Submitted by Gene Howington, Guest Blogger
In 1780, John Adams succinctly defined the principle of the Rule of Law in the Massachusetts Constitution by seeking to establish “a government of laws and not of men”. This reflects the democratic principles enshrined in the Constitution’s preamble: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” The very foundation of our legal system says that the law should work for us all, not just a select few.
This raises the question of what is a good law that serves the majority of society and what is a bad law that doesn’t serve the majority of society?
This idea is further bolstered by the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment:
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The latter addition of the 14th Amendment as well as the Preamble of the Constitution both reflect the spirit in which this country was founded as set forth in the Declaration of Independence: “When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
Clearly, the pursuit of the Rule of Law under the Constitution as informed by the Declaration is a pursuit of the Utilitarian concept of the right course of action is the one that maximizes the overall good consequences of an action; what is in the best interest of greatest numbers of We the People is in the best interests of the country.
Utilitarianism is a quantitative and reductionist philosophical form. Utilitarianism, however, is not a unified philosophical view. It comes in different flavors with the two primary flavors being Rule Utilitarianism and Act Utilitarianism. Strong Rule Utilitarianism is an absolutist philosophical view and rules may never be broken. Like any absolutist view does not take into account that reality occasionally presents situations where breaking a rule results in the greater good. For example, the strong reductionist rule that murder is bad is countered by the exceptional example of murder is not bad if performed in self-defense or the defense of others. This result of practical application is reflected in what John Stuart Mill called Weak Rule Utilitarianism. It becomes apparent that since not all rules are absolutely enforceable when seeking the common good and exceptional circumstances require flexibility in the law, that the Utilitarian pursuit of the Rule of Law must be in Mill’s Weak Rule formulation of Utilitarianism. But is considering the greater good and circumstantial reasons for breaking or modifying rules the best way to judge whether a law is good or bad?
If one considers Kant’s Categorical Imperative – “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.” – then any law not universally applicable should not be a maxim worthy of being recognized as universal. This is contrary to Utilitarianism in general as well as Weak Rule Utilitarianism specifically, but while Kant’s view takes subjectivity into account when dealing with circumstances it does not take into account that there can be objective differences in circumstances as well. It is part of the judiciaries role as a trier of fact to consider not only subjective differences but objective differences in circumstances in formulating the most equitable and just solution to a case at bar. In seeking to be universally applicable in defining maxims, Kant is an absolutist as surely as Strong Rule Utilitarians are absolutists. As a consequence of reality not being neatly binary in nature and thus not often compatible to absolutists approaches to formulating laws for practical application, what can be done to keep Weak Rule Utilitarianism from degenerating into Act Utilitarianism where actors will seek the greatest personal pleasure when presented with a choice rather than the greater good? Utilitarianism conflicting with the Categorical Imperative? Is there a unitary philosophical approach to evaluating whether a law is good or bad?
The answer seems to be no. If there is no single view, absolutist or otherwise, that leads to a practical system for evaluating whether a law is good or bad, then there is only one option for building a framework for evaluation. That option is synthesis.
Consider that absolutist systems as they are not applicable in reality should be confined to being considered theoretical boundaries rather than practical boundaries. This does not negate the value of considering systems like Strong Rule Utilitarianism or Kant’s Categorical Imperative, but rather puts them in the place of aspirational goals rather than practically attainable goals in every circumstance. Given that Mill’s Weak Rule Utilitarianism can degrade into Act Utilitarianism and that degeneration can be compounded by the number of exceptions there are to a rule, are there ways to minimize the defects of using only Weak Rule Utilitarianism to determine the societal value of a law? What supplements can be made to that framework?
I submit that one such supplement is found in the form of Negative Utilitarianism. Negative Utilitarianism is exactly what it sounds like; the inverse function of Utilitarianism. Whereas Utilitarianism is the basic proposition that the right course of action is the one that maximizes the overall good consequences of an action, Negative Utilitarianism is the basic proposition that requires us to promote the least amount of evil or harm, or to prevent the greatest amount of suffering for the greatest number. If one takes both into account in evaluation of the social value of a law (a synthetic approach), the test becomes a balancing act. On one side of the scale is the societal value of overall good consequences, on the other side is the societal value of preventing overall harm. This proposition suggests the following framework for evaluation of whether a law is good or bad.
- How many people benefit from the good consequences of a law?
- How many people benefit from the reduction of harm as consequences of a law?
- Does the benefits from promoting good consequences outweigh the costs of reduction of harm?
- Does the benefits from reducing harm outweigh the costs to the greater good in taking no action?
- Are the net consequences of a law perfectly knowable from either perspective or does the possibility of unforeseeable consequences exist? Can the unforeseeable risks be minimized either by construction of the law(s) to allow for contingencies or by regulating other risks or contributing factors?
- Do solutions from either perspective negatively impact human and/or civil rights? Do those negative impacts outweigh the positive effects to the greater human and/or civil rights of all?
This is but one way to evaluate whether a law is good or bad for society. What are other methods? Are there ways to improve this method? What do you think?
@Roco: I know multi-millionaires who think taxation is wrong not because they have failed but because they see it as a reduction in their life.
Maybe so, but I dismiss that thinking. I personally know a handful of self-made multi-millionaires and none of them think that; a typical self-made multi-millionaire (as opposed to the child of a rich family) is smart enough to understand that they would NOT be a multi-millionaire without the benefit of laws, courts, and social services for their customers. A multi-millionaire friend that owns some restaurants understands he is making use of the roads and police and food inspectors and firemen constantly without making any specific payments, as well as social security and medicare for his employees that means he doesn’t have to provide for their retirement, or meet their higher demands for pay if they were required to pay for it themselves. The same goes for my friend that owns a direct-mail business; the same goes for my friend that builds medical buildings, the same goes for my friend that owns a radio station. They agree with me that taxes are too high for the value recieved, but that is a different issue.
I am not intellectually dishonest; I was talking about my observations, of people that think they have failed and blame their failure on “taxation.”
Most self-made millionaires do not think they have failed; so they do not blame their non-existent failure on anything. If they think “taxes are wrong” then I think they are pretty stupid, since chances are their success depended heavily upon tax-funded infrastructure and services (like law enforcement and companies abiding by their contracts because of the existence of courts of law that can compel them to do so).
Tony C.
>the ideas I use are my own….I will read the writings of Locke, Jefferson, Smith, Malthus, Darwin, Archimedes, Newton,
In what alternative universe are these consistent? Note that Im not saying that you are wrong or contradictory. Im merely asking for the context. Eg, Nazism is moral in the context of sacrifice.
> the logic of Rand…is scientifically and morally indefensible
You are correct in the context of science as rationalism (pseudo-concepts not abstracted from concretes) and empiricism (a chaos of concretes unintegrated by concepts) and morality as a rationalization of sacrifice and suffering. In the context of science as the rationally systematic study of the natural causes of concretes and morality as a rational guide to life and happiness, you are wrong.
>Rand is a religion
Rand systematically abstracts concepts from concretes. You confess that your “reasoning” begins in “generalizations.” Eg, God is real. This is the anti-perception, anti-mind, epistemology of faith, rationalized to fraudulently obtain the earned prestige of the scientific method that created the West, the civilization you intend to destroy for the sake of destruction itself. Youre like an arsonist who burns down a house to watch the flames.
@Roco: how do you know you are right?
I think I am mostly right because I look for confirmation in how people actually act and behave; and I reject theories that exclude actual common behavior. What theories I have may not explain all behavior, but I do not think they exclude any actual behavior, and I do think they explain most common behavior, so I think I am mostly right, or to be more accurate, that my predictions have a good probability of being accurate, even if it is not 100% accuracy, and other theories I have heard or invented and considered have a lower probability of being accurate. The ideas I currently have are the fittest so far of the ideas I have heard or invented.
@Roco says: What insight do you have which Stephen Grossman doesnt have?
Obviously I can’t read his mind, but one thing seems obvious to me: Grossman thinks in absolutes and 100% extremes. ANY demand on his time is “slavery,” or “Marxism,” or “Communism,” or “Socialism.”
Another thing that seems obvious to me is Grossman is willfully dismissive of whether his philosophy can work or not; he just doesn’t care if it is practical or a society could form from that or if it would produce anarchy and rule by physical intimidation. Again, this is an aspect of absolutist thinking: If society requires obligations or taxation, he rejects it, even if the alternative for the vast majority of people would be abject slavery enforced by brutality. But then I think he will say he rejects that too, which leaves……. nothing.
Like Rand he has no theory of how people should organize themselves, he has no theory of how to maximize freedom without achieving total freedom, all he has is a set of demands that cannot ever be met by reality.
The result of that is advantageous to him: He can argue against anything that has the remotest possibility of working on the grounds that it violates one of his principles. He can argue against majority rule, even though getting 110 million people to agree 100% on anything is impossible. He can argue against democracy, or communism, or socialism, or anarchy, or anything, because his rules do not allow that can actually exist. I think he is angry and just wants to shout about it.
@Roco says: On what do you base the certainty of your correctness?
I don’t have certainty of my correctness, what I have is a high probability of correctness, and my evidence is accurate predictions of people’s behavior, both past and future. Often I have enough certainty that I am willing to risk large sums of money on my predictions, or once in a while even my life that I am right.
On the other hand, I can have certainty of incorrectness. I know Rand is wrong because it is easy to construct plausible hypotheticals in which her claims are simply untrue, and some of the claims are simply untrue because I know enough science, and I know enough about how the brain operates and is fooled, and how neurons work and intelligence works to see through her bullshit claims. So objectivism is simply untrue, the brain does not work the way she claimed. Grossman wants to believe the falsehood, so one insight I have, that Grossman does not, is that the foundation of Randian philosophy is just smoke and fiction. It is not “realistic” in the sense of accurately describing reality.
Roco,
I agree with just about everything Tony has written on this thread in his responses. I think he has done yeoman work in informing. However, as always I reserve my right to disagree with anyone, when it runs counter to my own thoughts.
My point was that Koestler was a far better writer than Rand and I stand by it. Darkness at Noon was a work of its’ time in which communism was the bogeyman in the US. I disdain Communism and I disdain Marx, because to me they share the commonality of taking certain valuable insights about the way society’s organize themselves and offer solutions to the problems identified that are drivel and totalitarian. I feel the same way about Objectivism though and all other “Isms” for that matter. Life never has a “one size fits all” solution.
Tony C:
how do you know you are right? What insight do you have which Stephen Grossman doesnt have? On what do you base the certainty of your correctness?
I am really starting to understand what you are saying and what Mike S is saying. It is all very interesting and causing me to change my evaluations.
Mike Spindell:
Yes I did mean Arthur Koestler. Thank you for pointing that out. I have only read Darkness at Noon so please forgive my spelling. Obviously I thought that was a great book.
By the way do you agree with Tony C about morality? The post directly above. I would be interested in your thoughts on the subject as well.
@Roco:
I don’t think Stephen Grossman understands what I am saying at all; or perhaps he just refuses to believe the facts and follow the logic because he is so emotionally invested in his fantasy. This is the primary reason people DO reject facts and logic, because admitting they are wrong requires making real the knowledge that much of their life and energy has been wasted, and that psychological pain is something they avoid. That is how it works with religions.
Mike Spindell’s argument is a good example of confirmation bias at work. That, and his penchant for a good ad hominem.
“why dont you post something substantive? Stephen Grossman understands exactly what Tony C is saying. He just rejects it.”
Roco,
I did write something substantive. Tony has been brilliant in not only demolishing every point your young hero has made, but in highlighting the callowness of his views. He has given the young man far more time than he deserves. However, I understand that you give this young man credence because his views resonate with yours. I rest my case.
“I have read a good deal of fiction in my day, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Melville, London, Dumas, Hugo, Ibsen, Kessler, Checkov, Pasternak and many others. She ranks right up there with any of them.”
It doesn’t matter what you’ve read. It is your ability to understand it, absorb it and to be able to think critically about the material’s literary and logical merit that determines your critical faculty. For you to compare Rand with
Tolstoy, Hemingway, Melville, Hugo, Dumas, Ibsen and Chekhov, as writers, is to show your own deficiency’s in literary critique. In written ability she also doesn’t compare to London, “Kessler” and Paternak. By Kessler I’m assuming you mean Arthur Koestler, who is also far superior in literary ability to Rand. There is no one with literary credentials, other than the fanatically religious Rand followers. William F. Buckley, an intellectual with literary insight and the founder of today’s Conservative movement loathed her, her ideas and her books.
The mistake made by Grossman, yourself and others is that you take arguments of no merit and expect them to be equated with actual logic. When you are met with opprobrium towards those ideas you somehow think it is unfair and whine that you’re not taken seriously. I take the backers of Rand’s ideas as seriously as I take those of “Creationism” and Scientology.
At least with Scientology though, its’ founder though a charlatan, was one hell of a good writer, with which Rand’s turgid drivel cannot be compared.
As far as Rothbard goes, well Duh! Why wouldn’t this paragon of the Austrian School not love her and have his breath taken away. She embodies a propagandist for his economic theories, in the guise of a popular author. Rothbard may indeed be more intelligent than me, but given his beliefs he simply lacks any insight into human nature and society. One can be highly intelligent, but blinded by ignorance simultaneously.
That I’ve even done you the courtesy of addressing you on this thread is far more than what you deserve, which is non-attention. If you, as I have, had been able to read this entire thread with something less than religious fanaticism, itself an irony when one talks of Rand, you would clearly see that Tony in totality has written an excellent refutation of Randian theory and Grossman immaturity.
In the end though I admit that the Randist’s may indeed reach primacy. The author shares the common trait of most demagogues, sociopathy. Most of her followers though can’t be blamed because sociopaths are quite convincing to those who need faith to cling to and of course to other budding sociopaths.
@Roco: could you please expand on the thought that morality is not “accepted by choice”? Do you mean people are moral naturally or that people who kill or molest children are just born evil? You either are or are not moral depending on the biology you were born with?
All of that is true with minor qualifications. Morality is a set of rules we follow in relationships with others; and although some of those are artificial and chosen, for the most part morality is based in naturally born feelings of empathy and fairness (two different things) that we see develop in the vast majority of children. They are not technically “born” with them, because the brain is still developing outside the mother; between birth and the first major reorganization at 2+ years it will triple in size; after that there is continued growth but primarily in step with body size. There are further genetically driven reorganizations, and there is evidence the human brain is not actually mature until sometime between 21 and 25.
So when you say “born with,” I cannot take that in a literal sense, I must take it in the sense of “naturally inherent” if nothing unusual happens to the infant during development. By “unusual” I mean the infant isn’t physically damaged, poisoned, crippled or deprived of oxygen or nutrition to the point of brain damage,
Even so, to a small extent people CAN be born immoral, due to genetic defects or bad luck that changes the formation of the brain so they are not capable of morality. To a small extent people can be born evil, the brains of sociopaths (1% of the population) really do function differently, as we can see on fMRI machines, and they seem to be missing some communication between parts of the brain that we see in everybody else.
We cannot ignore these few percent of abnormally functioning brains when discussing the law, because a large share of what we think is illegal is due to them! But for the purpose of a philosophical discussion, we can put them aside and talk about “normal” people.
Which brings me to your next statement: So people do not have a choice in the matter of their morality?
I do not know your definition of “morality,” Roco. I am not saying that as an insult or accusation but as a fact. If your very definition of morality (like Rand’s) is circular so it is always a choice, then there is no point in discussing it.
But my statements use the actual definition of morality, A set of social rules, customs, traditions, beliefs, or practices which specify proper, acceptable forms of conduct.
To me the key there is “social rules of acceptable conduct.” Morality is, by definition, what one’s society deems right and wrong, not what one personally defines as right and wrong.
If we want a smaller set of rules, we can look for some commonality, a non-contradictory overlap between societies. Obviously, if it is a person’s belief that it is immoral to marry outside their race or religion, that belief is not part of the commonality. But some unacceptable behaviors are: In virtually all societies, it is immoral to harm others for personal gain, it is immoral to lie or to deceive others for personal gain (including escaping punishment), it is immoral to break one’s solemn word, it is immoral to steal physical property, it is immoral to refuse to contribute to society itself. Those things are so immoral they rise to law in most cultures; but there are other immoralities that do not rise to law in all cultures but are still considered unacceptable (in the sense that people shun the transgressors or look down on them). Like cowardice, or selfishness.
Morality (and ultimately law) springs from an inherent sense we see in children of all cultures and languages about what is “fair” and what is not. I (at least) believe it is inherent, not taught, for several reasons. For example, children apply it to novel fantasy situations they cannot have been taught. We also see this sense of fairness in chimpanzees and smaller brained monkeys that still live in societies; so it is reasonable to expect this shared trait evolved in us long before the genetic changes that made us modern humans.
So, unless you discard the common meanings of words entirely, which I will not do, the answer is that morality is not your choice, it is defined by one’s society, and the most basic rules common to nearly all societies rest upon an inherent sense of what is fair and what is not. That sense can be informed and refined by facts, observations, reason, science and debate, but ultimately society is responsible for deciding what is acceptable conduct and what is not, and it is up to society to shun or punish those that act immorally.
After the anti-conceptual, anti-selfishness Nazis sacrificed the prisoners in their death camps, the prisoners were the chunks of meat that Tony C claims is human nature. Always connect concepts to concretes for the meaning.
Tony C
> We are always a chunk of meat ready for any cannibal to ambush, kill and swallow
After evading the moral responsibility to focus your conceptual mind onto concrete reality, this is an honest report of your experience of the self you morally despise so much that you must either evade its existence (w/a materialist rationalization), go insane or kill yourself.
>We are fragile.
Without conceptualizing or animal survival instincts and skills, this certainly follows.
The chunk of meat labeled Tony C has been stimulated to respond with “statements” about the “morality” of the relationships among chunks of meat. How could one respond to a chunk of meat in a supermarket that emitted sounds that seemed to suggest a moral opposition to meat-eating? I am at a loss for words.
Most Jews in Germany went passively to the Nazi death camps because they accepted the culturally dominant influence of Kant’s pseudo-morality of duty, of obligation w/o choice, of sacrifice w/o values. They had no Tea Party there, no Jefferson, no Locke, no Aristotle. They did have Kant’s confession that “I have denied knowledge therefore ,in order to make room for faith” and his claim that the moral man acts “without any end [purpose, value] or advantage to be gained by it.” Americans, fortunately, have Ayn Rand’s morality of rational selfishness to protect them from the Kants, Hitlers and Tony Cs spewed up by our anti-conceptual schools. But whether they will use her ideas is a matter or choice.
Mike Spindell:
“Tony,
It’s time to let the boy wonder luxuriate in the vast emptiness of his own head and use your great mind elsewhere on the blog. He will never grasp what you are saying, sage wisdom that it is and is I fear irredeemable in his religious fanaticism for an atheist novelist of mediocre turgidity.”
why dont you post something substantive? Stephen Grossman understands exactly what Tony C is saying. He just rejects it.
I have read a good deal of fiction in my day, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Melville, London, Dumas, Hugo, Ibsen, Kessler, Checkov, Pasternak and many others. She ranks right up there with any of them.
You may not agree with Maury Rothbard but his intellect is far superior to yours or to mine and so he probably has a better grasp on what makes piece of writing superlative.
Why yes, it is an appeal to authority but that doesnt make it wrong. You appeal to Rabbi Hillel all the time.
You just dont like her because, well I will let Maury Rothbard say it in a letter he wrote to her:
October 3, 1957
Mrs. Ayn Rand O’Connor 36 East 36th St. New York 16, N.Y.
Dear Ayn:
First, I would like to begin by saying “and I mean it”; there is no exaggeration or hyperbole in this letter. Anything less than complete honesty would be unworthy of Atlas Shrugged.
I just finished your novel today. I will start by saying that all of us in the “Circle Bastiat” are convinced, and were convinced very early in the reading, that Atlas Shrugged is the greatest novel ever written. This is our generally accepted initial premise, and the discussions over the book have naturally been based upon it. But this is just the beginning. This simple statement by itself means little to me: I have always had a bit of contempt for the novel form, and have thought of the novel, at best, as a useful sugar-coated pill to carry on agitprop work amongst the masses who can’t take ideas straight. A month ago, if I had said a book was “the greatest novel ever written,” it wouldn’t have been too high a compliment.
It is one of the small measures of what I think of Atlas Shrugged that I no longer pooh-pooh the novel. I have always heard my literary friends talk of the “truths” presented by novels, without under- standing the term at all. Now I do understand, but only because you have carried the novel form to a new and higher dimension. For the first time you have welded a great unity of principle and person, depicting persons and their actions in perfect accordance with principles and their consequences. This in itself is a tremendous achievement. For with the unity of principle and person there emerges the corollary unity of reason and emotion: and the reader, in grasping your philosophic system both in speech and through acting persons, is hit by the great emotion of an immediate and rational perception. As I read your novel, the joy I felt was sometimes tempered by the regret that all those generations of novel-readers, people like my mother w ho in their youth read Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, searching eagerly for they knew not what truths which they never quite found, that these people could not read Atlas Shrugged. Here, I thought, were the truths they were really looking for. Here, in Atlas Shrugged, is the perfection of the novel form. It is now a form that I honor and admire.
But the truly staggering thing about your novel is the vast and completely integrated edifice, of thought and of action: the astounding infinity of rational connections that abound, great and small, throughout this novel. Joey says she used to wonder how a novel could take you over ten years to write; she now wonders how you possibly could have written all that in a mere ten years. Every page, almost every word, has its meaning and function. I am sure that I have only scratched the surface of tracing all the interconnections, and a good part of my conversation consists of saying; and what of page so-and-so: do you see how that fits in? I recall now just a line, I believe it was in an early speech of Francisco, where the following nouns appear: reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. To some this [might] seem to be a random string of nouns, but I saw immediately that one follows from the other in strict logical progression, that each leads to th e succeeding. This is just one example of the almost infinite treasure house that is Atlas Shrugged.
To find one person that has carved out a completely integrated rational ethic, rational epistemology, rational psychology, and rational politics, all integrated one with the other, and then to find each with the other portrayed through characters in action, is a doubly staggering event. And I am surprised that it astonishes even I who was familiar with the general outlines of your system. What it will do the person stumbling upon it anew I cannot imagine. For you have achieved not only the unity of principle and person, and of reason and passion, but also the unity of mind and body, matter and spirit, sex and politics . . . in short, to use the old Marxist phrase, “the unity of theory and practice.”
This is the sort of book where one is apt to find a phrase or concept and exclaim: oh, no leftist could say such nonsense, and then go out and find the same nonsense being spouted all around you. It is almost impossible, after reading Atlas Shrugged, to take the usual leftist arguments seriously. At first I admit I missed the presence of a great, super-Toohey villain, a Dr. Fu Manchu of evil, but then I came to realize that this is one of the key points in the book. And then, when I tried to tell a couple of leftist acquaintances something about your system, all they could do was curl their ugly lips and sneer about a “paranoid closed system.” These are the “intellectuals” of our day!
I now come to the painful part of this letter. For standing as I do in awe and wonder at the glory and magnitude of your achievement, knowing from early in the novel that I would have to write you and express in full how much I and the world owe to you, I also know that I owe you an explanation: an explanation of why I have avoided seeing you in person for the many years of our acquaintance. I want you to know that the fault is mine, that the reason is a defect in my own psyche and not a defect that I attribute to you. The fact is that most times when I saw you in person, particularly when we engaged in lengthy discussion or argument, that I found afterwards that I was greatly depressed for days thereafter. Why I should be so depressed I do not know. All my adult life I have been plagued with a “phobic state” (of which my travel phobia is only the most overt manifestation), i.e., with frightening emotions which I could neither control nor rati onally explain. I have found that unfortunately the only way I could successfully combat this—painful emotion is by sidestepping the situations which seemed to evoke it knowing that this is an evasion, but also knowing no better way. So in this situation. I have never felt depressed in such a way after seeing anyone else, so I concluded that the best I could do is avoid the reaction by not going to see you. I had naturally been too ashamed to say anything about this to you. Strangely, I don’t feel ashamed now; it is as if when writing to the author of Atlas Shrugged, that book which conveys with such immediate impact the pride and joy in being a man, that it is impossible to feel shame for telling the truth.
In trying my best to figure out why I should have been so depressed, I can only think of one or both of the following explanations: (1) that my brain became completely exhausted under the intense strain of keeping up with a mind that I unhesitatingly say is the most brilliant of the twentieth century; or (2) that I felt that if I continued to see you, my personality and independence would become overwhelmed by the tremendous power of your own. If the latter, then the defect is, of course, again mine and not yours. At any rate, I have come to regard you as like the sun, a being of enormous power giving off great light, but that someone coming too close would be likely to get burned.
At any rate, I want you to know that, even without seeing you, you have had an enormous influence upon me—even before the novel came out. When I first became interested in ideas, my first principle that I had from the start was a burning love of human freedom, and a hatred for aggressive violence of man upon man. I always liked economics, and was inclined to theory, but found in my graduate economics courses that I felt all the theories offered were dead wrong, but I could not say why. Mises’s Human Action was the next great influence upon me, because I found in it a great rational system of economics, each interconnected logically, each following, as in Aristotelian philosophy, from a basic and certain axiom: the existence of human beings.
When I first met you, many years ago, I was a follower of Mises, but unhappy about his antipathy to natural rights, which I “felt” was true but could not demonstrate. You introduced me to the whole field of natural rights and natural law philosophy, which I did not know existed, and month by month, working on my own as I preferred, I learned and studied the glorious natural rights tradition. I also learned from you about the existence of Aristotelian epistemology, and then I studied that, and came to adopt it wholeheartedly. So that I owe you a great intellectual debt for many years, the least of which is introducing me to a tradition of which four years of college and three years of graduate school, to say nothing of other reading, had kept me in ignorance.
And now I find, and marvel at in wonder and awe and joy, that I have become a better person just in reading Atlas Shrugged. It is still incredible to me that a person’s character can improve from reading a work of art, but there it is. I have checked and found many friends who have read it have felt the same way. I think that reading it will bring to the attentive reader, as it has brought me, at least a little more of the conviction of pride in being a man, of joy in unlimited roads of achievement open before him, of the feeling that pain does not matter, of the happiness of being alive on earth, and even of the feeling that reason and justice will ultimately prevail. He will walk a little straighter, hold his head a little higher, and be far more honest (one of the greatest accomplishments of the book is its rational and emotional demonstration that honesty is a profoundly selfish and necessary virtue—and not just a luxury for suckers. Magnificent!).
The chief defect in this book—and I am quite serious—is that it lacks an index. My chief emotion in reading this book was beautifully summed up in an emotion that Dr. Stadler felt when he first came across Galt’s manuscript: torn between eagerness to proceed onward, and the eagerness to look back and think about and digest the many ramifications of what I had read. With a novel, this is even more troublesome, since the pull of reading onward is more irresistible. This book cries for a fully annotated index, so that when one wants to refer quickly to passages on certain subjects, or to a particularly moving speech or phrase, one could find it without delay. I know that no novel has had an index before, but none has ever required it before, and this does. Perhaps you could be persuaded to come out with a “textbook” edition, complete with index.
Please let me know if there is anything I can do to promote the sale of the novel. I will do anything I can: from writing letters to the editor to pasting stickers up on street corners. I am enclosing a copy of the letter I am now sending to the New Leader, in comment on the disgraceful and disgusting column of Granville Hicks, an “ex”-Communist, about your book. (When I said your book will improve the reader, I don’t mean the convinced leftists: I shudder what the book will do to their psyche, if they really read it.) I understand, glory be!, that John Chamberlain will review it for the Sunday Herald-Tribune—and, confidentially, there is a growing possibility that John may also review it for National Review, if Whittaker Chambers does not send a review in on time.
Only twice in my life have I felt honored and happy that I was young and alive at the specific date of the publication of a book: first, of Human Action in 1949, and now with Atlas Shrugged. When, in the past, I heard your disciples refer to you in grandiloquent terms—as one of the greatest geniuses who ever lived, as giving them a “round universe”—I confess I was repelled: surely this was the outpouring of a mystic cult. But now, upon reading Atlas Shrugged, I find I was wrong. This was not wild exaggeration but the perception of truth. You are one of the great geniuses of the ages, and I am proud that we are friends. And Atlas Shrugged is not merely the greatest novel ever written, it is one of the very greatest books ever written, fiction or nonfiction. Indeed, it is one of the greatest achievements the human mind has ever produced. And I mean it. If Zarathustra should ever return to earth, and ask me —as representative of the human race—that unforgettable questionn: “what have ye done to surpass man?,” I shall point to Atlas Shrugged.
Gratefully yours,
Murray
Tony C:
“My observation is that when people think they have failed, they rush to blame external factors beyond their control, and that is the sense I get when people tell me taxes are “robbery” and thievery” and selfishness is some kind of necessity for success. It tells me they think they don’t have the resources for success, from which I am guessing they feel like they are not as successful as they should be.”
I know multi-millionaires who think taxation is wrong not because they have failed but because they see it as a reduction in their life. Which no man has a right to. Not because of any sense of failure but from a sense of justice.
What you have stated is intellectually dishonest.
Tony C:
does a dog have a moral obligation to you? You get the dog for your own personal enjoyment therefore you are responsible for the dog.
If the dog doesnt have a moral obligation why not?
Tony C:
“I do not believe your assertion that obligation is a [purely] moral concept, or your assertion that morality is “accepted by choice.””
could you please expand on the thought that morality is not “accepted by choice”
Do you mean people are moral naturally or that people who kill or molest children are just born evil? You either are or are not moral depending on the biology you were born with?
So people do not have a choice in the matter of their morality?
@Grossman: I posted in this blog at the request of an acquaintance …
WHAT? Not even a “friend?” Then I hope you got paid or laid, selfish-boy, otherwise you have wasted valuable time you could have used mowing another lawn and earning twenty bucks.
@Grossman: Your evasion of reason …
You accuse me of the crime you commit; I do not evade reason, you do. I work from science, you don’t. I face reality, you live in a fantasy. I write to be understood, you write to scream obfuscated assertions and insults. I use logic, and hypotheticals, that you refuse to refute or interpret in your supposed “logic.”
I do not evade reason, I reject, with reason, your peurile invented Randian language and stupidly counter-factual claims about how the mind works and human psychology works. I embrace life and liberty, you reject it.
@grossman: You put quotes around “you” because, like any religionist, you hate and fear the self.
I put quotes around “you” for the common reason, to alert readers to the fact that I am using the word differently than its normal usage. In this case, I am using “you” to substitute for the phrase “the entity people regard as themself.”
As for Rand’s quote: “A man’s self is his mind—the faculty that perceives reality, forms judgments, chooses values…. Your self is your mind; renounce it and you become a chunk of meat ready for any cannibal to swallow.
THAT is a circular definition. The faculty she speaks of actually IS meat, it is neurons arranged in an electro-chemical device. The mind is a byproduct of an electro-chemical meat machine. There is a reality, but without those neurons, there is no perception, no judgment, no values. Those values are encoded in meat, and that is the foundation of self-knowledge, not divorcing one’s self from reality by pretending the mind is some greater magical being. Renounce the meat that you are, and you become a sucker, because then you have willingly agreed to a complete falsehood.
When we accept the meat that we are, then we can understand and accept our finiteness: Finite life, finite hours of work, finite ability to resist force, finite accuracy, finite humility, finite lifetime contribution, finite ability to defend ourself, finite ability to detect deception. We are fallible. We are fragile. We are always a chunk of meat ready for any cannibal to ambush, kill and swallow, but the predators of today (other than labor slavers, sex slavers, and religionists trying to steal control of lives) are primarily trying to steal money, either by force or by false pretenses.
When Rand attempts to elevate the mind above the meat, she is refusing to face reality and engaging in mysticism. Mysticism is a malicious lie, and like all malicious lies creates danger by convincing people to navigate a fantasy world instead of the real world. The difference can cost people their lives; for example it is how the sex slavers work in foreign countries: They lie to the girls and convince them of a fantasy; easy work for rich people as models, nannies or housekeepers, followed by American citizenship, so they willingly and happily board the planes, turn over their passports and IDs, and fly into the jaws of hell. It is how child predators work, how con men work, how televangelists work, and how Rand worked: Malicious lies that presented a fantasy world that did not exist and never would, but convinced suckers to pony up the money that she lived on and the fame she craved.
Tony C
Your conceptual disintegration continues:
> “You” are your brain and nervous system
You put quotes around “you” because, like any religionist, you hate and fear the self.
“A man’s self is his mind—the faculty that perceives reality, forms judgments, chooses values….Your self is your mind; renounce it and you become a chunk of meat ready for any cannibal to swallow.” Rand
> A “Concept” is a vague notion, theme, idea or plan. That is the definition I use. It is the ONLY definition I will use, if you speak to me I will interpret it in English, not in your own made up language that steals the words of English.
Fallacy of circular definition and fallacy of merely substituting words when a definition is needed. Were you allowed to graduate from a university without learning how to define concepts by essentials by observing similarities and differences among concretes and conceptualizing organizing them? One can, after all, ask for the definition of idea. Language is man’s method for physically symbolizing conceptualizing, which, you say, and I agree, you dont do. You express your emotions with grunts and chicken scratches. And, that, is apparently what you do in your work. Why would anyone pay an ape to reason?
>What brains do, without prompting or thought, is generalize and categorize
This certainly explains your “ideas.” Man, via his volitional mind, conceptualizes, with the brain as the physical basis of this. Brains dont generalize or categorize (conceptualize). Man’s choices to reason or evade creates his specific habit of learning and memory. Evasion creates the intellectual habit of moment-to-moment randomness guided by the terror that a living organism experiences when deprived of its means of survival. It grinds out junk, eg, materialism and mysticism, complementary halves of man without mind.
> pyschology experiment in which grade-school children watch small circles, all the same size and color, on a computer screen.
“Science” which studies man w/o his conceptual mind will produce conclusions valid for man without his conceptual mind. You have regressed to primitive tribalism, ignorant of your own mind, and afraid of a universe would wont yield to chants and drums. Thus your totalitarian socialism in which everyone obeys the thugs with the biggest clubs.
>redemption
You are beyond redemption. You are willfully sub-human.
> What distinguishes men from animals is the frontal cortex
Many things distinguish man from animals. Reason is the basic, the widest, cause of of the other properties. An ape looking at a frontal cortex might eat it or throw it in the air. You do the same in essence by evading it as the physical basis of reasoning, ie, of conceptualizing our perceptions of concretes.
I posted in this blog at the request of an acquaintance who despised your attack on human life in politics. Your evasion of reason explains that attack. One cannot argue with a liar because they have rejected their mind. I only hope that such creatures as yourself have less intellectual influence in my culture in the future. Youre a killer without values.
@Grossman: the source of the ideas you use.
This is a lie; the ideas I use are my own. Unlike you, I am fully capable of inventing my own ideas and coming to my own conclusions; I do not have to rely on anybody else; I do not defer to authority or fame or acclaim or assertions of dogmatic certitude, I give no credit for antiquity. I will read the writings of Locke, Jefferson, Smith, Malthus, Darwin, Archimedes, Newton, or anybody else as if they were written by complete unknowns yesterday, with allowances for dialect. I judge them as I expect to be judged; their thinking stands or falls on its own.
You, on the other hand, are a poseur engaging in false intellectualism; you cannot defend the logic of Rand because it is scientifically and morally indefensible, so you try to bludgeon people with bullshit logic and insults, because ultimately Rand is a religion that assures the selfish they have done nothing wrong, and the harm they cause is somehow magically in the best interest of the people they are harming. Can they prove that? No, because like most religions they have redefined words so the logic is completely circular and the truth is they just have faith, not logic, because the faith is emotionally comforting to the irretrievably self-centered, not rationally supported.