Regarding absolutes

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

Miss Rand dismisses the doubters thusly:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Challenges Re: Atlas Shrugged

Main question: How does Atlas Shrugged "fit" with the philosophical ideas underlying it?

A couple derivative questions:

(1) The idea of the men of the mind going on strike is a good premise; however, would such a strike realistically play out like the strike in Atlas? (Could there be a more realistic depiction than the one we got there, and would such a depiction give Atlas more appeal than it has?)

(2) In the novel, the main hero delivers his message in such a way that a large segment of society became convinced of Galt/Rand's ideas rather quickly. In the case of Atlas Shrugged as a delivered message, meanwhile, it's been more than 50 years and not more than a minority segment of society has even become sympathetic toward that message. Don't these disparate examples (one fiction, and one reality) indicate namely one thing - that the depiction of events as they unfold in Atlas defy correct philosophical hierarchy? Rand's expectation in Atlas is that mass-intellectually-stunted minds would be able to listen to and integrate a three hour radio address in which things like fundamental principles of metaphysics are invoked. But this is a comprachico-ized audience Galt was addressing! How do you get anything other than mass incomprehension and probably a descent into barbarianism once society collapses like it does at the climax of Atlas?

How do Galt and the strikers at the very end of the book expect that they'd be coming back to a society ready to implement laissez-faire capitalism? They're not going to be coming back to a society that's been enlightened by the events they have just suffered through; societal change just doesn't happen that way - not when the society has been comprachico-ized.

There's a reason Ayn Rand ended up writing "The Comprachicos." It was a result of a long process of her coming to terms with how her rationally-compelling novel fell on so many deaf and dumb and evasive ears. For the first two years after her novel came out, it was mostly psychological torture for her, trying to come to grips with how there could be so amazing a national cognitive meltdown, such that she and her ideas hardly seem to stand a chance. How could there be so much fucking ridiculous irrationality out there? Why do prominent university professors even today ignorantly and incompetently bash her so? What the fuck has gone wrong with the world, that reason and values are spit upon so, with little to no effective recourse? How do you muster the will to fight on, and do so while not letting anger and bitterness get the best of you at times? There is most definitely an anger and bitterness coming out in "The Comprachicos," perhaps the most withering anger and bitterness in any of her writings, because of the tragic nature of the cognitive damage done to so many people as she describes there. If it weren't for fucks like Comprachico Leiter and derivative Comprachicos, we wouldn't be in this mess.

Anyway, I think there's a choice to be made between "The Comprachicos" and the plot of Atlas Shrugged. And I really fucking love "The Comprachicos" as a piece of philosophical analysis, in how well it gets to the essence and the root of a pervasive problem. It may well be her most significant non-fiction work after Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Let's put it this way: it's the most significant essay of her most intellectually-mature stage post-ITOE. There were certain things she had figured out by 1970 that she hadn't by 1957. (It helped that she was a full-time philosopher after 1957.) Among those things was an identification of the intellectual problem of rationalism, or the construction and treatment of ideas in detachment from their proper roots in sensory experience. One big conceit of rationalism - to wax Hayekian - is the idea that you could swiftly and beneficially make a new order in defiance of how institutions evolve over time. Rand's genuine expectation - one shared even more extremely and naively by a young Leonard Peikoff - was that Atlas would change the world fairly swiftly. She simply did not anticipate the kind of massive and widespread irrationality, incomprehension, injustice, pathological cynicism, etc. she actually found in response. The basic cause of that response, of course, was a cultural and institutional backdrop that simply requires time and a process of education in order to change significantly. And you really don't have such a process at the end of Atlas.

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...

Platonic Realism vs. Science, Evolution, Etc.

Question: How badly does Platonic Realism interfere with science, secularism, evolutionary biology, etc.?

The scientistic response to Platonic Realism (PR) is that it violates scientific principles - empirical observability and verifiability (I'll leave "falsifiability" aside for now), testability, explanatory power, and other related concepts.

It's safe to say that PR is anti-scientific because it violates a central principle of cognition as such: induction. A fully philosophically-worked-out theory of induction wasn't made possible until the 20th century; that theory itself, of course, would have to be inductively-based. Induction is axiomatic-level; to try to deny it is to reaffirm it. Plato's Realism by its very nature is not inductively-based, but pure floating abstraction in the most applicable and fitting sense. By consequence it has no explanatory power (philosophically, this irresolvable problem is stated in such terms as "problem of partaking," a nice precursor to Cartesian "mind-body problem" given the basic principle involved: the commonsense-impossible "interaction" between the supernatural and the natural). By being an intrinsically floating theory, it cannot be reduced to the perceptual, hence the reason there is no testability, observability, or verifiability.

The question that initially occurred to me in the context of this thread was whether PR is empirically false given the established theory of evolution. The question came to mind because in evolution there are no Eternal Forms, but always transitional forms, and that the form of Man (in scientific terms: human DNA) was not actualized until some point in time, which means the form of Man is contingent, finite, etc. I'm guessing - without having given the matter much thought at all yet - that there is a proposed workaround of some sort to shelter PR from this particular refutation. After all, we might simply say that it is arbitrary, referencing beings entirely beyond the realm of the empirical, making it empirically unverifiable as well as unfalsifiable.

And adept advocate of PR might say that its not being "empirical" is not a philosophical problem, and that philosophy needn't be beholden to science (rather than vice versa). But the more adept philosopher than that, will say that PR is nonetheless arbtirary and fails to be inductive.

Aristotle is in a weird limbo-area on all this. His philosophical method was admirably inductive, but he was still limited by his own variant of Plato's Realism, also known as Moderate Realism. The first, first question I asked myself in the context of this thread was, "What was holding Aristotle back from positing what Darwin did over 2,000 years later? Was he lacking in the relevant empirical observations?" (I'll note here that Ayn Rand did not given an opinion on the theory of evolution when the subject came up. My best guess is that she did not regard herself as someone in a position - such as that of a biologist - to render a verdict on the matter. However, biology was one of Aristotle's chief areas of focus.) The supposed positing of the seed of evolutionary theory would be based on a straightforward observation of similarity between man and very similar animals - it might well have to involve higher primates. But if Form is thought to be eternal and unchanging, then the very notion of humans and other primates having a common ancestor might not even occur.

I'll just note in passing that PR as well as Moderate (Aristotelian-Thomistic) Realism is all-too-convenient cover for creationist views about our origins. Indeed, the notion of there being such a thing as Eternal Form, absent a Creator, is weird, to say the least, and probably incoherent. Aquinas performed a most understandable integration in his context. Let not this inference stand in place of the other (cosmological and ontological) arguments for God's existence, however.

The very problems stated here are the main reason scientists have basically cast off philosophy as useless to their field. Post-Aquinas and the Scholastics - with Bacon and others - modern science, called "natural philosophy" at the time, took on its own form independent of philosophy. At the same time, it has also had remarkable practical success - way more success than the humanities have had, in the meantime. (The Humanities are so screwed up that there may well have been regression since that time.) Some (understandably ignorant) scientists have used this track record of comparative progress as a victory cry for science and a reason to dismiss philosophy.

Here's what happened with the development of science: Well, first, there was Aquinas bringing Aristotle back into the fold, bringing with him a revival of this-worldly concerns. This led to the Renaissance and to the scientific revolution. Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas, however, would have been of limited use, at best, in formulating the basic methods of the natural sciences. Now, simply as a matter of practical necessity, rational principles of natural philosophy had to be discovered and formulated - and they were. The basic methodological principle? Induction.

Induction is the basic method of learning and cognition. It involves a painstaking process of organizing sensory observations into a coherent generalizable whole, in which later observations and theories build upon the earlier ones. Einstein, for instance, had the same knowledge-base Newton had to work with, and then some. So in some important, crucial and relevant sense, Einstein's theories did not contradict Newton's. Newton wasn't all of a sudden overturned and repudiated; Newton was working from a more limited base of knowledge, is all.

This point might not matter much to the practical scientist - their working methods get results, and that's mainly what matters to them - but it does indicate a proper epistemological approach. Theories can turn out to be wrong; observations cannot; the role of epistemology is to determine what conclusions and theories are warranted given the knowledge-base, such that later conclusions do not contradict earlier ones. (Philosophy's role is to explain in underlying terms how it is that induction is practical; it has something to do with these things called identity and causation, concepts pretty darn well undermined by Pragmatism and plenty other bastardizations of inductivist method to come out of analytic philosophy in the last century-plus. Thanks a lot, Kant.)

The reason that science made leaps and bounds over philosophy in the last few hundred years is that science was based on induction, while philosophy was not. Philosophy, at the hands of Descartes and the rest, floundered; these thinkers failed to identify at root the principles of induction as applied to all areas, including philosophy itself. Their basic anti-inductive psycho-epistemological paradigm, emulated en masse by philosophers to this very day? Rationalism. (And a heaping dose of social metaphysics thrown in for good measure.) That paradigm, however, is about to change, thank Rand.

(Note: I write this without yet having read Harriman's The Logical Leap.)