Emotion: How to Gain the Moral Highground

[Dglgmut]

Sorry, I like the title. I know it's misleading, as if I'm posting a well thought out essay, but it's just food for thought.

The problem with this whole "rationalism" movement is not that people don't want to think, but that they don't want to think about something that contradicts what they feel. For example, the gun control debate is skewed by attributing people who support gun control with a loving-kindness, while fallaciously attributing the opposite to those against gun control.

Rationalism vs emotion; that's how these debates are framed. Even if you can prove your opponent incompetent, you cannot discredit their passion for the issue at hand.

A focused mind was moral, according to Rand. Let's take it a step further and say that effort or passion is the essence of morality. Morality is about how man should live. What is more basic a principle than that man should want/care about something.

To gain the moral highground one must never lump in one's actions with ones intentions, as to imply that effort or passion is only good some of the time. Even if someone is wrong, their passion is necessary for any chance of them learning, growing, and moving past their errors.

The debate should be about how much to care (to care enough to think), not whether to care or to think.

The moral high ground is always common ground...

[caroljane]

the gun control debate is skewed by attributing people who support gun control with a loving-kindness, while fallaciously attributing the opposite to those against gun control.

Not by me, it isn't. I don't think and never implied that individual gun buyers and distributors are anything other than individuals, some wonderful people and some not. I do not collectivize in that way.

[Xray]

A focused mind was moral, according to Rand.

That a mind is "focused" on something does not automatically make it moral. It depends on what the focus is.

[Dglgmut]

A focused mind was moral, according to Rand.

That a mind is "focused" on something does not automatically make it moral. It depends on what the focus is.

Well the essential moral choice comes down to, "To think or not to think." as Rand put it, and Branden rephrased that somewhere in TVOS (I can't remember where) as the choice of whether or not to focus.

It is not immoral to be incorrect, as long as you are searching for what is correct. As long as you have a legitimate desire for the abstract "right", then you are acting morally.

The idea of focus here is more about putting in the effort to understand reality, not to focus in the sense of blocking out everything but the thing one is focused on.