Kant, Hume, Descartes, Hobbes and now.... Cookie Monster.

^ You can make all of that make sense by simply shifting your epistemological position to the only ones which truly make sense i.e. phenomenology &/or perspectivism.

To rephrase that in less impenetrable terms:
"Materialism" (or in your case I assume "Scientific Materialism") that is to say 'matter is primary', from a philosophers POV is a deeply flawed assumption. Flawed because there appears to be not one experience in human history that did not occur entirely within the mind.
When one see's say a Dog, one only ever experiences the images and sensations occurring within ones mind. You don't see the photons hitting your retina, only the way your mind as interpreted the data.

However the opposite position "Idealism" (mind is primary) is also fundamentally flawed in the exact opposite way. If our minds are the only "real" things then where exactly are they? And how do we even derive logic and reason if there is not something outside of ourselves which it describes? etc. etc.

Philosophers like Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre' got around this by defining a new category, "phenomena". We know for certain that "phenomena" exist in some sense because we experience them, the categories of mind and matter then become secondary properties, both only existing as definitions we apply retrospectively to experiences. i.e. stuff happens and then our brains kick in and say "that happened because of X because in the past X has preceded similar experiences" or "that thing looks like other examples of Y so is probably Y".

The problem then is that this appears to come no closer to telling us what is objectively happening in the universe, it's more like linguistic/logical housekeeping. The phenomenologists and existentialists did a superb job of clearing away all of the old invalid baggage about how we try to describe things, but they did little or nothing to solve the problem of Kants "nouminal world" (i.e. the "real" stuff that we are experiencing by simulation in our minds).

Its stumped philosophers for centuries as we don't appear to have any way to ever get at this "nouminal" or "real" world we naturally assume must exist in some way. But....

I reckon ultimately one of the first western philosophers in history nailed the way out 3000 or so years ago. Pythagoras said "all is number" and due to the work of Euler, Riemann and Fourier in particular I think we can now make it stick. (yeh its turning into an essay sorry )

Without wishing to go deep into a subject you could spend half your life on; Fourier transforms are involved in signal processing. It is a mathematical means by which spatio-temporal signals (e.g. the vibration of a string or the movement of a record needle) can be converted with no meaningful loss of information into frequency (analog) or binary (digital) forms and back again.

Mathematically speaking there is no reason to regard the "signal" as any less "real" whether it is in frequency form or spatio-temporal form. It is the same "signal", it can be converted 100% either direction.

So then here's the biggie: Is there any reason why we could not regard instrumental mathematical numbers and operations (i.e. the stuff we write down and practice as "mathematics") and the phenomena in the universe they appear to describe. I.e. when we use man made mathematical equations to describe and model the behavior of "phenomena" we experience like say Physicists do, could we suggest that we are using a form of Fourier transform? And moreover that this indicates an Ontological (existing objectively outside of yourself) aspect to the mathematical "signals".

Or to put it another way, is mathematics itself really real?

The Reimann sphere and Eulers formula provide a mathematical basis to describe the entirety of known existence in purely mathematical terms, but they indicate that pure ontological mathematics itself is more primary than anything we ever experience. It suggests infact that we ourselves are ultimately reducible to Ontological mathematical phenomena (what Leibniz called "Monads").

What we think of as "reality" could then perhaps be regarded as non dimensional (enfolded) mathematics interacting in such a way as to create the experience of a dimensional (unfolded) universe of extension (such as ours).

(R = distance between two points)
Enfolded universe: R=0
Unfolded universe: R>0

Neither is more "real", they are simply different perspectives from which Ontological mathematics can observe itself.

"Reality": R>=0

I've explained parts of that poorly sorry. Its an immense subject and can be tackedled from many different (often completely incompatible) paradigms. I hope at the very lest I have perhaps demonstrated that the Holographic universe theory could have legs if we combine the advances of scientific exploration (i.e. study of matter) with those of Philosophy and neuroscience (i.e. study of mind & reason itself). The latest big theory doing the rounds with neuroscience is that the mind/consciousness is a fractal phenomenon, which plays into what I've been discussing here more than you might think.

Then again maybe you just wrote me off as a crackpot within the first few lines "lawl" etc..

Tags for this video have been changed from 'hitman, philosophy, moral dilemma, metaphysical, elements of ethics, kant' to 'hitman, philosophy, moral dilemma, metaphysical, elements of ethics, immanuel kant' - edited by xxovercastxx

I'm very happy you liked it. I almost deleted that post because I was afraid the whole thing was too pompous. But I figured, ultimately, who could argue with the sentiment..."Garfield" really was a horrible film.


In reply to this comment by ChaosEngine:
In reply to this comment by TheFreak:
Put a thousand fruit flies in a box and you can watch the entire circle of life, played out in multiple generations, in a matter of days.
Now, stand back far enough to view the entirety of human existence in one box and the objective eye will discern no greater purpose than the fruit fly. We live, we reproduce, we die. All of human evolution and technical advancement bent to the simple purpose of continuing to exist.

We are ultimately seperated from the fruit fly by one thing; a simple question,
"Why?"

The contemplation of our own mortality is undoubtedly the single factor that has inspired us to become more than the sum of our individual lives. The yearning to outlive ourselves, to defy the inherent pointlessness of existence, to deny the emptiness of the void that precedes us and remains, undisturbed, after we're gone. The human defiance of the finity and futility of life drives the greatest achievements of our species.

Humanity, alone among the animals of the earth, has taken the gifts of evolution and harnessed them to scream its answer to the empty cosmos with soul wrenching achievements of art and philosophy. Those creations of mankind that we experience as a feeling, rising up from inside us and overwhelming our minds with a beauty and perfection far greater than ourselves.

The great accomplishments of mankind that elevate the purpose of our existence:
The philosophy of Aristotle
The architecture of Angkor Wat and St. Peter's Basilica
The art and discovery of Leonardo Da Vinci
The grandeur of the Sistine Chapel and the humble beauty of Van Gogh
The feets of engineering; the great wall of china and Apollo moon landing
All the great works of the most inspired among us, who could encapsulate beauty, wonder, humor and tragedy into discrete works of brilliance:

Shakespeare, Sophocles, Mark Twain, Hemingway, Kepler, Gödel, Newton, Hippocrates, Bach, Wagner, Coltrane, Hume, Kant, Descartes, Tesla, Gutenberg, Frank Lloyd Wright...
...and Bill Murray.

Except for his work on Garfield.
That movie was fucking horrible.


My life is better for having read that comment.

In reply to this comment by TheFreak:
Put a thousand fruit flies in a box and you can watch the entire circle of life, played out in multiple generations, in a matter of days.
Now, stand back far enough to view the entirety of human existence in one box and the objective eye will discern no greater purpose than the fruit fly. We live, we reproduce, we die. All of human evolution and technical advancement bent to the simple purpose of continuing to exist.

We are ultimately seperated from the fruit fly by one thing; a simple question,
"Why?"

The contemplation of our own mortality is undoubtedly the single factor that has inspired us to become more than the sum of our individual lives. The yearning to outlive ourselves, to defy the inherent pointlessness of existence, to deny the emptiness of the void that precedes us and remains, undisturbed, after we're gone. The human defiance of the finity and futility of life drives the greatest achievements of our species.

Humanity, alone among the animals of the earth, has taken the gifts of evolution and harnessed them to scream its answer to the empty cosmos with soul wrenching achievements of art and philosophy. Those creations of mankind that we experience as a feeling, rising up from inside us and overwhelming our minds with a beauty and perfection far greater than ourselves.

The great accomplishments of mankind that elevate the purpose of our existence:
The philosophy of Aristotle
The architecture of Angkor Wat and St. Peter's Basilica
The art and discovery of Leonardo Da Vinci
The grandeur of the Sistine Chapel and the humble beauty of Van Gogh
The feets of engineering; the great wall of china and Apollo moon landing
All the great works of the most inspired among us, who could encapsulate beauty, wonder, humor and tragedy into discrete works of brilliance:

Shakespeare, Sophocles, Mark Twain, Hemingway, Kepler, Gödel, Newton, Hippocrates, Bach, Wagner, Coltrane, Hume, Kant, Descartes, Tesla, Gutenberg, Frank Lloyd Wright...
...and Bill Murray.

Except for his work on Garfield.
That movie was fucking horrible.


My life is better for having read that comment.

Put a thousand fruit flies in a box and you can watch the entire circle of life, played out in multiple generations, in a matter of days.
Now, stand back far enough to view the entirety of human existence in one box and the objective eye will discern no greater purpose than the fruit fly. We live, we reproduce, we die. All of human evolution and technical advancement bent to the simple purpose of continuing to exist.

We are ultimately seperated from the fruit fly by one thing; a simple question,
"Why?"

The contemplation of our own mortality is undoubtedly the single factor that has inspired us to become more than the sum of our individual lives. The yearning to outlive ourselves, to defy the inherent pointlessness of existence, to deny the emptiness of the void that precedes us and remains, undisturbed, after we're gone. The human defiance of the finity and futility of life drives the greatest achievements of our species.

Humanity, alone among the animals of the earth, has taken the gifts of evolution and harnessed them to scream its answer to the empty cosmos with soul wrenching achievements of art and philosophy. Those creations of mankind that we experience as a feeling, rising up from inside us and overwhelming our minds with a beauty and perfection far greater than ourselves.

The great accomplishments of mankind that elevate the purpose of our existence:
The philosophy of Aristotle
The architecture of Angkor Wat and St. Peter's Basilica
The art and discovery of Leonardo Da Vinci
The grandeur of the Sistine Chapel and the humble beauty of Van Gogh
The feets of engineering; the great wall of china and Apollo moon landing
All the great works of the most inspired among us, who could encapsulate beauty, wonder, humor and tragedy into discrete works of brilliance:

Shakespeare, Sophocles, Mark Twain, Hemingway, Kepler, Gödel, Newton, Hippocrates, Bach, Wagner, Coltrane, Hume, Kant, Descartes, Tesla, Gutenberg, Frank Lloyd Wright...
...and Bill Murray.

Except for his work on Garfield.
That movie was fucking horrible.

CLEARLY fake. Kant u guise tell the diff?

One of my favorite quotes on this is from Schopenhauer

"We can do as we will, but we cannot will as we will"

I have never heard a good explanation for free will ever. Properly defined to the strength we all mean it by, it makes no sense, and try and change it into something we can make sense of, it is no longer the thing which we meant by free will. Let me expand on that.

What we all want to mean when we first set out on talking about free will is the notion that we (our consciousness) are self determining demigods in a sense. That our consciousness somehow is able to transcend all conditions, and make unbound and almost other worldly interjections on our behalf. I am not a materialist, so this isn't a problem for me on the onset. However, even if our brains contains some otherworldly processing engine, the data which populates it for most all decisions in life are from this existence. And those "things" all seem to behave in a way that is bound by predetermined rules. In fact, it is impossible to think of a realty that is not bound by conditions and rules. All reality that we can understand comes from reason and associations. In a world where something could exist by not existing, or where circles are also squares...would make no sense to us. The only world we can understand is a world where things change in a way reason can map to. This undermines the entire notion of a transcendent, boundless "free will", for even the will itself would have a set of rules and conditions it was playing by, or else just be a random number generator of sorts. And when we talk about free will, random number generation isn't what comes to mind, but it is the only thing that can remain if you take away reason, and determinism.

However, I do submit that our choices "feel" unbounded. There is a "feeling" of free will that defies an ability to define it well. But that is typically how feelings operate, outside of ways to completely explain them. But that doesn't make what they appear to represent any more real, only the feeling is real. I can have a feeling that contradictions exist, for example, but be bound by the laws of how I think to not be able to resolve that in reality (IE, if I believe conditions exist, I could still not preform one, like draw a circular square).

That is why many philosophers turns to certain forms of Compatibilism, while others changed what free will meant in their Compatibilism. I think the latter is cheating, and the former is how we as humans experience "free will". Ultimately, if the universe doesn't exist on causality, then my argument will be undermine, and indeed, some form of Occasionalism might be the true nature of reality. Even so, even Occasionalism can't account for free will, only random number generation can, and that isn't what we mean by freedom, or willing.


>> ^messenger:

I think there's enough content to spark a conversation about free will, discourse analysis aside. Excerpts I found interesting enough to be worthy of expansion:

I think there's enough content to spark a conversation about free will, discourse analysis aside. Excerpts I found interesting enough to be worthy of expansion:

Hume is one of many whom have shown the doom of empirical discovery, that is can never talk about anything but phenomena. Kant rescued what he could, although, A priori knowledge still ranks as truth, were as empirical ranks as best guess (99.999% does not 100% make).

What a clever kant!

*promote

>> ^GeeSussFreeK:

No, he is nearly making the subtle, but logical distinction between phenomenon and noumenon. Have had this conversation here a lot on the sift. The experience of blue is a very different one than the wavelength of 475 nm (which corresponds to blue for most people). "Light" is a subjective experience not related to real properties of photons. Photons appear bright because through the course of a billion years of evolution, interrupting photons as light, and their corresponding wavelengths as colors has better aided that animal that interrupting them as something else. But that says nothing about photons themselves, only the way in which minds are translating reality.
It is the distinction between Empiricism and Intellectualism. One believing that it takes senses to understand truth, the other, that only the power of pure reason can lead knowledge. I, for one, am mostly under the school of intellectualism as it pertains to epistemology. I trust the power of reason and logic to find truth, not eyeballs and olfactories.

No, the distinction between phenomenon and noumenon would more properly apply to colours than to light itself, which was proven by Newton to be a particle (or at least particule-like, and then later a dual particle-wave thingy of course). His conclusions were accepted by Kant, who redefined the distinction between phenomenon and noumenon to not contradict Newton's findings. Goethe disagreed with Kant and Newton, but he was a fool. He thought light and colour were the same thing thus he failed. Schopenhauer rectified Goethe's theory to apply only to the perception of colour but Goethe wouldn't have it thus he failed again and it was up to psychologists to prove Schopenhauer was actually right in a limited sense.

Your distinction of empiricism and intellectualism is also very naive. As far as we know, the only way you can prove the factuality of your knowledge is through experience. That's why modern science works and idle speculation (like most Ancient Greeks did) does not. Being an empiricist doesn't mean you "trust your eyeballs", quite the contrary in fact. That's why David Hume talks a lot of the required skepticism needed to know nature from one's senses. If we could see things as they are (as noumenon), then we would not need our senses nor our reason to interpret what they sense (the phenomenon). That's in fact the basic premise of Kant's whole Critic of Pure Reason. His solution, in a word, was to view reason as recreating it's own idea, in the original Greek sense of "form", of the original noumenon (the thing-in-itself) by interpreting the filtered sense data of phenomenon that passed through the categories of understanding (like substance, causality, etc.). Some call his solution a form psychologism and I think they are right, but Kant certainly didn't think so. In fact, I think it's not psychologistic enough, though one must be wary of going as far as to try founding everything on psychology, a circular dead end if there was one.

Ultimately, it comes to the question of what kind of knowledge you want: absolute knowledge or human knowledge? I purport absolute knowledge is unknowable (irreducible) to human knowledge in the same way the noumenon is irreducible to the phenomenon, not only by its own definition but by the very way knowledge works (at least for us, meaning in a subject-object duality where the subject cannot simply copy the object it wants to know but must make an inherently reduced image of it, i.e. an idea). I think this problem to be related to the P=NP conundrum. Only if P=NP can we ever hope to achieve absolute knowledge and then that is not even guaranteed (we would need to evolve somehow to transcend the P and NP divide which factually exists in our present human knowledge). As Scott Aaronson of the MIT puts it, "If P=NP, then the world would be a profoundly different place than we usually assume it to be. There would be no special value in “creative leaps,” no fundamental gap between solving a problem and recognizing the solution once it’s found. Everyone who could appreciate a symphony would be Mozart; everyone who could follow a step-by-step argument would be Gauss; everyone who could recognize a good investment strategy would be Warren Buffett. It’s possible to put the point in Darwinian terms: if this is the sort of universe we inhabited, why wouldn’t we already have evolved to take advantage of it?" (from his blog).

>> ^Nebosuke:

>> ^robv:
Ron Paul doesn't believe in evolution. That's not logical. Therefor I can't support him.

Paul is usually reasonable, but the "evolution is a theory" is a game killer.


What game are you playing? Would you rather one that believes in it and never ending war? Also, anyone in medicine believes in evolution, he just doesn't believe it is the complete explanation for life on this planet. (to which many different people hold in fact. Some think that the particles for life come from outer space, or even that those particles were already organic and life didn't originate here...there are many non-evolutionary based ideas here. The debate to the origins of the first life on this planet are not as simple as invoking "evolution". It is still a hot area of debate, and one I take particular interest in.)


"(as if something that is a proven scientific FACT needs belief)"

Firstly, philosophically, belief means any cognitive content held as true. Everything you "think" is, philosophically, what you believe. Belief is your personal, subjective position.

Knowledge is defined as right and true belief. To make the claim something is knowledge, you have to be able to show it is true. Science isn't a method of showing things to be true, but things to be false (you start with a statement "all doves are white", this statement is emperically true until you find you first black dove; the practice of empiricism works on negative evidence). Philosophically speaking, the only path to knowledge is rationalism, not empiricism (as pointed out by Kant's noumena and phenomena). There is no scientific/empirical claim that is irrefutable (meaning certain: without any doubt: can be shown that it can't, and never will, be otherwise (positive evidence)). Certain, without any doubt, is what is meant by the word truth. Knowledge being true (or certain) belief means one can say, logically, that any information gathered empirically isn't knowledge. Is there any scientific fact that hasn't be usurped by later scientific facts? Not even motion has even been certain, which is far less complex than evolution, and we see motion everyday.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noumenon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology

(I largely believe in most of evolution btw)

PS (this comment brought to you by parentheticals...use them love them, overuse them!)

What your describing is pretty neat, and also known as occasionalism. It is a REAL problem for scientists because it eliminates causation. It eliminates the universe from explaining itself because causes for things aren't related to any other state. There is the mind experiment where you set up a bunch of clocks to all go off one second after each other. To those around, when the clocks go off they seem to cause a chain reaction that causes the others to go off, but nothing is further from the truth. What is really happening is one state is leading into another completely unrelated state setup by some unrelated source. You don't even need the positive side of the argument (that someone set it up), but the negative of the argument; that causation is destroyed and causal links are mearly creations of minds and not the true metaphysics is maintained. It is on the same level of destruction to empirical knowledge that Hume caused until Kant quazi restoration (but Kant destroyed sciences ability to talk about the universe we live in, and relegate it only to the universe we experience. So he let us use reason, but science reasons in a box that is the human mind).

If you ever have some reading time to spare, I think George Berkeley is one of the more interesting metaphysisits of his day. He gets a lot of flack because his religious background, but his mind...his mind is awesome!

Critique of "The Objectivist Ethics"
by Michael Huemer http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/fac_huemer.shtml

The following responds to "The Objectivist Ethics" by Ayn Rand. I assume the reader is familiar with it. I begin with a general overview of what is wrong with it. I follow this with a set of more detailed comments, which make a paragraph-by-paragraph examination of her statements in the essay. The latter also elaborates further some of the points made in the overview.


http://home.sprynet.com/~owl1/rand5.htm

General Overview
1. Rand's Argument

Rand's argument seems to be as follows. I enclose in parentheses required implicit premises that I have introduced. The right-most column gives page and paragraph citations for where Rand says these things (15,6=page 15, 6th paragraph from the top).(1) Major conclusions are marked by asterisks.

1. Value is agent-relative; things can only be valuable for particular entities. premise 15,6
2. Something is valuable to an entity, only if the entity faces alternatives. premise 15,6
3. No non-living things face any alternatives. premise 15,7
4. Therefore, values exist only for living things. from 1,2,3 16,1; 16,3
5. Anything an entity acts to gain or keep is a value for that entity. premise 15,6
6. Every living thing acts to maintain its life, for its own sake. premise 16,3
(7. There is no other thing that they act to gain or keep for its own sake.) implicit premise
8. Therefore, its own life, and nothing else, is valuable for its own sake, for any living thing. from 5,6,7 17,1; 17,2
9. Therefore, life and nothing else is valuable for its own sake. from 4,8 17,3
(10. Everyone should always do whatever promotes what is valuable for himself.) implicit premise
*11. Therefore, everyone should always do whatever promotes his own life. from 8,10 passim, 17,4; 22,3; 25,2; 25,4(2)
12. A person can live only if he is rational. premise 23,4; 19-23 passim
*13. Therefore, everyone should be 100% rational. from 11,12 23,4; 25,7; 25-26
2. Problems with the argument

The argument contains eight fatal flaws.
Objection (i):

The first is that premise 1 begs the question.

One of the central groups of opponents Rand is facing is people who believe in absolute value, and not just agent-relative value. The absolutist view is that it is possible for some things to be good, simply, or in an absolute sense; whereas agent-relativists think that things can only be good for or relative to certain individuals, and that what is good relative to one individual need not be good relative to another. (N.B., this should not be confused with what are commonly called "moral relativism" and "cultural relativism.")

Another way to put the issue is this: absolutists think that value exists as a property of something--most likely, as a property of certain states of affairs. For instance, if I say, "It is good that intelligent life exists on the Earth," I am saying that the state of intelligent life existing on the Earth has a certain property: goodness. Agent-relativists think, instead, that value exists only as a relationship between a thing and a person. For instance, an agent-relativist might say, "It is good for me that intelligent life exists on the Earth," and this would mean: the state of intelligent life existing on the Earth bears a certain relationship to me: it is good for me. But an agent relativist would not say it is good simply.

Rand bases her ethics on the agent-relative position, but she offers no argument for it, only a bald assertion.
Objection (ii):

Premise 2 seems to be false. If I knew that I was inevitably going to get a million dollars tomorrow--there's no way I can avoid it--would that mean that the money will have no value? Again, Rand offers no defense of this assertion.

Perhaps her thought was that "good" is the same as "ought to be sought" or "ought to be chosen", and that since it makes no sense to say one should seek or choose what one either cannot get or cannot avoid, it follows that it makes no sense to say something one cannot get or cannot avoid is "good". But this simply illustrates why that definition of "good" is wrong. Nor does Rand offer any defense of this assumption (which she doesn't even explicitly state)--she seems simply not to have noticed that she was assuming it.
Objection (iii):

Premise 3 seems to be false. Rand claimed that living things face an alternative of existing or not existing but that non-living things do not. I can think of five interpretations of this, but all of them make it false:

First, it is not true that non-living things can't be destroyed. I once saw a house destroyed by flames, for example.

Second, it is true that the matter of which non-living things are composed can't be destroyed; but this is equally true of living things.

Third, it is not true that a non-living thing's continued existence never depends on its activities. If my computer ceases to function properly, this may cause me to destroy it.

Fourth, it is not true that positive action is never required to preserve a non-living thing's existence. A cloud, for instance, must absorb more water in order to continue to exist.

Fifth, it is true that non-living things do not possess free will. But this is equally true of almost all living things, and yet Rand claims that they (including plants, single-celled organisms, etc.) face an "alternative".

Thus, it seems there is no sense in which Rand's claim is true.
Objection (iv):

Either premise 5 is false, or the argument contains an equivocation. The word "value" has at least two different meanings.

First. Sometimes "value" is used as a verb. In this sense, it means approximately, "to believe to be valuable," or sometimes "to desire". Thus, if I say John values equality, I am saying John thinks equality is good, or that John desires equality. Along the same lines, "value" is sometimes used as a noun, to refer to things which someone 'values' in this sense--i.e., things which someone regards as good. Thus, if I say equality is one of John's 'values', I mean equality is one of the things that John believes is good.

Second. Sometimes "value" is used to refer to things which are good. So if I say, "equality is an important value", I am saying that equality is one of the important goods. Notice the difference, then: the difference between believed to be good and is good. No objectivist can afford to neglect this distinction, since if one does, one will be forced into extreme ethical subjectivism.

If Rand meant "value" in the first sense, then her premise was close to true. (Not exactly, since it is possible to act to gain something even if you don't believe it to be good, but let's overlook that.) However, in this case, it has no ethical significance. In particular, the later steps 8 and 9 would not follow, since they claim that life is valuable--that is, good--whereas the premise from which they are derived is about what is valued--that is, held to be good.

If Rand meant "value" in the second sense, then her premise was false. It is perfectly possible, as Rand herself explains later on, for someone to value what is actually bad for them. Nor did she give any argument for thinking that whatever one acts to gain or keep must actually be good.
Objection (v):

Premise 6 is false.

If we read it in a teleological sense, as saying living things have inherent goals or purposes, then it is false because nature is not teleological--Aristotelian physics and biology have long since been refuted. In that sense, living things do not aim at anything (with the exception of conscious beings with intentions).

If we read (6), as Rand suggests (p. 16n), to mean merely that the actions of living things result in the maintenance of their lives, then two problems appear. First, (7) will now be false. There are many things that living things' actions result in. For one thing, their actions result in the reproduction of their genes. For another, animals' actions result in production of body heat.

Second, it would follow, absurdly, that any object whose actions have results, has values. Thus, since when a rock rolls downhill, this results in its having greater kinetic energy, we must conclude that the rock acts to gain and/or keep kinetic energy, and therefore that kinetic energy is a value for the rock.
Objection (vi):

I have included 7, because it is necessary in order to get to 8. But 7 is false, however one reads it. If one interprets it as a claim merely about actual results of action, it is false as discussed above.

If one reads it as an observation about what organisms are evolutionarily 'programmed' for (that is, what traits are naturally selected for), it is false because the only trait that is selected for is that of producing more copies of one's genes. Thus, if anything is the ultimate 'value' for living things, it would be gene-reproduction (technically, 'inclusive fitness').

If one reads it as a claim about genuine teleology in nature, it is false because teleological physics is false.

If one reads it as a claim about the purposes or aims of living things, it is false because, for those living things that have purposes, they can often have other purposes. Rand frequently says that many human beings are aiming at self-destruction, for example. It is hard to believe that they are doing this for the sake of promoting their lives.

Consequently, conclusions 8 and 9 are unsupported, and in fact they are false. Many people value happiness or pleasure for its own sake, and not simply for the sake of further prolonging their lives. Rand herself, inconsistently, later declared happiness to be an end in itself. According to her theory, she should have said it was good only because it helped maintain your life.
Objection (vii):

This is probably the most egregious error. Premise 10 begs the question. Rand claimed to have an argument, a proof even, for ethical egoism. Yet 10 is one of the required premises of that 'proof'--and 10 essentially just is ethical egoism!

Some will dispute that this is really one of her premises. The reason I say it is is that without 10, the subsequent steps 11 and 13 do not follow. All Rand established up to that point, even if we ignore all the above objections, was that there is one and only one thing that is good for you, and that is your life. But obviously it does not follow that you should only serve your life unless we assume that you should only serve what is good for you. So, if 10 is not included as a premise, then Rand simply has a non sequitur.

Obviously, someone who held a non-egoistic theory--an altruist, say--would respond to the news of 8 and 9 (assuming Rand had demonstrated them) by saying: "Ah, so therefore, we should promote all life" or, "I see, so that means I should serve everyone's life. Thank you, Miss Rand; I previously thought I should serve other people's pleasure or desires (or whatever), because I thought that was what was good for them. But now that you've convinced me that life is the sole intrinsic value, I see that it was their life that I should have been serving all along." What argument has Rand given against the altruist, then? None.
Objection (viii):

Either 12 is false, or the inference to 13 rests on equivocation.

Rand explains that reason is our basic tool of survival. If her thesis is that any person who is not 100% rational, all the time, will die, then she certainly needs to provide argument for that. There seem to be lots of counter-examples, many of them pointed out by Rand herself.

If her thesis is something weaker, such as that any person who is not by and large rational will probably die, then 12 is plausible. But 13 does not follow. All that would follow would be, e.g., that one should be by and large rational.

3. General arguments against ethical egoism

Rand endorsed a version of 'ethical egoism': the view that a person should always do whatever best serves his own interests. I have discussed the following objections to this doctrine in my "Why I Am Not an Objectivist", so I will be brief here. Here is one general argument against egoism:
1.

If ethical egoism is true, then if you could obtain a (net) benefit equal to a dime by torturing and killing 500 people, you should do it.
2.

It is not the case that, if you could obtain a (net) benefit equal to a dime by torturing and killing 500 people, you should do it.
3.

Therefore, egoism is not true.

This argument is very simple, but that should not fool us into thinking it is therefore illegitimate. It is true that an egoist could simply deny 2, proclaiming that in that situation, the mass torture and killing would be morally virtuous. Any person can maintain any belief, provided he is willing to accept enough absurd consequences of it.

Here is a second argument against ethical egoism: it contradicts Rand's own claim that each individual is an end-in-himself and that it is therefore morally wrong to sacrifice one person to another. For either Rand meant that an individual life is an end-in-itself in an absolute sense--as discussed in my objection (i) above; or she meant that an individual life is an end-in-itself in a relative sense--i.e., for that individual.

Assume she meant it in a relative sense. In this case, Smith's life is an end-in-itself for Smith. But since Smith's life is not an end-in-itself for Jones, there has been given no reason why Jones should not use Smith or sacrifice Smith's life for Jones' benefit. In fact, for Jones, Smith's life can only have value as a means, if it has any value at all, since for Jones, only Jones' life is an end in itself.

Now, assume she meant it in an absolute sense. In that case, she contradicted her agent-relative conception of value. Furthermore, she generated a general problem for ethical egoism. If the life of my neighbor, Jones, is an end-in-itself in an absolute sense, and not just relative to Jones, then why wouldn't it follow that I ought to promote the life of my neighbor, for its own sake? But this is not what Rand wants--she claims that my own life is the only thing I should promote for its own sake.

4. Attacking straw men

Rand seriously misrepresents the history of ethics. Essentially, she leads the reader to believe that there have been only two alternative views in ethics: (a) that moral knowledge comes by mystical revelations from God, and (b) that moral principles are arbitrary conventions. Either way, ethics is regarded as "the province of the irrational." One other position is mentioned: that of Aristotle, who allegedly based ethics on what noble and wise people choose to do but ignored the questions of why they chose to do it or why he thought they were noble and wise. Next to these alternatives, Rand's theory looks almost reasonable by comparison.

However, the above is a gross caricature of the history of ethics, and Rand makes no effort to document her claims with any citations.

In short, Rand draws plausibility for her position by attacking straw men.

5. Man qua man and fudge words

Some time after getting to step 9 in her argument (as described in section 1 above), Rand introduces the idea of "the life of man qua man" (hereafter, MQM). She informs the reader that when she says a person should promote his own life, she means life MQM, which means the sort of life proper to a rational being. She tries to use this to explain why, despite the truth of egoism, you still shouldn't live off of the productive work of others by stealing--that's not the sort of life proper to a rational human being.

Let's distinguish, then, between life qua existence (hereafter, LQE) and MQM. LQE means simply one's continued literal survival--i.e., life in the sense of not being dead (what everyone else means by "life"). MQM is something more than that--the kind of life proper to a rational being.

The first problem is that Rand's shift in the argument from LQE to MQM is illegitimate. It is an equivocation: If "life" in the argument means LQE, then Rand cannot switch over to MQM as her standard of value and claim that she gave an argument for it; she only gave an argument for LQE. On the other hand, if we assume "life" means MQM throughout the argument, then the premises preceding step 11 that mention life or living are all false: 3 will be false, because many entities that do not possess life MQM face alternatives. 4 is false similarly. 6 is false, because most living things do not have MQM life. Moreover, it is clear that Rand meant LQE, since she starts off the argument by saying the only fundamental alternative is that of existence or non-existence.

The second problem is that Rand has given no criterion for what counts as 'proper to a rational being.' I consider three possibilities:

(a)


Suppose that we try to use something other than life as our criterion for what is rational. In that case, we would have to abandon her claims 8 and 9. Furthermore, she has in fact provided no such criterion.

(b)


Suppose we try to use LQE as our criterion. Then MQM collapses into LQE, and it cannot be used in the way Rand wants, to explain why some forms of physical survival are undesirable.

(c)


Suppose we try to use MQM as our criterion. Then we have a circular criterion, because Rand hasn't told us what "MQM" means, except that it means the sort of life proper to a rational being.

Rand makes a number of claims about what is or isn't rational, but they are simply arbitrary declarations in the absence of a criterion of the rational, and an explanation of how that criterion follows from her initial argument discussed in section 1. In many cases, her claims about what is 'rational' are intuitively plausible, but in no case do they follow from that argument.

The upshot is that Rand can and does use "man qua man" and "rational" as fudge words: words that can be interpreted to mean whatever it is convenient for them to mean at a particular time. Words that can be used to insulate her thesis from testing and to enable her to claim that her theory supports, or doesn't support, anything; since there is no precise and unambiguous definition of these terms.

6. Rand's intuitions

This will be a suitable topic to conclude with. Rand's main argument in "The Objectivist Ethics", as well as all of the moral claims she makes, here and elsewhere, rest squarely on her intuitions.

She would deny this. She says or implies at various points that she is giving a fully rational proof of her ethical system, that all her value judgements can be proven, and that ultimately they all rest on the evidence of the senses. She criticizes Aristotle for thinking ethics was not an exact science. The implication seems to be that she thinks her theory, as set out here, is an exact science. This claim would not withstand a casual acquaintance with any actual exact science.

Rand's ethical system rests on her assertion of premises 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 10, and 12. She gives no defense for 1, 2, 5, 7, or 10; and very little for the others. This would be alright if all of those were self-evident truths, like the axioms of a mathematical system. But not only are none of them self-evident, I have raised serious doubts about every one of them.

It is worthwhile to remind ourselves of what mathematics--a real exact science--is like. Mathematicians too start with certain premises. But their premises are not highly controversial claims like "value only exists relative to a person" or "everyone should only serve his own good". A typical mathematical axiom would be something like, "if a=b, then b=a" or "the shortest path between 2 points is a straight line"--things that no one doubts. Mathematicians then proceed to deduce their theorems according to rigid and precise rules. That is why there are no divergent views about mathematical theorems--when Euclid wrote his Elements, no one disagreed with it or presented arguments against it. That's because Euclid had actually proved his theorems. Does Rand think that she 'proved' a series of moral theorems like that?

Alternately, she might view her 'science' of ethics as more like the natural sciences, like physics or chemistry, say. Now, for many centuries these were not exact sciences either. Part of what makes them relatively exact now is that scientists have evolved techniques for eliminating fudge factors. A scientist with a theory has to 'put up or shut up'. He can't make vague gestures or rest his arguments on vague concepts, such as "proper to a rational being" or "man qua man". The scientist has to identify a specific, clear observation, preferably a measurement, that he predicts can be made in a certain experiment. He has to say, in effect: "If, when you do this experiment, the needle on the instrument goes up to past .6, then my theory is wrong." Does Rand think she has a theory that is empirical like that?

Probably not; I hope not. Probably she was simply using "prove" and "exact science" loosely, and perhaps she was unfamiliar with mathematics and modern science. In any case, the fact remains that Rand has proposed no experimental test that can be done on her assertion that value is only agent-relative, or that people 'should' only pursue what is good for them. Importantly, scientific reasoning involves the idea of falsifiability: a scientist must be prepared to describe what specific set of observations would refute him. This is one of the things that prevents fudging. Note another aspect: the sort of observation the scientist identifies should not be something that is open to interpretation, as to whether that sort of observation happened--or at least, it should be minimally so. These are the sort of things that make science science.

Rand has done nothing like this. She has not told us what sort of specific, not-open-to-interpretation observations she would accept as refuting her. That is why her theory is not scientific, and it is not a proof. It is based on intuition: her intuition that the premises mentioned above are true. Likewise, her claims about what is rational and what promotes MQM rest on intuition, for the same reason. The terms are simply not defined in a scientific manner (if they were, you should be able to build an "MQM-ometer" which would tell you how much a given event promoted your MQM), so they require the exercise of individual judgement in a particular case--in other words, intuition.

Now, I am not saying this means the concepts are illegitimate, nor does this, by itself, show that her argument is wrong (though the objections I raised in section 2 do).

I am not opposed to the use of intuition in philosophy--quite the opposite, in fact--and nor am I saying that Rand's ethics is bad simply because it is not an exact science. What I am opposed to is someone's claiming their intuitions and philosophical theories as 'scientific proofs,' and then deriding the philosophical theories of others for being unscientific and therefore 'mystical.'

When we confront this sort of thing, it is imperative that we remember that Rand gave no argument for ethical egoism. She assumed egoism, discussed other propositions at some length, and then said that she proved it.
Detailed comments

I list in order each major claim Rand makes, followed by my comments on it. Numbers preceding Rand's claims are the page and paragraph number (13,6 = page 13, 6th paragraph from the top), and the claims are paraphrased unless quotation marks are used.(3) All italics in quotations are in the original.

For convenience, I use "NA" as an abbreviation for the following: "Rand gives no argument for this. Perhaps she considers it self-evident, but I do not."

(1)


13,6: The first question we have to ask when approaching ethics is "Does man need values at all--and why?"

NA. Taking this as the starting point makes two substantive ethical assumptions, which are rejected by some ethical systems, namely:
(i)

That ethics is properly regarded as a tool, as something that we have to serve some ulterior purpose. This would seem to be building consequentialism in right from the start.
(ii)

That the particular purpose in question is to satisfy some human need.


(2)


13,7: "Is the concept of value, of 'good or evil' an arbitrary human invention, unrelated to, underived from and unsupported by any facts of reality--or is it based on a metaphysical fact, on an unalterable condition of man's existence? (I use the word 'metaphysical' to mean: that which pertains to reality, to the nature of things, to existence.)"

This is a false dichotomy. She ignores the possibilities:

(i)


That the concept of value is based on an ethical fact, where ethical facts are distinct from metaphysical facts. By ruling out this possibility, Rand presupposes that there is no is/ought gap.

(ii)


That the concept of value is a primary, not 'based on' anything.

(iii)


That it is a human invention, but that the invention is neither arbitrary nor based on the recognition of a metaphysical fact. Instead, the invention might have a pragmatic (rather than purely cognitive) function. Along the same lines, it might function to satisfy some desires we have. I don't think this sort of thing is what Rand has in mind by a 'metaphysical fact.'

(iv)


That it is based on alterable conditions of man's existence.


(3)


14,1: "Does an arbitrary human convention, a mere custom, decree that man must guide his actions by a set of principles--or is there a fact of reality that demands it?"

This implies: First, that conventions are not facts of reality. Second, that human conventions are generally arbitrary.

Perhaps by "fact of reality" she just means convention-independent fact, and perhaps she is not asserting that conventions (or "mere" customs) are always arbitrary. Nevertheless, the fact remains that Rand does not consider the possibility of grounding ethics on non-arbitrary conventions, i.e. conventions that serve useful functions--she appears to be assuming that a convention-based morality is non-objective, irrational, and arbitrary, but she has given no defense of this assumption.

(4)


14,2: "In the sorry record of the history of mankind's ethics--with a few rare, and unsuccessful, exceptions--moralists have regarded ethics as the province of whims, that is: of the irrational."

It would be difficult to support this contention by attention to the history of ethics, and in fact Rand does not attempt to do so. She names no one whom she might have in mind here.

Perhaps this will help: I have a history of ethics book here, and it includes the following moralists: Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Epictetus, Augustine, Aquinas, Hobbes, Butler, Hume, Kant, Bentham, Mill, Nietzsche, Bradley, Sidgwick, Moore, Prichard.(4)

Obviously, I cannot undertake to explain all of these moralists' positions here. Suffice it to say that I do not think anyone familiar with them would argue that Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Epictetus, Aquinas, Butler, Kant, Bentham, Mill, Bradley, Sidgwick, Moore, or Prichard--any one of them--thought that ethics was "the province of the irrational." I would be equally surprised to hear someone argue that those moralists as a class are accurately described as "a few" and "unsuccessful."

I'll grant her the cases of Hume and Nietzsche. I am unsure about Augustine and Hobbes.

(5)


14,3: Aristotle "left unanswered the questions of" why noble & wise people do as they do, and "why he evaluated them as noble and wise."

Rand overlooks Aristotle's discussions of the function of man and of the nature of the virtues (see Nicomachean Ethics). Perhaps Aristotle's answers to the above questions are wrong, but it is grossly inaccurate to imply that he had nothing to say about them.

(6)


14,4: Many philosophers have tried "to break the traditional monopoly of mysticism in the field of ethics ... But their attempts consisted of accepting the ethical doctrines of the mystics and of trying to justify them on social grounds, merely substituting society for God."

If Rand intended someone familiar with the history of ethics to be able evaluate this claim for himself, she should have identified some of the philosophers she is referring to here, as well as the ethical doctrines she claims they accepted and tried to justify on social grounds.

Referring to my list of famous moralists (comment 4): she may be referring to contractarians such as Hobbes, but it is unclear that he accepted "the ethical doctrines of the mystics." She may mean the utilitarians like Bentham and Mill, but again, they hardly accepted the same ethics as "the mystics" (if the latter means traditional religious teachings). I suspect Rand did not identify whom she was talking about because she did not know.

At this point, I am going to skip over the rest of her remarks about the history of ethics, about which I would say essentially the same things: that she makes no effort to document her claims and that they are in fact impossible to document because not true.

What is the significance of this? Two things. First, Rand gains an illegitimate rhetorical advantage with her readers by portraying her theory as the only existing alternative to two openly irrational theories--the 'mystical' theory and the arbitrary-convention theory. If her readers knew that there have been a great number of philosophers throughout history who have attempted to give ethics a grounding in reason and/or objective facts, they would be less inclined to accept Rand's theory and more inclined, perhaps, to investigate these other theories. Indeed, if Rand's theory were the only known way of even trying to ground ethics in reason, I myself might accept it.

Second, I do not think Rand was openly dishonest: she was not deliberately trying to manipulate an ignorant reader by lying about the history of philosophy. Rather, I think she herself believed that she was the only figure to attempt to ground ethics in reason or objective reality. I do not see how to avoid concluding that she was very ignorant of the history of her subject. I believe that this explains, in part, why her ethics is so flawed.

As an analogy, imagine a person with no training in science and engineering, trying to build a bridge. His first try would probably collapse, even if he were highly intelligent. I am not saying here that ethics is on a par with modern engineering in its degree of sophistication and certainty; nevertheless, people have been working on it for the past 2000 years, and there are things one can learn from that effort.

(7)


15,6: "'Value' is that which one acts to gain and/or keep."

First, just because someone acts to gain something, does not mean it has value. If an alcoholic acts to get another drink, it does not follow that the drink is valuable; it may be very bad for him. Perhaps Rand meant "value" only in the sense of "that which a person values, i.e., regards as valuable." But then she has failed to define the important concept for ethics, that of a thing's actually being valuable.

(8)


15,6: The concept of value "presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what?"

NA. This assumes without argument that nothing is intrinsically valuable, and there is no such thing as an end in itself (though she later contradicts this). It likewise assumes without argument that value is agent-relative.

(9)


15,6: "It presupposes an entity capable of acting to achieve a goal in the face of an alternative. Where no alternative exists, no goals and no values are possible."

NA. I think Rand means by "an alternative" a situation in which there are at least two possible future courses of events, and one can control which takes place.

Suppose you knew that you were going to receive a million dollars tomorrow. Suppose that you will receive it no matter what you do. Does it follow that it won't be good, or valuable? Rand seems to think it does--that in order for it to be good, there must be alternative courses of action you can take that will determine whether you get the money.

(10)


15,7: "There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or nonexistence..."

NA. It is unclear what "fundamental" alternative means. Perhaps she means this in the sense that one of the branches on that alternative forecloses all other alternatives (i.e., if you don't exist, then there are no choices available to you about anything); therefore, in a sense, all other alternatives depend on this alternative. If this is what she means, she is right; however, we must keep in mind that it does not follow that all other alternatives depend on this alternative in the sense that the resolution of this alternative determines how the other alternatives must be resolved.

(11)


15,7: continuing the same sentence: "...and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms. The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not..."

I can think of five things Rand might mean by saying something's existence is unconditional: she might mean (a) that the thing cannot be destroyed, (b) that the stuff of which the thing is made cannot be destroyed, (c) that whether the thing is destroyed or not does not depend on what the thing does, (d) that the thing continues to exist without performing any positive actions, or (e) that whether the thing is destroyed or not does not depend on any exercise of free will, and so in that sense there are no genuine alternatives. Let's examine these in turn.

(a): It is obviously false that only living organisms can be destroyed. Inanimate objects are often destroyed; I once saw a house destroyed by flames. The last quoted phrase suggests Rand might reply: yes, but the matter of which the inanimate object is composed continues to exist, which brings us to:

(b): It is true that matter cannot be destroyed. However, living organisms are composed of matter in exactly the sense that houses are composed of matter. Therefore, if we say the matter the house is made of was not destroyed (but only rearranged), we can equally well say that the matter of a living organism cannot be destroyed but only rearranged. The point is that Rand has identified no difference between living things and inanimate objects.

Perhaps Rand would reply that although the matter of a living thing cannot be destroyed, it can cease to be living matter; whereas the matter of an inanimate object cannot cease to exist as non-living matter. This, however, is false. Non-living matter is incorporated into living things, just as often as living matter decomposes into non-living matter.

(c): Whether an inanimate object is destroyed can often depend on what the thing does. If my computer malfunctions constantly and irreparably, this may well result in my destroying it. Or, for an example not involving human agency: if a storm cloud moves over a plain and rains on it, this may result in the cloud's ceasing to exist (because the cloud is converted to rain water, which then dissipates).

Perhaps Rand would say that in these examples, the inanimate object is purely passive. However, they do not seem to be any more 'passive' in these examples than living things normally are. They are acting in accordance with the laws of nature, with what they do being determined by their nature together with the environment they are in--just like living things.

(d): Perhaps Rand would say that the inanimate objects don't have to do anything, positively, to continue to exist, whereas living things deteriorate immediately if they stop acting--e.g., if they stop breathing. There is a difference of degree here, but not a qualitative difference: a living thing can continue to exist for a (very) short time without acting. Non-living things can exist longer, but nothing lasts forever. The computer will fall apart eventually, if it just sits here, even if nothing comes in and actively destroys it.

Perhaps Rand would say that although this is true, the computer can't do anything to stop the destruction that results from its inactivity, whereas a living thing can do something to stop (or delay) the destruction that results from its inactivity. But the storm cloud could do something to stop itself from dissipating: namely, absorb more water vapor. If it stops doing that, the storm cloud will eventually dissipate and so stop existing. So its continued existence depends on its activity. This may not seem like much of an 'activity'--but then, neither are the activities of a lot of living things (e.g., plants, sponges, mussels). It seems absurd to claim that, if this is true, it follows that it is good for the cloud to continue to exist, but not otherwise.

(e): It is true that the continued existence of inanimate objects does not depend upon free will, but neither does the continued existence of any kind of living thing other than people--and Rand is trying to identify something that differentiates all living things from all non-living things.

What is the significance of this? Rand aims to use this alleged difference between living things and inanimate objects to explain why 'value' applies to living things but does not apply to inanimate objects. Since she has failed to identify any qualitative difference between living and non-living objects, she has failed to explain this. This removes the foundation of her ethical system, since she cannot show why value applies to life at all.

(12)


15,7: "It is only the concept of 'Life' that makes the concept of 'Value' possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil."

NA. Rand has given no explanation for how value, good, or evil arises--even if we ignore the objections under 11 and even if we grant her claim there. That is, even if we granted that the existence of a living thing depends upon action, nothing follows about anything being good. In particular, it does not follow that the organism's existence is good, nor that its life-sustaining action is good (nor that it is bad). Rand has given no argument for thinking that life is good; not even that it is good for the living thing. So far all we have is that living things can exist or not exist.

(13)


16,2: "To make this point fully clear, try to imagine an immortal, indestructible robot, an entity which moves and acts, but which cannot be affected by anything, which cannot be changed in any respect, which cannot be damaged, injured, or destroyed. Such an entity would not be able to have any values..."

NA. Unfortunately, this scenario is under-described in all the important respects. First, it is unclear whether Rand thinks that a robot could be conscious or not. We proceed by cases:

Case A: Assume that the robot was not conscious. In that case, I agree that it would have no values. But this would not support the claim that "it is only the concept of 'Life' that makes the concept of 'Value' possible." If it shows anything, it shows that value depends upon consciousness--which is not what Rand is trying to show.

Case B: Therefore, let's assume Rand intended the robot to be conscious. Now we have a further question: Does the robot have any desires? Does it have any feelings? Does it have any moral beliefs?

Case B1: Assume the robot has no feelings, desires, or moral beliefs. In this case, I agree that it would have no values. But again, this does not show that 'value' depends on life. If it shows anything, it shows that 'value' depends on desire, feeling, and/or moral beliefs. And this is definitely not what Rand wants to conclude. Perhaps Rand would say that the robot couldn't have any desires, feelings, or moral beliefs because it is indestructible, etc. If so, however, she needs to give an argument for this. Why couldn't the robot have feelings about the things it sees happening? Why couldn't it want, for example, for people to be better off? Why couldn't it believe, for example, that it is morally good for humans to be happy?

Case B2: Assume the robot has feelings, desires, and/or moral beliefs. In that case, why wouldn't it have values? Why wouldn't it value the things that made it feel happy, for instance, or the things that it desired, or the things it believed to be morally good? In this case, Rand appears to be giving a thought-experiment to refute her own view, rather than to support it.

Perhaps, however, we are supposed to take the "cannot be affected" clause more strictly. If we take this literally, the robot could have no awareness of its environment since awareness of an object requires interaction with it. According to Rand's own theories, however, this means that the robot would not be conscious at all,(5) so we are back to case A above.

Moreover, the series of stipulations Rand makes about her robot, after "indestructible", have nothing to do with supporting her point. Her claim is that the concept of 'value' arises because living things have an alternative of existence or non-existence. Therefore, her claim must be that the robot, if indestructible, could have no values, regardless of what else was true of it. The part about its being incapable of being changed in any respect is therefore superfluous (besides being inconsistent with the claim that it moves and acts). I will grant that it may well be true that an entity incapable of being changed in any way could have no values; but if that showed anything, at most it would show that the concept of value depends on the concept of 'change', which, again, is not what Rand is trying to show.

A better thought experiment, therefore, would be one in which: the 'robot' has lots of feelings, it feels love for several humans and has developed close personal relationships with them; it also experiences a passion for classical music; it also has a strong desire for philosophical knowledge and often takes actions to further this; and it has a series of strong moral convictions, e.g., that socialism is one of the world's great evils, whereas democratic capitalism is morally good--but the robot is immortal. And now imagine Rand saying: "you can clearly see that the robot would have no interests and no values, and nothing could be good or bad for it." (Or perhaps Rand would say that the robot couldn't have those feelings, desires, and beliefs I describe because it was immortal--but again, this claim would need an argument.)

I conclude that this thought experiment does not support Rand's thesis, and that instead, it refutes her.

(14)


16,3: Only living things have goals, and "the functions of all living organisms ... from the nutritive function in the single cell of an amoeba to the blood circulation in the body of a man--are actions generated by the organism itself and directed to a single goal: the maintenance of the organism's life." A footnote warns that "goal-directed" does not mean "purposive" and that she also does not mean to endorse "any teleological principle operating in insentient nature." Rather, "I use the term 'goal-directed' ... to designate the fact that the automatic functions of living organisms are actions whose nature is such that they result in the preservation of an organism's life."

The footnote may have been added later to answer an objection someone raised. The problem is that once Rand makes that concession, she is no longer saying anything distinctive about living things. Yes, living things undertake actions which result in the maintenance of their life, usually. But if that licenses saying that the maintenance of their life is their goal, and that their actions are goal-directed, then we could equally well call anything goal-directed since anything has results. The rain causes the ground to get muddy: since the latter is the result of the former, we could say (using Rand's way of speaking) that the cloud's action of raining on the ground is goal-directed and that its goal is to make the ground muddy.

What about the point that the organism's actions are "generated by the organism itself"? I really don't know what this means. The internal state of an organism determines how it behaves in exactly the same sense that the internal state of any object determines how it behaves. The state my computer is in, together with the inputs it receives, determine what it does. The internal properties of a rock (e.g., the molecular structure, the mass, etc.) determine how it reacts when you do various things to it (e.g., it sinks in water, or it breaks apart when hit with a hammer, etc.) In the same way, the internal properties of an amoeba determine what it does when various influences from the environment impinge on it. In all cases, the action is determined by the laws of chemistry and physics. (I am not denying the reality of free will, but free will is not the issue here--Rand is talking about automatic functions of organisms.)

Again, Rand has failed to identify any distinction between living and non-living things here.

(15)


16,4: Organisms have to take in 'fuel' from the outside and use that fuel properly. "What standard determines what is proper in this context? The standard is the organism's life, or: that which is required for the organism's survival."

NA.

(16)


16-17: Life requires constant, self-sustaining activity. "The goal of that action, the ultimate value which, to be kept, must be gained through its every moment, is the organism's life."

... "An organism's life is its standard of value: that which furthers its life is the good, that which threatens it is the evil."

NA.

Rand seems to be sliding between the claim that the 'goal' of the organism's activity is its life, to the claim that its life is good or valuable. However, she told us before that by saying the organism's life was the 'goal' of its activity, all she meant was that this activity results in maintaining the organism's life. (See comment 14.) Therefore, Rand is sliding between the claim that A causes B, and the claim that B is good.

If Rand hadn't chosen idiosyncratic uses of "value" (see comment 7) and "goal" (see comment 14), she would perhaps have been much less tempted to make this confusion, and the reader would be less tempted to think that she was saying anything relevant to ethics. To repeat, her argument seems to be this:

1.


Organisms act to sustain their own lives.

2.


Therefore, their lives are good.

Which is a non sequitur. Only her misuse of the words "value" and "goal" make it seem at all cogent--given her definitions of those terms, she gets to rephrase (1) as "The goal of an organism's action is to sustain its life" and then "Sustaining its life is a value for an organism." This equivocation seems to be the whole foundation of her effort to derive an 'ought' from an 'is'.

(17)


17,3: "Metaphysically, life is the only phenomenon that is an end in itself."

NA. Even if we granted that Rand's argument above were valid and that she therefore showed that life is good, she certainly did not give an argument to show that nothing else is intrinsically good.(6) Why could there not be 2 or more ends in themselves?

(18)


17,5: "By what means does [a person] first become aware of the issue of 'good or evil' in its simplest form? By means of the physical sensations of pleasure or pain." She goes on the explain that pleasure tells you you are doing something good (something that furthers your life), while pain tells you you are doing something bad (something that interferes with your life).

I view pleasure and pain sensations differently. Pleasure is not a cognition of some fact; rather, it is just a good sensation, and a sensation that one likes to have. Likewise pain is just a bad sensation, and a kind of sensation one does not like to have. Pleasure is not the awareness of good; it is just something that is good. How to decide between Rand's view and mine? Two things:

First, if Rand is correct, then to be in pain is to be aware that something bad is happening, and also to be aware that "something is impairing the proper function of [one's] body" (18,1). If this is true, then small children and animals should be aware of those things, since they can have pain sensations. But I don't think an animal can be aware that something is impairing the proper functioning of its body, since I don't think an animal is even aware that there is such a thing as 'proper functioning', let alone the impairment of it. The animal just has a bad sensation that it doesn't like, and so it tries to get away from whatever is causing it. My explanation seems the simplest one.

Second, if Rand is correct, then it appears that there should be no reason, off hand, why one should want to avoid pain provided that one's bodily functioning was not actually being impaired. For instance, if you have to go in for surgery, and you know the surgery is actually going to improve your body's functioning, then there is no reason prima facie--at least, no reason that appears evident from the nature of pain according to Rand--why you should want anesthetics. For the pain is just a signal--in this case, a false signal--telling you that your body is being harmed. Since you know your body isn't actually being harmed, what's the problem? Why would you mind having the pain? Again, my explanation seems the simplest one.

(19)


18,2: "Consciousness--for those living organisms which possess it--is the basic means of survival."

What does this mean? Why would the beating of the heart, for example, not be an at least equally "basic" means of survival for us?

(20)


18-19: Organisms that have only sensations "are guided by the pleasure-pain mechanism ...: by an automatic knowledge and an automatic code of values. ... [I]t acts automatically to further its life and cannot act for its own destruction."

First, sensations are not knowledge, and an animal that has only sensations has no knowledge (because it has no concepts, and because sensations are not propositional).

Second, more importantly, the above claim is refuted by evolutionary biology. Organisms can act for their own, individual destruction. Example 1: when the male praying mantis mates, he seals his own doom, for he will be eaten by the female. (He does not know this, of course, but that is the result of his action.) Example 2: When a bee stings a person or animal, the bee dies as a result. Evolutionary biology shows that the actions of living things are aimed at the 'goal' (in Rand's non-teleological sense) of reproducing more copies of their genes, rather than simply of surviving.

This further illustrates the invalidity of Rand's form of argument. For if Rand's original argument for why life is the good were valid (see comment 16), then once we discover the facts of evolutionary biology, we should be forced to conclude that the ultimate good in life is producing as many copies of your genes as possible, which is absurd.

(21)


19,3: Unlike animals, man has "no automatic code of values ... His senses do not tell him automatically what is good for him or evil ... Man ... the being whose consciousness has a limitless capacity for gaining knowledge--man is the only living entity born without any guarantee of remaining conscious at all. Man's particular distinction from all other living species is the fact that his consciousness is volitional."

"...[T]he automatic values provided by the sensory-perceptual mechanism of its consciousness are sufficient to guide an animal, but are not sufficient for man."

Two main problems here:

First. It is unclear whether Rand is saying that we have no automatic code of values (as in the first sentence) or that we have one, but it just isn't enough for us, and we need something more (as in the last sentence). If the latter, she contradicted herself. If the former, her view is empirically implausible. Humans evolved from lower animals. If all the animals have an automatic code of values built into them (built into their sensory-perceptual mechanism), then that means that our evolutionary ancestors did too. Therefore, Rand must be claiming that somehow, in our evolutionary past, during the last 2 million years, that mechanism was selected out, and a completely new mechanism evolved that induces us to do many of the same things (e.g., seek food, fear predators, mate). The simpler explanation is that the original mechanism stayed there, and just got added to. The same response applies to Rand's evolutionarily implausible claim that only humans, of all animals, lack instincts.

Now, what is the significance of this? This is central to Rand's claim that ethics must be based purely on reason, and never on instinct or emotion. Given the biological basis she claims for ethics, if she is wrong about the biology, she is wrong about the ethics: if humans do have the same built-in code of values as the animals do, then it would follow that we should base ethics at least partly on instinct and/or emotion. I'm not saying that conclusion is true, only that it would follow if we accept Rand's thesis about the biological basis of ethics.

Second, Rand seems to be implying here that (a) animals will stay conscious without any active choice, but (b) humans will not. This is false; you won't automatically fall asleep if you stop trying to stay conscious. This is related to the fact that the forms of awareness the animals have were not selected out when we evolved from apes. We still have them; they were just added to. Rand seems to admit this later (21,2).

(22)


20,5: "In any hour and issue of his life, man is free to think or to evade that effort. Thinking requires a state of full, focused awareness."

This is not true unless in a merely stipulative sense. People can (and all too often do) think in a confused, only half-focused way.

As to the first point, this is not entirely true. People often find themselves unable to stop thinking about something. Nevertheless, I agree that people can choose to think more or less and to focus more or less.

(23)


21,3: "Metaphysically, the choice 'to be conscious or not' is the choice of life or death."

I'm not sure what function "metaphysically" is playing here, but I seem to understand the rest of the sentence, and it seems to say that if you choose to be conscious, you thereby choose to live, and if you choose not to be conscious, you thereby choose to die. This would seem to imply that if you decide to go to sleep, you will die.

Perhaps she means that if you decide never to be conscious, you will die. This seems true, but it also doesn't support the point I think she is aiming at here--namely, that you should always be fully rational and fully 'focused' (or: that "reason is man's only absolute"). You won't die if you're occasionally irrational or confused.

(24)


21,4: "A sensation of hunger will tell [a person] that he needs food (if he has learned to identify it as 'hunger')..."

The parenthetical suggests the absurd view that, unless a person learned to identify the sensation as 'hunger', he wouldn't want to eat when he was hungry. In other words, she seems to be claiming that if you lacked the concept of hunger, the sensation wouldn't be enough to make you want to eat. Do newborn infants not know to eat until someone teaches them that what they're feeling is 'hunger'? Cf. comment 21.

I agree that we need to use reason to survive. But Rand is claiming that we have only reason to tell us how to survive, and that claim does not withstand the facts of biology.

(25)


21,5: Man "has to discover how to tell what is true or false and how to correct his own errors; he has to discover how to validate his concepts, his conclusions, his knowledge; he has to discover the rules of thought, the laws of logic..."

NA. I think this means that if we do not discover those things, then we will not have any knowledge. This creates a vicious circle, however. How could we hope to discover 'how to tell what is true or false' if we were not already able to tell what is true or false? How would we know that a particular claim about how to tell what is true or false was true?

Similarly, if a person did not already know how to validate any concepts, conclusions, or knowledge, how could he go about discovering anything? Since he has no valid concepts, and doesn't know how to get any either, what would be his procedure for discovering what a valid concept is? It would have to be an invalid one.

It is as if Rand had said that in order to get anywhere, you had to first learn to drive, but to do so you have to drive to the driving school.

What is the significance of this? This bears on Rand's hostility to a priori knowledge, which makes her claim that even knowledge of logic is learned. The vicious circularity of her view means that knowledge of logic--in the sense of 'knowing how', though perhaps not in the sense of 'knowing that'--must be innate. (I.e., we innately know how to think logically, though we may not have explicit knowledge of the laws of thought.) It is incoherent to say that you figure out logically how to figure things out logically.

(26)


22,4: "What, then, are the right goals for man to pursue? What are the values his survival requires? That is the question to be answered by the science of ethics."

I am quoting this in order to refer to it later. If it wasn't clear enough already, Rand is saying that ethics is all about the question of how we can survive.

(27)


23,3-4: "The standard of value of the Objectivist ethics ... is man's life, or: that which is required for man's survival qua man.

"Since reason is man's basic means of survival, that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good..."

This is the first appearance of the "man qua man" standard of value. Until now, everything Rand has said has centered on, supported, illustrated, and explained the claim that the sole ultimate good is life or survival--and, accordingly, that the question of ethics is nothing other than, "What will enable us to survive?" (see comment 26) This has counter-intuitive implications: for instance, it would be morally better to live for 100 years in a prison and in constant agony, than to live for 90 years in bliss. Also, it would always be morally wrong to sacrifice your life for anything (in fact, this would be the worst conceivable moral wrong).

Rand does not want these results. Thus, she introduces the idea that the good is not merely life but life qua man. What does that mean? It means the kind of life "proper to a rational being." Now, there are two objections to this.

First, this move is not justified by anything preceding. Remember, the initial claim was that the existence of good & bad stems from the fact that living things face an alternative of existence or non-existence, which is "the only fundamental alternative" (see comment 10). This makes it clear that when she goes on to say that the good is what promotes an organism's 'life', "life" must mean continued existence. She is in no position now to introduce an ad hoc exception for human beings.

Second, what is the standard for what counts as "proper" to the life of a rational being? I see three alternatives:

(i)


"proper" means tending to promote one's life in the sense simply of continued existence. In this case, no modification has been made, and she is just saying that the good is whatever prolongs your existence. In this case, we get the counter-intuitive results mentioned above.

(ii)


"proper" means tending to promote one's life in the sense of the life of man qua man. In this case, we have a circular definition.

(iii)


"proper" means "good for" or "right for" where this does not mean promoting one's life. In this case, the fundamental proposition of Rand's ethics--that life is the only standard of value--is contradicted.


(28)


23,6: "If some attempt to survive by means of brute force or fraud, by looting, robbing, cheating or enslaving the men who produce, it still remains true that their survival is made possible only by their victims, only by the men who choose to think and to produce the goods which they, the looters, are seizing."

From Rand's other writings, we can infer that she has in mind socialist governments, among other things, and we know that she believes this looting behavior is morally wrong. It is reasonable to interpret this as an attempted explanation of why such behavior is morally wrong, in terms of the theory of ethics she has just given.

If so, it fails. Nothing in the above indicates how the looting behavior is not conducive to the survival of the looters. It is true that the strategy depends on the existence of non-looting, productive people. But that does not make it a bad strategy, given that one knows productive people exist and will continue to exist. Analogously, a tribe might live by hunting buffalo. That their existence depends upon the buffalo does not make this a bad strategy, provided they know the buffalo exist and will continue to exist.

Of course, Rand might say that the looters, while they survive, do not have the sort of lives 'proper to a rational being.' But (a) we have already indicated that Rand is committed by other things she says to holding mere survival (continued existence) as the standard of value, and (b) anyway, no reason has been given so far for why this behavior is 'improper' to rational beings.

(29)


23,6: "Such looters are parasites incapable of survival, who exist by destroying those who are capable, those who are pursuing a course of action proper to man."

No reason has been given why the looting behavior is improper, other than the claim that the looters are "incapable of survival." What does she mean by that? I consider four alternatives:

(i)


Perhaps she means that looters always immediately die, once they take up looting.

One counter-example to this will suffice. From her other writings, we know that Rand would regard most people in the United States government at present as looters. Yet these people are not dead. They have survived for years.

(ii)


Perhaps she means that the looters will eventually die.

But everyone will die eventually, so this shows nothing about why looters are more immoral than anyone else.

(iii)


Perhaps she means that the life expectancy of looters is significantly less than that of non-looters.

If so, she has given no evidence for this claim. We may again use the example under (i): do government officials on average have a significantly shorter life-span than, say, businessmen? I have no reason to think so.

(iv)


Perhaps Rand means that although looters can physically survive, their lives are sub-human in quality, i.e., they are not living 'qua man'.

In that case, no argument has been given for this claim. See also comment 27.

The significance of this is that Rand's meta-ethics is incapable of delivering the moral judgements she wants. Moreover, it is incapable of explaining obvious moral facts such as that stealing is wrong.

(30)


24,1: Discussing why looting will lead to your own destruction: "As evidence, I offer you any criminal or any dictatorship."

I have not edited the remark--she gives no further elaboration.

I do not find this adequate evidence. It is not obvious that all criminals and dictators have shorter life-spans than non-criminals, though I grant many of them do. Again, take the example of U.S. government officials, whom Rand would regard as looters.

(31)


24,2-3: Unlike animals, people have to take a long-term view of their lives--they are aware of their whole life-span. "Such is the meaning of the definition: that which is required for man's survival qua man. It does not mean a momentary or a merely physical survival. ... 'Man's survival qua man' means the terms, methods, conditions and goals required for the survival of a rational being through the whole of his lifespan--in all those aspects of existence which are open to his choice."

Does any of this explain why the survival of the looters doesn't count as "survival qua man"? Take these remarks in turn:

First, the looters do not have a merely momentary survival. Many of them live for years and years--a normal human life-span, in fact.

Second, their survival is not merely physical. I assume Rand's intended contrast to "physical" is "mental." The looters also survive mentally, in the sense that they remain conscious (they don't fall asleep or go into a coma).

Third, their looting enables them to survive through the whole of their lifespans.

Fourth, are they surviving as rational beings? Well, Rand has given no reason so far for thinking that their behavior isn't rational.

Fifth, are they surviving "in all those aspects which are open to [their] choice"? I'm not sure how to parse the end of that sentence, actually; it seems ungrammatical. I gather the point, however, is that certain goals, methods, etc. are applicable in all the circumstances where we have to make choices. I see no reason why the looters' behavior does not enable them to sur