Serious Philosophy Discussion

[Phr3121]

Children have a connection to greater truth based on the idea that your identity is actually in the “heart”, not the mind. We somehow call this “being down to earth”.

Animals are the same.

 

[Bullitt68]

I'm just going to say at the top of this post that, since you haven't yet responded to my previous post, @Caveat, this post technically constitutes a further response to the ideas and issues that you've brought up to this point.

That's one way : valuing certain points I agree with and disagree with the whole. There's also when you engage in a conversation with someone with an opposite view, still disagree with him at the end of the day, but think "wow, that co conversation was enlightening".

Exactly. There's nothing contradictory about that, either. But, again, clear and careful language is needed to explain that what precisely was of value wasn't your interlocutor's view but the opportunity presented by your interlocutor to (a) work through an opposing viewpoint and (b) pit your own viewpoint against an opposing viewpoint.

I am just playing with the idea of non-importance, but what would you say if someone sacrifices himself for other people ? Also, how does that make sense in Randian ethics (see the chapters about courage in Aristotle NE III) ?

First, it doesn't make sense in the context of Objectivism. But it's important to clarify what Rand means when she speaks of "selfishness" and of "sacrifice." From her essay "The Ethics of Emergencies" in The Virtue of Selfishness:

"'Sacrifice' is the surrender of a greater value for the sake of a lesser one [...] Thus, altruism gauges a man's virtue by the degree to which he surrenders, renounces, or betrays his values (since help to a stranger or an enemy is regarded as more virtuous, less 'selfish,' than help to those one loves). The rational principle of conduct is the exact opposite: always act in accordance with the hierarchy of your values, and never sacrifice a greater value to a lesser one [...] Love and friendship are profoundly personal, selfish values: love is an expression and assertion of self-esteem, a response to one's own values in the person of another. One gains a profoundly personal, selfish joy from the mere existence of the person one loves. It is one's own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns, and derives from love. A 'selfless,' 'disinterested' love is a contradiction in terms: it means that one is indifferent to that which one values.

Concern for the welfare of those one loves is a rational part of one’s selfish interests. If a man who is passionately in love with his wife spends a fortune to cure her of a dangerous illness, it would be absurd to claim that he does it as a 'sacrifice' for her sake, not his own, and that it makes no difference to him, personally and selfishly, whether she lives or dies. Any action that a man undertakes for the benefit of those he loves is not a sacrifice if, in the hierarchy of his values, in the total context of the choices open to him, it achieves that which is of greatest personal (and rational) importance to him. In the above example, his wife’s survival is of greater value to the husband than anything else that his money could buy, it is of greatest importance to his own happiness and, therefore, his action is not a sacrifice.

But suppose he let her die in order to spend his money on saving the lives of ten other women, none of whom meant anything to him—as the ethics of altruism would require. That would be a sacrifice. Here the difference between Objectivism and altruism can be seen most clearly: if sacrifice is the moral principle of action, then that husband should sacrifice his wife for the sake of ten other women. What distinguishes the wife from the ten others? Nothing but her value to the husband who has to make the choice - nothing but the fact that his happiness requires her survival.

The Objectivist ethics would tell him: your highest moral purpose is the achievement of your own happiness, your money is yours, use it to save your wife, that is your moral right and your rational, moral choice.

Consider the soul of the altruistic moralist who would be prepared to tell that husband the opposite. (And then ask yourself whether altruism is motivated by benevolence.)"

Now, with that established, you could then bring up something in the Iron Man/Captain America vein. Hence my selection of this particular essay of Rand's, which rejects ethical argumentation within the context of emergencies, or, in contemporary parlance, "states of exception," because they are precisely that: Exceptions to the rule, to normal states of (ethical) living.

The Stoic answer is simple: I want to survive, the I can be replaced by they. They want to survive.

The Objectivist response is simple, too: That's nonsense. The only way that would make any sense to an Objectivist would be if - to preserve my Iron Man/Captain America example - the rationale was something like what Iron Man decided: I want them (Gwyneth Paltrow and the Avengers crew, as well as humanity in general) to survive but the only way that that can happen is if I give my life to save theirs. That'd be valid insofar as it's evidence of a rational decision made on the basis of one's values in a state of emergency/exception.

The existence of Spartacus is perfectly possible in Stoic ethics. What I think you mean is that his existence would not come out of the Stoic ethics.

Exactly. A is A: If Stoicism (A) says "Be happy as a slave" and if Spartacus (B) says "Don't be happy as a slave" then Spartacus (B) is logically impossibile per Stoicism (A).

I am not aware of the biography of Spartacus, but I know his rebellion didn't amount to much. He won one battle, then the Romans took him seriously and killed him. Maybe he'd have been better off working on his happiness (I insist on working because your use of language is deceiving. It makes it seem like you can easily be happy about everything when in fact it is a long process : see the manual with advices for beginners and the progressing)

The notion that he may have been "better off working on his happiness" as a slave rests on the assumption that happiness was possible to him as a slave. But that's the whole point: To Spartacus, freedom was at the top of his hierarchy of values. That means that happiness sans freedom was not possible to him - which means that he absolutely would not - could not - have been "better off working on his happiness" as a slave. Same thing with Bertram T. Cates in the dramatization of the Scopes "Monkey" Trial in Inherit the Wind. Same thing with William Wallace in Braveheart. Same thing with John Proctor in The Crucible. And, most relevantly, same thing with Howard Roark in The Fountainhead. That's why their plights are so powerful: Because they're exemplary individuals who lived principled lives and who refused to sacrifice their values because to have done so would've made happiness impossible - faced with imprisonment, torture, and death, they decided that nothing was worse than sacrificing their values.

Irrationality is a word with a bad connotation.

So we're disqualified from using words with bad connotations?

I think the intent in characterizing them as irrational is to put them in a bad light.

Yes, of course. The rational is the good, the irrational is the bad. Connotations be damned: This is the truth. Why sugarcoat it at the expense of the rational/the good? To quote Rand from Atlas Shrugged:

"A moral code impossible to practice [...] [enjoins you to] dissolve all ideas in fog, to permit no firm definitions, to regard any concept as approximate and any rule of conduct as elastic, to hedge on any principle, to compromise on any value, to take the middle of any road [...] to reject the absolute of nature [...] A code that forbids you to cast the first stone [has the effect of forbidding you] to admit the identity of stones and to know when or if you're being stoned [...] There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong [...] In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit."

Yet, irrational philosophies do exist and irrationality is bad, so I should just accept the label and get over with it.

My point is not that.

Yes, it is. You can dance around it all you like, but you can't avoid it.

It is that irrationality is hastily used to characterize opposing philosophies when in fact they are not irrational

I don't care if "irrationality is hastily used" to "discredit" people/things: I use "irrationality" to demonstrate on the basis of reasoned deliberation and clear argumentation that people/things are irrational and should be discredited to the extent that they're irrational, and should anyone disagree with my judgments, they're free to try to prove me wrong on the basis of their own reasoned deliberation and clear argumentation.

see Kant for example.

I already covered this with my Rational-noun versus rational-adjective distinction.

In the same way that faith was used to characterize the whole of medieval philosophy.

No, not the whole - the fundamental. Once again, your abhorrence of thinking in basics/fundamentals is tripping you up. Not everything that was ever put down on paper by Kant was irrational; however, the core of his philosophy is fundamentally irrational. Those are two different statements.

Re-read Aristotle's book I. The first questions is what is the highest good ? Not why to further one's life. It is how to achieve it : by being virtuous. So the answer to "why should one be virtuous?" Is pretty straightforward: to achieve the highest good.

Re-read my post. That "answer" doesn't answer anything. Rearrange the points in whatever order you want - and you clearly moved the goalpost in this post, ending with the "Why should one be virtuous?" question when the bedrock question is clearly "Why should one want to achieve the highest good?" - eventually the "Why?" question will persist to where, to go back to Wittgenstein and the Philosophical Investigations, you reach "bedrock," at which point your explanations have come to an end, your "spade is turned," and all that is left for you to say is: "This is simply what I do."

My point - and the point of the Objectivist ethics - is that: That's okay. There's no way to philosophically "solve" life so that every single human being on the face of the Earth will "flip" their rational "switch" and automatically start living rational lives - but the point is that there doesn't need to be. All you're tasked with doing is bringing people to the water. Whether or not they drink is on them. To end with a final quote of Rand's from Atlas Shrugged:

"We do not tell – we show. We do not claim – we prove. It is not your obedience that we seek to win, but your rational conviction. You have seen all the elements of our secret. The conclusion is now yours to draw – we can help you to name it, but not to accept it – the sight, the knowledge, and the acceptance must be yours."

 

[Tycho- Taylor's Version]

I'm just going to say at the top of this post that, since you haven't yet responded to my previous post, @Caveat, this post technically constitutes a further response to the ideas and issues that you've brought up to this point.

All good.

I know how I want to respond, I'm just going to be a little more delayed for the rest of the week. Finishing up some year-end projects and an order of new books just showed up at my door as lovely little procrastination tools.

Keep the thread alive!

 

[Bullitt68]

All good.

I know how I want to respond, I'm just going to be a little more delayed for the rest of the week. Finishing up some year-end projects and an order of new books just showed up at my door as lovely little procrastination tools.

Keep the thread alive!

I'm going to be delayed, too. I've got two Thanksgivings this week with two different sides of the family, plus, since Thanksgiving isn't a holiday in the UK, I have deadlines coming up this weekend for UK job and postdoc applications.

This is me this week:

 

[Tycho- Taylor's Version]

I'm going to be delayed, too. I've got two Thanksgivings this week with two different sides of the family, plus, since Thanksgiving isn't a holiday in the UK, I have deadlines coming up this weekend for UK job and postdoc applications.

This is me this week:

Yea me too!

Spoiler

 

[VuvuzelaBzz]

First, it doesn't make sense in the context of Objectivism. But it's important to clarify what Rand means when she speaks of "selfishness" and of "sacrifice." From her essay "The Ethics of Emergencies" in The Virtue of Selfishness:

"'Sacrifice' is the surrender of a greater value for the sake of a lesser one [...] Thus, altruism gauges a man's virtue by the degree to which he surrenders, renounces, or betrays his values (since help to a stranger or an enemy is regarded as more virtuous, less 'selfish,' than help to those one loves). The rational principle of conduct is the exact opposite: always act in accordance with the hierarchy of your values, and never sacrifice a greater value to a lesser one [...] Love and friendship are profoundly personal, selfish values: love is an expression and assertion of self-esteem, a response to one's own values in the person of another. One gains a profoundly personal, selfish joy from the mere existence of the person one loves. It is one's own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns, and derives from love. A 'selfless,' 'disinterested' love is a contradiction in terms: it means that one is indifferent to that which one values.

Concern for the welfare of those one loves is a rational part of one’s selfish interests. If a man who is passionately in love with his wife spends a fortune to cure her of a dangerous illness, it would be absurd to claim that he does it as a 'sacrifice' for her sake, not his own, and that it makes no difference to him, personally and selfishly, whether she lives or dies. Any action that a man undertakes for the benefit of those he loves is not a sacrifice if, in the hierarchy of his values, in the total context of the choices open to him, it achieves that which is of greatest personal (and rational) importance to him. In the above example, his wife’s survival is of greater value to the husband than anything else that his money could buy, it is of greatest importance to his own happiness and, therefore, his action is not a sacrifice.

But suppose he let her die in order to spend his money on saving the lives of ten other women, none of whom meant anything to him—as the ethics of altruism would require. That would be a sacrifice. Here the difference between Objectivism and altruism can be seen most clearly: if sacrifice is the moral principle of action, then that husband should sacrifice his wife for the sake of ten other women. What distinguishes the wife from the ten others? Nothing but her value to the husband who has to make the choice - nothing but the fact that his happiness requires her survival.

The Objectivist ethics would tell him: your highest moral purpose is the achievement of your own happiness, your money is yours, use it to save your wife, that is your moral right and your rational, moral choice.

Consider the soul of the altruistic moralist who would be prepared to tell that husband the opposite. (And then ask yourself whether altruism is motivated by benevolence.)"

Now, with that established, you could then bring up something in the Iron Man/Captain America vein. Hence my selection of this particular essay of Rand's, which rejects ethical argumentation within the context of emergencies, or, in contemporary parlance, "states of exception," because they are precisely that: Exceptions to the rule, to normal states of (ethical) living.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it appears to me that Rand's definition of sacrifice requires someone to make a decision that is contrary to a value judgement of theirs. I have a hard time believing anyone has ever done such a thing, regardless of their conscious reasoning. Her example of a husband allowing his wife to die to save ten women who mean nothing to him being one of sacrifice is simply her saying that she would never make that choice, because it goes against what her value judgement would be in that situation. The women "none of whom meant anything to him" are actually women who would mean nothing to her, were she in his shoes, but to a husband who would actually save their lives over his wife's life, saving those ten women's lives must be of more value to him than saving his wife's life, either because of what he perceives as the unbearable guilt that would result from "selfishly" allowing them to die, because of the social status he thinks he will get by making the "selfless" choice to save them, or some other reason I'm not accounting for.

To me it seems that her argument against the "ethics of altruism" is that they impose imperative value judgements which are inferior to her own imperative value judgements. Her definition of "sacrifice" only leads her to moralise in the way she accuses altruists of moralising, but from the inverse perspective, as they believe the husband who saved his wife to be in the wrong, while she believes the husband who saved the ten women to be in the wrong. The altruists' standard is a universal one, so at least they're being consistent, while her standard of rational self-interest is one that is only universal in abstract, as the specifics of rational self-interest will vary from person to person. As such, her declaring what is in the rational self-interest of any husband who finds himself in that position is her imposing her own values on him in the same way that the altruists would.

One counter-argument I can see to my reasoning is that her hypothetical precludes the husband from valuing the ten women's lives over that of his wife, as he is passionately in love with her. I can't imagine a scenario where a man who values his wife's life over those of the ten women would "sacrifice" his wife, unless the "sacrifice" itself had more value than the life of his wife, which effectively leads back to my original point.

The other counter-argument to my reasoning that I can see is that any husband who values the ten women's lives or "the sacrifice" of his wife over the life of his wife is irrational. My answer to that is that it does not matter; you can think he's irrational etc. The fact remains that, given he's irrational, an irrational decision is not in conflict with his rational self-interest, which means his choice is a moral one by Objectivist standards.

 

[French Canadian]

I'm just going to say at the top of this post that, since you haven't yet responded to my previous post, @Caveat, this post technically constitutes a further response to the ideas and issues that you've brought up to this point.



Exactly. There's nothing contradictory about that, either. But, again, clear and careful language is needed to explain that what precisely was of value wasn't your interlocutor's view but the opportunity presented by your interlocutor to (a) work through an opposing viewpoint and (b) pit your own viewpoint against an opposing viewpoint.



First, it doesn't make sense in the context of Objectivism. But it's important to clarify what Rand means when she speaks of "selfishness" and of "sacrifice." From her essay "The Ethics of Emergencies" in The Virtue of Selfishness:

"'Sacrifice' is the surrender of a greater value for the sake of a lesser one [...] Thus, altruism gauges a man's virtue by the degree to which he surrenders, renounces, or betrays his values (since help to a stranger or an enemy is regarded as more virtuous, less 'selfish,' than help to those one loves). The rational principle of conduct is the exact opposite: always act in accordance with the hierarchy of your values, and never sacrifice a greater value to a lesser one [...] Love and friendship are profoundly personal, selfish values: love is an expression and assertion of self-esteem, a response to one's own values in the person of another. One gains a profoundly personal, selfish joy from the mere existence of the person one loves. It is one's own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns, and derives from love. A 'selfless,' 'disinterested' love is a contradiction in terms: it means that one is indifferent to that which one values.

Concern for the welfare of those one loves is a rational part of one’s selfish interests. If a man who is passionately in love with his wife spends a fortune to cure her of a dangerous illness, it would be absurd to claim that he does it as a 'sacrifice' for her sake, not his own, and that it makes no difference to him, personally and selfishly, whether she lives or dies. Any action that a man undertakes for the benefit of those he loves is not a sacrifice if, in the hierarchy of his values, in the total context of the choices open to him, it achieves that which is of greatest personal (and rational) importance to him. In the above example, his wife’s survival is of greater value to the husband than anything else that his money could buy, it is of greatest importance to his own happiness and, therefore, his action is not a sacrifice.

But suppose he let her die in order to spend his money on saving the lives of ten other women, none of whom meant anything to him—as the ethics of altruism would require. That would be a sacrifice. Here the difference between Objectivism and altruism can be seen most clearly: if sacrifice is the moral principle of action, then that husband should sacrifice his wife for the sake of ten other women. What distinguishes the wife from the ten others? Nothing but her value to the husband who has to make the choice - nothing but the fact that his happiness requires her survival.

The Objectivist ethics would tell him: your highest moral purpose is the achievement of your own happiness, your money is yours, use it to save your wife, that is your moral right and your rational, moral choice.

Consider the soul of the altruistic moralist who would be prepared to tell that husband the opposite. (And then ask yourself whether altruism is motivated by benevolence.)"

Now, with that established, you could then bring up something in the Iron Man/Captain America vein. Hence my selection of this particular essay of Rand's, which rejects ethical argumentation within the context of emergencies, or, in contemporary parlance, "states of exception," because they are precisely that: Exceptions to the rule, to normal states of (ethical) living.



The Objectivist response is simple, too: That's nonsense. The only way that would make any sense to an Objectivist would be if - to preserve my Iron Man/Captain America example - the rationale was something like what Iron Man decided: I want them (Gwyneth Paltrow and the Avengers crew, as well as humanity in general) to survive but the only way that that can happen is if I give my life to save theirs. That'd be valid insofar as it's evidence of a rational decision made on the basis of one's values in a state of emergency/exception.



Exactly. A is A: If Stoicism (A) says "Be happy as a slave" and if Spartacus (B) says "Don't be happy as a slave" then Spartacus (B) is logically impossibile per Stoicism (A).



The notion that he may have been "better off working on his happiness" as a slave rests on the assumption that happiness was possible to him as a slave. But that's the whole point: To Spartacus, freedom was at the top of his hierarchy of values. That means that happiness sans freedom was not possible to him - which means that he absolutely would not - could not - have been "better off working on his happiness" as a slave. Same thing with Bertram T. Cates in the dramatization of the Scopes "Monkey" Trial in Inherit the Wind. Same thing with William Wallace in Braveheart. Same thing with John Proctor in The Crucible. And, most relevantly, same thing with Howard Roark in The Fountainhead. That's why their plights are so powerful: Because they're exemplary individuals who lived principled lives and who refused to sacrifice their values because to have done so would've made happiness impossible - faced with imprisonment, torture, and death, they decided that nothing was worse than sacrificing their values.

So we're disqualified from using words with bad connotations?



Yes, of course. The rational is the good, the irrational is the bad. Connotations be damned: This is the truth. Why sugarcoat it at the expense of the rational/the good? To quote Rand from Atlas Shrugged:

"A moral code impossible to practice [...] [enjoins you to] dissolve all ideas in fog, to permit no firm definitions, to regard any concept as approximate and any rule of conduct as elastic, to hedge on any principle, to compromise on any value, to take the middle of any road [...] to reject the absolute of nature [...] A code that forbids you to cast the first stone [has the effect of forbidding you] to admit the identity of stones and to know when or if you're being stoned [...] There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong [...] In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit."

Yes, it is. You can dance around it all you like, but you can't avoid it.



I don't care if "irrationality is hastily used" to "discredit" people/things: I use "irrationality" to demonstrate on the basis of reasoned deliberation and clear argumentation that people/things are irrational and should be discredited to the extent that they're irrational, and should anyone disagree with my judgments, they're free to try to prove me wrong on the basis of their own reasoned deliberation and clear argumentation.



I already covered this with my Rational-noun versus rational-adjective distinction.



No, not the whole - the fundamental. Once again, your abhorrence of thinking in basics/fundamentals is tripping you up. Not everything that was ever put down on paper by Kant was irrational; however, the core of his philosophy is fundamentally irrational. Those are two different statements.



Re-read my post. That "answer" doesn't answer anything. Rearrange the points in whatever order you want - and you clearly moved the goalpost in this post, ending with the "Why should one be virtuous?" question when the bedrock question is clearly "Why should one want to achieve the highest good?" - eventually the "Why?" question will persist to where, to go back to Wittgenstein and the Philosophical Investigations, you reach "bedrock," at which point your explanations have come to an end, your "spade is turned," and all that is left for you to say is: "This is simply what I do."

My point - and the point of the Objectivist ethics - is that: That's okay. There's no way to philosophically "solve" life so that every single human being on the face of the Earth will "flip" their rational "switch" and automatically start living rational lives - but the point is that there doesn't need to be. All you're tasked with doing is bringing people to the water. Whether or not they drink is on them. To end with a final quote of Rand's from Atlas Shrugged:

"We do not tell – we show. We do not claim – we prove. It is not your obedience that we seek to win, but your rational conviction. You have seen all the elements of our secret. The conclusion is now yours to draw – we can help you to name it, but not to accept it – the sight, the knowledge, and the acceptance must be yours."

I have a hard time thinking anyone would save the 10 other persons while valuing that less then saving his wife. Maybe he values the persons less, but he values self sacrifice in itself, he values saving anyone's life, he values the social "glory" he will get from doing that, etc. All things finally go back to him, to satisfying his ego. But he "tuned" himself to getting his ego satisfied by performing actions that take into account more than his or his family's survival.

Also, it seems to me like you didn't address my solution to your Spartacus thing. Go read the theater analogy, about Stoic determinism and the lazy argument and you might find your answer.

"But that's the whole point: To Spartacus, freedom was at the top of his hierarchy of values."
The whole point of Stoics would be that he misunderstood what true freedom was. Stoics can completely understand that people are mistaken. People are free when they only place their happiness in what they control and slave when they place their happiness in things they don't. If you place your happiness in being famous, you are a slave fo the public's opinion. The hierarchy of value Spartacus subscribed to was wrong. However, that doesn't mean a Stoic could never be Spartacus. A Stoic could be Spartacus according to the theater analogy : he would just have to still place his happiness in virtues and not in the success of his enterprise (which is outside of his control). He would have to be courageous, not be affected when his companions die, not care when his plans go wrong, but only be happy that he is acting virtuously.

The final question would not be why would you want to reach the final good. There is an answer to that. Because in and of itself it that which makes life worthy and nothing added to it or subtracted from it adds anything to that. If you asked why should life be fully worthy of living ? While some would maybe say that the answer is philosophically unsound (let us remember that Aristotle is very common sense, always tries to find middle grounds) he would probably say : go watch a tragedy and tell me if that is what you want for yourself.
Btw I'm not trying to refute you or anything, just trying to get a conversation going.

Our discussion about ir/rationality is going in circles.

 

[JonesBones]

This Hegel video. interesting. Decartes said he thinks therefore he is. Nobody else is needed but the thinking individual. But Hegel and others say self is created through relationship. Which i agree with. The great american philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce said that every thought must be interpreted in another. What does this mean? Thought was created to be communicated. To be interpreted by another. It is built on exterior relations.




“Relationship is understanding. It is a process of self-revelation. Relationship is the mirror in which you discover yourself -- to be is to be related.”

― Bruce Lee, Tao of Jeet Kune Do

 

[JonesBones]

one of my favorite Peirce quotes that sums up life: Effort supposes resistance.

The world is resisting me. If it didn't resist, I would not have to put in any effort. Like boy king or golden child. Carried everywhere. No effort. No resistance. I want power. I want to be rich. I want to be free. Most of the world is resisting me on that.


“If this life is not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight.”

― William James

 

[JonesBones]

and the pragmatic maxim i think is good for understanding. Peirce was smart as fuck. I didn't understand this the first time I heard it.

Pragmatism. The opinion that metaphysics is to be largely cleared up by the application of the following maxim for attaining clearness of apprehension: Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.​

 

[Aegon Spengler]

This seems relevant at this point:

 

[French Canadian]

This Hegel video. interesting. Decartes said he thinks therefore he is. Nobody else is needed but the thinking individual. But Hegel and others say self is created through relationship. Which i agree with. The great american philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce said that every thought must be interpreted in another. What does this mean? Thought was created to be communicated. To be interpreted by another. It is built on exterior relations.




“Relationship is understanding. It is a process of self-revelation. Relationship is the mirror in which you discover yourself -- to be is to be related.”

― Bruce Lee, Tao of Jeet Kune Do

Descartes did not invent that. It was already said by Augustine : De civitate dei : si fallor, sum.
Also the Avicennean argument of the flying man.

 

[French Canadian]

I'm just going to say at the top of this post that, since you haven't yet responded to my previous post, @Caveat, this post technically constitutes a further response to the ideas and issues that you've brought up to this point.



Exactly. There's nothing contradictory about that, either. But, again, clear and careful language is needed to explain that what precisely was of value wasn't your interlocutor's view but the opportunity presented by your interlocutor to (a) work through an opposing viewpoint and (b) pit your own viewpoint against an opposing viewpoint.



First, it doesn't make sense in the context of Objectivism. But it's important to clarify what Rand means when she speaks of "selfishness" and of "sacrifice." From her essay "The Ethics of Emergencies" in The Virtue of Selfishness:

"'Sacrifice' is the surrender of a greater value for the sake of a lesser one [...] Thus, altruism gauges a man's virtue by the degree to which he surrenders, renounces, or betrays his values (since help to a stranger or an enemy is regarded as more virtuous, less 'selfish,' than help to those one loves). The rational principle of conduct is the exact opposite: always act in accordance with the hierarchy of your values, and never sacrifice a greater value to a lesser one [...] Love and friendship are profoundly personal, selfish values: love is an expression and assertion of self-esteem, a response to one's own values in the person of another. One gains a profoundly personal, selfish joy from the mere existence of the person one loves. It is one's own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns, and derives from love. A 'selfless,' 'disinterested' love is a contradiction in terms: it means that one is indifferent to that which one values.

Concern for the welfare of those one loves is a rational part of one’s selfish interests. If a man who is passionately in love with his wife spends a fortune to cure her of a dangerous illness, it would be absurd to claim that he does it as a 'sacrifice' for her sake, not his own, and that it makes no difference to him, personally and selfishly, whether she lives or dies. Any action that a man undertakes for the benefit of those he loves is not a sacrifice if, in the hierarchy of his values, in the total context of the choices open to him, it achieves that which is of greatest personal (and rational) importance to him. In the above example, his wife’s survival is of greater value to the husband than anything else that his money could buy, it is of greatest importance to his own happiness and, therefore, his action is not a sacrifice.

But suppose he let her die in order to spend his money on saving the lives of ten other women, none of whom meant anything to him—as the ethics of altruism would require. That would be a sacrifice. Here the difference between Objectivism and altruism can be seen most clearly: if sacrifice is the moral principle of action, then that husband should sacrifice his wife for the sake of ten other women. What distinguishes the wife from the ten others? Nothing but her value to the husband who has to make the choice - nothing but the fact that his happiness requires her survival.

The Objectivist ethics would tell him: your highest moral purpose is the achievement of your own happiness, your money is yours, use it to save your wife, that is your moral right and your rational, moral choice.

Consider the soul of the altruistic moralist who would be prepared to tell that husband the opposite. (And then ask yourself whether altruism is motivated by benevolence.)"

Now, with that established, you could then bring up something in the Iron Man/Captain America vein. Hence my selection of this particular essay of Rand's, which rejects ethical argumentation within the context of emergencies, or, in contemporary parlance, "states of exception," because they are precisely that: Exceptions to the rule, to normal states of (ethical) living.



The Objectivist response is simple, too: That's nonsense. The only way that would make any sense to an Objectivist would be if - to preserve my Iron Man/Captain America example - the rationale was something like what Iron Man decided: I want them (Gwyneth Paltrow and the Avengers crew, as well as humanity in general) to survive but the only way that that can happen is if I give my life to save theirs. That'd be valid insofar as it's evidence of a rational decision made on the basis of one's values in a state of emergency/exception.



Exactly. A is A: If Stoicism (A) says "Be happy as a slave" and if Spartacus (B) says "Don't be happy as a slave" then Spartacus (B) is logically impossibile per Stoicism (A).



The notion that he may have been "better off working on his happiness" as a slave rests on the assumption that happiness was possible to him as a slave. But that's the whole point: To Spartacus, freedom was at the top of his hierarchy of values. That means that happiness sans freedom was not possible to him - which means that he absolutely would not - could not - have been "better off working on his happiness" as a slave. Same thing with Bertram T. Cates in the dramatization of the Scopes "Monkey" Trial in Inherit the Wind. Same thing with William Wallace in Braveheart. Same thing with John Proctor in The Crucible. And, most relevantly, same thing with Howard Roark in The Fountainhead. That's why their plights are so powerful: Because they're exemplary individuals who lived principled lives and who refused to sacrifice their values because to have done so would've made happiness impossible - faced with imprisonment, torture, and death, they decided that nothing was worse than sacrificing their values.

So we're disqualified from using words with bad connotations?



Yes, of course. The rational is the good, the irrational is the bad. Connotations be damned: This is the truth. Why sugarcoat it at the expense of the rational/the good? To quote Rand from Atlas Shrugged:

"A moral code impossible to practice [...] [enjoins you to] dissolve all ideas in fog, to permit no firm definitions, to regard any concept as approximate and any rule of conduct as elastic, to hedge on any principle, to compromise on any value, to take the middle of any road [...] to reject the absolute of nature [...] A code that forbids you to cast the first stone [has the effect of forbidding you] to admit the identity of stones and to know when or if you're being stoned [...] There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong [...] In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit."

Yes, it is. You can dance around it all you like, but you can't avoid it.



I don't care if "irrationality is hastily used" to "discredit" people/things: I use "irrationality" to demonstrate on the basis of reasoned deliberation and clear argumentation that people/things are irrational and should be discredited to the extent that they're irrational, and should anyone disagree with my judgments, they're free to try to prove me wrong on the basis of their own reasoned deliberation and clear argumentation.



I already covered this with my Rational-noun versus rational-adjective distinction.



No, not the whole - the fundamental. Once again, your abhorrence of thinking in basics/fundamentals is tripping you up. Not everything that was ever put down on paper by Kant was irrational; however, the core of his philosophy is fundamentally irrational. Those are two different statements.



Re-read my post. That "answer" doesn't answer anything. Rearrange the points in whatever order you want - and you clearly moved the goalpost in this post, ending with the "Why should one be virtuous?" question when the bedrock question is clearly "Why should one want to achieve the highest good?" - eventually the "Why?" question will persist to where, to go back to Wittgenstein and the Philosophical Investigations, you reach "bedrock," at which point your explanations have come to an end, your "spade is turned," and all that is left for you to say is: "This is simply what I do."

My point - and the point of the Objectivist ethics - is that: That's okay. There's no way to philosophically "solve" life so that every single human being on the face of the Earth will "flip" their rational "switch" and automatically start living rational lives - but the point is that there doesn't need to be. All you're tasked with doing is bringing people to the water. Whether or not they drink is on them. To end with a final quote of Rand's from Atlas Shrugged:

"We do not tell – we show. We do not claim – we prove. It is not your obedience that we seek to win, but your rational conviction. You have seen all the elements of our secret. The conclusion is now yours to draw – we can help you to name it, but not to accept it – the sight, the knowledge, and the acceptance must be yours."

Also, about your love DesCartes. I'd love to know how he escaped the sceptic loophole without God. And how he is not a Stoic in terms of ethics (see his third rule and his extensive cicero quote throughout his discourse, or do you not know his quotes without quotation marks ?)

 

[French Canadian]

If anyone is still interested in philosophy, I would like to displace this conversation on free will.

How would you define it and how does it or does it not exist ?

 

[Tycho- Taylor's Version]

If anyone is still interested in philosophy, I would like to displace this conversation on free will.

How would you define it and how does it or does it not exist ?

I've been a compatibilist for some time, basically the result of realizing that indeterminacy in the universe doesn't actually do anything for free will. Free will in fact relies on the deterministic consequences of "willing," whatever that actually consists of.

Free will to me is the ability to behave in accordance with ones values and intentions.

I read this exchange recently which caused me to doubt a few things, but can't remember what atm.

 

[VuvuzelaBzz]

I've been a compatibilist for some time, basically the result of realizing that indeterminacy in the universe doesn't actually do anything for free will. Free will in fact relies on the deterministic consequences of "willing," whatever that actually consists of.

Free will to me is the ability to behave in accordance with ones values and intentions.

I read this exchange recently which caused me to doubt a few things, but can't remember what atm.

Do you believe your definition of free will lines-up with most people's, or do you believe it to be the most useful definition of it? The impression of the compatibalist position I've gotten when I've encountered it is that you tend to operate on a definition of free will that you acknowledge isn't the lay one, but which you believe accounts for the benefits people get from it.

Just for the record, my definition of free will is that we have agency when we make a choice and that, if time were to somehow turn back and one found themselves in the exact same circumstances, they would have the option of making a choice different than their initial one.

Personally, I'm not a big fan of changing definitions if I don't feel it's necessary to. I'd say I believe that we live in a deterministic universe, though there's a lot about existence that doesn't make much sense to me, but that there's no way to act out such a belief. One can hold it and base decisions off of it, but even a statement along the lines of "What's going to happen is going to happen, so I won't do anything." has the presumption of agency in it's phrasing, as does my sentence. Cognitive dissonance is essentially unavoidable if one is a determinist who believes we have no free will / agency, and I can see why that would lead some(compatibalists) to change their definition of free will, but personally I would rather accept the cognitive dissonance.

Basing all of one's actions on the axiom that we live in a deterministic universe and that we have no free will is something that I would assume to be unhealthy for most people, as I think there's a symbiotic relationship between the perception of agency and consciousness, though I haven't come up with an eloquent way of articulating that idea. I think there's certain contexts in which putting on a deterministic lens and assuming people have no agency can be useful, such as when determining what the goal of the criminal justice system should be, but generally I don't find it to be a particularly useful way of viewing the world for most people, just a conclusion some will come to when thinking about the universe.

Tl;dr: I don't believe we have free will and I don't think it matters all that much unless we make that the primary lens through which we view the world and one of the primary factors we base our decisions on.

 

[Tycho- Taylor's Version]

Do you believe your definition of free will lines-up with most people's, or do you believe it to be the most useful definition of it? The impression of the compatibalist position I've gotten when I've encountered it is that you tend to operate on a definition of free will that you acknowledge isn't the lay one, but which you believe accounts for the benefits people get from it.

Just for the record, my definition of free will is that we have agency when we make a choice and that, if time were to somehow turn back and one found themselves in the exact same circumstances, they would have the option of making a choice different than their initial one.

Personally, I'm not a big fan of changing definitions if I don't feel it's necessary to. I'd say I believe that we live in a deterministic universe, though there's a lot about existence that doesn't make much sense to me, but that there's no way to act out such a belief. One can hold it and base decisions off of it, but even a statement along the lines of "What's going to happen is going to happen, so I won't do anything." has the presumption of agency in it's phrasing, as does my sentence. Cognitive dissonance is essentially unavoidable if one is a determinist who believes we have no free will / agency, and I can see why that would lead some(compatibalists) to change their definition of free will, but personally I would rather accept the cognitive dissonance.

Basing all of one's actions on the axiom that we live in a deterministic universe and that we have no free will is something that I would assume to be unhealthy for most people, as I think there's a symbiotic relationship between the perception of agency and consciousness, though I haven't come up with an eloquent way of articulating that idea. I think there's certain contexts in which putting on a deterministic lens and assuming people have no agency can be useful, such as when determining what the goal of the criminal justice system should be, but generally I don't find it to be a particularly useful way of viewing the world for most people, just a conclusion some will come to when thinking about the universe.

Tl;dr: I don't believe we have free will and I don't think it matters all that much unless we make that the primary lens through which we view the world and one of the primary factors we base our decisions on.

Honestly I agree with you about the laymen terminology probably 90% of the time, I only work with countervailing definitions when the ordinary language proves to be incoherent, which I think it does in this case.

Your "agency" for example, sounds vaguely mystical to me. I absolutely experience agency, but from the outside I recognize that my sense of agency has preconditions - many of course, maybe too many to recognize - and that the concept of freedom makes more sense as the ability to act properly on those preconditions rather than with complete independence from them. So even if I did make the same decision in every replay of a past event, that decision was made no less freely just because it would always be the same (or, going further, because it must always be the same).

Imagine you're in line at a buffett, and your favourite food is chocolate cake, and the venue is known for making excellent chocolate cake, and you have an intense craving for just that chocolate cake. It would be strange to say, imo, that you lack some important kind of freedom because you choose chocolate cake every time that scenario is run. In fact it seems more appropriate to say you exercised your freedom to an enviable extent.

You could definitely say that kind of freedom is not the same thing as the metaphysical freedom people want to have, but in situations where you're maximally able to exercise the compatibilist's freedom, I don't see what the extra stuff gets you besides conceptual confusion lol.

 

[VuvuzelaBzz]

Honestly I agree with you about the laymen terminology probably 90% of the time, I only work with countervailing definitions when the ordinary language proves to be incoherent, which I think it does in this case.

Your "agency" for example, sounds vaguely mystical to me. I absolutely experience agency, but from the outside I recognize that my sense of agency has preconditions - many of course, maybe too many to recognize - and that the concept of freedom makes more sense as the ability to act properly on those preconditions rather than with complete independence from them. So even if I did make the same decision in every replay of a past event, that decision was made no less freely just because it would always be the same (or, going further, because it must always be the same).

Imagine you're in line at a buffett, and your favourite food is chocolate cake, and the venue is known for making excellent chocolate cake, and you have an intense craving for just that chocolate cake. It would be strange to say, imo, that you lack some important kind of freedom because you choose chocolate cake every time that scenario is run. In fact it seems more appropriate to say you exercised your freedom to an enviable extent.

You could definitely say that kind of freedom is not the same thing as the metaphysical freedom people want to have, but in situations where you're maximally able to exercise the compatibilist's freedom, I don't see what the extra stuff gets you besides conceptual confusion lol.

The bolded is why I find it unnecessary to redefine free will. Considering humans almost universally experience it, and generally refer to it as such, I think it's worth discussing whether it, as such, exists. Assuming those discussing it are determinists, your argument makes sense, as most(if not all) will acknowledge that the layman's conception of free will does not exist, but personally instead of redefining it, I would just emphasize your point that we can still exercise "freedom" to a satisfactory degree. At that point it's somewhat semantic whether you redefine it or not, but I think it's less confusing for most people if you don't, and you'll definitely get less push-back from sticklers like myself.

 

[Tycho- Taylor's Version]

The bolded is why I find it unnecessary to redefine free will. Considering humans almost universally experience it, and generally refer to it as such, I think it's worth discussing whether it, as such, exists. Assuming those discussing it are determinists, your argument makes sense, as most(if not all) will acknowledge that the layman's conception of free will does not exist, but personally instead of redefining it, I would just emphasize your point that we can still exercise "freedom" to a satisfactory degree. At that point it's somewhat semantic whether you redefine it or not, but I think it's less confusing for most people if you don't, and you'll definitely get less push-back from sticklers like myself.

I'd like to agree with you, but what people experience as agency very likely isn't the agency they think it is. I use the redefinition because I'm usually talking about something different from most people's intuition - what philosophers call libertarian free will.

That said, I use the same word because I still want to retain some of the connotation. The moral importance, for example, is still a thing.

 

[VuvuzelaBzz]

I'd like to agree with you, but what people experience as agency very likely isn't the agency they think it is. I use the redefinition because I'm usually talking about something different from most people's intuition - what philosophers call libertarian free will.

That said, I use the same word because I still want to retain some of the connotation. The moral importance, for example, is still a thing.

I don't disagree with you that what people experience as agency isn't what they think it is, but seeing as that's what most perceive free will as being, using a different definition of free will and saying they have it will lead most to think you believe they have that mystical type of agency. I understand the motivation behind using the same term to retain some of the connotation, but it doesn't sit right with me; it feels like I'd be playing a word-game meant to trick myself or others, when I find the argument that we have as much "freedom" as we could want or need stands on it's own without the redefinition. Perhaps it helps some combat a sense of nihilistic depression that stems from their deterministic beliefs, but I can't relate

Re: Libertarian Free Will - I'm not sure whether your interpretation of it is wrong, the definition I found on Google is wrong, or I'm misinterpreting something, but my impression of it is that it's closer to the definition of free will I gave than what you seem to be describing:

According to the Pocket Dictionary of Apologetics & Philosophy of Religion (InterVarsity Press, 2002), libertarian free will is defined as “in ethics and metaphysics, the view that human beings sometimes can will more than one possibility. According to this view, a person who freely made a particular choice could have chosen differently, even if nothing about the past prior to the moment of choice had been different.”

EDIT: Reading back I suppose you meant philosophers refer to most people's intuition as libertarian free will. In my defense the phrasing was somewhat ambiguous!