| | Jeff,
Yes, I agree. Having a rationalistic, Platonic, "form of the good", floating abstraction, view of morality to which one is rationalistically attempting to ""live up" is mistaken, wrong and, by Objectivist standards, immoral.
It leads to an inauthentic, unintegrated person.
And, I am convinced, Objectivism is its own protector on that score.
The proper course, I am convinced, is to simply, straightforwardly, lead one's life guided by reason. I include in that an ever growing understanding of what that entails at every stage of ones life.
I've been criticized here with the complaint that my definition of "moral perfection" was too "woozy" and "abstract" to be of much value. I have countered by saying that there is a reason for its abstractness: namely, the number of concretes the concept must subsume. Strictly speaking it has to include everything from what Ayn Rand does at the high end of complexity all the way to the low end of an infants first grasp of an object in conceptual terms. In addition, it has to capture the volition involved and the "long-term-ness" of it.
The reason it has to be as abstract as it is, is precisely its value: the definition allows us to put Ayn Rand, Eddie Willers, and an infant on the same moral evaluative standard, within their context of knowledge. Thus, an infant who tells a lie isn't assumed to have the same moral standing as an academic philosopher who tells a lie. Morally, they are on the same standard (commitment to rationality over the long term) but the infant is assumed not to know "commitment to rationality over the long term" from a hole in the ground, while the academic philosopher is assumed to have at least a rudimentary understanding of the value of honesty.
The infant's error is an "error of knowledge" (and should be treated as such, for at least the first 200 times ;-) One does have to provide the inductive ground for the eventual abstraction, after all, as well as the proper incentive for not lying). The professor's is an "error of morality" (and should be treated as such from the get go, which doesn't mean there isn't further context that mitigates the punishment.)
Another reason for making it abstract is to highlight the fact that, while it does take effort, it is a natural human function that one doesn't need to "worry" about in the way Robert B. has in mind, I think. And it makes the process easy to identify and automatize. The more automatized the less "worry".
Now, to your first point. Unfortunately for that point, this issue came up in precisely the context you allude to -- the judgments we make about certain people, ARI, and "the way Objectivism is promulgated", not to mention the schism between Peikoff and Kelley and their respective defining documents.
I don't see how we can divorce the discussion from its context beyond this point if we are going to discuss it at all.
Tom
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