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 am not the one that started calling you a sociopath and making fun of your beliefs.
Because I am not a sociopath and don’t write anything that can be interpreted as sociopathic. Shall we go back and see who called me a totalitarian?
Roco says: You believe in 3 legged dogs. So you state all dogs have 3 legs,
That is a lie. The rest is unread. However I will note that your failure is in using precisely this false logic you accuse me of using. You propose some model of business, and claim ALL businesses follows that model. You propose some model of personal interaction, and then claim it represents ALL interactions.
You are an extremist. Remember back when you stated ALL taxes were theft and robbery at gunpoint? You still have the same problem; government is a necessity or no rights exist and no contracts are enforced except by armed militias run by strong men dictators, which become robber barons and take your money and labor and life anyway.
Government must be funded, and the only fair way to fund it is through some sort of taxation that acts like an insurance premium for the services provided (police and courts and punishments and collections). PERIOD. The only fair way to decide on those services (and on people’s rights) is by some sort of super-majority rule; with the proviso that any laws passed will apply equally to all citizens, both those that agreed and those that disagreed. PERIOD.
Try and argue against THAT. I don’t think you can, honestly; I think you will quote Rand, or some other idiot hero, or you will respond with emotion instead of reason, or change the subject. In other words, I’m not holding my breath.
No, Grossman. My psychological reductionism and application is just more reasons why extremists such as yourself should not be taken seriously or trusted. I’ll also point out that my mind is quite well integrated whereas yours is a half-formed ideologically (as opposed to rationally) driven mess as evidenced by your posts. You have nothing of value to add to this thread and you haven’t since your first proselytizing post. Save your religious pronouncements for others because you’re finding no buyers here other than the previously converted.
“if you love your wife her happiness is important to you. So why wouldnt you compromise? I value my wife more than having sex with some whore or 1 night stand.
You really dont get it do you? But then none of you get it. With all of your talk about polarity and complexity you still cannot wrap your minds around this.”
Roco,
It is you who misses the point. My love for my wife and children is born not out of selfish need, but because I love the person she is. My relationship with her and hers with me is one of unselfishness, since either of us could have led much easier, wealthier lives without each other. Our love for our children comes not from a selfish desire to propagate our genes, but from the total unselfishness of unconditional love. That I would sacrifice my life to save any of their goes without saying, however, from an Objectivist perspective I would be foolish to do so. Your heroine Rand was an adulteress many times over and even tried to destroy Nathaniel Brandon’s marriage. Obviously she believed her needs took precedence over anything or anyone else.
‘You do understand that some of the villains in Atlas Shrugged were businessmen dont you? And some of here heroes were not super producers but just average people who had standards and were self reliant.”
Given our apparent difference in ages there is a great probability that I read
Shrugged decades before you. I am quite familiar with the book. Those businessman she despised were improbable, cardboard characterizations used to close her tautological reasoning. The “average people” heroes were of the same ilk. Her real leaders and Heroes, John, Ragnar and Dagny were portrayed as “ubermenschen”, of superior intellect, beauty, strength and the ability to lead.
Tony C:
“I’m fine with you finding this funny, honestly. It just proves your stupidity. Derision and personal insult is a common tactic of people without any intellectual ammunition. You cannot attack my logic, you cannot defend your philosophy against the simplest of science or hypotheticals, and you cannot even defend your own statements. When people do not have any intellectual defenses, they fall back on the emotional ones: Anger (like Grossman), insults, and derisive dismissal.”
I am not the one that started calling you a sociopath and making fun of your beliefs.
I guess you dont like it do you.
Your logic is based on the premise of self sacrifice. In your world view your logic is correct.
You believe in 3 legged dogs. So you state all dogs have 3 legs, Rufus has 3 legs therefore Rufus is a dog. Your logic is correct, it is just your premise which is wrong. Logic is nothing but a tool, it cannot give you a valid premise. If your premise is wrong your logic is wrong even though it may be correct in terms of form.
There is nothing wrong with charity at all, there is nothing wrong with respecting your fellow men who are worthy of respect, there is nothing wrong with valuing your friends. But there is something wrong with having to live your life for others by force.
If you believe in selflessness and self sacrifice by all means do so, send as much money as you can to DC to help others. But dont make the person who doesnt send his money too. He is helping people with his investments, he is funding the next Bill Gates or the next Steve Jobs. Gates and Jobs have helped a good many people too, by creating marvelous innovations which have made peoples lives easier.
“Nature to be commanded must be obeyed”.
Gene H.
>Grossman, “Ego, of course, is that part of man which reasons and values.”
>Really. The ego is also the part of the mind (if you believe Freud) that masks its own efforts to please the unconscious id with preconscious rationalizations to compensate for the id’s inherent conflicts with reality.
And if one does not regard Freud as even a scientist but as a Platonic (tripartite soul)/Kantian (subjectivism) witchdoctor infamous among philosophers of many different views as providing no evidence, merely floating abstractions and arbitrary descriptions? And I can certainly understand why selflessness (self-destruction) requires rationalizations for its inherent conflicts w/reality.
Your psychological reductions are mere logical fallacies and evasions of your intellectual responsibility to judge ideas. But Kantian subjectivists have run out of ideas. After declaring that reality is unknowable, reason is subjective and morality is valueless duty and suffering, what is there left to do except to abandon intellectual issues for various forms of superficiality. See: modern art for your empty soul.
Yes, selfless people cannot trust selfish people to sacrifice themselves to relieve the suffering of selfless people. You are correct.
Your concern with intellectual issues is a fraud since you believe that the mind, which you allegedly dont control, is under the control of your brain and which produces images which evoke emotions which cause you to act. The intellect is an integrating power, allowing man to know the One in the Many. You are lost in the Many, as ignorant as a baby which has not yet developed the human power of conceptually integrating its perceptions of concrete reality.
Man has the unique ability to regard entities as units that he integrates into a concept that is then used to know relationships among an expanding field of knowledge. Your subjectivism disintegrates your mind when faced with the complexity of reality. The complexity becomes mere isolated parts of an unknowable whole instead of a mental unit used for further study of reality. You are intellectually lost amidst blades of grass as if you were an ant incapable of integrating the perceptions into one state of consciousness, a lawn. This is not how Newton discovered that the concept of universal gravity integrated a vast field of narrower concepts, themselves integrations of millenia of recorded observations of nature. You stare, paralyzed, at the complexity of reality, like a brute animal limited to the perception of concretes, with no ability to integrate perceived similarities and differences into a conceptual whole. Man has no automatic survival knowledge. We are not born knowing how to build a fire or a stone club, much less a computer. Nor is man’s learning, beyond the perceptual, automatic. The Greek discovery of natural causes and scientific method came a very long time after pre-man evolved into man. And even today, most people do not know scientific method, including the creatures who graduate from universities. Human surivival requires a consciously focused mind, not a dizzy submission to images and emotions. But, of course, your morality has no purpose requiring a focused mind. In fact, it requires a mind unfocused on the concrete relationships between one’s sacrifices and one’s life as a whole.
You can poke and prod the brain as much as you please but without a conceptual understanding of the process of conceptual understanding, its merely the piece of meat you worship as an impossible substitute for conceptual understanding. You may as well have memorized an encyclopedia for all the good that your conceptually unorganized knowledge does for you. Pedantry is not wisdom. Bits and pieces of something you dont know as a whole are worthless. Man did not fly to the moon by socially acceptable mental associations and arbitrary models. And you will never learn anything by looking at neurons, synapses, dendrites and axions unless you look with a mind organized by a conceptually integrated understanding of reason. An unintegrated mind has no value to man’s life.
@Roco: No, you are the one that quoted it, you are the one that believes it, and you are the one that is wrong.
I’m fine with you finding this funny, honestly. It just proves your stupidity. Derision and personal insult is a common tactic of people without any intellectual ammunition. You cannot attack my logic, you cannot defend your philosophy against the simplest of science or hypotheticals, and you cannot even defend your own statements. When people do not have any intellectual defenses, they fall back on the emotional ones: Anger (like Grossman), insults, and derisive dismissal.
When you claim you find it funnier and funnier, but fail to produce even a whisper of counter logic or reasoned refutation, I know you are out of ideas, and I have won. Laugh all you want, you and I both know it is hollow.
Grossman,
“Ego, of course, is that part of man which reasons and values.”
Really. The ego is also the part of the mind (if you believe Freud) that masks its own efforts to please the unconscious id with preconscious rationalizations to compensate for the id’s inherent conflicts with reality. The ego has many defense mechanisms to create reconciliation between the ego and the id, such as denial, displacement, intellectualisation, fantasy, compensation, projection, rationalization, reaction formation, regression, repression, sublimation, undoing, suppression, dissociation, idealization, identification, inversion, splitting, and substitution. Almost all of which you’ve demonstrated here and are common afflictions among all the Objectivists that I have known. You’ve made another mistake I’m afraid. You’ve mistaken a hack writer for a psychologist. You’ve also mistaken me for someone who takes extremists, let alone Objectivists, seriously. Thanks for admitting that the only thing you respect is selfishness though. That tells rational people everything that they need to know in dealing with you and those like you, namely that not only are you not to be taken seriously intellectually, but that you are not to be trusted in the slightest.
Gene H
> I’m not rationalizing “my evil” or anyone’s evil, but merely stating a fact. A purely evil person is just as rare as a purely good person, but that does not mean people cannot be either good or evil. They just rarely are in the absolutist terms
You rationalized moral compromise earlier with determinism. Now you
admit moral absolutism is also possible (and, presumably, also determined). Perhaps you will then advocate a Hegelian synthesis of your contradiction. I await your creativity.
> Just because Hitler loved his dog and Goebbels loved and was loved by his children doesn’t make either of them not evil….It just makes them human.
Whoops! I jumped the gun. Youve returned to your earlier claim that moral contradictions are a result of human nature. This must be comforting when faced with the practical consequences of sacrifice and the objective requirements of human survival. Do you think that Nazi death camp guards also rationalized their actions w/determinism? Determinism was culturally dominant in Germany then in the Marxist and racist versions. Oh, wait, those death camp guards were given medals when they did _not_ get drunk. I guess determinism is an insufficiently powerful rationalization for sacrifice. Do you have a better one that you could offer to the memory of those dutiful guards? Perhaps some skinheads are reading this blog. I’m sure they would welcome your advice on how to spit at one’s own, sacred, irreplacible, one time around, soul in favor of arbitrary social morality.
> is the man who kills to defend others intrinsically evil because he has killed? Not necessarily. Sometimes it makes them heroes.
And when social subjectivism leads to opposing values between and inside societies (because of, allegedly, no absolutes) and the resulting armed conflicts, what then? And what of the German defense of German values in the 1930s and 1940s? Or of the Japanese defense of Japanese values in those years? Or of the 200 million murdered by Marxists for their hoped-for society? And all guided, so you claim, by emotions.
> You wouldn’t know real evil if it bit you on the ass.
I know your ideas.
>you also wouldn’t know real good either.
I know Rand’s ideas.
>You measure the universe with the yardstick of your own ego and personal gain like all Objectivists.>
A slight error: personal gain is the purpose of the yardstick. Ego, of course, is that part of man which reasons and values.
“…a warning against the kind of “Nietzschean egoists” who, in fact, are a product of the altruist morality and represent the other side of the altruist coin: the men who believe that any action, regardless of its nature, is good if it is intended for one’s own benefit. Just as the satisfaction of the irrational desires of others is not a criterion of moral value, neither is the satisfaction of one’s own irrational desires. Morality is not a contest of whims . . . .” Rand
>That’s not only a woefully small and inadequate tool for the task,
The moral task is life and happiness, not sacrifice and suffering.
>your inability to perceive and address complexity
“[The] enemies of reason seem to know that integration is the psycho-epistemological key to reason . . . and that if reason is to be destroyed, it is man’s integrating capacity that has to be destroyed.” Rand
“Integration is a cardinal function of man’s consciousness on all the levels of his cognitive development. First, his brain brings order into his sensory chaos by integrating sense data into percepts; this integration is performed automatically; it requires effort, but no conscious volition. His next step is the integration of percepts into concepts, as he learns to speak. Thereafter, his cognitive development consists in integrating concepts into wider and ever wider concepts, expanding the range of his mind. This stage is fully volitional and demands an unremitting effort.”
Rand
> your inability to empathize with others.
Selfish people empathize with and morally respect other selfish people. And despise, not pity, selfless people. I do, however, pity students who lack the knowledge of the objective and rational alternative to modernism/nihilism. Man must and does constantly chooses reason or evasion w/all that implies for action.
Tony C:
Actually that thought is not Rands. Francis Bacon talked about it 400 years ago:
“Further, it will not be amiss to distinguish the three kinds and, as it were, grades of ambition in mankind. The first is of those who desire to extend their own power in their native country, a vulgar and degenerate kind. The second is of those who labor to extend the power and dominion of their country among men. This certainly has more dignity, though not less covetousness. But if a man endeavor to establish and extend the power and dominion of the human race itself over the universe, his ambition (if ambition it can be called) is without doubt both a more wholesome and a more noble thing than the other two. Now the empire of man over things depends wholly on the arts and sciences. For we cannot command nature except by obeying her.”
Aphorism 28
You keep on posting your stuff and you keep on telling me I dont understand, I am finding it funnier and funnier.
@Roco: Nature is not commanded. If what you want to say is, “To exploit nature it helps to first understand nature,” that is an acceptable statement. You don’t have to “obey” any laws to design a building. What keeps the building UP is the nature of steel, and concrete, or wood or rock. You are not “commanding” nature to repeal gravity, you are working WITH nature by using materials that can, by their nature, resist the forces of gravity. The roof is still heavy, and gravity still acts on it, but not hard enough to splinter the supports.
You have not “commanded” nature, you have manipulated it. Although it HELPS to understand nature, that isn’t entirely necessary either. People were cooking food by trial and error for thousands of years before they had any inkling what chemistry was going on in the flames; or indeed before they had any inkling of chemistry, period.
The statement is bullshit because it misrepresents what is going on (nobody is ordering nature around), and what is necessary (nature is not ordering YOU around).
This is what is typical of Rand; promoting some innocuous statement by dramatization to “Philosophy.” Yes, it is absolutely true that “It helps to understand the rules of a system if your goal is to manipulate it or use it.”
That goes for nature, people, companies, cultures, and machines.
But of course put like that, people will hope you are just prefacing something a little more profound, not that you are already done!
So Rand has to distort it by extremizing it. Forget “help” and “understanding,” now it is a mandate: You MUST OBEY. Forget “using” it or “exploiting” it, or “working with it,” now you are “COMMANDING” it.
It is just ridiculous, overblown rhetoric, and the extremization of the language has actually morphed what could have been an axiomatic, self-evidently true statement into a falsehood.
As for “an end in itself,” I think you are wrong.
Mike Spindell:
if you love your wife her happiness is important to you. So why wouldnt you compromise? I value my wife more than having sex with some whore or 1 night stand.
You really dont get it do you? But then none of you get it. With all of your talk about polarity and complexity you still cannot wrap your minds around this.
You do understand that some of the villains in Atlas Shrugged were businessmen dont you? And some of here heroes were not super producers but just average people who had standards and were self reliant.
Why did you marry your wife? Do you value your wife? If so why? Did you marry your wife because you felt sorry for her? Love is selfish Mike.
And since love is selfish you will walk through a burning building to save your wife and your children.
If you dont understand why, I feel sorry for you.
Tony C:
“Bullshit. Nature does not give commands, it is not conscious, and your phrasing of this is conditional and contradictory: You are saying, “In order to control X you must allow X to control you.” That is a circular load of crap that makes no sense.”
“Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed”. This is a very simple concept. are you sure you dont understand it?
There are natural laws such as gravity and E=mc^2 or stress = P/A or F=ma. If I want to build a building I must obey the laws of gravity, if I wish to design and build an airplane I must obey the laws of aerodynamics. I can only control nature if I understand nature and to control nature I must obey the physical laws of nature. I can only obey the laws if I know them.
There is no circular reasoning at all.
I think she means that once you are here you have the ability to do whatever it is you are capable of doing with your life. What do you think the “Pursuit of Happiness” means?
An end in yourself does not mean that, see Pursuit of Happiness.
Of course many people (including me) were not a conscious goal in any sense, but a byproduct of, shall we say, youthful indiscretion.
@Roco: I won’t read Rand, I have already read enough to conclude she is a hypocritical liar and idiot, and I won’t argue with somebody quoting their scripture.
If you understand her argument, you are welcome to try and use her logic in order to refute some argument of mine. If you don’t really understand it, what is the point of arguing with you?
When people quote Rand, to me that is just like somebody quoting Bible passages at me, and counting on me to trust the Bible as much as they do.
I will take your first rephrasing: 1. “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed”
Bullshit. Nature does not give commands, it is not conscious, and your phrasing of this is conditional and contradictory: You are saying, “In order to control X you must allow X to control you.” That is a circular load of crap that makes no sense.
If what you are trying to say is that nature has “laws” that cannot be escaped, like gravity and the fact that you cannot live long without oxygen, then I say, “So what?”
Man is not trying to “command” nature, and in fact that is impossible: Nature doesn’t hear you or interpret or take commands; it is altered by sheer force and energy alone. You don’t TELL broccoli to give itself up for your supper, you take it by force. You don’t TELL the river to change its course, you dig a ditch and force the river into irrigation channels.
Man does not COMMAND nature, man exploits nature, because nature has no mind, no will, and proceeds, as it turns out, predictably enough that we can take actions to exploit the energy and elements of nature. When we do, nature is not “obeying” us, we are just manipulating it to our ends. When we pile rocks and clay in the river, nature does not “decide” to go around it or over it. We have just changed the equation by introducing a new element and the new solution is whatever it is.
As for the idea that man is an end in himself: Also false. The purpose of all life on earth is reproduction, and the desires for reproduction are universal. One can certainly reject that purpose and live a happy life; I know childless people that I believe have done that, and life can have a purpose (survival and reproduction) without a meaning (i.e, there doesn’t have to be a point to survival and reproduction, that can be an end in itself).
The word “end” is used in the sense of a “goal” or “accomplishment,” and no individual person was the goal of all of their ancestors. The goal of their ancestors was continuing their genetic heritage; if you want to honor that goal then you need to have children. If you consider yourself the final end product of all of that, I think that is your right, but it is the antithesis of their END, it is the willful termination of the genetic heritage they worked to preserve and hoped would persist.
Roco,
That’s some fine projection you’re doing there. Just because you’re confused, that doesn’t translate to others – let alone me – being confused. You can keep trying to tell me that I don’t know what I think and/or believe, but that simply isn’t the case. But that’s okay. I understand your lashing out. Children often behave that way when they find out reality operates independent of their infantile desires.
“1.Reality exists as an objective absolute—facts are facts, independent of man’s feelings, wishes, hopes or fears.”
The problem arises from what a given individual defines as facts. Such as Rand was the equal of Aristotle and Tolstoy.
“2.Reason (the faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses) is man’s only means of perceiving reality, his only source of knowledge, his only guide to action, and his basic means of survival.”
Given this formulation than the actions of a Psychopath murderer are internally consistent based on their perception of reality.
“3.Man—every man—is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.”
I pity your wife, children parents and siblings if you truly believe this. If your wife is unwilling to have sex with you more than once a week and you want it seven times a week, by your standards she should go, or you should consider polygamy.and/or adultery.
“4…………In a system of full capitalism, there should be (but, historically, has not yet been) a complete separation of state and economics”
Just too long to copy it all but your theory fails when you identify the unjust use of force as the only thing to be regulated. Since the government is to have nothing to do with the “free market”, than when a company like Microsoft gains a monopoly and sets things up to destroy all competition the government has no right to step in. When the phone companies keeping buying each other up until there is only one, that can set any prices it wants, no government intervention is needed. When one energy cartel controls all energy and extract exorbitant prices, not governments business.
The end game of your religion is a world controlled by monopolies and the powerful, with a population under their economic thumb. This is the end game of Objectivism and what your Faith blinds you to seeing.
Gene H:
I guess you dont understand complexity either. Stephen and I understand it far better than you do.
You basically do not understand how to apply principles. It shows in the majority of your writings. When you do try to apply principles you are typically wrong.
You say you are for the Constitution but everything you write about, is for the most part, against individual rights. Is that what you mean by complexity? The ability to hold and believe 2 disparate views at the same time and to believe each with equal conviction. No wonder you can argue as you do, no one can tie you down because you dont believe in anything and you believe in everything. Man, you are one complex dude.
What you say is contradictory in most cases, you do not know what you are for or against. You only know what you were taught at your university and you believe your professors because their view of reality is either shared by you or you are too stupid to truly understand the load of shit you have been fed.
Your post above on utilitarianism is an example of your inability to properly apply principles in the real world. That essay was the ramblings of a very disjointed mind. I would say it sucks to be inside your head, it must be a jumble of disconnect.
Integrate, Gene H, integrate before it is too late.
“You might study the character of Ellsworth Toohey in Rand’s novel about independence, _The Fountainhead_. He’s a Progressive architecture critic who advocates sacrifice and collectivism as the proper guides for designing houses and buildings and, in general, for organizing society. In Toohey, Rand has pinned your soul to a microscope slide. It’s not pretty. He lusts for power over others so that no one rises above the herd.”
Grossman,
This shows why you’re a religious fanatic in an atheistic religion. You quote what to you is scripture to make a point. The Toohey character was a ridiculous piece of characterization Rand used to give drama to her plot. Do you know any real architects who believe this, or indeed any real architectural critics? You take an absurd character, made up to embody evil from Rand’s perspective and give that as an example of your point.
You are no different from the Christian fanatics who for years persecuted Jews as Christ-Killers based on what was a made up, totally impossible story in the Gospels. To wit, Jesus who had been welcomed by the masses into Jerusalem only a week before, was supposedly condemned to death by the same Jewish masses, to the dismay of Pilate who had to go along because of a (a-historical) rule that he had to grant a favor on the Passover. This Pilate, who independent Roman sources relate was recalled from Jerusalem for brutality.
Both the phony character of Toohey and the phony section of the Gospels are equal in their fantasy. Rand’s writings are your Gospels and your belief in them is equally as Fundamentally Fanatic, as any extreme Christian, or any other religionist.
“You dont understand what they are.”
Roco,
I’ve fought communists, up front and personal and still bear the scars from my encounters. Just as I’ve fought many breeds of egotists trying to impose their power upon those they perceived as weaker. You’ve purportedly built a business, have gained some affluence and convinced yourself through an atheistic religion that you’ve succeeded all on your own. You also have developed a “bogeyman” that’s trying to take all of your hard earned dollars away. To ensure your religious insularity you comfort yourself by characterizing things you know nothing about with meaningless words of negative connotations. Ironically, you really think you have some understanding of things, but don’t because you’ve shaped your reality to ease your comfort.
I should point out, by the way, that the view I present above is a simplified view that is reasonably consistent with experiments on neurons and in the field of the physical basis of learning; but it is by no means complete or certain. We don’t know what “consciousness” is, or much about how the emotional centers of the brain actually compute, or many other things about the brain and mind; we have really just started this journey in the last 75 years or so.
Nevertheless, of the features we DO understand with a high degree of confidence, they are at complete odds with Rand’s guess of “Objectivism,” and since her results are at odds with human psychology, evolutionary psychology, history and verifiable human behavior, I think it is obvious her castle is made of sand, and will crumble and be washed away by reality.
That’s evolution! The “objectivism” meme makes one less fit to survive and reproduce (because selfishness is met with selfishness, resentment and often spiteful punishment), and in generations to come I think it will be weeded out by reality.