| | Mike,
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Ed,
"Morality is about benefit, and not about subjective and feeble satisfaction."
I really hate the sound of this. It sounds like something a collectivist would say.
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I merely meant to decry vulgar (unprincipled) hedonism, Mike. Still hate it?
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Benefit by whose measure?
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[this is where it gets ugly, as I know that Mike can get awful angry with me, at times -- and I don't give a rat's rear-end about that, I'm going to say what I want to, anyway]
Mike, you are smuggling in a primacy of consciousness standard here -- and that is illegitimate. It's as if you deny objectivity as a whole, or merely a part of it (e.g. objective values).
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I am the final arbiter of my own happiness
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You are the only one who can know all of your own desires, and how well you're doing at meeting them -- but arbiters decide things, and you don't get to 'decide' on ALL of the things that would make you happy (you have to 'discover' some of it).
This relates to a recent discussion I had with Bill. I had taken YOUR side in debate (I was arguing that rational calculation -- and the subsequent consequence-evaluation -- is tantamount to making a 'decision'). Bill disagreed and got the better of me, we don't get to decide what's good -- the good is a relation of reality to man.
Here's some OPAR (p 207-) quotes showing that we don't 'get to' decide on ALL of the things that make us happy ...
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Ethics, according to the received wisdom, is arbitrary; it is a field ruled by subjective feeling, dissociated from reality, reason, science. In this view, there's no disputing about value-judgments; there are no objective grounds on which to choose between production and theft, ...
Ethics is a human necessity and a science, not a playground for mystics and skeptics.
Goal-directed entities do not exist in order to pursue values. They pursue values in order to exist.
By the very nature of "value," therefore, any code of values must hold life as the ultimate value.
The distinctively Objectivist viewpoint here, let me repeat, is not that life is a precondition of other values--not that one must remain alive in order to act. This idea is a truism, not a philosophy. Objectivism says that remaining alive is the goal of values and of all proper action.
Plants and animals initiate automatically the actions their life requires. [break] They can be destroyed, but they cannot pursue their own destruction or even be neutral in regard to it. [break] Like every other entity, man has a nature; like the other organisms, he must follow a specific course of action if he is to survive.
Moral laws, in this view, are principles that define how to nourish and sustain human life; they are no more than this and no less.
Morality is the instruction manual in regard to proper care and use that did not come with man. It is the science of human self-preservation.
An animal does not choose its goals--nature takes care of that; so it can act safely on any impulse. Within the limits of the possible, that impulse is programmed to be pro-life.
An animal cannot grasp or deal with the total of its lifespan and does not need to do so.
Every science and every field of thought involves the discovery and application of principles.
A moral principle, accordingly, is not something sui generis. Properly speaking, it is a type of scientific principle, identifying the relationship to man's survival of the various basic human choices.
For a rational being, principled action is the only effective kind of action. To be principled is the only way to achieve a long-range goal.
To state the point another way, "man's life" means life in accordance with the principles of human survival.
The Objectivist standard of morality is not a momentary or merely physical survival; it is the long-range survival of man--mind and body.
Every moral value entails a life-long course of virtue.
"For an animal," writes Ayn Rand, "the question of survival is primarily physical; for man, primarily epistemological."
Rationality, accordingly, is the primary obligation of man; all the others are derivatives of it.
Since man survives by thought and production, every man should live and work as an independent, creative being, acquiring goods and services from others only by means of trade, when both parties agree that the trade is profitable.
The essential fact to grasp here is that social existence is an asset to man in the struggle for survival.
Egoism, accordingly, does not mean that a man should isolate himself from others or remain indifferent to them. On the contrary, a proper view of egoism requires that a man identify the role of others in his own life and then evaluate them appropriately.
If a man is to qualify as self-sustaining and self-respecting, he must not help, let alone love, his enemy, or even his neighbor--not until he discovers who the neighbor is and whether the person deserves to be helped. As to helping a stranger in an emergency, this is moral under certain conditions.
The realm of facts is what creates the need to choose a certain goal. This need arises because man lives in reality, because he is confronted by a fundamental alternative, and because the requirements of his survival, which he does not know or obey automatically, are set by reality (including his own nature).
Existence, we say--the metaphysically given facts of reality, including the identity of man--is what demands of human beings a certain course of behavior.
A primary choice does not mean an "arbitrary," "whimsical," or "groundless" choice. There are grounds for a (certain) primary choice, and those grounds are reality--all of it. The choice to live, as we have seen, is the choice to accept the realm of reality. This choice is not only not arbitrary. It is the precondition of criticizing the arbitrary; it is the base of reason.
Ethics is conditional, i.e. values are not intrinsic. But values are not subjective, either. Values are objective.
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Ed
(Edited by Ed Thompson on 6/24, 4:33pm)
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Every prescription is a description, since all statements about reality, including normative or ethical statements, are simply statements of fact - statements about what exists.
