| | You can always add a caveat about the spiritual destruction of children, of course: I put those kinds of monsters right up there with the initiators of force.
But those (like Kant) who propagate destructive ideas to adults are impotent if their audiences are willing to think; and those (like Mother Teresa) who practice destructive ideas are simply their own victims.
How can this possibly compare with those (like Hitler and Ted Bundy) who go after innocent victims by force, robbing, raping, butchering, and annihilating them?
Again: Is "evil" the mental abrogation of virtues? Or is it the actual destruction of values?
The Peikovian notion that "evil" is primarily a mental process -- something that occurs totally inside of one's skull (see "Fact and Value") -- is Platonic nonsense, a notion that I find utterly non-objective. How can one objectively identify, gauge, measure, reward, or punish "good" or "evil," except by reference to the real-world consequences of objective actions upon the actual values and lives of real human beings?
Incidentally, that Platonic notion of moral judgment-passing is not Rand's. She did not believe, as Peikoff does, that one can logically "infer" someone's actual moral status or psychological thought processes from his statements and ideas. Compare what Peikoff said in "Fact and Value" on that issue, with this from Rand ("Ayn Rand Answers," page 169:)
The only way to attempt this would be to identify a philosophic idea, and ask what could be the psychological motive of anyone holding it. If you wanted to expose a psychological aberration, you’d need to analyze what’s wrong with an idea and then demonstrate that only improper motives A, B, and C could lead to anyone holding such an idea. To discuss the psychological roots of certain evil or irrational ideas in this way is proper, because you are dealing solely with the implication of an idea that’s available to you; you are not passing judgment on a person. To deduce the motives of a man from his writings is improper and nonobjective, because there could be ten million motives for the same kind of action. [emphasis added]
But note here that Rand isn't even talking about determining someone's "evil" by means of inferences about his mental processes or psychological motives; she is saying the reverse: that after one identifies "evil" in some idea or action, one might perhaps try to infer the possible motives ("psychological aberrations") of the person who holds it -- with the huge caveat that "there could be ten millions motives" why someone would write or say a particular thing.
(Now, one might reasonably wonder how this squares with Rand's expressed opinions about Kant's "evil," for example; but whether she consistently applied her principle of passing moral judgment is another matter.)
In case you think this is taken out of context, try this, from Rand's recorded interview with talk show host Ray Newman:
NEWMAN: When do you classify someone as immoral?
RAND: Only when he has done...done, in fact, some immoral action... When someone in action [Rand's emphasis] does something which you know, can prove, is an immoral, vicious action -- a sin, not a value; or a vice (whichever you want to call it) -- then you have to judge him as he has proved.
You never judge a person on mere potentials, and you seldom judge him on what he says, because most people do not really speak very exactly; and on the basis of some one inadvertant remark you would not judge a person as immoral. If, however, he goes about the country preaching immoral ideas, then you would classify him as immoral.
...But the important thing here is the degree of knowledge a given person has.
If you do not know exactly the nature of what you are doing, then you can't be considered immoral -- particularly if it's a young person and it's correctible. A person can make a mistake and correct it. [emphasis added]
But it would have to be a major crime -- for instance, a person lying. Let's use that as an example. I would never forgive that at all. I would regard that as a top immorality, and regard that person as immoral, regardless of what kind of virtues he or she might have. Needless to say, if you have a robber or a murderer, or a person who is systematically breaking the rights of other people, you would call him immoral, no matter what lesser virtues he might have. [Note that these "evils" are all actions. -- RJB]
So you, in judging people of mixed premises, as most people are, you have to balance, in effect hierarchically, the seriousness of their virtues and of their vices, and see what you get in the net result.
Try to square these statements with Peter Schwartz's and Leonard Peikoff's moral equations of libertarians with the Soviet regime, or David Kelley with late Soviet apologist Armand Hammer -- or with their view that Kant was morally worse than Hitler and Stalin.
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