Ayn Rand is laying out her recommendation for how an agent should act to save another in an emergency situation. She writes this on Page 54 of her book, The Virtue of Selfishness” “Since men are born tabula rasa, both cognitively and morally, a rational man regards strangers as innocent until proven guilty, and grants them that initial good will in the name of their human potential. After that he judges them according to the moral character they have actualized. If he finds them guilty of major evils, his good will is replaced by contempt and moral condemnation. (If one values human life, one cannot value one of its destroyers.) If he finds them to be virtuous, he grants them personal, individual value and appreciation, in proportion to their virtues.”
My response: She believes we are born tabula rasa cognitively and morally. I believe we are born certain innate ideas, perhaps Kantian cognitive categories, certain predispositions like being born corrupt with a bad will, born with a weak will rather than a strong will, etc. Still, we are more tabula rasa than born cognitively and morally set, so we need experience, input and values from our parents and society to urge us to adopt good values to know how to live, to build up our weak inborn conscience that loves to excuse, lie and justify whatever immoral or low behavior that we desire to engage in, to transform our corrupt and weak will into a strong, good will, wielded by an individual who has overcome his natural, irrationalist, anti-intellectual bent, to think, act, and maverize as a strong-willed agent of good and enlightenment.
Rand makes a contribution when she suggests we need values and good culture, so we use our very lives, our intellect, our wills to promote what is good in the world, and to add new technologies and knowledge about the world.
We should treat strangers with general good will.
Rand: “It is on the ground of that generalized good will and respect for the value of human life that one helps strangers in an emergency—and only in an emergency.”
My response: She will allow her first-hander to assist others in an emergency like they are drowning but we do not show charity or self-sacrifice for others for any other reason. She seems absolutistic, extreme, and too harsh about sacrificing of the self for others, but, in the main, she is correct, that each person in life should be self-sufficient, solving their own problems without charity from others.
Rand on Pages 54 and 55: “It is important to differentiate between the rules of conduct in an emergency situation and the rules of conduct in the normal conditions of human existence. This does not mean a double standard of morality: the standard and the basic principles remain the same, but their application to either case requires precise definitions.
An emergency is an unchosen, unexpected event, limited in time, that creates conditions under which human survival is impossible—such as a flood, earthquake, a fire, a shipwreck. In an emergency situation, men’s primary goal is to combat the disaster, escape the danger and restore normal conditions (to reach dry land, to put out the fire, etc.).
By ‘normal’ conditions I mean metaphysically normal, normal in the nature of things, and appropriate to human existence. Man can live on land, but not in the water or in a raging fire. Since men are not omnipotent, it is metaphysically possible for unforeseeable disasters to strike them, in which case, their only task is to return to those conditions under which their lives can continue. By its nature, an emergency situation is temporary; if it were to last, men would perish.
It is only in emergency situations that one should volunteer to help strangers, as it is in one’s power . . . In the normal conditions of existence, man has to choose his goals, project them in time and achieve them by his own effort. He cannot do it if his goals are at the mercy of and must be sacrificed to any misfortunate happening to others. He cannot live his life by the guidance of rules applicable only to the conditions under which human survival is impossible.
The principle that one should help men in an emergency cannot be extended to regard all human suffering as an emergency and to turn the misfortune of some into a first mortgage on the lives of others.”
My response: I mostly agree: the young must be taught by their parents, their pastor, their cops, their teacher, that suffering and inequality are built into life, and the human brain is a powerful tool—the most powerful tool humans possess—and as each child agent learns to discipline himself, and freely chooses to amount to something as an individual going after his enlightened self-interest, most children, most of the time, will grow into self-sufficient adults well equipped to meet their material needs and to maverize, either rendering suffering and want defeated and absent, or something to motivate them upward and outward on their own, and this is the standard Rand the refugee from Stalinist Russia preached and practiced. She did not baby herself and she refused to baby others, allowing them the freedom to become, and that is love of self and others.
Rand on Pages 55 and 56: “Poverty, ignorance, illness and other problems of that kind are not metaphysical emergencies. By the metaphysical nature of man and existence, man has to maintain his own life by his own effort; the values he needs—such as wealth or knowledge—are not given to him automatically, as a gift of nature, but have to be discovered and achieved by his own thinking and work. One’s soul obligation towards others, in this respect, is to maintain a social system that leaves man free to achieve, to gain and keep their values.”
My response: She is so eloquent here. Rand paradoxically agrees with God in Genesis when Yahweh tells Adam that he is going to have to wrench a living from nature from now on by the sweat of his brow, maintaining his life by his own effort. She anticipates that the Founders political model of governance, the constitutional republic with a free-market economy is the social system best adopted to facilitate citizens being free and able to care for themselves and their family. Think what anarchist-individuators can build upon such a noble foundation.
Rand: “Every code of ethics is based on and derived from a metaphysics, that is: from a theory about the fundamental nature of the universe in which man lives and acts. The altruistic ethics is based on a ‘malevolent universe’ metaphysics, on the theory of man, by his very nature is helpless and doomed—that success, happiness and achievement are impossible to him—that emergencies, disasters, catastrophes are the norm of his life and that his primary job is to combat them.”
My response: Both Rand and I are essentialist but yet she denies that human basic nature is corrupt: she likely thinks we are naturally good or naturally morally neutral I do not know if she is a psychological egoist, but she is a normative egoist and a rational egoist.
There is evil in the universe but there is good too, and likely neither is permanently dominant. She is wise to advise that this-worldly happiness and fulfillment are a moral obligation for us to work towards, not mere selfish pleasure seeking, and her optimism about life on earth and its worth is a reasonable rebuttal against altruistic, otherworldly pessimism about any earthly human pushback and its merit.
Rand: “As the simplest empirical refutation of that metaphysics—as evidence of the fact that the physical universe is not inimical to man and that and that catastrophes are the exception, not the rule of his existence—observe the fortunes made by insurance companies.
Observe also that the advocates of altruism are unable to base their ethics on any fact of man’s normal existence and that they always offer ‘lifeboat’ situations as examples from which to derive the rules of moral conduct. (What should you do if you and another man are in a lifeboat that can carry only one? etc.)
The fact is that men do not live in lifeboat—and a lifeboat is not the place on which to base one’s metaphysics.
The moral purpose of a man’s life is the achievement of his own happiness. This does not mean he is indifferent to all men, that human life is of no value to him and that he has no reason to help others in an emergency. But it does mean that he does not subordinate his life to the welfare of others, that he does not sacrifice himself to their needs, that the relief of their suffering is not his primary concern, that any help he gives is an exception, not a rule, an act if generosity, not a moral duty, that it is marginal and incidental in the course of human existence—and that values, not disasters, are the goal, the first concern and motive power of his life.”
My response: I do believe the world is inimical to man because humans are individuals with the potential to bring love, order, cosmos and structure to the chaos of raw reality. Nature is what God created, and the controlled forces, creatures, flora and laws, water, rocks and mineral resent being ordered, and they attack humans as the enemies they are, part of God’s team innately and especially if they answer the divine call to live as living angels. Nature is not completely inimical to man, but is primarily so, and we must be stewards of nature, and not submit to it masochistically, or rape nature either: rather we should be calm, logical, sensible in-charge stewards of nature that use its resources to our advantage and pleasure without polluting, smashing ecosystems or driving plants and animals to extinction.
I mostly agree with what Rand writes here about altruists basing basic morality, altruistic morality they push, on weird, rare hypothetical, zero-sum-games, where all lose: the living betray their values, and the dead just died, so all lose. Egoism needs to be our basic ethical system based in daily values to live by, not speculating about radical self-sacrifice in do or die tragic scenarios likely not to occur—or rarely so.
I am an egoist but not a pure or absolute egoist as Rand was. The principle of moderation that guides my moral thinking forces me to come up with a hybrid or pluralistic ethical system: egoism-altruism. The main moral purpose of a man’s life is to achieve his own happiness, and he does that by creating, inventing, producing wealth, thinking originally while maintaining the civil society, while worshiping—or not—the benevolent deity of his choice and this metaphysic should bring him happiness, most of the time in this world and the next.
Rand, on Page 56, begins Essay 4, The ‘Conflicts” of Men’s Interests: “Some students of Objectivism find it difficult to grasp the Objectivist principle that ‘there are no conflicts of interests among rational men.’”
My response: We are human: and we always conflict with ourselves, with God, with our spouse and family members, our neighbors, our competitors in business and rival factions as other religious dominations and political factions or parties. I assume she is advising that rational, moderate, men should be able to peacefully negotiate truces and civil order at the minimum, and perhaps come to honorable compromises that satisfy most of the parties most of the time.
Rand on Pages 57 and 58: “ . . . There are four interrelated considerations which are involved in a rational man’s view of his interests, but which are ignored or evaded in the above question and in all similar approaches to the issue. I shall designate these four as: (a) ‘Reality.’ (b) ‘Context.’ (c) ‘Responsibility,’ (d) ‘Effort.’
(a) Reality. The term ‘interests’ is a wide abstraction that covers the entire field of ethics. It includes the issue of: man’s values, his desires, his goals and their actual achievement in reality. A man’s ’interests’ depend on the kind of goals he chooses to pursue, his choice of goals depends on his desires, his desires depend on his values—and, for a rational man, his values depend on the judgment of his mind.
Desires, (or feelings or emotions or wishes or whims) are not tools of cognition; they are not a valid standard of value, nor a valid criterion of man’s interests. The mere fact that a man desires something does not constitute a proof that the object of his desire is good, nor that its achievement is actually to his interest.
To claim that a man’s interests are sacrificed whenever a desire of his is frustrated—is to hold a subjectivist view of a man’s values and interests. Which means: to believe that it is proper, moral and possible for man to achieve his goals, regardless of whether they contradict the facts of reality or not. Which means: to hold an irrational or mystical view of existence. Which means: to deserve no further consideration.”
My response: I am not quite sure where she is going with this explanation of reality, but I think she is explaining that one’s interest is morally worth going for if one’s desires on not just whimsical or subjective, but if those desires can be made consistent with one’s values and overall goal to lead a happy, productive life. This sounds reasonable. There may be subjective desires that are wholesome if irrationally derived.
Rand: “In choosing his goals (the specific values he seeks to gain and/or keep), a rational man is guided by his thinking (by a process of reason)—not by his feelings or desires. He does not regard desires as irreducible primaries, as the given, which he is destined irresistibly to pursue. He does not regard ‘because I want it’ or ‘because I feel like it’ as a sufficient cause and validation of his actions. He chooses and/or identifies his desires by a process of reason, and he does not act to achieve a desire until and unless he is able to rationally validate it in the full context of his knowledge and of his other values and goals. He does not act until he is able to say: ‘I want it because it is right.’”
My response: Rand often comes across as setting a moral standard so ideal, so demanding of perfection that one either lives up to that sterling standard each and every time, as each ethical choice is measured against this ideal by one’s cool, clear certain reasoning and cognition, grounded in one’s in his certain knowledge, value and goals. She is too uncompromising and that is not a realistic standard for moral excellence to be achieved by the average person. Her standard is a laudable ideal for the agent to work for, the standard written just above, it is important to accept that we are flawed sinners, more irrational than rational by nature, choice, sheer laziness, weak will and deep moral ignorance that plagues all humanity, steeped in altruistic ethics. Rand seems to tell the reader that either you are a paragon, adhering to this standard of perfection, or you are a complete loser and sinner, an evil creature. That message that may be her message to the reader is cruel in that the standard is so high that people will not even try, that inadvertently, she is making them feel bad about themselves when all they need is to have some parent or authority finally send them the message that though flawed, they are redeemable, that they have worth, that they have a right and even a duty to work to get as close to a Randian ideal as possible, and that is all any of us can ever achieve, and that is a great moral and spiritual victory that would get one into heave. Like so many idealists, Rand may be a fanatic, demanding the perfect from people, which is the enemy of the good, and bringing about the good in oneself is a great moral victory for oneself and society. Rand is right more than not but her standards of excellence demanded from followers seem too severe to me. We do not like or love others if we expect too much from them too soon. All we can do is perfect ourselves, and know given enough time and access to the right values, most people will eventually do the right thing most of the time.
The most effective moral code does not demand that people be perfect spiritually or morally, or that, failing that level of achievement, they are as bad as any other sinners, and anyone less than perfect will burn in hell and know no happiness on earth.
The moderate moral code that states individual rights, not group rights, is the locus of moral self-perfecting (always trying, always getting better, never quite getting there, and ot worried or feeling guilty about not getting there). If they are of self-love and through that love God and others, then their mostly good state of will and soul spiritually and morally is enough for God to let them enter Purgatory with heaven as their destination in say 80 years. That likely is as good as it gets for most souls.
Rand “The Law of Identity (A is A) is a rational man’s paramount consideration in the process of determining his interests. He knows that the contradictory is impossible, that a contradiction cannot be achieved in reality, and that the attempt to achieve it can only lead to disaster and destruction. Therefore he does not permit himself to hold contradictory values, to pursue contradictory goals, or imagine that the pursuit of a contradiction can ever be to his interest.”
My response: Rand is mostly right here, but there are true contradictions that exist in reality and we must factor this into our thinking.
Rand on Pages 58 and 59: “Only an irrationalist (or mystic or subjectivist)—in which category I place all those who regard faith, feelings or desires as man’s standard of value) exists in a perpetual conflict of ‘interests.’ Not only do his alleged interests clash with those of other men, they clash also with one another.
No one finds it difficult to dismiss from philosophical consideration the problem of a man who wails that life entraps him in an irreconcilable conflict because he cannot eat his cake and have it too. That problem does not acquire intellectual validity by being expanded to involve more than cake—whether one expands it to the whole universe, as in the doctrines of Existentialism, or only to a few random whims and evasions, as in most people’s views of their interests.
When a person reaches the stage of claiming that man’s interest conflict with reality, the concept ‘interest’ ceases to be meaningful—and his problem cease to be philosophical and becomes psychological.”
My response: We can have our cake and eat it too, but we must must do it wisely, not self-destructively, and our desires should be consistent, logical and consistent with reality just outside and transcendent reality so that we lead moral and happy lives.
Rand: “(b) Context. Just as a rational man does not hold any conviction out of context—that is: without relating it to the rest of his knowledge and resolving any possible contradictions—he does not hold or pursue any desire out of context. And he does not judge what is or is not his interest out of context, on the range of any given moment.
Context-dropping is one of the chief psychological tools of evasion. In regard to one’s desires, there are two major ways of context-dropping: the issues of range and of the means,
A rational man sees his interests in terms of a lifetime and selects his goals accordingly. That does not mean he has to be omniscient, infallible or clairvoyant. It means that he does not have to live his life short-range and does not drift like a bum pushed by the spur of the moment. It means that he does not regard any moment as cut off from the context of the rest of his life, and that he allows no conflicts between his short-range and his long-range interests. He does not become his own destroyer by pursuing a desire today which wipes out all of his values tomorrow.”
My response: Sounds good, we should try to live consistently over time, but our values be they short-range or long-range may clash occasionally or permanently, so we must strive to make it all as consistent and sensible as possible, and then prioritize our remaining but incompatible desires in a way as in line with our overall values as possible.
Rand on Pages 59 and 60: “A rational man does not engage in wistful longings for ends divorced from means. He does not hold a desire without knowing (or learning) or considering the means by which it is to be achieved. Since he knows that nature does not provide man with automatic satisfaction of his desires, that a man’s goals or values have to be achieved by his own effort, that the lives and efforts of other men are not his property and are not there to serve his wishes—a rational man never holds a desire or pursues a goal which cannot be achieved directly or indirectly by his own effort.”
My response: Rand here seems sensible and ethical, we need to be realistic and to use honorable, practical means to achieve our ends. Some ends may just need to be discarded.
Rand: “It is with a proper understanding of this ‘indirectly that the critical social issue begins. Living in a society, instead of on a desert island, does not relieve a man of the responsibility of supporting his own life. The only difference is that he supports his life by trading his products or services for the products and services of others. And, in this process of trade, a rational man does not seek or desire any more or less than his own effort can earn. What determines his earnings? The free market, that is: the voluntary choice and judgment of the men who are willing to trade him their effort in return.
When a man trades with others, he is counting—explicitly and implicitly—on their rationality, that is: on their ability to recognize the objective value of his work. (A trade based on any other premise is a con game or fraud.) Thus, when a rational man pursues a goal in a free society, he does not place himself at the mercy of whims, the favors or the prejudices of others; he depends on nothing but his own effort: directly, by doing objectively valuable work—indirectly, through the objective evaluation of his work by others.
It is in this sense that a rational man never holds a desire pr pursues a goal which cannot be achieved by his own effort. He trades value for value. He never seeks or desires the unearned. If he undertakes to achieve a goal that requires the cooperation of many people, he never counts on anything but his own ability tp persuade them and their voluntary agreement.
Needless to say, a rational man never distorts or corrupts his own standards and judgment in order to appeal to irrationality, stupidity or dishonesty of others. He knows that such a course is suicidal. He knows that one’s only practical chance to achieve any degree of success or anything humanly desirable lies in dealing with those who are rational, whether there are many of them or few. If, in any given set of circumstances, any victory is possible at all, it is only reason that can win it. And, in a free society, no matter how hard the struggle might be, it is reason that ultimately wins.”
My response: I agree.
Rand: on Pages 60 and 61: “Since he never drops the context of the issues he deals with, a rational man accepts that struggle as to his interest—because he knows that freedom is his interest. He knows that the struggle to achieve his values includes the possibility of defeat. He knows also that there is no alternative and no automatic guarantee of success for man’s effort, neither in dealing with nature or with other men. So he does not judge his interests by any particular defeat nor by the range of any particular moment. He lives and judges long-range. And he assumes full responsibility of knowing what conditions are necessary for the achievement of his goals.
© Responsibility This last is the particular form of intellectual responsibility that most people evade. That evasion is the major cause of their frustrations and their defeat.
Most people hold their desires without any context whatever, as ends hanging in a foggy vacuum, the fog hiding any concept of means. They rouse themselves only long enough to utter an ‘I wish,’ and stop there, and wait, as if the rest were up to some unknown power.
What they evade is the responsibility of judging the social world. They take the world as the given. ‘A world I never made; is the deepest essence of their attitude—and they seek only to adjust themselves uncritically to the incomprehensible requirements of those unknowable others who did make the world, whoever those might be.”
My response: We cannot succeed, prosper or be happy as a secular first-hander or as a religious living angel unless we take responsibility for our goals and the means that we select to gain them and achieve them must be honorable, realistic, and consistent with our overall plan to actualize our adopted values in this world and in the next. This chapter 4 by Rand is one of her most brilliant chapters, and if learned, could teach a moral agent how to navigate through the world adeptly for a lifetime.
Rand on Pages 61 and 62: “But humility and presumptuousness are two sides of the same psychological medal. In the willingness to throw oneself blindly on the mercy of others there is the implicit privilege of making blind demands on one’s masters.
There are countless ways in which this sort of ‘metaphysical humility’ reveals itself. For instance, there is the man who wishes to be rich, but never thinks of discovering what means, actions and conditions are required to achieve wealth. Who is he to judge? He never made the world—and ‘nobody gave him a break.’ . . . That is the psychology from which all ‘social reforms’ or ‘welfare states’ or ‘noble experiments’ or the destruction of the world have come.
In dropping the responsibility for one’s own interests and life, one drops the responsibility of ever having to consider the interests and lives of others—of those others who are, somehow, to provide the satisfaction of one’s desires.
Whoever allows a ‘somehow’ into his view of the means by which his desires are to be achieved, is guilty of that ‘metaphysical humility’ which, psychologically, is the premise of a parasite. As Nathaniel Branden pointed out in a lecture, ‘somehow’ always means ‘somebody.’”
My response: We need to know what we are about, make good decisions about how we can live well and ethically, and it is our individual reasoning about such moral choices that we allow us to make solid, consistent plans to live by as responsible individuals and adults.
No comments:
Post a Comment