Happiness and meaningfulness (and Frankl)

Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning is one of the most well-loved books in the philosophical-psychological literature.  Meaning in life is a central concern for everyone who lives an examined life (and perhaps everyone or nearly everyone lives one, to some extent or other).  Perhaps, as human beings, living an examined life is the very thing that makes it meaningful or worth living, per Socrates's ages-old dictum.  (My modification on his dictum would likely be this: "The extent to which a (human) life is unexamined, is the extent to which it isn't worth living.")

To those who examine the issues and questions surrounding life's meaning, the relation of happiness to meaning is almost sure to arise at some point.  Don't we humans want to be happy more than anything?  Isn't that what ultimately makes live worth living?  Isn't the pursuit of happiness what confers meaning upon our activities?

A recent article by Emily Esfhani Smith in The Atlantic suggests otherwise.  In it, she explicitly distinguishes a life of happiness or happiness-pursuit from a life of meaning, and brings in Frankl as a key figure for the discussion.  By "siding" with Frankl on the fundamental importance of meaningfulness in life, she claims to place herself in opposition to the idea that happiness is what ultimately matters.  As the title of her article indicates, she thinks that "there is more to life than being happy."  But is there some kind of opposition, much less a distinction, between the two (happiness and meaningfulness)?

Smith quotes the authors of a study in the Journal of Positive Psychology:

"Happiness without meaning characterizes a relatively shallow, self-absorbed or even selfish life, in which things go well, needs and desire are easily satisfied, and difficult or taxing entanglements are avoided," the authors write. 

How do the happy life and the meaningful life differ? Happiness, they found, is about feeling good. Specifically, the researchers found that people who are happy tend to think that life is easy, they are in good physical health, and they are able to buy the things that they need and want. While not having enough money decreases how happy and meaningful you consider your life to be, it has a much greater impact on happiness. The happy life is also defined by a lack of stress or worry. 

Most importantly from a social perspective, the pursuit of happiness is associated with selfish behavior -- being, as mentioned, a "taker" rather than a "giver." The psychologists give an evolutionary explanation for this: happiness is about drive reduction. If you have a need or a desire -- like hunger -- you satisfy it, and that makes you happy. People become happy, in other words, when they get what they want. Humans, then, are not the only ones who can feel happy. Animals have needs and drives, too, and when those drives are satisfied, animals also feel happy, the researchers point out. 

"Happy people get a lot of joy from receiving benefits from others while people leading meaningful lives get a lot of joy from giving to others," explained Kathleen Vohs, one of the authors of the study, in a recent presentation at the University of Pennsylvania. In other words, meaning transcends the self while happiness is all about giving the self what it wants. People who have high meaning in their lives are more likely to help others in need. "If anything, pure happiness is linked to not helping others in need," the researchers, which include Stanford University's Jennifer Aaker and Emily Garbinsky, write.

(Bolded emphases mine.)

There are some familiar themes being sounded here, yes?  The pursuit of happiness being linked to selfishness would certainly not be troublesome to an influential ethical egoist such as Ayn Rand, right? (Keep in mind that Rand's conception of egoism and of happiness isn't about "receiving benefits from others" but rather, in its noblest and fully-formed manifestation, about producing or creating benefits for oneself - like Halley and his fifth concerto, for instance.)

Continuing:

What sets human beings apart from animals is not the pursuit of happiness, which occurs all across the natural world, but the pursuit of meaning, which is unique to humans, according to Roy Baumeister, the lead researcher of the study and author, with John Tierney, of the recent book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. Baumeister, a social psychologists at Florida State University, was namedan ISI highly cited scientific researcher in 2003. 

The study participants reported deriving meaning from giving a part of themselves away to others and making a sacrifice on behalf of the overall group. In the words of Martin E. P. Seligman, one of the leading psychological scientists alive today, in the meaningful life "you use your highest strengths and talents to belong to and serve something you believe is larger than the self." For instance, having more meaning in one's life was associated with activities like buying presents for others, taking care of kids, and arguing. People whose lives have high levels of meaning often actively seek meaning out even when they know it will come at the expense of happiness. Because they have invested themselves in something bigger than themselves, they also worry more and have higher levels of stress and anxiety in their lives than happy people. Having children, for example, is associated with the meaningful life and requires self-sacrifice, but it has been famously associated with low happiness among parents, including the ones in this study. In fact, according to Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, research shows that parents are less happy interacting with their children than they are exercising, eating, and watching television. 

"Partly what we do as human beings is to take care of others and contribute to others. This makes life meaningful but it does not necessarily make us happy," Baumeister told me in an interview.

Meaning is not only about transcending the self, but also about transcending the present moment -- which is perhaps the most important finding of the study, according to the researchers. While happiness is an emotion felt in the here and now, it ultimately fades away, just as all emotions do; positive affect and feelings of pleasure are fleeting. The amount of time people report feeling good or bad correlates with happiness but not at all with meaning. 

Meaning, on the other hand, is enduring. It connects the past to the present to the future. "Thinking beyond the present moment, into the past or future, was a sign of the relatively meaningful but unhappy life," the researchers write. "Happiness is not generally found in contemplating the past or future." That is, people who thought more about the present were happier, but people who spent more time thinking about the future or about past struggles and sufferings felt more meaning in their lives, though they were less happy. 

Having negative events happen to you, the study found, decreases your happiness but increases the amount of meaning you have in life. Another study from 2011 confirmed this, finding that people who have meaning in their lives, in the form of a clearly defined purpose, rate their satisfaction with life higher even when they were feeling bad than those who did not have a clearly defined purpose. "If there is meaning in life at all," Frankl wrote, "then there must be meaning in suffering."

I imagine Miss Rand having a field day with all this; my present task is to re-create such a field day in my own style and given my background in eudaimonist ethics broadly speaking, notably David L. Norton's version.  Supplementing Rand's eudaimonism with Norton's, do we get any meaningful (ahem) contrast between the meaningful life and the happy life?

In the first bolded emphasis above, in the first quoted text, I highlight the notion of "happiness without meaning."  Does this mean (ahem) that happiness is without meaning, or does it mean that there can be happiness with meaning?  If the latter, it doesn't appear to be addressed at all in the article, so we're left hanging with the impression that happiness and meaning may indeed be quite separate from one another.  After all, happiness is associated with "selfish" behavior while meaning is associated with transcending the self for a "higher" purpose beyond oneself.

I should mention that this supposed dichotomy pervades the popular literature these days, including the "self-help" literature but also the "spirituality" literature (meaningfulness being rightfully associated with a concept of spirituality), with spirituality conflated in many people's minds with belief in God.  (Or, in many cases, this is necessarily associated with the belief that an ancient person named Jesus was born of a virgin and was resurrected from the dead; without believing this, it would seem, a great number of people would find their lives devoid of meaning.  I find this decidedly bizarre, but I've yet to "see the light," as they say.)  Indeed, well-known pastor Rick Warren declares that a purpose-driven life is one that is Christ-centered, not self-centered.  Similarly, rabbi Simon Jacobson writes (in a more intellectually-informed way) that a meaningful life is a "G-d"-informed one.  Eastern spiritual leaders such as Swami Prabhupada tell us that self-realization comes about through becoming one with the divine.  And on and on it goes.

I, on the other hand, think of happiness and meaning as intertwined so closely that I have a term that subsumes them both: a life of fulfillment.  Now, meaningfulness tends to be associated in the non-philosophical popular consciousness with spiritual fulfillment, which is associated either with (again) belief in God (or Christ), or treated in such a way as to be a separate and distinct matter from fulfillment of the rest of one's life, or both.  This latter reeks of a soul-body dichotomy [*], while the former begs all sorts of important questions.  The former tends to associate meaningfulness with hope, and hope with belief in an afterlife.  I offer the film The Shawshank Redemption as evidence that hope need not be bound up in ideas of the supernatural.

([*] - "Happiness," according to the researchers in Smith's article, is about doing the same things other animals do, satisfying animalistic bodily needs.  "Meaning" is doing what is distinctive to us.  Or something like that.  Point being, there's a purported dichotomy here.  Why can't meaningfulness include satisfying the bodily urges?  Hmmm?  Or, alternatively, can we distinguish meaningful bodily-urge-satisfaction from non-meaningful bodily-urge-satisfaction, or degrees (or kinds?) of meaningfulness in such activities?  Eating a delicious and nutritious meal capped off by a perfectly sweet creme brulee sounds a lot more, well, meaningful than eating ordinary potato chips; or, it has more dimensions of meaning to it.  Potato chips do provide some meaningful benefit; so do bland rice and beans.  But what if the good dimensions of these can be integrated while excluding the not-so-good, as per Aristotelian dialectic?  Ah, now we're getting somewhere!)

I think we begin to see here the confusions piled upon confusions in much of the (popular) literature on happiness, meaning, spirituality, hope, and related concepts.  Thankfully there is a philosophical literature that typically seeks precision in these matters, and wouldn't you know it, it's the (neo-)Aristotelian literature that best exemplifies the reaching of said precision.

In the philosophical literature, the concept of eudaimonia goes back to the ancients.  Now, to be sure, the concept of eudaimonia raised many questions and concerns among the ancients, namely: what is it, exactly?  But given what the greatest of the ancient thinkers had to say about it, and what modern descendants of the idea have had to say about it, the questions and concerns have been more productive than confusion-propagating.  It should be noted that the ancients - the Greeks - were worldly enough in their worldview as not to find a dichotomy between life's ultimate meaning and this-worldly pursuits, with all the confusions perpetuated by acceptance of such a dichotomy.  It should further be noted that Plato's ideal of a transcendent Good was radical for his time and place in comparison to Aristotle's much more naturalistic, empirical, worldly ideas about success in life.

(Besides, an Aristotelian might ask, What if a person's belief in the supernatural is indeed mistaken or groundless?  Does that leave the person in the dark when it comes to life's ultimate questions?  Or are there answers to be had through the normal procedures of secular scientific discovery?  Can we locate a telos for us in our nature, a standard by which to determine right conduct given our distinctively human potentialities?  Hell, what would the likes of Thomas Jefferson (a deist - which is practically distinct from an atheist how exactly?) say?)

The concept of eudaimonia is associated in the Aristotelian literature with a concept of perfection (or in the Greek, teleois) of our natures, of bringing to explicit completion (actuality) that which is implicit at the outset (potentiality).  In modern lingo, this lines up perhaps perfectly (ahem) with the concept of self-actualization, defined by Merriam-Webster as reaching fully one's potential.  Then again, it might line up more perfectly with Alan Gewirth's concept of self-fulfillment.  (There's that term again: fulfillment.)  Anyway, let's say that eudaimonia lines up with a concept of perfection in one's life, that is, a life that is not lacking in any significant way - that is to say, that it is an all-encompassing concept that subsumes all the goods one might want out of life.  That includes both happiness and meaning.  Isn't it synonymous indeed with life fulfillment?  What else does it mean to realize fully one's potential?  There's potential in humans that (when actualized) is manifested in both happiness and meaning.  Indeed, what else does self-actualization involve if not the full array of goods; in Maslow's terminology there is a hierarchy of needs at the top of which there is meaning, fulfillment, "transcendence" of some base conception of the self, spirituality, hope, and so forth (including - hell, why not? - happiness).

There is a modern conception of happiness that has been widely recognized as being spiritually impoverished.  The most influential of modern philosophers, Immanuel Kant, apparently had this conception of happiness (the satisfaction of inclination) in mind when rejecting the thesis that happiness is the highest ethical aim in life.  There are materialistic connotations to this conception of happiness, associated with the pursuit of economic good that so preocuppied modern political economists in the wake of the Industrial Revolution.  But even that had its limitations, as when John Stuart Mill, leading philosopher of utilitarianism ("the greatest balance of happiness over unhappiness, for the greatest number"), distinguished between the "higher" and the "lower" pleasures, illustrated most famously by his dictum that "it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied."  (It bears mentioning here that before writing on ethics and political philosophy, Mill was himself among those devoted to questions of political economy - indeed, he wrote the treatise in which classical/Anglo/Smithian/Ricardian political economy culminated, Principles of Political Economy (1848), before the Marxian interpretation and marginalist revolution took things in different directions.  That Marx's comprehensive worldview was so deeply immersed in questions of political economy, should indicate how central political economy has been to so much modern philosophizing.)

But the ancient and Aristotelian conception of happiness as eudaimonia doesn't line up with this modern conception of happiness as pleasure, and it is the modern conception of happiness that evidently infuses the discussion in Ms. Smith's Atlantic piece.  Moreover, there is most definitely a confusion when "wants" and "needs" are discussed the way they are.  (See again the third paragraph of the first section of quoted text above.)  In one sentence there is the talk of "a need or a desire" and in the very next there is mention only of getting what one wants (desires?).  But (a) There is a distinction among eudaimonists (and Norton is explicit about this) between mere desire and right desire, the satisfaction of which he defines in terms of eudaimonia or self-actualization; and (b) Maslow's hierarchy is a hierarchy of needs and not of wants per se; it is in getting what we need that we self-actualize.  (Surely the distinction between want and need in that Rolling Stones song is apropos?  There's also surely a tie-in to the House, M.D. television series, as the wiki article points out.  What we have here is an absence of failure to integrate.)  Finally on this point, it's commonly understood that self-actualization has an interpersonal or social dimension that goes beyond the "selfish" satisfaction of one's desires to the exclusion of others (a point that Rand did not disagree with, but might have been much more explicit about).

I'm intrigued by the last quotation above, from Frankl, that if there is meaning in life at all, then there's meaning in suffering.  I don't see a real problem with this as long as we distinguish suffering from despair, that is, a suffering without hope.  And when I, personally, think of hope, my thoughts almost invariably go to that movie with Andy Dufresne and Red.

I think a useful distinction that might be made between happiness and meaningfulness is as follows: happiness is a psychological state or condition that amounts, qua psychological phenomenon, to a feeling of life-satisfaction - or, better yet, life-fulfillment, whereas meaningfulness refers to one's existential condition.  (Existentialism is primarily concerned, after all, with meaning in a world devoid of a discernible cosmic telos.)  Norton, meanwhile, identifies eudaimonia as both a feeling and a condition attendant upon the satisfaction of right desire (which is understood in Aristotelian terms - as the actualization of the potentialities which constitute the self).

Frankl's book on man's search for meaning is a must-read in any event.  There is a clear-cut parallel in my mind between that book (particularly the first half) and the idea behind the Shawshank story - namely, how one can have or discover hope amid suffering.  Indeed, even when happiness or eudaimonia does elude us, e.g., under extreme conditions of unfreedom as found in a prison or concentration camp - even as much as happiness or eudaimonia serves as some kind of ultimate standard of successful human living that justifies pursuits in that direction - there is something we can nonetheless hold onto in such dire times to give our lives meaning (and which needn't imply affirmation of the supernatural), and that is hope.  In Randian terms, this emerges as the benevolent universe premise and is reflected in Roark's attitude toward life as he works in a quarry (when he might have pursued the life of "happiness" by accepting a commission that would compromise his architectural integrity).  In Aristotelian terms, all of this emerges as an endorsement of harmonious integration of the seemingly disparate ends (aims) of human life.

Perfectivism: Some Rough Ideas

Intro comments: This is from an email I wrote earlier today to fellow eudaemonists who are in academia, in its original (unedited) but copy-pasted form. The subject of the email is "eudaemonism as perfectivism." I consider this to be the absolute state of the art in ethical theory, and encourage anyone reading this to forward this onto anyone that might find it of interest. The terminology and discussion here is somewhat technical and presupposes some familiarity with the ethical tradition (the eudaemonist tradition in particular) and with the academic literature. I'm fairly confident that the basic idea - and most especially the spirit animating these investigations - passes the highest possible philosophical muster, academic or otherwise. (The opposition to Rand is toast, guaranteed.)

-----

I think the term "perfectionism" carries with it a lot of unhelpful baggage, so I've decided to adopt a new term, perfectivism. I think a perfectivist account of eudaemonia or flourishing is the best, most complete, most (ahem) perfect account. Here is it: eudaemonia has gone under wide range of headings, terms, associations, etc. The usual translation of eudaemonia as "happiness" is misleading since happiness refers to the psychological reward associated with eudaemonia. Eudaemonia isn't just a psychological condition but something more comprehensive than that, something I would sum up in the phrase "perfective living." I'm aiming to provide the most complete account of that, something that someone of Aristotle's dialectical sensibilities would aim for (and I think that's the concept he himself was aiming for).

Someone of Aristotle's dialectical sensibilities would look at the tradition and identify the good parts that varying thinkers were aiming for, while discarding the limitations, mistakes, one-sided understandings, etc. So my perfective account by its very nature has to take into account and integrate with it the best in Rand and Norton; I'm also going to be reading Gewirth's Self-Fulfillment shortly (first chapter is here: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s6413.pdf ), since one way of rendering eudaemonia might well be "self-fulfillment," a term which is supposed to be more encompassing than self-actualization.

Here's the contribution each of the other thinkers makes to the perfectivist understanding of eudaemonia: Norton does an eminently plausible job of linking the familiar term "self-actualization" to the ancient concept of eudaemonia. At the minimum, eudaemonia incorporates self-actualization into a complete account. The Merriam-Webster definition of "self-actualization" is fitting: to reach one's full potential, which has Greek/Aristotelian accounts of goodness or perfection written all over it. Norton makes his account of eudaemonia as complete as he can by referring to eudaemonia as both a condition and a feeling that attends the satisfaction of right desire. The feeling itself of eudaemonia he doesn't translate into any other term (though I think that feeling is best captured by the term "happiness"), but he does speak of it as its own intrinsic reward; the feeling itself could not be perfected upon; it is the feeling of completeness that comes with the condition of living completely. In thinking through this, I've come to understand eudaemonia as encompassing the condition (the perfective activity of self-actualization) and the feeling (happiness) under something integrating these two into a whole: complete or perfective living, fulfilled living, self-fulfillment. This is an inclusive-end eudaemonia, incorporating, integrating and encompassing as completely as possible the goods that constitute it.

Now, Rand. Rand is most Aristotelian in terms of her identification of the human good with rational activity, that activity expressive of our distinctive mode of excellence or perfection. She comes at eudaemonia from the aspect of our rational natures, based on the identification that the human mode of flourishing (I don't know whether to say "flourishing" is more synonymous with eudaemonia or with the condition-aspect of it, i.e., self-actualization; also, if a feeling is also a condition of sorts, then I think we can speak of eudaemonia and flourishing as synonymous, flourishing referring to all those conditions, including the feeling of happiness, that make up complete living) arises from the perfective application of the characteristic mode of human functioning: rational activity. So we have a eudaemonism that is a virtue-ethics in which the fundamental/primary/basic virtue that explains all the other virtues as applications of this primary virtue, which is the virtue of rationality. I think of rationality in terms of perfective intellectual activity, which (self-referentially?) involves the seeking of the best and most complete explanations of the phenomena in our capacity as philosophers, and involves the practical application of rationality to the specific individuated life-pursuits of each person. (I think that this is to say, perhaps in very Aristotelian fashion, that eudaemonia cannot happen without philosophy integrated into one's life, even if one isn't a philosopher by profession. I know that saying this is in very Randian fashion, if "Philosophy: Who Needs It" is any indicator.) The whole point of Rand's epistemology - a point I think is sorely missed - is a perfective account of rational activity with a supremely practical aim in mind (which she gets to when she talks about concepts as devices to achieve unit-economy, i.e., mental efficiency and, in turn, mental potency), keeping in mind the basic thesis of Atlas Shrugged: the role of the mind in human existence. (Also, the basic thesis of her work: the primacy and supremacy of reason over egoism and capitalism.) It is by perfecting one's cognitive processes through rigorous application of a systematizing-empirical-inductive approach to inquiry that we will be most well-equipped to deal with the challenges of life. Whether this puts Rand and/or Aristotle into the "perfectionist" category in the Hurka-ian sense, I'll leave that for debate.

For philosophers-per-se, this perfective intellectual activity is captured by the term "contemplation," I think. So any eudaemonic life does involve a philosophical or contemplative aspect (you can't have someone who is eudaemon who isn't possessed of wisdom or a love of it). But with a figure like Rand, and I'm assuming like Aristotle, there isn't a dichotomy between theoretical and practical; the ultimate (eudaemonic) purpose of this intellectual activity is practical application to individuated, particular, concrete problem-solving, challenge-meeting, etc. In the Nortonian sense, this involves discovering and actualizing one's distinctive potentialities or excellences; for the person whose eudaemonia consists in philosophizing by profession, this means its own distinctive form of theoretical and practical unity; ideally, the practical life for the philosopher is the theoretical life. The Randian angle here is that the philosopher should aim for accessibility and clarity to the wider public. (I say "aim for"; if you looked at the "dialogue" section of the expanded 2nd edition of ITOE, it involves only specialists and long-time students. Apparently at some point the philosopher ends up spending at least some time communicating/collaborating with only high-level specialists who share the appropriate context.) I'm assuming it's an Aristotelian angle as well, as I'm sure Aristotle's long lost dialogues would have made quite evident.

Okay, I'm tapped out for the moment. Thoughts?

Oh, also, this account of eudamonia incorporates Randian and Nietzschean (and, I'm guessing, Aristotelian) ideas of goodness in terms of "life-affirmingness," where eudaemonia is then understood as the most life-affirming mode of activity. And the most life-affirming activity is synonymous with perfective activity. Something like that. I think Rand subtly though understandably got some concepts confused here: Our understanding of goodness comes, as it does with Foot in Natural Goodness, from life-phenonema, where we can understand life-processes in terms of need-fulfillment (with a Maslow-inspired "hierarchy of needs" analysis applying to the relation between life and flourishing). Where Rand got her terminology mistaken is her definition of "value" as "that which one acts to gain and/or keep," but she implicitly retreats from this in a footnote on goal-directed action. It turns out that by "goal" she didn't mean "goal" in the usual (correct) sense but something more broad than that, i.e., "directed toward a result [telos?]." Here's how I think the value-language applies: Goodness is biocentric; value is dependent upon sentience. (That is to say, plants and amoebae don't pursue values since value-pursuit depends upon at least a basic-level awareness of that which is good for the organism.) Norton's answer to the is-ought problem identifies the relation of "ought" to "is" in terms of potentiality in relation to actuality. Actually, I think that this is an appropriate identification of the relation between goodness and nature, i.e., as instantiated in life-phenomena. The narrower subdivision of that is the "fact-value" relationship, and if value is dependent upon sentience, then we understand the facts (sentient life) that give rise to the concept "value." Then we get the narrower subdivision of the fact-value relation, the "is-ought" relation, that which applies to specifically human goodness, resting upon the ability of human beings to recognize and act for reasons. If the standard of goodness is life-affirmingness and the standard of value a psychological rewardingness, we come to a moral standard that incorporates these two, i.e., a eudaemonic one. I think this is exactly what Rand was aiming for with the best arguments and understanding she had at her avail at the time. For that reason, her argument - or perhaps way better yet, her (systematic-empirical) method of approach, which contains in it means of self-correction for faulty or incomplete arguments - merits a very close second look. (The expensive way of going about studying that approach is to immerse oneself in Peikoff's lecture courses. The inexpensive way I aim to essentialize for a wide audience in Perfectivism. It's Aristotelian-dialectical in its basic orientation, so it definitely has that going for it.)

Generational Shift, Cont'd

Expanding upon my previous posting, I want to do a bit of a thought experiment. Say that you brought Aristotle into today's intellectual scene. What would he have to conclude on the political-philosophical front? (An alternative thought-experiment is to bring a short-list of All-Time Great Philosophers into today, but I like to keep it simple with Aristotle, since his powers of assimilation [or, in alternative terminology, dialectic] would make it kinda pointless to bring in the others. And I take it more or less for granted that, to use Rand's phraseology, Aristotle is the philosophical Atlas holding up the Western intellectual tradition.)

Now, I want to first put aside one point-missing answer that inevitably comes up in connection with Aristotle, to the effect that he endorsed questionable doctrines - universal teleology, an insufficient account of universals, a measure of political authoritarianism or collectivism, and other stuff in that vein. It misses the point that Aristotle was assimilating the best ideas of his day to come to the best answers available to him. If he were around today, with the benefit of 2,500 years of philosophical hindsight, he'd have better answers on these things. For example, in light of modern political philosophy, he'd incorporate Lockean insights, as well as those of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Spencer, Mill, Rand, Hayek, Rawls, and Nozick. By "incorporate" (or assimilate) I mean the Aristotelian method of considering all the views, isolating their merits from insufficient one-sided applications in any given case, and abstracting-integrating a more complete answer without the weaknesses of the others. He'd have a way of assimilating, say, Spencer and Rawls that doesn't preserve the substantive oppositions between them (given the law of non-contradiction - e.g., either we have an extensive welfare state or we don't). (Sciabarra presents a helpful overview of this methodology originating in Aristotle - what Sciabarra calls dialectics, or what I'd call integration (horizontal and vertical) - in the first part of Total Freedom.)

Okay, let's now take the most representative figures whose ideas have been most influential on political philosophy in America over the last half-century. I don't mean the most representative figures in the academy per se, but the most representative figures in "the real world," those who have actually had the most influence on the formation of present-day political positions and oppositions in America. If it were the academy deciding on things, there would be a decidedly more left-liberal "center" in American politics today than there is now; in fact, though, the academy has influenced American politics less than its inhabitants would have liked, given a certain resistance to the academy in the real-world American populace.

Another consideration in selecting the representative figures I'm about to name is that we want figures who are plausibly referred to as political philosophers and can rightly be accorded the distinction of "philosopher," rather than, say, polemicist, pundit, commentator, propagator, intellectual (but short of "philosopher" status - the likes of Dawkins and Hitchens, to cite prominent names in recent years on non-political matters, don't qualify), etc. I make this qualification because while the likes of Buckley, Kirk, and Kristol have been influential on conservative "movement" politics, I don't think they have much in the way of philosophical chops. (Didn't want to have to knock conservative intellectuals down a notch, but the dastardly and disreputable treatment of Rand by Buckley and Kirk makes this knocking-down quite unavoidable.) I also make this qualification because I am thinking in terms of longer-term influence which comes from having philosophical-level stature. This stems from how profound and seminal a thinker is. I also do this in order to exclude political scientists, historians, and economists who haven't contributed much by way of political philosophy proper.

Through appropriate process of elimination, I come up with six most significant figures who, taken together, best define the best of what there is on offer for influential political ideology in America. They are, in order of birth date: Hayek, Rand, Rawls, Chomsky, Dworkin, and Nozick. They all have the virtue of being "big names," and the breakdown gives us, by American political standards, three "right" figures and three "left" figures. They span the range from "radical for capitalism" to "radical for anarcho-syndicalism." If there is any one figure that best defines the "center" in America, it would be Hayek, with Rawls a close second.

One thing to note about every one of these figures is the lack of a "conservative" emphasis on the centrality of religion to politics; the closest in that regard would be Hayek, an agnostic himself who acknowledges the importance of tradition (and hence, of some aspect(s) or other of religion to social ordering). Whatever any of them might say for religion, they're all really only interested in what we can know about the natural world (including the social and political world) independent of any religious or theological commitments. In that regard, they inherit an Aristotelian sensibility - and in that regard, modern theocentric conservatisms are implicitly hostile to Aristotelian sensibilities. If Aristotle were around today, I don't think he would have much to say for these conservatisms. So there you have it as far as theocentric political conservatisms go. (A much better approach for these conservatives is to invoke the natural-law tradition without a theological package-deal; that's in fact what the better ones do.)

So, taking the above six philosophical heavy-hitters, how would Aristotle do his characteristic assimilation? The answer, I think, is not one that left-liberals are going to like. Aristotle is too systematic a philosopher not to understand the priority of ethics over politics, which puts him closest to Ayn Rand among these six. Eudaemonist ethics are now, as in Aristotle's time, the best normative-ethical theory going. If you look at the contemporary scene as far as Aristotelian scholarship goes, and further narrow down that group to scholars who are familiar with Ayn Rand's ideas, you find - quite unsurprisingly, to those with so much as clue about these things - a great deal of sympathy toward her ideas. Were Aristotle around today, he couldn't help but to notice this, and to notice the affinity between his-ideas-with-2,500-years-of-hindsight and her own.

Further, it's hard to believe he would be unfamiliar with Norton's eudaemonism which is, to my knowledge, the best-developed modern text in eudaemonist ethics. He couldn't help but notice the literature on perfectionism, and make the appropriate assimilations. Further, he couldn't help but notice that an ethical program of perfectionism, as hierarchically prior to any political program, would render a lot of issues and debates in contemporary political philosophy - which take for granted widespread lack of perfectionistic virtues - moot. That's one outcome of Aristotelian-style assimilation: rendering many debates moot. In promoting a Nortonian-Randian perfectionist program, various debates among present-day left-liberals become irrelevant; obsessions with "distribution of the social product" and egalitarian ideals fall by the wayside - just as, say, debates amongst the various factions of materialists in Aristotle's day fall by the wayside under his assimilation.

(This is evidence of how removed from the real-world American mainstream the academic political-philosophical mainstream is, if we go by who occupies the top posts at the top-rated universities. Nozick's diagnosis has plenty bite to it, and it probably doesn't tell the whole story; Rand and Hayek have things to say about this as well, and one thing they do share is a criticism of tendencies toward rationalism among intellectuals. Here I can't help but think Aristotle would endorse these diagnoses and criticisms - which is why I think the second most similar to Aristotle among the six is Hayek. If Aristotelian-style philosophizing is the standard, it's just not looking too good for left-liberal academia.)

This is not to say that Aristotle wouldn't acknowledge, take into account, etc., the good points being made by the "left" figures I've mentioned; what he would oppose is incomplete and one-sided applications of the good parts. With Rawls, he might acknowledge the merits of a theory being aimed toward principles that people could, with suitably-defined impartiality, reasonably accept. The notion there is fairly vacuous on its own, though, and aside from its intuitive appealingness to a left-liberal academic audience, the contrivance that is the Original Position doesn't suitably account for your ordinary notions of justice once you take into account Rand and Norton with their eudaemonistic approach. (Norton's developmental approach to personhood, for example, makes it exceedingly silly to formulate a theory of justice based on a veil-of-ignorance model which pays no heed to the task of discovering and actualizing one's distinctive individuative potentialities. Norton gets into this in the last chapter of Personal Destinies.)

I couldn't speak for a hypothetical present-day Aristotle, but I think that of the three "left" figures, Chomsky may well be found the most sympathetic figure, given his (implicit) observations of just how devoid of virtue the present money-power-propaganda model is. (That's my spin on it, anyway; I share many of the "left-style" criticisms of today's corrupted political scene. I differ in my diagnosis and solution, while the hard-left-wing seems quite oblivious to what Ayn Rand actually has to say about power. They certainly haven't a clue as to how her views on reason and virtue hierarchically integrate with her views on political power and corruption. The characteristic blind attack on Rand I see from hard-leftists is based on the ignorant assumption that she endorses an exploitative model in virtue of her egoism and alleged "elitism." It's really very embarrassing how ignorant and oblivious to philosophy this stuff is. At least Chomsky himself has had the good sense to refrain from commenting on Rand, about whom he has no obvious qualifications to speak.) Chomsky is of the view that if people were really not so ignorant they'd embrace his social ideals, but we also run up against a limitation with Chomsky: he's not a philosopher proper. He's a political philosopher whose primary background is linguistics and social science; he isn't known for contributions in ethics or epistemology. Aristotle would supersede him. It's interesting that a primacy-of-social-sciences view seems to dominate the far-left mentality in this country.

Alright, enough for beating up on the left. I do want to now give a brief comment on what Aristotle would say about Ayn Rand, and it's probably not going to sit well with her more devoted admirers. While Aristotle would greatly admire Rand's methodological prescriptions, the integration of theoretical and practical, her substantive ethical views (eudaemonism), and quite likely her political philosophy (radical liberalism), he would not have approved of her very non-Aristotelian approach to other philosophers. In place of Rand's over-the-top caricatures and demonizations of Immanuel Kant, he'd have done something way more effective and Aristotelian: fully understand him, characterize Kant's views in his own terms, acknowledge his context, and proceed to refute him. Taking an adversarial stance carries the dangers of partisanship; Aristotle could do so without falling into partisan otherization and demonization, which we find so common in political rhetoric.

For all her methodological emphasis on integration and context, Rand's polemical style was very one-sided. That style has been insidious, a shortcoming that has fed upon itself in really nasty ways. It has been a huge impediment to her ideas taking hold in a timely fashion. It has been insidious, because it has attracted a certain kind of following consisting of adherents who emulate that style, often in increasingly offensive and bizarre ways. Some of the worst of it came out in the writings of Peter Schwartz and in other contributors to The Intellectual Activist in the '80s and '90s. It's why David Kelley, for whatever his shortcomings, couldn't stand it any longer and realized something had to get better.

What happened is that between Rand's heyday up through the 1990s, there were devoted adherents of Objectivism who best understood its methods as presented in Peikoff's courses, but who failed to consistently integrate those methods due to insidious bad practices. That's how you ended up with a movement were a Peter Schwartz was a de facto leader, while there was thorough ignorance of such magnificent ideas and sensibilities as Norton's. It's disgusting, really, that this kind of thing happened in a movement devoted to reason and reality. Not until the 2000s do we see serious attempts to repair this tendency. I think there is a lot to be learned from this problem, given all the cultural progress delayed by it. Rand was simply wrong to say things like, "Kant was the most evil man in mankind's history," and the various attempts I've seen over the years by the devout, to save Rand's condemnation of Kant, just don't hold up. She fucked up here, is all. She had shortcomings and blind spots, and of the sort that Aristotle would not have had or put up with.

But that's the genius of Aristotle. He could acknowledge where the shortcomings, fuck-ups, mistakes, personality flaws, etc. were in Rand's mode of philosophizing, and he could acknowledge and understand the context that led to these unfortunate tendencies, and still extract-and-assimilate the good stuff (of which there is a shit-ton), just as current-day Aristotle scholars like Gotthelf, Lennox, Miller, Rasmussen and Den Uyl have picked up on. And, I believe, he'd also have, Sgt. Hartmann-like, ripped the present-day academy a new gaping asshole for failing so badly to notice this good stuff. With an Aristotle-caliber philosopher, it's all about holding everyone to the highest standards. Perfectionism, you see.

[CLIFFHANGER: Will the next blog posting be that Sgt. Hartmann-like gaping-new-asshole-tearing? Stay tuned, because, whatever it'll be, you won't want to miss it!]

David L. Norton's Personal Destinies

My current book project was initially conceived as something somewhat less ambitious (although the logic of it eventually led me to what it is now), and that was more or less a comparison between Ayn Rand's normative ethics and the ethics of David L. Norton's masterful Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism. I ended up making it my own personal destiny to write an ultimate book with the ideas of these two still at the substantive core, just teasing out the implications.

The very idea of connecting Rand to Norton in a close way seemingly hadn't occurred to anyone before, but you'd think it might have since the parallels are so compelling. They're both ethical individualists. They're both eudaemonists. They both have a compelling normative ethics - so darned compelling that were they widely known, understood, adopted and implemented, utopia would be automatic. So perhaps you can say that the mission of Toward Utopia is to make this normative-ethical vision so obviously compelling, so indisputable, so undeniable that a helluva lot of people ought to get on board right quick so that we fast-track right toward utopia.

Here's the gist of the program: We understand Ayn Rand's normative ethics as, in essence, a self-actualization ethics. The ground of virtue is the need to self-actualize, and we recognize self-actualization to be an inherently desirable thing. Rand and Norton conceive of the fundamental virtue in distinct but complementary ways (which can be integrated): Norton conceives of virtue as integrity to the self to be actualized; Rand conceives of virtue as rationality, or the optimal exercise of the human cognitive faculty, reason being the basic human mode of functioning. Rand's epistemology comes into play here because her entire philosophy is built toward a practical end, which is living our lives to the utmost. This is best achieved through mental unit-economy, which stems from following proper cognitive guidelines; the perfection of our cognitive faculty leads to optimal cognitive efficiency, effectively raising our IQ. (There is a genius, i.e., daemon, in all of us, see.) That fast-tracks us toward self-actualization, and when people cooperatively pool their now-enhanced cognitive resources, things get fast-tracked even more, which frees up yet more cognitive resources to enhance, and so forth. So I'm just playing my part in getting this avalanche started. After that, there is just no room for the cycnicism, pessimism, and defeatism (in addition to all that cognitive inefficiency and irrationality) currently holding us back from achieving a better world.

So this posting is about Personal Destinies. I don't intend it to be a review so much as a brief exposition and commentary in which I can barely hold back my fawning. If I had to name a single favorite philosophy book, it would be this one. There's a good reason why this is. First, my philosophical specialty is ethics, and ethics has a certain centrality in philosophy that the other branches of philosophy don't have. (Epistemology has a centrality of its own. Perhaps the contrast here is this: epistemology is more basic, while ethics is more central.) Second, it's expertly and beautifully crafted. Just brilliant. It also has the "cred" of coming from a leading university press, so there's no reason, no fucking reason, for academics to (continue to) overlook it. Third, it's true - chock full of true.

There's one downside: it is obscure. That is to say, it is written in an obscure style. I say this because some years ago, as I was in college and then in grad school, I tried on two occasions to venture into the book, and barely followed what Norton was saying. Now, when a graduate student in philosophy specializing in ethics reads this book and doesn't get what's going on, that's pretty good evidence that it's obscure. And I still say it's obscure. In fact, while there are parts of the book that I understand - and like a lot - there are still parts of the book quite hard for me to follow even on the basis of two recent readings. I'll get to that in a bit. But first, another tidbit as to how I re-encountered this book, if this is any clue as to the completist-perfectionist nature of the mental process involved.

See, when I first delved into the book way back when in school, I noticed that some chapters were devoted to critics of "recent eudaemonisms," including that of Nietzsche. The idea of Nietzsche as a eudaemonist struck me as odd and/or intriguing, which is why it stuck in the back of my mind for later retrieval. It was then a discussion in early 2010 on the SOLO forum in which Rand commentator Jennifer Burns and Rand-defender James Valliant were participating, where links between Rand and Nietzsche were discussed - I think it was about their respective celebrations of human excellence - and that's when it clicked. I had to go back and scrounge up my Norton book. Then I "got it." The first chapter (the most accessible) had me hooked.

(To even think of drawing the connection between Rand, Nietzsche and Norton requires a context of knowledge that only a few people possess. Hell, how did I even know about Norton to begin with? Only because he was mentioned in the works of Machan, Rasmussen and Den Uyl. And how many people have read them indepth? That demographic is limited to people interested in Rand, in ethics, and in academic-style philosophy. A small group to begin with. So what are the odds Norton's book would have fallen into total obscurity were it not for the works of these Rand-influenced philosophers? [Insert angry rant about Rand and the academy here.])

Now, about the book. I mentioned the first chapter. The first chapter is enough to sell a reader on the basic idea. I knew just from reading the first chapter that there was a book project in the making. The chapter's title is "The Ethical Priority of Self-Actualization." Norton here is doing an ambitious integration of his own here: in a manner hardly at all accomplished in any of the other literature, Norton ties the ancient concept of eudaemonia to the 20th century concept of self-actualization popularized first and foremost by Abraham Maslow. I mean, how was that connection so badly missed outside of Norton's work? To top that, Norton mentions in his first footnote (in the Preface) that he uses the terms "eudaimonism" (his spelling) and "self-actualization ethics" and "perfectionism" interchangeably, and that "formally and inclusively" he he employs the term "normative individualism." It just all comes together!

Norton, in characteristically beautiful style, illustrates the concept of the "daimon" by analogy to the hollow clay busts of the semi-deity Silenus fashioned by ancient Greek sculptors, which contained inside them a golden figurine to be revealed when the bust is broken open. The golden figurine is akin to our inner daimon, i.e., the inner self. Our ethical task, in short, is to bring this self to outward actuality, so that (citing the passage from the Phaedrus which Norton quotes at the very beginning, before the Preface) the inward and the outward self may be at one. I mean, already you can tell this is an awesome ethical system. This is where the virtue of integrity comes in - you act so as to harmonize the inward and outward self. The parallels to Howard Roark are obvious to anyone in the habit of drawing integrations. Going back to the title of the first chapter: self-actualization has ethical priority. It is the chief and fundamental concern of ethics, from which other ethical considerations follow. Rand again! (How did so many miss this connection, again? HOW????!!!)

Norton is careful to distinguish self-actualization from self-realization. His claim is that the inward self is real whether actualized or not. It exists as potentiality. Moreover, Norton expands upon both Aristotle and Rand by emphasizing more than just the generic human potentiality of rationality; he uses the phrase (among the many wonderful phrase-coinings in this book) "innate distinct potentiality," which is the self. Each individual has his own "unique and irreplaceable potential worth" in virtue of his unique innate nature. Dougs Rasmussen and Den Uyl would later distinguish generic and individuative potentialities, the actualization of both of which are necessary to self-actualization or eudaemonia. The normative enterprise consists, then, in self-knowledge or self-discovery and engaging in the work to progressively actualize that potentiality.

That's the basic idea, upon which the rest of the book builds. Chapters 2-4 critique "recent eudaemonisms," in turn: British Absolute Idealism, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and then the Existentialism of Sartre. I assume these chapters would be of interest to those who are reasonably well-versed in these thinkers, which admittedly I am not (for the moment, only for the moment). I do have a basic idea as to the differences between Existentialism and a Grecophile eudaemonism, namely, as to whether "existence precedes essence." Norton (and Aristotle, and Rand) affirm that we do have an essence or nature from the onset of our existence; this defines our potentialities to be actualized.

Chapter 5, titled "The Metaphysics of Individualism," is perhaps the most difficult chapter in the book; not having specialized in metaphysics, a lot of his discussion here goes over my head. (I should mention here that there's a silver lining to the difficult parts of Norton's book: it affords the opportunity to come back for subsequent readings and get something out of it. How many books can one say that about?) One very intriguing thing Norton does in this chapter is to address the meta-ethical question of goodness and "ought" in relation to natural facts. The gist of Norton's answer here consists in conceiving "ought" as potentiality in relation to actuality (thereby answering Hume, who treats fact in terms of actuality without discussing such concepts as potentiality), and in describing the basic promissory nature of human actions. (I think this latter aspect may correspond to Rand's "initial choice" upon which obligation is grounded, in connection with facts about, essentially, our potentialities.)

Chapter 6, "The Stages of Life," provides Norton's conception of the person as informed by developmental psychology, starting with childhood, then adolescence, and then maturation, and, finally, old age. There are distinctive principles of behavior applying to each stage, while the transition between stages involves what Norton refers to as "world-exchange" by the person. Childhood essentially involves dependency; the stage of adolescence is characterized by creative exploration of potentialities; maturation or adulthood is the "main phase" for which eudaemonistic principles see their application; old age is . . . well, it sounds kinda drab the way Norton describes it. I don't want to think about old age until I approach it.

Chapter 7, "Eudaimonia: The Quality of Moral Life in the Stage of Maturation," describes the condition of "living in truth to oneself," or "being where one wants to be, doing what one wants to do." That sounds like a rare phenomenon in the present-day world, but the whole point is that we all have this daimon in us that can in principle be actualized under the right conditions. Norton refers to eudaemonia as a feeling and a condition; in the first chapter, he describes it as both a feeling and condition attendant upon the satisfaction of right desire, which distinguishes it from many prevailing conceptions of happiness (though in line with the ancient Greek conception of happiness). Eudaemonia is "marked by a distinctive feeling that constitutes its intrinsic reward and therefore bears the same name as the condition itself." My favorite part of this chapter - a fascinating one, at least - is the last part, where Norton discusses the "post-mortem life." To wit:

"...It follows that the individual who is living in truth to himself is ready to die at any time. The sense of this is conveyed in a report by Abraham Maslow of his feelings upon completion of what he identifies only as an 'important' piece of work. 'I had really spent myself. This was the best I could do, and here was not only a good time to die but I was even willing to die . . . It was what David M. Levy called the "completion of the act." It was a good ending, a good close.' What follows the good close is termed by Maslow 'post-mortem life.' He says, 'I could just as easily have died so that my living constitutes a kind of extra, a bonus. It's all gravy. Therefore I might just as well live as if I had already died.' What comes next in Maslow's account sounds a new note. 'One very important aspect of the post-mortem life,' he says, 'is that everything gets doubly precious, gets piercingly important. You get stabbed by things, by flowers and by babies and by beautiful things -- just the very act of living, of walking and breathing and eating and having friends and chatting. Everything seems to look more beautiful rather than less, and one gets the much-intensified sense of miracles.'

"For myself, I cannot imagine a better evocation of the wonder that must have filled Adam in the moment when he first opened his eyes upon the world. . . .

"By the eudaimonic individual death is not feared as the 'period' by which a tragic fate cuts short the unfinished sentence. In the biography of the good life every sentence is a fitting epitaph and is the epitaph until it is succeeded by the next sentence. . . .

"Therefore to the good life death is no stranger, no alien event opposed to life, and death does not 'take us by surprise, as Sartre says, nor 'alienate us wholly in our own life.' Death is life in its consummation, and because consummation is perpetually within the well-lived life, so likewise death is within that life. The conception of death as alien to life is the product of a death-aversion which, by attempting to banish death from the sphere of life, precludes to life its consummation and its worth." (p. 239-240)

(This reminds me of Lester Burnham's final monologue in American Beauty.)

Chapter 8, "Our Knowledge of Other Persons," is also rather technical and difficult; he describes the process of "participatory enactment" in which we recognize in ourselves a world of possibilities only one of which is actualized in our own person, but this set of possibilities enables us to see those within others that are or can be actualized. I think the basic concept here is an explanation of how a self-actualizing individual recognizes and adopts a principle of universalizability, respect for persons, and taking an interest in the self-actualization of others.

This leads into chapter 9, "Social Entailments of Self-Actualization: Love and 'Congeniality of Excellences.'" Norton explains at length the distinction between love ("the aspiration to higher value"), passion, eros, and friendship, and brings up another wonderful phraseology, "diverse and complementary excellences," which is fairly self-explanatory. Chapter 10, "Intrinsic Justice and Division of Labor in Consequent Sociality" applies the social-entailment idea to the concept of justice. Here Norton brings up a principle of justice that I can't exactly describe as capitalistic, since he describes principles of justice in terms of what an individual is entitled to in virtue of his own distinctive excellence; this is presented as an alternative to the theories of justice advanced by Rawls and Nozick. Since I take the Nozickian principle to be the correct one, that has priority over what Norton says. Norton does have interesting things to say about what use a philosopher has for a sports car, though he seems to rule out that a philosopher can't also be interested in possessing sports cars. But it is plausible in the sense that philosophers, especially, aren't inclined toward seeking enrichment via material possessions such as sports cars. That idea is hardly new, and it may need modification (and certainly some kind of resolution with Rand's celebration of money-making).

Minor note: Norton uses the term "egoism" in a fairly standard sense, which is not Rand's, and rejects egoism in the standard sense as being morally inadequate. He does, however, commend the "egoistic" flavor of the ancient eudaemonists for rightly recognizing the priority of self (for which interest in others' self-actualization is an expression).

It is my hope that, in time, Personal Destinies will be mass-published and easily affordable; did I already mention that I think the world would be a better place if this book (or, say, a popularization of its ideas) were widely read? One thing's for sure: it has been a chief source of inspiration for me philosophically, as an example of how good a book can be.

Randian Heroes as Perfectionists

I am coming to grips with what all I am prepared to say and what I am not yet prepared to say in my book. Tying my central perfectionist thesis to the issues that the leading academic philosophers - particularly those in epistemology - are concerned with, it just not going to be possible in this first book. I do not have the requisite training (from self or others) and context for it. I am quite rusty at my academic-style philosophizing after a decade away from graduate school. Further, my book is conceived as aiming squarely at the intelligent layperson; and the intelligent layperson is far removed from what Quine's "Two Dogmas" is all about. The perfectionist in me says this tying-in would make a good candidate for a second book, though.

My academic area of specialty was ethics and political philosophy. My grasp of these issues is a lot more sound than the issues that the likes of Quine, Kripke, Davidson and David Lewis specialize in. However, I think my perfectionist thesis is plenty good enough to blow away the competitors in the field of ethics, and that includes the leading "contemporary" moral philosopher, Rawls.

Ethical perfectionism is a synonym for eudaemonism, which is best defended in the "canon" literature by Aristotle in The Nicomachean Ethics. Up until about 30 years ago, the main alternatives in ethical theory (aside from forms of rejection of moral theories) were "utilitarianism" (or, more broadly, consequentialism) and "Kantianism" (or, more broadly, deontology). This alternative is what was being presented to students in college philosophy courses as the best that philosophers had to offer in the field of ethics. Pretty sad, huh? So, since that time, Aristotle and "virtue ethics" have surged into prominence, and as recent or contemporary literature is scoured for "virtue-ethical" positions within this Aristotelian tradition, Ayn Rand's name naturally comes up. Her ethical egoism is hardly dissimilar to ancient Greek and especially Aristotelian ethics on the matter of being self-centered in ethics, with virtue defined in terms of promoting self-actualization or eudaemonia or real happiness. Whether the academic literature has fully made the identification yet, eudaemonism and perfectionism and self-actualization and virtue ethics (with some kind of stress on the needs of the self foremost hierarchically) are synonymous because they all are descriptions of the same basic concept. As academic literature goes, David L. Norton's Personal Destinies is the best contemporary statement of eudaemonist or virtue ethics.

What really reveals someone's ignorance of Ayn Rand and of the history of philosophy, is comparing her ethics and her idealized heroes to Nietzsche's Ubermensch, usually package-dealt with some strawman claim that Rand, "like Nietzsche," is an elitist, and more likely than not looking for a moral justification (through hijacking Nietzsche, more or less) for capitalist exploitation. Yes, it's one of those eye-rollers students of Objectivism have been confronted with thousands of times. Why don't these idiots appreciate Rand for what she actually said, the students of Objectivism keep asking. (Good question, actually.) Further, it really reveals a lack of intellectual sophistication to hone in on similarities to Nietzsche rather than similarities to Aristotle.

(Let's say that Nietzschean-style "nihilism" is the main alternative modernity has to clinging on to religion-and-morality. I mean, that's what has plunged the political left into a deep-structural moral vacuum (see the '60s and its effects), and the right into fear that the world will collapse without a return to religion-and-morality (see the right from Buckley to today). Aristotelian-Thomistic-Lockean-Jeffersonian-Randian "natural-law" perfectionism is the third way that would give us the fix we need, but unfortunately there is massive ignorance of this tradition. So the typical little left-wing college know-it-all has a context where Nietzsche is taken to be a, or the, leading voice of the secular world, and where leftists succeeded in rewriting America's history into a class-war context rather than an individualist one, and compares Rand to other thinkers in that context. Really lame and so cliched, right?)

Randian heroes are perfectionists. Rand is clear about this in some of her Letters ca. 1946, so it gives some idea of where Rand was in her intellectual development at that time, and how she viewed the relation between moral perfection and traditional religion. (This was around the time she was most embroiled in discussions with Isabel Paterson about all the Big Issues - God, religion, morality - and "Pat" informed her that her ethics had a character all its own, simply distinct from the egoists Nietzsche and Stirner.) This is around the time she was also studying the history of philosophy, with emphasis on the Aristotelian and Thomist traditions; this was around the time that the significance of the "problem of universals" became known to Rand, and the time she made her earliest identifications leading to her theory of concepts. In her maturest stage of intellectual development, her ideas were far more Aristotelian or Thomistic than Nietzschean. This goes for her eudaemonist-perfectionist ethics.

The heroes represent what a eudaemonist-perfectionist ethics lived-out might look like. Her heroes were always reflections of her husband Frank or herself, and there's nothing of an "Ubermensch" character about them (either the heroes, Frank, or herself); they're just normal human beings reaching their full potentials through virtue (rationality), and doing so with an individualistic pride - like what America's supposed to be about, right?

Methodological Issues in "Egoism and Rights"

On the subject of the relation between egoism and rights, the work of Eric Mack, Douglas Rasmusssen and Douglas Den Uyl stood out above the rest for pretty much three decades or so. The "Dougs" have spelled out the essence of the correct position in fullest detail, while Mack has offered valuable insights of his own in thinking about the issue, especially from a Randian angle, with his emphasis on the core moral notion that "man is an end in himself."

The basics of the difference between their two approaches is covered in an issue of Reason Papers. The gist is that Mack's approach is dualistic and Kant-inspired, which reflects his more hardcore-academic style, while theirs - following Aristotle and Rand - is integrative. Mack's work on this subject began with his own "Egoism and Rights" (1973, The Personalist) and culminating in a series of increasingly technical academic essays over the years; his most developed viewpoint is represented in "On the Fit Between Egoism and Rights" (1998, Reason Papers). The "Dougs" work culiminates in Liberty and Nature (1991) and Norms of Liberty (2006). Their characteristic style and content is represented well in the Reason Papers symposium in the first link above.

My own, article, "Egoism and Rights," (see link in "About Me" to your right) represents the "state of the art" on the subject in an academic format, stated in brief essentials. There are, also, some methodological concerns to address there.

Some relevant background: As I have had a fiercely independent sense of life from very early on, I have staunchly repudiated any forms of authoritarianism or other varieties of unreason, especially when associated in any way with Ayn Rand. I took Rand's central dictum, "Think for yourself," most seriously, and repudiated social metaphysics wherever I saw it. I saw an authoritarianism in the "ARI" brand of promoting Objectivism, which I saw at the time as being against careful, reasoned, dialogue-respecting activity. I took Rand's unscholarly polemics as representative of her overall style of doing philosophy. I was more ready to buy into the picture fostered by the apostates, the Brandens, and then David Kelley. The toxically effective smear-jobs perpetrated by the combination of the Branden accounts was effective at breeding a cynicism that nearly destroyed me (and, I'm sure, many others) in the end. The essential upshot: "If not even this woman lives up to her ideals, so much for ideals." Thanks a lot, Nathan.

Speaking of Nathan, he's a friend of Chris Matthew Sciabarra, editor of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, in which "Egoism and Rights" appeared in 2006. There were things I know now that I did not know at the time. Three significant things in particular: (1) James Valliant's The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics appeared in 2005, and it's like the veil had at last been lifted: You know what, Ayn Rand was pretty darn swell after all, and Nathan is an unspeakably unjust scumbag who single-handedly fueled a culture-wide ad hominem against Objectivism's founder. That man is persona non grata. (2) Evidence of lying and backstabbing behavior in 2006 by Chris Sciabarra against then-friends Diana Hsieh, Lindsay Perigo, and James Valliant, evidence that - to my knowledge - has gone unanswered and unrebutted to this day. (3) A falling-out, in 2006, between yours truly and JARS's associate editor, Robert Campbell, over a series of increasingly stupid things he was saying on public internet forums, debasing JARS's reputation in the process. (Last I checked a few months back, Campbell was spewing some nonsense about me "prostrating [my]self in front of Leonard Peikoff." This is what JARS has been reduced to. Purely coincidentally, the journal is now running well behind schedule.) All this was in addition to the fiasco over at the closely-aligned Objectivist Center (then re-named the Atlas Society), where TOC/TAS's director, David Kelley, a spineless pragmatist, took no stand on the Branden matter (Branden being a TOC/TAS speaker) in the wake of Valliant's book.

Anyway, before that, I was more friendly toward the JARS model, or what I thought it to be. It's respectful, responsible and scholarly dialogue, and as an added bonus, Rand and I win the argument! Also, the culture at ARI today is just different - it just has a different feel, sense-of-life even - than it was back in the days of Schwartz and his emulators. Less of an insular, sectarian, authoritarian and social-metaphysical vibe given off to the wary fiercely-independent type. (After all, these folks were quite terribly ignorant about Mack and the Dougs. I just fucking hate ignorance.)

Here's another piece of the puzzle: I'm one of the "fortunate" few to meet the following criteria: (1) Familiarity with academic-style philosophy; (2) Familiarity with Ayn Rand's ideas; (3) Familiarity with Leonard Peikoff's lecture courses; (4) Familiarity with Mack and the Dougs' work; (5) Background in economics; (6) Lots of intellectual curiosity. Combined, these put me in select company. A close match (to say the least) for all these criteria is Chris Sciabarra. The guy knows his stuff, whatever else you say about him - even if the stuff is presented in the terrible jargon and style of academia, which it is. Well, what finally got me interested in Peikoff's courses is their inclusion in the massive bibliography to Sciabarra's Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (1995). From Peikoff, I was introduced to the history of philosophy - most wonderfully, to Aristotle - and then to the advanced courses in Objectivism. Those courses center around methodology.

Methodology was Sciabarra's central focus in writing Russian Radical; he thinks that Hegel and Marx have some useful insights on this subject. (For the kind of anti-dialoguing I instinctively rebelled against, there's John Ridpath's unfairly brutal "review" of the book in the ARI-aligned Intellectual Activist. If the only criterion were the presentation style, then he'd be spot-on. If it's that similarities to thinkers like Marx or Hegel are too preposterous to take seriously, then he needs an argument in the face of Sciabarra's evidence, and he never gives one. That's why I fucking hated the "accepted ARI style" of the time.) It's not surprising that any number of thinkers could all touch upon a similar point, when they've given such matters so much of their intellectual attention. Rand had a systematic approach to thinking, like Hegel did. There's something to be learned from that as we differentiate and integrate concretes like Rand, Aristotle, Plato, Hegel, Kant, Marx, etc. Ignoring the relevant similarities is a pro-ignorance strategy, and I just fucking hate ignorance.

Anyway, my intellectual curiosity led me to the Peikoff courses despite his Branden-and-Kelley-fostered image as an authoritarian cultist. The courses were, in time, a saving grace intellectually, on many levels. What the courses do show is that Rand's methodology is as sound as it needs to be, without ever having needed Hegel or Marx's dialectical methods to amplify or explain thing further. Anyone who knows Rand knows that she came up with a shit-ton of identifications independently of other thinkers; that's just how she rolled. What we don't get from Hegel or Marx is a path to a theory of induction. With Aristotle, of course, the similarities to Rand are much greater; the approach taken by the (neo-Aristotelian) Dougs is very close methodologically to Randian-Peikoffian integration. Plenty of other Rand scholars and Aristotle scholars have noted the deep similarities as well. In the Sciabarrian scheme, it only makes sense to mentally organize the concretes so that Aristotle has a lot higher "similarity-score" to Rand than do Hegel or Marx. Unfortunately, this is not an effect of the style and presentation of Russian Radical.

So, familiarity with the ideas of Mack, the Dougs, Rand, Peikoff and Sciabarra culminated in my article, "Egoism and Rights." This emerged from another, longer, unpublished piece trying to cover a lot more ground in limited space, the subject being ethics and how the concept of integration (e.g., theory-practice, fact-value, individual-social) applies there. Integration as a basic thematic and methodological concern made JARS a very friendly venue. Sciabarra's framing of the integration-theme was "a revolt against dualism." One result of a revolt against dualism is a revolt against Kant-emulating academic style, a product of rationalism, which is one fork of the rationalist-empiricist dichotomy that Peikoff spent most of Understanding Objectivism railing about. "Egoism and Rights" took one such example of academic dualism - in essence, "Rand is either a deontologist or consequentialist; She is an egoist; Egoism is consequentialist; Consequentialism is incompatible with rights; Therefore, egoism is incompatible with rights" - and subjected it to methodologically-informed refutation. Lost in that whole rationalistic deduction from a false alternative was Rand's actual views, which could be had by reading her own actual descriptions and depictions of egoistic behavior.

One methodological issue I want to mention here conerns what might have led me to state certain points the way I did. One thing that does not sit well with me now is how I talk about the rightful beneficiary of action being a derivative or less fundamental issue than the standard of value. The correct view would be to develop those points in unison - as Rand did. It would be correct to say that both the issue of the standard of value and the issue of the beneficiary are distinct conditions which both have to be met for judging a moral action or principle, but that neither condition precedes the other hierarchically. Perhaps a harmless-looking mistake to treat their relation as I did, but I'm a perfectionist, see, and harmless-looking little things can be insidious and damaging long-run. Much as I was on an "integration"-thematic kick at the time, it wasn't so well integrated with other, related methodological subjects - hierarchy, essentializing, reduction, context. Integration isn't done for its own sake, after all, but to aid in sound cognition and practical action.

Also, in the time since I wrote "Egoism and Rights," my concerns have shifted more toward the fundamental area Rand eventually shifted focus to - epistemology. The ethics stuff is a piece of cake by comparison at this point; of greater interest is how the ethics integrates with the whole hierarchical system of thought. (An epistemological-practical thematic unity I picked up on in the process: perfectionism.)

For its purpose, however, "Egoism and Rights" succeeds remarkably, through an essentializing, straightforward style (by academic-journal standards), considerable familiarity with Objectivist method, and a pretty much irrefutable take on Rand's "new concept of egoism." (This was well before I ever even noticed the extreme similarities between Rand's and Norton's eudaemonisms. Eudaemonism, of course, necessitates rights.) Even if it gets hierarchy wrong at a point, the important points still get out there.

More observations about "Egoism and Rights" as or when they occur...

Very Brief Note About Perfectionism

An essential aspect of perfectionism is thinking and living integrally.

The Singularity Already Happened?

Once in a while, the Daily Dish has an especially interesting link. This one makes a case that the Singularity has already happened.

Oddly/interestingly enough, the 19th century on through right around WWI is that Golden Age in human history Miss Rand waxed so poetically about. Hell, come the early 1900s, the USA may well have been on the verge of utopia. Then, the assholes took over. I'm speaking, of course, of "progressive" pragmatists who had no answer to, or embraced, the fucking socialists (who'd already been chewed up and spit out by Mises, but his book was in German and so the readership was limited for a time). Having no answer to socialism, and facing economic crises, pragmatic experimentation with the American people's liberties set in. The results have been - seeing as the consequence has been a mixed economy (the legacy of pragmatism) - shall we say, mixed.

Just imagine extrapolating the 19th century onward. Where would we be now? Economic analysis - the competent capitalist stuff, not the incompetent or dishonest socialist stuff, or the pathologically-agnostic pragmatist stuff - says that we'd be way richer by now. One academic-style myth we should do away with, is this idea that human history is evolving toward something not all that capitalistic but rather some hybrid of capitalism and government controls. That myth is a legacy of pragmatism, which has this pathological tendency towards mixing, compromising, and reconciling. (When pragmatism dispenses with an accessible, stable, underlying causal reality and settles for "overlapping consensus" and other such buzzwords, the only result is a mixing of what's true and what's not true.) But let's just envision a world in which 40 percent of the country's resources aren't directed by fucking politicians, bureaucrats, public employees unions, and the rest of the pro-forced-stagnation crowd.

Now, it's a completely dishonest Marxist myth that prior to Big Government, America was having it pretty bad. One need only look at the progression between the Declaration of Independence to Henry Ford's assembly line to see the improvements for all classes of economic actors. What this says is that we shouldn't let the fucking Marxists dictate history to the rest of us - which is exactly what happened when those fucking Marxists took over the History (and other) departments. That has cost us decades of progress. So much for the "progressive," i.e., pragmatist-liberal, strategy of embracing A (freedom) and not-A (socialism) at the same time.

Now, my thesis is that the Singularity has begun, and that it began here. I have advertised this very blog as your headquarters for the Singularity. So what's all this stuff about a past Singularity? First off, Ray Kurzweil's concept of the Singularity centers around technology - and it's rather evident that we are headed into a true space-age of technology in the coming decades. I don't think it's relevant that this coming space-age is only a continuation of trends we've already had; the fact is that the past trends produced major technological advancement that had not reached the space-age tipping point that Kurzweil is talking about. What Kurzweil is talking about is such an advance over what we've seen already - given a geometric progression - that we can hardly imagine what humanity would look like a few generations from now.

So what's this business about the Singularity beginning here? Well, tying back into the 19th-century growth period, we have a record of the awesome success of the capitalistic system. The "new" Singularity is a return to that model. But going back to that model would merely be a consequence of a more fundamental underlying cause: a philosophical revolution. Kurzweil's prediction concerns technology; my conception of the Singularity is more all-encompassing and fundamentals-oriented than that. What we are looking at is an intellectual revolution.

We've had intellectual revolutions before, but not of the kind I'm talking about. Kant, for instance, initiated an intellectual revolution. Christianity represented an intellectual revolution. Marxism represented an intellectual revolution. Aquinas (i.e., Aristotle) represented an intellectual revolution. Aquinas aside, these revolutions were a false start, a fuck-up, a diversion, a regression, what have you. (Absolutely I consider the Christian era until Aquinas a regression compared to the ancient Greek era. I'd go so far as to say that because of the horrendous psycho-epistemology involved - the astonishing levels of denigration of the intellect - the West suffered roughly 1,500 lost years. Of course, with the denigration of this-worldly concerns involved, these Lost Years don't and shouldn't really matter to the medievalist mystics. Nice going, anti-reason assholes!) Now, with the help of Ayn Rand's philosophy - namely her theory of concepts and general methodology - we finally have a chance to get it right.

We are now at a tipping point, intellectually. We are now finally on the verge of getting our epistemological house in order. We are finally at a point, given our historical progression of fits and starts, of reaching intellectual maturity. Kurzweil's conception of the Singularity is one of technological maturity. Technology, however, is deadly in the hands of those empowered by a deadly worldview. With the intellectual maturity, we also get a moral maturity.

Given the history of human evolution, consider humanity's intellectual and moral maturation a matter of moving beyond a lesser stage of development or maturation. Religion is like the product of a child-level epistemology, one of dependence on authority, before a more critical or questioning stage comes about. That critical or questioning stage - analogous to adolescence in an individual - began some 2,500 years ago with the advent of Philosophy. The child-epistemology religion-attachment stays around during this period until the conflict is worked out; that working out is the onset or maturation or adulthood. (David L. Norton refers to the stage of maturation in an individual as eudaimonia.) The course of history, all the way from the primordial ooze up through the present day, is ample demonstration of this development.

I mean, isn't it obvious once you think about it?

The only issue now is how much ultimately-futile opposition, denial, sneering, fear-mongering, etc. is going to get in the way of this progress toward full maturation.

America

Some of my favorite essays by Ayn Rand appear in the late 1960s and early 1970s; they represent a part of the Objectivist canon that goes underrecognized and underappreciated, because to fully recognize and appreciate them requires a certain (a) deep structural familiarity with Objectivism down to its unit-economizing psycho-epistemology and characteristically clear communication method, and (b) fundamentally American sense of life, one that the left-liberals squandered away with lousy philosophy. Some of my favorite Rand essays include "Apollo 11" (1969), "The Comprachicos" (1970-71), and "Don't Let It Go" (1972). This last, in particular, is unapologetic in its pro-Americanness. It represents a greater appreciation of America - not as it is, but as it might be and ought to be - than any of the flag-waving right-wingers (who would undermine America at every step, starting with silly and stupid amendments to the constitution to ban flag burning, as if a symbol were more important than the substantive freedom the symbol is supposed to symbolize; but it doesn't stop there: how about their reason-undermining religious tenets, eh?).

The Fountainhead is the Great American Novel. Rand's Letters are generously peppered with reverence and love for the country she emigrated to so that she could be more than nominally free to self-actualize as a novelist-philosopher. It's almost something the left-liberals simply don't get about this country, something they either forgot or never grasped, due to a Pragmatism-inspired education which inculcates Rawls-style mental processes rather than Rand-style mental processes. That alone stunts and stultifies genius and encourages wimpy conformity. What Americans qua Americans long for and hope for is a vision of man's greatness and examples of the ability to achieve it. They've already got that in its highest-paid actors, athletes, and businesspeople. Where they have yet to achieve that is in the area of the intellect, but once structural greatness is instilled at the level of the American intellect, we'll see "we've only just begun."

The left-liberals have nothing new to offer to enhance America's structural greatness; it's just more of the same old government, and bureaucrats, and public employee unions, and taxes, and crossed fingers ("maybe!") that it all doesn't fall apart on them. It's a cult not just of compromise and conformity, but of stagnation. Let's be more like the Euros and . . . stagnate. What kind of inspiring vision is that? It makes you almost want to hop right on over to the Palin camp, it's so stultifying and boring. Obama tells an audience of the converted the other today that "I am my brother's keeper." We've heard that for 2,000 years, and where has it gotten us? We are told that ethics and morality is supposed to be about restraining your own interests in the service of society. Kant, philosophy's Naked Emperor, said that ethics isn't and shouldn't be about achieving your own happiness, but about subordinating yourself to the Moral Law. The modern intellectuals just lap this nonsense right up, but it's not what America is about.

Already an observer of academia is seeing how happiness-based neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics is sweeping aside the fraudulent deontology-utilitarianism alternative, as neither of those manifestly inferior approaches tell us how to self-actualize or why that is the fundamental ethical priority. America's best home-grown intellects advance eudaemonism in ethics because, well, it's the only sound ethical system going. It's no mistake that Aristotle, the Philosopher, advocated a version of eudaemonism. At least Kant got it right that human moral life requires the free exercise of one's mind, but - aside from building that tenet upon an empty formalistic base - it's such an obviously true aspect of ethics that he doesn't get much more credit for identifying that ethical truism than other moderns like Locke, Jefferson, Spencer, Rand, Rothbard and many others deserve as well. Hell, Ayn Rand at age 21 could recognize that fundamental moral truism, in choosing America over Soviet Russia. That's the drawing power that America has to a truly functioning mind. Just let a country's minds be free, and there's pretty much no limit to the greatness that can unfold.

If you truly recognize, understand and appreciate what makes America great despite all its flaws and checkered history, you'll recognize that our best days are ahead of us, that we'll lead the rest of the world instead of follow, that Rand is on the way in and Rawls with his "let's forcibly sacrifice the most productive" ethos is on the way out, that Aristotelianism easily trumps Pragmatism as robustness trumps weakness as Roark trumps Keating, that this Friedmanite-liberaltarian pragmatist-maybe business is an aberration based on non-integration. We're going to see that Jefferson and Rand and Kubrick and Jordan and Stern and Buffett and Google can be the norm rather than the exception.

If we think of human history as analagous to human life-stages, we can identify the point in time that humanity reached its late adolescence, when it declared, via the United States Declaration of Independence, its independence from all forms of authority and tyranny over the mind of man. The rest of the world has had little choice but to follow in America's footsteps on this, or to perish. Humanity's next step is into full adulthood, and America can and will lead once again.

America - Fuck Yeah!

The problem with "maybe"

This posting is to address the fundamentally different paradigms represented by Randianism and "liberaltarianism," respectively. The thing with Ayn Rand is that she represents very basic American, Aristotle-inspired, Jefferson-mirroring respect for common sense, which of necessity includes "Lockean" natural rights of person and property. In academic-philosophical jargon, intuitionism is some kind of theoretical stand-in for "ordinary common sense." (I happen to think "intuition" is a euphemism for Randian "grasp," but that's not a theory of epistemic justification, much less any theory involving bullshit metaphysics a la Plato.) And one thing that hard-headed, uncommon common-sense does not put up with is mushy "maybe"s. Just think how "maybe" commonly infused throughout your everyday life wouldn't result in anything other than an unsustainable anti-conceptual chaos. And yet that's what the "liberaltarian" paradigm gets us. It is borne of a psycho-epistemology of chronic uncertainty and pragmatism. What Aristotelian-Jefferson-Randian American commonsense was hijacked by, was a home-grown Pragmatism.

So here's how Pragmatism clashes with common sense: Pragmatism doesn't give us any fixed, firm absolutes, whereas common sense does. Common sense tells us that it is wrong to initiate the use of physical force against human beings, since the appropriate mode of activity for human beings is that guided by the use of their own minds, and physical force (inasmuch as it is present) negates the possibility of such activity. So in common sense such behavior is wrong, and such anti-force principles are ingrained in common law and well-understood under natural-law doctrine. Pragmatism is different: it takes fallible and imperfect humans as the given, as the standard to which all practice is to be tailored. Out is the concept of reality as the ultimate given and standard-setter (as common sense dictates). It is no surprise that Pragmatism quite commonly devolves into cynicism. The fundamental orientation becomes one of taking conflicts between fallible humans as the primary and finding a means of resolving the conflict, rather than of establishing the truth of the matter. Does this not describe the entire ugly process that is politics, oh my brothers. Everything gets subject to the authority of committee decision rather than of reality. Aren't we better than this?

So here's the problem with Pragmatist-liberlatarianism: all we get is "maybe." The most unacceptable "maybe" of them all is its basic epistemic uncertainty. Humans don't function that way because humans acting with common sense are reality-oriented, and reality is an absolute. And from the radical epistemic "maybe" of Pragmatism we get a moral-social-political "maybe" on the question of whether physical force is acceptable. The Pragmatist has to go through some non-reality-based process or other of determining whether the force in some instance (or class of instances) "works," according to arbitrarily or committee-defined standards of what "works." So apparently it is an open "maybe" in the Pragmatist-liberaltarian mindset whether depriving a human being of the effective use of his own mind and judgment "works" to advance some desired end. The absolutist and common sense response to this is a facepalm in reaction to the whole contradictory notion of it all from the outset. Why the fuck do "liberaltarians" leave such a fundamental moral primary - of not using force against a rational being - up to a big fat "MAYBE"? What kind of goddamn selling point is that?

Here's the problem, then: The Pragmatist-liberaltarian readily admits that if everyone became aware of the prag-lib arguments, maybe we'd all get the nice libertarian capitalist utopia we've all been wet-dreaming about. Maybe we wouldn't even need to address more fundamental metaphysical, epistemological and ethical ideas, including ideas about human virtue and perfection and self-actualization, to get to this nice utopian scenario.

Ayn Rand wouldn't settle for this. The whole idea is to make our lives as perfect as we can, and that doesn't admit of mushy maybes. We need to know that in the good society we will be free of physical force. We need to know that our arguments are right, that anybody presented with them will be convinced that physical force is categorically evil. It is an absolute matter of fact: a people who are exposed to and independently-integratively understand Ayn Rand's ideas will by necessity be a libertarian and capitalist people in virtue of being self-perfecters intellectually and morally.

Much as F.A. Hayek's arguments are as compelling as it gets in the Pragmatist-liberaltarian paradigm, I'm gonna have to go with Ayn Rand on this, thank you very much. The world is going to be a heck of a lot better place a lot sooner as a result.

[ADDENDUM: I swear to God, I didn't see this Sully post until after posting the above. The problem with Sully, of course, is that he quotes Cowen's "maybe" stuff approvingly - as if probability, uncertainty, statistical reasoning, and so forth are the best model. I'd like to ask: did the truly great philosophers think in probabilistic terms? Is that how the reality under consideration by them - absolute, ontological reality - appears to them, in probabilistic terms? Is that how they reasoned on ethical matters? Aristotle was some version of a pragmatic philosopher, but was he vague in any way about the absolute, categorical, and binding character of abstract principles as a constitutive means of the practical? Ayn Rand - soon to be widely recognized as one of the 5 greatest philosophers of all time - certainly wasn't at all vague about the relation between the abstract and the practical. Hell, was Hayek probabilistic, uncertain, and all "maybe"-like about how decentralized and dispersed knowledge is necessary to a working social order, or that socialism fails in virtue of its constructivist-rationalism, or that liberal norms occupy a place between instinct and abstract-reason? I haven't studied Popperian epistemology - a chief influence on Hayek's thinking along with Misesian praxeology - enough to know whether it encourages or thrives on the uncertainty-ethos. My best guess is that it's very British and therefore very commonsensical along with being very, um, pragmatic and non-rationalistic. So in some sense, yeah, I think it does thrive in that context. Anyway, as theory, Hayekianism has much the similar appeal that Misesian praxeology has, but built on some kind of scientific (though avidly anti-scientistic) empiricism rather than aprioristic categories. Let's just not mistake all that for Aristotelian-Randian methodology.]