Is freedom to breed a right?

[Wolf DeVoon]

3 hours ago, anthony said:

For you the pilot, the reality is all lose-lose. End of your life  - or choose to continue a bare, solipsistic existence without values, a self-sacrifice. In recognizing that fact, your life must be reduced to minimal/zero value compared to human life surviving on Earth and what has to be your last rationally selfish chosen action to ram the meteor: value won - not a self- sacrifice. So much for mental emergency "scenarios" and sophistry.

Well, the whole thing is preposterous. Jts does not live on a spaceship, given a choice to save the world or let it be destroyed  -- which in itself is fanciful poppycock. Ramming an asteroid big enough to end life on earth with a one-man spaceship would have the same effect as an ant attempting to strangle an elephant. Try to frame another lifeboat scenario involving, for instance, risking your life to save a baby trapped in a house fire. Allow me to help. Premise One: We all have to die some day. Premise Two: It is an option to die at a moment of your own choosing, whether as a soldier defending freedom, or as an anarchist attacking a repressive regime, or a garden variety parent sacrificing one's liberty, pleasure, and dignity to feed and clothe imbecilic ingrates (teenage children). The operative concept is choice, exercised in daily life on earth, not in cockamamie lifeboat fantasies. All things noble are as difficult as they are rare. Dump the ingrates and live for your own sake.

[anthony]

Hey Wolf, that's my concocted scenario in response to Langan's ridiculous assertion above, somewhere, about the "plausible scenario" of sacrificing an individual for all humanity.. My tale, I say what goes ;) - and my premises are of a rational egoist who pilots a craft with nuke missile on board which would with certainty divert/destroy the meteorite - but - it won't launch, leaving him with the only (rational selfish, I proved) alternative to detonate it by collision. Save himself or save the World. You're the story writer, ride along with my "cockamamie" fabrication.

But I agree: "Moment of your own choosing", and circumstances of your choosing--if it has to come to that. That circles back to one's objective values, and value hierarchy, to which you stay true, hell or high water.

[Peter]

3 hours ago, anthony said:

Hey Wolf, that's my concocted scenario in response to Langan's ridiculous and immoral assertion above, somewhere, about the "plausable scenario" of sacrificing an individual for all humanity.. My tale, I say what goes - and my premises are of a rational egoist who pilots a craft with nuke missile on board which would with certainty divert/destroy the meteorite - but - it won't launch, leaving him with the only (rational selfish, I proved) alternative to detonate it by collision. Save himself or save the World. You're the story writer, ride along with my "cockamamie" fabrication.

But I agree: "Moment of your own choosing", and circumstances of your choosing--if it has to come to that. That circles back to one's objective values, and value hierarchy, to which you stay true, hell or high water.

I too think we can divert debris coming at the Earth if we strike or nuke it far from our planet. Humanity should disperse, from earth and from crowds. Just think about the “body count’ when we congregate. The murderous psychopaths who are mass murderers may be one in a hundred million but they do a lot of damage. I know it is a cliché, but I honestly do not expect a mass extinction caused by a virus developed in a lab. On Downton Abbey they dramatized the "Spanish Flu" in the early 20th century, but I think strains like ebola and even AIDS can't be extinguished.   

Some interesting points about how civilization nearly destroys itself about once a century, and some oldies about asteroids and UFO’s.

Peter

From: "Dennis May" To: atlantis Subject: ATL: Re: UFO Lands on Whitehouse Lawn Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2001 23:16:45 -0500. R. Christian Ross wrote: <You (Dennis) also mentioned, previously, that this information may hinder arguments re: ozone depletion...would you mind elaborating on this point?

If bacteria can be transported by means unknown to the edge of space from an Earthly source then so can dust, salt crystals from sea spray, and the various chemicals from volcanic activity.  It is estimated that volcanoes emit 10**5 to 10**6 times more chlorofluorocarbons per year than all ever produced in the history of mankind.  The ozone depletion advocates have to assume these sources of chlorofluorocarbons are "rained" out before traveling far enough to affect the ozone.  Millions of tons of chlorine from airborne salt crystals are available on a daily basis given an unknown mechanism to transport it to altitude.  It becomes a question of conflicting models of what happens near the edge of space.  If bacteria can travel to the ozone layer from Earth what effect are they having?  The ozone depletion advocates certainly don't recognize their existence at all much less how they could have been transported there from the surface or from space.  Space bacteria would have likely hitched a ride on larger debris which is also pelting the ozone layer.

Ming Shan wrote: <Yes, it's fun to know about, but really, how *parsimonious* is the scientists' explanation?  It's more parsimonious to assume that the organisms discovered were carried aloft from the surface of the planet.

I don't deny that some transport mechanism from lower altitudes is possible but it would have to be electrostatic or electromagnetic in nature and is as of yet unknown.  Simple Brownian motion, air currents, and other mechanical means cannot produce the bacteria seen at altitude. There simply isn't a thermal/mechanical means of transportation.  Astronomers were caught with their pants down on electrostatic effects in Saturn's rings (braids), many failed to predict the large electrical currents flowing in space, and most astronomers still neglect electrostatic and electromagnetic effects on much larger scales, a fact they will eventually regret.

<There are all manner of things living in the utterly hostile and "alien" conditions of Antarctica and at the surface of the planet under the oceans, but nobody would make the assumption that they got there any other way than the obvious:  either abiogenesis or migration.

I wouldn't say "nobody" would for the more exotic locations you didn't mention. The bacteria found kilometers deep in the Earth's crust may very well be descended of bacteria trapped for billions of years and left over from impact debris.  One modern theory of deep crust oil deposits has it coming from geological formations built up from impact debris. This debris rained organics and the bacteria which still feed on it deep in the Earth's crust to this day.

Geologists recognized nano-bacteria before biologists did.  Geologists tend to be supporters of the Mars meteorites as containing ancient life because they had long ago identified nearly identical formations as bacterial in nature.  This was not controversial until the Mars angle came into view.

The model for the high altitude bacteria goes hand in hand with spectroscopic observations showing a soup on the surface of comets and asteroids which very much resembles the waste products of biological activity.  The expected transport mechanism for the high altitude bacteria are small fluffy snowball comets which rain down on the Earth constantly.  They disintegrate long before leaving a meteor trail and leave a foggy mist as they meld into the Earth's atmosphere.  We owe the Earth's oceans and much of our organic material to the continual rain of dirty snowballs from the great cloud of dirty snowballs outside of Pluto' orbit. Dennis May

 F

rom: "Dennis May" To: atlantis Subject: ATL: Re: Panspermia Date: Mon, 06 Aug 2001 14:39:04 -0500

 

Thanks to R. Christian Ross for finding more links on Panspermia.  The more I read about this subject the more likely I find it that all of space is seeded with primitive life and has been for a very long time.  Those who take issue with the possibility of interstellar Panspermia don't seem to remember that the latest theories of interstellar space have the space between stars populated with tremendous numbers of small dark bodies.  There also seems to be a problem of innumeracy at work even among scientists studying the problem.  Given the resources and proper conditions life will attempt to reproduce geometrically.  It takes a very short amount of time for primitive life forms to generate billions of offspring.  Primitive life forms exist in astronomical numbers and have for at least billions of years.  Combine this with a demonstrated ability to survive hard vacuum and remain dormant for at least a 1/4 billion years. Life doesn't have to plan a proper orbit and search for the ideal place to land in order to spread through the stars.  It only has to try trillions of times.  Those bacteria which have adapted to their space surroundings and reproduced successfully will eventually populate the entire observable universe. Dennis May

From: "Dennis May" Reply-To: Starship_Forum Subject: Re: End of Man Unless... Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2001 13:53:51 -0500

Monart Pon wrote: >In the article, Hawking was quoted as saying, "I don't think the human race will survive the next thousand years unless we spread into space. There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet."

>The human species has survived many "accidents" and catastrophes in the past, from the World Wars of the last century, to the Plague in medieval Europe, ...It seems arbitrary to suppose that humankind will be destroyed by such catastrophes, rather than to suppose that humankind can survive or avert them.

Mass extinctions have occurred many times in the history of the Earth.  Some of these mass extinctions have yet to be explained.  The extinction of individual species happens all the time, again often without explanation.  It is known that a single species can become extinct in one environment or continent while thriving in another.  Speciation often occurs as a result of separation into different environments over extended periods of time.

Confinement to a single niche often results in extinction.  Genetic variation tells us that modern humans were nearly extinct at one time. We have extraordinary little genetic variation compared to other Old World Apes.  This small degree of variability means we are more prone to disease related extinction than many other animals.  Dozens of offshoots of the human family tree are extinct much less the Old World Ape family tree.  We are the survivors, hundreds of our cousins didn't survive.  Modern humans have included several racial groups which no longer exist.

Our ability to cure diseases is offset by our ability to create drug resistant strains of disease and bioengineer new diseases.  This doesn't even mention other weapons of mass destruction.

The primary means of averting extinction is niche diversity.  In the case of humans this would mean moving into space [the largest and most diverse niche possible].  The present large numbers of humans is certainly no guarantee.  Passenger pigeons numbered in the billions and would black the sky for days during migrations.

>Besides, is the danger of something wiping out the human race on Earth the main reason for going into space? I, as an individual, if I find that the future of humanity in a thousand years to be irrelevant to my own life now (recall the one and the many), why should I be motivated by that hypothetical danger to go into space?

Niche diversification increases the possibilities for political diversification including the creation of freedom friendly governments or communities.  Civilization confined to the Earth increases the likelihood of a dramatic swing towards collectivism from which civilization might never recover.  How close did the Nazis/Axis come to conquering the world?  How close the communists? How close various religious groups?  What about the fanatics of today?  Every pendulum swing brings us again to the brink of disaster, eventually we won't recover unless it becomes physically impossible for any one group to control all humans [in space].

The question of individual motivations can only be answered by individuals.  Some companies founded in Europe four hundred plus years ago still exist today.  If you were an individual working for such a company you might very well care about the long term vision of the company and its goals much less the big company called humanity.  Short term thinking if applied globally would prevent many large projects from ever occurring.  Space colonization is clearly one of those projects requiring long term thinking and investment.  I could very well die today hitting a deer on the way home from work, I've seen it happen to other people.  I might live to be 100 like my great, great uncle who kept a full time job till he was 93.  Medical and technological advances might extend my age well beyond what people think is reasonable or even possible today.  A single scientific breakthrough could bring disaster or glory to humanity depending on what it is and how it is used.  Those who don't or won't live for the possibilities inherent in long term thinking won't be a part of the rewards should they come before expected or come in unexpected ways.

 I

have worked on several engineering projects which were continuing improvement projects without a "finish" date.  Others were projects which have been worked on several times over four decades or more and still are not completed.  Difficult problems often must be approached many times before the promise of big rewards becomes real.  There can be many small rewards along the way giving some satisfaction but the promise of a big payoff is the real motivation.

 I

see the promise of space as very real and tangible. The impediments are primarily political not technological. Minor changes in our political environment in the late 1960's could have lead to hundreds of thousands of people living in space today.  It didn't happen not for lack of technology but a lack of vision.  I become very uncomfortable when I hear people talking about the long term future not affecting them today.  It makes me want to go back to 1968 and spank Nixon for canceling nuclear rocket research.  No long term vision means no future for yourself or anyone else. Dennis May

[anthony]

On 5/29/2018 at 8:30 PM, jts said:

Immense meteorite headed for Earth, about to destroy all humanity. Rockets don't fire. Only one way left, ram the spacecraft into the meteorite. 2 options.

Option 1:  Perform an act of selfishness (or whatever) by saving self and letting all of humanity die.  This seems to be consistent with Ayn Rand's virtue of selfishness and perhaps would be a heroic act. Or perhaps this would be an exception to the principle that selfishness is a virtue.

Option 2:  Perform an act of altruism (or whatever) by giving one's life to save humanity.  Under Objectivism perhaps this would be an unspeakable evil. Or perhaps an exception.

Maybe we can come up with some sophistry (or whatever) to show that option 1 is altruism and option 2 is selfishness.

 

Is "sophistry" still on your mind? as usual, you've flitted off without reply. I note that throughout you call it "selfishness". This is rather *rational* selfishness, and I wonder if you know what rational means if, for you, reasoning is "sophistry".

[anthony]

2 minutes ago, anthony said:

 

 

Delete

[anthony]

On 5/29/2018 at 7:42 PM, Peter said:

What if an opinion is shared by a billion inhabitants of earth? Does that grant that particular thought, scientifically proven veracity?  In a sense the concept of “the collective” could be defined by the number of thumbs ups you get on a net account, a media show, beneficial personal and national alliances, or at the political polls. “The collective” is constantly changing. Politicians try to stay in front of or influence “the collective.” If you get one person with too much psycho-epistemological influence, it is always a factor of reality, but the “ether or the stuff which makes up the collective” is always shifting. Taylor Swift, or a movie franchise, or a television show, may be “in” today but not popular tomorrow.

 

 

As long as the “individual’s influence” over “the collective” is voluntary, I see no lasting harm in it. Rock and Roll was going to be the downfall of kids, but those kids grew up to be grandparents who are still trying to bring universal freedom to the world. The Soviet Union, Attila the Hun, and Nazi Germany were not voluntary and millions of people were murdered.  

 

 

Peter    

Peter, I'd say all that the "collective" is, is the collective and numerical term for many individuals, and in itself benign and useful. Or as you suggest, attaching oneself to a group of other individuals, voluntarily for one's benefit in work or play. But when the "collective" is used to signify 1. the force of superior numbers of individuals over any individual 2. some perceived (mystical) collective 'identity' and value above an individual identity and his value - then it is "collectivism" as ideology, and we better watch out. Langan looks to pit the individual against the collective because he can only think collectively, of the masses. (Kind of, fallacy of the Stolen Concept). You are "Peter the individual" over and above being any other thing, from gender to nationality, etc... hierarchically, way down to being one of the "collective" of individuals who e.g. liked the Rolling Stones, or puts on his right shoe before his left.

[Peter]

Anthony wrote: You are "Peter the individual" over and above being any other thing, from gender to nationality, etc. end quote

Hark. I hear a voice from the Enterprise’s Engineering Department. “I certainly agree with ya laddy.” I could shorten “Peter the individual’ to “P.I.”, as in Spencer For Hire, private detective.

As an aside to the aside, my daughter gives me copies of entertainment magazines and I can go pages without knowing who the heck the celebrities are. I watched the 2015? Star Wars movie on TV, and it would swing from pretty good to juvenile and unwatchable, then back to pretty good. I had to turn the channel. It must be me. But I really got the feeling I was watching several groups of (writers, directors and producers) holding sway throughout the movie for a few minutes each. Awful. Special effects and pandering to kiddies is ruining the story lines of Hollywood.

Peter  

[jts]

2 hours ago, anthony said:

Is "sophistry" still on your mind? as usual, you've flitted off without reply. I note that throughout you call it "selfishness". This is rather *rational* selfishness, and I wonder if you know what rational means if, for you, reasoning is "sophistry".

Sometimes I am confused by the difference between selfishness and altruism.

Example 1:  A soldier gives his life to save others. Some people would call this an act of altruism. Objectivists probably would call this an act of selfishness.

Example 2.  A man decides to practise the virtue of selfishness. So he gets a job and takes care of himself instead of living on welfare and being a parasite.Another man decides to practise altruism. So he gets a job and takes care of himself the same as the first man did. But he tells himself that he is practising altruism because he is relieving others of the burden of taking care of him.

Example 3.  An act of charity or generosity such as giving money to the poor and needy or to the Ayn Rand Institute can be viewed as an act of selfishness or as an act of altruism depending on how you look at it. Yaron Brook would have you believe that you can give money to the ARI without buying anything and do that as an act of selfishness.

 

 

[anthony]

On 6/2/2018 at 9:22 PM, jts said:

Sometimes I am confused by the difference between selfishness and altruism.

Example 1:  A soldier gives his life to save others. Some people would call this an act of altruism. Objectivists probably would call this an act of selfishness.

Example 2.  A man decides to practise the virtue of selfishness. So he gets a job and takes care of himself instead of living on welfare and being a parasite.Another man decides to practise altruism. So he gets a job and takes care of himself the same as the first man did. But he tells himself that he is practising altruism because he is relieving others of the burden of taking care of him.

Example 3.  An act of charity or generosity such as giving money to the poor and needy or to the Ayn Rand Institute can be viewed as an act of selfishness or as an act of altruism depending on how you look at it. Yaron Brook would have you believe that you can give money to the ARI without buying anything and do that as an act of selfishness.

 

 

Good set of questions, jts. They point out what's wrong and ambivalent and evasively dishonest, with universal perceptions of altruism vs. rational selfishness. Some general observations. The deep difference between the two is that rational selfishness is "real". In this ethics, is everything that's "real" about man's consciousness with regard to existence: What is possible (and not) to man and individual  - the gathering of knowledge and values he alone has to accumulate if he wants "the good life". Altruism flies in the face of all this, it is artificial, a made-up fantasy by religions and philosophers of morality who had little comprehension or concern of man's nature. Because, with the best will in the world, no one can see into another's mind, handle their intake of reality, appreciate their specific values, or think-reason for them, or feel emotions on their behalf - nor, actually "do good" for them, in anything but a superficial, transitory manner. This code is based on the recognition that altruistic self-sacrifice is *hard*. Therefore, it is "good", and the harder the better. Those altruists condemn egoism because concern with oneself is "easy" (they think) and the consequential happiness gained is through selfish evil. Which tells of their human-hating premises.

How far should one go, rationally, to help out others willingly (short of trying to live for them)? That's where exactly identifying one's own - objective - values applies. Anything acted upon, if well within the range of one's own resources - material and physical and mental abilities - would not be a sacrifice, I think. Everything which requires robbing your resources at greater cost to, or surrender of your own chosen life values - spiritual, human, intellectual, material - and a great value, your time - would constitute a self-sacrifice, a loss to yourself and betrayal of what and who was much more precious to you.

The largest indictment of altruism is that nobody practices it completely. Everyone knows tacitly it is impossible to do, with consistency, while managing to hold onto any remnants of values which they'd eventually have to give up to sustain living for the sake of others, until the point they themselves are needy of charitable help. So the guilty, agonizing conflict each lives in: how much can and ~must~ I give up -- of myself in order *to be good'*(in mine and in others' eyes, or God's)? A second indictment, altruism destroys what it supposedly sets out to accomplish - since it will be no surprise then that such a person ends up resenting others' real and perceived demands on him, then loathing other people, and finally putting paid to genuine goodwill and helpfulness among men. That together with the effects of collectivism is where we are at today, you can see.

 

[anthony]

On 6/2/2018 at 9:22 PM, jts said:

Sometimes I am confused by the difference between selfishness and altruism.

Example 1:  A soldier gives his life to save others. Some people would call this an act of altruism. Objectivists probably would call this an act of selfishness.

Example 2.  A man decides to practise the virtue of selfishness. So he gets a job and takes care of himself instead of living on welfare and being a parasite.Another man decides to practise altruism. So he gets a job and takes care of himself the same as the first man did. But he tells himself that he is practising altruism because he is relieving others of the burden of taking care of him.

Example 3.  An act of charity or generosity such as giving money to the poor and needy or to the Ayn Rand Institute can be viewed as an act of selfishness or as an act of altruism depending on how you look at it. Yaron Brook would have you believe that you can give money to the ARI without buying anything and do that as an act of selfishness.

 

 

Example 1. First off, anyone who "gives" his life is at least a fool - or immoral. That means he finds little value in his supreme value. This "soldier example" is evergreen, why, I think because this is taken as altruism at its most noble and we get all emotional about an apparent self-sacrifice. It bears little resemblance to real life. An unconscripted individual joins up the military, because he recognises a top, objective value in his country, keeping it free, etc. He is then willing to possibly *risk* - not give - his life for the great value. His agreement is implicit in the contract he signs. In a moral Army, he is never put into situations of inevitable death by his officers. (Men - hold this position to the last man...!)It can happen that say, his unit comes under heavy fire in the open, and he estimates the best and only response to save he and his fellows is to make a dangerous, offensive move. Risk against reward. This is what he agreed to and what he was trained for. A lesser value, his risk, for the greater value, all their lives, and sometimes it comes off. That sounds selfishly moral, so if he died in the attempt it wasn't a self-sacrifice. 

It won't happen to 99% of individual lives 99% of the time. 

Take that into account and you see that this is so remote a scenario that it's hardly realistic, but altruists like to refer to the unlikely or extreme or impossible to make their non-point, which gives their game away. Altruism isn't "real", it is unnatural to human life. They will insinuate/state: See what this man did, why can't we all be like him and be instantly ready to "give" our lives for others? (Also, sacrifice-lovers seem to think everybody lives in a movie script, a work of fiction).

[william.scherk]

3 hours ago, anthony said:

[A]ltruists like to refer to the unlikely or extreme or impossible to make their non-point, which gives their game away. Altruism isn't "real", it is unnatural to human life.

I've found it useful to separate out a Randian definition from definitions derived from (evolutionary) biology;  altruistic behaviours of animals (including human animals) fit within a fairly limited meaning -- and without reifying a 'thing' into a living being or independent force ("Altruism says ...").

We can find examples in human behaviour in which a person acted to gain and keep values,   the action benefited someone else -- resulting in consequences harmful in some way to the first person, his or her own integrity.

Ellen and I have some good discussion about the differences in definition ... I'll see if I cannot find it.  My go-to place on OL when I come up against "Altruism says" is the Barbara Branden thread on Altruism.

While I dig out Ellen's contributions to my understanding, here's another thread that takes up the challenge of definitions, featuring Ellen and Robert Campbell amongst other thoughtful comments:

 

Edited June 4, 2018 by william.scherk
Minor grammar fix

[anthony]

William, What's necessary I believe is to mentally remove charity and other aid to others, from "altruism". They are the inessential (minor?) part of the concept. Rand''s meaning is the proper and original meaning given by Comte: Briefly, one is born and exists to help others. Your life is subservient to other lives. That's how Comte thought he observed a complex society survive and continue - the consequence of other-ism by every citizen. Needless to say, he wasn't observant of human nature.

Once you disassociate the two, it becomes clearer. What I've noticed the altruist does, is to combine them as one, i.e. a 'good' act by you (because something or someone catches your attention, your identification and evaluation - and emotions - so much so that you find selfish value in helping them out of a dis-value) - then must -obviously- become a lifetime of emotionally-caused actions dedicated to others, self-sacrificially - at net loss to your values and self. Clever trick, actually, but dirty.

The biological argument, (I like to add - the skeptical argument) which simplistically follows on from what animals (ants in anthills, etc.) are genetically 'programmed' to do for survival, is self-defeating and self-contradictory. It ignores that man is the rational animal and doesn't know automatically what is "good" for himself - or others - which is why he needs an objective theory of the good. Try living for one day on 'instinct'!

[william.scherk]

49 minutes ago, anthony said:

Rand''s meaning is the proper and original meaning given by Comte: Briefly, one is born and exists to help others. [...]

I think one could probably make a list of Rand's various extension and supplements to "the proper and original meaning."  It has been done before in a couple of topic threads.

Citing Rand is always fun for everyone!

Quote

The biological argument, (I like to add - the skeptical argument) which simplistically follows on from what animals (ants in anthills, etc.) are genetically 'programmed' to do for survival, is self-defeating and self-contradictory.

It looks like it may not be as much fun to cite "The Biological Argument."

If I promised five bucks to OL, would you care to cite the biological argument? It could be seen as a floating abstraction ... unless we can examine the argument.

Quote

It [the biological argument] ignores that man is the rational animal and doesn't know automatically what is "good" for himself - or others - which is why he needs an objective theory of the good. Try living for one day on 'instinct'!

It might be a difficult as getting through the day relying on one's understanding of "human nature." 

"The 'human nature argument' of course is anti-man and anti-reason," he said without giving any specifics.

Quote

Ayn Rand did not use "altruism" uniformly. As shown in the first Lexicon entry, she said, "The irreducible primary of altruism, the basic absolute, is self-sacrifice—which means; self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial, self-destruction—which means: the self as a standard of evil, the selfless as a standard of the good." A dictator may be an advocate of self-sacrifice by others and in practice sacrifice others, but completely reject self-sacrifice of himself. Another person may practice self-sacrifice (of himself). Condensing all these behaviors into one category confounds significant differences.

She also said, "altruism permits no view of men except as sacrificial animals and profiteers-on-sacrifice, as victims and parasites." That portrays altruism more broadly than simply self-sacrifice (of one's self).

 

Quote

It's the same problem in both cases. The problem is her using a meaning at variance with common parlance use of a term and insisting that her meaning is the "right" meaning - and managing to produce needless misunderstanding on the part of people who aren't aware that they have to learn a Rand-decreed vocabulary to get what she's talking about.

I'll give an example from another area, cosmology. The term "Big Bang" was coined by Fred Hoyle as a pejorative. People adopted it, however, as the name for the mainstream theory. Suppose someone were to insist on using the term in the way Hoyle did. Unless the person engaged in repeated explanation, the likely result is that the person would be misunderstood.

 

Edited June 4, 2018 by william.scherk
Formatting

[anthony]

Hey, it takes two to tango! The self-sacrificer will eventually disappear if everybody rejects his sacrifices. The sacrificer of others to himself will fail if others resist being sacrificed. If they are able. He could have force over them, and so, "the dictator" . In general, there is complicity between sacrificer and self-sacrificer and they add up to the same "altruist" thing.

"Common parlance" is usually immaterial. Philosophy contains other uncommon parlance which is correct-to-reality, where common use is superficial. I.e. "selfish" - a pointless argument over definition, if ever there was.

[anthony]

On 6/2/2018 at 9:22 PM, jts said:

Sometimes I am confused by the difference between selfishness and altruism.

 

Example 2.  A man decides to practise the virtue of selfishness. So he gets a job and takes care of himself instead of living on welfare and being a parasite.Another man decides to practise altruism. So he gets a job and takes care of himself the same as the first man did. But he tells himself that he is practising altruism because he is relieving others of the burden of taking care of him.

 

 

 

4

If that's his rationale for taking a job (relieving others of the burden) believing he is practicing altruism, you have to take his word for it - he is an altruist. It is not for his rationally-selfish sake, but concern for others.

[anthony]

21 hours ago, william.scherk said:

I think one could probably make a list of Rand's various extension and supplements to "the proper and original meaning."  It has been done before in a couple of topic threads.

Citing Rand is always fun for everyone!

It looks like it may not be as much fun to cite "The Biological Argument."

If I promised five bucks to OL, would you care to cite the biological argument? It could be seen as a floating abstraction ... unless we can examine the argument.

It might be a difficult as getting through the day relying on one's understanding of "human nature." 

"The 'human nature argument' of course is anti-man and anti-reason," he said without giving any specifics.

 

 

William, "I think one could make a list of Rand's various extension and supplements..." True, you can have fun with that...

What this is I think, was that Rand could quickly identify not only the core concept, but: a. its premises; where it came from, by what thinking, and b. its consequences; where it will logically lead. Objectivist identification, you know, includes causality (the law of identity applied to action). After which, her evaluation of the consequences in action, in terms of objective value, will determine whether such concept is good or bad for man..

[william.scherk]

Thanks, Tony. I am left still wondering about The Biological Argument from your remarks upthread.

[william.scherk]

Altruism ...

2 hours ago, anthony said:

On 6/4/2018 at 11:11 AM, william.scherk said:

Quote

The biological argument, (I like to add - the skeptical argument) which simplistically follows on from what animals (ants in anthills, etc.) are genetically 'programmed' to do for survival, is self-defeating and self-contradictory.

It looks like it may not be as much fun to cite "The Biological Argument."

If I promised five bucks to OL, would you care to cite the biological argument? 

[...] Rand could quickly identify not only the core concept, but: a. its premises; where it came from, by what thinking, and b. its consequences; where it will logically lead. Objectivist identification, you know, includes causality (the law of identity applied to action). After which, her evaluation of the consequences in action, in terms of objective value, will determine whether such concept is good or bad for man..

I am going to offer "breeding rights" theses and anti-theses drawn on observations -- considering the opening post. I shall contrast the empirical, the skeptical, the objectivist, the Kantian-Comtean, and neo-Randian takes on "breeding rights," without begging the biological question, I hope.  Or maybe I will not even compare and contrast, I'll just narrate a story.

What the hell are these "breeding rights"? Maybe I don't even yet get it.

Do they extend past your own living property and belongings and semen/eggs?  Can you be wrongly denied such a right, and if so, what is your redress in various places in the world, under various politico-philosophical regimes?

Is a "right to abort" included in the roster of essential breeding [powers/]rights?

I might find out that 'rights' to breed, propagate, disseminate, and control the living products of a process or patent are fiendishly complex in the case of dogs,  domesticated foxes, cell-lines, plants, genetic material and so on, and yet fiendishly simple in the case of human beings ...

The first illustration I can think of for human breeding rights are photographs of big families. Grotesque slums, Roma hovels in Transylvania, squalid California homeless encampments, or hideous refugee hellholes Over There are evocative indeed, but tell other chapters of a larger human story, perhaps.

Spoiler

It is weird that the reproductive "rights" of remaining loyal FLDS folks are still in the hands of the prophet.  Basically, no one can breed until he says so.  And he hasn't said so. First they come for the colour red, then music and toys, then unlaquered hair,  but always they come for your genitals.

 

Edited June 5, 2018 by william.scherk
Grrrrrrrammar

[anthony]

Biological Altruism

First published Tue Jun 3, 2003; substantive revision Sun Jul 21, 2013

In evolutionary biology, an organism is said to behave altruistically when its behaviour benefits other organisms, at a cost to itself. The costs and benefits are measured in terms of reproductive fitness, or expected number of offspring. So by behaving altruistically, an organism reduces the number of offspring it is likely to produce itself, but boosts the number that other organisms are likely to produce. This biological notion of altruism is not identical to the everyday concept. In everyday parlance, an action would only be called ‘altruistic’ if it was done with the conscious intention of helping another. But in the biological sense there is no such requirement. Indeed, some of the most interesting examples of biological altruism are found among creatures that are (presumably) not capable of conscious thought at all, e.g. insects. For the biologist, it is the consequences of an action for reproductive fitness that determine whether the action counts as altruistic, not the intentions, if any, with which the action is performed.

Altruistic behaviour is common throughout the animal kingdom, particularly in species with complex social structures. For example, vampire bats regularly regurgitate blood and donate it to other members of their group who have failed to feed that night, ensuring they do not starve. In numerous bird species, a breeding pair receives help in raising its young from other ‘helper’ birds, who protect the nest from predators and help to feed the fledglings. Vervet monkeys give alarm calls to warn fellow monkeys of the presence of predators, even though in doing so they attract attention to themselves, increasing their personal chance of being attacked. In social insect colonies (ants, wasps, bees and termites), sterile workers devote their whole lives to caring for the queen, constructing and protecting the nest, foraging for food, and tending the larvae. Such behaviour is maximally altruistic: sterile workers obviously do not leave any offspring of their own—so have personal fitness of zero—but their actions greatly assist the reproductive efforts of the queen.

From a Darwinian viewpoint, the existence of altruism in nature is at first sight puzzling, as Darwin himself realized. Natural selection leads us to expect animals to behave in ways that increase their own chances of survival and reproduction, not those of others. But by behaving altruistically an animal reduces its own fitness, so should be at a selective disadvantage vis-à-vis one which behaves selfishly. [...] Stanford Encyc. of Philosophy

[anthony]

2 hours ago, william.scherk said:

Thanks, Tony. 

Sure, a pleasure. You can see why other thinkers would be aghast at Rand.

"But that doesn't mean that!" "How can she know..?"

Her 'secret' method was in causal identification.

[Jonathan]

On 9/23/2014 at 11:40 PM, jts said:

Chris Langan...

Who?

A guy who is very good at taking tests, and at nothing else?

J

[anthony]

PHILOSOPHY

Image: Image: Sam Harris, Wikimedia Commons

The Mystical Ethics of the New Atheists

Alan Germani  January 23, 2014  AudioPDF In The Objective Standard, Fall 2008

In the wake of the religiously motivated atrocities of 9/11, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens have penned best-selling books in which they condemn religious belief as destructive to human life and as lacking any basis in reality.* On the premise that religious belief as such leads to atrocities, the “New Atheists,” as these four have come to be known, criticize religion as invalid, mind-thwarting, self-perpetuating, and deadly. As Sam Harris puts it: “Because each new generation of children is taught that religious propositions need not be justified in the way that others must, civilization is still besieged by the armies of the preposterous. We are, even now, killing ourselves over ancient literature. Who would have thought something so tragically absurd could be possible?”1

The problem, say the New Atheists, is not merely the “armies of the preposterous”—militant religionists such as Islamic jihadists or so-called religious extremists. The broader problem, as Harris notes, is the “larger set of cultural and intellectual accommodations we have made for faith itself. Religious moderates are, in large part, responsible for the religious conflict in our world, because their beliefs provide the context in which scriptural literalism and religious violence can never be adequately opposed.”2 In other words, religious moderates shelter and fuel the religious militants of the world by espousing or condoning the beliefs that motivate them. The New Atheists want such moderates to wake up to the dangers inherent in their religions, to question their unquestioned beliefs, and to stop supporting the militants’ faith by giving it, in Dawkins’s words, undeserved respect.3

In their efforts to change the minds of such religionists, the New Atheists enumerate the absurdities of religious doctrine, from virgin births to covenants with God to harems for martyrs; they recall the atrocities to which religious belief has led, from the Spanish Inquisition to the Salem “witch” trials to 9/11; and they call for a “future of reason” and “the end of faith.”

But the New Atheists acknowledge that documenting the historical consequences of religious belief is insufficient to convince people to abandon religion. Many people cling to religion because they regard it as the only possible source for an objective morality. They believe, as Dawkins puts it, that “without God there would be no standard for deciding what is good.”4 In other words, people accept religion because they need morality; they need principles to guide their personal choices, social relations, and political institutions—and, explicitly or implicitly, they know it. Until religionists are convinced that there is a secular source for an objective morality, they will continue to cling to religion for this reason if no other. As Harris puts it:

The problem is that once we abandon our belief in a rule-making God, the question of why a given action is good or bad becomes a matter of debate. And a statement like “Murder is wrong,” while being uncontroversial in most circles, has never seemed anchored to the facts of this world in the way that statements about planets or molecules appear to be. The problem, in philosophical terms, has been one of characterizing just what sort of “facts” our moral intuitions can be said to track—if, indeed, they track anything of the kind.5

Setting aside for the moment the notion of “moral intuitions,” this passage points to a crucial truth: In order to persuade religionists to abandon their dangerous beliefs, one must do more than show what is wrong with religion—one must provide something positive to fill the moral void. One must show that an objective morality exists and that it is based not on revelation or faith but on observable facts. One must show how morality is derived via reason from sensory evidence.

What do the New Atheists offer in this regard? What morality do they espouse—and how do they arrive at its principles?

Let us turn first to the ethical ideas of Christopher Hitchens.

“We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion,” says Hitchens of himself and his fellow atheists in the opening pages of God Is Not Great.6 Although Hitchens exerts little effort elaborating what such an ethical life entails (he focuses primarily on demonstrating the follies of religious belief and arguing for a secular and scientific vs. supernatural understanding of the universe), he does assert his ethical views in statements scattered throughout his written works and public appearances. For instance, in one passage in God Is Not Great, he posits that men are naturally selfish and opines that perhaps we would be “better mammals” if we were not.7 Asked on ABC’sGood Morning America to respond to those who ask him to consider the “good” that religion does, including its promotion of “charity” and “selflessness,” Hitchens lauded as moral those “who live their lives in effect for others”—but insisted that atheists can lead such lives, too.8 These and similar statements show that Hitchens equates morality with altruism, the notion that being ethical consists in living for others.

How does Hitchens “know” that this idea is true? What facts of reality does he cite in support of it? “[C]onscience,” says Hitchens, “is innate,” and “[e]verybody but the psychopath” has the “feeling” that this is so.9 This “innate conscience” is what makes murder and theft “abhorrent to humans without any further explanation”; it is what gives children an “innate sense of fairness”; and it is what informs each of us of our “duty to others.”10 In short, according to Hitchens, this “innate conscience” enables us to just know what is right and wrong—and altruism is right.

The notion of an “innate conscience” is, of course, not original to Hitchens; the history of philosophy is replete with appeals to a “moral sense” or “moral intuition” or “moral law within.” But although many have appealed to such a sense, none has ever been able to overcome the fact that it is observationally false that humans possess an innate sense of right and wrong: Many people, and not just psychopaths, make horrifically bad choices that ruin their own lives, the lives of others, or both. And not all of these people know that their actions are morally wrong. On the contrary, many believe that their actions are morally justified. Among the countless counterexamples one could cite against any claim to an “innate conscience” is the fact that the 9/11 hijackers regarded their murderous actions not as abhorrent, but as sublime. Did these killers—and the millions of people in the Middle East who celebrated their actions—lack an innate conscience? Or did their innate consciences house different contents than those of Americans who reacted with horror to what they did?

Ironically, the claim to innate knowledge—the claim to “just knowing” something—is precisely what Hitchens and the other New Atheists condemn when they condemn faith. Accepting an idea on faith means accepting it when there is no evidence to support it. Claiming innate knowledge amounts to the same thing: claiming to “know” something apart from evidence.

The claim to “innate knowledge,” like the claim to knowledge through faith, is a form of mysticism, the claim to a non-rational, non-sensory means of knowledge.

The fact is that moral ideas are not innate; like all ideas, they are created, chosen, learned—and they can be developed or accepted either rationally (via observation and logic) or irrationally (via non-rational means). Moral ideas can be founded on fact or based on feeling; they can be valid or invalid. The question is: How do we know whether a particular moral claim is valid or invalid? What is the standard of moral validity?

By insisting that moral ideas are innate, Hitchens shirks the vital task of identifying a moral standard—and thereby abdicates the possibility of grounding his anti-religion diatribes: How can religious belief be wrong if the “innate consciences” of billions of people tell them that it is right?

Would that this was the extent of Hitchens’s failures.

In connection with his observationally false view that morality is innate, Hitchens subscribes to the idea that man is mentally and thus morally hampered by innate irrationality. As he puts it:

Past and present religious atrocities have occurred not because we are evil, but because it is a fact of nature that the human species is, biologically, only partly rational. Evolution has meant that our prefrontal lobes are too small, our adrenal glands are too big, and our reproductive organs apparently designed by committee; a recipe which, alone or in combination, is very certain to lead to some unhappiness and disorder.11

Hitchens further claims that man has a “religious impulse” or “worshipping tendency” and that religious faith exists and is ineradicable because “we are still-evolving creatures.”12

These are curious claims coming from an intellectual who seeks to change minds about morality. If man’s ethical ideas were innate, if his biology predisposed him to irrationality, if he had no choice about whether to commit evil, then the entire field of morality—which presupposes that man does choose his actions—would not only be pointless; it would be impossible. If man cannot choose his actions, then he cannot have a guide to choosing his actions.

Although Hitchens may be adept at pointing out religious absurdities, he not only fails spectacularly when it comes to providing a valid secular alternative to the moral guidance provided by religion—he endorses essentially the same ethics as do religionists (altruism) and he arrives at this ethics by essentially the same means (mysticism). If this is the best the New Atheists have to offer in their efforts to lure people away from religion, they should not be surprised to find religionists ignoring them.

At first glance, Sam Harris appears committed to discovering a valid secular moral standard: He shows as little regard for secular viewpoints that lack such a standard as he does for religion. Harris correctly characterizes the folly of moral relativism as follows: “No one is ever really right about what he believes; he can only point to a community of peers who believe likewise. Suicide bombing isn’t really wrong, in any absolute sense; it just seems so from the parochial perspective of Western culture.” Harris also condemns pragmatism for lacking a moral standard, noting that, from its point of view, “the notion that our beliefs might ‘correspond with reality’ is absurd. Beliefs are simply tools for making one’s way in the world.” And Harris speaks frankly to the futility of holding either of these views:

To lose the conviction that you can actually be right—about anything—seems a recipe for the End of Days chaos envisioned by Yeats: when “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” I believe that relativism and pragmatism have already done much to muddle our thinking on a variety of subjects, many of which have more than a passing relevance to the survival of civilization.13

Eschewing relativism and pragmatism, Harris subscribes to “ethical realism,” the view that

our statements about the world will be “true” or “false” not merely in virtue of how they function amid the welter of our other beliefs, or with reference to any culture-bound criteria, but because reality simply is a certain way, independent of our thoughts. . . . To be an ethical realist is to believe that in ethics, as in physics, there are truths waiting to be discovered—and thus we can be right or wrong in our beliefs about them.14

Such passages in Harris’s works raise hope that he will identify and advocate a reality-based alternative to the ethics of religion and relativism. Unfortunately, however, Harris, like Hitchens, “grounds” his ethics in innate knowledge, which he labels “intuition.”15

According to Harris, there is a point at which “we can break our knowledge of a thing down no further,” a point at which we must anchor our ethical and other ideas to reality by taking “irreducible leaps” via “intuition,” which he says is the “most basic constituent of our faculty of understanding.”16

Why does an “ethical realist,” who claims to believe that ethical truths are waiting in reality to be discovered, insist that ethics must be grounded “intuitively,” via “irreducible leaps,” rather than rationally, via direct observations of reality? Because, Harris’s paean to a discoverable ethics notwithstanding, he subscribes to the neo-Kantian view that our sense perceptions are “structured, edited, or amplified by the nervous system” to the point that “[n]o human being has ever experienced an objective world, or even a world at all.”17

Although there is a long philosophical tradition that denies the validity of the senses, and although such skepticism remains fashionable to this day, the validity of the senses is self-evident: We rely on our senses all day, every day to ascertain the facts of reality. If our senses were invalid, we would have no means by which to determine whether it is safe to cross the street, whether our food is sufficiently cooked, or whether the phone is ringing. If our senses were invalid, we would have no means of identifying any such facts, and we could not function or live.

The fact is that the “most basic constituent of our faculty of understanding” is not “intuition,” but sense perception—our mind’s basic contact with reality. And those who try to deny the validity of the senses must rely on that very validity in the process of doing so. In order to put his denial in print, for instance, a skeptic author must rely on his sense of touch to convey his thoughts through his keyboard; he must rely on his vision to see his monitor and confirm that his keystrokes have correctly formed his intended words and sentences; he must rely on the vision of an editor to read his manuscript and on his own sense of hearing to field the editor’s phone calls; he must rely on the sensory perception of thousands of people involved in the printing, marketing, and distribution of his tract; and he must rely on the vision of his readers if they are to gain knowledge of his remarkable assertion that “[n]o human being has ever experienced an objective world, or even a world at all.”18

Fashionable though it may be to deny the validity of the senses, doing so makes no sense. Nor is it a sound strategy for persuading people, as Harris hopes to do, that ethical truths, like physical truths, are “waiting to be discovered.”

Because Harris denies the possibility of knowing reality, it should come as no surprise that he, like Hitchens, defaults to the “just knowing” view of ethics. Unlike Hitchens, however, Harris specifies a moral standard.

Our “intuitions,” he says, tell us that the standard of the good is “happiness” and that the standard of the evil is “suffering.” Does this mean that one should promote one’s own life by pursuing happiness and by avoiding suffering? No, says Harris, such pursuits and avoidances do not qualify as moral; an act “becomes a matter of ethics only when the happiness of others is also at stake”—at which point we have “ethical responsibilities” toward them.19 Does this mean that we should reward those who bring value to our lives? No, says Harris, to “treat others ethically” is to set aside one’s own selfish interests and to “act out of concern for their happiness and suffering. It is, as Kant observed, to treat them as ends in themselves rather than as a means to some further end.”20

On Harris’s account, we are morally obliged to promote the happiness and reduce the suffering of others, whatever the consequence to our own lives may be.

t is one thing to think it “wrong” that people are starving elsewhere in the world; it is another to find this as intolerable as one would if these people were one’s friends. There may, in fact, be no ethical justification for all of us fortunate people to carry on with our business while other people starve. . . . It may be that a clear view of the matter . . . would oblige us to work tirelessly to alleviate the hunger of every last stranger as though it were our own. On this account, how could one go to the movies and remain ethical? One couldn’t. One would simply be taking a vacation from one’s ethics.21

Like Hitchens, Harris advocates altruism, the notion that being moral consists in living for the sake of others, or, more precisely, in self-sacrificially serving others. And although Harris acknowledges that “there are millions of people whose faith moves them to perform extraordinary acts of self-sacrifice for the benefit of others,” he claims that “there are far better reasons for self-sacrifice than those that religion provides.”22

The best “reason” for self-sacrifice, says Harris, is that “the social feeling of love is one of our greatest sources of happiness; and love entails that we be concerned for the happiness of others.” This, he says, “suggests a clear link between ethics [by which Harris means altruism] and positive human emotions. The fact that we want the people we love to be happy, and are made happy by love in turn, is an empirical observation.”23

The happiness that Harris advocates is not the happiness that comes from the achievement of one’s own self-interested, life-promoting values. Rather, it is a “higher happiness,” which allegedly comes from sacrificing one’s own interests for the sake of others.24

What if someone, in his self-sacrificial service to others, fails to achieve this “higher happiness”? Harris says that he should rectify the situation by meditating and liberating himself from the “illusion of the self” that is the “string upon which all [his] states of suffering and dissatisfaction are strung.”25 And what if this person still fails to intuitively grasp the sacrificial essence of ethics? Then, says Harris, he may be precluded from “taking part in any serious discussion” of morality.26

Far from demonstrating how ethical truths might be discovered by reference to the facts of reality, Harris severs moral inquiry from reality by denying the validity of the senses, embraces self-sacrifice as the essence of morality, “grounds” this principle in “intuition,” and then attempts to intimidate those who challenge the propriety of that code or method. Further, like Hitchens, he maintains that man is both impaired by immoral intuitions that “lurk inside every human mind” and predisposed to religious belief.27 And, lest he leave open the possibility that man can choose to act contrary to his intuitions and predispositions, Harris explicitly denies the existence of free will.28Without choice, it is worth reiterating, morality has no meaning, and books such as Harris’s are an exercise in futility. Again, if this is the best the New Atheists have to offer in the realm of morality, they should not be surprised when their bestsellers fail to change many minds.

Like Hitchens and Harris, both Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins hold that being moral consists in self-sacrificially serving others. Dennett regards as moral those who are “making the world better by their efforts, inspired by their conviction that their lives [are] not their own to dispose of as they choose” and willing to let their “own mundane preoccupations . . . shrink to proper size” (Dennett’s emphasis) because they are “not all that important in the greater scheme of things.”29 He regards as immoral those who are “self-absorbed,” “self-centered,” and who “slack off on the sacrifice and good works” in which they ought to engage.30 Similarly, Dawkins regards as moral those who are “altruistic,” and as immoral those who are “selfish.”31

Dawkins, like Hitchens and Harris, claims that man possesses innate moral ideas, but he posits an evolutionary basis for them, saying that, “in ancestral times when we lived in small and stable bands like baboons,” natural selection “programmed into our brains altruistic urges,” which he characterizes as “Darwinian mistakes: blessed and precious mistakes.”32 Dawkins also holds that humans are predisposed to religious belief—but, again, he posits an evolutionary explanation for the idea and, in the process, references a theory of Dennett’s that our irrational tendency toward religion is “a by-product of a particular built-in irrationality mechanism in the brain: our tendency, which presumably has genetic advantages, to fall in love.”33

Of course, the same objections to Hitchens and Harris’s positions on these matters apply to Dennett and Dawkins’s: If man’s views of “right” and “wrong” spring from innate ideas (genetically rooted or otherwise), or if he is biologically predisposed to irrationality, then morality, the realm of chosen values, simply does not apply to man. According to Dennett and Dawkins, however, ethics is not derived merely from innate ideas; social consensus also plays a role.

Dennett says that “no factual investigation” could answer “questions about ultimate values” and that “we can do no better than to sit down and reason together, a political process of mutual persuasion and education that we can try to conduct in good faith.”34 In other words, because we cannot derive moral principles from facts (the old “is–ought dichotomy”),35 we should survey existing ethical views and accept those that are most popular. Although Dawkins agrees that ethics must be rooted in moral consensus, he says that we can forgo Dennett’s extended ethical chat—because such a consensus already exists.

Citing some of the horrors found in the Old and New Testaments, Dawkins observes that today “we do not, as a matter of fact, derive our morals from scripture. Or, if we do, we pick and choose among the scriptures for the nice bits and reject the nasty.”36 He notes that if we derived our morals from scripture, “we would strictly observe the sabbath and think it just and proper to execute anybody who chose not to. We would stone to death any new bride who couldn’t prove she was a virgin, if her husband pronounced himself unsatisfied with her. We would execute disobedient children.”37 Because we do pick and choose, he says, “we must have some independent criterion for deciding which are the moral bits: a criterion which, wherever it comes from, cannot come from scripture itself and is presumably available to all of us whether we are religious or not.”38

The “independent criterion” by which Dawkins denounces the story of the biblical flood as evil and by which he praises Jesus as “surely one of the great ethical innovators of history”39 is what he calls the “moral Zeitgeist.”

[T]here is a consensus about what we do as a matter of fact consider right and wrong: a consensus that prevails surprisingly widely. . . . With notable exceptions such as the Afghan Taliban and the American Christian equivalent, most people pay lip service to the same broad liberal consensus of ethical principles. The majority of us don’t cause needless suffering; we believe in free speech and protect it even if we disagree with what is being said; we pay our taxes; we don’t cheat, don’t kill, don’t commit incest, don’t do things to others that we would not wish done to us.40

An important attribute of Dawkins’s “somewhat mysterious consensus” is that it evolves over time. This shifting “moral Zeitgeist,” then, would explain why civilized people today look with horror upon the numerous instances of biblical heroes committing or condoning rape and mass murder, whereas the Bible’s authors—with their ancient ethical mindsets—did not think twice about portraying such real or imagined events as magnificent.

To illustrate this evolving morality, Dawkins points to several examples from the past two hundred years. For instance, whereas just a few decades ago it was uncontroversial in the West to hold that blacks were intellectually inferior to whites and that women were intellectually inferior to men, such views seem shocking today. Attitudes regarding civilian casualties have similarly changed; Dawkins points out that “Donald Rumsfeld, who sounds so callous and odious today, would have sounded like a bleeding-heart liberal if he had said the same things during the Second World War.”41

But Dawkins’s theory of the “moral Zeitgeist” clearly does not solve the problem of how to validate moral ideas by reference to reality; it just treats collective opinion as though it were objective fact. That a changing moral consensus exists and that most people unthinkingly absorb their moral views through social osmosis does not mean that the consensus is correct or that people should acquire their moral views this way. Although Dawkins acknowledges that we can and must judge the contents of the Bible by reference to an independent moral standard, he fails to recognize that we can and must judge the social consensus by reference to the same.

Any attempt to ground morality in social consensus—whether of Dennett’s “we democratically agree on it” variety or of Dawkins’s “mysteriously shifting” variety—is hopelessly non-objective. Either the consensus is always right, or it can be wrong. If it is always right, then morality is subjective and simple: Morality equals popular opinion, whatever that happens to be at the time. If this is the case, there are no objective moral principles; there are only ever-changing social policies. If this is the case, the New Atheists have no grounds on which to condemn the inhuman religiosity of the Middle Ages, for its crimes were moral by the standards of the then-contemporary “Zeitgeist.” If the consensus can be wrong, however, then there must be an objective standard by reference to which it can be assessed.

For all their noise, the New Atheists fail to identify such a standard. While decrying faith, they fail to show that morality can be based on reason and thus grounded in reality. They fail to offer anything essentially different from the religionists whom they condemn, instead joining them in the belief that moral knowledge can only be gained by non-rational means.

Why do these alleged men of reason join men of faith in appealing to mysticism as a basis for morality? The reason is simple: The morality they seek to defend, altruism, cannot be grounded in reason or reality. There are no facts that give rise to the principle that a person should sacrifice himself for the sake of others. Those who maintain that being moral consists in being altruistic have no alternative but to base that belief on some form of mysticism—whether “innate ideas,” or “intuition,” or a “mysterious consensus,” or religious faith. The New Atheists may have omitted God from their ethics, but their ethics remains essentially the same as that of the religions they condemn: a mystical call to self-sacrifice.

In today’s predominantly religious world, it takes some measure of courage to criticize faith and challenge the existence of God—and Hitchens, Harris, Dennett, and Dawkins deserve some measure of credit for doing so. But it takes greater courage to challenge the even more widespread belief that being moral consists in self-sacrificially serving others. If the New Atheists are serious about convincing people to abandon religion and adopt a rationalsecular worldview, then they must find the courage to follow reason wherever it leads—even if it leads them, as it will, to challenge the validity of altruism.

Fortunately for those who do have the courage to follow reason and challenge the validity of altruism, Ayn Rand has already discovered, demonstrated, and codified a morality based on and derived from the demonstrable requirements of human life, happiness, and coexistence: rational egoism. By first asking the question “Why does man need morality?” she proceeded to discover that man, as a being who must make choices, needs morality as a guide to life-promoting action. She discovered that man’s life is the standard of moral value—which means that actions that advance man’s life are moral and that those that retard or destroy man’s life are immoral.

Unlike religion and secular altruism, rational egoism neither entails nor permits any claim on the lives of other men. It holds that each man should act in his own best interest and that each man is the proper beneficiary of his own thought and action. And because egoism recognizes that it is right for a man to think and act in his self-interest, it also recognizes that it is wrong for others to violate this right through physical force or fraud. Rational egoism not only serves to guide an individual’s actions; it also serves as the foundation for a rights-respecting, civilized society.

It is beyond the purpose of this article to elaborate the ethics of rational egoism. But those who see the glaring need for a rational (i.e., non-mystical), life-serving (i.e., non-sacrificial) morality—a morality for living and achieving happiness on Earth—will find it elaborated in the works of Ayn Rand.

[anthony]

On 6/2/2018 at 9:22 PM, jts said:

Sometimes I am confused by the difference between selfishness and altruism.

 

Example 3.  An act of charity or generosity such as giving money to the poor and needy or to the Ayn Rand Institute can be viewed as an act of selfishness or as an act of altruism depending on how you look at it. Yaron Brook would have you believe that you can give money to the ARI without buying anything and do that as an act of selfishness.

 

 

 

Can you imagine anyone or yourself giving "to the poor and needy", without seeing and taking any satisfaction from it? Giving, divorced from self, the giver? If there's objective value, there is rational selfishness, all beginning with one's observations and thought (identification and evaluation) about anyone in need. As aside, how demeaning it must be for the recipient of charity who is considered value-less by a 'selfless' donor.

But there are the philosophers who command that to be fully moral, one should do exactly so ~without~ looking for and finding value in the act and recipient- i.e. mindlessly, dutifully and self-lessly. (In Rand's insight , and we can see, this advocacy destroys voluntary charity or benevolence or kindness).

ARI, an easy answer - as for any cause and organization- donate, selfishly, if you choose and if you think Objectivism should be spread widely and ARI helps achieve that end and will use your money wisely. Instead, consider the extreme, of a convinced Marxist who donates to the Karl Marx Institute (or somesuch). He may equally claim on whim (subjectively) he's giving in a spirit of selflessness - or, conversely, contributing from the 'selfish value' he sees in promoting his creed. So the selfish act isn't derived from self, as such, it's conditional - defined by an  individual's rationality and the ~type~ of value he holds. In the case of irrational, anti-individual, altruist Marxism, his can only be a subjectivist or intrinsic value, never objective value with man's life as its standard. 

 

[william.scherk]

URL links to Tony's excerpted and full-text reproduction ...

1 hour ago, anthony said:

PHILOSOPHY

Image: Image: Sam Harris, Wikimedia Commons

The Mystical Ethics of the New Atheists

Alan Germani  January 23, 2014  Audio  PDF In The Objective Standard, Fall 2008

https://www.theobjectivestandard.com/issues/2008-fall/mystical-ethics-new-atheists/

19 hours ago, anthony said:

Biological Altruism

First published Tue Jun 3, 2003; substantive revision Sun Jul 21, 2013

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/altruism-biological/

Edited June 6, 2018 by william.scherk
Added descriptor

[anthony]

9 hours ago, william.scherk said:

URL links to Tony's excerpted and full-text reproduction ...

https://www.theobjectivestandard.com/issues/2008-fall/mystical-ethics-new-atheists/

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/altruism-biological/

Thanks man. Alan Germani nicely dissects the quartet of New Atheists (Harris, Dennett, Dawkins, Hitchens). As militantly atheist as these naturalists are, in different ways their neo-mystical roots are still showing in professing altruism and self-sacrifice. And if they have no realist, reasoned alternative for morality, what draw can their other secular ideas be for new atheists?