Landon,

I don't disagree with individual rights. They are proper. I do disagree with leaving out context, which is what one hysterical lapdog (Jason), for instance, is doing at the present.

There is a fundamental error in arguing Objectivist principles that leads people to extreme positions where they say rather silly things. That is (for as strange as quoting him will sound strange in this context) what Joe Rowlands called the "all-or-nothing" approach. I fully agree with that criticism.

For example, even Rand says it is good to help strangers in emergencies, because we all belong to the same species, thus there is value in preserving human life over death. But if you say that thought within the context of starving babies, then one of these knuckleheads will pop up and mention babies in a foreign country or some other place you can't get to. How on earth are you going to help a stranger when you can't even access him? (blank-out) They eliminate context and when you define that context, they get into a pretzel of rationalizations. Then these boneheads try to attribute their own contextless ruminations to you so they can safely stay within their all-or-nothing arguments, and "trounce the enemy."

I think this is the closest I ever see to Don Quixote charges at windmills on Internet forums. It gets quite comical. The reality is that nothing ever gets trounced. A person merely shows how foolish he can be.

When you try to do behave like that with someone outside of Objectivism, though, he will go running to the nearest church and stay a LONG way away from Objectivist ideas - thinking that they are either evil or crazy.

I will go further, however. If I ever learned of a person eating around a starving baby that was not his, with no other adult around, and letting that baby die, I would take very severe measures against that person. In that context, this whole "all-or-nothing" issue of rights just doesn't have very much meaning. What kind of world is that where the adult's property rights would supersede a basic survival need of an infant, when no other recourse was available to the infant? An infant is not an adult and there is a minimum responsibility involved.

The whole issue of family law is based precisely on that responsibility. Taking this responsibility to the extreme in an emergency situation does not invalidate fundamental principles like property rights or parental responsibilities under normal conditions, as Rand well implied in her essay entitled "The Ethics of Emregencies." She did not cover children in that essay, but talked about responsibilities toward children elsewhere. I will have to dig to find it. (I think it was in a discussion on abortion.)

Yaron Brook made an amazingly callous proclamation about the moral highroad of leaving tsunami victims to their own devices right after the disaster. His arguments were similar to what people are talking about here with starving babies. The starving baby argument goes like this:

1. Ignore the physical starving baby with some kind of "doesn't matter" phrase.

2. Merely talk about the principle of individual rights or property rights.

3. Say that you are thus moral or defending principles or whatnot.

What's missing? Context. Let me repeat that because the hysterical lapdog is salivating to use more foul language as if it were some kind of macho or something. (arf arf!)

Context.

That means that I personally do not defend sacrificing a person's property rights in the free world to try to send money or food to starving children in a corrupt dictatorship. There is no rational context for that to even be successful. Frankly, I do not defend sacrificing any rights whatsoever. I do not consider it to be a sacrifice to help a helpless person in an emergency, though. It is an emergency, with beginning, middle and end.

All this, the strange all-or-nothing behavior with childish posts equivalent to sticking your tongue out at someone, is what I originally addressed. The reason we are even posting on some issue like this right now is because there is an incredible amount of ill will to understand going on around here. But this behavior doesn't convince anybody of anything and it turns prospective adherents to Objectivism off. I personally have stopped seeing value in it.

Back to Yaron Brook. For him, the tsunami victim, like the starving baby above, was a rhetorical word, not a living person in a disaster. So out came the "doesn't matter" position. However, I saw a recent mention somewhere that Brook's tsunami essay is no longer posted on the ARI website. Apparently public opinion wasn't going for it - it was too much "all-or-nothing" to stomach. What they saw on TV wasn't a rhetorical phrase. They saw real people suffering excruciating and real temporary hardship.

I really can't spend as much time here as I have been doing. So I will try to address the pyramid structure and divisions of philosophy in a bit more depth to get it all done at once.

Let's start with Joe's request for a definition of branch. I did a bit of looking to bone up, because I couldn't remember such a definition in the literature. Then I discovered that that even Ayn Rand never defined what a "branch" of philosophy meant, other than that it was a division or discipline of philosophy. Her clearest breakdown of branches is in "Philosophy: Who Needs It." She called epistemology and metaphysics the theoretical foundations of philosophy. Although she did not state it there, her phrase "theoretical foundation" means that they are based on axioms. And she called them branches, one dealing with what you know and the other with how you know it. She called Ethics "technology" and stated that it was limited to man, not all of existence, and that it was a code of values to guide his choices and actions. Politics was described in terms of social system principles, with the tie-in to ethics being that the answers provided by ethics determined how men should treat other men. Esthetics was called the study of art and it was based on metaphysics, epistemology and ethics.

Peikoff did more work on describing the disciplines. He called ethics, politics and esthetics "evaluative" branches. The way he expressed himself in the chapter on art in OPAR is possibly where Joe got his atypical phrase about politics being a subset of ethics. Here is how he phrased it:

Hierarchically, esthetics, like politics, is a derivative, which rests on the three basic branches of philosophy. Politics, as the application of ethics to social questions, is the narrower of the two fields. Esthetics is more profound: art's special root and concern is not ethics, but metaphysics.

I find this manner of expression to be a bit confusing, since I see sense-of-life (one of the bases of Rand's esthetics) strongly involving ethics. Also, ethics essentially deals with a code of values for an individual in relation to existence. Politics deals with more than one individual, thus the field of communication becomes a very important part of it. Although Rand did not comment much on communication philosophy-wise, she did make statements like the following from "The Psycho-Epistemology of Art":

Art is the indispensable medium for the communication of a moral ideal.

For such communication to even exist there has to be some kind of political organization, even a very basic one of two survivors on a desert island. I doubt that their social system would involve much formalization, but it would still exist. To communicate, one person needs to issue the message and another person needs to receive it. Thus, esthetics will involve politics to some extent – actually to an important extent for more collective art forms like plays and cinema.

Now as regards politics and ethics with the "subset” jargon, I mentioned one specific instance where epistemology played a direct role in determining the political structure, essentially bypassing ethics. That was on the faith-reason issue. Power was seen as deriving from the supernatural, which was defended intellectually by faith, thus the divine right of kings was established. Faith-reason is important in determining individual value choices (ethics), but those choices for individuals were not what decided the divine right of kings. It was a direct connection between politics and epistemology. Faith alone determined it. Also, communication is one more bypass of ethics between politics and epistemology, since epistemology deals with language – and once again, it takes at least two to tango, and that means a social structure. Thus, I do not see politics enclosed within ethics, even though ethics is based on epistemology. There are some direct connections from politics to epistemology that do not involve ethics.

There are even other statements by Rand in other places giving these categories slightly different wordings and connotations, but basically this is it. What Jon Trager mentioned: a base of the two "theoretical" branches – metaphysics and epistemology, then ethics in the middle, and then politics and esthetics sitting on top. However these last two derive from all three of the branches below them, not just from ethics.

So the pyramid structure is not quite precise in drawing up an image for the Objectivist hierarchy of philosophical disciplines. The more I mess with all this oversimplification, the more I don't like it. There are too many specific direct connections. Also, the present environment here is not very serious for conducting a discussion of this nature.

I hope that this touches on the basics with you. I will continue this with you another time as there is still a great deal that needs to be made clear. But I refuse to argue against lapdogs.

One final note. As I was finishing this post, I just saw Joe's latest post.

Joe, dude, the difference between ethics and politics is that ethics deals with a code of values for the individual human being and politics deals with rules of conduct for a group of human beings. The individual to group difference already precludes one from being a subset of the other.

The agents are different (being singular and plural), establishing a reality for plural agents with characteristics that fall outside (but in addition to) the reality for the single agent, thus the disciplines of ethics (sincgle agent) are differentiated from politics (more than one agent).

Also, I wasn’t suggesting censorship. I was being sarcastic, since owning the site seemed like as good a reason as any for changing Objectivist terminology at whim. Unless I misunderstood, and you really do believe that Rand wrote that subset or branch of ethics stuff. But then, you should state where she did.

Also, I have never suggested surrender to altruism – ever – and, anyway, that is no defense against excessive rudeness, which is what I claim is very poor activism. And I still claim that excessive rudeness is poor activism. If you like it, though, support it. I wish you luck.

I can only characterize your complete misread of my thoughts as ill will. I find the present barrage of the kneejerk accusation of "dishonest" when there is nothing else to say as tiresome. People are starting to sound like Randroids all of a sudden (and not only are those accusations false, they are contemptible coming from people of the caliber here). Also, when cornered on an issue, you and others on this thread are doing the same thing I have seen hardcore Randians do elsewhere - you claim that the issue is not important before ignoring it and attributing a false position to me or whoever you are addressing. That will never become an argument, no matter how you dress it up. You psychologize me instead of addressing the issues (well… you do address your own issues – just not the ones I bring up), and then accuse me of not talking about them. You engage in your own tricks and evasions, but prefer to accuse others of doing precisely what you do.

Whatever all this is, it certainly is not a discussion and it is not productive. It is a complete waste of time – mine and yours.

Basically I am interested in the ideas, not the monkeyshines. Calling something rational (like your false statements about my ideas and mischaracterizations of me) – and calling something Objectivist (like that subset thing) – and it actually being rational or Objectivist are very different.

Anyway, this has gone on too long. I wish you all well. Enjoy your particular brand of Objectivism and the “new and improved” phraseology over Rand’s. I hope you get lots of converts. I need a bit of time off right now to finish some projects. Hopefully, we can be more cordial later - or at least more civil. Till later.

Michael

 

(Edited by Michael Stuart Kelly on 2/11, 10:50pm)

The basic guidelines for the trier of fact must be:  (a) whether "the average person, applying contemporary standards" would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest, (b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law, and  (c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

Actually, the only provable standard of what constitutes obscenity would be an objective standard, philosophically proved and valid for all men.  Such a standard cannot be defined or enforced in terms of law: it would require the formulation of an entire philosophic system; but even this would not grant anyone the right to enforce the system on others.