She never said reason is better than emotion. She said emotions aren’t tools of cognition, that our thinking should be based on reason, not feelings. But she and her characters did have very strong emotions; they just didn’t depend on them for their thinking.
Air, water, food, shelter, productive work, self-esteem and sex are a few objective values. They are neither subjective nor arbitrary.
Nope. They only have value within the context of a value system that values what they make possible.
A system that values not starving to death is pretty much universal.
Rand spins in circles here. Life is the standard of value, but values presume an answer to “value to whom and for what”. For whom do we attempt to create morality systems? Living human beings. Life, air, water, and food are therefore a precondition of values. They cannot both be a precondition and a standard. If “life” is the standard, then people can live long lives while doing no productive work, having poor self-esteem, and having no sex. So when pressed, Rand often resorts to “life proper to man” at which point it becomes clear that she hasn’t addressed the is-ought dichotomy at all.
I disagree. But I can easily change the last sentence to this, which is even more damning:
(not an actual quote)
When what someone (say, Ayn Rand, for example) says is semantically equivalent to “Yawning orange microwaves masturbate fleetingly,” there’s really nothing one can say in response to it except to point out that it’s incoherent babbling nonsense.
It’s not damning at all; it’s an indicator that I’m a member of the reality-based community.
I agree. And all of your ranting amounts to incoherent babbling nonsense.
Do people want to create value, or do they want to be seen to be creating value? They’re not the same thing. If I invent some miraculous alloy should I just be content with my creation, or do I take my ball and go home if the world doesn’t suitably reward me for my creation? And the rewards needn’t be money; they could be fame, or admiration, or influence, or outright power in determining how my creation is used. Whatever the reward, it’s just another variation on people acting in their own interest.
And there’s nothing particularly wrong with that, just don’t dress it up as some grand philosophy of noble benefactors being dragged down by the greedy, grasping rabble who don’t recognize their greatness.
I don’t think she does. Her philosophy is pretty straightforward. We all need water and food. But not one has the right to take water and food or anything else produced by the labor of another simply because you “need” it.
To envision Rand’s world, you need to envision an economy a bit different from our own. I would imagine there would be a lot less lawyers, finance people, lobbyists, consultants, politicians, bureaucrats, marketers, middle mangers and other relatively highly paid people who don’t really “produce” anything. Corporate legal structures might be very different as well, with CEOs and executives having more direct liability. But I also imagine things might be very hard for a lot of people who can’t be “productive” for one reason or another.
I don’t think anyone is dragging down anyone else’s value. I don’t believe it is a competition to see who is the most value. I think it is important for us to find something we are valuable at to some degree to some persons.
Her claims to have derived her philosophy objectively are anything but straight forward. She claims to have solved the is-ought gap by basing her ethics on the nature of man, and that life is the standard of those ethics. Since life has certain objective requirements, objective values can be derived from that. She also says that life is a precondition of value, that without life there is no point of seeking or considering values. This is circular. “Follow my moral code for life” and “You can’t follow any moral code without first having life.”
Since it’s clear that we don’t need philosophy to understand the immediate need for food and water, the question soon arises “what kind of life is this moral code for?” A long life? If hers is an “objective morality”, shouldn’t people live longer if they follow her moral code? They clearly do not, and this is why at some point in her argumentation she starts referring to “life proper to man” or “man qua man”. It becomes clear at this point that her moral code is for a certain kind of man. Not the objective nature of man at all, but an idealised conception of man. That is to say, subjective.
I’m not saying that you can’t find interesting justifications in there. I like that she argues in favour of honesty and integrity and the like. Her attempts to claim that her philosophy is derived from reality are false, but are also what engenders such devoted followers to her ideas (perhaps ironically, she is great at appealing to the emotions of people who are predisposed to agree with her.) So I’m not arguing about whether stealing is right or wrong. Maybe those high level justifications are straight forward. They aren’t what made her popular though.
If it was clear that it was a fictitious moral code for fictitious people, then that’s fine. She claims that her’s is a philosophy for the real world. While I have sympathy with the notion that we shouldn’t base real life ethics off extreme life raft/trolley problem examples, she does not provide a practical alternative.
For reference, I took the liberty of Googling the entry on “life” from a Rand website.
I guess the way I interpret it is that “life” in and of itself is the prerequisite for “value”, since only living things can create goals and objectives with which to ascribe value to something. There is no “value” without “life”.
Another quote I found:
“Man’s life, as required by his nature, is not the life of a mindless brute, of a looting thug or a mooching mystic, but the life of a thinking being—not life by means of force or fraud, but life by means of achievement—not survival at any price, since there’s only one price that pays for man’s survival: reason.”
IOW, the “standard” she seems to set is that man should be free to pursue life as he sees fit, so long as he doesn’t infringe on other’s pursuit of theirs.
“Reason” and “not mooching off others” are constant themes.
But, yeah. I don’t really see how she solved the “is-ought problem”. To you point, she just sort of created this morality out of thin air and built her philosophy around it. There are no gray areas in Atlas Shrugged. People are only “producers” or “moochers/looters”.
That’s correct, but her claims are that she derives everything both from reality and systematically, so if you agree with her metaphysics it can only make sense that you’re a laissez faire capitalist. The reality is though, once you get past the emotive prose, the misrepresentation of other ideas, and the invented definitions for common words, it’s really just a mish mash of borrowed ideas, sometimes loosely connected, sometimes not connected at all.
She even admitted as such. Her whole philosophy is motivated to justify the Randian hero. Then she says in effect that it’s ok that she based her whole philosophy off an idea rather than from observation, a method that would be in conflict with her philosophy, because she’s smarter than everyone else:
“It may be considered strange, and denying my own supremacy of reason, that I start with a set of ideas, then want to study in order to support them, and not vice versa, i.e., not study and derive my ideas from that. But these ideas, to a great extent, are the result of a subconscious instinct, which is a form of unrealized reason. All instincts are reason, essentially, or reason is instincts made conscious. The “unreasonable” instincts are diseased ones.”
“Some day I’ll find out whether I’m an unusual specimen of humanity in that my instincts and reason are so inseparably one, with the reason ruling the instincts. Am I unusual or merely normal and healthy? Am I trying to impose my own peculiarities as a philosophical system? Am I unusually intelligent or merely unusually honest? I think this last. Unless—honesty is also a form of superior intelligence.”
From: The Journals of Ayn Rand - Ayn Rand, Leonard Peikoff - Google Books
Here’s the problem. Every business jerk who reads Atlas Shrugged imagines themselves to be Hank Reardon, Dagny Taggart or even John Galt himself. No one believes themselves to be James Taggart or Wesley Mouche. That is to say, an inept mid-level functionary contributing to a corrupt and broken system.
Worse I think is that every business jerk feels justified in downplaying the role that social services like law, defence, health care, education, and so forth play in creating an environment that is conducive to successful business. Suddenly every brilliant surgeon, patient teacher, dedicated judge, overworked nurse, is a “second hander” only living thanks to the value created by businessmen. Headline aside, I think this article is a good philosophical approach to that argument: The simplistic flaw in Ayn Rand's philosophy | Cascade PBS News
I think you’re right though, in as much as she misrepresented business as a world where competition is a chivalrous battle of ideas. Of course she would blame the government on any perceived faults in todays world, but the notion that a fictional world with pesky roadblocks removed from business would be rational and just is exactly the kind of “magical thinking” that she decried.
She would provide examples of the harm that a certain regulation did, and any counter examples aren’t worthy of discussion because you’re not thinking “in principle.” In her mind, she had proven that regulation was immoral in principle, and that her principle was derived from reality. In effect she demanded that you attempt to disprove her ideas that she derived from reality by making no reference to reality yourself. Just one of the many rhetorical devices she would use to discourage criticism. This quote from the above article illustrates well her approach to any discussion:
“I see that Rand does not tolerate the philosopher’s patient tarrying with differing points of view but moves in quickly for the rhetorical kill. She seems to be moved by a passion — the libido dominandi, the desire for control — far more than by the gentle art of thinking.”
This is hardly unique to followers of Rand. A whole lot of Christians - even convicted murderers - read the bible and ask themselves “What would Jesus do?” I’ve never heard anyone ask “What would Pontius Pilate do?” People tend to identify with their chosen heroes, regardless of their own sinfulness. That’s what makes storytelling such a powerful art. It concretizes philosophical principles and actually shows us what kind of lives our heroes lived, to enable us to emulate them. Do you think it’s an accident that there are so many saints… and stories about them?
Would she admit that her philosophy is as fundamentally flawed as Christianity? Probably not. She’d blame the practitioners for their personal failings.
But Rand has the built-in explicit “Selfishness is exalted” and “Altruism is reviled”. This gives righteous justification to Randians to be cold heartless jerks who build themselves up at the expense of others.
She explicitly stated - on numerous occasions - that one person’s success should never be achieved at the expense of others. Hell, she wrote entire books on the subject. If people choose to ignore her definitions of “selfishness” and “altruism” in order to be jerks, it’s not her fault.