| | Joe, as you might predict, I'm with you on this.
If you use terms in a culturally idiosyncratic fashion, you are begging for misunderstanding. Context matters, and that includes cultural context. Appropriating some word that has a long-standing, conventional meaning, then ascribing to it some new meaning, makes sense only if you have a book-length platform to explain yourself -- and only if that explanation is the entire point of the tactic.
That's what Rand did in The Virtue of Selfishness, which had, as its subtitle, "A New Concept of Egoism." She spent the entire book challenging "selfish" in its conventional meaning: that was her point and goal. She also did the same in The Fountainhead, where she spent nearly 900 pages differentiating Roarkian egoism from its counterfeit cousins, in the characters of Wynand and Keating. I think it was eminently justifiable in the way she did it.
But suppose she had simply started, in casual conversations, referring to herself as "selfish." Would that have made a bit of sense? Would that have communicated "Howard Roark" instead of "Peter Keating" to the public?
It made great philosophical sense for Rand to do so concerning "selfish"; but even though she did it at book length, repeatedly and relentlessly, the wider culture still interprets "selfish" to mean Peter Keating, not Howard Roark. To publicly endorse "selfishness" today, without great qualification, is to be misunderstood. And if you have to qualify it to death, what is the value in using the term?
What is rational about deliberately making oneself unintelligible? After all, words do not have intrinsic meanings; they are the mere symbols we ascribe to concepts -- concepts whose meanings and referents have developed in a cultural context over time, often becoming entrenched. And once a word has become universally associated with one meaning, it is simply stupid to start using it unconventionally...unless you have the time and resources to mount an effective challenge to the conventional usage.
Now let's take "evil." Conventional connations of the concept "evil" include not just matters of value-content, but also of degree of harm and of malicious motive.
Degrees of "bad," in most people's minds, range from petty forms and minor vices (e.g., "white lies," laziness, etc.), through more destructive levels (e. g., cheating, conniving, petty larceny, etc.), to grand-scale malice and destruction (e.g., theft, physical brutality, murder, sociopathic criminality, nihilism, etc.). To conflate all of these degrees under the single, undifferentiated label of "evil" cheapens the sheer horror and malignancy of the world's monsters, exactly as Joe Rowlands says. If Kant is as bad as Hitler, then Hitler is no worse than Kant.
And, to paraphrase a line from the animated film The Incredibles: "If everyone is a monster, then no one is."
In fact, one of my biggest objections to Leonard Peikoff's entire approach to passing moral judgment in "Fact and Value" is that he collapses all degrees of "evil" into a single vice: "evasion." On that premise, libertarians suddenly become the moral equivalents of Communist thugs, Methodist choir directors become the moral equivalents of Islamist beheaders, Kant becomes the moral equivalent of a Nazi death camp supervisor, etc., etc. (Forgive me any imprecision of memory on the exact moral comparisons that Peikoff, Schwartz, et al., have typically made: I don't normally file away the ludicrous in my memory banks. But I think most of you are familiar with these sorts of "ominous parallels.")
The second component in most people's conception of "evil" is malicious motive. There is a moral universe of difference between some altruistic schmuck who "means well," and some psychopathic monster who takes glee from torture, murder, and destruction. The early Catherine Halsey in The Fountainhead was NOT the ethical equivalent of her uncle, Ellsworth Toohey. (Nor was Peter Keating. Nor was Gail Wynand.)
And to equate Mother Teresa with Adolph Hitler as equally "evil" is to say that an old biddy's self-sacrificial career of emptying bedpans in the slums of Calcutta is no different in motive than the genocidal slaughter of millions during a continent-wide war of destructive conquest.
Please! That "moral equivalency" is transparent nonsense -- nonsense whose transparency is only opaque to a terminal rationalist. And it's nonsense that is rejected indignantly (and properly) by everyone in the culture whom we are trying to reach. Do you think that any service is done to the spread of Objectivism by homogenizing bedpan carriers and brutal killers under the same undifferentiated term, "evil"?
A mental policy ("focusing" or "evasion") is only the threshhold of morality, not its entirety. In passing moral (or criminal) judgments, motives matter. So do the degrees of actual harm done.
It is a hallmark of fanatics (whatever their ideology) that they seek to feel smug and self-righteous by promiscuously slinging about accusations of "evil." But if communication and intelligibility count for anything, then let's try to be at least a little bit aware of the traditional usages and connotations of terms -- and of how we are coming across to those who hear us.
Again, words are not "intrinsic" in their meaning. To use words publicly as if they were our own private code, laden with our own secret meanings, does not make us effective advocates; it makes us the cultural equivalents of witch doctors.
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