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Eva,

Somehow I think there's hope for you.

God, saying that brought back a memory of a friend I used to have in Brazil.

I wrote about him a few years ago here:

There are some ethics that are completely objective. One is productive work. The other is using reason to judge reality for dealing with it. But here's the catch. Traditional ethics have always been decreed by a higher power, like the Ten Commandments. There is always an "if" (desired result) involved in all ethics. In religious ethics, that "if" is always is pleasing the higher power. (Thou shalt not kill "if you want to please God," and so on.)

With Objectivist ethics, the "if" always goes back to some reality-based value, then essentially back to the fact that reason is man's main tool of survival. Rand goes overboard and says that reason is man's ONLY means of survival, but the history of cavemen and primitive cultures shows that they managed to survive for centuries almost on the level of perceptual animals. However, reason is our means of knowledge. Here is one example of how this plays out in the social realm.

If you want to judge whether Person A murdered Person B, you need knowledge. Reason is man's means to acquire knowledge. Thus it is ethical to use reason to determine whether Person A murdered Person B. It is unethical to condemn Person A for murder because "God told the accuser" or that the accuser simply felt that the guilty man did it or the accuser had a vision or something like that. A formal movement during an age where this subjective standard was considered ethical, The Inquisition, is now considered, even by Christians, to have been an evil time of abuse of power where innocent people were tortured and killed. Today's suicide bombers are the perfect example of what happens when ethical standards are chosen on subjective, and not objective, criteria. I could do the whole conceptual chain, but that would take too long. Here we see that justice has to include the component of reason in order to be aligned with reality (true or false). That is derived from both reality and man's nature as a rational animal.

I will grant you that there are things Rand tried to include as ethical, such as artistic taste for a glaring example, which exceed the realm of ethics. Or more to the point, the field of ethics (values) was involved, but Rand did not make room for differing values, judging things only on a good/evil basis. On a metaphorical basis (thinking about morality), I say black and white exist in reality, but so does an entire spectrum of gray, and so does a rainbow of colors. When you claim that ethics are ONLY subjective, I see you saying that black and white do not exist at all. I see no reason whatsoever to claim that ONLY black and white exist or that black and white do not exist when I can clearly see black and white with my own eyes, and I can see gray and colors, too.

Sometimes I come across amusing examples of how reason develops on top of an irrational premise and results in turning a practice considered universally evil on its head. For example, cannibalism is usually seen as evil, yet there is a book called Brazil by Uys where the traditional warlike accounts of cannibalism among Brazilian Indians (probably Tupinambá, I no longer remember since I read the book some years ago) were given a different spin. In this version of cannibalism (known among anthropologists by the endearing term "affectionate cannibalism," a loved member who died is eaten so that he will not carry rotting flesh into the afterlife. These Indians were horrified at the white man's practice of burying the dead. I don't know what source Uys used for this, though, and his work is Michener-like fiction.

Also, the head-shrinking of the Jivaro Indians is well-known (they are from the Ecuador and Peru region of the Amazon jungle). If you look them up, you will see that their head-shrinking was to confine an enemy's spirit in the afterlife. Yet I had a friend in Brazil, a very colorful person named Edmund Bielawski, who actually filmed the head-shrinking ritual (he saved the life of a tribe member, so he became friendly with the tribe, and this was before the different armies went in and machine-gunned those Indians practically out of existence). It was quite a story and maybe someday I will write up an article about this person (we were drinking buddies). I have been gratified to see that Edmund must have finished his film because I saw it referenced doing a Google search, EXPLORING OF THE SOURCE OF THE AMAZON RIVER. I do know that Edmund would periodically exhibit an unfinished rough copy in Brazil when he got broke and these events would always result in ample news coverage.

What was explained to him by the Indians was that a friendly person could have his head shrunken, also. The idea was that if a person was doing many bad things in life, there were evil spirits in his head. So to cure him, they would shrink his head to a size that could not contain both his spirit and the evil spirits. The only inconvenience was that they had to decapitate him first in order to help him, but that was a mere detail...

In today's society, cannibalism is ritualized in the Christian communion, where people symbolically eat the flesh and drink the blood of Christ.

In all these cases, cannibalism is considered ethical. So I agree that from this perspective, the ethical consideration is subjective and cultural. But notice that if the premises behind the cannibalism are taken as values, reason is employed in obtaining them. In this sense, reason was not chosen to arrive at the premise, but reason was chosen to act on it.

Objectivism differs from most all other ethical systems in that it uses reason to determine the premises (core values). That is how it derives the "ought" from the "is."

btw - The link to the info on the movie is now here.

I'm glad I came across this. I promised Edmund's son I would send him some memories of the times I spent with his father, but they were painful because I did not want him to be dead, so I kept putting it off. Then it went into the black hole of inertia. I think I'll try to keep that promise in the next few days.

On the post, nowadays I would not couch the argument in language like that, but I like the premise-checking I did back then.

The phrase, "there's hope for you," reminds me of a story with Edmund that was to be included in a book we were writing together (The Green Jungle and The Black Jungle). But we used to get pissy drunk on pinga together (all the time, in fact) instead of writing. Then I moved and he died. There that project went.

Unfortunately, I don't have time to write it out right now. I will a little later. It's one hell of a nice story.

Michael

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*** No, I'm just an average gurly-gurl who's lucky enuf to have taken a self-defense course, and to have been able to use it at the right time. The mace-spray helped, too.

Eva,

So you killed him?

God I hope so.

You wrote earlier:

* I have no death wish. I believe that the guy to tried to rape me called my 'dollhead', too. I understand that his frat brothers still leave flowers at his gravesite, some three years later.

If you didn't kill him, that means you buried the poor soul alive.

I tremble...

:)

Michael

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