Regarding absolutes

Serious philosophers hold that there are absolutes - perhaps, indeed, that everything (every existent, every fact, every event, every sound mental integration of such things) is an absolute, i.e., not subject to alteration or revision.  The question then arises, what does that mean?  I'll respond first with a concrete instance: It's an absolute that the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776; it is a fact and as such it isn't alterable.  But from what I've seen, many people have difficulties with the concept of absolutes (or absolutism), and so an example such as this might not really hit home in the face of their objection to, or rejection of, the idea that there are absolutes.

Miss Rand dismisses the doubters thusly:

“There are no absolutes,” they chatter, blanking out the fact that they are uttering an absolute.

That sounds like a familiar stock response to skeptics who utter something to the effect that there are no absolutes.  It works, but maybe it doesn't address the non-skeptics, the "ordinary folks out there" who are suspicious of those who speak in terms of absolutes.  What I want to suggest is that  there isn't true confusion (among intellectually serious people) over there being absolutes or not, but rather the issue is what the rejection of something put forward as an absolute means in people's minds.  Are they really rejecting the idea of an absolute, or are they misunderstanding what "absolute" means to the serious philosopher, or are they, perhaps, simply rejecting something proposed as an absolute because either (a) they don't think the that something being proposed as an absolute (often a controversial moral, political, or religious ideal or principle) should be regard as an absolute, or (b) because the absolute being offered is ill-formed?

The case-in-point that brought me to thinking about this appeared in philosopher Edward Feser's blog, under the blog entry titled "The road from libertarianism," which chronicles his move away from ("right-wing" or capitalist) libertarianism to the politically conservative position he holds today.  What stuck in my mind was this paragraph in particular:

That the “ownership” aspect of the thesis is no less indeterminate than the “self” aspect also became more evident to me as I thought more carefully about John Locke, who was a defender of the thesis of self-ownership but also someone who denied that our rights were so absolute that we could have a right to commit suicide or to sell ourselves into slavery.  And after all, in everyday life we can rightly be said to own all sorts of things to which we don’t have absolute property rights.  For example, you might own the land your house sits on without thereby having the right to store nuclear waste on it.  But then, how absolute should we take property rights to be, and why?  That depends on your theory of rights.  And that reinforces the point that the thesis of self-ownership by itselfdoesn’t tell us nearly as much as many libertarians think it does.  Ifthe theory of rights that underlies the thesis entails an absolute right of self-ownership, then our rights over ourselves are exactly what libertarians think they are.  But if the theory that underlies the thesis does not entail such an absolute right -- as it didn’t for Locke -- then we might in some sense own ourselves, but withouttherefore having the right to take heroin, or unilaterally to divorce a spouse, or whatever.  Again, the idea of self-ownership by itselfwon’t tell you either way.  You have to look to the underlying theory of rights to find out -- in which case the thesis of self-ownership isn’t doing a whole lot of work.

The word "absolute" shows up five times in this paragraph, and as a means of dispensing with the idea of "self-ownership" as an absolute right or principle.  Feser's framing of the issue isn't so much about the absoluteness of a purported right of self-ownership, but about having to appeal to some other moral principles to make the principle determinate.  Do we have the right to sell ourselves into slavery?  That question can lead us in one of (at least) two directions: We can ask whether understanding the principle of self-ownership as an absolute leads us to accept the legal propriety of selling oneself into slavery; or, we can ask whether we need to appeal to other moral principles to determine whether a usefully determinate right of self-ownership entails the right to sell oneself into slavery.  Feser treats both of these in perhaps a significantly-related way.  My focus here, though, is on the way in which the term "absolute" is being used.  This need not even concern specifically the right of self-ownership under question, for early in the paragraph he discusses the idea of absolute property rights (over non-bodily resources) in conjunction with whether or not we have the right to store nuclear waste on our property, which raises intuitive concerns not altogether different than those raised by questions about a right to sell oneself into slavery.

That being clarified, let us now ask: Does your having an absolute right with respect to your duly-acquired property entail that you have the right to store nuclear waste there, right in the middle of a neighborhood, say?

This ties in with recent public debate over the Second Amendment individual right to bear arms.  Some people in the debate claim that the individual right to bear arms isn't absolute because we aren't rightfully permitted as individuals to bear nuclear arms.  This claim must be distinguished from a similar-sounding familiar claim, which says that the Second Amendment individual right to bear arms doesn't extend in scope to an individual right to bear nuclear arms - that such a restriction bearing on one's legal rights does not run afoul of the Second Amendment.  If someone makes this latter claim, they may or may not also mean to say that the Second Amendment isn't an absolute.  And that's the crux of the matter.

What I would advocate is the view that the Second Amendment, viewed as an absolute, doesn't extend in scope to an individual right to bear nuclear arms.  This, in short, as an example, illustrates the (absolute!) principle that there are absolutes, when those absolutes are properly formulated.  A not-so-serious "philosopher" might infer that the "when those absolutes..." qualification, by virtue of being a qualification or a condition, rules out the principle understood as an absolute.  In this person's mind, the concept of a conditional or qualified absolute doesn't compute.  The problem is, I think many folks out there suffer from this very problem when considering the subject of absolutes (assuming they ever actually consider them beyond brief dismissals of the very idea).  Now, Feser by all appearances is a serious philosopher but he engages in a not-so-serious approach to discussing absolutes in the way he does as quoted above.  It is pernicious to clear and cogent understanding of what is meant by "absolute," and as pernicious things go, "the least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold." (Aristotle)

So in analogy to the Second Amendment example, I return to Feser's commentary about absolute property rights and storing nuclear waste.  The whole issue concerns not whether the rights in question are absolutes - they are - but what the correctly specified contours and scope of those rights are.  We have an abstract principle of what I and Locke and Jefferson would term natural rights, which has a number of formulations all of which amount more or less to the same idea: that individuals are rightly the sovereigns over their personal domain - over their physical person and their duly acquired property - and that their personal domains must be capable of peacefully coexisting with the personal domains of others.  And what does that mean, in practice?  Here we need to be careful, in our transition from the abstract formulation to the practical implementation, not to erect a pernicious dichotomy between the two.  If in practical implementation, we end up with (say) a prohibition on storing nuclear waste in a neighborhood setting, we don't get to then say, "Oh, that abstract statement isn't so absolute after all," or, more perniciously, "That abstract statement of an absolute isn't helpful for practical application."  After all, storing nuclear waste in a neighborhood setting imposes an unreasonable risk or threat to the personal domains of one's neighbors.

But there is something to be said for not rationalistically dabbling in abstractions without the ability to formulate good, workable, concretely-detailed laws governing people's domain-regarding interactions.

(And to circumvent pernicious "cultural conservative" mischief, we distinguish domain-regarding interactions from interactions regarding all the other areas of life; we are concerned here only with how boundaries ought to be set.  Within those boundaries, people have every natural right to do things the "cultural conservatives" find so horribly objectionable that boundary-invading force needs to be employed - you know, to keep teh gayz from doing gay stuff, for instance.  Let us dismiss without serious consideration the question of whether "natural right of personal domain" doesn't extend to or encompass the right to engage in "victimless crimes."  Calling Lysander Spooner for the knock-down, drag-out, no-brainer argument-stopper on that one...)

So how do we figure out what is domain-respecting and what is domain-disrespecting?  Well, through practice.  That institution known as the common law wasn't deduced from abstractions in a vacuum or in a philosopher's armchair; the laws pertaining to personal domains had to evolve - or, arguably, better yet - be discovered (through trial-and-error) over a long period of time.  This would be a sort of "natural rights/natural law" variant upon a familiar Hayekian theme, stressing said discovery as the "telos" of the legal process while giving neither constructivist rationalism nor slavish adherence to tradition any respect.

(Hayek's formulation of the spontaneously evolved legal order is in terms of being "between instinct and reason," which I think eventually approaches in concept that which we usually refer to as "tradition." Someone of such Randian sensibilities as yours truly cannot accept that formulation; the evolution of common law happens in the correctly-defined "middle ground" between tradition and rationalism, which is a general cognitive malady of which Hayek's diagnosis of constructivist rationalism is a variety, and rationalism is not, ever, in any way, to be confused with reason.  The sense of the term "reason" that Rand endorses (the appropriate aforementioned "middle ground") involves experience, trial-and-error, historical data, and so on, which makes legal evolution not so much "spontaneous" as a process of experience-based reasoning in progressive/perfective discovery of the correct implementation of correct abstract principle (i.e., natural rights).  Indeed, the idea of natural rights itself wasn't always around, and had to be discovered through that very same sort of process.  For the extended Objectivist treatment of the cognitive malady that is rationalism (which is treating reason in effect as a process of deduction with floating abstractions), there is the indispensable Understanding Objectivism.  For an(other) extensive study of the Objectivist opposition to all kinds of false dichotomies, including the theoretical and the practical, there's Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical.)

I make mention of Hayek in large part because that's where Feser's non-Randian, conservative political sensibilities are (keeping in mind that Hayek wrote this).  That might help to explain the pernicious language regarding absolute rights.  (Feser's more primary/fundamental philosophical sensibilities are closer to the Randian track, so that's good.  Being that he is of the theistic persuasion, one would very much expect a high regard for absolutes from him, but that doesn't mean that his paragraph quoted above isn't a slip into perniciousness.)  Hayek's approach to defending (classical) liberalism is a "pragmatic" one, and I'm not clear on whether this version of pragmatism isn't vulnerable to the standard objections to the pernicious sorts of pragmatism that eschew absolutism, or that it isn't at the very core of what Rand found so bad about Hayek qua defender of capitalism upon reading The Road to Serfdom.  It helps to keep in mind that the approach to defending classical liberal (and especially individualist) ideals among American theorists (Jefferson, Thoreau, Spooner, Tucker, Mencken, Rand, Rothbard, Nozick, Mack) tends to have a more extreme or robust flavor than that of the English ones (Hume, Smith, Bentham, Mill . . . hell, Mill ended up a socialist, and have the Brits ever really recovered since?); Hayek's approach coincides much more with the latter, and it's even reflected in his rather dull prose.

(EDIT: This parenthetical become something of a diversion, but it all integrates in the end, of course.  Herbert Spencer, a Brit, was more of a radical, and boy has he paid the price in the form of vicious smears as a "social Darwinist."  And such a familiar-sounding vicious smear, innit? . . . and wouldn't you know it, Sully the Fool strikes again!  Why is it that when I keep integrating, Sully keeps showing up as a useless fool?  Why, I ask, why?  Let me guess, he's probably totally bogged down these days in cabinet-nominee discussions, the sort of thing no serious, long-term-focused intellectuals get bogged down in.  And OMG, wouldn't you know it, I'm right.  That's his most recent posting.  Integration/induction works yet again.  Checkmate, dickweed.   Here, how 'bout you do this (assuming you're keeping up on what's of real importance, i.e., blogs like this one, and this one's just getting warmed up): direct your readers to reddit for all the "useful" articles you post to the Dish, condense every twenty "opinion" postings into one unit apiece instead, use the rest of your time to study philosophy, and you might actually end up a historically-influential public intellectual.  Note that Hitchens won't be remembered all that much in the long run (except perhaps as a well-spoken leading figure of the intellectually-juvenile and hence short-lived New Atheist movement of the very early 21st century), and you're headed right in the same direction.  I just have a sense for these sorts of things - for example, like how P.T. Anderson's non-Oscar-nominated The Master will far outlast many of the films that got Oscar nominations this year.  Clearly PTA has a higher similarity-score with Kubrick qua filmmaker than do Bigelow, Russell, Spielberg, and even Tarantino, and that pretty much tells the story, does it not.  Ayn Rand: now there's someone with lasting influence, for reasons all too obvious to folks like me.  Get a fucking clue, Sully!  Also, for those who don't know: Sully, of Brit origins, is much more in line with the Brits in his reverence for the boring, "reason"-downplaying and overly-conciliatory-sounding Hayek in preference to the robust, reason-celebrating and uncompromising Rand.  It all integrates and makes sense just as I said, dunnit?)

So I think that about does 'er.  Wraps 'er all up.  Was it a meticulously lengthy proving of the obvious, old wine in new bottles, or a genuinely valuable insight unfamiliar to many?  It gets harder and harder for me to tell these days.  And does it even meet my river-of-gold standards of late?  Shouldn't I be, like, abstractly theorizing about the Singularity of singularities - you know, the coming Big Integration, whatever (awesome thing) that turns out to be?  (How do we make it past this problem though?  Urgency, do you feel it?)  Aw heck, I'm rambling again.

Essentialized Comprehensiveness

If you have a look at the selection of books in my Profile, you find that it has a lot of books by or about Ayn Rand, enough to take up about half of the intellectual-theoretical books listed there. The rest consists to a large extent of economic-theoretical works in the "Austrian" tradition. Why, if I aim for comprehensiveness, don't I include a massive selection of influential works from all across the spectrum of ideas? Because the list is essentialized for the sake of unit-economy. Unit-economy is a highly capitalistic principle. Ayn Rand's whole system is geared toward people who think like capitalists. She recognized the essential principle behind capitalism: that it is, unavoidably and undeniably, the system geared to the requirements of human life, i.e., of the mind. (Hint: It's the principle behind Aristotle's boundless intellectual activity and productivity.)

So, the list basically gives you all that you need to know, in essence, to figure out what's what, and then to flourish like you've never flourished before. The key is not in resenting the capitalists (and stagnating), but in becoming a capitalist (and growing). (The truth here is an exact inversion of Marx.)

In this, Rand was so far ahead of her time that, for the most part, and so very tragically, she was casting pearls before swine. (See, e.g., here.) Only swine turn away from the essential message of John Galt's radio address - the role of the mind in human existence - and of Ayn Rand's body of work. Only anti-capitalist uber-swine who call themselves "philosophers" would blank out this stark and glaring theme, and indulge the mainstream swine in their base and ignoble ignorance regarding the role of the mind in human existence. (To paraphrase a pearl cast heroically before so many swine, such "philosophers" should be provided a club and bearskin and a cave to dwell in, instead of chaired university professorships. The latter situation is fucking insane for an advanced civilized society.)

If you want an actual real-life instantiation of Plato's Allegory of the Cave, look no further than the widespread swinish reaction to Ayn Rand's pro-mind and pro-life ideas. Only swine run from the word "selfishness," for instance, without giving any sort of careful thought to meanings (intended or otherwise), or to context, or to hierarchy, or to integration. The swine have been conditioned to react to stimuli in certain ways (e.g., to words instead of concepts or ideas or essentials), so much so that they revolt even against a messenger who advises them to use their minds to the utmost so that they might then move past swinehood and into the adulthood of the intellect.

Unlike myriad academically-tenured destroyers of the mind, this here philosopher is no swine.

And things are going to change drastically for the better, and much faster than the out-of-it crowd could even begin to realize.

Mark my words.

:-)

Academic Analytic Philosophy and The Meaning of Life

The Distinguished Professor, Comprachico Leiter, addresses the subject of the relation between professional philosophy and the public's view of meaning-of-life questions. Leiter is being his usual elitist self, while commenters further address the seeming divide between their profession and the public at large.

Meanwhile, the other day, Leiter took a typical pot-shot regarding a certain "hack philosopher."

Now, what might the connection between these two phenomena be? I ask because there absolutely is a connection here. The "hack philosopher," after all, provided very thoughtful and compelling answers on meaning-of-life questions; she has considerable popular appeal and an uber-practical approach to philosophical questions, while professional philosophers have by and large neglected to look at these answers. Surely there's an integrating connection between all these facts.

One of Leiter's blog commenters, David Velleman (a professor of philosophy at the top-rated philosophy program in the world, NYU) recommends a few books from Serious Philosophers that deal with meaning-of-life issues. The Serious Philosophers include the usual suspects: Rawls, Nagel, Nussbaum, Williams, etc. - all academics. The books by these figures he recommends are from academic presses, addressing questions in an academic fashion, appropriate first and foremost for fellow academic philosophers. Rawls's Theory of Justice aside, these works are and will continue to be virtually unknown by the public-at-large, precisely because they are so academic in nature. Doesn't recommending these books kind of miss the whole point about the disconnect between the academy and the public at large? Doesn't it illustrate the whole point?

The only two books I've read on Prof. Velleman's recommendations list are the Rawls and Nagel ones. Now, there is an essay by Nagel, "Equality," in Mortal Questions, that made me remark at the time how far removed in sense-of-life terms it is from the "hack philosopher's" essay on the Apollo 11 launch. I mean, if sense-of-life has something to do with the meaning of life (I just now raised the potential connection between these two concepts), then isn't there something more inspiring in meaning-of-life terms in "Apollo 11," than in an academic essay on the importance of equality?

Okay, let's take the more familiar case, that of Rawls. What does one get out of A Theory of Justice in meaning-of-life (and sense-of-life!) terms? How, for instance, does maximin or the Difference Principle come to bear on the virtues of character required to achieve eudaemonia? Let's just put this in very plain terms a member of the general public as well as professional philosophers can understand: what has a closer connection to our understanding of the whole issue of the Meaning of Life: the ancient-Greek-inspired concept of eudaemonia or real happiness, or Rawls's Difference Principle?

Prof. Velleman caps off his book recommendations with this: "These authors have been associated with some of the foremost philosophy departments, and no philosophy student can get far without reading their work."

I think this kind of sums the whole problem up. We also have here a case of good answers being right under everyone's noses.

Now, let's say we take another look at the "hack philosopher" from an objective and impartial perspective as regards the big meaning-of-life issues in philosophy. Well, the standard objection raised right off is that the "hack philosopher" advocates selfishness as a virtue, and that's a no-no. However, the no-no response is not really an intellectually responsible one at all; it all crucially hinges on what the philosopher in question means by "selfishness." Far as I can tell, an excruciatingly small number of philosophers have given serious and respectable thought to what that philosopher actually meant (it has something to do with that ancient-Greek-inspired concept of eudaemonia, I think), and they come out in basic agreement with the philosopher. This is a very interesting data point, don't you think?

Part and parcel of eudaemonia, and of understanding the meaning of life, is adopting a (properly) capitalistic ethos. Already this puts much of the academy - well, the humanities parts of the academy - at odds with the interests of the general public. Rejecting a capitalistic ethos necessarily entails a form of intellectual disintegration between theory and life. The economics portion of the academy has done a better job figuring this out, but the humanities portions are more insulated from economic reality which demonstrates the superiority of capitalism.

Back at the time that he was a lone voice in the wilderness, Ludwig von Mises explained in apodictic-praxeological terms why socialism would fail. On the biggest economic question of the 20th century, Mises turned out to be right. The Nobel Prize arguably should be replaced with the Mises Prize. Anyway, it seems only Robert Heilbroner had the good graces to admit defeat in his own time, and to acknowledge the greatness of Mises.

Now, if Mises was right about that, what else might he have been right about? If he was right, not just about the failure of socialism, but that the best and most feasible economic system is the laissez-faire capitalism of classical liberalism, then that really puts the academy - and especially the humanities portion - in disconnect with and at odds with the general public and regular folks' interests, aspirations, etc., now does it not.

So, what we have here is an institutional bias against capitalism in academia, combined with compelling but pro-capitalist answers to big meaning-of-life questions being right under everyone's noses. So there you have it.

[ADDENDUM: Isn't it a case against the prevailing academic model all on its own, that so many of its practitioners have failed to integrate all the facts available here? The best philosophers are those best at making integrations qua philosopher. Could it really be that hard to integrate, say, Objectivist ethics with the eudaemonist tradition, or eudaemonism with meaning-of-life questions, or meaning-of-life questions with the unqualified goodness of capitalism, or with sense of life, or with Kubrick, or with House, M.D., or with Ralph Vaughan Williams, or with the history of philosophy? I mean, seriously, how fucking hard could it be? Sheesh! No wonder Understanding Objectivism is going to be such a big seller in the future.]

[ADDENDUM #2: Placeholder for future blog entry under the title "Economy." Integration is all about achieving maximum mental economy by thinking in essentials. But to think in an economistic fashion is to think suspiciously like a . . . capitalist! No fucking wonder . . . (That was an act of integration right there, BTW.)]

How this Philosopher is Looking out for You

There is a deep "fit" between someone's adopting the Ultimate Philosopher moniker and writing a book titled Toward Utopia, and that someone being a huge and well-informed devotee of Ayn Rand. It's really no surprise in the slightest to someone in my epistemic position - someone with tremendous amounts of intellectual curiosity combined with a deep familiarity with philosophically-sound cognitive guidelines (explicated at length by Rand and Peikoff, as it turns out). But even taking Ayn Rand out of the picture, there's Aristotle, and he was looking out for the everyday human being as skillfully as anyone.

Take some hate-filled bastard like Karl Marx. He proclaimed to be a defender of humanity, and many, many people, by the millions if not billions, bought into it. Yet the likes of Karl Marx are the biggest enemies of humanity, in virtue of lousy cognitive processes or bad character or a combination of these things. The only reason Marx seemed to have more credibility than the run-of-the-mill socialists of his day, was his ability to dress up his "findings" in respectable-sounding philosophical-level jargon. He got that pretense to respectability by adopting a Hegelian context. Marx's co-opting of Hegel was his way of coming up with intellectual cover for his monstrously bad social-economic ideas. His writings reflect a deep-seated hatred of capitalism for which he was seeking a rationalization.

The result of Marx's influence: tens of millions of people dead. Needlessly dead, of course, as the Socialist Revolution promised by Marx, and the Paradise promised by his devotees, never happened. Capitalism has triumphed for the simple and obvious that capitalism is the proper social system for human beings. (This left-wing meme that capitalism is the source of oppression, wars, plutocracy, the military-industrial complex, poverty, and such is so much biased, ignorant, cognitively-fucked, and sometimes-dishonest BS.)

So, if Marx was clearly not on the side of the people, just what other intellectual figures, in their own insidiously damaging ways, were also against the interests of the people? Turns out there are shit-ton of them. Something about the very philosophical profession as such seems to provide a bias against everyday practicality - from economics all the way up to the fundamental-level cognition philosophers specialize in. We could start, for instance, with Plato's arbitrary doctrine of the Forms - Form being an otherworldly and unseen, but perfect and pure, X that "explains" the lowly, dirty every day appearances which we need to get beyond in order to attain true wisdom. Does it really take that much imagination to see what insidious anti-man effects this notion has in practice?

Strangely enough, the philosophers - the ones who are supposed to detect and identify the insidious effects of fundamental-level ideas - have dropped the ball. This would follow naturally from their theory/practice disintegration. What sort of real-life destruction could flow from Plato's doctrine of the Forms? It's not even a question that the philosophical mainstream seems to even want to consider. There are ideas over here, and then reality over there, and philosophers like Plato are merely doing their best to understand life in fundamental terms; so how could we vilify Plato or his system? This is the instinctive reaction from non-Randians to Rand declaring Kant "the most evil man in mankind's history." I think Rand is mistaken about this, but - unlike the mainstream philosophers gleefully ready to dismiss her as a crank - I understand what Rand was getting at: Kant's ideas are extreme in their insidiously destructive effects.

It was the utter fucking mess made of philosophy by Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche and Heidegger that has turned Europe into what it is today: a people looking to America to show the way, since their leading lights don't have the answers. This is without even getting into the indirect and insidious influence these thinkers' ideas had on the course of European politics in the very bloody first half of the 20th century. Socialism was all the rage amongst the intelligentsia in the early 20th century, including by the head intellectual honcho of the time, Heidegger. The effects of socialism have been widespread death, stagnation, etc. Heidegger liked National Socialism. Is this someone the man-on-the-street can trust to be on his side?

Kant said that morality is about following abstract universal principles with very murky substantive guidance, rather than about achieving happiness and self-actualization. Is Kant on your side?

Kant said that he had found it necessary to deny human knowledge of the "thing in itself" to make room for faith. Whether or not his intention was to keep religion and reason separate, this could only have the effect of emboldening the pro-faith crowd; the cashing-in is Dinesh D'Souza and his fellow illiberal theocrats. So, is Kant on your side?

Kant said that human perfection isn't possible in this world, and that morality demands that we act as if there were an infinite afterlife in which only then perfection might be achieved. So, is Kant still on your side?

Hegel's reaction to Kant's dualistic approach to philosophy (one emulated to an appalling extent in the mainstream academy) is to dissolve all distinctions into identity; the World, in other words, is a manifestation or emanation of Idea; Object is identical with Subject. Is Hegel on your side?

Schopenhauer intuited that the "thing-in-itself" is Will and that if we can detach in the way prescribed by Eastern mysticism, we'll not suffer so much. Is Schopenhauer on your side?

Bertrand Russell played a bunch of linguistic parlor-games that had no positive practical effects for life, for morality, for common sense, or for political freedom, i.e., capitalism. Is Russell on your side?

John Rawls said that whether you have a right to keep the product of your mind and efforts depends on whether your doing so satisfies his Difference Principle. Is Rawls on your side?

I could go on, but the concretes mentioned already should establish the essential point. We should judge a philosopher on the basis of how well he or she fulfills the job a philosopher is supposed to fulfill, and that job necessarily involves working on behalf of - not against - human beings.

It is no wonder that philosophy has gotten such a bad reputation in the mainstream. It has the reputation for head-in-the-clouds impracticality. At the hands of Plato, Kant, Hegel and others, that reputation is deserved. What the mainstream - not just the ordinary folk but also the mainstream of intellectuals - doesn't yet know is that these thinkers' abstract ideas do have massive practical effects. No philosopher sets out to create an impractical or destructive system of philosophy; the philosopher has a basic worldview and seeks the greatest intellectual fortification for it. It's that process of fortification that has the greatest potential real-world effects. If the fortification runs contrary to the actual requirements of reason, happiness and freedom, then it can have tremendously damaging effects on these values. It is precisely in virtue of the impracticality of a well-fortified worldview like Plato's that it can have the most damaging practical effects when people - whether knowingly or not - adopt such ideas and attempt to implement them.

The solution isn't to toss the philosophy baby out with the anti-practicality bathwater, but to fundamentally transform what philosophers do so that they are finally working in unison on behalf of ordinary people. We might start with repudiating those philosophers who are most clearly against the interests of ordinary people, which are the philosophers opposed to capitalism. The likes of Marx are the most obvious charlatans. But remember what made Marx's prominence possible: Hegel. That means doing higher-level, more abstract work at the greatest level of fundamentality: metaphysics and epistemology. (Again, this is why David Kelley's working-with-libertarians strategy is such a futile waste.) And at that level, we need philosophers who are on our side: Aristotle and Ayn Rand.

This is the goal of my blog and my work. I aim to be the philosopher who writes and works on your behalf. I affirm the classical realism first defended expertly by Aristotle. I affirm that cognitive clarity and sound thinking methods on fundamental questions can be achieved. I affirm the pursuit of happiness in ethics. I affirm the right to the pursuit of happiness in politics. I affirm that human beings, given the right conditions, are capable of mind-blowing greatness. I affirm that capitalism is the only social system proper to human beings where they can seek and achieve greatness and enjoy the product of their efforts.

I affirm that free will means the possibility of greatness and moral perfection, not an excuse for moral failings and for projecting perfection onto an unknowable infinite afterlife. I affirm that the popular practice of wondering about whether we're all brains in a vat (or, better/worse yet, "why there is being rather than nothing") is so much sophomoric, context-dropping BS. I affirm that "the problem of induction" can be solved by actually looking at how sound real-world thinking processes are inductive in their essence. I affirm that you can't attack these principles without implicitly affirming them.

Anyone notice, by the way, how no BS ever got past Roark or Galt? Isn't it time for the anti-Rand types to take a hint?

The Trolley Problem

(Thoughts that occur as I look through some of the answers and analyses of the answers in a philosophers' poll.)

How would Ayn Rand answer "the Trolley Problem"? My inclination is to think she would ask for any real-world scenario in history that comes remotely close to resembling such a scenario. She was concrete-oriented that way. In terms of general principles - not to be confused with a rationalistic "top-down" approach which takes such a scenario as a "good test" of some abstract principle that may or may not have been derived rationally and properly - her approach is indicated in "The Ethics of Emergencies." The Trolley Problem would fit the definition of an emergency situation as well as any. So what's the right answer? Is there a right answer?

Philosophers of the "mainstream" variety like to use such hypotheticals to challenge either moral theories or moral intuitions or both. What do our intuitions on this say? "Intuition" seems like a euphemism for "common sense," and common sense tends to be a highly reliable indicator of at least being on the right track. (I like to think of Aristotelian and Randian philosophy as common sense carried through consistently and to the extreme.) Common sense would say that faced with such a scenario - and the scenario stipulates that one's actions affect strangers of an indistinct age, gender, intelligence, etc. - you "do the numbers" and flip the switch (resulting in one death as opposed to five).

Now, the question of interest to philosophers is whether doing the numbers validates utilitarianism as the ruling paradigm of moral reasoning.

Isn't that a bit insane? Isn't that more than a bit insane? What kind of philosophic/epistemic methodology leads one to such a conclusion? What if utilitarianism gets its appeal mainly from applying the ethics of emergencies to normal real-world scenarios? And that gets us back to the original question: what real-world historical scenario resembles the Trolley Problem? We need a theory we can apply to the real world and not just to a hypothetical scenario that may or may not resemble the real world.

My (and Rand's, and Aristotle's) moral theory is an individualistic eudaemonism, which would fall quite squarely into the "virtue ethics" category. Eudaemonism tends not to concern itself with such questions as what to do in a Trolley Scenario, but rather with what it takes to live a good human life. So ultimately what it comes down to is what decision is constitutive of the agent's living well as a rational animal. The broad principle is covered quite well in "The Ethics of Emergencies," and the broad principle aligns very closely with a common-sense orientation toward the world. Common sense dictates, without knowing anything about the people involved, without being provided any alternative to either one or five people dying, etc., that you flip the switch and save four lives. That seems to be the reasoning a eudaemonic agent goes through in such a situation. It looks like the decision a person trying to live the best life they can would reluctantly make.

But what bearing does that have on the way a eudaemonic individual lives his life generally? We get back to the real world and ask what scenarios look like that. I'll just throw this one out there as it seems like as good a concrete as any: the decision to drop nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Here we have political leaders faced with two basic alternatives, under the assumption that the Japanese army and its leadership are all brainwashed (much like the Nazis) and won't surrender peacefully: Drop the big bad radiation-spewing bombs, or go through a protracted invasion with much greater loss of life, especially of American life. Faced with such an alternative, what do you do? The American leaders "ran the numbers" and decided it definitely wasn't worth the cost in lives, especially in American lives. The real, main issue is what got these countries into such a fucking crazy scenario to begin with. But given the craziness of the scenario, the nukes - with all their own associated horrific effects - looked like the least-worst option. It so happens that no nukes have been used in wartime since. Coincidence? It also so happens that the leading nations of the world haven't gotten themselves into such a crazy fucking situation to begin with since then. Coincidence?

(Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film Dr. Strangelove highlighted the fucking craziness of it all, and there hasn't been a nuclear showdown anything like the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis since that time. Coincidence?)

Okay, so we have a real-world scenario that kind-of resembles the Trolley one, and best as I can tell, eudaemonistic ethics emerges essentially intact, so what do we learn from the Trolley Problem? Why do "mainstream" philosophers obsess over such things? (It so happens that those philosophers most associated with the problem, Philippa Foot and Judith Thomson, are among the best of "the mainstream," so perhaps the main upshot was to highlight the inadequacy of deontology and consequentialism as ethical theories, or maybe better yet, how incompetent but influential philosophers have used these theories in all kinds of counter-intuitive ways. Long story short, the answers these theories or their proponents are likely to give in such a situation are counter-intuitive. I don't find that to be surprising at all. These moral theories are rationalistic constructions that don't gel with common sense. Foot, however, was a virtue ethicist. Coincidence? I don't think so, seeing as how eudaemonism does everything an ethical theory is supposed to do.) Perhaps the "mainstream" obsesses on such matters because of bad philosophical methodology, i.e., bad epistemology. This would not be any surprise, seeing as how "mainstream (academic) philosophy" has become so specialized and so compartmentalized that epistemological issues hardly enter into the picture amongst the mainstream moral theorists.

We already know that to be the case when it came to the most influential mainstream moral philosopher of our times, John Rawls.

But seeing as how the Trolley Problem is, at the most fundamental root, about philosophical methodology (i.e., epistemology), how do you really answer it without doing all the appropriate background integrations to begin with. How on fucking earth do you approach any such problem (much less any other problem) without having done the appropriate background integrations (which include a high regard for common sense)? In other words, how does the mainstream of contemporary moral philosophy deliver anything but epistemic paralysis, short of becoming thoroughly familiar with proper principles of epistemology? Do these mainstream academic philosophers even really know what the word "integration" means?

Seriously, do they?

(Hint: During the course of 2 years of graduate study at what was, at the time, a leading program in moral and political philosophy, I don't think I ever heard the word "integration" once. Maybe in effect during my course in ancient philosophy given by a prominent Aristotelian-Randian, I did. Aristotle's hylomorphic theory of the soul was a big focus there, and that's basically all about integration without using the word. But it's doubtful all that many contemporary academic moral philosophers understand the epistemic implications of Aristotle's approach to the soul much less anything else. If they did, the world of academic philosophy wouldn't be mired in such a bog of shit, for one thing, and it would be all familiar with Ayn Rand's theory of concepts for another. So, no, the academic mainstream really hasn't the faintest what "integration" really means. Note: it's not the same thing as Rawslian "integration" - read: laughable attempt at reconciliation - of rational and irrational moral positions.)

America vs. Pragmatism

To follow up today's earlier posting, I'd like to provide a brief intellectual narrative of the United States of America.

The United States of America were founded upon an absolutism and radicalism expressed in the Declaration of Independence. Its chief author, Thomas Jefferson, was an uncompromising advocate of reason as against unreason - including opposition to the use of physical force as a reason-negating activity, as a matter of principle. His moral groundings were in Lockean natural law (with some Jesus-inspired other-oriented benevolence thrown in to complement the rights- and self-preservation angles covered in natural-law theory). The Founders, Jefferson included, grounded their statements on things like "self-evidence" and "the Creator" and some abstract "Divine Providence." The religious overtones of it notwithstanding, the radically libertarian idea - then as well as now - was one of religious toleration and freedom, hence the broadly abstract and not-specifically-defined statements concerning "Divine Providence."

The early decades of the United States of America were defined by the height of Enlightenment-era philosophy, and Thomas Jefferson (not Germany's Immanuel Kant) best represents those heights. There's not just the reverence for natural law, or the uncompromising commitment to reason intermixed with a people-respecting religious tolerance, or the recognition of the secular value of Jesus's teachings in isolation from the magical-mystical bullshit of his non-philosophical adherents, but also the commitment to a very central American value: common sense. In addition to being President of the United States of America, he was, at the same time, president of the American Philosophical Society. If you read through some of his letters concerning philosophy, he shows he is well-versed in the ancient Greek philosophers, notably and positively Epicurus. His statement that Epicurus represents the height of secular and Greek philosophy is incomprehensible except in light of the evident fact that he wasn't aware of Aristotle. Can you just fucking imagine how robust America would be had Thomas Jefferson known about Aristotle? Would Ayn Rand's philosophical writings have even been necessary to restore America to its intellectual origins? Ayn Rand was correct on one point: Aristotle, via Aquinas, via John Locke, was the intellectual father of America, without the Founders even knowing it. Nevertheless, Jefferson represents one heck of a standard for America to follow; the basic sensibility is all the same as with Aristotle.

Aristotle, Jefferson, Rand - they all represent an approach to philosophizing that is empirical and yet absolutist, reality-oriented without being authoritarian, judgmental and pro-virtue and non-libertine while remaining libertarian, eudaemonistic and perfectionistic with emphasis on personal well-being and happiness (incorporating other-related virtues - most importantly, justice) as the aim of life, unapologetically capitalistic, and marked at all times by a respect for common sense. It's as American as it gets.

So, how did pragmatism come about and begin to consume the American ethos from within? For the first 100 or so years of America, there was a classically Jeffersonian ethos that ruled. It's ultimately what led to the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves. Being very practical and productive, the American people had little time or patience for the wankers who often pass for philosophers. The main focus of life in the American mindset is to live this life well, and philosophy is only of value, cash-value if you will, if it is of aid in advancing the life well lived. Until the pragmatist movement came along in the late 19th century, after the Civil War, American intellectual life was radically individualistic, optimistic, and perfectionistic. The abolition of slavery, for instance, was a moral necessity to America's leading intellectual lights. Any visions of future utopias - be they Josiah Warren's hippie-communes or Spoonerite-Tuckerian private-property arrangements - were all based on a vision of voluntary participation rather than state-enforced regimentation. Those utopian-perfectionist voluntaristic visions remain as true now as they did then; only the American intellectual context has changed since that time.

The Pragmatist movement was borne of a concern about relating ideals to practice. One thing that has to be emphasized here is that when the Pragmatist movement was at its height - ca. 1900 - Aristotle had only begun being translated for an English-speaking audience. So it was really just a matter of timing and place, essential factors in analyzing the history of ideas. If Epicureanism (or whatever the top English-speaking philosophers like Hume, Adam Smith or John Stuart Mill had to say) was the best philosophy known to Americans at the time, something better had to be erected in order to deal with the emerging problems and challenges that Epicurean or British philosophy just can't deal with. You need intellectuals who aren't wankers who can usefully guide us through these challenges.

Pragmatism is not defined by specific commitments but by a certain way of dealing with challenges, and the method here is rather minimalistic: piecemeal adjustment with empirical weighing of hopefully-well-defined and well-measured costs and benefits (short-term as well as long-term, with priority given to the short term, ceteris paribus, given Keynes's dictum about the long term).

Compare America's intellectual state ca. 1930 vs. that of the European states. By 1930, Europe had been bombarded with bad philosophy for centuries, was under the spell of Kant's disastrous "Copernican" subjectivism, under the spell of unsurprisingly mystical interpretations of Hegel's Absolute and historical necessity, or under the spell of Schopenhauerian metaphysics of Will, or Nietzschean subjectivism, or under the spell of non-Aristotelian, Humean-Millian empiricism, or under the spell of Marxian socialism, or under spell of Millian progressive-socialism, and the spell of Hegel-inspired Nationalism. With that kind of intellectual bombardment, it's no surprise that Germany embraced National Socialism, that Britain was not far behind in the push for socialism, that France was filled with ennui and existential angst about it all, that the Soviet experiment (with millions of people's lives, against their will, it must be pointed out) was being embraced and/or taken seriously as an alternative model of organization of "the resources." It wasn't a matter of Ludwig von Mises having or not having compelling arguments against socialism; it was a matter of a condition of intellectual dysfunction/insanity whereby the vast majority of his contemporaries were heavily invested in the nationalist-socialist mentality. The history of ideas is such that the kind of intellectual revolution Mises initiated requires time to unfold; had Mises been writing around at the time of Marx's heyday, things would very likely have been quite different. (It's also worth mentioning that by ca. 1900, the intellectual center of Europe had migrated from Germany to Austria, given the failings of German philosophy and the relative promise offered by the Vienna intellectuals.)

In America ca. 1930, the intellectual context was one of Jeffersonian individualism combined with home-grown Pragmatism. The Pragmatic mindset was that our Constitution didn't embody such abstract ideals as those set forth in Herbert Spencer's radically libertarian Social Statics. That famous pronouncement by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was taken as received wisdom rather than as an easily-challenged - and false - understanding of constitutional jurisprudence. Wouldn't it just be mind-blowing if the Fourteenth Amendment did indeed enact Mr. Spencer's Social Statics? The very mind-blowingness of such a notion is enough to send any good Pragmatist running in fear. It's un-pragmatic to blow people's minds, now, so let's play it safe. . . . Do you begin to see the insidious unintended effects of a pragmatist mindset? Could the American Revolution, or the slave-freeing Civil War, have happened on a pragmatist base?

One bad but understandable interpretation of American-grown pragmatism is that it saved the United States of America from pursuing the same path that the Marx-infused European nations pursued. Going full-out socialist would have been unpragmatic, as it represented too drastic, too idealistic and too radical a shift from . . . from whatever American ideals at the time were. As a pragmatism-infused mindset is not defined so much by specific commitments but rather a means of dealing with conflicts amongst commitments, the radically individualistic and Jeffersonian ideals America was built on were incidental to the pragmatist analysis. The main objectionable thing to a swift departure from these ideals is not that it is a departure, but that it's swift and - get this - overly idealistic. And, we have discovered (via empiricistic observation - so there's always a pervasive uncertainty and "maybe" about it all) that capitalism "works" well enough to satisfy competing mainstream (the mainstream being defined - how?) ideological demands.

We can see an influential home-grown theory of justice - John Rawls's A Theory of Justice - as an exercise in American-style pragmatism. We have two competing ideals - libertarianism and egalitarianism - that need to be reconciled via a please-everybody Synthesis. Only - as with pretty much anything pragmatistic - it satisfies no one except for the compulsively pragmatistic (like many academic philosophers). What we don't get in Rawls is anything "mind-blowing" or "too radical." What we do get is a kindly and well-intentioned (the road to hell, etc.) attempt to fuse (evil) egalitarianism with (good) libertarianism. The reason that Rawls's theory even gives so much weight to liberty is because of its being American. Leaving everything in the hands of the Euro intellectuals, what would we get? Given the European context, the best we get in reaction to socialistic egalitarianism is Mises and Hayek, and neither of them offered their pro-capitalistic visions as moral visions. What we get with them is a classical liberalism little distinguished from that of Hume and Mill. With Hume we get chronic uncertainty; with Mill we get a consequentialist defense of liberty based on its social benefits. And in a pragmatistic mindset, these get thrown into the mix as ideas that need to be reconciled with the others. Hey, I'm as ecumenical in my sensibilities as they come, but it's more like Aristotle's ecumenism: recognizing what's right in a view will tossing out the weak stuff. Pragmatism doesn't acknowledge the strong and the weak in this sense; rather, there is a Primacy of Reconciliation that has ideas and conflicts amongst them, rather than an absolute and independent reality, as the primary focus and orientation. (How on earth can Rawls's theory of justice have truly lasting impact when it steadfastly abstains from deep ethical, epistemological, and metaphysical commitments? Are Rawls's genuflecting-wankers this intellectually puny? The notion is mind-blowing, I know. That's why the Prevailing Academic Model of Doing Philosophy is going to fall on its face. Mind-blowing, I know....)

Here's what Ayn Rand said in the most succinct and biting terms about pragmatism as the intellectual malady that it is: "Someone wants to bash your skull in, reach a livable compromise: Tell him to break one leg." (Ayn Rand Answers: The Best of Her Q&A, p. 7)

After some 50 years of pragmatism making its way through American culture, America was broken intellectually in the mid-20th century. Broken, dysfunctional, directionless, proudly anti-philosophical (philosophy having been dispensed with as an impractical failure). Ayn Rand was proclaiming this fact like it should have been as obvious to everyone in her day as it was to her. But just keep in mind: in a pragmatist mindset, someone making the sweeping and absolutist and idealistic (and unacceptably mind-blowing) proclamations that Ayn Rand made is not to be trusted. Rand simply was far ahead ("out of place") of her time, thrown into a world of anti-philosophical intellectual disintegration. But taking a long-run view of these things, all that Rand was doing was initiating an intellectual revolution, in the midst of a sea of pragmatism, to get America back to its roots. In short, the pragmatist movement was a diversion from America's (and the world's) true course, an intellectual stumbling block borne of a lack of Aristotle. Aristotle alone whacks Pragmatism upside the head; Rand puts Pragmatism to shame; historical experience will be the ultimate proof of its anti-practical failings.

Now, here's what's gonna happen. (Only someone perceptive enough to run a blog like this one knows how these blog postings are "for the ages," and there is a special satisfaction of knowing how subsequent generations will look back and say, "Yes, indeed, those ideas were mind-blowing for the time, but he turned out to be right, of course.") The big one-two punch that, on its own, would, in time, restore America to its founding ideals, is the introduction to America of Aristotle's English-translated works, and Ayn Rand's Objectivism. One amazing thing about Rand's early philosophy - summed up in her most perfect novel, The Fountainhead - is how much of it is simply Americanism, discovered and discoverable quite independently of Aristotle. (This is just how commonsensical Jeffersonian-American ideals really are; they aren't beyond the reach of the "man on the street," even; all we need is the right kind of intellectual leadership, like we had in Jefferson's day, and not wankers who eschew common sense.) The best evidence indicates that Rand did not start into a hardcore study of Aristotle and the history of philosophy until the early- to mid-1940s. Random Houses's Basic Works of Aristotle, a compiled volume of translations edited by Richard McKeon, was first published in 1941. Rand mentions in a 1940s letter having bought a copy of "the complete works" of Aristotle, presumably referring to this volume. Anyway, the basic point here is that Aristotle was just being introduced to America in the early 1900s, and Ayn Rand was independently developing American-common-sensical ideas in a radical, integrated, and systematic way after taking from Nietzsche what needed to be taken and integrated into a rational individualism (namely, a heroic sense of man's greatness and potential). With founding ideals represented by Jefferson, and bold echoes of those very ideals in the world-historic philosophers Aristotle and Ayn Rand, what will happen "as if by necessity" is a second Renaissance centered right here in America. America's potential hasn't even come close to being fulfilled.

The problem with Pragmatism? It simply couldn't offer a moral vision like this, and therefore simply can't work to bring about the desired result (widespread human flourishing-perfection).

WTF Happened to Leonard Peikoff?

Diana and Paul Hsieh present an array of relevant facts relating to the recent silliness surrounding the "Peikoff-McCaskey schism" which threatens to splinter Objectivists into silly warring factions yet again. I'm ready to draw some conclusions here that are amply justified based on the available data.

First off, Peikoff has decided not to hold himself accountable for his behavior. The sum total of his "reasons" for issuing his "him or me" ultimatum are contained in an email which leaves a bunch of questions unanswered. McCaskey, for his part, is accountable for his doings and responds to inquiries. The fact that Peikoff would fail to respond to the Hshiehs' follow-up inquiries after maintaining a consistent correspondence with them prior to that is evidence of . . . well, what? Evasion? Arrogance? Incompetence? We just don't know. What we do know is that somehow Peikoff's "stature within Objectivism" is supposed to be some kind of undefined trump card he feels he can pull in any dispute.

Second, following Objectivist inductive method, what we have seen in this latest instance is an addition to previous behaviors on Peikoff's part that establish a pattern from which we can draw a generalization. For one thing, he pulled the same "I'm Ayn Rand's heir" card in the Peikoff-Kelley split of 1989. For another, Peikoff leaves questions unanswered but has decided that his judgment is final. Usually, when forming an objective judgment of something, you don't make a final determination while leaving questions hanging. That is the behavior of an authoritarian who expects people to go along or leave. How this is consonant with Objectivism, I haven't the faintest. This occurred not just with Peikoff-McCaskey and Peikoff-Kelley, but also with Peikoff-Reisman (1993). How many times do we need to see this pattern rear its ugly head before we conclude that Peikoff, for all his stature and accomplishments, isn't the be-all-and-end-all of the advancement of Objectivism today? (Besides, the be-all-and-end-all of Objectivism, the Prime Mover, remains Ayn Rand. It bears noting that the one great schism of which she was a part - the Rand-Branden split (1968) - was one where Rand was entirely justified given Branden's ghastly moral crimes against her and countless other Objectivists.)

Third, Peikoff's moral condemnation of McCaskey ("raises him one rung in Hell") is inexplicable based on every item of evidence that has come forth. There's no rationally-identified (or identifiable) context to this - for the simple reason that the judgment is contrary to the facts, i.e., false. But this appears to be a judgment for which Peikoff, again, has decided not to be accountable. The significant conclusion to draw from this is that this judgment-methodology (if there's even a methodology behind it) runs counter to the spirit and letter of Peikoff's own advice given in such outstanding courses as Understanding Objectivism.

There isn't room for agnosticism on this point: the facts establish that Peikoff has abdicated his credbility as a leader within the Objectivist movement. That may not come to much, considering how he has recently announced his official "retirement" from teaching Objectivism, but the fact that (due to his control over Ayn Rand's estate) he continues to hold sway over the ARI, self-described as the Center for the Advancement of Objectivism, shows that he continues to throw weight around in certain "Objectivist circles." Now, either he's "in retirement" or he isn't. This behavior resembles that of a diva who wants to have it his way or else, and expects everyone to simply understand, somehow.

Finally, this stuff is just all too silly considering how far removed it is from the spirit of Ayn Rand herself. The "Objectivist movement," whatever advances it has made in recent years (capped off most notably by Tara Smith's 2006 Cambridge-published book, Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics), it's simply not up to the standards that Ayn Rand or I would have demanded. The intellectual-cultural revolution Rand had foreseen could have happened a generation ago had a lot more people had their acts together. (This is one reason why Nathaniel Branden was and is such a fuck: were it not for his massively anti-Objectivist behaviors, the Revolution might well have happened by the 1970s. That is the power that ideas have over a culture, and how the course of those ideas can be affected for better or worse by a mighty few.) Fortunately, there is at least one person ready, able and willing to take up the torch in ways the current mainstream Objectivist movement has yet to even foresee, but of which Ayn Rand herself would have been proud. Thankfully, for all concerned, this business of Peikoff and his schisms will be left in the dust.

Know hope.

[A follow-up post is here.]