Autolykis:I think it's a problem because it means that one can choose his life over the lives of others. As repugnant as it may be to say, serial murderers like Jeffrey Dahmer murdered others to relieve some uneasiness they felt otherwise. In so doing, they saw themselves as undoubtedly serving their own lives. But they certainly weren't serving life in general, as their actions lead to the deaths of others.
tunk:You could, at any moment, point to "live bad guys", immoral people who happen to have a pulse. Yet mere appearances tell you nothing about whether their long-run survival is assured. As Smith puts it, this is like being a doctor, seeing a patient walk into your clinic, and concluding, "You're fine; after all, you're alive!" Just because you can get away with cheating on a principle in a particular instance does not make cheating a valid norm, in the same way that the fact you might survive if you jaywalk with a blindfold doesn't make blindfolded jaywalking a good street-crossing policy. And indeed, "bad guys", if they survive and flourish for long periods, can only do so to their extent that they practise Randian virtues more times than not. So, someone who "cheats" is pitting themselves against their fellow man, undermining the kind of society that makes it possible for them to pursue their values. They have to commit more wrongs to cover up the first wrongs, increasing the chance of being caught. It is only possible to cheat insofar as there remains anyone off of whom you may be a parasite, which decreases in likelihood the more you cheat. And of course, people who lie, kill, rape, steal, etc. usually foster severe inner psychological problems. Whereas all of this can be avoided by treating your fellow man as someone with dignity who represents a potential value to you in trade [until proven otherwise]. This is why egoism isn't predatory, but in fact demands a lot of discipline from you.
So, someone who "cheats" is pitting themselves against their fellow man, undermining the kind of society that makes it possible for them to pursue their values. They have to commit more wrongs to cover up the first wrongs, increasing the chance of being caught. It is only possible to cheat insofar as there remains anyone off of whom you may be a parasite, which decreases in likelihood the more you cheat. And of course, people who lie, kill, rape, steal, etc. usually foster severe inner psychological problems. Whereas all of this can be avoided by treating your fellow man as someone with dignity who represents a potential value to you in trade [until proven otherwise]. This is why egoism isn't predatory, but in fact demands a lot of discipline from you.
Serial killing is not rational (in the sense of "virtuous"). It is not a means to actualizing your human potentiality, but in fact severely undercuts it. These people may have seen themselves as furthering their lives, but that was a dire miscalculation. "Life" is more than just breathing and having a pulse; it requires that you flourish. And "removing uneasiness", as I said many times, is a praxeological statement about action, not an ethical goal of action:
I was [...] attempting to guard against the misinterpretation that "flourishing" simply means feeling good. Feeling good is a necessary but not sufficient condition for flourishing, since lots of destructive practises can make you feel good, at least in the short term. The point is to feel good as a result of doing the right things.
The virtues life requires are not cheatcodes that you can adhere to whenever you happen want to get ahead. Life's means are virtues and traits of character to be seriously and devotedly pondered, practised, cultivated and perfected throughout the whole of one's existence. They are, indeed, merely instrumental, but for optimal survival must be seen as virtual ends-in-themselves. Killers are clearly not serious devotants to their flourishing.
What does it mean to "serve life in general"? How can I evaluate what serves others lives? What if they don't want me to serve their lives? What if it will hurt my life to serve their lives? What if my honest attempt to serve their lives hurts their lives? Rand's whole freaking project was to establish that self-sacrifice is not necessarily synonymous with moral behaviour. If your own life is not worth living for yourself, then your own life is not worth living for others, and others lives are not worth living for yours, and everyone should commit suicide immediately in order to be as holy, hygienic, and altruistic as possible. Before man can confidently live for others, he must first live for himself.
An interesting book on this subject that I'm planning to read is Kathleen Touchstone's Then Athena Said, which uses game theory to establish Objectivist hueristics for ethical decision-making in lots of different scenarios, rape, murder, theft, charity, reproduction, etc.
But maybe it's worth it to me to risk my life to do something that is "wrong." For example, you mentioned smoking cigarettes... perhaps 1 pack / week is an acceptable level of risk to my life that I judge the immediate gratification to be worth the risk that I end up in the hospital with lung cancer. The very fact that I can weigh my life against my pleasure from smoking means that "smoking is wrong" is only true in a much weaker sense than "murder is wrong" is true.
I don't think "murder is wrong" is merely a statement that "don't commit murder because you won't like the consequences if you are caught." There's something stronger here, we mean "murder is wrong" no matter whether the person who does it gets caught, no matter whether they suffer any consequences. I do not believe it's wrong in any kind of objective or universal sense but I do think that it's wrong in a stronger sense than just how bad you'll feel about being punished if you get caught.
"Your life depends on it" is not a satisfactory answer to me. I take my life into my hands every time I get in a car but murder is wrong in a much stronger sense than any of these pedestrian things I do while taking my life into my hands, like riding in a car or smoking a cigarette.
Here, I think we cross the threshold from philosophy back into praxeology and linguistics. Murder is wrong because people generally hold it to be. This should not be mistaken for a statement about ethics. Rather, it's a statement about how people use language. If I say "murder is indifferent" or "murder is good" I'm speaking every bit as much gibberish as if I said "trumpets sound green" - it's just not how language is used and these statements are all unintelligible for the same reason.
Ethical discussion frequently goes awry on this issue. It's about who controls what. As an individual I control my own actions and only I can assess the psychic satisfaction I derive from various courses of action. Jeffrey Dahmer may very well have felt his behavior was worth risking prison and the death sentence. We would not say that Gandhi was acting immorally because he risked imprisonment because we understand that Gandhi had taken into account the suffering he would endure in prison and still felt it was worthwhile. Similarly, we should not say that Dahmer was acting immorally because he risked imprisonment... after all, he probably considered the possibility of being caught, imprisoned and put to death and still felt his actions were worth it to himself.
However, as an individual, I do not control language. Language is not decided by any individual. "Serial killing and cannibalism are wrong" is something that is not in my hands. I don't get to decide whether this is true or not. The speakers of a language determine its use. So, Dahmer was acting immorally because that's what serial killing and cannibalism are: wrong. Just like the sky is blue, serial killing and cannibalism are wrong. Everybody knows this and no abstruse ethical argument is required to establish this so long as we are careful to acknowledge that "serial killing and cannibalism are wrong" is not normative, that is, that it is not a proposition which any given individual must assent to. You are free to believe otherwise and you may (like Dahmer) really feel otherwise as a result of sociopathy or other mental disorder. But just because you feel differently than the rest of us doesn't mean you get to redefine the language. Serial killing and cannibalism remain wrong even if you (genuinely) feel otherwise.
Clayton -
Clayton:For example, you mentioned smoking cigarettes... perhaps 1 pack / week is an acceptable level of risk to my life that I judge the immediate gratification to be worth the risk that I end up in the hospital with lung cancer.
Am I not making myself clear? How something feels is not a reliable guide to action. Smoking a pack might "feel" good. On the other hand, playing soccer with friends or taking care of your nephew or writing a song or directing a play might also feel good. Your feelings are the result of biology, but also of your standards and valuations, which you have the will to alter as a rational agent. The point of eudaimonism is to feel good as a result of doing the right things. This is the Randian conception of self-esteem. The more you practise virtue, the more it will start to feel good. (This may sound like a ridiculous grade-school slogan, but it really isn't considering that by virtue, I mean obeying your own rational interests.) As I conceded repeatedly, it is possible to cheat on a principle once or twice and not die. But why have principles if you aren't going to abstain from breaking them (the virtue of integrity)? Why even attempt to optimize life? Why live?
A world in which every man is a virtuous agent who treats his fellow man as an end-in-himself not to plunder but to trade with is a world worth living in. Every attempt you make at cultivating individual virtue is a contribution to that goal. Contrary to some, it is in your self-interest to have a healthy community. (The Objectivist explanation for Ghandi-types. And I didn't say it was immoral to risk imprisonment. Imprisonment for a just cause is certainly virtuous. Imprisonment for being a parasite is a deserved punishment.) The virtue of justice, for example, requires evaluating people with desert and acting accordingly. You should not entertain ,as a matter of justice, someone who manipulates and abuses you.
I take my life into my hands every time I get in a car but murder is wrong in a much stronger sense than any of these pedestrian things I do while taking my life into my hands, like riding in a car or smoking a cigarette.
tunk:Every action you take potentially has a long-run consequence on your life, and many times, when those consequences are far removed we ignore them. That doesn't make them any less real. [Rationality qua moral virtue requires you to seriously weigh them]
Let's separate ethics and politics like we separated ethics and praxeology. I've been discussing why it is not in your interests to murder, which convential moral philosophy dismisses as a non-issue but which is actually a very important question insofar as motivation for respecting rights is concerned. That's to say, I've been concerned with non-murder as a moral rule. Non-murder as a right, as part of a politics that provides a restrictive meta-normative framework for individual flourishing, is a wholly different question and aptly dealt with in Norms of Liberty by the Dougs. Normativity and meta-normativity are separate. Rand deals with one, Rothbard/Hoppe/the Dougs deal with the other.
Clayton:So, Dahmer was acting immorally because that's what serial killing and cannibalism are: wrong. Just like the sky is blue, serial killing and cannibalism are wrong. Everybody knows this and no abstruse ethical argument is required to establish this so long as we are careful to acknowledge that "serial killing and cannibalism are wrong" is not normative, that is, that it is not a proposition which any given individual must assent to.
I don't like this style of argument. I understand that you aren't arguing for norms here but just establishing linguistic facts, but is it even true that we all "know" that murder is wrong? Whence psycopathy, then? And if one was to base an ethics on intuition, how could you distinguish moral knowledge from mere prejudices? And why only stick to questions on which there is a moral majority? Does everyone "know" whether abortion or homosexuality are wrong? What if people's preferences changed? And why even decide based on majorities? Why not go for minority intuitions of a very smart and well-bred group of people and put them all in charge as enlightened dictators? And how to make all of this non-arbitrary? This is all quite shaky. I prefer deduction from axioms.
tunk:Serial killing is not rational (in the sense of "virtuous").
In whose sense of "virtuous"? And what force in the universe makes serial murderers follow that sense of "virtue". (To ask the question is to answer it.)
tunk:It is not a means to actualizing your human potentiality, but in fact severely undercuts it. These people may have seen themselves as furthering their lives, but that was a dire miscalculation."Life" is more than just breathing and having a pulse; it requires that you flourish.
Jeffrey Dahmer apparently thought he was "flourishing" as he murdered one person after another. My point is that notions such as "human potentiality", "miscalculation", and "flourishing" are inherently subjective. There are no objectively correct interpretations of those notions.
tunk:And "removing uneasiness", as I said many times, is a praxeological statement about action, not an ethical goal of action: I was [...] attempting to guard against the misinterpretation that "flourishing" simply means feeling good. Feeling good is a necessary but not sufficient condition for flourishing, since lots of destructive practises can make you feel good, at least in the short term. The point is to feel good as a result of doing the right things.
But that begs the question - what are "the right things"? I submit that there are no such things. That is, "the right things" (and therefore also "the wrong things") do not exist at all.
tunk:The virtues life requires are not cheatcodes that you can adhere to whenever you happen want to get ahead. Life's means are virtues and traits of character to be seriously and devotedly pondered, practised, cultivated and perfected throughout the whole of one's existence. They are, indeed, merely instrumental, but for optimal survival must be seen as virtual ends-in-themselves. Killers are clearly not serious devotants to their flourishing.
Again, by whose standard of "optimal"? Yours? What makes me necessarily follow your standard and not some other?
tunk:What does it mean to "serve life in general"? How can I evaluate what serves others lives? What if they don't want me to serve their lives? What if it will hurt my life to serve their lives? What if my honest attempt to serve their lives hurts their lives? Rand's whole freaking project was to establish that self-sacrifice is not necessarily synonymous with moral behaviour. If your own life is not worth living for yourself, then your own life is not worth living for others, and others lives are not worth living for yours, and everyone should commit suicide immediately in order to be as holy, hygienic, and altruistic as possible. Before man can confidently live for others, he must first live for himself.
Why are you injecting this stuff about "self-sacrifice"? I didn't bring that up at all.
tunk: An interesting book on this subject that I'm planning to read is Kathleen Touchstone's Then Athena Said, which uses game theory to establish Objectivist hueristics for ethical decision-making in lots of different scenarios, rape, murder, theft, charity, reproduction, etc.
Thanks. Maybe I'll take a look at it someday. In the meantime, I look forward to your response.
The keyboard is mightier than the gun.
Non parit potestas ipsius auctoritatem.
Voluntaryism Forum
First:
Clayton:I don't think "murder is wrong" is merely a statement that "don't commit murder because you won't like the consequences if you are caught." There's something stronger here, we mean "murder is wrong" no matter whether the person who does it gets caught, no matter whether they suffer any consequences. I do not believe it's wrong in any kind of objective or universal sense but I do think that it's wrong in a stronger sense than just how bad you'll feel about being punished if you get caught.
Then later:
Clayton:However, as an individual, I do not control language. Language is not decided by any individual. "Serial killing and cannibalism are wrong" is something that is not in my hands. I don't get to decide whether this is true or not. The speakers of a language determine its use. So, Dahmer was acting immorally because that's what serial killing and cannibalism are: wrong. Just like the sky is blue, serial killing and cannibalism are wrong. Everybody knows this and no abstruse ethical argument is required to establish this so long as we are careful to acknowledge that "serial killing and cannibalism are wrong" is not normative, that is, that it is not a proposition which any given individual must assent to. You are free to believe otherwise and you may (like Dahmer) really feel otherwise as a result of sociopathy or other mental disorder. But just because you feel differently than the rest of us doesn't mean you get to redefine the language. Serial killing and cannibalism remain wrong even if you (genuinely) feel otherwise.
To the untrained mind, the latter paragraph would seem to contradict the former. Specifically, you first claim that you don't believe murder to be "wrong in any kind of objective or universal sense", but then later you seem to claim otherwise: "So, Dahmer was acting immorally because that's what serial killing and cannibalism are: wrong. Just like the sky is blue, serial killing and cannibalism are wrong." While the word "blue" in the English language is used to refer to the (set of) wavelength(s) of visible light that the daytime sky typically reflects, the word "wrong" cannot refer to serial killing and cannibalism the same way. As you yourself noted, "right" and "wrong" aren't facts about the world. Instead, they're value judgements, and thus necessarily subjective.
I don't like this style of argument. I understand that you aren't arguing for norms here but just establishing linguistic facts, but is it even true that we all "know" that murder is wrong? Whence psycopathy, then?
Clearly, not all without exception. But unless we descend into logical nihilism, language has definite meaning (suceeds in communicating thoughts between people) and this meaning proceeds out of "common usage" or "accepted usage" or what-have-you.
And if one was to base an ethics on intuition, how could you distinguish moral knowledge from mere prejudices?
Note that I'm not saying that "serial killing and cannibalism are wrong" is intuitively true; it is definitely true within the context of language just like "the sky is blue" is definitely true, not merely intuitively true.
As for criticizing moral ideas within society (which we can observe in language), I think you've struck on the role of religion, academic ethics, etc. We need specialists who spend their time thinking big thoughts and investigating the reasons why people generally believe A to be good and B to be bad and whether those are good reasons or poor reasons and the providing persuasive critiques of and acceptable alternatives to the prevailing moral ideas. I don't believe there is any gold standard or One Right Way to do this. I think it's a never-ending process of discovery and debate, much like science.
Note that Rand fulfilled precisely this sort of role. She disagreed with many prevailing moral sentiments, she investigated the reasons why these moral sentiments are prevalent and she offered persuasive critiques and acceptable (to Randians, at least) alternatives to them. Whether her ideas will stand the test of time remains to be seen.
And why only stick to questions on which there is a moral majority? Does everyone "know" whether abortion or homosexuality are wrong?
Let's shift to something slightly less politically charged - prostitution. There are good reasons why people don't want prostitutes walking the streets. It's indecorous and men who frequent prostitutes are more likely to have serious marital problems since they are relieved of the sexual pressure to make peace with their wife, and so on. They are more likely to have illegitimate children. Single men who might be having children and raising them to contribute to society are relieved of the burden to seek a wife since they can simply visit a prostitute which is distinctly less bothersome than marriage. But, economic analysis shows that it is a really bad idea to make prostitution illegal.
But there is a third choice... everyone believes that prostitution is immoral but nobody makes any serious attempt to exterminate it. This is how prostitution was handled for thousands of years until the last couple centuries. Like abortion and homosexuality, prostitution has long been considered immoral. Rather than simply concluding "our ancestors were simply unenlightened, prejudicial bigots," I think we need to look deeper and ask if maybe there's a reason why this was the case. It may just be that widespread moral disapproval combined with tacit legality is the most harmonious way to handle these kinds of fringe behaviors.
What if people's preferences changed? And why even decide based on majorities? Why not go for minority intuitions of a very smart and well-bred group of people and put them all in charge as enlightened dictators? And how to make all of this non-arbitrary? This is all quite shaky. I prefer deduction from axioms.
Well, the study of language is its own field and it works from its own axioms like any other field. Obviously, language itself makes a poor axiomatic base. I'm not saying that ethics is "majority vote". All I'm saying is that sociopathic moral ideas may be genuinely held by individuals but that this does not constitute the slightest challenge to de facto morality (the moral ideas held by humans, generally).
To summarize my views, I see three categories of intertwined study related to ethics:
- Descriptive morality (morals as they are in the general population) - Moral criticism (expert commentary on the reasons why people hold the morals they do and the deficiencies or strengths of these reasons) - Moral practice (applying moral knowledge to one's own choices and decisions)
With you, I see 'morality' and 'ethics' as essentially synonymous, with the former having a slightly more colloquial connotation and the latter having a slightly more formal or academic connotation.
Autolykos...are you joking? I spent like a dozen posts elaborating on the Objectivist account of morality. Every single one of your questions has already been answered. Please read what I had to say.
No, I'm not joking. I've read this entire thread, and with all due respect, I'm not satisfied by any of your answers. Please try again.
uh oh, you're not "satisfied". if you have any actual criticisms of what i said you are free to bring them up
Autolykos:In whose sense of "virtuous"? [...] what are "the right things"?
tunk:The argument for ethical principles just goes like this: If you want to achieve goal F, you "should" do A, B, C, and "shouldn't" do X, Y, Z. You want to achieve goal F. Therefore, you "should" do A, B, C, and "shouldn't" do X, Y, Z. [Goal F is life qua flourishing, life-optimization, the standard the adoption of which allows you to act.]
[Goal F is life qua flourishing, life-optimization, the standard the adoption of which allows you to act.]
tunk:[B]ecause all human beings accept the basic “ought” that they should do what is necessary to promote their lives (or else they would not and could not act), they accept the other “oughts” that follow: namely, those principles that promote human flourishing. [...] These for Rand are Rationality, Honesty, Independence, Integrity, Justice, Productiveness, and Pride.
Autolykos:And what force in the universe makes serial murderers follow that sense of "virtue".
tunk:The purpose of a natural ethic is not to establish some kind of moral safety net below which you cannot fall, that human beings never morally err. The point of a natural ethic is to establish what is moral error and what isn't.
Autolykos:My point is that notions such as "human potentiality", "miscalculation", and "flourishing" are inherently subjective. There are no objectively correct interpretations of those notions. [...] Again, by whose standard of "optimal"? Yours?
tunk:When I say "objective" flourishing, I mean objectivedependent on the context of the individual. [Every individual life has different needs because people are different.] That's to say, if I was provided with every relevant bit of information about you, who you are, where you are going, your ambitions, your failures, your past, present, and future, your loves, your hates, your virtues, your vices, etc., I would be able at any given time to inform you whether your actions will contribute to your long-term survival. This is life's function as an objective standard. Of course, human beings are not omniscient. In reality, the individual must adopt whatever ends he and only he judges are necessary for his flourishing [...], and he could very well err. [...] But this does not erode flourishing's objective status. Life is still a standard; it still distinguishes things you should do from things you shouldn't. The only qualification is that what fits into these categories is more often than not left for you to discover. In practise, life's objectivity is relative, but relativity is not the negation of objectivity.
But this does not erode flourishing's objective status. Life is still a standard; it still distinguishes things you should do from things you shouldn't. The only qualification is that what fits into these categories is more often than not left for you to discover. In practise, life's objectivity is relative, but relativity is not the negation of objectivity.
Autolykos:"the right things" (and therefore also "the wrong things") do not exist at all.
prove it kthnx
I'm not trying to claim that there is a decision procedure that can be run by anyone to determine the truth/falsity of the phrase "serial killing and cannibalism are wrong"; it's not an objective proposition. I'm merely making a statement about the semantic rules of language and what this tells us about human morality (it doesn't tell us everything, but it tells us a lot). While right/wrong are not objective facts like the wavelengths of the visible light reflected from the sky, neither are they merely subjective truths.
For example, "chocolate is delicious" is not in the same category as "murder is wrong" even though both express subjective sentiments about the world. The reason is that there is a high degree of variation of tastes regarding chocolate but there is virtually no variation in sentiment regarding the morality of murder. Hence, we treat "chocolate is disgusting" as an equally valid expression as "chocolate is delicious." Both express intelligible sentiments about chocolate. But we do not treat "murder is fun" as an equally valid expression as "murder is wrong" because nobody but a sociopath thinks murder is fun. It is basically never true that someone genuinely believes that murder is fun so it's essentially a semantically meaningless expression.
Also note that I'm not drawing a hard and fast rule here, it's something that varies by degree. It's not majority vote. tunk mentioned abortion and homosexuality which are issues over which there is significant variation but about which disagreement is so strong that people tend not to think of one's position on these issues as merely a matter of taste. People form extremely strong opinions on these issues despite the fact that there is nothing close to a popular consensus on their moral status. I take this as an indication that these behaviors reside in a different moral category than crimes such as murder or rape about which almost everybody has the same strong feeling (that they're wrong).
Not sure I've clarified anything here... my brain's a bit muddled today, feel free to push back.
tunk:uh oh, you're not "satisfied".
That's right.
tunk:if you have any actual criticisms of what i said you are free to bring them up
I already have.
I have no idea what "life qua flourishing, life-optimization, the standard the adoption of which allows you to act" means. Regardless, no one is bound to choose it as a/the goal.
I've already addressed this. Promoting one's own "flourishing" - whatever he thinks that means! - is not at all the same as promoting human "flourishing" in general. In other words, the other "oughts" you mention do not follow from the notion that everyone accepts "the basic 'ought' that they should do what is necessary to promote their lives". I think you'd be more intellectually honest if, instead of saying "those principles that promote human flourishing", you said "those principles which promote my idea of human flourishing".
The only way I can make sense of this is if you really mean that the point of a natural ethic is to define what is moral error and what isn't. Moral error isn't a fact about the (human) world.
By "objective dependent on the context of the individual", do you mean "subjective"? If so, why not simply use that word? It's shorter.
But even then, no one is bound to consider "long-term survival" as his standard of ethics. Indeed, what does "long-term survival" even mean? When does "the long term" begin? When does it end? Furthermore, you seem to equivocate between "long-term survival" as the "proper" ethical standard and "(human) flourishing" as such. You've stated before that by referring to life as "the ultimate end" of man, you don't mean mere physical survival, yet you seem to reverse your position above. Which is it?
tunk: Autolykos:"the right things" (and therefore also "the wrong things") do not exist at all. prove it kthnx
Keep in mind that I don't mean "the right/wrong things" vis-a-vis some chosen goal(s) or end(s). I mean per se. If "rightness" or "wrongness" were a quality inherent in any/every given action, then it would necessitate a particular outcome for any/every given action. Yet the outcomes for actions obviously vary. Indeed, some actions which people think should never happen still do happen, perhaps all too often. For example, sometimes people get away with murder and sometimes people are imprisoned or worse for crimes they didn't commit. All this goes to show that justice is not a force operating on the universe like gravity or electromagnetism.
you clearly didn't read anything i wrote, or if you did, understand it. this is a ridiculous waste of my time.
tunk:you clearly didn't read anything i wrote, or if you did, understand it. this is a ridiculous waste of my time.
As far as I can tell, you defined "objective flourishing", and that only once:
tunk:Objective flourishing means surviving in the most optimal way.
That seems to lead us back to the question: under whose standard of "optimal"? How am I bound in any way to agree with your (or anyone else's) standard? If by "optimal" you implicitly mean vis-a-vis the individual's goals/ends, then we're back to the thorny issue of individuals being able to choose goals that necessarily hurt others. Those individuals who do so would then have a notion of "surviving in the most optimal way" that you would consider to be sub-optimal. Who's objectively correct here? My answer is, neither of you.
I'm sorry if I somehow sounded harsh. That wasn't my intention. Nor was it my intention to intimidate you away from this thread. I'm not a troll and I am serious. However, reading what you wrote and understanding it are two different things. If I don't understand something, I tend to ask questions about it. Simply repeating what you already wrote won't help me understand it, I'm afraid.
Autolykos:Nor was it my intention to intimidate you away from this thread.
It would take a lot more to do that. And I didn't define flourishing only once. I gave several definitions for it, life-optimization, living in such a way as to best be able to continue to live, etc. If you don't understand these definitions, I will elaborate, again.
For starters, we can both agree that actions can only be "evaluated" in light of a standard. A goal acts as a standard. E.g., if your goal is to do really well in school, it is "good" to study and "bad" to loaf around. Studying will optimize achievement of your goal. For my purposes here, no action is "good" or "bad" in and of itself, but only in relation to an end adopted by the acting agent.
Follow me?
Now, "life" is also a goal that can serve as a standard, but it is very unique. Life isn't "achieved" in a final, ultimate sense, the way many other goals are. Instead, life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If your goal is life, in other words, you have to do stuff to maintain your life like you maintain a car or a nephew. This is because as a living being you face a continual alternative between existence and non-existence, and every decision you make has some kind of ramification, large or small, on the outcome.
Still follow me?
What is my definition of "life", in the sense of life being a goal? "The promotion of optimal conditions for the operation of your essence across your natural lifespan." That's to say, maximizing your chances for survival, not simply for the short-term, but for the whole duration of the life which nature has made available to you. Of course, you will eventually die, but a natural death isn't the object of your choice, so it's not relevant here. If "life" is your goal, you "should" strive to do what's best to maintain it (optimize it) at all possible times. Acting to live is acting for long-run survival.
Ok? Now what should you do to survive? Can we know this a priori and shove all human beings into one cookie-cutter survival plan? Or is it necessarily contextual and "subjective"?
The Randian answer is, both. Because life is a standard, like "doing well in school", there are things we can objectively evaluate by mere armchair speculation and inferences from theory and practise that every individual should not do if life is their goal. There is a world out there that operates according to the laws of cause and effect, and actions have objective consequences. For example, you should not get obese and put yourself at risk of heart disease. You should not lack self-esteem and put yourself at risk of depression. You should not overdose on perscription drugs. You should not slice your head off with a machete. You should not, in general, do obviously self-destructive things. By the same token, there are also things every agent with life as their goal should do. Eat 3 meals a day, get lots of rest, avoid stress, do regular exercise, etc. If your stomach tells you you are hungry, it is objectively good to eat and objectively bad to ignore the hunger signal and not to eat, assuming life as the goal. As I said earlier, if you think you might be sick and you make an educated guess that you are probably not and and see a doctor just to be sure, you are doing something objectively good. If, however, you do have such a reason, and you willfully ignore it, you doing something objectively bad. I hope what I am saying strikes you as reasonable.
(Incidentally, it seems to me that "good" and "bad" are not clear cut categories, but opposite points on a spectrum. The "good" end represents minimal evasion of the facts of reality, the "bad" end represents maximal evasion. If you see a doctor you are, ceteris paribus, more good than if you don't. If life is your goal, you should try to be as close to "100% GOOD" as possible.)
It starts to become clear that "life" is more than just making sure you have a pulse. Life requires not just physical health, but psychological health. Generally, you will be more likely to sustain yourself if you are confident your life is worth sustaining. As Rand would say, you must pursue "spiritual" values as well as material values. You should, for example, pursue activities which give you a sense of self-esteem, e.g. productive work, fruitful companionship, hobbies, etc.
This is where it starts to get fuzzy. We can't know what exactly, for every individual, will give him self-esteem. We can only perscribe it as a general principle, but leave the application of that principle to the agent. Ok? This is what I mean when I say life qua goal is relative. However, it is still objective. There is still a standard that guides your actions. It is not "subjective", if by that term you mean not possible to evaluate from outside the agent. (It is "subjective" in the sense that only the agent makes such evaluations in practise, but since the term suggests different meanings I don't use it.) On the contrary, as I wrote before:
tunk:[I]f I was provided with every relevant bit of information about you, who you are, where you are going, your ambitions, your failures, your past, present, and future, your loves, your hates, your virtues, your vices, etc., I would be able at any given time to inform you whether your actions will contribute to your long-term survival. This is life's function as an objective standard.
If you told me that playing sports raises your self-esteem, and you play sports in a way that is likely not to be self-destructive (e.g. you don't think chugging bleach is a sport), I could evaluate your actions as "good", assuming I had unimpeachable reasoning powers and assuming life was your goal. Get it? This is the Randian argument for moral principles. If you define "flourishing" as optimal living, living in such a way as to best be able to continue to live, as described above, then life = life qua survival = life qua flourishing. And I didn't mean "human flourishing" as in the flourishing of everybody, but "human flourishing" as individual flourishing. Your flourishing. How your flourishing relates to other people is another question we can deal with later. For now, I just want to make the case for rational self-interest.
Now, you might say this is all well and good, but why should I pursue life? Where's the obligation?
Here is where the argument gets subtle. I believe I was clearest when I put it to Clayton:
tunk:If your goal is "life" [...] then there are certain things you "ought" to do. Faced with the alternative between being obese or doing regular exercise, for example, you "ought" to do the latter. Faced with the alternative between spending an afternoon bonking yourself on the head with a hammer or doing your math homework, you "ought" to do the latter. (For self-evident reasons, I hope.) But before all of these alternatives, you are faced with one basic alternative: acting or not acting, choosing or not choosing. Life says you "ought" to do the former. An agent with life as an ultimate value "ought" to act and choose. Consequently, an agent that acts and chooses has life as their ultimate value.
Do you see? Every time you act, you are basically broadcasting that you would prefer to be an acting, choosing entity than not. As we already noted, that evaluation implies a standard. What standard is that? Life. Why life? Why can't it be playing poker or hunting deer? Don't these require action too? Because life precedes all of these ends. Life is the phenomenon which gives rise to all action and value, because life requires that you act and value. Otherwise, you would go out of existence. Life is an "end-in-itself". (A value is the object of action, that which you act to gain and/or keep.) If you value anything you must value that which makes valuation possible. Hence, an acting and valuing agent values life.
Now, Clayton made the very important point that, in reality, humans do not actually face a choice between choosing and not choosing. That's true. But in another sense, we do have that choice, because every choice is a choice of choosing over not choosing. Every choice expresses that preference. This is why it is part of our nature to act, and why pursuing life is our natural end. In order to act, we must adopt life as a standard and optimize it at the most basic level by acting. If life was not your standard, you couldn't act. The only alternative to life is non-life, which requires no action or valuation and can't give rise to action or valuation. It's important to grasp this.
Consider the law of scarcity. Scarcity is an implication of the fact that human beings act, just as is life qua ultimate value. But scarcity is not the object of our choosing. All we know is that, if there were no scarcity, resources would be infinite, we would face no need to make choices, and so we couldn't act. But we cannot imagine such a world; the law of scarcity is a necessary law of thought in an imperfect universe of scarce means (whether or not you recognize it as such!). The same is true of the non-contradiction principle.
I maintain life as the ultimate value is also a necessary truth. In order to be able to argue that you don't value life, it is necessary that you value life! Your statement is a contradiction, performative or otherwise. It is rendered "null" and you might as well have not said it.
I can think of 3 objections to this. Robert Nozick tried to subject this argument to a reductio ad absurdum by saying that being rid of cancer is a value. But in order to value being rid of cancer, you must have cancer. Does that mean that someone who wants to be rid of cancer is acting to gain and/or keep cancer? To extent Nozick's so to make sure you grasp it, if you're a libertarian buying ham at a deli, a government bureaucrat might have made it possible for that ham to pass inspection. Does that mean all libertarians who value ham sandwiches are acting to gain and/or keep bureaucrats? Rasmussen and Den Uyl, I think, had a convincing response to this. Cancer and bureaucrats are not necessary conditions for your ability to value:
Nozick on the Randian Argument, 192:Strictly speaking, cancer is a necessary condition for the state or condition of 'being cured of cancer,' but it is not a necessary condition for the existence of the value 'being cured of cancer.' According to Rand, values do not exist without valuers, and 'being cured of cancer' is a value only in relation to a living being which values that state or condition. As Nozick understands [...] [the argument], cancer would have to be a value if one valued being cured of cancer. Here, Nozick views values in a manner Rand would call intrinsic. [For] Rand, however, [...] something is a value only in relation to someone's ability to value, and cancer is not a necessary condition for that."
O'Neil in response to Rasmussen said that were this true, all it would prove is that life is valued as a means, not an end. But remember our definition of value, "that which one acts to gain and/or keep". That's to say, all values are ends. The argument is not that you have to be alive in order to act. The argument is that as a living being you constantly express a preference for action over non-action, and life is the standard which that preference presupposes.
You could also say that you don't have to adopt life qua long-run survival as your goal in order to act. Maybe all you need is to attain short-run survival. This ignores the fact that only life (qua long-run survival) is an end-in-itself. What is an end-in-itself?
tunk:[M]ost ends are only justified by reference to higher-order ends. E.g. why does Joe buy a gun? To rob a bank. Why? Because he needs the cash. Why? Because he's a junkie and the street price of heroin has risen. And so on.
That chain must end somewhere, it cannot regress infinitely. If there was no ultimate aim of all your actions, all your lesser aims would disappear, because you would have no standard for choosing any lesser aims. You would not be able to choose anything over anything else. The chain must stop at an end that is not justified by reference to a higher end, but is self-justifying.The chain must stop at life, because only life requires any choice at all, choice per se. The capacity to choose is a basic capacity of living beings. Moreover, action requires that you adopt life as your standard. Having life as your standard requires you to act. Act, you need life. Get life, you can act. Et cetera, on and on in a cyclical chain. This is why life is a self-justifying end-in-itself. It is in your nature to act, and so in your nature to pursue life.
Hence, we must ask, what standard allowed you to evaluate that dying at time t-1 (t being the moment of natural death) was preferable to dying at time t? This is a choice after all, and what standard allows you to make such choices to begin with? The answer is clear.
It may seem odd to maintain that life could be your ultimate goal, yet you could adopt self-destructive lesser goals. Not really, once you realize human beings live in an uncertain world in which they can err. Human ignorance also impies that life could be your implied standard and yet you're unaware of it. (If people were not in fact unaware of it, there would be no need for me to post on these forums!) Self-destructive actions is one class that contains a subset of actions that will kill you immediately, and another subset containing actions that will wear you down over time. Both are "bad". (I hope you can now see what I mean when I use that word.)
tunk:It would take a lot more to do that. And I didn't define flourishing only once. I gave several definitions for it, life-optimization, living in such a way as to best be able to continue to live, etc. If you don't understand these definitions, I will elaborate,again.
I searched for an explicit definition of "flourishing" and what I posted was all I could find. If you implicitly defined "flourishing" in other places, then I'm sorry that I'm not a mind-reader.
tunk:For starters, we can both agree that actions can only be "evaluated" in light of a standard. A goal acts as a standard. E.g., if your goal is to do really well in school, it is "good" to study and "bad" to loaf around. Studying will optimize achievement of your goal. For my purposes here, no action is "good" or "bad" in and of itself, but only in relation to an end adopted by the acting agent. Follow me?
Although a goal can act as a standard, it's still a completely arbitrary standard. There's no property of the universe that makes us bound to evaluate things only in terms of goals.
tunk:Now, "life" is also a goal that can serve as a standard, but it is very unique. Life isn't "achieved" in a final, ultimate sense, the way many other goals are. Instead, life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If your goal is life, in other words, you have to do stuff to maintain your life like you maintain a car or a nephew. This is because as a living being you face a continual alternative between existence and non-existence, and every decision you make has some kind of ramification, large or small, on the outcome. Still follow me?
If "goal" is defined as something that can be achieved in a (semantically speaking) final, ultimate sense, then life is not a goal at all. But even accepting a different definition for "goal", if only arguendo, how does one know whether the actions he's taking - which includes refraining from taking other actions - are indeed maintaining his life? It's certainly possible that one believes - he may even think he has every reason to believe - that taking a particular action will maintain his life, but instead ends up doing otherwise. Finally, the very phrase "maintain one's life" seems very ambiguous to me.
tunk:What is my definition of "life", in the sense of life being a goal? "The promotion of optimal conditions for the operation of your essence across your natural lifespan." That's to say, maximizing your chances for survival, not simply for the short-term, but for the whole duration of the life which nature has made available to you. Of course, you will eventually die, but a natural death isn't the object of your choice, so it's not relevant here. If "life" is your goal, you "should" strive to do what's best to maintain it (optimize it) at all possible times. Acting to live is acting for long-run survival.
That's just it. What is one's "natural lifespan" exactly? Can anyone ever actually know that? A person who smokes his whole life and ends up dying from emphysema is said to have died from "natural causes", but it's strongly believed that, had he not smoked, he wouldn't have gotten emphysema, and he would've lived longer. Presumably. The fact is, no one knows whether he would've lived longer. It's possible that purchasing cigarettes at some point instead of doing something else actually saved him from dying earlier. If we could somehow know that that was indeed the case for him, wouldn't we make the counter-intuitive conclusion that smoking actually increased (if not maximized) his chances for survival?
The one thing we know about the future - in a manner of speaking - is that it's uncertain. Combine the inherent uncertainty of the future with the complexity of the world at large, and it's extremely difficult if not impossible to figure out one's actual chances for survival. People who calculate probabilities for future events typically have all sorts of assumptions built into their calculations. A catch-all assumption in that regard is what economists call ceteris paribus - Latin for "all other things being equal". But the thing is, those assumptions are necessarily arbitrary. So there is no ultimate logical justification for anything. It's turtles all the way down.
tunk:Now, you might say this is all well and good, but why should I pursue life? Where's the obligation? Here is where the argument gets subtle. I believe I was clearest when I put it to Clayton: tunk:If your goal is "life" [...] then there are certain things you "ought" to do. Faced with the alternative between being obese or doing regular exercise, for example, you "ought" to do the latter. Faced with the alternative between spending an afternoon bonking yourself on the head with a hammer or doing your math homework, you "ought" to do the latter. (For self-evident reasons, I hope.) But before all of these alternatives, you are faced with one basic alternative: acting or not acting, choosing or not choosing. Life says you "ought" to do the former. An agent with life as an ultimate value "ought" to act and choose. Consequently, an agent that acts and chooses has life as their ultimate value. Do you see? Every time you act, you are basically broadcasting that you would prefer to be an acting, choosing entity than not. As we already noted, that evaluation implies a standard. What standard is that? Life. Why life? Why can't it be playing poker or hunting deer? Don't these require action too? Because life precedes all of these ends. Life is the phenomenon which gives rise to all action and value, because life requires that you act and value. Otherwise, you would go out of existence. Life is an "end-in-itself". (A value is the object of action, that which you act to gain and/or keep.) If you value anything you must value that which makes valuation possible. Hence, an acting and valuing agent values life.
As I said before, broadcasting that you would prefer to be an acting, choosing entity than not in no way means you necessarily also prefer everyone else to be an acting, choosing entity than not. In other words, there's a difference between holding one's own life as a standard and holding life in general as a standard.
Forgive me for not responding to the rest of your post, but I see the rest of it as simply following from the initial arguments you put forth. If I challenge those initial arguments, I see no point in dealing with the derivative arguments. What I do find interesting is that you start off by seemingly agreeing with me that all standards are subjective (i.e. arbitrary), but then you end up trying to twist a particular standard into being the objective one. It can't be both at the same time. Either A = B or A =/= B.
Autolykos:If you implicitly defined "flourishing" in other places, then I'm sorry that I'm not a mind-reader.
No one's asking you to be a mind reader.
tunk:Human beings must therefore not only eat and have a pulse, but must flourish: live in such a way as to be able to continue to live.
tunk:Flourishing doesn't refer to a mere subjective feeling [...]. Objective flourishing means surviving in the most optimal way.
tunk:Feeling good is a necessary but not sufficient condition for flourishing, since lots of destructive practises can make you feel good, at least in the short term. The point is to feel good as a result of doing the right things.
Keep in mind whether or not you agree with my definitions or find them coherent or exhaustive, etc. is a wholly different issue from whether I attempted any to begin with. I resent being accused of not defining my terms as if I'm some kind of con artist. (Some Objectivists might indeed have been con artists; I am not.)
Autolykos:There's no property of the universe that makes us bound to evaluate things only in terms of goals.
How could you evaluate anything except as whether or not it is conducive to bringing about a future state of affairs that strikes you as satisfactory, i.e. achieving a goal? This isn't a "property of the universe", it's a basic principle of praxeology. I didn't pull it out of my rear. Man acts purposefully, using means to achieve desired ends. Argue with Rothbard about it:
Man, Economy, and State:All action aims at rendering conditions at some time in the future more satisfactory for the actor than they would have been without the intervention of the action. [...] Action takes place by choosing which ends shall be satisfied by the employment of means. [...] Suppose that he decides on course A. This is a clear indication that he has ranked the satisfaction of end A higher than the satisfaction of ends B or C.
Maybe what's throwing you off is the fine distinctions, or lack of such, between the words "value", "goal", "end", and "standard". A value, for our purposes, is what you act for, that which you act to gain and/or keep. All action pursues a value. "Value" can thus be used interchangeably with "goal" and "end". And values serve a particular function, which is acting as a standard by which you can judge whether you ought or ought not to do certain things. It's beyond me how standards have any origin other than in goals. Why judge any course of action as worth avoiding, unless you are trying to optimize your pursuit of a certain state of affairs? This is the logical nature of action. Perhaps you can bring up counter-examples.
Autolykos:[H]ow does one know whether the actions he's taking - which includes refraining from taking other actions - are indeed maintaining his life? It's certainly possible that one believes - he may even think he has every reason to believe - that taking a particular action will maintain his life, but instead ends up doing otherwise. Finally, the very phrase "maintain one's life" seems very ambiguous to me.
You are subjecting this goal to a skepticism which I think you would plainly see as silly to subject to any other goal. How do you "know" whether taking your car to the garage will "maintain" it? How do you "know" that the best way to keep your car in good shape might not be shoving a cat in the exhaust pipe? You don't ultimately "know" anything. You make inferences from logic and experience that seem to point to the right course of action, and over time, you are proved either right or wrong. We live in a world of cause and effect, and actions have objective consequences. We are not so helpless and stupid that we can't identify them. We wouldn't have made it this far if that were the case.
Suppose I was president of Libertopia (supposing Libertopia would even have one) and you were my chief economic advisor. As responsible elected officials charged with custodianship of the public good, we share a goal, which is the economic prosperity of all Libertopians. Now the question is put to us: ought Libertopia to adopt a minimum wage? Would that further its prosperity? Theory says that a wage above marginal revenue product will reduce employment; arguments that try to establish the labour market as some kind of monopsony seem to fail. Speculation suggests an increase in crime (black market activity and bribery, idleness and petty crime) will result. Evidence confirms all of this. So we weigh the various factors and come to a conclusion: we ought not to adopt a minimum wage.
The one thing we know about the future - in a manner of speaking - is that it's uncertain.
Nothing I've said disputes that.
Combine the inherent uncertainty of the future with the complexity of the world at large, and it's extremely difficult if not impossible to figure out one's actual chances for survival. People who calculate probabilities for future events typically have all sorts of assumptions built into their calculations. A catch-all assumption in that regard is what economists call ceteris paribus - Latin for "all other things being equal". But the thing is, those assumptions are necessarily arbitrary. So there is no ultimate logical justification for anything. It's turtles all the way down.
It is "difficult if not impossible to figure out one's actual chances" if you're attempting a specific quantified prediction, the way mainstream economists do. Life as a goal does not require omniscience and I never said it did. But it does not follow that it is impossible to understand anything about what will kill you or wear you down and what won't. We can make quantitative predictions, which Austrians were making about the housing boom, for example. Will rat poison kill you or not? Is depression preferable to self-esteem or not? Is heart disease preferable to regular exercise or not? Certainly self-esteem, regular exercise, and abstinence from rat poison are empirically correlated with a healthy life.
And incidentally, the ceteris paribus assumption is not "arbitrary". How could anyone who knows anything about the Austrian school suggest that? It's absolutely necessary for discovering what is cause and what is effect. If you'll pardon me, that's ignorance on the level of the infoshop FAQ, which (I think) says that economic laws only hold true if you hold everything else equal, but they stop applying in the real world. They don't stop applying! That's the whole point! They merely may or may not be offset by the effects of other laws. A minimum wage might cause unemployment, but at the same time that unemployment might be offset by a credit-fueled boom. That doesn't change the fact that the prospects for unemployment would be reduced without the minimum wage (or that more unemployment is likely to result as a consequence of the credit expansion.) And without ceteris paribus investigations you would not know any of that anyway.
With regards to the "natural lifespan" issue, my definition of "natural death" is merely whatever death-time is set for you that isn't the object of your choice. It may be that, prior to choice, natural-death-time has a null value. Amd I agree, as soon as you start to make choices, that date is pushed forward. But who cares? You shoud to try to act so as to minimize the gap between the natural time and the chosen time. Or if the former is null, then to extend chosen time as much as possible, ceteris paribus. Of course, increasing the quantity of your life may result in a decreased quality; these two variables ideally would be in equilibrium. That's optimal performance.
Whether or not it's achievable is a different matter, as is what policies might bring it about, which I admit is not entirely clear-cut. This is why Rand insisted: "[E]verything man needs has to be discovered by his own mind and produced by his own effort [...] Man cannot survive, as animals do, by the guidance of mere percepts. A sensation of hunger will tell him that he needs food (if he has learned to identify it as “hunger”), but it will not tell him how to obtain his food and it will not tell him what food is good for him or poisonous." The means to sustain our lives is not given to us, we must try as best we can to discover it. That's why we can only sketch out some general principles to follow which are by no means exhaustive and the application of which is necessarily contextual. Sometimes we can only weigh probabilities, e.g. "What are the chances that smoking will extend my life and the chances it will subtract from it?"
I would however venture to say that the progress of civilization and the discovery of the market mechanism perhaps show that man is not totally helpless with regards to what will promote his existence on this earth.
Autolykos:As I said before, broadcasting that you would prefer to be an acting, choosing entity than not in no way means younecessarily also prefer everyone else to be an acting, choosing entity than not.
But I'm not trying to argue that you would necessarily prefer everyone else to be an acting being. I'm arguing for egoism. Other people come into the picture later, and if you want to bring up the normative question of how a rational egoist treats others, we can discuss it. I was concerned, on the other hand, with the meta-normative case for self-interest. Only individuals act, and that is the point at which I begin the Randian inquiry.
I'm starting to think the way I initially organized the argument was confusing. Let me restate the case more or less as Rasmussen put it, since he did it in fewer steps.
Now, let's be clear as to what I'm not saying. I'm not saying there is some external force in the universe forcing you to pursue life. I am not maintaining everyone always succeeds in acheiving their ultimate value. I'm not even saying everyone is always aware that they are pursuing life, or that they are incapable of weighing other (but necessarily lesser) values against it. Indeed, if you accept my argument, then it's clear that the reason why man suffers is because he does not know what he wants, or, if he does, he has no idea what actions will help him acquire it. People act for life but often fail. This is why many people do ridiculous things from which they mistakenly believe they will profit in the long run (house-flipping, abusive relationships). The point of morality, then, is not to shove commandments down your throat. Morality is practical advice for acheiving the goal which you implicitly accept as a living, acting being.
Man, in a word, is like Ralph Wiggum, who, without a clue, asks the barber to make him look like Charlie Brown.
What causes you to attribute to me a defense of "subjective" standards, I think, is the peculiar nature of Randian values, with which you may not be familiar. For Rand, nothing has "value" unless someone places a value on it. Only in this sense are values "subjective"; that is, they are not an intrinsic property of anything, but are adopted by an acting subject and serve a purpose in relation to that subject. I prefer to call them "agent-relative", for the reason that they are still objective. That is, if X is sick and wants to get better, Y, a doctor, could perscribe to him various medicines that will be likely cure him. X's value is objective (it can be analyzed by agents outside X) but also agent-relative. Life is not an intrinsic value, but agent-relative in the same way.
tunk:Keep in mind whether or not you agree with my definitions or find them coherent or exhaustive, etc. is a wholly different issue from whether I attempted any to begin with. I resent being accused of not defining my terms as if I'm some kind of con artist. (Some Objectivists might indeed have been con artists; I am not.)
Of the quotes you presented as definitions, the second one is the one I already posted and the third one doesn't qualify to me as a definition at all. I must've missed the first one, so I stand corrected: you defined "flourish" once and "objective flourishing" once.
tunk:How could you evaluate anything except as whether or not it is conducive to bringing about a future state of affairs that strikes you as satisfactory, i.e. achieving a goal? This isn't a "property of the universe", it's a basic principle of praxeology. I didn't pull it out of my rear. Man acts purposefully, using means to achieve desired ends. Argue with Rothbard about it: Man, Economy, and State:All action aims at rendering conditions at some time in the future more satisfactory for the actor than they would have been without the intervention of the action. [...] Action takes place by choosing which ends shall be satisfied by the employment of means. [...] Suppose that he decides on course A. This is a clear indication that he has ranked the satisfaction of end A higher than the satisfaction of ends B or C.
Nothing in that Rothbard quote says anything about the notion that one can't evaluate anything except in terms of goals. Here's a counter-example: "I consider the blueness of the sky to be sad." Where's the goal in that?
tunk:Maybe what's throwing you off is the fine distinctions, or lack of such, between the words "value", "goal", "end", and "standard". A value, for our purposes, is what you act for, that which you act to gain and/or keep. All action pursues a value. "Value" can thus be used interchangeably with "goal" and "end". And values serve a particular function, which is acting as a standard by which you can judge whether you ought or ought not to do certain things. It's beyond me how standards have any origin other than in goals. Why judge any course of action as worth avoiding, unless you are trying to optimize your pursuit of a certain state of affairs? This is the logical nature of action. Perhaps you can bring up counter-examples.
I'm glad you provided your definition of "value", because I now understand that we're not using the same definition for that word at all. In my case, "value" cannot be used interchangeably with "goal" and "end". So unless and until we agree to a common definition for the word "value", we'll be talking past each other. By the way, I think this difference in definition of the word "value" leads to a lot of the semantic disconnect between Objectivists and others.
tunk:You are subjecting this goal to a skepticism which I think you would plainly see as silly to subject to any other goal. How do you "know" whether taking your car to the garage will "maintain" it? How do you "know" that the best way to keep your car in good shape might not be shoving a cat in the exhaust pipe? You don't ultimately "know" anything. You make inferences from logic and experience that seem to point to the right course of action, and over time, you are proved either right or wrong. We live in a world of cause and effect, and actions have objective consequences. We are not so helpless and stupid that we can't identify them. We wouldn't have made it this far if that were the case.
Since you agree that no one ultimately knows anything - except what he directly experiences - then you must agree that there's no way to know what constitutes "maximizing one's chances for long-term survival". While actions do have objective consequences, how do we know when those consequences end? In fact, part of the problem here is that there's no necessary meaning for the word "consequence". Another way of putting this is that we're where we are right now because of literally everything that has ever happened before this moment. Finally, empirical inferences can never be logically (i.e. deductively) proven. There's always the possibility that some future observation will render a given inference invalid. Hence there's never certainty to any inference.
tunk:Suppose I was president of Libertopia (supposing Libertopia would even have one) and you were my chief economic advisor. As responsible elected officials charged with custodianship of the public good, we share a goal, which is the economic prosperity of all Libertopians. Now the question is put to us: ought Libertopia to adopt a minimum wage? Would that further its prosperity? Theory says that a wage above marginal revenue product will reduce employment; arguments that try to establish the labour market as some kind of monopsony seem to fail. Speculation suggests an increase in crime (black market activity and bribery, idleness and petty crime) will result. Evidence confirms all of this. So we weigh the various factors and come to a conclusion: we ought not to adopt a minimum wage.
We wouldn't come to any conclusion. Following Mises, I'd immediately resign.
But to your point, a minimum-wage law could lead to some people's next most urgent desires not being satisfied, if those involve paying and/or earning wages that are below the minimum wage. All other things being equal, utility and thus prosperity overall would be diminished.
tunk:The one thing we know about the future - in a manner of speaking - is that it's uncertain. Nothing I've said disputes that.
Then why do you continue to claim that we can somehow know what constitutes "maximizing one's chances at long-term survival"?
tunk:It is "difficult if not impossible to figure out one's actual chances" if you're attempting a specific quantified prediction, the way mainstream economists do. Life as a goal does not require omniscience and I never said it did. But it does not follow that it is impossible to understand anything about what will kill you or wear you down and what won't. We can make quantitative predictions, which Austrians were making about the housing boom, for example. Will rat poison kill you or not? Is depression preferable to self-esteem or not? Is heart disease preferable to regular exercise or not? Certainly self-esteem, regular exercise, and abstinence from rat poison are empirically correlated with a healthy life.
Isn't the word "maximizing" inherently quantitative? At the very least, it's typically used in a quantitative, not qualitative, way.
Will rat poison kill me or not? I don't know, it depends on the dose and maybe some other factors.
Is depression preferable to self-esteem or not? Preferability is not an intrinsic characteristic to either depression or self-esteem.
Is heart disease preferable to regular exercise or not? Same answer.
tunk:And incidentally, the ceteris paribus assumption is not "arbitrary". How could anyone who knows anything about the Austrian school suggest that? It's absolutely necessary for discovering what is cause and what is effect. If you'll pardon me, that's ignorance on the level of the infoshop FAQ, which (I think) says that economic laws only hold true if you hold everything else equal, but they stop applying in the real world. They don't stop applying! That's the whole point! They merely may or may notbe offset by the effects of other laws. A minimum wage might cause unemployment, but at the same time that unemployment might be offset by a credit-fueled boom. That doesn't change the fact that the prospects for unemployment would be reduced without the minimum wage (or that more unemployment is likely to result as a consequence of the credit expansion.) And without ceteris paribus investigations you would not know any of that anyway.
The ceteris paribus assumption certainly is arbitrary, because no one is ever a priori or prima facie bound or obligated to assume it. All assumptions are inherently arbitrary.
tunk:With regards to the "natural lifespan" issue, my definition of "natural death" is merely whatever death-time is set for you that isn't the object of your choice. It may be that, prior to choice, natural-death-time has a null value. Amd I agree, as soon as you start to make choices, that date is pushed forward. But who cares? You shoud to try to act so as to minimize the gap between the natural time and the chosen time. Or if the former is null, then to extend chosen time as much as possible,ceteris paribus. (Increasing the quantity of your life may result in a decreased quality; these two need to be balanced because they are mutually dependent.) This is optimal performance. Whether or not it's achievable is a different matter.
See, in the above you assume certainty about the future. You claim that there is already a death-time set for someone. How can you ever hope to know that it exists at all, let alone when it is? Furthermore, quality of life can't be measured. It's entirely subjective. Hence I see no way that your or anyone else can talk about "optimal performance" here in any way that makes sense.
tunk:But I'm not trying to argue that you would necessarily prefer everyone else to be an acting being. I'm arguing for egoism. Other people come into the picture later, and if you want to bring up the normative question of how a rational egoist treats others, we can discuss it. I was concerned, on the other hand, with the meta-normative case for self-interest. Only individuals act, and that is the point at which I begin the Randian inquiry.
When you state that "an acting and valuing agent values life", that certainly sounds to me like you're referring to life in general - otherwise you would've said "an acting and valuing agent values his own life". In any case, what do you mean by "meta-normative" vs. "normative"?
tunk:I'm starting to think the way I initially organized the argument was confusing. Let me restate the case more or less as Rasmussen put it, since he did it in fewer steps. Man acts purposefully. Living beings pursue values. These are, for my purposes, the same proposition, for reasons I already gave. If you value ("act to gain and/or keep") anything, you must value ("act to gain and/or keep") that which makes valuation possible, that which gives you the capacity to value. I don't see how this can be denied. A living being that values would clearly prefer to have the ability to engage in value than not to. What gives you that capacity is the conditionality of your existence, the fact that you are alive and that life fundamentally requires, not only that you pursue certain values, but value per se, in order not to go out of existence. If you're dead, you don't need no values. Thus a living being that pursues values has life as the ultimate value. Now, let's be clear as to what I'm not saying. I'm not saying there is some external force in the universe forcing you to pursue life. I am not maintaining everyone always succeeds in acheiving their ultimate value. I'm not even saying everyone is always aware that they are pursuing life, or that they are incapable of weighing other (but necessarily lesser) values against it. Indeed, if you accept my argument, then it's clear that the reason why man suffers is because he does not know what he wants, or, if he does, he has no idea what actions will help him acquire it. People act for life but often fail. This is why many people do ridiculous things from which they mistakenly believe they will profit in the long run (house-flipping, abusive relationships). The point of morality, then, is not to shove commandments down your throat. Morality is practical advice for acheiving the goal which you implicitly accept as a living, acting being.
Again, we seem to be using different definitions for certain words, such as "value" and also now "morality". I certainly don't define "morality" as "practical advice for achieving the goal which you implicitly accept as a living, acting being". Rather I define it as "the set of actions against which I permit the use of force". Surely you can see the great difference there.
tunk:Man, in a word, is like Ralph Wiggum, who, without a clue, asks the barber to make him look like Charlie Brown.
I have no idea what this is supposed to mean, sorry.
tunk:What causes you to attribute to me a defense of "subjective" standards, I think, is the peculiar nature of Randian values, with which you may not be familiar. For Rand, nothing has "value" unless someone places a value on it. Only in this sense are values "subjective"; that is, they are not an intrinsic property of anything, but are adopted by an acting subject and serve a purpose in relation to that subject. I prefer to call them "agent-relative", for the reason that they are still objective. That is, if X is sick and wants to get better, Y, a doctor, could perscribe to him various medicines that will be likely cure him. X's value is objective (it can be analyzed by agents outside X) but also agent-relative. Life is not an intrinsic value, but agent-relative in the same way.
Following philosophical dualism, when I use the word "objective", I typically use it to refer to something inhering in an object. Likewise, when I use the word "subjective", I typically use it to refer to something inhering in a subject. Now on the monistic level, the subject/object distinction ceases to exist. On that level, then, values can be said to be "objective" in that they (currently) inhere within one or more objects that are also dualistic subjects. I think this is just my own way of articulating what you said above. The difference is that you seem to use "objective" in a monistic way whereas I use it in a dualistic way. Semantics strikes again!
My third definition of flourishing was a negative definition. Why are those to be ruled out?
Autolykos:Nothing in that Rothbard quote says anything about the notion that one can't evaluate anything except in terms of goals. Here's a counter-example: "I consider the blueness of the sky to be sad." Where's the goal in that?
Man, Economy, and State: In order to institute action, it is not sufficient that the individual man have unachieved ends that he would like to fulfill. He must also expect that certain modes of behavior will enable him to attain his ends. A man may have a desire for sunshine, but if he realizes that he can do nothing to achieve it, he does not act on this desire.
Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics:On Rand's understanding, a person's interest is measured by the long-range, all-encompassing condition of his life. Consequently, advancing one's interest requires adherence to principles. [...] A principle is a 'general truth on which other truths depend,' Peikoff writes. Moral principles identify the relationships between the most basic kinds of choices that human beings can make and the impact of those choices on human survival. [...] What kinds of actions advance human lives and what kinds of actions impede them is a matter of fact. Human beings' fundamental needs do not fluctuate among different individuals or days of the week. Correspondingly, effective means of serving those needs do not fluctuate - not in essentials. Because the kinds of actions that are valuable to human beings are, at core, constant, we must be constant in respecting [them] [...] Moral principles are formed through the observations of numerous concrete experiences and logical inferences [not necessarily deductive!] concerning the effects of different kinds of actions on human flourishing. (A person might adopt the principle of justice, for instance, on the basis of recognizing the beneficial results of just actions in specific incidents in his personal relationships, in his workplace, in events in history or education policy.) Principles integrate a vast quanity of data culled from a variety of circumstances into the most fully informed, rationally considered judgements we could have. It is difficult to assess the net effects of any perticular action on the intricate network of values that constitutes a person's interest. [...] We have neither the memory (in volume or precision) nor the intellectual insight to penetrate to the most salient aspects of a concrete situtation when it is considered in isolation from all others. Principles, however, compensate for these limiations by incorporating knowledge gleaned from many situations. Principles reflect a sober assessment of the wider and longer-range repercussions of contemplated actions.
See, in the above you assume certainty about the future. You claim that there is already a death-time set for someone. How can you ever hope to know that it exists at all, let alone when it is?
Furthermore, quality of life can't be measured.
tunk:My third definition of flourishing was a negative definition. Why are those to be ruled out?
I don't see how "Feeling good is a necessary but not sufficient condition for flourishing, since lots of destructive practises can make you feel good, at least in the short term. The point is to feel good as a result of doing the right things." is a definition at all. You're not explaining fully what you mean by "flourishing" with that statement. All you're doing there is outlining a necessary but not sufficient condition for what you call "flourishing". Since you don't provide the set of conditions that are sufficient for what you call "flourishing", your explication of it is incomplete.
tunk:I guess this person would prefer a sky that wasn't blue. But this example is irrelevant because this person can't possibly act to achieve that preference and so it can't be a value for him. Remember we wierdo Objectivists define "value" and "evaluation" in terms of action. Maybe Rothbard agrees: Man, Economy, and State: In order to institute action, it is not sufficient that the individual man have unachieved ends that he would like to fulfill. He must also expect that certain modes of behavior will enable him to attain his ends. A man may have a desire for sunshine, but if he realizes that he can do nothing to achieve it, he does not act on this desire.
It has nothing to do with preference. It's simply an imputation of one quality ("sadness") onto another ("blueness [of the sky]"). But since you mean something different by "value" from what I mean by it, I can let this one rest. Suffice it to say, I prefer not to use "value" in the way that you do. You've already stated that you use the word interchangeably with "goal" and "end", so can we use those words instead of "value"? Finally, it makes no difference to me which one of us Rothbard happens to agree with.
tunk:Yeah, there's never any certainty. I thought I said this when making my original case. The argument for moral principles is not argument from certainty. There is indeed no way to know what maximizes survival one-hundred percent. But we can draw up some general principles that are likely to bring you closer to that goal, in the same way you can make generalizations about what might fix your car. That's why I said being "good" was not an absolute category but a point on a spectrum. Is shoving a cat in your exhaust pipe good for your car or not? It serves no purpose with regard to keeping your car functioning properly (unless it's a very odd kind of car), so not.
If there's "no way to know what maximizes survival one-hundred percent", I'd say there's no way to know it at all. To me, knowledge isn't a matter of degree. It's binary. Either one knows something or he doesn't. There's no in-between. Another semantic dispute, perhaps, but there it is.
Is shoving a cat in my exhaust pipe good for one's car or not? I don't know, "good (for one's car)" is a matter of opinion. I don't think it's good for my car, but that's just me. What another person thinks there is his business, as long as he doesn't infringe upon anyone else.
tunk:Maybe Tara Smith puts it better than I do: Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics:On Rand's understanding, a person's interest is measured by the long-range, all-encompassing condition of his life. Consequently, advancing one's interest requires adherence to principles. [...] A principle is a 'general truth on which other truths depend,' Peikoff writes. Moral principles identify the relationships between the most basic kinds of choices that human beings can make and the impact of those choices on human survival. [...] What kinds of actions advance human lives and what kinds of actions impede them is a matter of fact. Human beings' fundamental needs do not fluctuate among different individuals or days of the week. Correspondingly, effective means of serving those needs do not fluctuate - not in essentials. Because the kinds of actions that are valuable to human beings are, at core, constant, we must be constant in respecting [them] [...] Moral principles are formed through the observations of numerous concrete experiences and logical inferences [not necessarily deductive!] concerning the effects of different kinds of actions on human flourishing. (A person might adopt the principle of justice, for instance, on the basis of recognizing the beneficial results of just actions in specific incidents in his personal relationships, in his workplace, in events in history or education policy.) Principles integrate a vast quanity of data culled from a variety of circumstances into the most fully informed, rationally considered judgements we could have. It is difficult to assess the net effects of any perticular action on the intricate network of values that constitutes a person's interest. [...] We have neither the memory (in volume or precision) nor the intellectual insight to penetrate to the most salient aspects of a concrete situtation when it is considered in isolation from all others. Principles, however, compensate for these limiations by incorporating knowledge gleaned from many situations. Principles reflect a sober assessment of the wider and longer-range repercussions of contemplated actions. In other words, denying the possibility of moral principles is denying that human beings have any objective needs. Why do we starve, then? If you were consistent about your skepticism, you couldn't really live. How do you "know", really, that you should eat what others classify as poisonous mushrooms? Rand's morality is fundamentally practical. Yes, rat poison depends on the dose. But given the choice between a unit of wine and a unit of rat poison, and the goal of life, are you saying there would be no way to choose one over the other for lunch? And of course, "[p]referability is not an intrinsic characteristic to either depression or self-esteem," I'm not arguing for intrinsic value! Those things only have value relative to a human end.
Moral principles are formed through the observations of numerous concrete experiences and logical inferences [not necessarily deductive!] concerning the effects of different kinds of actions on human flourishing. (A person might adopt the principle of justice, for instance, on the basis of recognizing the beneficial results of just actions in specific incidents in his personal relationships, in his workplace, in events in history or education policy.) Principles integrate a vast quanity of data culled from a variety of circumstances into the most fully informed, rationally considered judgements we could have. It is difficult to assess the net effects of any perticular action on the intricate network of values that constitutes a person's interest. [...] We have neither the memory (in volume or precision) nor the intellectual insight to penetrate to the most salient aspects of a concrete situtation when it is considered in isolation from all others. Principles, however, compensate for these limiations by incorporating knowledge gleaned from many situations. Principles reflect a sober assessment of the wider and longer-range repercussions of contemplated actions.
In other words, denying the possibility of moral principles is denying that human beings have any objective needs. Why do we starve, then? If you were consistent about your skepticism, you couldn't really live. How do you "know", really, that you should eat what others classify as poisonous mushrooms? Rand's morality is fundamentally practical. Yes, rat poison depends on the dose. But given the choice between a unit of wine and a unit of rat poison, and the goal of life, are you saying there would be no way to choose one over the other for lunch? And of course, "[p]referability is not an intrinsic characteristic to either depression or self-esteem," I'm not arguing for intrinsic value! Those things only have value relative to a human end.
First off, I fail to see how I'm denying the possibility of moral principles. Then again, keep in mind that I have different definitions of "moral" and "morality" from yours. I don't consider a statement such as "A person should eat if he doesn't want to starve" to be a moral statement at all. Second, even though I technically don't know whether mushrooms classified as poisonous really are poisonous, I assume that they are. I fully understand and accept that this assumption is formally arbitrary. Objectively speaking, however, there exists no non-arbitrary way to choose whether to eat mushrooms classified as poisonous. Likewise, there exists no non-arbitrary way to choose a unit of wine vs. a unit of rat poison for lunch. Finally, if you're not arguing for intrinsic value, then I suggest not asking questions of the form "Is X Y to Z?" or making statements of the form "X is Y to Z", as those formulations imply factuality and therefore intrinsicness.
tunk:Another definition dispute. For you, assuming anything is "arbitary" because nothing "binds" you to assuming it. But holding other things equal is certainly a good means to the end of knowledge. And if your goal is knowledge, and if arbitrary means "based on random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system", then clearly, using the ceteris paribus method is not arbitrary. It is a means picked by reason to an end.
Whether people consider a given assumption to be good for something is irrelevant to the fact that, formally speaking, the assumption is still arbitrary. By "arbitrary" I mean the opposite of "logically necessary".
tunk:See, in the above you assume certainty about the future. You claim that there is already a death-time set for someone. How can you ever hope to know that it exists at all, let alone when it is? ...that's why I allowed for the possibility that "natural-death-time" might have a null value.
...that's why I allowed for the possibility that "natural-death-time" might have a null value.
What I meant was there cannot be anything other than a null value attributed to "natural-death-time" until after the fact.
tunk: Furthermore, quality of life can't be measured. But that's not the point. You can't have quantity of life without a certain quality of life, and vice-versa. "Life" only requires honestly trying to achieve both. Nobody says you have to get them in exactly the right amounts; that would be an unachievable superhuman task. As I've said, Rand's morality doesn't say it is immoral to err if you make an honest attempt to live well. Making deliberate evasions of the need for quality and quantity of life would be immoral. (Say, not taking medicine your doctor perscribed you. Obviously, there's a possibility he erroneously perscribed them. But what are the chances he's wrong compared to the chances you're wrong? If you knew more about medicine than he did, you wouldn't have sought his advice. And presumably, if he lived and worked in a free market, he would have acquired a reputation among consumers for good advice.)
But that's not the point. You can't have quantity of life without a certain quality of life, and vice-versa. "Life" only requires honestly trying to achieve both. Nobody says you have to get them in exactly the right amounts; that would be an unachievable superhuman task. As I've said, Rand's morality doesn't say it is immoral to err if you make an honest attempt to live well. Making deliberate evasions of the need for quality and quantity of life would be immoral. (Say, not taking medicine your doctor perscribed you. Obviously, there's a possibility he erroneously perscribed them. But what are the chances he's wrong compared to the chances you're wrong? If you knew more about medicine than he did, you wouldn't have sought his advice. And presumably, if he lived and worked in a free market, he would have acquired a reputation among consumers for good advice.)
To speak of "decreasing quality of life" and "[quantity and quality of life] need to be balanced" is to imply that "quality of life" is not only intrinsic to life but can also be measured. Since you agree that neither of those notions is true, you must logically agree that therefore quality of life cannot increase, decrease, or be balanced with anything (logically speaking).
tunk:No, I literally mean values his own life. I thought that was clear. This is Rand we're talking about. Normative means what you should do. Meta-normative means why you should do it. I was trying to provide a "proof" of egoism. What principles egoism requires you to practise, once we've accepted its truth, is a separate issue.
Sorry, that wasn't clear to me at all, because you kept saying "life" without any qualification such as "his own".
Egoism, as a normative theory of ethics, cannot be proven as fact, because nothing normative can be proven that way. There is no more truth (or falsehood) in egoism than there is in altruism. Normative facts do not - indeed cannot - exist. "Doing X results in Y" is not normative. The best you can do in this regard vis-a-vis egoism is show whether its conclusions are logically consistent with its premises.
what? i did provide sufficient conditions for flourishing, in the previous definitions. that definitions are interdependent doesn't make them any less definitive (so to speak).
yeah, at this point it's just semantics. i mean, qualitative knowledge about what promotes your survival is still binary. you either have that knowledge or you don't. when i say "good for your car", i mean with regards to maintaining your car's functioning is it a necessity, like watering your plant? clearly not. you keep missing that randian values are relative (, and relative to life as the ultimate value. so, presuming life is the ultimate value for X, starving is bad for X. i just left out that qualification because i figured you would have got it by now.
we might have to wait until after the fact to attribute a null value to "natural-death-time". but we can consider the possibility that it might have a null value a priori and make provisions for that case.
as for this quantity/quality stuff, perhaps i am guilty of using language imprecisely. (who isn't?) if i say quantity and quality of life need to be balanced, what i mean is that, say, you should not spend 40 years in your basement working on a magic potion to extend your life while forgetting about going for walks, listening to music, talking to friends and family, etc. moderation is key. again, i don't mean a quantitative but a qualitative balance. when you judge you're doing too much of one, ease off a little and focus on the other. while taking action, you should try to get the right amount, although you can never fully "optimize", in the way an economy never reaches equilibrium but is always approaching it. (though you "ought" to try. nobody ever said moral codes were easy as cake.)
and finally, "normative facts" can exist if what i've argued is true. you can't deduce a normative conclusion from non-normative premises, but there are hypothetical imperatives:
1. Joe wants donuts (Joe "should" do what is best to get donuts).
2. Flapping his arms is the best way to get donuts.
3. Joe should flap his arms.
replace "donuts" with "life" and you get an assertoric imperative, "since you want life, do X": the basis for what naturalistic teleology calls "value-laden facts". decisions to act are not arbitary since they are necessarily made in light of goals. we use means to acheive our desired ends, so we can evaluate actions based on whether they achieve those ends.