Israel Should Ignore the Protests to Fulfill Them

[Mike11]

If someone can show me a single instance when "defeating" Palestinians on the battlefield made Israel safer (its obviously completely pointless to ask most of you to think in terms of what is best for Palestinians) I am open to hearing your theory.

The only time violence has worked over there was when Syria and Egypt bitch slapped Israel in '73.

Edited January 10, 2009 by Joel Mac Donald

[fight4thefuture]

Do you think we should feel guilty for having to kill innocent people in war?

Julian,

Who said anything about feeling guilty?

But let's look at it. As human nature stands, this is something most people who kill innocents in war are going to feel anyway. I dread to think what a person who feels guilty will do if he learns how to alleviate his tormenting guilt through the lesson (on a psychological and premise level) that killing innocent people can be a moral good. I'm not so sure his subconscious will be as discriminating as his conscious mind in choosing innocents the next time, especially if he is a person who likes to be good.

I think a much more realistic thing is to say that it was a terrible thing that needed to be done under extraordinary circumstances and strong wishes that it should never happen again. And if the person feels guilty, that is merely a sign that he is a human being. I see that as much healthier for those who have killed innocents in war. Through that way they can find some peace.

Ignoring the fact that most people who have killed innocents in war are going to feel guilty all by themselves is ignoring reality. Trying to program that out of people and dismissing it by saying they shouldn't feel that way in the first place (because they were performing a moral good) is a bit too much for my reality meter—in addition to the fact that it can be quite dangerous to peaceful society.

Battles are not just fought on the battlefield in war. They are also fought in people's minds and souls. Within this context, I fully believe war is hell.

Michael

What do feelings have to do with thoughts? I just thought it would help me better understand what you were advocating, and it did. All of the abstract reasoning was getting a little much for me.

You might find this interesting, Michael... From the play Think Twice featured in The Early Ayn Rand: "Ingalls: I've told you this because I wanted you to know that I don't regret it. Had circumstances forced me to take a valuable life--I wouldn't hesitate to offer my own life in return. But I don't think that of Walter. Nor of Serge...."

Edited January 11, 2009 by Julian

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Julian,

The "I don't think of you" premise is a dangerous one for your happiness. I speak from experience. It must be understood in context and it is one of the places where I totally disagree with Rand's scope.

Within a specific context, it is true and even a valuable attitude. For instance, when I am creating or learning or otherwise being productive, or even engaged in something I really enjoy, I literally don't think of those who wish to impede or destroy me or my work. Nor do I want to. But I do think of them at other times. I can't help it. It just comes by itself.

As an aside, for one who wrote several times on not thinking about certain kinds of individuals, Rand certainly thought deeply enough about them—even specific ones in her later writing (for example, Skinner, Rawls, etc., who she no doubt judged to be intellectually corrupt).

Scientific evidence is increasingly available that indicates that many of our normative abstractions start by being prewired emotions (called "affects" at that stage) that automatically react to stimuli. If you want to see a fascinating discussion of this, start here:

The Wonderful Way Shmurak Faces Emotion

The problem with Rand's scope is that she claimed all emotions can be subjected to volition. The reality is that some emotions can be, but others start from birth (or even before birth). These initial emotions are what Shmurak calls "affects." (He defines emotions as affects plus experience.) To deny that these form an essential part of normative abstractions is to deny a part of reality in concept formation.

Here is how the scope issue plays out to a ridiculous degree in Objectivist thinking. A clunky concept was put together by Peikoff: premoral choice to live. At least I believe he is the one who came up with it. It was introduced here (OPAR, pp. 244-245):

If life is what you want, you must pay for it, by accepting and practicing a code of rational behavior. Morality, too, is a must—if; it is the price of the choice to live. That choice itself, therefore, is not a moral choice; it precedes morality; it is the decision of consciousness that underlies the need of morality.(51)

The interesting part of that footnote is that is says:

51. See AS, p. 941.

I looked in other places in OPAR and I could not find what passage Rand wrote that he was using as a reference. In consulting 3 different issues of Atlas Shrugged, I came up with 3 different places for the page number. I do not have the original Random House hard cover version, but I did come up with a passage that might make sense in the paperback centennial edition by Signet, which appears to be a reproduction of the original. I am not sure, though. But here is the passage Peikoff might mean as his grounds for insinuating his idea of a premoral choice to live. It is from Galt's speech and is on p. 941 in the Signet edition. It deals with the morality of self-sacrifice.

"A sacrifice is the surrender of a value. Full sacrifice is full surrender of all values. If you wish to achieve full virtue, you must seek no gratitude in return for your sacrifice, no praise, no love, no admiration, no self-esteem, not even the pride of being virtuous; the faintest trace of any gain dilutes your virtue. If you pursue a course of action that does not taint your life by any joy, that brings you no value in matter, no value in spirit, no gain, no profit, no reward—if you achieve this state of total zero, you have achieved the ideal of moral perfection.

"You are told that moral perfection is impossible to man—and, by this standard, it is. You cannot achieve it so long as you live, but the value of your life and of your person is gauged by how closely you succeed in approaching that ideal zero which is death.

"If you start, however, as a passionless blank, as a vegetable seeking to be eaten, with no values to reject and no wishes to renounce, you will not win the crown of sacrifice. It is not a sacrifice to renounce the unwanted. It is not a sacrifice. It is not a sacrifice to give your life for others, if death is your personal desire. To achieve the virtue of sacrifice, you must want to live, you must love it, you must burn with passion for this earth and for all the splendor it can give you—you must feel the twist of every knife as it slashes your desires away from your reach and drains your love out of your body, It is not mere death that the morality of sacrifice holds out to you as an ideal, but death by slow torture.

"Do not remind me that it pertains only to this life on earth. I am concerned with no other. Neither are you.

I can see some logical twists and turns that could be used to arrive at a concept of volition without morality. I don't see how these twists and turns justify "every is implies an ought" when discussing volition (a long discussion from the opening essay in VOS), but that is another can of worms.

At any rate, Objectivists have since turned logic upside down and inside out trying to justify what premoral choice to live actually means. Don't even mention the word "instinct." You will get your head bit off. But "instinct" is exactly what a premoral choice is to a conceptual consciousness. Either that or whim. And can you imagine a rational morality based on a whim as premise?

The real rub comes if you rephrase "premoral choice to live" as "prewired choice to live." This last is the basis of almost all normative abstractions, but it takes away volition and opens the way for the possibility that moral perfection might not be a valid concept for judging all of volition. That is a possibility Peikoff's position will not entertain. People of that view get really nasty if you challenge it or even ask inconvenient questions.

But supposing "prewired choice to live" is valid, and I believe it is, this means there can also be a "prewired guilt for killing members of the same species," as some kind of "prewired species valuation," at least in healthy human beings.

A healthy volition will build on the prewired part, not try to negate it. As I read over and over in Objectivist literature, "Nature to be commanded must be obeyed." Well this also applies to the nature of the human mind. Prewired stuff exists in the mind and so does volition.

I learned through living that if you try to sever your values from the prewired part of your mind, like trying to claim to yourself that it does not exist and that you consciously choose all your values, you will get busted up badly by reality. Getting sewn back together, if you are lucky enough to have that possibility, is no fun. You can alter prewired values by volition, and some are hellishly difficult to alter. But you should not deny what exists and is easily observable both within your own mind and all around you.

This is why the moral doctrine of total indifference to any innocent people you kill, or blaming it on somebody else to justify total indifference, will most likely have a psychotic result. Your conscious mind will try to impose that doctrine, but your subconscious mind will have none of it.

Feeling guilty for killing innocent strangers is not altruism unless one chooses it to be. It is merely existing according to our identity. A rational morality will deal with that reality (i.e., identity), not deny it. Feeling guilty is a form of suffering and it is not rational to perpetuate suffering as a morally proper state by denying that it exists.

Ironically, if you deny it exists, you will end up feeling guilty because you feel guilty. And what kind of morality is that?

Michael

[Mike11]

Feeling guilty for killing innocent strangers is not altruism unless one chooses it to be. It is merely existing according to our identity. A rational morality will deal with that reality (i.e., identity), not deny it. Feeling guilty is a form of suffering and it is not rational to perpetuate suffering as a morally proper state by denying that it exists.

Ironically, if you deny it exists, you will end up feeling guilty because you feel guilty. And what kind of morality is that?

Michael

Freud said that experiencing guilt and depression are prerequisites for mental health.

[Brant Gaede]

Feeling guilty for killing innocent strangers is not altruism unless one chooses it to be. It is merely existing according to our identity. A rational morality will deal with that reality (i.e., identity), not deny it. Feeling guilty is a form of suffering and it is not rational to perpetuate suffering as a morally proper state by denying that it exists.

Ironically, if you deny it exists, you will end up feeling guilty because you feel guilty. And what kind of morality is that?

Michael

Freud said that experiencing guilt and depression are prerequisites for mental health.

He did seem to be a depressive. I wonder what he felt guilty for: refusing to accept women's stories of childhood sexual abuse? Psychoanalysis?

--Brant