Meme 039: Ayn Rand Centennial: Patch Still Needed
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Meme 039: Ayn Rand Centennial: Patch Still Needed
sent 2005.2.2
Atlas Shrugged was the book that influenced me more than any other. I read it,
at the suggestion of my best friend back home in Colorado, during the Summer
between my second and third year in college, that is in 1964, when I was 19
. He
said, read it a hundred pages a week and you'll be finished by the end of the
Summer. At first I thought it was a caricature, and was three or four weeks
into the reading before I got caught up in it. I finished it quickly.
I had gotten bored with the graduate math courses I had been taking ever since
I arrived at the University of Virginia. The beginning graduate level courses
were very good, but the later ones struck me as pointless piling up of
abstractions. My professors told me that even they lacked intuitive
understanding of their research work but nevertheless could crank out papers.
So Atlas Shrugged gave me a new direction in life. Most of the books she
recommended reading were in economics. At it happened, U.Va. had one of the
few
free-market graduate economics schools in the world. I convinced James Buch
anan
and Gordon Tullock on the economics faculty there I could do the work, even
though I had had no courses, so I switched majors.
However, there was a fight between the "conservative" economics faculty and
the
Dean of the Graduate School, who was a mediocre political science scholar a
nd a
liberal. He was not only envious of Tullock's outstanding scholarship but
resented the incursion of economics into his turf of political science. He
used
his power to block Tullock's promotion to a full professor. Tullock left U.Va.
as a result. Next year, Buchanan threatened to leave if Tullock were not
brought back. He wasn't and he left, too.
I was associated with the Buchanan-Tullock group and was too naive then--an
d am
probably too naive today--to play dissertation politics. I was told, "Mr.
Forman, if you give us a dissertation, we will give you a Ph.D.", in other
words, no assistance. I went to work for the federal government temporarily in
1969 and am still there! First for the Civil Aeronautics Board, where I came
out for deregulation much too early, like the day I arrived. My first boss,
Sam
Brown, agreed with me, and he gave me my only promotion. His section was
abolished after his research questioned the merits of some of the CAB's
actions. The Board was abolished at the end of 1984, and I've worked at the
U.S. Department of Education ever since. I would keep only that part of it
that
generates information, which is a public good, or about 1% of it. This
attitude, plus the fact that I have worked in policy units and am too hard of
hearing to play the policy game even if I were cynically bent on doing so, has
kept me stuck at a low level. I am not sure which is the more important factor.
Back to the story, I had pretty much forgotten about Ayn Rand by the end of
1984, but I started corresponding with Buchanan about another matter, namely
the philosophy of Mario Bunge, who was writing an eight-volume Treatise on
Basic Philosophy, designed to show what the world is to actual scientists by
clarifying and systematizing their implicit assumptions. Bunge is as
Aristotelian as Ayn Rand and far more knowledgeable about science. I told
Buchanan that Bunge's "systemism" had the key to reconciling the conflicts
between individualism and collectivism. Having moved from Virginia Tech to
George Mason, he invited me to write a dissertation under him at GMU, which I
did. I got my Ph.D. in 1985, no promotion at work, but an enormous personal
satisfaction at having finished a dissertation at last, and under so
distinguished an economist.
There was only part of a chapter on Ayn Rand in the dissertation, which I
expanded into a full chapter in my book, _The Metaphysics of Liberty_
(Dordrecht, Holland: Kluwer Academic, 1989). The book is on my website,
http://www.panix.com/~checker (don't forget the tilde).
I lost interest again in Ayn Rand, until I got my first home connection to the
Net in early 1995 and spent a great deal of time arguing about Objectivism. On
June 7 I sent forth the essay right below. There were a couple of feeble
replies and then silence. The need for a patch remains.
It took me a few more years to become a Recovered Objectivist, which is to
say,
just rather bored with the controversies. There are several essays of mine
pertaining to Objectivism on my site.
I follow my essay with a bunch of items on the centenary that I found from
Google News.
I do not regret the years I spent wrapped up in Ayn Rand, nor anything abou
t my
life, really, and most esp. not the other path down the road of biology and
human group differences. I might have been more productive of ideas had I not
spent so much time chasing down so many byways. I don't think, bar a major
upgrade in the quality of our species, that the grand hopes of a final vision
promised by the Enlightenment are going to materialize. I've become a
thoroughgoing post-modernist in this respect, and a transhumanist is urging
the
upgrading.
The quest is as important as the vision, anyhow. My autobiography is mostly
what I read, readings that I have been sharing with you on my lists, not any
partial conclusions that never seem to settle down to anything I can write up.
Nietzsche and Peirce had the same problems, not in not writing at all
(Wittgenstein stopped after one dissertation and one article) though on a
higher level.
Thank you, Ayn Rand, for your leading me in the path of righteousness for your
name's sake. Wrong metaphor.
PATCH NEEDED FOR "THE OBJECTIVIST ETHICS"
by Frank Forman
Summary
I have restudied Ayn Rand's key essay,
"The Objectivist Ethics," very closely, but I
find a hole in her argument, a gap in her
reasoning. She passes from the indisputable
fact that dead men make no choices to an
entire system of egoist ethics. In what
follows, I am going to outline her argument.
I shall be arguing that she moves from
survival as the supreme aim to happiness.
This move requires a patch to cover the hole
in her argument, and that patch I denominate
the Objectivist psychology, which is at
bottom a theory of virtue. But all this is so
far mostly implicit. If there are other
writings of hers that can provide a fully
satisfying patch to cover the hole, or if any
readers can provide the patch on their own,
we certainly want to hear it. I'm using _The
Virtue of Selfishness_ for pagination.
Some Concepts
**Morality** (here equated with ethics)
is "a code of values to guide man's choices
and actions--the choices and actions that
determine the purpose and the course of his
life" (p. 13, the first page of the essay,
which ends on p. 35).
So, she defines a word, "morality," in
terms of other words, "code," "value,"
"guide," "choice," "action," "determine,"
"purpose," "course," and "life." Most of the
words are not likely to give any trouble, at
least not here and at least not now. We can
argue how comprehensive this code should be,
where the principles leave off, and where one
just goes ahead and makes cost-benefit
estimates or just acts on one's tastes. We
can also argue over the various meanings of
"determine." But for now, only "value" and
"purpose" are apt to give problems. I am not
trying to maximize quibbling, rather to
isolate a hole in an argument interpreted as
best as I can.
**Value** "is that which one acts to
gain and/or keep" (p. 15). This definition
has been quoted many times by Ayn Rand's fans
and/or critics. She does not specify the
scope of values or which levels they cover:
first level desires like tastes, second level
desires that are more considered and deal
with longer-range achievements, and what may
be top-level values having to do with the
overarching purpose of one's life. Again,
"purpose" is a word that will be causing
trouble. In any case, "value" here is simply
a matter of what one does in fact act "to
gain and/or keep."
Life or Death
She goes on: "The concept 'value' is not
a primary; it presupposes an answer to the
question: of value to _whom_ and for _what_?
It presupposes an entity capable of acting to
achieve a goal in the face of an alternative.
Where no alternative exists, no goals and
values are possible" (p. 15). Well, yes, but
the definition seems clear enough: the value
is that which *one* *acts* to gain and/or
keep. There is an actor and the value is what
that actor acts to gain and/or keep. What she
means by a "*primary* concept" is not clear.
But I don't want to quibble; nor will I
quibble that a new concept, "goal," has been
introduced.
Then she, speaking through John Galt,
tells us that "there is only one fundamental
alternative in the universe: existence or
nonexistence--and it pertains to a single
class of entities: to living organisms. The
existence of inanimate matter is
unconditional, the existence of life is not:
it depends on a specific course of action.
Matter is indestructible, it changes its
forms, but it cannot cease to exist. It is
only a living organism that faces a constant
alternative: the issue of life or death. Life
is a process of self-sustaining and self-
generated action...." (p. 15). Diamonds, of
course, are entities and can cease to exist
by being heated to a certain temperature,
even though the elemental carbon continues,
but diamonds cannot act. So perhaps she means
values are to be attributed only to entities
that can act. On the next page, however, she
speaks of her famous hypothetical
"indestructible robot" (p. 16), which (she
says) can have no values (cannot act to gain
and/or keep anything), since it does not face
the "one fundamental alternative in the
universe: existence or nonexistence." The
term "fundamental" has been introduced
without definition, so I cannot be certain
whether she is mistaken about there being
"only one fundamental alternative in the
universe." My own view is that indestructible
robots violate the laws of physics, but they
are at least logical possibilities and they
could indeed have values.
Life or Reproduction
I make these points only because her
next paragraph introduces something that is
contrary to what we know about biology: "On
the _physical_ level, the functions of all
living organisms...are actions generated by
the organism itself and directed toward a
single goal: the maintenance of the
organism's _life_" (p. 16). We know from
biology (Miss Rand was not up to date) that
*reproduction* is every bit as much the goal
of organisms, if not more so, as the
maintenance of life. True enough, the
organism must remain alive long enough to get
the sperm or eggs out (sometimes it dies
before birth of its offspring is actually
achieved), but the goal of continuing to live
can be, and often is, overridden by the goal
of reproducing. Self = two children = four
grandchildren = ... is the governing
equation, since the self is going to die
anyway. Organisms, often, will go on living
after the birth of their children, but the
end is to serve getting one's offspring to
the point of _their_ reproduction, not to
keep oneself alive. Once Mom and Pop have
outlived their usefulness, they die; indeed,
they are genetically programmed to die, or so
at least claim most biologists. So the
"fundamental alternative" is not life but
reproduction.
Now this view of biology, known as the
"selfish gene" view, is not without its
critics. The older view, which was Darwin's,
was that the individual organism is the
fundamental and only unit of selection. Now
the consensus view is that individual genes
are the sole units. But then there are those
claiming that units larger than the
individual, even entire species and higher
taxa, can also be units of evolution. This
gives rise to the difficulties of what is
called group selection: there must be a
genetic disposition to what biologists call
"altruism," meaning a willingness to
sacrifice one's life for the good of some
group larger than the carrier's of one's own
genes. But this means that those organisms
with such a disposition will be bred out of
the population. Group selection can arise in
very limited circumstances, nevertheless, but
such circumstances are quite rare, or so goes
the consensus opinion. I mention all this,
since the question of units of selection has
never been satisfactorily conceptualized. I
should also state that the biological world
is rife with cases of apparent "altruism,"
and accounting for them is regarded by many
biologists, including E.O. Wilson, as the
central issue of sociobiology. A great deal
of apparent "altruism" can indeed be
explained away: how big the residual of
unexplained instances is, I do not know. I
have not browsed sci.bio.evolution enough to
check on any debates there. Objectivism will
certainly have to be developed much further,
or be replaced with a scientific metaphysics
of the sort Mario Bunge has developed, or
merged with it, to tackle this extremely
important and difficult issue.
A Truism
Ayn Rand continues: "An _ultimate_ [not
_fundamental_, but this seems to be no big
change] value is the final goal or end to
which all lesser goals are the means--and it
sets the standard by which all lesser goals
are _evaluated_. An organism's life is its
_standard of value_: that which furthers its
life is the _good_, that which threatens it
is the _evil_.... the fact that living
entities exist and function necessitates the
existence of values [recall: that which one
acts to gain and/or keep] and of an ultimate
value which for any given living entity is it
own life. Thus the validation of value
judgments is to be achieved by reference to
the facts of reality. The fact that a living
entity _is_, determines what it _ought_ to
do. So much for the issue of the relation
between "_is_" and "_ought_" (p. 17).
Forget for now the problems biologists
have with life, not reproduction, being the
*fundamental* (or *ultimate*) value. What she
is saying, and *all* that she is saying, is
that in order for an organism to act to gain
and/or keep anything at all, it must stay
alive, that *enough* of its actions must be
such as to succeed at keeping alive. In other
words, though this is a conclusion she did
not draw, the organism might act to gain
and/or keep any number of things^, but it has
to value staying alive and moreover its
actions must in fact succeed in its staying
alive.
^[What constitutes "things" is
unspecified: Ayn Rand just says "that
which."]
This seems like an utterly harmless
truism. Living things are *constrained* in
the sorts of action they can undertake, but
how constrained is the question. An ethics,
at all worthy of the name, can get out of
this seemingly harmless truism *only* if the
constraints are really vigorous. The task for
ethics is to formulate just what these
constraints are. Ayn Rand does not go into
the full details of what living things must
do to get an adequate amount of food, but she
does state that plants do so automatically.^ Animals (the higher ones, at any
rate) also
need consciousness, of at least the
sensational variety, to go hunt for their
food, and animals higher yet need to operate
on the perceptual level. But men have to
operate on the _conceptual_ level as well, at
least sometimes and perhaps a great deal of
the time, if they are to stay alive.
Moreover, making concepts is voluntary (p.
20). She never explains why, since she was
largely uninterested in biology, but she
could have read a statement of V.C. Wynne-
Edwards: "Compliance with the social code can
be made obligatory and automatic, and it
probably is so in almost all animals that
possess social homeostatic systems at all. In
at least some of the mammals, on the
contrary, the individual has been released
from this rigid compulsion, probably because
a certain amount of intelligent individual
enterprise has proved advantageous to the
group."^^
^[So do certain lowly animals like
sponges, but I won't quibble.]
^^[V.C. Wynne-Edwards, "Intergroup
Selection in the Evolution of Social
Systems," _Nature_ 200: 623-26 (1963)). This
was available before the paperback edition of
_The Virtue of Selfishness_, though no one
should blame Ayn Rand for not knowing the
article.]
Now if Ayn Rand can quote John Galt, I
can quote me: "Such an explanation invokes
group selection and is bound to be
controversial. An alternative explanation
might be that a) thinking requires work (uses
up costly brain chemicals) and b) free-will
circuity allows the animal (or maybe just
certain humans) to choose both whether to
think and what to think about. Far less brain
hardware, in other words, may be required by
taking the free will route"^
^[Frank Forman, _The Metaphysics of
Liberty_ (Dordrecht, Holland: Kluwer
Academic, 1989), p. 155).]
But now what do we have? Only that, to
survive, each individual man must engage in a
certain amount of conceptualizing. There is
much more to be done before we arrive at the
Objectivist ethics as we know it. Ayn Rand
goes on in the next few pages to discuss what
concepts are ("mental integrations of two or
more perceptual concretes" (p. 20)), what
reason is ("the faculty that perceives,
identifies and integrates the material
provided by the senses" (p. 20)), and what
thinking is (the process of reasoning) and
requires ("a state of full, focused
awareness" (p. 20)). She redefines
consciousness "in the sense of the word
applicable to man" to mean the (voluntary)
focusing of his mind. She adds, "the choice
'to be conscious or not' is the choice of
life or death" (p. 21).
The Hole in the Argument
What has happened is that there is an
elision between *some* focusing as being
necessary to any man's survival and "a state
of full, focused awareness." ****It is this
elision that constitutes the major hole in
the Objectivist ethics and needs to be
patched up****. She adds that "a process of
thought...is not infallible" (peculiar
grammar here) and that man "has to discover
how to tell what is true or false and how to
correct his own errors; he has to discover
how to validate his concepts, his
conclusions, his knowledge; he has to
discover the rules of thought, _the laws of
logic_, to direct his thinking" (pp. 20-21).
How man survived the hundreds of thousands of
years before he did all these things is not
addressed. Again, there is an elision between
the minimum necessary and virtuous
aspirations.
Here is a potential patch: "If some men
do not choose to think [at what depth?], but
survive by imitating and repeating, like
trained animals, the routine of sounds and
motions they learned from others, it still
remains true that their survival is made
possible only by those who did choose to
think and discover the motions they are
repeating. [This is true of nearly all the
thinkers, too.] The survival of such mental
parasites depends on blind chance; their
unfocused minds are unable to know _whom_ to
imitate, _whose_ motions it is safe to
follow. _They_ are the men who march into the
abyss, trailing after any destroyer who
promises them to assume the responsibility of
being conscious" (p. 23).
Or, you'd better think for yourself,
lest you be at the mercy of others. But Ayn
Rand, as in many other cases, dichotomizes a
continuum: you'd better think and focus to
the hilt, or you're a mental parasite and
your survival depends on blind chance. She
adds presently, "The men who attempt to
survive, not by means of reason, but by means
of force, are attempting to survive by the
method of animals,...by rejecting reason and
counting on productive _men_ to serve as
their prey. Such looters may achieve their
goals for the range of a moment at the price
of destruction: the destruction of their
victims and their own. As evidence, I offer
you any criminal or any dictatorship" (pp.
23-24). (Note that the last sentence here and
the last sentence of the previous paragraph
leave the individual and discuss social
consequences.)
Same problem. The hole in her argument,
the gap in her reasoning, is still there:
this "moment" may very well last an entire
lifetime, and it is only a *claim* that if
"man is to succeed at the task of survival,
if his actions are not to be aimed at his own
destruction, man has to choose his course,
his goals, his values in the context and
terms of a lifetime" (p. 24). And she
switches from survival to "man's survival
_qua_ man," as opposed to "the momentary
physical survival of a mindless brute,
waiting for another brute to crush his skull"
(p. 24). She adds that a man "_can_ turn
himself into [such] a subhuman creature and
he _can_ turn his life into a brief span of
agony.... But he _cannot_ succeed, as a
subhuman, in achieving anything but the
subhuman--as the ugly horror of the
antirational periods of mankind's history can
demonstrate" (pp. 24-25). By again dragging
in social consequences of the actions of
individuals, she has conflated the individual
man with collectivities of them. This, from a
prophet of egoism!
The hole is still there, but there are
ten more pages to go in this essay, as well
as in other essays by her and by others like
Nathaniel Branden and Leonard Peikoff. And
the readers here might supply the patch with
their own arguments and evidence. The patch
so far is the claim that hoping that others
will take up the slack if you default on your
thinking is risky. She presents no evidence
that the risk is all that great. Her policy
is what economists would call extreme "risk
aversion": take no chances that others will
pick up the slack. But she does not justify
this policy.
The Objectivist Virtues
But there is another way to cover the
hole. The patch in the Objectivist ethics is
quite implicit in the rest of the essay,
which mingles more stuff about the
requirements of survival with talk about
virtue and happiness. Exercising my brain may
not have all that much effect on my life
span, after a certain minimal point, but
doing so may nevertheless make me better off
in some sense. Mental exercise is on all
fours with physical exercise: it is self-
recommending and you may need specific
advice, which you may or may not carry out.
So let Ayn Rand stop being our moral
*physicist* and become our moral *physician*.
The patch between the two I denominate the
*Objectivist* *psychology*.
"_Value_ is that which one acts to gain
and/or keep--_virtue_ is the act by which one
gains and/or keeps it. The three cardinal
values of the Objectivist ethics--the three
values which, together, are the means to and
the realization of one's ultimate value,
one's own life--are: Reason, Purpose, Self-
Esteem, with their three corresponding
virtues: Rationality, Productiveness, Pride.
"Productive work is the central
_purpose_ [not virtue] of a rational man's
life, the central value [not life itself
anymore] that integrates and determines the
hierarchy of all his other values. Reason is
the source, the precondition of his
productive work--pride is the result.
"Rationality is man's basic virtue, the
source of all his other virtues," and it
means "the recognition and acceptance of
reason as one's only source of knowledge,
one's only judge of values and one's only
guide to action.^ It means one's total
commitment to a state of full, conscious
awareness, to the maintenance of a full
mental focus in all issues, in all choices,
in all of one's waking hours...." (p. 25).
^[Can we trust others very much at all?
Should be all become our own physicians, if
life is the standard of value?]
Ayn Rand, the Moral Physician
This is Ayn Rand the moral *physician*,
not the moral *physicist*, talking.^ It ought
to be the job of physicians get their
patients actively involved with their own
health, rather than just to manage their
diseases, to aspire and not just do the
minimum.^^ Ayn Rand fits this to a T, and
that, I submit, is what her philosophy and
her ethics most especially is all about. Her
novels are aspirational. She said she was a
novelist first. We ought to take her
seriously on this.
^[Or should it be moral meta-physicist,
with a thesis about life being the standard
of value? It was Nathaniel Branden who went
on to being a moral *coach*, with his various
Institutes. Anyhow, the term metaphysicist
should be reserved for Mario Bunge.]
^^[Here I go using the O-word ("ought"),
but never mind.]
Now watch what happens: Rationality
comprises several subvirtues, among them
independence, integrity, honesty, and
justice. Regards the latter, "one must never
seek or grant the unearned or undeserved,
neither in matter nor in spirit" (p. 26).
Fine, but two new concepts, unearned and
undeserved, have appeared out of nowhere in
an essay that purports to give a foundation
for ethics. You and I have a pre-
philosophical understanding of what these two
words mean. We have gone to Ayn Rand the
moral *physician* for advice on how to live,
not Ayn Rand the moral *physicist* for
elucidation of ideas.^^
^^[There's similar stuff about the
virtues of productiveness and pride that
follows in this part of "The Objectivist
Ethics," which I do not need to cite.]
And what does this moral physician
promise us? Happiness. "The basic _social_
principle of the Objectivist ethics is that
just as life is an end in itself, so every
living human being is an end in himself, not
the means to the ends or the welfare of
others--and, therefore, that man must live
for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself
to others nor sacrificing others to himself.
To live for his own sake means that _the
achievement of his own happiness is man's
highest moral purpose_" (p. 27).
The *physicist* said life was the
fundamental purpose; the *physician* holds
out happiness. Here's her justification for
the switch: "In psychological terms, the
issue of man's survival does not confront his
consciousness as an issue of 'life or death,'
but as an issue of 'happiness or suffering.'
Happiness is the successful state of life,
suffering is the warning signal of failure,
or death. Just as the pleasure-pain mechanism
of man's body is an automatic indicator of
his body's welfare or injury, a barometer of
its basic alternative--so the emotional
mechanism of man's consciousness is geared to
perform the same function, as a barometer
that registers the same alternative by means
of two basic emotions: joy or suffering" (p.
25).^
^[As is the case with thought being
volitional, she does not recognize the
importance of neurological or evolutionary
evidence to verify this harmonious fit.
Humans have emotions because the animals we
evolved from do, but why animals should
burden their brains with an emotional circuit
instead of just straightaway doing the right
thing as far as survival and reproduction go
is a good question, since adding extra
circuits has a cost in calories. I tried to
get some answers on some other newsgroups but
without success.]
Cognitive Basis of Emotions
What Ayn Rand does claim is that the
emotions, in order to pay off in the coin of
happiness, must be programmed correctly. And
that calls for reason, since man is born
without innate ideas.^ Full happiness cannot
be obtained unless one thinks to the hilt and
thereby ensures that one's values are
rational. "If he chooses irrational values,
he switches his emotional mechanism from the
role of his guardian to the role of his
destroyer. The irrational is the impossible;
it is that which contradicts the facts of
reality; facts cannot be altered by a wish,
but they _can_ destroy the wisher. If a man
desires and pursue contradictions--if he
wants to have his cake and eat it, too--he
disintegrates his consciousness; he turns his
inner life into a civil war of blind forces
engaged in dark, incoherent, pointless,
meaningless conflicts (which, incidentally,
is the state of most people today)" (p. 28).
(What were things like in Russia, then, I
ask.)
^[She is wrong here. Men are afraid of
snakes even in countries like Madagascar
where there are no poisonous snakes. This
fear is an emotional reaction by the mind and
therefore, on her own theory of the
cognition-emotion link, a piece of innate
knowledge about snakes and their dangers.]
Something very wrong has happened. An
obsessive desire (as opposed to some idle
daydreaming) for something one is aware is
impossible will surely cause emotional
problems. But we all pursue goals that turn
out not to be feasible, that contradict "the
facts of reality." Ayn Rand almost seems to
be imagining a mind^ that has direct access
to the truth and will punish emotionally
those who do things contrary to this truth.
What an incredible machine! Of course, she
would deny any such thing; in this very
essay, she stated that men are fallible. But,
nevertheless, that's what she said. I will
leave it to others to specify what she should
have said, to figure out what she meant by
irrational values. We will still need to know
how to choose rational values among the
myriad available ones, the only limitation
being that they support life.
^[She rarely uses the word brain and
almost always says "rational being" instead
of "rational animal." Methinks her thought is
towards the end of the spiritual pole on the
spiritual-materialist continuum, even while
she officially rejects the mind-body
dichotomy.]
The message from Ayn Rand, the moral
*physician*, however, is clear enough: be
ambitious; set up long term goals that are
plausible; get to work; be productive; do
things yourself; don't mooch; don't loot;
don't swindle. Take pride in your
achievements. Above all, be independent.
Sounds like good advice to me, but
independence comes to me naturally. I think
it's in my genes. It gets me into trouble,
endlessly, but I keep my self-respect and my
sanity. I never did care for all those
altruists who thought other people came
before me. Indeed, when I first read _Atlas
Shrugged_ in 1964, for the first few hundred
pages, I thought the book was a modernist
satire on these people. But that her advice
is for everyone, I do not know. Yes, a lot of
people would be happier if they were more
daring and independent. That they should all
be as independent as Ayn Rand is just a claim
of one moral physician and one great
novelist.
Interpersonal Ethics
The rest of the essay moves away from
the individual's code for his own life to
what most people regard as morality, namely
rules for dealing with other people. There is
more dichotomizing, which is superb
exhortation but bad metaphysics. There is her
famous metaphysical claim that "the
_rational_ interests of men do not clash--
there is no conflict of interests among men
who do not desire the unearned [that word
again!], who do not make sacrifices nor
accept them, who deal with one another as
_traders_, giving value for value" (p. 31).
She concludes her essay with political
philosophy. The word "right" appears out of
nowhere four lines from the bottom on page
32, but then she said she had presented the
political theory of Objectivism "in full
detail in Atlas Shrugged_" (p. 33).
I don't think she did; in fact, I know
she didn't. If there is what the
metaphysicians among philosophers call
"preestablished harmony" among the interests
of rational men, this needs to be
demonstrated. _Atlas Shrugged_ did not do the
job, nor did a later essay, "The 'Conflicts'
of Men's Interests."
Whatever the holes, Ayn Rand, to her
great credit, focused on what is generally
called not "ethical egoism" but "metaethical
egoism," or the doctrine that any system of
morals must be justified to the individual.
The problem, "Why be moral?", goes back at
least to Socrates, who gave the same answer
Ayn Rand did, namely that it's good for your
character. Otherwise, a system of morality is
something anyone can draw up however he
chooses and it will remain an idle set of
rules.
Ayn Rand knew better. She tried to
ground her system on the necessity of keeping
alive. Alas, not very much can be deduced
from that. But that was Ayn Rand the moral
physicist. Ayn Rand the moral physician had a
system that was far, far more comprehensive.
But it rests upon an implicit Objectivist
psychology. Until that psychology is
presented, elucidated, and defended (which
will involve more neurology, evolutionary
biology, and more just plain empirical
drudgery than she ever realized), the
Objectivist ethics has holes. They need to be
patched. And in the attempts to make the
patches, the ethics may be get altered quite
a bit, but it may also be able to answer many
questions it now cannot.
1995 June 7/First Version
---------------------
The New York Times > Books > Critic's Notebook: Considering the Last Romantic,
Ayn Rand, at 100
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/02/books/02rand.html?ei=5070&en=086506d4db45
b0c0&ex=1108011600&pagewanted=print&position=
5.2.2
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
What did Ayn Rand want?
[snip this and the rest of the articles.]
Robert Kolker
>
> I had gotten bored with the graduate math courses I had been taking ever
> since I arrived at the University of Virginia. The beginning graduate
> level courses were very good, but the later ones struck me as pointless
> piling up of abstractions. My professors told me that even they lacked
> intuitive understanding of their research work but nevertheless could
> crank out papers.
You should have switched to physics or applied mathematics.
Bob Kolker
Randroid Terminator
<che...@panix.com> wrote:
>It took me a few more years to become a Recovered Objectivist, which is to
>say, just rather bored with the controversies. There are several essays of
> mine
>pertaining to Objectivism on my site.
There is no such thing as a "Recovered" Objectivist. Recovery is a
life-long process.
--
http://www.friesian.com/rand.htm
--
"When I say that the intuition of outer objects
and the self-intuition of the mind alike represent
the objects and the mind, in space and in time,
as they affect our senses, that is, as they appear,
I do not mean to say that these objects are a mere
illusion."
Immanuel Kant