| | Robert,
First, about "If Rand interpreted the standard of evaluation (in "happiness is the purpose, but life is the standard") as a number--and I would certainly take Robert Efron's testimony to that effect seriously--this needs to be made more generally known."
Actually, Robert Efron confirmed to me something that struck me about Rand's definition of "standard" in "The Objectivist Ethics": 'A "standard" is an abstract principle that serves as a measurement or gauge to guide a man's choices in the achievement of a concrete, specific purpose.' A measurement is a number. "To guide choices in the achievement of a goal" describes how a quantitative measure of optimization is used in cybernetics (today, "control theory.") Once the connection was pointed out, I found it impossible to read Rand's definition of "standard" in any other way.
You write, "Rand's printed works don't announce it explicitly." But Rand does announce it explicitly - see above. One just needs to keep in mind, when reading Rand, her love of mathematical conceptualization. Another thing that Barbara Branden reported when I interviewed her at SOLOC 4 was that this was the biggest difference between Ayn Rand's cognitive style and Nathaniel Branden's - he just wasn't interested in mathematical conceptualization, which fascinated Rand.
About Harry Binswanger's dissertation: I just have not had the time to travel for this research, and I have other priorities for the near future. If you know someone at Columbia (or in NYC) who might help, I'd love to do the comparison. Harry Binswanger, Ron Merrill and I discussed a great deal with Robert Efron when we were together at MIT, and I would not be surprised to find that much of what Efron taught us influenced the original text of Harry's dissertation.
"What if organisms are recursively self-maintaining but not self-optimizing?" That depends on the evolutionary level of the species in question. It would be difficult to imagine what evolutionary pressure could have led to the evolution of the pain-pleasure mechanism, other than its usefulness for short-term optimization of behavior. If happiness is an assimilation of the previously evolved pleasure-pain mechanism to long-term optimization of the effects of behavioral choices mediated by human cognition, then happiness would be exactly the "evolved measuring instrument" that Rand postulated in the "barometer argument."
On (3) - within 2 years of the break, Rand also lost contact with Efron, Anderson and Greenspan, and at that point she just did not trust anyone enough to attract others with whom she might have discussed mathematical concepts, which Peikoff, like Branden, wasn't all that knowledgeable about. And she increasingly understood that she herself didn't know enough mathematics to make progress in a mathematical direction on her own. How much this influenced her to restrict the scope of her "philosophy" is anyone's guess.
You write that the 'ARI-affiliated are now inclined to denounce a wide variety of interpretations of Rand's ethics as "consequentialist."' I discussed this at some length with Diana Hsieh. ARI's critique concerns Kelley's misinterpretation of principles as weights in cost-benefit optimization by tradeoff, rather than as bounds on the solution space. Although Kelley shares his weights-in-tradeoff orientation with the consequentialist tradition, the use of principles as bounds on the solution space works better in everyday life (where computations must be quick and reliable) than the weighted cost-benefit optimization used by traditional consequentialists. My guess is that traditional consequentialists just didn't have enough knowledge of linear programming to understand this. But ultimately, Rand's identification of (life as the) standard as a measurement means that values and virtues have to be instrumental in the service of that standard.
|
|
