 Virtue of Loyalty
by Joseph Rowlands
Loyalty is traditionally viewed as a virtue. And yet it my experience, Objectivists tend to reject loyalty as a kind of irrationality. That's not particularly surprising. Loyalty is often viewed as sticking by someone's side no matter how irrational they are or improper their behavior. It is thought of as turning a... (Read more...)
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A Virtue of Optimism
by Joseph Rowlands
One of the characteristics that is common to most of the Objectivist virtues is an identification of things that have the possibility of getting in the way of acting effectively and rationally. Honesty, for instance, points out how acting on the unreal is counterproductive, and that only a focus on what's real can lea... (Read more...)
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 Does New Knowledge Invalidate Old Knowledge?
by Joseph Rowlands
One of the more interesting epistemological arguments made by Objectivists is that new knowledge does not invalidate old knowledge. When you learn that a chair is made of individual atoms, it does not negate your previous knowledge about the chair. You would still understand that it is furniture, designed for people ... (Read more...)
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Causation in a Complex System
by Joseph Rowlands
What is the right way to analyze a complex system? A complex system can have many variables with complex interactions, leading to complex effects that have many different attributes. Some examples of complex systems are economies, biological systems, climate, and child development. Each has an enormous number of fac... (Read more...)
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Selfish Altruism
by Joseph Rowlands
There is an inconsistency among people who support altruism. They can't quite decide whether altruism should be practiced because it benefits them or in spite of the fact that it benefits them. (Read more...)
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Economic Power and Intervention
by Joseph Rowlands
A common view of economic relationships is that a person isn't really free if they have no real choice in a decision. When the stakes are high and the options are limited, a person will have to take the most attractive option. He has no choice. And if he has no choice, it really isn't freedom. Even though no coerci... (Read more...)
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Variants of Consequentialism
by Joseph Rowlands
Consequentialism describes moral systems that focus judgment on the consequences of actions. (Read more...)
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Different Views of Integrity
by Joseph Rowlands
A person shows integrity when they stick with their judgment even under pressure. As a virtue, this is a useful and admirable quality. It's useful because it's not enough to be rational, to be thoroughly honest, to weigh your choices careful and to determine your best course of action. None of that matters if you do... (Read more...)
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Disconfirming Evidence
by Joseph Rowlands
Years ago in school I learned about an important method in science. Since then, I've mentioned it to a few people and they told me that they were never actually taught it in school. The lesson went something like this: A guy is given a set of numbers. The numbers given are 4, 6, 8, 12, and 14. He is told that... (Read more...)
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Towards a Moral Science
by Joseph Rowlands
Philosophy, properly understood, does not lend itself to the methods of science. It deals with fundamental assumptions and understandings about the world. It provides a mental framework for understanding and evaluating. Philosophical premises are not as easily refuted as a scientific theory. Science can make predic... (Read more...)
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Qualitative Predictions
by Joseph Rowlands
All too often people think about predictions as being quantitative. A physics problem might ask you to predict how far a bullet will fly given an initial velocity and position. Economic forecasters will try to predict the change in inflation, or unemployment, or the trade surplus. Engineers will make predictions abo... (Read more...)
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Saturday
February 16, 2013 |
The Boundary of Philosophy and Science
by Joseph Rowlands
The history of science begins with a new way of thinking about knowledge. Before the development of science, it was viewed as appropriate for philosophers to make statements about the nature of the world. They might speculate that everything is made of fire, earth, water and air. They might claim that heavier object... (Read more...)
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False Freedom
by Joseph Rowlands
One common criticism of free markets is that they aren't really free. When an employer and an employee negotiate terms, the employer has an unfair advantage. The employee needs a job in order to make a living. It is said that his choice isn't really free because he really don't have much of a choice at all. He has ... (Read more...)
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Secular Altruism
by Joseph Rowlands
Atheists are often on the defensive when it comes to morality. (Read more...)
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Induction and Identity
by Joseph Rowlands
One of the famous problems of induction is how to go from some number of specific occurrences to a generalization. The classic example is someone seeing white swans and concluding that all swans are white. When the first black swan is discovered, it proves the original generalization false. It also raises the questi... (Read more...)
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Economic Problems of Charity
by Joseph Rowlands
One of the unintended benefits of a free market is the way the price system creates efficiency in the production of goods and services. Businesses seek to gain profits, and they can do so only if they can sell a product for more than it cost to produce. Products that can't sell for more than the cost will be disconti... (Read more...)
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 Morality Needs No God: Chapter 1
by Joseph Rowlands
The following is an excerpt from my new book Morality Needs No God. (Read more...)
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The Unseen Violation
by Joseph Rowlands
In Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson, he focuses on the different effects that are caused by particular economic policies. Specifically, he shows that some actions are very visible and people tend to look only at those. There's a second class of effects that are unseen. (Read more...)
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Rough Draft: Functions of morality
by Joseph Rowlands
The following is a very rough draft of an essay I started on morality. It's in very rough shape, as I wrote it for my own clarity and not a general audience. I submit it here for those who might be interested. (Read more...)
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 Emotional Responses and Selecting Values
by Joseph Rowlands
In the last lecture, I talked about how intrinsic values can't be rationally compared, so you're left with just feeling your way to a solution. This is a pretty serious problem, and what we're going to focus on in this thread. (Read more...)
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Objective, Subjective, Intrinsic
by Joseph Rowlands
There are three major views of the nature of values. The first two, subjective and intrinsic, are often seen as a dichotomy. Objectivism accepts an objective view of values. (Read more...)
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Values
by Joseph Rowlands
Value is the central concept in ethics. Everything else revolves around it. Ethics is a person's means of choosing between actions. Actions, on the other hand, are aimed at accomplishing something. That something is called a value. Rand defined a value as "that which you act to gain and/or keep". It's what you're trying to accomplish when you do something. That can be acquiring some physical good, like a steak or a new car. It can also mean something like pleasure or improved physical fitness. It can be a friendship, or romantic interest. It can be the development of a new skill. And to give an example of keeping something, putting out a fire to protect your house is an example of acting in order to keep it. Anything you act to gain and/or keep is a value, in the widest sense of the term.
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 Themes of Ethics
by Joseph Rowlands
The first question of ethics, which is the starting point of it all, is why do we need ethics in the first place? Can we live without it? The answer Objectivism gives is that we need a code of values in order to make our decisions. Since we're beings of volitional consciousness, we don't have an automatic means of knowledge. We don't have an automatic way of deciding what to do. We have to figure out a way of making choices. And that's the role ethics fills. (Read more...)
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Certainty
by Joseph Rowlands
Certainty is a topic that confuses a lot of people because they use an unrealistic standard. The typical problem is that they mean certain in a way that doesn't allow for any possibility of being wrong. The typical line is that if you can't know everything, you can't know anything. So as long as you don't know everything, you can't really be certain, can you? Obviously that kind of standard would be impossible to meet unless you were omniscient. And we're not. (Read more...)
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Volition, Focus and Evasion
by Joseph Rowlands
I mentioned that Objectivism supports the position of Free Will. There is still a question of how this is manifested. Yes, we can choose between different actions, or different ideas, etc., but how? Is there a basic kind of choice?
The answer is volition. According to Objectivism, volition is the choice to focus or not to focus, and it is the fundamental choice. It amounts to choosing to think or not to think. To examine, or to not examine. Since consciousness is awareness, it's really a choice to be aware or not. That's as fundamental as you get. (Read more...)
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