Aggrad02

Dustan,

If I haven't already, let me give you a warm welcome to OL.

I hope you like our little home.

Michael

Thank you very much, I is really hard to find people to have discussions about philosophy with as I am not a student and do not make a career in academics.

Dustan

Edit - I just saw your second post. There is a fight between philosophy and psychology. The way you postulate things (claiming that you know what does not exist) is a philosophy trumping psychology position. As I implied, my view is that the context has to be a healthy mind before rationality can be moral or not. A sick or damaged mind has the volitional capacity impaired. That makes for a lot of color (not just gray).

Michael

What do you consider a healthy mind and unhealthy mind? Some people would consider an irrational mind as unhealthy, or do you mean a medically unhealthy mind (such as schizophrenia, bi-polar, alzheimers)?

I don't think that an unhealthy mind can be rational consistently, while a healthy mind can be irrational. A person does not have to be irrational all the time to be considered irrational, just some of the time.

Ayn Rand considered rationality as "the recognition and acceptance of reason as one's only source of knowledge; one's only judge of values and one's only guide to action". Basically recognizing reality and using reason to make decisions.

I don't think you can make an unhealthy rational decision. If the mind is not healthy enough to either grasp reality or use reason, then it cannot be rational. If the decisions are truely rational (knowledge gained through reality and decisions made using reason) then they shoulded be judged black or white.

Since philosophy is the base of all sciences, it should follow that psychology should be integrated on a foundation of philosophy. A psychology that fights philosophy would be a psychology founded on a different philosophy than the one it is in conflict with. In reality this would be a clash of philosophies and not psychology/philosophy.

Edit- I just read again your explanation. If what you mean by an unhealthy mind = loss of volitional capacity, then that person is no longer able to make decisions freely (there is some physical disturbance in the brain that affects decision making). If that is the case then that person's decisions could not be considered rational, nor do I think that you could consider their actions as moral or amoral, as to judge an action it must be freely chosen. If would be the same as judging a person who is being commanded at gun point to do a certian aciton, since that person no longer has free will, then they no longer can be judged morally.

Thanks Michael for the clarification on the example and the context of the discussion.

I think in that situation a morally right person would have to value life and help the child. Someone who purposefully didn't help the child for sadistic reason would cleary be acting with evil intentions, while someone who doesn't want have to deal with the situation and ignore the situation would be blanking out.

I haven't studied alot about rights (or too much for that matter), but I don't think that the child's rights would oblidge the stranger to help him. I don't think one person's rights can obligate someone else. I think that the child's right to life comes more from the parents responsiblity to care for them as the parents chose to reproduce.

-- Dustan (That is my name, I graduated from Texas A&M University in 2002, so that is the screen name I use for various things, it is easy to remember when you have just one.)

Years ago, when I started seeing things in the black and white of Objectivism, I started forgetting that these are only two colors in existence. There's a whole spectrum that I stopped seeing.

From my own observations, I have perceived that one of the most poisonous moral postures is a false dichotomy (and it really is one) where a person believes that admitting the existence of a moral gray situation results in destroying the black and white - and vice-versa. It doesn't. Some things in life are meant to be extreme. Others go way out of whack when you take them to the extreme because they don't belong there. They belong in the middle. You also ruin an extreme by putting it in the middle.

Michael

Michael I have to disagree with you.

If being moral is seeking values to promote rational self-interest, then there can be no grey.

There are only four scenarios:

Either someone is being rational and pursuing his self interest. or

He is being irrational and pursuing his self interest or

He is being rational and pursuing his destruction or

He is being irrational and pursuing his destruction.

Only one of these decisions is white and the other three are black, the middle two are not grey.

That does not mean that a person can never make a wrong decision. That person may have inadequate knowledege, but as long as he acts rationally with the knowledge that he has it is a morally white.

If a person comes to a rational decision that he is emotionally uncomfortable with and which is a really tough decision considering the situation, the decision and the alternative are not grey, one is superior rationally and white and the other is black.

Rationality is not an extreme. Existence is not and extreme. Life is not an extreme. Their is no middle between rationality and irrationality, existence and nonexistence, or life and nonlife.

This is a little ranting and one of my first post, so excuse me if any of this is off base.

I just began reading this board this week and have tried to not join this conversation because it was apparently started long ago, but I think that I must.

I haven't been able to find Michael's moral dilemma, but from the first couple of posts seem to get the idea.

A man is walking in the wilderness and spots an unattended baby that is apparently hungry. The man has some food, so the question is whether he should feed the baby or continue on his way risking the baby dying of starvation.

"Ayn Rand upholds rational self-interest. This means the ethics of selfishness, with man's life as the standard of value defining self-interest, and rationality as the primary virtue defining the method of achieving it." (From Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand by Leonard Peikoff, p.234)

To determine how he (the food man) should act ethically, he would have to determine rationally what is in his best interest. And it does not seem that given this problem the way that it is presented you can accomplish this. If the problem stated above is the correct one, then I think that it is not specific enough to be analyzed rationally and objectively. Instead of a possible real life situation, it seems only a mere painting of one, a snap shot of time.

There is alot of context missing:

Where in the world is this wilderness? In a state park in the US? In the middle of the Sahara? In the jungle?

How far it is from civilization? One day? Two days? 10 Days?

Where is the man going with the food? On a day hike? Is he lost himself? Going to feed his family of 20 likewise starving children?

What condiiton is the food in? Is it edible for a baby? Maybe it is posionous and the man is trying to keep it from harming anyone?

What is the food for? Does the man just have it? Is it for his family? If he is lost does he need it for himself?

What does the man know about babies?

Is there any other context missing? Maybe in the area there has been several robberies involving stranded babies, that when travelers try to help it they are ambushed by hiding thieves.

Without knowing the answers to these questions and many more we cannot adequately help this man make a rational ethical decision. Are there possible situations in which the man can pass on helping the baby and still be morally good? Of course, since an ethical man must value life. And there are many possible situations in which passing the baby is morally evil as well. If the man has to take a self destructing or value sacraficing action to help or pass the baby then the he has made a unethical decision.

In Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, Peikoff says that: "As to helping a stranger in an emergency, this is moral under certian conditions. A man may help such a person if the concept "emergency" is properly delimited, if no sacrafice is involved on the helpers part; if the recipient is not the cause of his own suffering, i.e., the helper is supporting not vices but values, even though it is only the potential value of a fellow human being about whom nothing evil is known; and, above all, if the helper remembers the moral status of his action. Extending help to others in such a context is an act of generosity, not an obligation. Nor is it an act that one may cherish as one's claim to virtue. Virtue, for Objectivism, consist in creating values, not giving them away" p. 239.

On another note about this delimma, dying of hunger is probably the fourth thing that will kill this child if left unattended. The baby will die of dehydration, exposure or wild animals long before it dies of hunger, making the man's food useless and act of assistance what is crucial to the survial of the baby, not the man giving up food (which may be a value to him).

--Dustan

This is just an idea but...

Do you think that there is a possibility that the tobacco companies are happy that they are able to advertise in some form on t.v. since they have been banned in the '70's

Smoking is an irrational habit. I do not know of anyone who smokes that doesn't know that it will eventually kill you. (I am sure there are some exceptions), but people smoke anyhow. So it would seem like the message (which is intended for smokers) is ineffective while the company gets to get thier company name in at the end. (Boy those cigarettes are killing me, but those people at Phillip-Morris really care about me!)