Which is fine, so far as my argument goes. My point isn’t why she didn’t have the skill to break into the realm of academic philosophy, but why it doesn’t really say much about her broad ideas. Those ideas might be fairly intriguing, if fleshed out and mended by someone of greater skill. And they might simply be lame. Ultimately, what is or isn’t good is what works in the real world, based on actual studies of cause and effect. Being able to turn everything into mathematical/logic equations that properly equalize on both sides is impressive, and may have gotten her more notice in the world of Philosophy, but that doesn’t tell you much about how well a society would perform if Objectivism was taught to school kids and you modeled the government and economy on its tenets. Setting up a government on its tenets would simply be easier if it was more internally consistent and rigorously defined.
What is it that you contend ethical systems do begin with?
For instance, the opening to Kant’s principal work on ethics, The Foundation of the Metaphysics of Morals, goes (famously): There is nothing that can be conceived in the world, or even beyond it, that can be called good without qualification save only a good will.
Now this is a sentence that, to my mind, has no technical infirmity that would prevent it from being able to take on a truth value. It is false if and only if there is something that exists in our imagination, the world, or beyond it that can be called good without qualification and which is not a good will. Otherwise the sentence is true.
This is not to say the determination would be easy. Or even that I have any idea how one would go about making the determination. But not being able to operationalize the determination of a sentence’s truth value is, provisionally, not the same thing as saying the sentence cannot have a truth value.
Value judgments. “Oughts” as distinct from “ises.”
The technical infirmity is that its truth value is not false but meaningless. Not that the sentence itself is meaningless.
Until the last century, the depiction of the ideal is what most artists - in all the arts - have done.
That, of course, depends on your definition of “perfection.” And even in the context of Objectivism, there’s a subtle difference between “ideal” and “perfect.” Dominique Francon in *The Fountainhead *and Hank Rearden in *Atlas Strugged *were both morally ideal, even when they had flaws in their thinking. But they were both willing and able to correct that thinking. Rand never confused moral perfection with infallibility, neither in real life nor in fiction.
You don’t know anything about philosophy.
S/he wasn’t discussing philosophy per se. S/he was discussing the necessity for ideas to be rigourously defined philosophically before they could be applied to the real world.
That may well be a more intelligent, certainly more pragmatic, and probably more useful discussion than one on some arcane piece of philosophy.
I meant, in general.
“Meaningless” is not a truth value. Is it your contention that the FMM opens with nonsense?
Sounds like sour fucking grapes to me. I mean, come off it… this thread asks what is AR’s status in contemporary philosophy. Objectivists bitch and moan that AR is being kept out of the academy because of some kind of liberal professorial conspiracy.
But then, after a thread like this, which happens with fair regularity, and with the same recurring result, without fail it will be asserted “Well, we don’t care anyhow… philosophy is dumb.”
That wasn’t what I meant at all.
You can’t compare sub-standard pseudo philosophy and philosophy on the same terms.
But that doesn’t mean that any attempt to use some system in the real world must fail because it is not rigorous philosophy.
Of course, if I’d been aware of the history of such threads here I might not have bothered to comment.
Ayn Rand became popular in the early 1960s among many first generation college students. These lacked a personal memory of the Great Depression, and of the New Deal’s generally successful efforts to help victims of the Depression (like the parents of many of these students). These college students were consumed by a desire for upward social mobility. They thought of the government as a barrier to this. They desired lower taxes for themselves, and fewer government regulations to interfere with money making.
Ayn Rand told them that what they were trying to do was the right thing.
If it had not been for the War in Vietnam, the student right may have been more dominant during that decade than the student left. Nevertheless, after the entry of American combat troops to South Vietnam, anti-communism could no longer be used as a stick to beat the New Deal, the Democrat Party, and the government with. It implied the obligation to enlist, and risk one’s life on behalf of “freedom.”
Ayn Rand was not nimble enough to combine her praise of selfishness with a reason to avoid combat duty in Vietnam. The New Left did present a moral reason for doing what most male college students wanted to do anyway, which was to avoid combat duty. The New Left also implied the license to indulge in casual sex and illegal drugs.
The student right could not compete with this. Consequently, Ayn Rand’s support dwindled among college students as the decade of the sixties progressed.
Ayn Rand continues to have an appeal to some young people, but her appeal seems limited to the United States.
Ran across this amusing article today.
No, I am saying that all ethical arguments go back ultimately to the premise “X is good,” which has no truth value in a factual sense. That does not mean the statement “X is good” is meaningless, nor that it is unimportant, but only that it cannot be true or false in the sense that “2 + 2 = 4” or “John Smith is six feet tall” can be true or false. The basic flaw in Rand’s system is it ignores, or obfuscates, or denies that distinction; it purports to arrive at ethical values that have a “2 + 2 = 4” – or, better still, “A = A” :rolleyes: – kind of validity.
You state that as if it’s a settled matter, a fact generally known which should be accepted without controversy. It’s an argument you have to make (and which may be worth its own thread). Anyway, if I believe that a eudaimonstic egoism describes the true state of affairs vis-à-vis correct human behavior, and it turns out that my arguments rely on some set of axioms which cannot be justified, then surely I am in a real sense wrong.
On the contrary, I would argue if no statement of the form “X should do Y” can ever be true or false, then it becomes incoherent in principle to condemn any action except as “I don’t like that”. If that is not an accusation of importance, I don’t know what is.
I am fairly certain that that is exactly what it is among philosophers, including philosophers who espouse definite and non-relativist ethical systems. Perhaps some Doper more current in contemporary philosophy can correct me on that point.
I didn’t claim to. I’d be fairly certain, though, that according to nearly every philosopher that genocide is bad. What if all of the governments of the world went on a widescale mission to kill everyone with an IQ below 100 and the result of that was that, even correcting for average compound/exponential growth, there was a clear hockeystick result after that of increased technological growth, economic growth, general health, a move towards cleaner technology, a worldwide decrease in warfare, etc. and the new angle of human development continued on even after 5-10 generations – so more people are positively affected (i.e. saved) than were killed?
Ultimately, philosophy is a tool for mankind to figure out the best way to go about living. But, the only way to know which philosophical ideas work is to test them in the real world. Even knowing nothing about philosophy, I still know that there’s no chance that we’ll ever set up a test case to see whether eugenics, racial genocide, etc. will work. Philosophers don’t run the world. They can advance ideas, but what gets tested is up to the rest of everyone. Their ideas are just ideas until someone actually attempts to implement them.
Or, to condense that all down into bullet points:
- Philosophy either does, or does not, exist to come up with ideas for how to make the world becomes a better place.
- If it does not exist for that purpose, then no useful goal is being served by philosophy.
- If it does exist for that purpose, philosophers are extremely limited in their ability to test their ideas on society as a whole. And yet, that is the only way to verify whether an idea would make the world a better place.
You’d still end up with 50% of people being below average* intelligence.
- Median.
No, it isn’t. Because “true vs. false” and “good vs. bad” are entirely different and unrelated concepts.