| | Francois, Thanks for you explanation. I actually had the opportunity to use some of it today. I have a university course on Bioethics and the professor (a liberal, you know American politics?) was going on and on about how morality is innate and how biology can account for the altruistic nature of humans. Several students objected but when I asked her to define "innate" she could not. No I wasn't surprised, liberal professors are usually "immoral" creatures that don't like to define terms:) I don't mind if they want me to just think about the issue and slowly arrive at my own definition, that would be OK. But they don't define their own use of terms, they don't believe in definitions. I asked her if maybe we could say that morality is implicit instead of innate (anything to try and introduce reason into the discussion) NO IMPOSSIBLE!! Humans are innately moral!!
Well I hated to do it but I used the naturalistic fallacy on her, which was not nice, I know. I noticed that people who defend Evolutionary Psychology tend to commit the "naturalistic fallacy" when it is to their advantage to do so. In other words they want to promote "altruism" and so they use evolution to demonstrate how good is in the genes. They commit the naturalistic fallacy just as often as "individualists" do, but they defend altruism rather than individualism. Well I got na answer, no justification or clarification, no definition. Gee, If that were a restaurant and I had received such bad service for my money, I would never go back!!!
BTW: What you cut and pasted from my message kind of scared me when I reread it. I used the word "imprinting" which is a term I somehow borrowed from Etiology (Konrad Lorenz) and conflated with "influencing". Sorry. Oh and your last question about the schism: I know the reasons for it, but like many of the emotionally charged schisms throughout the history of philosophy, you usually don't know everything until a century later, sometimes never:)
I think Objectivism has very valid fundamentals, but they get lost in the posturing or the butt-licking, or the mind-evasions. Above all I am never impressed when someone tells me they have read Atlas Shrugged 40 times, Fountainhead 60, miscellaneous essays 600 times, etc. That is no substitute for critical thinking which must be performed individually, without Rand or "God-in-heaven" looking out for you.
There is still too much Rand in Objectivism:) That is why there are the "Orthodox" and the "liberal Objectivists" or whatever you call them. Because of the "cult of personality" or "persona", Objectivism cannot become an independent philosophy. Oscar Wilde made a remark about literature which I think is comparable to this. "Dans la literature il faut toujours tuer son pere" (in literature one must always kill one's father). Objectivists need to kill Rand in order for the philosophy to live, otherwise it will stagnate.
Objectivism has a sickness. It has a schism and one part of the body is warring against the other. What does the doctor do when your body is sick? Specimens are sent to the lab. In this case the LAB is professional philosophy, academia. No Objectivists want to do that so Objectivism remains at home and gets sicker. It gets no treatment to shock it back into health. I guess you could also say that Rand was a bad mother, she didn't let her children go to school, i.e develop independently.
|
|
