Hildegarde

Mary Agnes’s funeral is tomorrow, and I’m  having one of those odd and floaty days.

When I get like this, I tend to wander around reading the kind of stuff I usually see no point to–this history of the Mediterranean through food, for instance.

Okay, that book is actually a good one, even if a lot of the recipes require a boatload of lard and salt pork.

But I do want to say a couple of things.

The first is that I’m not sure I agree with a lot of Rand–in fact, I am sure that I disagree with a fair amount of it.

I do think she made a credible attempt at a humanist morality with an objective foundation that is not merely a matter of saying “this is the behavior I like, so I’m going to call it moral.”

She did it, however, in a way that hasn’t been done before, or at least not really.

She did it by rejecting out of hand what most of us would consider “morality” to be. 

Instead, she identified as moral issues aspects of human behavior that common moral codes tend to ignore altogether–productivity and rationality, for instance–and to have no particular use for some ideas common moral codes simply assume (like charity).

What most moral philosophers try to do instead is to take common moral opinions–charity is a good idea, for instance–and provide them with a foundation from non-religious sources. 

And by and large, it hasn’t worked.

The most ambitious–and most honest–of these attempts has got to be John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, which also has the virtue of being reasonably well-focussed.  What most of the attempts to write secular moral philosophy have done over the last 40 years–from Paul Kurtz to Peter Singer and back again–is to chase around trying to include everything they’ve decided is a good idea this week.

That way, you get the spectacle of Kurtz’s Eupraxia and Forbidden Fruit,  which start out declaring that we ought to look to those moral precepts held by all societies everywhere across time–and then trying to somehow make the emancipation of women and the right to abortion “fit” in a history that wants nothing to do with them.

For all Kurtz’s unrigorous silliness, however, he at least makes an attempt to be analytically rigorous.  His failures have mostly to do with the fact that he assumes his conclusions.  He begins by “knowing’ what belongs in a moral code and then goes casting about for some foundation that will fit it.

If there is a way to secularly ground an objective basis for a moral code, it can’t be done this way.  Whether you like Rand’s conclusions or not, the approach to discovering such a ground must be to do what she seems to have done–first investigate, then explicate, and if what you end up with is not the same as what we now call “morality,” so be it. 

It is possible that, if we investigate honestly, we will find that what it really means to be moral is very different from what we’ve been taught to expect it means.  The movement of the heavenly bodies turned out to be very different from what Copernicus had been taught to expect it would be, too.

What Peter Singer and his disciple Peter Unger do is far worse than anything Kurtz has managed, and it’s worse in Unger than in Singer.  Or maybe I should say that Unger hides it less well.

In fact, I’d say that what Unger does, at least in the book Living High and Letting Die, isn’t technically philosophy at all.   It’s closer to that great–and greatly embarrassing–fad of the 90s, “values clarification.”

As I pointed out here before, Unger does not try to provide any ground for his moral philosophy.  He rejects both logic and truth as being irrelevant to moral enquiry,  and then tells us he’ll give us a series of examples that will help us idenity our “Basic Values.”

If all this sounds hopelessly muddled, it is, but it was that when I first mentioned it days ago.

What’s been getting to me as I read through the book is Unger’s reports of the responses given to him by people to whom he’s given his hypothetical scenarios.

And just to make sure that it wasn’t just me–being a rather unusual sort of person for that sort of exercise–I read a few of the hypotheticals to Greg and Matt, and they didn’t respond as “most people” either.

Actually, I should have known that Greg wouldn’t respond to these the way Unger’s respondents did, because he’s never responded to this thing as  you’d expect.  Once, when he was much younger–around three or four–I gave him the Lifeboat exercise. 

He listened to the whole thing from start to finish, growing more and more exasperated, and when I was done he went, “Isn’t one of those people a carpenter?  Fine then.  He can build more lifeboat.”

It’s possible that Unger simply invented the respondents he reports on–he mentions, at one point, trying to get a sociologist interested in his project, and failing, so he’s the only one who knows–but maybe not, and if not, those responses bring us to some very interesting places.

The big one, for right now, is this:  that there are a significant number of people in this country (or on this country’s college campuses) for whom the very idea that somebody, somewhere might be hurting in some way brings them to such a degree of emotional panic that they’re no longer able to think their way out of a paper bag.

And it’s that panic I want to get to next, that hyperemotionalism that’s perfectly willing to throw out bath water, baby and just about anything else in the face of the possibility –well, I’m not sure of the possibility of what, yet.

Maybe I’ll get to that later.

Let me start out by saying that there’s going to be no coherent post today.  I got up at one thirty in the morning and couldn’t go back to sleep, so, since I’m working a deadline on the new book and don’t want to be late, I got up to work, and here I am.

Right now, I just want to make a couple of points that seem to me so obvious I can’t believe we’re discussing them.

The first is that “artists, scientists and government” are not “parasitic,” nor are the people who engage in them parasites living on the productive work of others.

Government can, of course, be parasitic, and often gets there, but basic government (the police, the courts, military defense, to start) is absolutely essential to the functioning of any society.  Which means that the people who engage in it are engaged in productive work.

And the idea that scientists are somehow parasitic on productive people absolutely flabbergasts me.   i suppose what’s called “pure science” can seem that way to people who don’t understand how this works, but pure scientific research provides the knowledge from which technology is born, and technology gives us everything from the polio vaccine to air conditioning. 

This is, by almost any standard, probably the most productive work in any society.  It is essential for almost all the other productive work done in any advanced society. 

And as for artists–well, I could point out that art (narrative and plastic) is to be found in every society ever existing on earth.  Societies invent art (and especially narrative) before they invent the wheel and even before kinship groups are completely stable.

So we seem to need that.

But never mind that for a second, there’s a simpler way to tell if art is productive work.

Either people other than the artist are willing to pay for it, or not.

Every time somebody puts down a twenty to buy your composer’s CD, he’s testifying to the fact that he thinks the composer has done productive work. 

If you produce something worth something to your fellow citizens, you’ve done productive work, even if what you’ve produced is a Pet Rock.

The burglar and the con man aren’t different from the artist because they’re in a “different occupation.”  They’re different because, in fact, nobody wants what they have to offer.  You wouldn’t pay a man to rob you (well, except in a really complicated Patricia Highsmith plot) or a con man to cheat you out of your money.  They resort to force and fraud because they’re unable to offer you anything of value in exchange from what they want to get from you.

Nor does it matter if the thief goes home and volunteers for meals on wheels.

If the point wasn’t clear the way I put it, then change the way it’s formulated:  the productive citizens does not need thieves to survive, but the thieves need productive citizens. 

I could build a society with productive citizens and no thieves.  I could not build a society with thieves and no productive citiznes.

As for whether slavery is good for the slaveholder–the only way to support such a contention is to look only at the very short term and keep your mind completely blindfolded from history.

Slave societies always produce relatively fewer technological innovations than free societies do, and once you get to the modern world, they produce vastly fewer. 

So a slaveholder who thinks slavery is “good for him” is deluded–sit in your slaveholding society telling yourself how good you have it while your children die of diptheria and your wives die of puerpal fever and you die yourself from a cancer that can be cured now with very little fuss and bother.

If you don’t know that alleviation of these evils is possible, you won’t realize what you’re missing–but you’ll still be cutting off your nose to spite your face.

As for the Vikings–I was responding directly to a comment that said the Vikings built a successful society by plundering other societies’ wealth.

To the extent that the Vikings did productive work, they did indeed have a successful society.  To the extent that they engaged in plunder, they had a parasitic one. 

And they were a net drain on the wellbeing of the rest of the world–and on their own well being, since they chaos they caused retarded the advancement of learning on all levels.  And we’re back to the problem with the slaveholding society, above.

So, do I think it’s always irrational to break the social contract?

Yes.

That is, first, assuming that the social contract is valid–an invalid and coerced “contract” (say, a dictatorship) is no contract at all, and not only can be broken but must be if any progress is going to happen.

But assuming a valid contract, then breaking it (to steal, for instance) may be logical, but it is never rational.

And it always involves violating the rationality of other men.

That’s what force and fraud does.

I have no idea how I’ve spelled anything today.

I’m going to go finish this tea and see what I can do about getting some stuff  done.

Sometimes it occurs to me that I can never quite get to anything on time on this blog.  I’m actually pretty good about deadlines in the real world, but this thing keeps me circling stuff over and over again.

Let me start by addressing John’s contention that the Vikings built a successful society by stealing the wealth of other societies.

I suppose this comes down to how you define “successful,” but to me it sounds like saying that Susie successfully completed her calculus course when in fact she passed only by cheating her way through every assignment and test.

The Vikings, like the burglar, live lives that are not successful but parasitic. 

Think of it this way:  a productive society can exist and thrive even if no burglars (or Vikings) exist in the world.  In fact, it will probably do better if they don’t.

A Viking society, or a burglar, requires productive people to survive–if those people did not exist, pursing a course of robbery would just leave them to starve.

That is the way in which the burglar “opts for death.”  He opts for a strategy that, consistently pursued by the world around him, would leave him to starve.

He can hide that fact from himself as long as he has productive people who do the work necessary for any human beings to survive, but it’s a form of denial.   It’s neither success, nor facing reality.

Robert says that the problem with the slaveholder is not that he doesn’t face reality but that he “uses people as things.”

But using people as things is not facing reality.  People are not things.

And it does not require an axiom to that effect to know it, either.

That people are not things, that they are ends in themselves and not to be used as the (unwilling) means to the ends of others, can be discovered through observation.

We know that human beings are the creatures that do things like create Rheims Cathedral, and antibiotics, and the Empire State Building, and theoretical analyses of all these things of things.

We know that it is only by the use of his mind that a man can do any of these things, or anything else. 

Since the free and full use of his mind is man’s only way to survive at all, but also the only way to survive as a human being (that is, something capable of stuff like the above), then the one thing a human being must have is the free and full use of his mind.

That mind will differ in degree of ability from the minds of other human beings, but it will differ only in degree.  Even a child with Down Syndrome has the kind of mind I’m talking about.  A dog, no matter how intelligent, does not.

It is a moral imperative to treat each man as an end in himself and not as an (unwilling) means to your ends because this is the kind of mind he has.

It doesn’t matter if God gave it to him, or if nature did.  What is, is. 

This seems to me to be such an obvious thing–that is, that human beings are different in kind from all other living things, and not just different in degree–that I am always completely astonished when people try to argue otherwise.

Birds build nests, yes, but they don’t build the Houses of Parliament and they don’t develop elaborate philosophical systems to explain the principles of beauty in architecture. 

Cats and dogs will tend to themselves if they are wounded or sick, but they don’t discover antibiotics to cure their infections and they don’t set their own legs and they don’t develop dense scientific treatises on the Germ Theory of Disease to explain why medicine will work if they have it.

The fact that human beings have minds that will do this is just that–a fact, part of that reality that we must face if we are to live.  And the better we face it, and the more generally any society does face it, the more successful we will be, in any strict understanding of the word “successful.”

When Susie cheats her way through her calculus course, she doesn’t “successfully” pass it, no matter what her transcript might seem to indicate. 

When the con man or the burglar or the Viking raider gets a bunch of money by force or fraud, he doesn’t “successfully” survive, even if he lives to a ripe old age.   He just makes himself the enemy of the survival of everybody else and in the process removes himself from the category of “human being qua human being”–that is, he chooses to live not a human life, but an animal one.

This seems to me to be a very strong ground for moral injunctions against force and fraud–and it doesn’t even take into considerations the grounds for legal injunctions against the same.

But it all starts with admitting that human beings are unique among all other living things, and that the nature of that uniqueness must be accommodated in anything we say about them.

Us.

You know what I mean.

I understand why religious people would hold to the idea that you cannot distinguish the uniqueness of being human by looking at the natural world–making man “special” is something God can do–but I never have understood why people who call themselves “humanists” would declare the same thing.

But then, there’s another rant in that…that modern humanism is not in fact humanism.

And I’m not going to get there today.

Well, okay, not quite.

It’s Sunday, it’s hot, I have to go out for a bit this afternoon, and I’m still not exactly cheerful.

But I do want to get back to Unger for a while, and I will.

Let me just say what I promised to say–although I will note that since I am, here, trying to explain what somebody else has said (Ayn Rand, in this case), I’m not sure how I’m supposed to achieve rigor except in the reporting of it.

So here it goes:

Rand says that the fundamental axiom of any moral system must be that “existence exists.”

An axiom is an idea that cannot itself be proven, but that also cannot be abandoned–it is impossible even to try to refute it without using it. 

And that is certainly true of “existence exists.”  My guess is that it’s impossible even to imagine a case in which existence does not exist, because you have to exist to imagine it.

If you see what I mean.

The axiom “existence exists” is usually called the “law of identiy.”

The second axiom that is fundamental to all moral (or other) systems is what’s called the “law of noncontradiction”–that a thing cannot both be and not be in the same respect at the same time. 

Something can’t be all black and all white at the same time.  Something can’t have a round head and a square head at the same time.  Something can’t be all hard and all soft at the same time. 

And, most importantly, something cannot be both entirely alive and entirely dead at the same time.

Living things, because they are living, are faced continually with a single question:  life or death?  Survive or perish?

Each living thing answers that question by pursuing the strategies inherent in its nature.

For human beings, the only available strategy is the use of the mind.  The mind is the survival mechanism nature has given human beings.

But human beings, unlike any other animals (as far as we know) is capable of refusing to employ this strategy, of undercutting it, of denying it altogether.

But to the extent that we do that, we opt for death–and the law of noncontradiction being what it is, even when we think we are opting for the death of somebody else, we are actually opting also for our own. 

This is not the same thing as saying that either we or anybody else is actually going to die right this second because of the choices we make.

Rather, when a con man cons a victim, he creates a situation where that victim is manipulated into at least crippling his ability to survive by entering into a world of lies.

But the con man is also crippling his own ability to survive.  In order to go on getting what he wants (or needs) he must make sure that the victim does not ever realize that his reality has been faked.  That means he must now work constantly and in perpetual knowledge that the whole thing could fall apart at any moment. 

The only way to do that is to create an ever widening miasma of lies, until the con man lives as much in that unreality as any of his victims do. 

And since the choice of unreality is–in the long run–the choice of death over life, the con man increases the strength of that choice not only for his victim and for himself, but for the world at large. 

With the burglar, we’re also dealing with a denial of reality.

Wealth does not simply spring into existence on its own.  It has to be created and earned. 

A burglar behaves as if that were not true.  Wealth “just is,” and all he has to do is pick it up.

To accept reality here, you would have to say “wealth has to be earned, and if I haven’t earned it then I have no right to it.”

I feel like I’m doing this badly here, but I do think it makes more than a little sense, and that it is clear.

It’s not just a question of Rand “not liking” force or fraud.

It’s that force and fraud always involve refusals to accept reality as real. 

In both cases, the criminal is assuming that wealth “just is” and is lying around for the taking.  Both refuse to accept that wealth must be creaed and earned to exist at all. 

And, in fact, both are counting on somebody else accepting that existence exists and that it is what it is.

If somebody else hadn’t done that, no wealth would exist for them to rob.

I’m really, really, really not doing a great job here.

So, for those of you who don’t watch FB, there’s the news–my mother-in-law died yesterday morning.  This was not surprising.  Matt and I had gone up the day before to see her, and she was no longer able to speak, and not expected ever to be able to speak again.

But it was one of those things, if you know what I mean.  There’s a long way between “isn’t expected to” and “is.”  My mother, who went into the hospital at approximately the same time and wasn’t expected to recover, is in fact recovering nicely, and more alert and aware by the day.  Or, at least, that was what the nurse told me when I called last night.  I’ll call again this morning, and see.

I know that there are people who try to work out the “meaning” of all of this, but I’m not one of them.  For better or worse, I don’t seem to have much interest in the Meaning of Life as it’s usually understood.  Maybe I will when I’m older, I don’t know.

What strikes me about all this, and, interestingly enough, what has seemed to be striking Matt, is something else.  I am rapidly getting to the point when there is going to be nobody in my life who remembers the entire history of me, except me. 

I’m actually mostly there.  My brother and my father are gone, and although my mother is still alive she doesn’t remember me.  I remember sitting with her once, in the recreation room of the nursing home, when she turned me me suddenly and said, “I never had any children, did I?”

And that wasn’t a philosophical statement of some existential import.  She’d just forgotten–forgotten me, and my brother, and my father, and the more than fifty years of her marriage.

I do have cousins, but the ones I get along with grew up around D.C. and not around here, and the one’s I don’t get along with didn’t grow up here, either.  They were off in an entirely different world, so much of a different world that I tended to forget they existed when I went away to college and graduate school.

It’s not that I had such a wonderful childhood.  It was, at best, mixed, and I look back on it now as if I’d spent that entire time delusional.  I was not capable, at the time, of seeing it for what it was. 

Sometimes when I think about myself at that time of my life, I’m reminded of Bill’s line about John Lennon:  John Lennon was the only person in the world who had the opportunity to be John Lennon, and he  blew it.

I won’t say that I blew it, but I do seem to have spent my childhood and adolescence in a blur that was my inability to accurately perceive myself. 

I don’t know.  Maybe what I’m trying for here is not really available anywhere.  Maybe nobody else perceived me any more accurately than I perceived myself.  I certainly did not perceive my cousins (the ones I don’t get along with) accurately at all.

But maybe it’s just that some kinds of history exist only in the minds of the people who have lived it, and when those people die, the history dies with them.

And maybe it’s that it’s something of a shock to realize that things that mattered to me passionately once now matter not at all, because they don’t exist to matter.

If that makes sense.

Tomorrow, why con men and bank robbers are not in any way allowed under the schemata Rand put forward, and why Robert is geting that wrong.

But today, I’m just going to go off and have another funk.

I’ve got a new, upgraded version of this blog program to work with today.  It’s one of those things.  We’ve been meaning to upgrade for a while, but it wasn’t hurting anything to stay where we were, so we didn’t get around to it, and then we did.

I can’t see a great deal of difference between the old version of the program and this one, except that in the space for the post title it says Put Title Here in very faint grey letters until you do put the title there, and I don’t see the point. 

Otherwise, it’s just what I’m used to.  It feels like one of  those things, an upgrade for the sake of an upgrade, as if the people who write these programs think that something has to change every few years or so, even if there’s no need for it.

Having gotten my obligatory new thing bitch out of the way, I want to go back to Ayn Rand and Peter Unger, because I’ve started Living High and Letting Die:  Our Illusion of Innocence, and all I can say is that I’m flabbergasted.

Well, okay, that’s not all I can say.  But we’ll get there.

First, I think Robert is wrong that Ayn Rand gives no compelling reason why we shouldn’t just off and bash somebody in the head if they have something we truly want for ourselves.

Rand’s entire conceptual structure rests on the fact that human beings have one and only one means of survival–their minds–and anything that corrupts or violates that diminishes our capacity to live.  In order to survive and live, we must use of minds to their fullest, which means identifying and accepting the real.  Force and fraud are the chief ways in which some human beings try to destroy the minds of others.  When we engage in force or fraud, what we do is to deny reality rather than accept it.  We not only make other people less capable of surviving, by violating our own hold on rationality and reality, we make ourselves less capable of surviving.

I was also a little confused by Cheryl’s comment that she wasn’t being rational when she decided to read what she liked just because she liked it.  I don’t understand what isn’t “rational” about that.  In fact, I’d say–and I think Rand would say–that choosing to read what you “ought” to read because somebody’s told you that’s what you’re supposed to do would be irrational.  Reading what you want to read because you want to read it is, in fact, the rational thing to do.

And that brings me to Unger, because the issue of rationality looms large in his book, and the issue of truth does to.

But not in the way you’d expect.

Let me throw in a little background here,

I said when I first started this book that it looked as if it were going to make the same argument as Peter Singer”s “Famine, Affluence and Morality.”

I was more right than I realized.  Unger not only directly acknowledges that Singer’s essay is his starting point, and that his book is meant to strengthen Singer’s and extend them. 

Singer’s premise, and Unger’s, is that people living in the first world are doing something deeply immoral and reprehensible if they do not give–by private donation or through their governments–all the wealth they earn beyond that necessary for basic survival to people in the third world who without such a donation would surely die early.

I do intend to address that premise eventually, but for today I want only to note a few things about this book.

The first is that Unger has a skewed idea of the “rational,” too. 

At one point, he declares that there is no need to insist on rationality in moral argument, because rationality has nothing to do with moral argument.  He “proves” this by giving a hypothetical example that goes as follows:

You’re walking by and see a child drowing in a shallow pond.  It would cost you nothing to save this child–it wouldn’t be dangerous for you, get you in trouble or otherwise negatively impact your life–and you easily can save him.  But you see that the child is your cousin, and under your uncle’s will, you and this cousin will share in the uncle’s great fortune.  The cousin with get four fifths, and you will get one fifth, unless the cousin dies before you.  Then you will get it all.

Unger then tells us to assume that you have a drug you can give the drowning child to make sure he won’t suffer, and another drug you can give yourself so that forget all about what you’ve done and therefore never feel any guilt.

It’s therefore rational, he says, for you to let your cousin die–and that proves that rationality is no use in moral argument.

The crux of all this, of course, is that it amounts to saying:  if we lived in an alternate universe that was nothing at all like our own, rationality would be no use in moral argument. 

But we live in this world, not that one, and there is no case in which you could commit such an act in which these conditions would prevail.  And once these conditions do not prevail–once you have to consider the cousin’s suffering and your own guilt–then rationality does indeed become vital to moral argument. 

And that’s without getting into whether or not it would be rational for you to gain a fortune by such means in the first place.  I think it wouldn’t, but we’ll get to that later.

The next thing Unger does is to make a slight nod in the direction of moral truths.  How can we know–on what foundation can we say–that moral dictates are “true.”

And then he doesn’t discuss it.  He just announces that the question is a distraction, and entirely beside the point.  Human beings, he says, act as if moral precepts are true, in fact are passionate about their commitment to them, so it doesn’t matter if they’re  “true” or not.  They just are.

In other words, Unger provides no basis at all for any of the things he is about to say, unless you accept his claim that we all have Basic Moral Values that are just here, however they got here, and we should just go with them as far as they will lead us, taking them to their logical conclusions.

And it gets worse than this.  He starts out with a single moral idea, which he ascribes to Singer and adopts as his own, which goes like this:

“If we can prevent something bad without sacrificing anything of comparable significance, we ought to do it.”

Then he amends this to say that it should be read in a strong sense–we are morally obligated to do it, and we’re doing something bad and wrong if we don’t do it.

He then points out that most of us would feel that there is something wrong with an adult who didn’t save a child from drowning in a shallow pond–that we feel that such an adult has an obligation to save that child.

And then he goes on to say that if we have an obligation in that instance, we have it in all instances, including when it comes to starving children in the third world.

Now, like I said, this mess of half-thought and solid confusion can use a lot of untangling, but right now I’d like to point out one more way in which Unger simply refuses to engage any argument at all.

There are two possible responses, he says, to our moral belief that the adult is obligated to save the child drowning right in front of him. 

One of those responses (he calls it the “preservationist,” accepts this obligation, but denies that it extends to people far away without whom we are in direct contact.

The other of those responses (which he calls the “liberationist”–is this stuff predictable, or what?) says that the obligation is the same in both cases because the cases are subtationally the same.

At that point I thought he was just going to ignore the third possibility, which is that it can be argued (and with good foundations, too) that we are not morally obligated in either case.

But he doesn’t ignore that, exactly.  He notes that the idea exists, calls it “negativist,” and airily announces that the idea is so morally repugnant that there’s no point in paying any attention to it.  When it can’t be helped, he’s going to restrict any comments about that to the footnotes.

It is, truly, one of the most remarkable examples of bad faith argument I’ve ever seen.  It’s not really argument at all.   It’s more like, “I’m going to tell you what’s what, and it is because it is.”

Unger is not trying to prove a case.  He’s simply announcing it, and then calling it self evident and declaring victory.

And the case is monumentally ridiculous, too.

But more on that tomorrow.

At one point,

Well, what can I say?  It wasn’t a bad birthday as birthdays go.  Matt even cooked me dinner.

So thanks to everybody who sent happy birthday wishes, and back to the fray.

First, I didn’t mean to imply that Rand based her moral philosophy on her definitions of selfishness and unselfishness.  The basis begins with the law of identity (a thing cannot both be and not be in the same respect at the same time) and goes from there.

And I’m pretty sure that it’s a closed system–that you can only disprove it (if it can be disproved at all) by attacking its premises.  Its logic is not faulty.

And, I notice, that Cheryl was still using the words in their non-Randian definitions–she talks about how, if Paris Hilton was really a performance artist, she could be “just as unselfish as any other artist.”

But to Rand, “unselfish” is always a bad thing.

“Unselfish” does not mean be considerate of other people.

It means having no self–no convictions or ideas of your own.

And yes, using words in ways like this, in ways other than they are usually defined, can cause more than a little trouble.

But John said that people either based morality on God, or on what they just “felt” was a good thing–and my point here is that Rand does neither.  She does, in fact, provide a perfectly logical, consistant, objective basis for a moral code, and then she provides the code.

But here’s the kicker.

She doesn’t provide that basis for the moral code you and I are used to.  She is not providing a basis for the morality of Christianity, or anything like it.

And that is, of course, part of her point.  She holds that the reason we think there is no rational, scientific way to know what is moral is because we have been fed a moral code that is inherently irrational and unscientific.

Reason can tell us what we must do to be moral–but it will not support most of what people have been calling “moral” for centuries.

In other words, the problem is not that there is no objective basis for morality, but that there is no objective basis for the morality we’ve been taught up to now.

At this point, things get a little complicated.   I’m not going to try to outline Rand’s philosophy in a blog.  “This is John Galt Speaking” is probably 4000 words long, and it’s just a sketch of the overall argument.  She wrote books detailing the rest of it.

But I do want to point out two things.

First, that argument does, in fact, provide an objective ground for natural individual rights (freedom of speech, conscience, etc) that does not rely on religion and does not leave them up to “the government gives them to me.”

Second, that when you look at her list of virtues and vices, you’re struck by what’s not there–there’s no harping on sex and sexuality.  Homosexuality is not moral or immoral in Rand’s moral philosophy.  It’s irrelevant.

Let me list here, for a moment, the virtues as proposed by Rand:

a) rationality–we are morally obligated to accept the reality of the world outside ourselves and to seek and support the truth by the use of our reason.

b) independence–we are morally obligated to make our own judgments and be true to them.  It’s all right to figure out we’re wrong and change our minds because we have new facts, but it’s never all right to change our minds, abandon our beliefs or convictions, just because somebody else says so, or “everybody’ says so, or it isn’t what the dogma of our religion or politics declares to be true.

c)integrity–we are morally obligated to reject contradictions between our beliefs and our behavior.  We must act on what we have determined to be morally right, not just think it.

d) honesty–we are morally obligated to tell the truth, and to act the truth. 

e) justice–we are morally obligated to give each person what he deserves, nothing more and nothing less.  We must judge other people rationally, and be judged by them. 

f) productiveness–we are morally obligated to contribute to the society we live in by producing at least as much as we consume.  Productive work is the single most important obligation we have to other people and to society at large.

g) pride–not talking about hubris here, but about that interior demand that we always do our best and only our best work.  And we are morally obligated to judge ourselves as rationally as we would judge anybody else.  That is, if we cure cancer, build the Sears tower, write a good book or establish the first human colony on Mars, we not only should, but must, judge ourselves favorably, as we would judge someone else favorably, for doing these things.

I’m getting tangled up again.

But that’s a beginning–

And, again, that’s NOT the foundation of Rand’s moral code, it’s the code itself.  I don’t quite know how to get into the law of identity.

But this gives me a good place to look at the Singer/Unger “you have no right to anything until all the starving people on earth are fed” argument.

And I’ll do that at some other time.

Well, to start, I’m definitely in favor of the poster who said that one way to beat depression was to read my books–yes, absolutely, the whole country should do that.  I could go to Maui.

But let me get to Cheryl’s comment on “This is John Galt Speaking.”

First, as an aside, I’d like to point out that I wasn’t (necessarily) advocating the content of the moral code Rand puts forward in that essay or in any other place.

All I said was that she has managed to provide an objective foundation for morality that is not based on God and that is not based on “it feels good.”

It also happens to be a moral philosophy that is humanistic in the original sense–it derives from a deep respect for and understanding of the special status of human beings.

That said–my guess is that, if you’d read it through rather than skimming it, you might have found less to disagree with than you’d think.

Rand does not define the terms “selfish” and “selfless” the way they’re defined in common usage.

Consider this example:

Mary is the mother of Tom.  She loves Tom passionately.  From birth, she’s recognized that he is extraordinarily talented.  As he’s grown, she’s seen that he’s also very ambitious.  For Mary, Tom is the single most important and valuable thing that has ever existed.  She scrimps and saves all his childhood to give him extra opportunities, like Space Camp and accelerated math programs.  She goes without things she really enjoys, like chocolates and movies and vacations, to make sure he gets the best possible start.  She really puts herself through the wringer to make sure he can go to the best college.

Is Mary being selfish, or selfless?

Is Mary living “for the sake of” Tom?

For Rand, Mary is being selfISH, and she’s not living for the sake of Tom, but for her own sake.

Selfishness, to Rand, is not that mindless grasping after do it my way whims that we think of when we use the term.

Selfishness, to Rand, is having a strong sense of oneself and what one values, and supporting those things one values most.

Since Mary values Tom above any of the things she gave up, she’s made no sacrifice at all, and her life is an example of a human being identifying her values and committing herself to the support of them.

Sacrifice, for Rand, means giving up something you value MORE for something you value LESS.

Now,  take this contrast:

For Dr. Jonas Salk, the most important thing was putting an end to childhood polio.  He worked all his life for very little money–relative to what he could have made if he’d done something else–to achieve this goal.  Once he had produced an effective vaccine, he put it immediately in the public domain.  He could have gotten rich from the sale of it.  Instead, he let the money go to make sure everybody could afford to have his child vaccinated against the disease.

Paris Hilton was born into a rich family.  She went to rich girls’ schools.  She lived in rich girl places.  As soon as she was old enough, she started to go out to parties nearly every night.  She chose her clothes with an eye to getting publicity, and she chose her actions with an eye to getting publicity, too.  She did whatever she had to do to be a public personality.  Even her spending habits were conditioned, at least in part, by what they would get her in terms of publicity.

Of the two people above–which one is selfish, and which one is selfless?

For Rand, Salk is the selfISH one–he identified what he valued most, dedicated his life to it, and pursued his goal without concern for what other people thought he ought to be doing or how the world would judge him.  He was selfISH because he had a strong sense of self.

For Rand, Hilton is selfLESS.  There’s no there there.  Her tastes, her habits, her life is determined by other people, what they will think, what they will say, how they will react.  She’s selfLESS because, when you get to the core of her, she has no self.  She’s the creation and reflection of other people.

Rand is not the only person in the world to use words in a way that isn’t usual in the population at large, but at least she does outline her definitions explicitly when she makes her arguments.  Buried in that long essay “This Is John Galt Speaking” is an argument about epistemology that includes a fair presentation of how she’s using the words she’s using and why.

Lots of people use unusual definitions without making those differences clear.  And others use words in a way that is common in one small group but not in the population at large.

I was confronted by this last night on Keith Olbermann’s program, where he discussed (with a female African-American professor from Princeton) whether or not the Tea Party movement was “racist.”

And what I got was this, “A lot of people don’t understand that if you support public policies that have a disparate impact on people of color, that’s racist.”

What?

Most of us would define racism as treating individuals as members of their race rather than as individuals, or doing them harm simply because of their race, or denying them rights and opportunities simply because of their race.

No wonder “progressives” see the Tea Party movement and most Republicans as “racist” and the Tea Party movement and the Republicans just think the progressives are indulging in hate speech–they’re not using “racist” to mean the same thing.

So, before you decide Rand has nothing to say to you, try to make sure you know what she’s actually saying and how she’s defining her terms.

But today, I’m going to do neither.

It’s my birthday, and I’ve had NO sleep.

Matt’s going to cook for me, I have friends coming over this evening, and I think I’m going to go take a nap.

So–last night, to sort of cap everything off,  Bill’s mother went into the emergency room with blood clots in her legs, inoperable.  She’s had operations for those a few times, but now her arteries are just too hard.  So Bill’s sister Mary is looking for hospice for her, and we’re all hoping she lasts long enough for us to get there.  It’s one of those things, though.  She may not recognize us if we do come.

Mary Agnes has never really been okay since Bill’s sister JoAnn died.  I don’t suppose that’s surprising.  JoAnn was the third of her four children to die before her.  Bill’s father died years ago.  The last few years she’s been alone, relying on the Rosary and very depressed.

Ack.

I look back over what I have seen in my life and I find it harder and harder to put the pieces together.   The extremes make enough sense.  The people who really screwed up, the people who lived so well ( in a moral sense), both seem to have come out where they should. 

So have the people with themes, as I’d guess I’d have to put it.  The people who weren’t actively bad but didn’t actually do anything except sort of go through the day by day by rote ended up–well, pretty much where they started.  The people who desperately wanted one particular thing and were actively engaged in working for it didn’t always get that one particular thing, but they did always get something above and beyond what they’d started with. 

And some of those stories are very interesting.

But there seem to be a lot of people who aren’t–aren’t defined at all, I guess.  Who just are.  When Mary Agnes was a young girl, she defied her very conservative Italian immigrant family to go off to Adelphi and become an RN.    My mother defied her father and spent a season singing in the chorus of the Metropolitan Opera. 

And then, you know, the Fifties happened, and they both came home and got married, and now we’re here.

It’s very odd for all this to be happening when I’m reading my way through This Is John Galt Speaking. 

I always thought the argument in that piece made perfect sense, but it does sometimes make it sound as if death is optional.

Ah, more later, maybe cheerier.

First, let me say that I’m likely to be distracted over the next few days.

My mother, who is ninety-two and has been in a nursing home in Florida for many years, was apparently taken to the hospital sometime Wednesday and is now very ill.

This does not come as some kind of enormous shock.  I call her on a regular basis, and I insist on talking to her even though it’s been years since she knew who I was.  It’s been obvious for some time that she’s been getting more and more out of it with the passing weeks.

What bothers me here–besides the obvious–is that it took at least a day before anybody bothered to contact me, and it might have been closer to two days.   The news came in an e-mail late on Thursday afternoon, from the legal guardian who had never once before in all the past four years bothered to return a single one of my phone calls.

Even then, I got less than no information from him except the number of her attending physician.  I called the doctor, I called the hospital, I called the nursing home.  The nursing home hasn’t returned my call yet–and it’s been almost three days now.

When I got to the doctor, I found that there was no record on any of my mother’s paperwork that I existed, or that she had any living relatives at all.

When I got to the hospital, I found that her hospital records listed my brother as a contact person–my brother died four years ago.

I’m close to exploding here on some fundamental, visceral level that seems to skirt any form of reason. 

If she dies in this little stretch, it will happen before I have a chance to see her.  I don’t think the extra day’s notice will have changed that, but the people in Florida had no way of knowing whether it would or not. 

From what I can figure out about what’s been going on, they already knew, when I called last Sunday, that there was something going seriously wrong.  And yet, when I asked, all I got was, “oh, she’s doing fine.”

Between what happened to my father and what is now happening to my mother, I’m frantically trying to make sure that if anything ever happens to me, I’ve got enough people with my power of attorney, with their names on my accounts, with my health proxy and all the rest of it so that they can control what happens to me without ambiguity, and not get stuck in a mess like this.

And maybe I should listen to King Lear, but I trust the boys. And if I can’t trust them, I don’t care.

So there’s that.

Ack.

I was going to get around to making some comments about the comments of the last few days, but I really don’t have the heart for it.

Let me just put in this, because it’s the most important part.

I don’t think “social science” is going to come up with a science of human nature.

I don’t think “social science” is science of any kind–and I include in that most of clincial psychology.

“Social science” has always been normative, not descriptive.  It has always existed to put scientific-sounding jargon around previously determined desired social outcomes. 

To ask, though, what would happen if we found that X was immoral and lots of people thought X was unjust seems to me to be just plain silly.

Lots of people find evolution objectionable–but that does not change the fact that evolution occurred.  The same is true for anything else.  Anybody can object to anything.  Facts are facts.

That said, I think part of the problem here is that we’re thinking of a science of human nature as providing laws of human nature that are moral laws.

But it’s at one remove.  The laws of physics and chemistry are what they are–engineering takes those laws and uses them to produce practical applications.

Moral law is like engineering, not like physics–first you find the laws of human nature, then you find the technical adaptations of them that work in real life.

Will everybody agree on the worthwhileness of these?

No, of course not–but you can’t get them to agree on the worthwhileness of air conditioning systems or SUVs, either.   So what?

My guess is, in fact, that lots of people will object to any moral system derived from an actual science of human nature, because most people have at least some incentitive to try to deny reality on one level or another.

But that’s for another time, when my brain is actually functioning.