The Maverick Philosopher vs. Ayn Rand

The Maverick Philosopher, who elects to identify himself at his blog under real-nym Bill Vallicella, doesn't think all that highly of Ayn Rand.

That is unfortunate, but understandable, given his context.

What's more, when he bashes Rand as being a "hack" and whatnot, he goes through the trouble of presenting evidence and argument.  So he presents something of a formidable foe to those who would take Rand seriously as a philosopher.  (He does allow that she is a philosopher, but just not a good one.)  As one could quite readily discern from his blog, he is an honorable fucking adversary, even if mistaken in his general assessment of Rand.  (Plus he has a better (more perfect) overall command of the written word than I.)  He provides a very refreshing alternative to the anti-philosophizing attitude represented by the ignoble Leiters.  Perhaps one day I should have the pleasure of meeting him and collaborating, as all mutual philosophizing should be about.  Here I want to take issue with his overall assessment while acknowledging, in the spirit of dialectic, what he gets right.

First, the "bad stuff" about Rand (and Peikoff) . . .

Maverick pretty much nails Rand on the issues he has decided to cover when discussing her.  Pretty much, though not all the way.  Rand's very simple approach to metaphysics on neo-Aristotelian lines either hardly adds to what Aristotle already accomplished, or gets things wrong when applying understanding of the axioms to various substantive issues, including perhaps The Most Substantive Issue of Metaphysics: Does God Exist?  Going back to Nathaniel Branden's "intellectual ammunition department" response to the God-as-First-Cause question in The Objectivist Newsletter, the official Objectivist position is, in essence, that God cannot exist because, as Branden put it, the universe is the totality of that which exists.  God is not part of the universe, therefore, God does not exist.  Q.E.D.  It's pretty much that bad, and Maverick will fill you in on the details.  It also makes Peikoff's own position very muddled in light of his statement that "existence exists" does not specify that a physical world exists (and how could it, given its trivially-true character?).

The Objectivist rendering of the law of causality as a corollary of the law of identity (stated as "A is A" although expanded upon by direct quotation from Aristotle in the last pages of Atlas) is at best a simplistic restatement of Aristotelian ideas about causes, while Peikoff's treatment of the issue in light of what he subsequently says about free will is muddled.  The standard Rand/Peikoff/(Binswanger?) claim is that since under a given set of circumstances, only one "action" (behavior?) is available to a given entity, this rules out  (as "irrational" or something) indeterministic interpretations of Quantum Mechanics.  The Objectivist interpretation  of causality as (correctly!) applied to free will is that the "only" action open to a volitional being is that which follows from its nature: to act freely, to choose.  The problem for the orthodox Objectivist is that this, in turn, allows for indeterministic causation (yes, you read that right) not just in the subatomic realm studied by QM, but universally.  What we are left with is the inductive epistemological task of discovering which phenomena are (mechanistically) determined and which are not.  (Indeterminism must not be equated with volition; if subatomic particles don't behave as classical mechanics would dictate, that hardly at all implies their exhibiting volition, as you might hear many an amateur student of Objectivism claim.)

Rand/Peikoff's "refutations" of idealism and materialism are similarly, and hopelessly, muddled.  The Objectivist axiom of consciousness dictates most reasonably that a consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms; that in order for it to be conscious, it had to be conscious of something (which exists).  The problem is, this doesn't do anything to refute idealism, since standard idealisms hold that, in Berkeley's formulation, "to be is to be perceived."  Consciousness still remains the faculty of perceiving that which exists, in such a formulation.  This cannot be rejected on the basis of "the primacy of existence" (if that is read as implied by the [I hate to put it this way, but I have to] trivially-true axioms).  This would amount to metaphysics-by-fiat, that "existence exists" means something substantive to the effect that Berkeley's formulation is automatically ruled out.  I think had Rand been surrounded by expert metaphysicians during her intellectual career, she'd have done a much better job at this sort of thing; however, had the mainstream of academic analytic philosophy at the time not been bogged down in anti-metaphysical practices while Aristotle was going relatively neglected, she might have found such experts where they around.  This gives rise to the question: Why did she not integrate/dialecticize with Henry Veatch, or him with her?  What we have here is a failure to integrate.

The Objectivist "refutation" of materialism is little better, since it amounts to a strawman equation of materialism with a vulgar, uber-reductive materialism.  In OPAR, Peikoff mentions four supposedly paradigmatic materialists in his sense: Democritus, Hobbes, Marx, and Skinner.  In one indication that Peikoff was behind the times at the time of OPAR's 1991 publication, he appears unaware that Skinner had long been a non-issue by then, particularly in wake of Chomsky's demolition job some two decades before.  Not only that, he hadn't been influential in mainstream philosophy.  Skinner might plausibly be an example of vulgar reductive materialism but since mainstream philosophers didn't take him seriously, what's the idea of bringing him into a discussion of what allegedly went wrong in metaphysics at the hands of philosophers?  The case of Marx doesn't work well here, either, because Marx as a vulgar reductionist reeks of a strawman.  But the real kicker here is: how does Objectivism escape charges of materialism when (contrary to Peikoff's earlier admission that the existence axiom doesn't specify the existence of a physical world) it rules out the existence of God on the grounds that only the physical universe exists?  Objectivism turns out to be a substantive naturalism, which isn't (as John W. Robbins's incompetent critique of Objectivism would have it) synonymous with materialism, at least not as Peikoff describes it (the vulgar-reductive kind which denies the reality of consciousness), but that leaves the question: who of significance in the history of philosophy does hold that latter view?  I won't hold my breath for an answer.

So, getting back to the Maverick, when he's bashing the substantive Rand/Peikoff arguments in metaphysics, he's shooting fish in a barrel.  It's no surprise to me that inasmuch as Rand scholars write on metaphysics they go back to Aristotle and sometimes Aquinas for beefing-up.  (For instance, Chapter 1 of Den Uyl and Rasmussen's The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand seems to contain more discussion about the Aristotelian tradition than about Rand in particular.)

When Maverick attacks Rand's views on abortion, he rightly points out where her views are sorely lacking, although I would not consider her views obviously stupid considering the time at which she wrote them, a time when Judith Thomson's flawed article defending abortion was not so obviously flawed according to the understanding of many readers then.  (The violinist example . . . whoo boy!  I mean, if a fetus could be easily transferred from the mother's body to some other nutritive environment - just as the violinist could be hooked up to someone else - then the violinist example is a great, knock-down defense of a woman's unlimited "right to choose what happens to and in her body."  Not to mention that whole thing about volitional activity bringing about the (special) relation of fetal dependence, in marked contrast to the involuntary hooking-up to the violinist.  And why a violinist, anyway?)  I would also take issue with one subtle but significant point.  When Rand wrote, "The living take precedence over the not-yet-living (or the unborn)," Maverick interprets this as follows: "Rand equates the unborn with the not-yet living."  The "or" here might suggest a logical equivalence, but the rhetorical context does not make that at all clear and, being accustomed as I am to Rand's writing style, I read it as the different kind of "or," as in presenting two distinct cases.  In any case, I think needless to  say, the abortion debate has gotten more sophisticated in the nearly-forty years since, with Don Marquis's anti-abortion argument making a most potent case for how abortion is, at minimum, extremely morally problematic; the standard "woman's right over her body" arguments advanced by so many intellectually-lazy defenders of abortion rights have to fully confront Marquis's argument.

Maverick's coverage of Rand's intellectual relationship with John Hospers sorely mischaracterizes the reasons for their parting of ways.  It was not over Hospers having "dared criticize" Rand, but the style in which he did so.  Binswanger has the scoop on what precipitated their break, and if that is an accurate portrayal, then Hospers's behavior cries out for a reasoned explanation, which (due to Hospers's passing) we may never get.

Speaking of Binswanger, Maverick is to be commended for his respectful interchange with Binswanger at his blog.  It's too bad all these one-sided cheap-shot artists around the online world don't have the guts or the decency to do likewise.

Before continuing, I do want to mention that I'm lukewarm about Maverick's seemingly blanket characterizations of "liberals" as decadent libertines on moral and cultural matters and freedom-stomping statists on political and economic ones.  (Maverick self-identifies as a conservative.)  If one were to pin him down to specifics, I'm fairly sure he would distinguish the thoughtful liberals from the not-so-thoughtful ones, in which case the former aren't the ones giving liberalism such a bad name.  But doesn't that go for pretty much any "school" of thought, be it liberalism, libertarianism, Objectivism, or . . . conservatism?  If we're going to criticize "the liberals" for their faults, then "the conservatives" are fair game . . . and have you seen how "the conservatives" have done a piss-poor job, since roughly around the time of their adoption of the Southern Strategy, at presenting an intellectually-fortified defense of conservative ideals?  There was Barry Goldwater back in the '60s penning The Conscience of a Conservative, and then later coming to identify as a libertarian and to decry the religious fundamentalism taking over the GOP.  There was William F. Buckley (by the way, did he get calmly and methodically destroyed by Chomsky on his "Firing Line" show, or what?) who came to identify as a libertarian as well as conservative.  (I read somewhere that, to his credit, Buckley smoked a little bud; also, he proved in his eloquent style how the Drug War is a moral and practical disaster.) You had Reagan playing up to the il(classical)liberal Moral Majority, and things continued downhill from there: the Dan Quayle VP nod, the illiberal declaration of "culture war" at the '92 GOP convention, Clinton Derangement Syndrome, the Bush torture regime, FOX's credibility-destroying partisanship, Limbaugh's descent into intellectual dementia, Hannity's blatant partisanship and anti-intellectualism, Savage's paranoid hysteria, O'Reilly's anti-intellectual streak, the ridiculous '08 Dingbat VP nod, "refudiate," Obama Derangement Syndrome, demise-is-always-around-the-corner paranoia, End Times-ism, many Tea Partiers' selective attention/memory/knowledge, seeming GOP indifference to the healthcare affordability crisis, Moneybags as the lone credible (sic) '12 candidate, birtherism, intellectually vacant opposition to marriage equality, evolution denial, climate change denial (coupled by projections onto scientists as allegedly politicizing the issue), and, now, out-and-out morons running the House Science (sic) Committee.  If "the conservatives" would address these problems as much as "the liberals" should address theirs (starting perhaps with their pathological inability or unwillingness to seriously and honestly confront what they imagine to be impossible: a formidable Aristotelian-individualist-capitalist intellectual juggernaut spearheaded by a fiery novelist), we might well have neo-Aristotelian/perfectivist nirvana, would we not.

Okay.  Now.  Where does the Maverick get it wrong about Rand?

First, let me point out that his shooting-fish-in-a-barrel routine is directed almost exclusively at Rand's lousy substantive metaphysical arguments.  What he does not cover is her ethics, her politics, or - most crucially, most fundamentally, most signficantly - her prescribed (neo-Aristotelian) methodology for dealing with ideas.  (Method pertains primarily with epistemology, not metaphysics.)  Outside of what Peikoff, Sciabarra, and a few others have done, this never gets addressed those writing about Rand, her critics most of all.  One might claim that Peikoff's lecture courses, in which this central topic is most extensively worked out, are too inaccessible a format (the complaint about their being too expensive - as in the hundreds of dollars - no longer holds, by any remotely plausible stretch), but that still leaves Sciabarra's Russian Radical, which has been in print for nearly two decades now, and which Rand critics either brazenly evade or remain blazingly ignorant about.  Peikoff's Understanding Objectivism course has been in print for almost a year now (and if you aren't deeply familiar, directly or inderectly, with the contents of this course, then your understanding of Rand's philosophy is probably for shit, given the crucial, fundamental, supremely significant role of method in it; this is not even to speak of Peikoff's later courses, such as The Art of Thinking or Objectivism Through Induction) and so far the critics have remained completely silent about the book version of Understanding, through either ignorance/cluelessness or evasion.  (Right on bad-faith cue, the haters did manage, just around the same time Understanding was released, to heap attention upon Gary Weiss's Ayn Rand Nation which, from what I can tell, is as clueless as any of the secondary literature out there.  This disparity of response right here says pretty much all you need to know about the haters' total lack of scruples.)

(I mean, if staunch adherents/admirers of Thinker X's ideas uniformly tell you that such-and-such resource is absolutely essential to grasping Thinker X's ideas properly, the intellectually curious person would very much want to obtain that resource if the person wanted to speak competently and persuasively about the merits of Thinker X's ideas, rather than to run around like a random thug taking pot-shots at Thinker X and the adherents of Thinker X's ideas.  This is only common sense; this only stands to reason.  Oh, did I mention that Peikoff lecture courses available at $10 a pop, for undergrads to snatch up and integrate en masse, spells Game Over for the intellectual Establishment?  If not, I'll say it again: Peikoff lecture courses available at $10 a pop, for undergrads to snatch up and integrate en masse, spells Game Over for the intellectual Establishment.  Done deal.  I've never been more certain of anything in my life.  The fuck you think Russian Radical was all about, anyway, fun and games?   You've been spermjacked, Leiter & Co.  Checkmate, assholes.  You can't refute perfectivism. :-)

Second, the intellectually responsible thing to do is to see in what areas Rand's ideas have been carefully analyzed and developed by subsequent thinkers, if one wants to know where her strengths were.  I've already touched upon method (Peikoff and Sciabarra).  In ethics, there's Tara Smith's Cambridge-published book on Randian-egoistic normative virtue-ethics, along with the recent Ayn Rand Society volume.  In politics, Rand's "What is Capitalism?" is a hugely important essay with respect to a central theme of hers: the role of the mind in human existence.  The essential substance of her political ideas has reached its latest academic development in Sciabarra's Total Freedom and Rasmussen and Den Uyl's Norms of Liberty.  As for her aesthetics: first off, not to understand her aesthetics is not to understand her views about sense of life, which is not to understand Rand's own sense of life, which is not to understand the benevolent universe premise, which is not to understand Rand the person; it is to not understand her views on psycho-epistemology, which is to not understand her theory about method, which is to not understand her philosophy, period.  Second, when a scholar of aesthetics such as John Hospers says that Rand's novels carry much aesthetic importance, the intellectually responsible reaction is to perk up one's ears.  Finally, in regard to epistemology "proper," the forthcoming (2013) Ayn Rand Society volume continues and develops Rand's work on the nature of concepts and their role in knowledge.

It is a fascinating psychological and sociological dynamic to observe, how people's views on a thinker or topic can vary so much depending not only on their individual contexts of knowledge, but also on what data points they cull into making their observations and judgments.  If you focus exclusively on things like Rand's terrible polemics and lousy substantive arguments in metaphysics, one is bound to think little or negatively of her.  If one focuses exclusively on (to put it in briefest essence) the perfectivist aspects of Rand's philosophy and personality, one is bound to see her as the second coming of Aristotle.  The perfective dialectical reconciliation of these two seemingly disparate data sets - the act of objectively and comprehensively establishing the full context - involves doing as I do right here and in dozens of other blog entries on Rand.  And to his great credit Maverick, being staunchly anti-intellectual-bigotry and perfectivist in his sensibilities, wrote: "Rand's ideas ought to be discussed, not dismissed."  A shit-ton better than the closed-minded sneers and ultra-politicized "gatekeeping" of Leiter and his ilk, innit?  (A search on the term "nietzsche" at Maverick's Rand page (which I linked at the outset of today's discussion) is apropos.  Further, I have it on authority of a well-established Nietzsche scholar that Rand was more disciplined a thinker than Nietzsche was.  She did select the Aristotelian route from Alasdair MacIntyre's (dialectically inadequate?) Aristotle/Nietzsche alternative, if that tells you anything.  But what if Nietzsche had been productive another thirty years?...)

The unquestionable fact is, there is a fast-growing academic literature on Rand that didn't exist before.  Combined with the effect of those now-way-inexpensive Peikoff courses, and the publication of Understanding Objectivism, and the neo-Aristotelian resurgence in general gathering steam in the academy, the effect should be exponential: an explosion in interest in Rand among the intellectually curious.  The deniers - inside the academy and out - have two options: (1) keep evading and behaving like thugs, or (2) get a clue.  To wit:

"Checkmate, asshole."

Animals and Fetuses in a High-Tech Future

Are Peter Singer and other leading animal-rights ethicists not being progressive and forward-thinking enough about human fetuses? The main gist a casual observer gets from Singer & Co. is that animals deserve strong moral consideration in virtue of being sentient, but that human fetuses, not being sentient or advanced in development, are not and needn't be accorded strong moral consideration as against "a woman's right to choose." The first position (about animals) is pretty radical by today's standards (and I'm highly sympathetic to say the least, despite not being an ethical utilitarian), but the latter position (about fetuses) is pretty mainstream today.

The course of Western history has included, over extended periods of time, progressive "reading-in" of classes of morally-significant beings to more full-fledged consideration or membership in the moral community. We have seen in America, by progressive stages, the abolition of legal slavery, then suffrage for women, then the Civil Rights movement of the '60s, the transformation of the traditional family model starting in the '60s toward greater independence for women (hence the current not-very-fetus-friendly laws), and, most recently, the eminently sensible push for marriage equality regardless of one's choice of consenting adult partner.

Animals currently have some protections under the law against behavior we might vaguely (in moral terms, independent of whatever non-vague language of the law) refer to as "needlessly cruel." Fetuses begin seeing legal protections only after the first trimester of pregnancy. Both of these represent about the most effective pragmatic compromise we might expect under present law given prevailing widespread moral attitudes. We are well short of the expectations of the radicals who seek a greater measure of equality under the law for animals and fetuses, respectively.

The opposition raised between the pragmatic mainstream and the radicals is an opposition between a supposedly "considered and wise" course and a supposedly "morally enlightened" one. The "morally enlightened" argument is that, in history, previously marginalized or discriminated-against classes of morally-relevant human beings ended up winning equal respect under the law, and certain already-existing morally-relevant features is the reason their equality was eventually recognized. It takes a progressive, forward-looking, enlightened mindset to identify these morally-relevant features and then to work to knock down the unreasonable, retrograde mindsets that keep these features from being recognized. At least that's a take on it that the radicals would endorse.

The pragmatic mindset, meanwhile, notices how upsetting to a stable order radical change can be, and so resists these overnight pushes toward an ideal. The current system works well enough; it is not so obviously broken that it needs to be overthrown in one fell swoop. Just look at what happened to Soviet Russia when that was tried.

This pragmatic-idealist opposition (a false dichotomy a Perfectivist doesn't accept) is well-presented and explained in Thomas Sowell's A Conflict of Visions. Sowell's distinction, which essentially lines up with this one, is between the "constrained" and the "unconstrained" vision of human beings.

Anyway, what leads me to this is posting is my thinking about what a technologically-advanced future would look like in regard to the legal protections of animals and fetuses. I do this because I think that the current resistance to radicalism on these subjects is borne not of willful moral blindness necessarily, but definitely a certain moral blind spot engendered by the pragmatic mindset. Both sides ("pragmatic" and "idealist") fall into faulty diagnoses and rationale. But focusing on the problem with pragmatism for a moment: it inhibits visionary thinking, the ability to even creatively explore and challenge the structural weaknesses of the present paradigm. It also results in a tendency toward skepticism, subjectivism, and relativism.

One thing pragmatism is noted for is the skepticism about universal and eternal "categories" that might somehow impress themselves upon us if only we just look and see. That attitude is actually a reaction in the opposite direction from Platonism and "metaphysics" (the investigation of "ultimate reality" as logically prior to the fleeting and ephemeral experience). This notion hardly seems new in the history of philosophy - it comes up in various sects of lesser philosophers in ancient Greece, e.g., the Skeptics and the Cynics - but it is the prevailing, dominant "sense of life" and mindset in America, or at least was half a century ago.

(How many effing times did Rand quote a weak, wishy-washy, or villainous character in Atlas saying, "We've got to be practical--" and stopping, like it needs no further explanation, other than that one shouldn't stand on principle? She was reporting on the state of reality at the time. Rand wasn't alone in this, by the way; Mises once got up at a meeting of the Mont Pelerin society and informed the appeasers and compromisers there that they were all socialists. How impractical! Trump card: By what standard do we regard something as practical? What was Roark's standard of the practical? Would selling out his principles be practical according to his sense of self and standard of value? Notice who the Pragmatist in The Fountainhead is. Actually, there are two of them. One is a mediocrity, the other a slave to the whims of the mob.)

Since half a century ago, Randism has become a cultural force and Aristotelianism has been (slowly but surely) emerging triumphant in the academy. One thing about Aristotelianism (in the broad sense, not Aristotle's own conclusions per se) is that it doesn't succumb to criticism. It just doesn't. Just as the sophists, skeptics, and cynics couldn't hold a candle to Aristotle back then, so American-style pragmatism can't hold a candle to Aristotelianism 2,300 years later. The opposition to Plato-style eternal categories doesn't apply to Aristotelianism, and also falls apart in the face of Aristotelianism. An Aristotelian framework does speak in terms of natural laws within the context of a realist systematizing empiricism.

Here's the different ways pragmatism and Aristotelian respond, respectively, to the present gaps between human knowledge and natural laws in their entirety: Pragmatism dispenses with the notion of "natural law," because, all said and done, there is no "cash value" to be had in the idea of natural law over and above observed regularity. The Aristotelian response is to simply ascribe the gap to the limitations of our knowledge at any given time, and that present ignorance about natural laws does not mean there aren't any or that we can't speak meaningfully about them. Rand takes this analysis to its extreme: denying natural law is effectively tantamount to committing the fallacy of the stolen concept, or perhaps even more strongly, to denying that existence has primacy over consciousness (i.e., to denying that consciousness is identification of already-existing facts, regularities, etc.). Or, perhaps even stronger yet, we could invoke the principle of Affirmation through Denial: inasmuch as we do philosophy well, we're thinking as perfectively, i.e., as comprehensively as to subject matter as Aristotle did, like Rand did.

Now, as to animals and fetuses. I anticipate changes in the law in the future regarding the treatment of animals and fetuses because of changes in technology. In regard to animals, for instance, we will eventually be able to synthesize meat without having to use animals in the process. Food would be assembled in large labs or factories, etc. Likewise, technology will exist in the future that would enable embryos to be removed from the mother's body and stored safely. And the law would mandate that because of the unique potentialities for self-actualized personhood that exist in principle within each embryo. It would be a crime, morally, to dispense of that potentiality it can be saved safely and with little cost. (A technological trump card here would be more completely effective contraceptive practices, so that the inconveniences of unwanted pregnancy don't even become an issue.)

Now, to envision this kind of futuristic scenario requires some thinking-outside-the-box that pragmatism doesn't deal in and doesn't regard as practical. To the pragmatist, we have to deal with the here-and-now, and here and now people get significant enjoyment from eating animals. Hey, it seems to work well enough (despite the tendencies toward bad health that the recently-emerging eating habits have been creating). What's more, the pragmatist doesn't really get into the business of challenging the base and ignoble rationalizations people will offer for eating factory-farmed meat. To call those rationalizations "base and ignoble" is to presuppose a standard that the pragmatist won't endorse. But they are rationalizations born of a blindness or ignorance (whether it's willful blindness or ignorance depends on the individual case). The self-serving rationalizations one is likely to hear are creepily similar to the self-serving rationalizations people would offer at various times for slavery, the subjugation of women, racial discrimination, marriage discrimination, etc. And the pragmatist has no answer to them, because "We have to be practical--"

Let's not mistake something here: the present situation of cruelty to animals and relative indifference to fetuses ("zygotes aren't people/citizens/etc.") is the result of a pragmatic mentality, just like slavery, subjugation, etc. in previous eras were. The Founding Fathers did espouse natural rights, but to get a new country going, they had to pragmatically compromise on slavery. This is not to say that this didn't constitute an improvement over things prior to the founding of the United States. But it is to say that they were willing to "go along and get along" with an evil (under natural law) because that's the best they could do at the time. It would seem that the history of legal rights is a history of the greatest deal of human and/or animal dignity consistent with economic feasibility.

But to deny that there are natural rights is, while the cashing-in (if you will) of Pragmatism, it is opposed to the ideals upon which this country was founded. And when the last century in America was dominated by Pragmatism rather than Aristotelianism, that provides a very compelling explanation for a widespread resistance to Ayn Rand's idealism. (An explanation with much . . . cash value, wouldn't you say?) But if Americans do have a good understanding of their country's founding roots, and if they do understand therefore the value and practicality of idealism, then they're quite ripe and ready for an Aristotelian-Jeffersonian-Randian-Perfectivist program of idealistic education and therefore of a revolution for the better.

With that period of a new Enlightenment, a Second Renaissance, people just wouldn't get away with peddling the open irrationalities we see all over the place; they would be called out and refuted way more resoundingly and effectively than they are now. (This includes capitalism-bashing Comprachicos with top-flight professorships.) This also means that self-serving rationalizations, pragmatic compromises, and the like, would be discredited and rejected that much more quickly. Then, just like with slavery, women's subjugation, etc., people will look back on the treatment of animals and realize just how ignorant, self-serving, and economic-feasibility-based the previous generations' "moral" reasoning was, given the absolute facts of the matter.

. . . and that's why I've adopted Perfectivism. :-)

[ADDENDUM: I've mentioned it before, but it bears mentioning again: Pragmatism encourages dis-integration. How do you best judge the merit of a philosopher? By how extremely, how radically, how emphatically, how heroically the philosopher stresses the systematic integration of knowledge in accordance with the absolute requirements of our conceptual mode of consciousness. Pragmatism is disqualified from the get-go. And that's why America is floundering at the moment. What America needs is a realist philosophy to support its "common sense" ethos - realist metaphysics, systematizing-empirical epistemology, eudaemonist ethics, benevolent individualist social ethics, capitalist political economy, Romantic aesthetics. "Let your mind and your love of existence decide."]

[ADDENDUM #2: By "self-serving rationalization" above I mean, of course, rationalization which serves a current self that is not a fully-actualized self, i.e., the self as it might be and ought to be.]