| | Michael,
Such people have poor inward and outward visions. Your inward vision is your ability to introspect and to morally evaluate yourself. If you can do that well, then you can sensitize yourself to subtle changes stemming from choice-points in your life. For instance, a highly-introspective and morally aware person might see a $20 bill fall out of an old lady's purse while she is walking -- and immediately pick it up and give it back to her ("Pardon me, Ma'am, but you just dropped this money while walking."). However, other kinds of people -- people who aren't introspective or as morally aware -- will do one of 2 things:
1) Take a lot of time to process what they should do, or take too many unimportant things into account (such as whether others are looking at you), and then make a decision based on a confabulated mix of jumbled moral and practical propositions
2) Salivate over the unearned money and grab it up before anyone else sees (letting the woman walk away without giving her the money back)
So your inward vision is your ability to sense your own value and importance -- and how it is that choice-points work to formulate your character (which is something that is really good for you to improve, as there are tremendous, long-lasting psychic benefits to having a good character). It is a mental recognition that you can earn your own positive appraisal and that you have the moral potential to become better and also to reap the rewards of becoming better. Some philosophers might disdainfully call this process a process of moral perfection (in order to make it a straw man), but it is really only ever about making progress -- so we should call it moral progression, or the ubiquitous human potential for moral progress (or UHPFMP, for short).
:-)
Your outward vision is your outlook or worldview. For instance, you can believe the world is populated only by demons and goblins (e.g., greedy bankers, lying politicians, violent gangs, etc.), and therefore you have to scratch and kick and steal and lie to gain or keep anything of value -- or you could believe differently than that. You might, for instance, believe that the universe is not against you, and that -- with a little effort -- you could engage life as a learning student on a journey (as someone who can learn to be successful and to live well as a human being; and reap all of the rewards of living well). A paradigm case is when Aristotle alluded to the man of great magnanimity -- who lives his life so well that value bursts forth out of him like a geyser, showering even uninvolved others with value, who are either close or just even in contact with him.
If your inward or outward vision is skewed -- and cultural philosophy is the most important factor for these -- then you won't be in a position to appreciate what Rand had to say about her philosophy for living on earth.
Ed
(Edited by Ed Thompson on 11/05, 6:15pm)
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