Nate H

Nathan, welcome to OL.

When I was a freshman in college many years ago, I had not read Rand. I had always been an altruist from my Christian family life. For a couple of years, I had been a Christian socialist (abolish private property) because I thought private property allowed people to be selfish, which was wrong. One day in my English class I expressed my support for the virtue of unselfishness, the virtue of putting the concerns of others above one’s own. I went on to pose a question that had begun to nag me. In consistency with my ethics of altruism, should one not also put others’ beliefs above one’s own? I was completely serious, and the class was at first dumbfounded. They began to search out what such a position could possibly mean, and even a secular socialist friend of mine in the class tried to raise some gentle objections to making such a move.

I became an atheist that spring, but continued with the altruistic ethics (and socialism). I read Fountainhead over the summer, and read Atlas in the fall of sophomore year. From the latter:

“Your self is your mind. . . .

“It is your mind that they want you to surrender—all those who preach the creed of sacrifice, whatever their tags or their motives, whether they demand it for the sake of your soul or your body, whether they promise you another life in heaven or a full stomach on this earth. Those who start by saying: ‘It is selfish to pursue your own wishes, you must sacrifice them to the wishes of others’—end up by saying: ‘It is selfish to uphold your convictions, you must sacrifice them to the convictions of others’.

“This much is true: the most selfish of all things is the independent mind that recognizes no authority higher than its own and no value higher than its judgment of truth. . . . (1030, first ed.)

“Do you ask what moral obligation I owe to my fellow men? None—except the obligation I owe to myself, to material objects and to all of existence: rationality. I deal with men as my nature and theirs demands: by means of reason. I seek or desire nothing from them except such relations as they care to enter of their own voluntary choice. . . . (1022)

I had already come over to the side of Howard Roark and had dropped altruism (and socialism) and the denigration of selfishness by the time I read the text just quoted. After absorbing all of Rand’s writings, I think your question reasonable to remain. Your question is a very good one. It is broad and rich. I have chased it a long time. I will try to say more soon.

Again, welcome.

Thanks for sharing that with me. I noticed that the same people who support altruism in my classes are the socialists. One girl went out and got drunk, then was not allowed to debate at the next tournament. She gathered the team together and explained to them why her actions were so selfish and she was not thinking of us. However, she had sacrificed something she really wanted to do (debate at districts) for something she didn't want to do as much (get drunk). Her doing such was entirely consistent with her ethics, I noticed.

The epistemology of reason is the rational-empirical method. Formally, that is known as the Scientific Method. You can find it taught as 3, 5, 9 or 14 "steps" but the fundamental process is the same as "common sense." We perceive something, investigate it, understand it, formulate conjectures, test those, and from the new knowledge extrapolate to new truths, both wider and deeper. If this were infallible, we would never discuss anything more than once. If the Scientific Method were the Philosopher's Stone, Galileo would have derived Quantum Mechanics from Aristotle's General Relativity. By that I mean, we know that that science proceeds - as we all do in daily life - by trial and error.

We adjust our lives by trial and error. Science moves forward by the same method. We know that political laws defining science are disasterous, from Galileo to Lysenko to Intelligent Design. When I was born, biology books taught that humans have 48 chromosomes; now we count 46. Science must be free to pursue truth.

If you mandate by law or custom or culture that a person must follow some other conclusions different from the ones he draws from his own experience and logic, then you prevent the discovery of a better life. As science would be dumbed down to the level of superstition, humans, deprived of self-interest based on reason and experience would be reduced to animals.

If a person is not to follow the logical conclusions derived from the evidence of his senses, what mode remains?

So you're essentially saying that man should be free to follow his reason and logic, simply because that's his nature as man. To do otherwise is to reduce him to what an animal is.

And if man is free to make conclusions from his experience and logic, he would recognize that life is the best virtue, and that the furthering of his life is his highest moral purpose, that nature demands that he be selfish? '

Do you suppose that you can use reason (experience and logic) to establish an ethic of altruism? Or is there some other non-self-interest we have not considered?

I expect you to eliminate your competition and then stand another 20 minutes telling me why you're right. I won't accept an ethics of rational self interest simply because I cannot prove altruism by the standards of reason. Egoism and self-interest will be proven and altruism will be disproven before I accept selfishness.

I would revise your question. It's not that epistemology deductively leads to ethics. It's that man's nature leads one to conclude various things about what would be an appropriate ethics. One's epistemology underlies all of one's conclusions about everything, including epistemology and ethics, and is not the principle focus nor deductive source for asking questions about morally proper behavior. To use a metaphor, a telescope is a tool for looking at distant stars, but distant stars have nothing to do with telescopes. Likewise, reason is the tool for knowing, but in and of itself it does not inject itself into the object of study. Now it so happens that the object of study is man, who indeed has this rational faculty, and by virtue of that, it is of course relevant to the question. But epistemology is what underlies your (the observer's) method. It is in effect your "telescope".

Shayne

Fair enough. I've never studied philosophy before.

Well, the first question I have is the fact that in her "Essays" book, Ayn Rand suggests that government finance in a free society would not come from taxes, but from things such a lotteries, user fees, or a charge for the government to 'uphold' your contract, all of which are voluntary.

Then she states in education that you should be able to get a tax write-off if you fund your own or someone else's education. This would break up the government's monopoly on education (it seems very similar to a voucher system to me). However, this suggestion is for a 'mixed economy', not her ideal situation from what I gathered.

In a fully free, Objectivist society, what would education look like?

The second question is this:

Let's say I create a pill that I say will help you sleep, but it ends up giving you cancer (theoretically). The person that consumed the pill files a court complaint that the creator of the pill has 'used force' against him, because he was not notified of the possible side effects. What would an objectivist court rule?

What if the consumer had a side-effect of diabetes instead of cancer? Is someone really using force against you if they don't tell you of possible side effects in a voluntary trade?

All of the other paths in Ayn Rands philosophy I understand fairly well, except for this one. I have found some implicit examples in her books, but I have not come across any explicit examples.

I also find it's easier to follow Nathaniel Braden's or Leonard Peikoff's logic for me personally. I've gone through the FAQ and I read the sticky at the top of this forum.