Obama on Ayn Rand in Rolling Stone

[Brant Gaede]

Re the title The Virtue of Selfishness -- see post #24: I'm one of those who think that Rand would have been less inviting of caricaturing and misunderstanding if she'd chosen a different title. For instance, The Virtue of Self-Valuing would have said what she meant without the inflammatory connotations.

Imo Rand was fully aware of the inflammatory connotation of "selfishness". She wanted the title of the book to be provocative.

The title was correct though rhetorical. She knew how to punch things up. I do think her explanation of selfishness inside was quite deficient. This is not surprising considering how deficient the Objectivist Ethics are also, rooted in fictional creations in turn rooted in animadversion on altruism and reaction to the Soviets.

--Brant

Brant: are the fictional creations you refer to the characters of Rand's novels? Or something less literal?

Characters. I'd add that I greatly oversimplified this matter. She IDed altruism as the source of the moral strength and problem of collectivism and her selfishness was partially in answer to that. However, that's too much of one or the other. People are very complicated social animals but everybody has their own brain. So you have this individual-social thing going, but the collectivists made the mirror mistake Rand did, taking too much on a first principle at the price of the other. That individualism must be the rational basis of a moral ethical system, and such a role taken over by altruism is an abomination reflected in political collectivism, doesn't eschew a necessary balance between the two out of natural human biology--we are not felines and we are not ants or bees--only means that philosophy and psychology should be an integrated discipline encompassing all of what is known as the "Liberal Arts" (which includes basic science). Her basic point that altruism is the morality of slavery and selfishness is the morality of freedom is valid. Because selfishness is more basic to the adult human animal than altruism, it's the proper rock-hard foundation for morality, not altruism.

--Brant

[Dglgmut]

Re the title The Virtue of Selfishness -- see post #24: I'm one of those who think that Rand would have been less inviting of caricaturing and misunderstanding if she'd chosen a different title. For instance, The Virtue of Self-Valuing would have said what she meant without the inflammatory connotations. I've had people say in response that they were first attracted to Rand because the title The Virtue of Selfishness aroused their interest, but I think that if they wouldn't have become attracted anyway, maybe their reasons for interest weren't in keeping with Rand's message. Also, I think that that title encourages the sort of behavior in Rand followers which justifiably serves as a poor advertisement to well-mannered folk.

Ellen

But [self-valuing] does not fill the bill of egoism. It leaves open the possibility that other-valuation is as rudimentary among right values as self-valuation, and this is a possibility she aimed to nip. Concern for others, where open to choice, must be justifiable by the root rightness, concern for oneself. Otherwise it is not ethical egoism old or new, and not Rand.

In that case, you're pointing to an unfixable flaw, yes?

I'm not suggesting, btw, that The Virtue of Self-Valuing would have been the "best" title. It's just a variant which seems to me better than what she used. A whole different title, something with a similar pattern to Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, I think would have been best.

Also, I think that "selfishness," in its usual connotations, doesn't fit the bill of Rand's approach either, and that her trotting out a supposed dictionary definition from a dictionary which no one has ever found (as far as I've heard) just produced unproductive argument after argument over the meaning of "selfishness."

--

Imo Rand was fully aware of the inflammatory connotation of "selfishness". She wanted the title of the book to be provocative.

She as much as said so in the introduction -- "for the reason that it frightens you," if I'm remembering the quote correctly.

What I'm suggesting isn't that she wasn't trying to provoke but that she made a tactical error, one which has impeded wider interest in her ideas. I think there were times when she could be her own worst enemy, to state the point strongly.

And with that, "gentle reader"...

The hurricane entertainment is about to start here. The wind's picking up; the rain's pattering.

A year to the day from the 2011 Nor'easter. Whatever powers that be, please don't let this one be as bad as that one.

I'm turning off my computer. "See" y'all again when I can.

Ellen

Ellen, Interesting how unfavorably you perceive the title of VoS.

As with all her titles (except for the bland ITOE) for me it couldn't be better composed.

First, it's honest: the morality is indeed self-ish; second, it's my guess that rather than

scare readers away, many or most Objectivists were attracted precisely by the notion of

selfishness being virtuous - the people who recoil in disgust would never progress further

into Objectivism, anyhow.

I'm semi-sure I did note a definition for selfishness as the neutral "Concern for one's self", somewhere -

but that was way back then, when it was important to 'prove' to myself that Rand had it right.

Nowadays, I'm "WTH! Bring it on!" Whether or not any dictionary includes this definition, is immaterial, surely?

We know that the concept of selfishness - as Rand meant it - has always existed in the minds of certain

men and women. She didn't invent it.

It 'only' had to be identified, isolated and analysed.

(And recovered from its traditional, negative connotations.)

Hoping you and the other Easterners ride out the storm OK.

I agree but I thought her explanation was good enough: she used the word for the same reason the reader might fear it.

What does that mean? It means people who are afraid to engage in honest introspection. To do so would presupposes a value of self, wouldn't it?

It really does necessitate a concern for self to even give oneself that necessary attention.

[anthony]

Yes. Except I believe the shock/provocation element was an also-ran to the truthfulness(rightfulness) AR perceived in essential selfishness. Doubtless, she was a superb wordsmith and knew more than anyone the impact of one word.

You make a fine observation about presupposing, being afraid to be honest, and giving oneself the necessary attention. Evidently, any relations to reality, with its corresponding thought and introspection, predisposes us to instantly grasp the value in something new.

It seems some part of an individual's consciousness pre-cognitively recognises the problem

to be able to draw attention to it, and respond. Round about, I'm getting to your point

that we must first have a sense of the selfish, in order to prize selfishness.

Selfishness is our natural state, so why then is it so feared?

Nobody's fault really: our parents mostly were preparing us for a life in society the best way they knew how - the way their own parents taught them.

(I'm trying to take into account the high variability in upbringing a child; I think certain

fundamentals are constant.) In my case, between attentive, caring parents and not-bad teachers, I was

still left with a sense of existing at some minor level in someone's or something's hierarchy.

Something big, bigger than I could ever be, to which I would always owe 'something' (never quite explained).

Frustration, resentment, rebelliousness, copping-out (and others) are all likely responses to a situation one can't comprehend as I couldn't.

Cutting it short, The Virtue of Selfishness, later on, replied to my vague sense of "injustice" of the system I had been groomed for. Rand turned upside-down the hierarchy I had taken as a 'given' and replaced it with the true 'given'.

Without the "I" that observes, assesses, experiences, creates, tries to know, and KNOWS - what else is life, after all?

(Good insight that got me going, Calvin.)

[Guyau]

Hoping all in the storm area are making it alright.

But [self-valuing] does not fill the bill of egoism. It leaves open the possibility that other-valuation is as rudimentary among right values as self-valuation, and this is a possibility she aimed to nip. Concern for others, where open to choice, must be justifiable by the root rightness, concern for oneself. Otherwise it is not ethical egoism old or new, and not Rand.

In that case, you're pointing to an unfixable flaw, yes?

. . .

No, it may be possible to fix with only minor forfeitures from Rand’s egoism as given in her nonfiction and fiction. I mean a modestly revised rational egoism, distinctively Randian, might remain truly an egoism and be a truer ethics (and psychology), as seen by my lights. One needs to be able to accommodate treatment of people as ends in themselves for reasons of self-interest that do not turn one’s responsiveness to those ends in themselves into at bottom only an instrumental value to oneself. One can expand the conception of the self, I imagine, so as to place some other persons as pretty basic to it (that means not confining the basic value of others to the two good things, sources of knowledge and production, instrumentally conceived) in ways that need to be specified and integrated in the whole value structure. The challenge would be the old one of making such expansions without diluting the conception of self so far as to leave the ethical theory no longer plausibly an egoism. Whether or not that challenge is met, the effort to get moral psychology more fully right and more specifically elaborated is good.

I have a faint memory that some of the younger academic expositors of Rand’s philosophy have grappled seriously with elaborating the relation of agent egoism and beneficiary egoism as well as the relation of instrumental values to constitutive values. But I’m away from my home library at this time. Hope to follow up.

There have been some really good insights in the posts to this thread.

[Brant Gaede]

"The noble soul has reverence for itself"

Is that the quote Rand removed from The Fountainhead?

Is it apropos to this discussion?

--Brant

[Guyau]

Yes, Brant, it surely is apropos.

The passage is from #287 of the chapter “What Is Noble?” in Beyond Good and Evil.

It is not works, it is faith that is decisive here, faith that establishes rank order (this old, religious formula now acquires a new and deeper meaning): some fundamental certainty that a noble soul has about itself, something that cannot be looked for, cannot be found, and perhaps cannot be lost either. – The noble soul has reverence for itself. –

That was an expression of Nietzsche in which Rand could still find much right in 1943, right with her ideal character Roark. A few #’s earlier, in #265, Nietzsche expressed an element of his concept of (new) nobility that Rand had rejected by the time of Fountainhead and which was antithetical to her Roark concept set forth in the novel.

At the risk of annoying innocent ears I will propose this: egoism belongs to the essence of the noble soul. I mean the firm belief that other beings will, by nature, have to be subordinate to a being “like us” and will have to sacrifice themselves. The noble soul accepts this fact of its egoism without any question-mark, and also without feeling any harshness, compulsion, or caprice in it, but rather as something that may well be grounded in the primordial law of things.

There was nothing in the novel or the film according to which one could see that view as Rand’s and as what she was condoning or promoting with her character Roark. Yet ascribing that view to Rand was common among intellectuals and propagandists aligned with Christianity, with welfare-liberalism, and with left socialism. After Atlas appeared, the same smear went on all the same, notwithstanding the fuller articulation of her moral view, including express support for the individual rights of every person. It was only smear, which is to say merely dishonest, and when Rand restored the Nietzsche quote she had originally intended as epigraph for Fountainhead, I don’t think she increased the potential of innocent misunderstanding of what she was holding forth as a moral ideal.

[anthony]

Hoping all in the storm area are making it alright.

But [self-valuing] does not fill the bill of egoism. It leaves open the possibility that other-valuation is as rudimentary among right values as self-valuation, and this is a possibility she aimed to nip. Concern for others, where open to choice, must be justifiable by the root rightness, concern for oneself. Otherwise it is not ethical egoism old or new, and not Rand.

In that case, you're pointing to an unfixable flaw, yes?

. . .

No, it may be possible to fix with only minor forfeitures from Rand’s egoism as given in her nonfiction and fiction. I mean a modestly revised rational egoism, distinctively Randian, might remain truly an egoism and be a truer ethics (and psychology), as seen by my lights. One needs to be able to accommodate treatment of people as ends in themselves for reasons of self-interest that do not turn one’s responsiveness to those ends in themselves into at bottom only an instrumental value to oneself. One can expand the conception of the self, I imagine, so as to place some other persons as pretty basic to it (that means not confining the basic value of others to the two good things, sources of knowledge and production, instrumentally conceived) in ways that need to be specified and integrated in the whole value structure. The challenge would be the old one of making such expansions without diluting the conception of self so far as to leave the ethical theory no longer plausibly an egoism. Whether or not that challenge is met, the effort to get moral psychology more fully right and more specifically elaborated is good.

..."possible to fix with only minor forfeitures...

..."to be able to accomodate treatment of people as ends in themselves..."

..."not confining the basic value of others to the two good things, sources of knowledge and production..."

[boydstun]

These are good and true thoughts that many of us must have gone through. (If not so coherently.)

How to live egoistically, by our own lights, and - preferably- not in conflict with Randian thought, and without

rationalization?

The "minor forfeitures" as you put it, become necessary, I believe: No egoist will easily take to rigid strictures, not after he has turned away from one dogma - obligation and duty to others, morally and psychologically.

That one *must always* be the beneficiary of one's action, is potentially problematic, the single weak link .

Why *must* one? A self-assured rational egoist should be able to apply his own judgment at any stage - life is too complex for such a simplified rule of thumb.

All people are ends-in-themselves, whether they know it or not. (Or enjoy it, or not.)

My understanding is that this is a metaphysical 'given' - except: In most cases it will not also be an epistemological and moral conviction.

In this vein, we are all 'natural-born' egoists, a small minority choosing to be rationally egoistic, while most have not. The distinction is between the implicit and the explicit, while there also are many shades in between.

The implicit/explicit and unquestioned 'virtue' of selfLESSness is so established at every level, all around, that Rand evidently was convinced that she had to counter it uncompromisingly with selfISHness as the true virtue. (Rightly so.)

However, she also laid down one injunction too many, I think, but one easily "fixed".

[MrBenjamatic]

I'm sure he knew much more about Ayn Rand than he admitted. I was reading Atlas, again, after hearing that Obama won; I was reading the scene when the bum from Starnes company was in Dagny's car. Rand, making clear the causes and effects of adopting an economy from each according his ability to each according to his need, said something to the equivalent of: When someone falls for a miserable piece of insanity and cannot make it work or name a reason for continuing it that means they have a reason they don't want to admit. Obama I'm sure knows its Objectivism he's up against as I'm sure he violently, under his expertly perfected front, pretends he is actually helping the people and doing good. He knows his reasons, he just doesn't want to admit them; they would scare others and himself more so.

Furthermore, regarding the quote of keeping silent about one's true goal, in justifying politics with the laws of logic, I got those I argued with to "justify" tyranical law by stating, rather yelling (and literally sometimes shrieking) that things are not what they are. THAT, logically, is their justification. They screamed, obviously, as I didn't leave them the opportunity not to justify their politics illogicially. The laws of logic must be the standard of all arguments and all arguments must be purposeful. The basic "justification" for political regulation today is to violate the rights of men, not because he has violated anothers rights, but because he hasn't but might because he has the ability to. In order to practice most professions, you must serve a guild socialist "professional" organization and learn in colleges approved and dictated to by the organization, not because you have violated others rights in that profession, but because you haven't but might as you're able to. The important difference between 18th & 19th century slavery and "professional" slavery is that the slaves back then weren't allowed the opportunity to switch masters. All slave drivers regulate a single or group of slaves physical and mental labor. Now, as I said, their primary unstated justification is that you should be regulated not because you have violated others rights but because you haven't, but might because your able to. I don't want to get off topic so I'll conclude here.

[Guyau]

Tibor Machan has a nice article concerning the Obama remark here.

Another good piece on the remark is this one by Alexander Cohen.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I would like to relate some thinking from the academy bearing on Ellen’s question and my reply to it in #54 (and the posts thereafter). Below are excerpts from two reviews of Charles Larmore’s The Autonomy of Morality that pertain to our very issue.

From Richard Kraut:*

The title essay of the volume (and its longest) is . . . framed as a defense of one of the principal themes of H.A. Prichard, namely, that moral reasons cannot be, and need not be, validated by anything external to themselves. To be a moral person, Larmore holds, is to see another's good as an unmediated and legitimate demand on oneself (73, 88). Therefore, any attempt to validate that demand through self-interest or rational freedom destroys its unmediated status. What is most provocative in this essay is its extended discussion of the failures of Hobbes, Kant, and their contemporary followers (chiefly David Gauthier and Christine Korsgaard), to appreciate Prichard's point that the question, "why be moral?" is ill-conceived. Kantians, according to Larmore, are of course not egoists, but they nonetheless make the same mistake as egoists: they seek to ground the authority of moral reasons on something beyond those reasons themselves.

From Micha Werner:*

The fifth essay, which gave the title to the bundle, is new. It can also be seen as the book's centerpiece since it defends the author's stance on fundamental issues of moral theory and meta-ethics. The phrase "autonomy of morality" is a felicitous expression of Larmore's position, which he contrasts with the Kantian "morality of autonomy". Kantianism, however, is only one of Larmore's opponents, the other being "instrumentalism" in practical philosophy -- mainly the contractualist tradition from Thomas Hobbes to David Gauthier. The problem that, according to Larmore, plagues these two strands of practical philosophy is that they are trying to ground morality in something else -- something pre-moral that is considered more basic than morality. In the case of instrumentalism, this is a specific form of self-interest that, by definition, excludes any interest we could have in the good of other persons as such. By this basic move, Larmore claims, instrumentalism directly excludes everything that could count as moral, since morality obligates us to care about other people's good just as we care about our own. The failure of instrumentalism to grasp the meaning of moral obligations corresponds to its inability to reconstruct their full scope. Hence, instrumentalism fails to justify precisely those norms that can be seen as paradigmatic elements of our moral code: duties towards the strangers and the weak and the requirement of honesty (cf. 91ff.).

[Ellen Stuttle]

Stephen,

Judging from the reviews you quote in post #59, Larmore's position looks as bad as it gets from Rand's point of view: If there's anything in it for you, it doesn't count in qualifying you as a moral person, and there isn't even the reason of the rational autonomy of others for seeing "another's good as an unmediated and legitimate demand on oneself " (quoting from Richard Kraut's review). Makes me wonder how Larmore could so much as claim knowledge of what constitutes "another's good."

Is Larmore someone influential in current academic thought, do you know?

Ellen

[Guyau]

Ellen,

I don’t have any sense of how influential Larmore is in moral and political philosophy as I’m not enough versed in the contemporary leading lights in those areas. I say that because I do not immediately know the answer, as I would for any of my other phi profs at Chicago. I can say that he is a fabulous teacher. I have ordered this book The Autonomy of Morality, to which I had been led by a work of his I’m studying now The Practices of the Self, which is great. The courses I took from him were on the topic of the latter book and on pragmatism, which both give me much advantage with Self.

The reviewers of Autonomy speak of Larmore’s third-realm ontology of the moral, which had adherents around a century ago, if I understand correctly. That might be congenial to Michael Huemer, although Larmore, like Peirce, is no friend of intuition. My own interest in getting Autonomy, however, is mainly to see something he had to say in there about correspondence theory of truth, and in particular to see how he assimilates Peirce with it.

I don’t get the impression that on the moral theory of Autonomy “if there is something in it for you, it doesn’t count in qualifying you as a moral person.” It could be that one’s moral concerns are inherently something for oneself, an interest forming part of one’s constitution, and not values in an instrumental way, but we’ll see.

C.V. CL is no stranger to Social Philosophy and Policy* (’94, ’99, ’10)*

[Ellen Stuttle]

Stephen,

Interesting that Larmore was a teacher of yours. I didn't have time to look up anything about his c.v., so had no idea where he's taught.

I'm surprised, from what seems to me indicated by the reviews you cited (post #59), that he's written a book called The Practices of the Self

Re:

I don’t get the impression that on the moral theory of Autonomy “if there is something in it for you, it doesn’t count in qualifying you as a moral person.” It could be that one’s moral concerns are inherently something for oneself, an interest forming part of one’s constitution, and not values in an instrumental way, but we’ll see.

I'm only going by the passages you quoted from the reviews, but if, as Kraut writes, Larmore holds that "To be a moral person [...] is to see another's good as an unmediated and legitimate demand on oneself (73, 88). Therefore, any attempt to validate that demand through self-interest or rational freedom destroys its unmediated status," I don't see how pursuing one's self's interests would qualify one as "a moral person" even if those interests weren't "values in an instrumental way."

What I signed on to say was that I'd had an odd thought -- result of a long train of associations pertaining to Nietzsche's being strongly influential on both Rand and Jung. Suppose Rand had used the title The Virtue of Self-Reverence? I wonder how that would strike you -- maybe with the same objections as to The Virtue of Self-Valuing.

[Guyau]

Ellen, the substitution of self-reverence for selfishness in the title, like your other suggestion, self-valuation, is a nice capture of a major thrust of her theory. The same objection (#44) I had against the earlier suggestion would also apply to this one, but I think less of that objection now that I come to think of the circumstance that the book has a subtitle and could still have it with either of those substitutions: A New Concept of Egoism.

The choice of self-reverence in the title would have the special merit of reflecting Rand’s letting go of the supernatural without letting go of the sacred. Selfishness has a merit over these two substitutes of being more obviously tied to action and prudence, which Rand wedded to morality, as in her wedding of Rearden’s power to his glory. What about self-interest? I think that would have tended to give a first impression that this was to be a defense of Adam Smith, though the subtitle would counter that for the more knowledgeable.

I think Brant was right that Rand wanted the selfishness to counter altruism up front (#51). It was natural to her anyway from its many uses in Fountainhead, and it succeeded in giving the viewer pause and sometimes impetus to open VoS. But Brant’s note is on to an important trail. It was and is true, as Nietzsche and Rand observed, that altruism is a key to left socialism. The opposition of altruism and egoism (or selfishness) seems to have become a commonplace in the nineteenth century. Guyau wrote about it as if it were a routine opposition (which he aimed to mediate). Then too, in mid-twentieth century, as I came to late high school, I became a socialist for the exact reason that private property allowed people to be selfish, my very term. I did not come to Rand through VoS, but through Fountainhead, where Rand had just the right term and its reformation for me. That novel was the end of my socialism.

[merjet]

I don’t get the impression that on the moral theory of Autonomy “if there is something in it for you, it doesn’t count in qualifying you as a moral person.” It could be that one’s moral concerns are inherently something for oneself, an interest forming part of one’s constitution, and not values in an instrumental way, but we’ll see.

While this is about Lamore, autonomy has a large role in Kant's ethics and the part in quotes sure fits Kant. Christine Korsgaard doesn't believe so, but others have said Kant held a crudely hedonistic theory about all motives other than moral ones (Creating the Kingdom of Ends, p. 56).

[Frediano]

This came quick.

The distinction between Individualism and Collectivism is not "I/We;" it is free association vs. forced association.

And when that distinction is clearly painted, nobody in their right mind will line up and march behind forced association.

So, when is that distinction going to be clearly painted? The sooner the better, for freedom not from societies, plural, but "S"ociety, singular. We should never conflate the concept of 'one nation' with 'one "S"ociety. We are a nation of free societies, formed freely by free people, under rules of free association. And we should never ne duped by histories latest tyrant wannabee into believing we are "ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Fuhrer"-- no matter what Holy cause has got the latest charismatic nut with his eyes rolled into the back of his head, overwhelmed with the purity of his cause.

[Guyau]

Fred,

Rand surely agreed with you that free v. forced association is a dividing line between individualism and collectivism. Rearden’s courtroom speech includes that. She would not think it a sufficient line without setting out also I v. we as a coincident dividing line.

People in general do not see government as force in the same way that they see the acts of the burglar or assailant as force. They do not see taxation as theft in the manner of Bonnie and Clyde, nor conscription as forced labor in the manner of slavery. We try to get them to see it more along those libertarian lines, but that requires holding government to the same morality concerning deliberate force that most everyone holds concerning individuals. That is an individual-I v. association-we point of view, one in which the individual is beginning and end.

Moving from people in general to people with some education in political philosophy, the reservation will be made, as you know, that the system of private property is an enforced system, whose contours (such as law of inheritance and estate tax) are open to rational variations and whose justification on an individualist basis has always fallen short. There is then some (or much) impetus to a collective perspective, at least as complement to an individualist one, for a rational approach. The adequacy of an individualist justification or of a free-association justification has yet to win wide intellectual assent.

The following passage from Rand 1943 ties together the two lines I/we and free/forced association:

Isn’t Europe swallowed already and we’re stumbling to follow? Everything is contained in a single word—collectivism. And isn’t that the god of our century? To act together. To think—together. To feel—together. To unite, to agree, to obey. To obey, to serve, to sacrifice. . . . Look at Europe . . . . One country is dedicated to the proposition that man has no rights, that the collective is all. The individual is held as evil, the mass—as God. . . . [Another] country [is] dedicated to the proposition that man has no rights, that the State is all. The individual held as evil, the race—as God. . . . Am I raving or is this the cold reality of two continents already? . . . Give up your soul to a council—or give it up to a leader. But give it up, give it up, give it up. . . . Kill the individual. Kill man’s soul. The rest will follow automatically. (HR XIV, 694–95)

I do not think there is possible a society fully free for individuals without overwhelming integrated public understanding and acceptance of the concept of individual rights. I do not think that that understanding is in hand without conscious respect for autonomy, without valuing treatment of individuals as ends in themselves and knowing that this is justice, for they are.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Merlin and Ellen, more later.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

PS

I said in #61 that The Practices of the Self is great. There is a good, short review of it here.

The criticism that Ellen raises in #60 and #62 concerning Larmore’s view on the immediacy and the self-standing character of the moral, as expressed in The Autonomy of Morality, is elaborated further by Richard Kraut in his review here. Scroll down to 3. Morality “speaks with its own voice.” I have shown some of Prof. Kraut’s own quasi-Aristotelian ethical theory here.

[Guyau]

When I receive The Autonomy of Morality (A), I will integrate it with The Practices of the Self (S), which is important background for the essays in A. The reviewers of A did not have the background of S because although S had been published in French before A, it was not translated into English until after A. I will there compare and contrast with Kant, with Rand, and with Nozick (1981). Perhaps that study can form an addition to my thread “Rand’s Morality of Life.”

Meanwhile, let me convey some of Larmore’s conception of a contrast of the relation between desire and duty on the one hand and the relation of desire and the good on the other hand. These remarks arise in The Practices of the Self in the course of Larmore’s discussion of the importance of unexpected goods.

Readers will have noticed that throughout this discussion I have spoken of an unexpected good as though it possessed a certain “objectivity.” To judge by the terms I have used, it is the object of a discovery, something whose value we were not in a position to envision, given our outlook at the time, and which we only come to appreciate in light of some unforeseeable experience. . . . Many philosophers claim, of course, that in general the good can be reduced to the projection of desire, as though by calling something a good we were merely indicating that we desired it. [cf.] But this view seems to me completely wrong. The good serves, rather, as a standard for the evaluation of our desires . . . .

That there exists a relationship between the good and desire is undeniable. For it is in this regard that the good differs from the other main normative category, which is duty, at least insofar as certain duties are thought to be binding on us whatever our desires may be. A duty does not present itself as something we ought to desire; we will not have failed to respect it just because we don’t feel the desire to fulfill it, even if virtue itself consists in going this one step further. In the case of the good, the situation is quite different. Normally, to recognize a good is to desire it. Nothing in this observation, however, calls into question the objectivity of the good. For everything depends on the exact relation between the good and desire.

. . . . In contrast to a brute impulse (a dubious notion, more a piece of philosophical mythology), every desire represents its object as something there is a reason to pursue. Otherwise desire could not play the role it does in the explanation of conduct. To appear as worth desiring is in fact what it means for an object to present itself as “good.” Of course, we may believe we have reasons to seek the object without being in a position to explicitly state those reasons. [i betcha that both AR and RN (’81) can help one out a bit with that.]

The fact that the object of our desire appears to us as good cannot . . . be explained by the fact that we desire it, as a certain philosophical orthodoxy would claim. It is precisely the opposite. Our desire is awakened by the fact that the object appears good, that is, by the fact that there appears to be a reason to pursue it. Once this truth is admitted, it should be less difficult to understand how the goodness of a thing constitutes a reality, a reality that we can discover, and even perhaps by chance. A good is objective insofar as the reasons to pursue it prove to be “objective” . . . . A reason is “objective” if it can be established from an impersonal point of view, that is, on the basis of premises that are to be accepted because they are deemed to be true and not because they happen to be endorsed by particular individuals. It would be hard to deny that some of our beliefs are founded on objective reasons. What then excludes a priori the possibility that there exist objective reasons to desire certain things?

. . . . Objective goods can be instrumental goods; they can also constitute final ends. The important thing is that they exist. And if normally we need only to see a good in order to desire it, this intimate relationship between the good and the desire is explained by the fact, developed throughout this book, that we are in general normative beings, disposed to follow the reasons we find for thinking this or doing that. (181–83)

[Guyau]

Tara Smith will be giving her lecture “The Virtuous Egoist” on March 25 at Rice University.

Contact Reid Atcheson (rice.objectivism@hotmail.com).

Abstract

Ayn Rand is well known for advocating selfishness, yet the substance of that selfishness is rarely understood. This lecture presents Rand's ideal: a virtuous egoist.

Prof. Smith explains why a person should be an egoist, the kind of egoism that Rand does and doesn't commend, and the kinds of virtues that a person must exercise in order to actually advance his self-interest. Along the way, Smith differentiates Rand's rational egoism from hedonism, materialism, and predation, and sketches Rand's egoistic account of two vital but widely misunderstood virtues: honesty and justice.

[9thdoctor]

For some reason this doesn't strike me as worthy of its own thread. I get the feeling Sharpton cribbed from Obama, so I'm putting it here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ae6KPpm-ldM

[syrakusos]

He got a haircut. Everyone is wearing their hair shorter these days.

[Southern Capitalist]

"Ayn Rand is one of those things"?

What thing?

women?

philosophy?

writer?

subject?

experiences?

on and on.......and on

Those in high power, or politics, are getting more incompetent by the years.

[Xray]

Sharpton about the philosophy in Atlas Shrugged: "That's s okay for a book but it has no place in reality".

So he attacks people who advocate what it says in a book, but he himself doesn't seem to have any problem preaching about stuff that is also only in a book: The Bible.

[Dglgmut]

Sharpton about the philosophy in Atlas Shrugged: "That's s okay for a book but it has no place in reality".

So he attacks people who advocate what it says in a book, but he himself doesn't seem to have any problem preaching about stuff that is also only in a book: The Bible.

Yeah, but that was based on a true story.

[Xray]

Sharpton about the philosophy in Atlas Shrugged: "That's s okay for a book but it has no place in reality".

So he attacks people who advocate what it says in a book, but he himself doesn't seem to have any problem preaching about stuff that is also only in a book: The Bible.

Yeah, but that was based on a true story.

Like for example God created the word in seven days, yeah right.

[Brant Gaede]

Sharpton about the philosophy in Atlas Shrugged: "That's s okay for a book but it has no place in reality".

So he attacks people who advocate what it says in a book, but he himself doesn't seem to have any problem preaching about stuff that is also only in a book: The Bible.

Yeah, but that was based on a true story.

Like for example God created the word in seven days, yeah right.

I think He did that on the eighth day.

--Brant