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Our Inner Puritan
Living alone on a desert island, no person could thrive or survive as a professional poker player - but n either would applying the "trader principle" get him anywhere at all. Ethics does not reduce to mere economics in either the exclusively private and personal sphere nor in wider society. To criticize professional poker players as not offering value for value is plausible in the macroeconomic sphere - but only if one again subscribes to a purely monetary definition of value (one that Objectivism starkly denies) and if one also ignores that professional poker players can draw an audience no different from the audience for any other competitive event.
Our Inner Puritan might recoil at gambling - I do not gamble, find people buying Lotto tickets at my local pharmacy pathetic, and wouldn't enter a casino on a bet. But this is an aesthetic choice. I get no thrill from gambling. (Nor do I get a thrill from castigating gamblers.) I would rather spend my disposable income on a romantic evening with my boyfriend. No doubt others would find my taste for period pieces, sirloin steak and sodomy repulsive. But as with the joy of gambling, my aesthetic - that is optional- values are moral in so far as they bring me joy and do not detract from my moral responsibilities to feed and clothe myself, pay my bills, protect my health, and otherwise provide for my long term happiness. While poison is always evil if one wants to live, most of one's choices in our free, productive, and diversified economy are wide open as to whether we like video games, bubble gum, bottled water and $1,000 designer purses by Gucci, or, like myself, camping, blue cheese, rare books and blue-jeans.
Objectivist moral theory exists only in outline, with a lopsided emphasis on virtues, and a tacit assumption that Rand's or one's own conventional values are self evidently rational. Just as interpersonal ethics can be divided into the optional etiquette and the mandatory politics personal ethics can be divided into the optional aesthetic and the mandatory personal responsibility. In a free, large, and vibrant society, with the possibility for individuals to choose among a huge number of niches in our division-of-labor economy, or to make their own niches, and to choose their own social circles each with their own standards of etiquette, it is atavistic to expect people to conform to traditional or conventional lifestyles. If you can support yourself as an on-line poker player or as a transvestite beauty-queen or by selling bottled water at $2 a pint then revel in your freedom and the age in which you live. Just a few decades ago, the internet didn't exist, transvestism was illegal and likely to get one murdered, and the bottled water market existed only in deserts and the path of oncoming hurricanes.
We are not cavemen, nor subsistance agriculturalists nor Ozzy and Harriet and we need not live like we were.
Ted Keer
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