the metaphiscal view of humans as created equal in Objectivism. Rights and self-interest are not derived from one another.

That said, rational self-interest demands we respect one another's rights. After all, if we don't it becomes a free-for-all, and even the victors in such a situation suffer horribly. African warlords may live like kings in their country, but their lives are much worse than a middle-class worker in the USA (and are frequently much shorter).

Merton, the flaw in your reasoning is that you assume a philosophy must be either utilitarian or deontological--ie, it must either allow anything that works, or forbid everything but a (necessarily short) list of activities. Objectivism doesn't fall into either category, and the confusion you're having stems from the breakdown of your taxonomy.