Rational Enablement? (1997)


Roger Bissell

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Conditional Morality and Rational (?) Enablement

by Roger E. Bissell

November 15-17, 1997

Here's a thought that seems to get at an interesting parallel about morality and life.

Since life is conditional and not automatic or guaranteed, why shouldn't morality be conditional and not categorical? In other words, Rand was right in "Causality versus Duty."

People sometimes want to pin down Objectivism into saying that you should value life, when all they really mean is that they want you to, because valuing life is good for you. (Thanks, Mom!) I think it's really a sign of emotional and psychological maturity to let go of the crusade to drum categorical imperatives into people's heads and give them the rope with which to hang themselves.

Skeptics, altruists, etc., need to be allowed to experience reality, instead of being propped up and enabled by those who allow themselves to give the benefit of the doubt to their arguments. In the present case, it means to stop trying to convince skeptics that they should value life, only to show them that if they want to live, they should do certain things, but that it's their life to live or forfeit as they choose. No one is going to make them live or pressure them into living.

If there's one thing I learned in the 12-Step meetings of groups like Al-Anon, it's that people who are deprived of excuses to rebel against the pro-life ("your pressuring me to do it made me not want to do it" etc., ad nauseum and aggravateum) are more likely to come around and get in line with life and reality.

Also, since the ultimate value is the basis for obligation or what people ought to do, it is begging the question to say that one ought to value it. Just as you cannot try to prove the laws of logic without question-begging, for they are the basis of proof. To try to deny long-range either life as the ultimate value or the laws of logic requires one's continuing to exist, which requires that one smuggle them in and use them, even if in unacknowledged fashion.

In regard to answering error with rational argument, there are excellent reasons for "hanging in there," at least up to a point. As the saying goes: If not now, when? If not us, who? How long to persevere, and when to throw in the towel, however--those are important considerations.

Although the amount of material out there that needs answering shows no sign of slacking off, it's very much a matter of "Choose Your Issues," as Rand said in The Objectivist Newsletter. In other words, selectivity and discernment are vital. We can't answer everything, nor should we even try.

As my wise friend, Douglas Rasmussen, told me recently, when I was seeming to fall prone to going overboard with crusader zeal:

You need to take it easy. Truth, love, goodness, etc. do not depend on [other people] getting things correct. Your mission is not to save them or the world; your mission is to know and understand and live fully. You don't exist for the cause; the cause exists for you.

I have printed this out in large font and posted it on my bulletin board, so that I can read it every time I sit at my computer.

I keep reminding myself: balance, balance, balance! I am not just a thinking machine for the Objectivist movement, but also a musician, a husband, a father, a person who loves listening to Frank Sinatra and Eddie Daniels (among many others), a person who loves reading Tom Clancy and James Hogan and Orson Scott Card (among many others), and a person who loves personality theory and genealogy (among many other pursuits).

These things are all important parts of the complete "me," who feels off-kilter when any of them is missing for too long. But that also includes philosophizing!

So, remembering my limitations, I try to carefully select what I will put my time and effort to, in hope that I am maximizing my efforts and perhaps spreading the seeds of understanding and positive change to others who are in a position to help them grow to full flower. It's a very abstract process, one which usually shows results in unexpected ways, often some time after I have forgotten about the particular thing I wrote.

Trickle-down influence is very much a reality, as nebulous or hard to pin down as it may seem at times. So, as Dagny kept telling herself--under what were surely more trying circumstances than we face!--"Don't let it go."

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Roger,

This issue of wanting to live was a choice I made at a stage where someone just blowing on me would have pushed me over the line. The strange thing is that it was not a decision I made once and then was done with it - I now make everyday, but usually it is automatic. That one fully conscious time at my weakest point, however, was a limit experience.

I am doing a lot of thinking about on this and reading these days. The amygdala and the organic nature of consciousness - both of which can become ill and recover - are aspects that throw a monkey-wrench in the exercise of volition.

I think my "limit level decision" was not simply a decision (like an on and off button), but a tentative, stumbling act toward recovery. I certainly wasn't recovered just because I was able to grind out an extremely weak, "Yes, I want to live" inside my soul. There was a long hard road ahead.

Was this "limit level decision" moral and rational? Yes. Was it biological and conditional? Yes, also. It could even be called medical. Philosophically, I guess choosing to live is a matter of an on/off button. Psychologically, there is illness (which is not volitional in nature) that needs to be fought.

You give much food for thought in this section on addiction.

Michael

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