The Argument from Arbitrary Metaphysics

Perhaps all of you here are seasoned enough in your knowledge of Objectivism not to fall for the rhetorical trick I will describe. However, I often found myself falling for it even five years after I had discovered Ayn Rand, so I think this is something worth talking about for the sake of those who are new to Objectivism.

I am referring to a common tactic of sophists who try to undermine people's confidence in Objectivism. These sophists posit some "hypothetical moral dilemma" to "prove" that there are holes in Objectivism, when the entire "hypothetical dilemma" relies on arbitrary metaphysical assumptions.

David Friedman has used this tactic in The Machinery of Freedom to undermine his readers' convictions that there exist absolute property rights (without making a distinction between contextually absolute property rights and context-free, Categorically Absolute property rights). I will quote Ronald E. Merrill's paraphrasing of Dr. Friedman's argument in The Ideas of Ayn Rand, since I find Dr. Merrill's paraphrasing more amusing and to-the-point:

*The earth is going to be destroyed tomorrow in an asteroid strike (!)
* This can be prevented by use of a piece of equipment costing $100 (!!)
* Of which there happens to be only one unit in existence (!!!)
* And the owner refuses to let go of it because he'd just as soon he and the rest of the human race were killed (!!!!)
So: should one or should one not steal it?

With this hypothetical scenario, Dr. Friedman thinks that he has gotten the natural-rights-believer in a corner. He assumes that an honest person would have to answer yes.

This reminds me of a "hypothetical moral dilemma" I would pose to my classmates in grade school:

Suppose that today aliens came to Earth and threatened to kill everyone on it unless you killed somebody's grandmother and ate her by 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time tonight. Would you do it?

When my classmates asked for qualifying information (like "Do I even have to eat her bones, or are their parts of her body I don't have to eat?"), I would have to make up something on the spot.

The problem is that, in my first five years of calling myself a student of Objectivism, I would have played Dr. Friedman's game by asking him for more qualifying details, such as, "How rigid is the world-saving equipment's owner in his refusal to sell it or give it away? I want to be absolutely sure that I cannot reason with him before I resort to stealing his property..."

What I didn't understand back then was that questions that rely upon arbitrary metaphysical assumptions do not even merit being dignified in such a manner. They should simply be identified as arbitrary, and there is no way to reason with the arbitrary.

I don't think this is perfectly understood among free-market advocates. Please correct me if I'm mistaken about this, but I think that sometime near the late '90s or early 2000s, Liberty magazine did a survey of its readers, and it asked questions that were along these lines: Suppose that you were hanging on a ledge of a tall building, and you would fall to your death unless your swung your body into the open window of somebody's apartment without getting anyone's permission first. Would you save your life this way?

Most of the survey's respondents answered yes, and so R. W. Bradford concluded that this showed that the majority of Libertarians had come to reject the notion "of Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard" that private property rights are absolute. (As so often happens with Objectivism's critics, Mr. Bradford conflated Objectivism's contextual absolutes with the Rothbardian's notion that absolute moral principles must be Categorical Imperatives that must always apply regardless of context.)

Such a question does not deserve to be seriously entertained. Why am I hanging on this ledge to begin with? Am I Spider-Man? What is the frequency of something like this happening in the real world? How many people hanging on ledges saved their lives by swinging their bodies into somebody's open apartment window?

Mr. Merrill named the unspoken implication of all these hypothetical scenarios -- and practically every question that relies upon arbitrary metaphysics:

But suppose reality weren't what it is? Then your rules would get you in a mess.

In every one of the "hypothetical scenarios" I named above, the questioner provides no evidence that the scenario he posits is realistic or plausible.

I have a problem when artists imbue their art with arbitrary metaphysics for satirical purposes and then expect their readers or viewers to take the arbitrary metaphysics literally.

Harry Potter has fantasy metaphysics, but that's okay because it's just for entertainment; it's not satirical. The story of Frankenstein relies upon fantasy metaphysics to make a satirical point about how a man can destroy himself and others if he fixates too heavily on just one obsession, but at least the fantasy symbolizes something that can happen in reality: a scientist who didn't fully contemplate the repercussions of his actions cross-bred what would later come to be known as the killer bees.

However, a lot of satirists have used arbitrary metaphysics in satirical art and expect their messages to be taken literally when the message itself relies upon the reader or viewer taking aspects of the story's metaphysics as literally true.

For instance, I think that Oedipus Rex does expect its audience to take literally its message that somebody should "know his place," accept his "fate," and try not to make something of himself. But for someone to take that message literally is to take many of the story's metaphysical assumptions literally, and the metaphysics of the story are self-refuting.

We are expected to blame Oedipus for destroying himself because he caused all of his problems in his attempts to defy his metaphysically-given fate. But if Oedipus's fate is metaphysically given, and his sorrow is predetermined no matter what, then how can Oedipus be responsible for his own misfortune?

And though Soylent Green is not supposed to be fully taken literally, its environmentalist message is meant to be taken literally, and for the viewer to believe the story's message is for him to share the filmmakers' assumption that Malthusian economics and demography are metaphysically correct (which they are not).

One can rationalize that Oedipus Rex and Soylent Green are "pro-Objectivist" in the sense that both stories feature people being punished for evading reality (in the case of Soylent Green, society is in its rotten state because people evaded the reality that everything environmentalists said in the 1970s was correct). But to rationalize the stories that way is to ignore that the "reality" being "evaded" in these stories was a metaphysics arbitrarily pushed by the satire's creators.

(I've heard the rationalization that "accepting fate" in Oedipus Rex is merely symbolic for "accepting the laws of nature." I don't find that plausible. The people of Sophocles's time did literally believe in the supernatural, and the Ancient Greeks really did believe that people should accept the station they are born into.)

Here's a more famous example of a satirist's message relying upon the extent to which his readers take his arbitrary metaphysics at face value: Suppose you want to live for your own sake, while violating nobody's rights. And you get rich that way. Then on Christmas Eve, three ghosts haunt you and threaten you that you will go to hell and die alone unless you become more altruistic. Well, I guess you're screwed if you don't want to be altruistic.

I think that the reason why satirists and philosophers actually succeed at winning debates when they employ arbitrary metaphysics is that Objectivists and many non-Objectivists have a different criteria for considering a proposition "theoretically possible."

If an Objectivist is to consider a proposition "theoretically possible," there actually has to be evidence of the possibility that can be indicated by sensory experience. But, in the case of many non-Objectivists, the sole prerequisite for a proposition to be considered "theoretically possible" is . . . somebody can imagine it.

The thinking often goes like this: Is it theoretically possible that there is a sapient, decision-making, omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God that created all of Existence? Yes, it is theoretically possible because I have an easy time imagining it. Is it theoretically possible that Existence always existed, without having to be created by some First Cause? No, it is not theoretically possible, because I have a hard time imagining it.

But I can imagine a 13.8-gram ice cube falling to the bottom of a transparent 4.545964591-liter container filled with room-temperature water and staying there for a thousand years without melting or evaporating. That is not reason enough to consider this scenario theoretically possible. Where's the evidence?

There are no documented cases of a baby being genetically cloned from an adult human being through the process of Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer. But that this can be done is theoretically possible because there is evidence that it can be done -- the process has occurred with various mammals. There is sensory evidence of the possibility. There is no sensory evidence that tomorrow you will discover that some asteroid was heading toward Earth and went unnoticed until the very day that it would collide with Earth, or that the asteroid can only be stopped by a one-unit device owned by somebody who wants everyone to be killed by the asteroid.

And for someone to use arbitrary metaphysics in his arguments does not require that he assume his arbitrary metaphysics to be correct. For him to even conflate his arbitrary postulations with "possibilities" is to employ the Argument from Arbitrary Metaphysics.

Dinesh D'Souza uses it in his What's So Great About Christianity when he says,

Kant's argument is that we have no basis to assume that our perception of reality ever resembles reality itself. Our experience of things can never penetrate to things as they really are. That reality remains permanently hidden to us.

How do Kant and D'Souza know that this is a possibility? Because they can imagine it. Yet is it plausible to believe that if a baby were born without any sense of touch, sight, hearing, smell, taste, or balance, the baby would even know what is going on around her? We only know about reality through our senses.

D'Souza argues that there exists at least one piece of information -- what I call "Datum X" -- that not only remains unknown to everyone at the moment, but is something that will necessarily remain incontrovertibly imperceptible to any sapient being's senses forever.

This raises many questions. One is: if nobody can ever obtain Datum X through his senses, then how does D'Souza even know that Datum X exists? (Because he can imagine that it exists, right?)

And, for argument's sake, I will briefly speak as if Datum X exists. People should only be worried about that which they can exercise some modicum of control over. If something is metaphysically unchangeable, then why should anyone fuss over it? I cannot change that the Earth is round, so it would make little sense for me to constantly bemoan how horrible it is that planets have to be round when I would be so much happier if Earth was cube-shaped.

By that same token, if Datum X shall ever remain congenitally unperceived by everyone forever, then why the heck do many philosophers build their careers on blabbering about it?

I think that there is a purpose in philosophers claiming to know that there exists some piece of data that can never be perceived by anyone's senses, and in assuming that something is possible as long as it can be imagined -- it serves a purpose in undermining the importance of sensory-verified, observation-based, inductive reasoning.

What do you think?

Post 1

Saturday, November 24, 2007 - 1:21am

Stuart says that according to Dinesh D'Souza's Kantian philosophy,

[W]e have no basis to assume that our perception of reality ever resembles reality itself. Our experience of things can never penetrate to things as they really are. That reality remains permanently hidden to us.

The mistake he's making is that perception doesn't "resemble" the object of perception. Perception is the act of being aware of something; it isn't another object of awareness that can be compared to reality. In order to say that one's perception resembles the object of perception, one would have to perceive one's perception as well as the object of perception and then compare the two to see if there's any resemblance. But then the same question would arise. Does one's perception of one's perception of the object of perception resemble one's perception of the object? -- the answer to which would require that one perceive that perception in order to make a further comparison, etc. ad infinitum.

The answer to this vicious regress is to check one's premises. One does not perceive one's perceptions. One perceives reality directly through one's perceptions. Quoting Galt in Atlas Shrugged, "A consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in term: before it could identify itself as consciousness, it had to be conscious of something. If that which you claim to perceive does not exist, what you possess is not consciousness." (p. 1015)

- Bill

Post 2

Saturday, November 24, 2007 - 8:35pm

Thank you very much, Mr. Dwyer.

I think that when I first began acquainting myself with Objectivism, I misunderstood the phrase "Check your premises." I just thought it meant I should check my own premises. But I didn't check David Friedman's premises when I read his attacks on absolute ethics -- attacks that were disguised as "hypothetical scenarios." If I bothered to check Dr. Friedman's premises, I would have asked myself whether "hypothetical questions about ethics" should even be entertained when they rely upon arbitrary metaphysical assumptions.

So not only do I need to check my own premises, but I can benefit from checking other people's premises, too. :-)

Post 3

Saturday, November 24, 2007 - 10:12pm

Good job on that one Stuart - it is always one of those issues that I understood but had a hard time articulating - this is helpful, and needs to be used more often.

Post 4

Thursday, November 29, 2007 - 8:28pm

Dear Mr. Hayashi;

Your post has the virtue of being thorough and cogent. Unfortunately, it is totally wrong. That is not a problem, as the point here is not making points in some kind of contest, but rather - one hopes, anyway - arriving at truth.

I ask you to compare the objections you raise to the use of extreme, fabricated cases to the methodology of the hard sciences, in which every effort is made specifically to find the limit cases, the exceptions to the rules. Physicists dance in the streets when they find an apparent exception to general relativity. They build multi-billion-dollar colliders in order to create conditions that may appear nowhere in nature in order to explore the nature of fundamental particles, and the fallout is things like better computer chips.

The limit cases that you raise as examples from various economists and/or would-be philosophers are perfectly apt in their own right in demonstrating the failure of many so-called objectivists to understand their own professed philosophy. Rights and ethical principles exist in specific contexts. Morality or meta-ethics as the study of values and virtues are, on the other hand, essentially context independent.

When faced with a dilemna of the kinds you cited, it is generally the case that one has stepped significantly outside the context in which the ethics and rights which exist in normal society are valid. As in physics, when one steps significantly beyond the realm of the everyday - tiny fractions of light speed, low energy or mass concentrations, e.g., most of our experience as animals on the earth - then one has to drop back and punt, moving from Newtonian mechanics to the more general theories of relativity and quantum mechanics. These theories have a wider range of applicability - perhaps total or ontological - while in the local, pre-20th century tech environment they approximate the Newtonian mechanics so closely that it is simpler to use Newton.

We do not want to try every moral case from first principles any more than we want to invoke relativity to build a car motor. Nonetheless, when we ARE talking about first principles, then we DO have to be able to address the limit cases that require the more generally valid theory.

You cited the following as an example:

"I will quote Ronald E. Merrill's paraphrasing of Dr. Friedman's argument in The Ideas of Ayn Rand, since I find Dr. Merrill's paraphrasing more amusing and to-the-point:

*The earth is going to be destroyed tomorrow in an asteroid strike (!)
* This can be prevented by use of a piece of equipment costing $100 (!!)
* Of which there happens to be only one unit in existence (!!!)
* And the owner refuses to let go of it because he'd just as soon he and the rest of the human race were killed (!!!!)
So: should one or should one not steal it?

With this hypothetical scenario, Dr. Friedman thinks that he has gotten the natural-rights-believer in a corner. He assumes that an honest person would have to answer yes. "

Yes, in fact a moral person would steal it, if that were the only feasible option. Note that our respect for the property of others is within the context of a society in which our very survival is not in immediate question. Once that premise is violated and we ARE at risk of death or serious harm, then we are fully justified and in fact would be immoral NOT to "violate the rights" of someone who tried to use property rights as an excuse to let us die. One could imagine many, many scenarios that do not involve asteroids or one-of-a-kind super asteroid killers.

Suppose you are involved in an auto accident and your beloved spouse or lover is likely to die without immediate medical attention. A passer-by stops, gets out and looks, takes some photos, and is then called by someone on his cell and decides to leave without rendering any assistance or calling for other help. If property rights trumped the basic moral principle of preservation of life, which is what a property right itself is based upon, then you would have to simply let him go. Instead, the moral thing to do is to use whatever violence is necessary - but no more - to sieze the car and/or cell phone and get help for your spouse. You can compensate the person who owns the car once the emergency is over, and if he or she doesn't agree that the compensation is sufficient, then you can go to court or before arbitration.

Of course, if this happened in the context of a hurricane - a la New Orleans - or an earthquake or nuclear attack - all of them quite possible - then perhaps the other pary is in the same situation, trying to preserve his or her paramount values. Too bad. The nature of the situation is that you are outside the context of normal society, and the sets of rules that you follow in normal society do not necessarily apply.

Sadly, this highlights a fundamental error of many "libertarians." The LP, for example, I believe still requires one to sign a pledge NEVER to initiate force. If they properly qualified the pledge to put it outside of lifeboat situations, it would be valid to ask for it. However, they are victims of the position put forth at the 1st Southern Libertarian Conference in Atlanta, 1971, where I believe it was Don Ernsberger who declared the innovation of a "libertarian ethics," based on the non-aggression principle.

He did not, however, place this ethics in its proper position in the philosophical hierarchy, but rather stated it as an ontological absolute, thus dooming the libertarian movement to its present obscurity, as anyone could come up with multiple scenarios in which they would never dream of following the "libertarian principle." Any movement which forces people to choose between being right and being alive is doomed.

This principle was then woven into a full fabric of fanciful moral philosophy, leading to the "libertarian life" advocates, who put forth the idea that the only moral people were those who NEVER violated the libertarian axiom, and that, in fact, those people who DID consistently follow the axiom were beyond moral reproach, no matter how useless or depraved their lives were otherwise.

And then there was the team of George Smith and Wendy McElroy, who came up with the concept of "sniping from the gray areas," to refer to anyone who pointed out the absurd implications of their libertarian life excuse for a philosophy. I could go on...

But, I'll leave you with that for the nonce to ponder, with hopes that if I am right then you will be convinced or if you are correct then I will see the error of my ways and repent... ;-)

Post 5

Friday, November 30, 2007 - 1:36am

Mr Hayashi,

You are misunderstanding the point of these hypothetical moral dilemmas. Of course they require one to entertain various quite arbitrary and often bizarre things. But these bizarre situations exemplify, in a vivid and easily understood way, real, important and not at all bizarre moral issues. Just as stealing is stealing whether it is a car, a $100 bill, intellectual property (at least according to some), or Harry Potter's magic green wand, so a range of unusual situations can possess exactly the same moral logic (e.g. property rights vs. human life).

Of course people rarely, if ever, find themselves hanging from ledges with convenient windows nearby. Let's go further and say that no-one ever has or ever will, if you want. Even granting this, it is still a useful example to consider because it forces one to realize the implications of ones professed moral principles. The dilemma is a tool of thought. It is not really meant to be answered one way or the other. The correct response is not "Yes" or "No" but "Hmmm..."

So, to return to the hanging-from-a-ledge situation - of course it's a ridiculous scenario, but what isn't ridiculous is the realization that there are situations in which an categorical interpretation of property rights would lead one to make decisions which intuitively seem bizarre. Once one realizes that property rights are not inviolable, one is forced to decide under which circumstances they should be violated - to "draw a line" and justify it, rather than simply saying "Never!". But this is where it all gets rather murky and complicated. If you are willing to violate someone's right over a minor piece of their property in order to directly save an innocent human life, why stop there? Why require that the saving of life be direct, for example? Why require that a life be saved, rather than made more bearable? The point is not that these latter questions are somehow unanswerable or purely rhetorical. The point is that they demand serious thought and the answer cannot be simply an appeal to principle because that takes us back to the original dilemma.

More realistic dilemmas could easily be provided: suppose that you lived in California and happened to find yourself trapped by advancing wildfires, the only way to escape being to trespass across your neighbors land... but demanding that the examples be realistic misses the point, as I said. An example about a magical alien wizard from the center of the Sun who has to steal one of Zeus's thunderbolts in order to prevent the universe from exploding would do just as well (and is more fun, don't you think?) The point is that you yourself almost certainly do not hold property rights to be absolute, even if you say that you believe this (I'm not saying you do say this, but many people do...), and it may take a vivid example to make you realize this. As I said, they're tools of thought.
(Edited by Jeremy B on 11/30, 3:20am)

Post 6

Friday, November 30, 2007 - 1:32pm

Stuart, thank you for sharing your insightful ideas. For Objectivists, perhaps the paradigm is Ayn Rand's essay on "life boat ethics." Not only is it easy to imagine a real life boat situation, Rand's generation had lived through two world wars with great naval battles, so these examples were from their own experiential world. Moreover, in the 19th century, more such stories also were known. Perhaps the modern stand-in is Alive the story of the Uruguayan soccer players en route to Chile who crashed in the Andes. In any case, these stand for any such emergency. That said, there may be some value to inventing ethical dilemmas that involve novel situations. Modern medical ethics was created as a special subject of study as a result of the advances in technology that pushed the limits of predetermined norms. But, these puzzles must always come down to basic principles.

By analogy, in the 14th and 15th centuries, algebrists and abacists challenged each other to public arithmetic contests and then the algebrists -- having won that round -- went on to challenge each other to solve cubic equations and so on. Now, where in "real life" do you find a cubic equation demanding to be solved? And -- more to the point -- any such solution must rest on the same principles as the rest of mathematics. Consequent from both of those is the fact that such solutions provided new tools later for new problems.

So, hanging from a ledge might never happen, but might be useful to consider. However, I think not. I think that you have hit the nail on the head here. These seemingly difficult problems are not in any special way different from real life examples -- except that they are unlikely, being based on imagination, not on fact. If there had been such a case of a ledge-hanging person, then that could be offered for discussion.

I archive just such news stories to be used later when I teach classes in criminal justice. This happened to this police officer. What would you do? What other choices could have been made? What information would change the event? And so on. But these come from the actual daily lives of real people. As you pointed out so cogently, many hypothetical problems in ethics are so unreal as to not deserve consideration. Based on what I learned from reading your essay, if someone were to present me with a wild scenario, I would reply, "If you have a real problem, then present it."

Post 7

Friday, November 30, 2007 - 2:06pm

Phil, I have to quibble. First off as a matter of principle, I challenge you to show any special circumstance illuminated by your example of the automobile accident, or Bill Bradford's ledge-hanger.

Question 1: What is wrong with placing a small tax on the very rich so that millions of poor infants can have enough food?

Phil: "The nature of the situation is that you are outside the context of normal society, and the sets of rules that you follow in normal society do not necessarily apply."

Question 2: What is normal?

Phil: They build multi-billion-dollar colliders in order to create conditions that may appear nowhere in nature ...

How can anything exist except "in nature"? Do you mean this in the sense that we build multi-billion dollar automobile factories to create machines that do not exist except by human action? In what way does the automobile push our limits of understanding of ethics that an apple orchard or a herd of cows do not? Apples and cows exist (as you say) "in nature" i.e., independent of human action, but once you apply human action to them -- once they become property -- then "something" about them is different. What that is is easy to determine and applies to all other forms of property, by definition. You do not need extravagantly imagined hypothetical cases.

Phil: Any movement which forces people to choose between being right and being alive is doomed.

And yet we have such a doggedly hard time shaking off Christianity and Islam. How do you account for that? The genetic rewards to altruism aside, I point out that according to the Grammar Checker under Tools in Microsoft Word, The Sermon on the Mount reads at the first grade and The Declaration of Independence reads at Grade 50. So, I conclude that childish ideas endure, but that mature thinking is harder.

Question 3: Would you say, then, that Ayn Rand's example of hungry young Hank Rearden not stealing an apple was contrary to your own moral code?

Post 8

Saturday, December 1, 2007 - 2:10pm

Michael: I'm either suffering an attack of the stupids today or your post was not very clearly written, as I don't understand most of your objections.

My examples were intended, first, to demonstrate, as others have proceded to do as well in new posts, that one does not have to invent out-of-this-world situations to create lifeboat examples. Rights are a part of normative ethics. The underlying principles that justify the existence of rights are closer to being ontological, applying to every situation imaginable, but rights in and of themselves presuppose a situation in which ones survival is not at the expense of someone else's or vice versa. I.e., only in the non-lifeboat contexts do "rights" as such apply, but a general theory of value, or a morality, or meta-ethics (the terminology here is not used consistently unfortunately), applies universally to all living things.

Secondly, from an epistemological standpoint, it is important to define exactly what that context of applicability is and where it ends, entirely or in some limited respect. Lifeboat situations do not exempt one from future consequences based on how precisely and correctly one acted in accordance with the moral dictates of the situation. I.e., if the lifeboat only safely holds ten and there are eleven of you, then you are justified in thowing ONE person overboard, but not two or more. At the instant that you have only ten, then you are no longer outside of the rule of normal ethics and you cannot then violate the rights of the remaining passengers without suffering legal consequences.

Lifeboat situations do arise in ordinary life and one should take some time to think through how to act when faced with one, as there very likely won't be time to do much philosophical inquiry while the situation is going on.

As far as Hank Reardon and the apple is concerned, I think it would be a matter of whether one was merely hungry or on the point of fainting or dying. Survival trumps property rights.

Oh, and I made an error of attribution, I think. I believe that it was Jarret Wollstein who introduced the "libertarian ethics," at the Ist Southern Libertarian Conference, not Don Ernsberger, altho Don was a major supporter of the position.

At one of the "Dagny's Gulch" conferences put on in Long Beach by Dagny Sharon in the mid-80's, Don, a speaker at the conference, was asked if he would violate his child's rights if, as a toddler, they decided to run out and play in traffic, and, if so, how he would justify it.

Ernsberger replied that even though it was immoral, he would use force to prevent his child from running out into the traffic. I.e., a blatant conflict between morality and practicality, which implies something wrong with one's concept of morality. I have no such problem, as my morality is not based on non-aggression to begin with, but rather on self-interest, although in normal social situations I am just as non-aggressive as any "libertarian lifer."

As far as taxing the rich to keep the poor kids from starving, I would point out that in a rational society, ceteris paribus, children would have a much higher market value than today, where it is considered a DUTY for either parents or society to ensure their welfare. Historically, children have been treated as assets, not bottomless holes of need. Our present attitude towards them is virtually pure altruism at its worst.

Given that wealth is created by human beings, and that we all benefit enormously from the existence of other productive people, it would be reasonable to expect that people would line up to invest in children in a more rational society, just as parents did so in olden times, on the expectation that their children would enable them to survive in their old age. It is only in the lifeboat situation that our altruistic ethics and collectivist statist political system have put us in that the question of taxing the rich to pay for the poor kids would make any sort of superficial sense.

Your example of the success of the religions is noted. Not sure how to answer it as ceteris paribus probably does not really apply. In the context of trying to sell people on the validity of a political philosophy, however, when it is easily demonstrable that it leads to either blatant conflicts with their existing values or has to be arbitrarily abandoned - as in the case of the kid running into traffic, then the credibility drops toward zero.

Post 9

Monday, December 3, 2007 - 5:57pm

Phil, thanks for your cogent and detailed reply and accept my apologies for the presentation of a disjointed array of assertions. My general intent was to question the value in the "ledge hanger" scenarios. The "lifeboat" says it all.

The underlying principles that justify the existence of rights are closer to being ontological, applying to every situation imaginable, but rights in and of themselves presuppose a situation in which ones survival is not at the expense of someone else's or vice versa.

I agree with the first part, but I am not convinced of the second, not even by the works of AR, and not by anything since. All of life is a "lifeboat:" To think or not to think, to be or not to be and all of that. To say that "one's survival is not at the expense of someone else's" is to speak of a zero-sum situation. Is that, then, the definition of a "lifeboat"? And if so, then what is poker? This what I meant by "What is normal?" How is some part of existence different from some other part? It is not that I subscribe to the war of all against all, but, that, ultimately, we are all in competition for resources, even as we trade for mutual benefit. That is why I asked at the first about taxing millionaires. Is it not true that this gradualist approach must be rejected out of hand? Your case was this:

Note that our respect for the property of others is within the context of a society in which our very survival is not in immediate question. Once that premise is violated and we ARE at risk of death or serious harm, then we are fully justified and in fact would be immoral NOT to "violate the rights" of someone who tried to use property rights as an excuse to let us die.

Again, property rights are human rights. However, my life is the standard of my action. So, yes, nominally, your right to an inviolate hedgerow might suffer my intrusion, but the case of Hank Rearden speaks to something else, not necessarily "higher" but surely "deeper." If you cannot maintain your own life as man qua man, then you have lost the struggle and do not have the right to loot others to maintain your existence -- ... never to ask another man to live for mine...
The difference between my crossing your property line and the taxing of the rich to feed the poor is the salient question. By what standard do we evaluate these actions?

Lifeboat situations do not exempt one from future consequences...

I agree 100%. All my life, I believed that AR missed the (life)boat on this. I decided to create a new post to answer the question. You must be aware of Buckminster Fuller's "spaceship Earth." It might as well be called "lifeboat Earth."
You said "... In the context of trying to sell people on the validity of a political philosophy, however, when it is easily demonstrable that it leads to either blatant conflicts with their existing values or has to be arbitrarily abandoned - as in the case of the kid running into traffic, then the credibility drops toward zero..."and I agree in that the goals is to sell people a new and better philosophy, which then is shown (easily) to have problems. Philosophers are not the only ones who can leverage non-contradiction.

Let us continue to reason together.
Mike

Post 10

Monday, December 3, 2007 - 7:08pm

Michael wrote: "All of life is a "lifeboat:" To think or not to think, to be or not to be and all of that. To say that "one's survival is not at the expense of someone else's" is to speak of a zero-sum situation. Is that, then, the definition of a "lifeboat"? And if so, then what is poker? This what I meant by "What is normal?" How is some part of existence different from some other part? It is not that I subscribe to the war of all against all, but, that, ultimately, we are all in competition for resources, even as we trade for mutual benefit. That is why I asked at the first about taxing millionaires. Is it not true that this gradualist approach must be rejected out of hand?"

Skyscrapers, power plants, farms and most edible crops are the result of human beings acting in concert to produce enormous amounts of value that did not exist in nature. Human beings are not naturally predators upon each other, except in lifeboat situations. Rather, they benefit greatly from each other's existence. If the universe was such a lifeboat, then we would all be doomed. People can't survive by taking in each other's laundry. Fortunately, the universe is not - at least on our present scale - a lifeboat. We currently have enough wealth among us on this planet that everyone except the terminally ill, including the very old,* could survive and prosper. The problem is how to make that investment. See below.

*(The terminally ill and very elderly, with their almost infinite demands upon the medical system, are a special case. Very often the last few months of a person's life cost as much - in terms of heroic medical measures - as the whole productivity of their life prior to that point, and they are often miserable throughout the final decline to boot. Eventually, if we don't bankrupt ourselves as a species, we will have solutions to prolonging life and defeating aging and disease, and then this problem will go away.

Meanwhile, our altruistic medical establishment is bankrupting itself on providing care for everyone that is more and more expensive as more and more people survive with more and more things wrong with them. It would make sense for insurance companies to offer to buy off the terminally ill, giving them a wad of cash as the price of foregoing extreme measures to keep them alive hooked to feeding tubes, etc., but our religious altruistic ethics forbid that kind of bargain, even though all parties would benefit thereby. I just hope that the drain on resources, which will get worse as my generation enters old age, doesn't cost so much that the really valuable research into reversing aging simply doesn't get funded.)

The current systems have the fatal flaw that they reward failure. I.e., if you are sick with AIDS in Africa, then you qualify for free food and other benefits in many areas. I've read of people deliberately acquiring AIDS in order to eat. If everything is going well, then the funding from all the altruistic charities and state programs goes elsewhere, to where things are worst. Is this subsidy of failure likely to produce anything but more failure?

If we had a secure means of investment in the masses of people in the 3rd world, then it would be such a lucrative process that money market fund managers would be scrambling to get the cash there. The Grameen Bank and other microloans programs have proved the financial feasibility. However, they don't generally offer enough incentive to bring in the major investors, and they are not really set up to make the mass effort necessary to really solve the problem of world poverty, which would have to involve a lot of infrastructure and education.

A real solution would be more along the lines of investing in a personal trust, whose shares would be available for sale on the world internet market. I have discussed this idea elsewhere on RoR.

In any case, we are a LONG way from running out of local resources to the point that life approaches a zero sum game (except for the factor of exponentially growing medical expenses I note above). The problems for the next couple centuries will be how to rationally invest what we have, instead of squandering it chasing squeeky wheels.

Post 11

Wednesday, December 5, 2007 - 11:55am

Stuart:

I agree that your stress about using the term 'theoretically' for any merely imaginably-acceptable 'possibility' is an abuse of the term and mis-leads one into a framework of thinking about supposedly real logical consequences (with ethical implications) resulting from sometimes merely fantasy considerations as a starting point.

O-t-other-h, I find many 'life-boat' scenarios worth considering as thought-provoking on-the-fringe-of-ethics probs; some I find answerable by Rand re her idea "Ethics do not apply here"...and, of course, some not.

2Bcont
LLAP
J:D

(Edited by John Dailey on 12/05, 12:06pm)

Post 12

Wednesday, December 5, 2007 - 11:58am

Stuart:

'Arbitrary' metaphysics does apply to some so-called ethic-probs, but, not all methinks. Some probs are merely arbitrarily thought up, but, ntl, are plausible if not (for most people) probable...like hanging from a ledge on a tall building: what to do, if 'ethically' concerned about others' property?

Thought provoking post, though. Interesting examples re your points.

LLAP
J:D

Post 13

Thursday, December 6, 2007 - 2:11am

You are walking down the street and a giant radioactive octupus bursts through the pavement and in one tentacle, he has the President of the United States and in another 50 school children and in a third your wife and in a fourth tickets to the World Series and in the fifth a white flag of surrender and in the sixth an atomic bomb and in the seventh and eighth he is juggling back and forth the rights to Ayn Rand's Estate. You are armed with a semi-automatic rocket-launcher, a crossbow, a morningstar, a 9-mm Glock, an Uzi, a syllogism, and a large bucket of fresh oysters. Before you can react, Kofi Annan arrives on the scene, dressed like an octopus, but unknown to you, really is an octopus dressed like a man dressed like an octopus. You decide to kill him with the Glock but between the time you pull the trigger and the time the bullet arrives, you realize that it really a kind of quantum gravitation lens image mirage, and you have really shot yourself. In desparation, you turn to the octopus and offer him anything he wants to save your life. But, the octopus replies that saving your life would not be in his best interests because he loves your wife.
Now, I know we have discussed this before, but this time, I want to consider an alternative to the usual reponse most Objectivists give to this problem. Therefore, would it make a difference, if you could substitute anyone else for Kofi Annan?
You see the dilemma, of course.

"Suggestion for Dr. Yaron Brook re wartime innocents" by Rodney Rawlings
http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/GeneralForum/0890.shtml
Post 7 Monday, June 12, 2006 - 7:56pm by Michael Marotta

Post 14

Friday, December 7, 2007 - 11:54am

My interest in this is limited to two questions: why do some (most?) men use 'doomsday' scenarios to flush out their moral ideals? Are they really so terrified of existence?

Post 15

Sunday, December 9, 2007 - 7:31am

Well, Steve, we can see from that cigarette that nothing scares you.

Life is an either-or situation. The choice to think or not to think is the choice to live or not to live. Moving up the ladder (so to speak) morality is the tool by which we decide which values to pursue in order to further our lives. As efficacious as you want to be, the choice to spent a million dollars on a big gold dollar sign for your living room or on filling the walls of your villa with Quent Cordair, the choice comes back to life or non-life.

Nontheless, I agree that there is a strong negativity to Objectivism, as there is to the wider mass culture. About 80% of Francisco's "Money" speech is about what money is not. That is fairly representative of the psycho-epistemology of objectivism. Rand called Richard Halley's music a violent No flung at the world. On the other hand, scientologists make music about the joy of creating.

Atlas is a book to be read in the Fall and Winter. As Winter becomes Spring read The Fountainhead. If Ayn Rand had not followed Nathaniel Branden to New York City if she had stayed in that Neutra house in the desert Atlas would have been a different book. John Galt would have raised the sign of the dollar at the 2/3 mark and the book would have seen the rebuilding of civilization with Cheryl and Eddie married and expecting... and ended with the young Danneskjold boys grown up and on their way to the Moon.

Post 16

Sunday, December 9, 2007 - 4:26pm

An interesting point being raised here - thanks, Steve - it is true that most only have the sunlight at the end of a book long storm, so to speak, instead of the projected future such as Michael suggested [and which, btw, have been inclined to agree with for many years]... indeed, in my own still incompleted 'sequel', that very kind of future projection was being made - as if, in effect, it might have been [or better, could have been] what Ayn would have done if there whadn't been so much negativity at that period of her life.... [and no, this 'sequel' is such only in carrying out that projected kind of future life, not as a continuation of the characters - more as if several had read her book and decided to enact the consequences....].... guess it comes more to seeing the wrongs of the world and only having a glimpse of the sunlight if all were discarded - and as such, usually seeing the impossibles of utopias as consequences [Bellamy comes to mind].....

Post 17

Sunday, December 9, 2007 - 4:36pm

Michael. Forget everything I said about you...

What a great idea! A sequel to "Atlas Shrugged!"

Since no one has come forth as an individual to volunteer in tackling the task, I suggest a team approach. Some of the best fiction out there has been collaborative efforts, and this could be done best perhaps by allowing separate teams to take over various characters, plotting their histories, making up plausible back stories to fill out their characters, etc.

This could be a first in a sense. There have been alternate history novels by the score. Harry Turtledove, who I saw at this last LOSCON, has written several dynamite series exploring alternate time lines. Clearly, "Atlas..." now falls into the alternate time-line category, as it missed a host of important developments, especially personal computers and the internet. However, as an alternate history, it is perhaps unique in that it was written before the history that took a different path. Nonetheless, it otherwise fits that model. If someone were handed it today and thought that it had been written in the past twenty-five years, then they clearly would assume that it was a deliberate alternate history.

Doing a projected sequel then to an alternate history written ahead of time (so to speak) would segway perfectly into the AS movie. If the movie is as successful as it should be, then of course people are going to want a sequel! I would suggest, also, as a spinoff of the movie, whether or not the sequel is done, that a manga version could be great. I recently stumbled accross the classic best-seller Japanese novel, "Battle Royalle," which has to be one of the most violent pieces of writing ever, and was a brilliant character study in how people behave in true lifeboat situations.

However, I found the manga version first, by accident, and could not put it down. When I also located the original novel, it had much less impact on me than the image-based version. The artists who did the imagery in BR were geniuses. They captured every subtlety of emotion - both single emotions and complex emotions overlaid with attempts to dissemble. I would stop at individual pages and just study them for all the hidden nuances.

AS, with all the imagery of the characters, etc., that Rand put in, is perfect for a high-quality manga adaptation, with the same subtlety and power evinced in BR. And, it would be a great revenue stream for the copyright holders, presumably the Ayn Rand Institute as well as possibly the movie producers. I think that "Battle Royale," which is a BIG book in the original, almost on the scale with AS, ran to some twenty-five or so manga books. Imagine AS taking off in Japan and then spreading to China! That is quite possible in the manga form.

Anyway, whatever happens, blame it on Michael... (Unless it's a huge success, in which case you may recall my input.)

Post 18

Sunday, December 9, 2007 - 4:40pm

Oh my Galt...

Robert, that's NOT FAIR! Were you secretly watching my input somehow? I swear that I absolutely had no idea that you were working on an actual sequel... Now if I had just been a few seconds or minutes quicker on the uptake. Anyway, I'm glad that there is already support for the idea.

Post 19

Tuesday, December 11, 2007 - 8:51pm