@Gallowflak

I would argue that it does require at least a greater intellectual maturity to stay an atheist and live with the conviction that there is no big brother in the sky to help you or alleviate your suffering. For example, Jesus said the suffering will be alleviated only when you die, but most Christians ignore that part and think that prayer acts in this world, hence the strong placebo effect seen in some. Now I am much more impressed by the Buddhists monk who, after years of training, can use this placebo effect almost on demand, but you have to wonder if at that point religion is necessary at all. It seems more like mental discipline. Religious belief may help to persevere in your attaining this mental discipline, but I very well doubt that it is beyond science's grasp.

Also, you seem to have missed a crucial part: the atheist says that his understanding of that experience must change, not that it will (automatically) change. Herein lies the shortcomings of the human mind. But the potential for change, the openness, is there. Of course, if you think that I mean that "openness" also means openness to religious ideas, then you are sadly mistaken. Religious ideas have been rejected by the atheist because they do not adhere to the basic premise of trusting only experience (I could broaden this to accommodate the odd rationalist atheist but they are so rare in my experience that the effort would not be consistent with the Pareto principle to do so).

Now, you may think that compartmentalization can give you the best of both worlds: I use religious ideas in some domains (like morals and ethics) and science in others (basically everything else). But that is wanting to eat your cake and have it too. Religious ideas presuppose some weird metaphysics that will creep in your science sometime or another. Plus, counting on religion to guide your morals blinds you to the actual psychological underpinnings of those judgements. And really, if you change some of your religion's moral teachings because they do not agree with you, can you still say you are of this religion, nay that you are even religious at all? If you do compromise your religion's teachings in a kind of modern pragmatism, then you are misguided about religion: you do not need it. What I think is that many prominent religious figures come to this conclusion, that they do not need religion since they are "beyond" those kinds of petty worldly matters. But since they think they are special and that everyone else is below them, they think the masses still need religion. But really how they come to this conclusion, by falsely believing themselves superior, is ultimately irrelevant, and in fact many lay religious persons reason the same way with regards to their fellow citizens: others need religion, not me, so I need religion to protect me from them, etc. They do not see that a rational discourse about morals/ethics is possible, so they stick to religion as a default answer because they were educated that way.

Now, if we were perfect reasoning machines it would not matter whether we were "religious" or not, "theist" or not: we would never base our reasoning on false or unproven assumptions except as a way to partake in thought experiments, i.e. we would not base our actions on those thought experiments, except to verify the validity of their conclusions. That is the kind of perfect reasoning the atheists want. Of course, a perfect reasoning machine that has religious beliefs would suffer quite rapidly from extreme, possibly debilitating, cognitive dissonance. That is why I think religion must be erased if we want our reasoning to evolve towards something like perfection. You may not like the prospect of becoming a Vulcan now, but will you even be able to mind when you will have become one? No. Of course, those who will become Vulcan-like will be our descendants, not us, so they will care even less.

They are doing the opposite of that thought experiment...you know the one were you take a machine gun back to the past and kill entire armies. They are taking machines from the past, to the future to get killed by armies.

@Sniper007

1/5 of an acre to feed an entire family of what size? Not all land is suitable for farming. Hundreds of trillions? What about water usage and waste processing? That number is literally laughable. What about deforestation's effects on climate? Most estimates I've seen that assume farming every inch of suitable land and cramming everyone into cities built on the rest are around 30 billion, only 5 times our current population. Farming all possible land also doesn't take into account natural disasters, local shortages in resources, or man-made errors in the ability to transport said resources. How would you argue that it's a good idea to use every resource available for farming when that is inherently unbelievably risky? Every natural increase or decrease in crop production would cause hunger...there would be no buffer.

Clearly, if we arrive at some number for the extreme-thought-experiment population for Earth, the maximum sustainable population must be lower than that number to avoid unnecessary deaths.

Even if you (naively, IMO) ignore empirical data for the sake of argument, How can you philosophically argue the justice in cramming everyone into cities and the loss of all nature except what can't be farmed? Ignoring empirical data is not a good idea, especially when philosophy must let us cover such topics as economics, climate, population growth, etc. Subjects that are awash with numbers and data.

It is sufficient to recognize that large families are NOT a good use of resources or land in all situations. Everyone living their lives as best they know how while ignoring everyone else around them is a recipe for hideous situations. Ignoring empirical data in relation to theories of justice sucks all the practical use out of them. Ignoring data in favor of thought experiments is a great way to discuss things, but bringing numbers in usually destroys one argument or the other with sheer moral and practical force.

He didn't factor in duct tape! Dammit, that's cheating! Everything works with duct tape!
>> ^GeeSussFreeK:

Ahhh, obscure didn't mean what I thought it meant. Though, this is a debunk of Richard Feynman's long standing and widely held hypothesis that such a machine would not work.

>> ^Jinx:

Wait, so if the output encounters any resistance is it not going to transfer any torque to the control shaft? I don't fully understand how it works, but I'd like to see him give that output a little bit of resistance and see what happens.


This is my point. Yes it would transfer torque to the control shaft. The more power you put through it, the more power you'll need for the control shaft. There will be a power cost to run at a speed where the control shaft isnt locked. This is why I think joedirt is wrong.

A quick thought experiment joedirt: Imagine this system hooked up to a 2000hp diesel unit. If there was no extra power input needed then the little electric motor he has here would work fine. Do you really think it would?

There will be friction to overcome, and the gearing need for such a large power plant would generate a lot of friction. There would also be, I believe, a torque transfer to the control shaft that would be far, far from negligible.

It will certainly need a good chunk of power to control it. This doesn't mean it won't be better than the current systems, but it certainly isn't the case that there will be no power drain from this transmission.

A) These properties that are "just right" for life...are only just right for this TYPE of life.
B) So what if there were no life. Nothing to view the universe...would that mean that it wouldn't exist? Hahaha fellow philosophers it's the ol' "tree falling in the woods" thought experiment.

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

I'll try to approach this from another angle.

I know that I am 'aware'. That is, not only do I behave as though I was a concious being with self-awareness, I am indeed aware of what's going on. I don't know, however, whether any of you guys are. You certainly behave like it, but there is no way to know for sure.

However, there is no reason to believe otherwise. From an objective point of view, there is nothing about any other human being that is fundamentally different from me, therefore I have no reason to believe that any other human being is not 'aware', just like me.

Now, here's a thought experiment: Make a brain in a vat. Take a live person, somehow extract his brain from his body without killing the poor guy, and place it in a vat. Attach artificial sensory organs and life-support systems, such that all the information that flowed between the brain and the body now flows between the brain and an artificial machine. In the traditional philosophical experiment, the person shouldn't notice any difference, but that's not really important for my purposes. The important thing is that he can experience the outside world.

Is there any reason to doubt his awareness now? I can't see any.

Now continue to mess with our poor victim. Replace his prefrontal cortex with an equivalent ANN (Artificial Neural Network), made out of electronics. Whether or not that's possible, here's the next step:
Abandon the vat and simulate the entire configuration on a computer.

Now we have an ensemble of electronics instead of an ensemble of neurons. Still, the guy's behaviour is essentially the same. The objective facts can be correlated with the facts about the original person. He still has a prefrontal cortex, it just exists in computer memory instead of in a real configuration of neurons.

I still can't find any reason to doubt whether this person is aware. This seems to demonstrate that it's not the 'stuff' you're made of that's important; it's the abstract configurations between the functional units, no matter how the units themselves are manifested in reality. And that seems to argue against any important ontological difference between people and other things.

Oh yeah, longde, I'll give you that the full story is likely much more thought out.

I would turn it down, because it's not my place to sacrifice other people. If they went willingly sure, but otherwise I would not. Of course, you can construct scenarios where I WOULD do it, if the world is completely collapsing and they offer a trade to fix it in exchange for some horrendous thing, but such thought experiments are not always productive in the end.

I personally could sure use a huge hunk of gold, but if someone can make gold for free, then the whole point is moot - the value of my gold is like any other crappy metal, very small. A pretty paper weight.

I haven't watched the video yet, but GeeSussFreek's comment prompted me to reply. I don't want to sound mean, but most of GSF's comment is gobbledygook. Words like "experience" and "consciousness" need to be thrown out of the discussion unless you not only rigorously define them but also prove that they apply to humans. If you define them simply as "what human minds do" (which is what you have done in your talk of experiencing the color blue) then all you have is a tautology.

The problem with the man in the box thought experiment is as gwiz665 pointed out. First, you can't just assume such a translation book would be possible. If such a book did exist, if the book allowed for fluent conversation on arbitrary topics, then the man-plus-book system would indeed possess understanding of the language. Saying the man doesn't have understanding of the language is like dividing a brain into the amygdala, hypothalamus, etc and saying of any piece that it doesn't possess understanding of language--it's true but doesn't prove anything other than that intelligence isn't infinitely divisible into smaller pieces of the same. Just like water isn't infinitely divisible into smaller pieces of water, eventually you find the individual pieces are made out of some other kind of stuff.

A simple thought experiment shows that AI is not only possible, but with computers that process information the same as today's. The brain is made out of matter, which obeys the laws of quantum mechanics, which we can simulate on today's hardware. A computer that is sufficiently fast could simulate the fertilization of a human egg and its development into a full grown adult. Running the simulation in real time and providing it with the appropriate input signals(a pair of video cameras for vision, etc), the adult would be just as intelligent or self-aware as you or me. In fact, any words like "experience" or "consciousness" you use to talk about you or me would apply equally to our simulated person. By starting the simulation at the fertilization of the egg, it doesn't even require any knowledge about how the brain works. But, since it is unlikely that the brain directly relies on quantum phenomena, with sufficient knowledge of the cellular and chemical structure of the brain you could simulate it at that level instead and get the same results on hardware that is many orders of magnitude slower. The only way to refute this line of reasoning is to relegate the mind to some supernatural phenomenon, but at that point you're believing in magic and all bets on meaningful conversation are off.

Oh man, you make a good argument here GSF, but some of your points are wonderfully put down by Daniel Dennett (my hero) in, hmm, I think it was Consciousness Explained. (I wrote an assignment on this a few years back, I'll just see if I can get the quotes and stuff..)

The Chinese Room thought experiment is essentially a dud. Dennett calls it an Intuition Pump.

“while philosophers and others have always found flaws in his thought experiment when it is considered as a logical argument, it is undeniable that its “conclusion” continues to seem “obvious” to many people. Why? Because people don’t actually imagine the case in the detail it requires.”

He argues that Searle's position may:

“(…) lull us into the (unwarranted) supposition that the giant program would work by somehow simply “matching up” the input Chinese characters with some output Chinese characters. No such program would work, of course”

For a program to work it would have to be:
“extraordinarily supple, sophisticated, and multilayered system, brimming with “world knowledge” and meta-knowledge and meta-meta-knowledge about its own responses, the likely responses of its interlocutor, its own “motivations” and the motivations of the interlocutor, and much, much more”

The point is, that Searle only looks at the man in the box, and not the whole box, which is what answers. While the little man may not have an understanding of the Chinese letters, the man + the reference book does have that understanding. Searle himself argues that this box would pass a Turing test, but that's the whole box, not just the little man inside.

You say

"Let us use another example. Let us say that we have broadcasting towers all over the USA. They are broadcasting all sorts of different programs to all sorts of different people. It is a complex web of towers and receivers but it all seems to work out ok. So, are we to conclude that radio towers are conscious? Of course not, but that is what are are doing with the human experience of consciousness. Lets look at that quickly.

When you experience something, you experience every one of your scenes simultaneously. You remember the sounds, the tastes, the sights...it is all there. However, your brain never really has a point in which all points connect. Your consciousness is something that seems to violate the laws of physics, that things are happening in different locations in space at different times, but for your consciousness, at the same time. This isn't something that is reducible to brain states, and not something that is physically possible in computer technology as we know it. It doesn't matter if it is parallel or not, if things don't touch but are somehow related this is mystifying; and as a result, unreproducible. Perhaps consciousnesses is reducible to one point in the brain we haven't found, but so far, there is no such thing."

And again, I want to refer to Dennett and his "Multiple Drafts theory", which I think is an excellent answer to this. I don't think that consciousness violates physics as such (obviously it doesn't, or it couldn't exist in our physical universe). I think that our consciousness is an amalgamation of sensory input that is processed in our brain and presented in our consciousness as "scenes". I mean, we have a much, much larger flow of sensory input than is presented to us, and our unconscious mind filters though this and presents what is perceived to be relevant inputs to "us" (our conscious minds). I think in the end it is actually reducible to brain states, in the same way that any give program, say firefox with videosift loaded, can be reduced to an electrical state at a given time in my computer.

On the concept on Blue and blueness, I think you are making a Qualia argument. To be honest, I can't remember all the details of that right now, but again Dennet's "Quining Qualia" in one of his books covers it greatly, if my memory serves.

I also love this subject.

First of all, these are two brilliant people faced with an uncertain question about an unclear topic. To have any meaningful conversation for any longer than 30 mins is a feat in and of itself. Bravo to everyone involved for their time and energy!

Since this is the internets, I will of course give my opinion. AI was something I wrote much about in college. First, I stared like the man on our left. I was a technologist, I believed in the power of computing and simulation. Facts were only things that were verifiable and proven through rigorous trial and error. In an effort to discover the truths of the universe. I had the utmost zeal for technology solving all the worlds problems, and that it could realize any possible challenge. After years of study and introduction to many different areas and ways of thinking, I had a, what I consider, more realistic understanding about technology and philosophy. With that said, lets get some meat!

Let us go over some of the things they mentioned. First, the Chinese room argument.
This is a thought experiment where a man goes into a room. It is locked and only has a small slot for access. In the room with the man is a typewriter and book of Chinese. The man does not speak Chinese, but the book has explanations of how to respond to certain symbol sets. It does not offer translated meaning or things of this nature. It is simply if you see "This" then type "That". It is pure syntax, no meaning is applied.

Now, a second man comes to the slot of the room. He inserts a sentence into the slot and waits. The man inside the box looks at the paper, looks at this guide and begins to churn out his output. He slides the output through the slot and the second man receives it. He reads it and it appears that the response is from something that knows Chinese. Something that understood what he said and replied. However, this is not what happen. The person inside knows nothing of how to speak that language, he was only responding syntactically to other syntax. This is not intelligence, rather, more definitely, this is not understanding.

Much to my disappointment I became aware of this thought experiment. Because currently, this is how ALL software is realized. The hardware is essentially dumb, it does nothing except what the software tells it to do. This means at best, a computer in its current form can never have understanding. So at best, this conversation has to be about new, different computers that doesn't work on the same syntactical model that we have today.

The counter to this was that humans can be understood in the same way a computer can, were as the hardware is just doing what the brain is telling it to. That we are just state machines with brains being the software and the body being the dumb hardware. This would imply that humans also do not have understanding. However, we do, and that is where the problem is.

Now, we must be clear on what understanding means before we move further. Understanding is hard to flesh out briefly, but I will try. Experiencing the color blue is more than just experiencing a certain wavelength a light. It has a context that goes beyond just the facts of it, you experience blueness! Blue has a real experienced value. You have done more than just become aware of it, you have experience of it. More over, you can actually think back upon the experience itself, it is more than just a wavelength to you, not only is it blue, but you have an experience of blue to reflect on with all sorts of other things relating to it.

The man in the room had no understanding of Chinese. It was gibberish to him. He can only do what he was told in his special language.

The next is a typical fallacy that I have used from time to time without realizing it. It is easy to do and it is made in this presentation. Appeal To complexity in a slightly modified form. That, we don't understand how human consciousness as the brain is complex. And, in fact, it is in that complexity that the emergent property of consciousness comes from. This of course is not necessarily true or untrue, but he is stating this as a fact of consciousness in computing being a possibility because of this.

Let us use another example. Let us say that we have broadcasting towers all over the USA. They are broadcasting all sorts of different programs to all sorts of different people. It is a complex web of towers and receivers but it all seems to work out ok. So, are we to conclude that radio towers are conscious? Of course not, but that is what are are doing with the human experience of consciousness. Lets look at that quickly.

When you experience something, you experience every one of your scenes simultaneously. You remember the sounds, the tastes, the sights...it is all there. However, your brain never really has a point in which all points connect. Your consciousness is something that seems to violate the laws of physics, that things are happening in different locations in space at different times, but for your consciousness, at the same time. This isn't something that is reducible to brain states, and not something that is physically possible in computer technology as we know it. It doesn't matter if it is parallel or not, if things don't touch but are somehow related this is mystifying; and as a result, unreproducible. Perhaps consciousnesses is reducible to one point in the brain we haven't found, but so far, there is no such thing.

I have already gone on way to long, and I could go on for about 20 more pages. I still have my thesis on it laying around here somewhere. I LOVE THIS TOPIC, but my studies have lead me to believe that creating an ACTUAL intelligence isn't possible with current digital technology. Let me remind everyone that digital computing hasn't changed since basically Leibniz , and that was in the 1600s. In other words, AI, or Computers with Consciousness is NOT possible with state machine logic.

I would like to point out one more fallacy the pro-AI guy was (and let me be clear, I love the idea of AI too, so I am pro as well! But I just think it is impossible) that simulations of of brain states is simulacrum, not experience. Simulacrum difference from actual experience because it begs the question, is this thing ACTUALLY experiencing anything other than a brain state. For instance, the color blue is not necessarily equal to any particular brain state. Brain states alone do not sufficiently explain human consciousnesses, to assume that a proper modeling of them is anything other than just another simulacrum is without cause. In short, a simulacrum does not an experience make. (The people in the painting aren't experiencing a wonderful day)

>> ^brain:
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: Following all of the same logic, should we have socialized car insurance?


the difference is that not everyone has or should have a car. Cars are optional, so insurance is optional. Health care covers your body, which is not optional.

However, I also agree that any state that has mandatory car insurance is creating a scam, so that sucks and should be fixed.

>> ^peggedbea:
>> ^brain:
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: Following all of the same logic, should we have socialized car insurance?


Actually... yes, in any state that has a law requiring auto insurance there should be a government run option. To require something by law that is ran by for-profit companies is just inviting abuse, even with regulations. Though I suppose this could possibly be fixed by making a regulation requiring the insurer be non-profit.

>> ^peggedbea:
>> ^brain:
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: Following all of the same logic, should we have socialized car insurance?

No!

We should. Private car insurance gives scenarios like this (in Quebec at least): when you have an accident, your insurance company pays for the damage you have done to the other car, not your own. So far so good. However, if you bump into a passerby, the SAAQ (public government insurance) pays for personal "damages" which are in addition to healthcare costs already covered by the public healtcare system. It pays them both to you if you were injured in the collision and to the passerby. OK. But the weird thing is, that if your car is damaged by your hitting the passerby, HIS CAR INSURANCE will have to pay for the repairs on your car, because the SAAQ only ever covers personal injuries : property damage is covered by (mandatory if you own a car) private insurance! This is in spite of the fact that he was on foot and notwithstanding which party is responsible for the accident : you could have been drunk driving and it wouldn't make a difference. If the passerby doesn't have property insurance (i.e. if he doesn't own a car or doesn't own a house with blanket property insurance, etc.), he pays out of his own pocket. This has been tested in court (with a drunk driver claiming thousands of dollars of damages to the family of his dead victim) and found perfectly logical and true to the letter of the law on property insurance policies. If the SAAQ covered both personal injuries and property damage on cars this scenario couldn't happen.

Of course you can modify the laws to cover this scenario, but more laws equals more potential loopholes and generally testify to how rotten a system has become. It also empowers the judiciary and unduly enrich the lawyers. The moral is : the SAAQ should cover property insurance insurance on cars since it is mandatory. The same logic should be applied to all types of insurance found to be mandatory. I do not like top-down representative governments, but between them and the mini-tyrannies called corporations, I prefer the former.