Critique of Objectivist ethics theory

[Darrell Hougen]

Michael,

Nice diagram. Now, if you would just label the gray area, "ethics," you would have the meat of Rand's philosophy. (I guess that means the, ought circle would have to fit within the is circle.)

Darrell

Edited March 14, 2007 by Darrell Hougen

[Ellen Stuttle]

I’m working on this “prescriptive” and “descriptive” difference in relation to the is-ought discussion. That is a meat issue, you would agree?

Victor,

Absolutely.

Descriptive = is = cognitive.

Prescriptive = ought = normative.

Rand claimed that these were two different strains of concepts. She called them interconnected (and I agree). The strange part with her writing is that she wrote about this difference more in The Romantic Manifesto than anywhere else.

However, here is the rub for the present discussion. Rand's argument (only in places in her writings, but most especially in the deductions of others from Rand's argument) is that ALL cognitive concepts include a normative abstraction, thus they are not really different.

Hume's argument (or more specifically, the deductions of others from Hume's argument) is that the two strains are COMPLETELY separate.

Michael,

I think that your recent interest in "cognitive" as distinguished from "normative" concepts is skewing your understanding of the point Hume was making. I admit that it's been a number of years since I last read Hume's Essay myself, and I don't have details clear to mind. If what I say is incorrect, I figure Daniel can set me straight when he signs on again.

I noticed in some of your earlier posts that you were seeming to think that people are saying that fact and value have nothing to do with each other. That's not what I'm saying, or I think what Daniel or Dragonfly or Bob is saying either. Instead, the point is that you cannot deduce an "ought" from an "is." You can't directly say, "Here's an is; therefore, here's an ought." You can only get a conditional statement. I used the example of eating nutritious food, an example I think you've also used. It's not problematic to say, "If you want to live, eating nutritious food is a good idea; we know this because of our knowledge of the facts of nutrition." The error would be to say that you can demonstrate through some deductive process that a person ought to want to live. You can get a conditional from facts but not an imperative. I think that Hume would have agreed with this.

Also, I don't know where you're getting that Rand claimed "that ALL cognitive concepts include a normative abstraction, thus they are not really different." Do you have a text source for this?

Ellen

___

[Darrell Hougen]

I noticed in some of your earlier posts that you were seeming to think that people are saying that fact and value have nothing to do with each other. That's not what I'm saying, or I think what Daniel or Dragonfly or Bob is saying either. Instead, the point is that you cannot deduce an "ought" from an "is." You can't directly say, "Here's an is; therefore, here's an ought." You can only get a conditional statement. I used the example of eating nutritious food, an example I think you've also used. It's not problematic to say, "If you want to live, eating nutritious food is a good idea; we know this because of our knowledge of the facts of nutrition." The error would be to say that you can demonstrate through some deductive process that a person ought to want to live. You can get a conditional from facts but not an imperative. I think that Hume would have agreed with this.

But, you can get an imperative from the fact of existence. Go back and read posts #202 and #93.

Even, if you couldn't get an imperative from a fact, I think the conditional (weak) form of Rand's conclusion is a huge step forward because it reduces all of ethics to a single choice, the choice between life and death. In other words, if you choose life, you must have an ethical system taking life as your standard of value. That is a much better result than Hume's statement that it all comes down to the passions.

The alternative to choosing life is to either choose some other end (as yet unspecified) or to fail to choose any end, which is essentially nihilism. If no end is given a priiori preference over any other, then all ends are a priori equal, including death. And, if you are a nihilist, there is nothing cognitive to keep you from suddenly deciding to jump off of a tall building or throw yourself under a bus.

Note that if one chooses to be a slave of the passions, then one has essentially chosen nihilism. Emotionalism is not a substitute for cognitive concepts.

Another possible end is altruism. However, altruism, as it is usually stated, is so vague as to be meaningless. I will have more to say about that in a future post.

Darrell

Edited March 15, 2007 by Darrell Hougen

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I noticed in some of your earlier posts that you were seeming to think that people are saying that fact and value have nothing to do with each other. That's not what I'm saying, or I think what Daniel or Dragonfly or Bob is saying either. Instead, the point is that you cannot deduce an "ought" from an "is."

Ellen,

I was going to get to the derivation part. I first wanted to establish that there is a connection between cognitive and normative abstractions, since I have seen the contrary not only insinuated, but openly declared ("ethics is subjective, period"). As the man said, "I will return" (to this issue).

Also, I don't know where you're getting that Rand claimed "that ALL cognitive concepts include a normative abstraction, thus they are not really different." Do you have a text source for this?

I sure do, and not only one, but I have to hunt them up. I essentially became aware of this from Peikoff's essay, "Fact and Value." Here is a direct quote from that essay:

Objectivism holds that value is objective (not intrinsic or subjective); value is based on and derives from the facts of reality (it does not derive from mystic authority or from whim, personal or social). Reality, we hold—along with the decision to remain in it, i.e., to stay alive—dictates and demands an entire code of values. Unlike the lower species, man does not pursue the proper values automatically; he must discover and choose them; but this does not imply subjectivism. Every proper value-judgment is the identification of a fact: a given object or action advances man's life (it is good): or it threatens man's life (it is bad or an evil). The good, therefore, is a species of the true; it is a form of recognizing reality. The evil is a species of the false; it is a form of contradicting reality. Or: values are a type of facts; they are facts considered in relation to the choice to live.

In the objective approach, since every fact bears on the choice to live, every truth necessarily entails a value-judgment, and every value-judgment necessarily presupposes a truth. As Ayn Rand states the point in "The Objectivist Ethics": "Knowledge, for any conscious organism, is the means of survival; to a living consciousness, every 'is' implies an 'ought.'" Evaluation, accordingly, is not a compartmentalized function applicable only to some aspects of man's life or of reality; if one chooses to live and to be objective, a process of evaluation is coextensive with and implicit in every act of cognition.

. . .

Just as every "is" implies an "ought," so every identification of an idea's truth or falsehood implies a moral evaluation of the idea and of its advocates.

After digesting this, I started seeing slivers of it in Rand's writings. Peikoff quotes her above in one of those slivers. (I included the sentence later in Peikoff's article after the ellipses out of sheer orneriness because it is so ridiculous. This is essentially a prescription and moral sanction for bigotry.)

The "choice to live" thing only muddies up the issue. As I pointed out earlier, an infant does not have a choice to live. The drive to live is automatic in the young. A stomp-down honest-to-goodness choice to live only develops in a person as the awareness of the possibility of suicide develops. That means that the choice to live is only pertinent to relatively mature human beings. Before that, there is no choice at all. There is only an innate drive.

This is what started me on thinking that SOME "oughts" are derived from "is" and are universal and OTHER "oughts" are derived from the exercise of free will according to each particular will (or ego or person or whatever one wants to call the thing that does the willing). This led me further to remember that there is the psychological "is" of the human individual along with all the other "is's" out there in reality. And this led me to start thinking that Rand and Hume might be on completely different wavelengths here.

More later. I want to review Rand's writings on this and I want to read Hume and even the Popper article Daniel linked to. (After all, if no knowledge of facts can ever be true, as Popper posits—it can only be falsified—then knowledge of facts qua facts does not exist, thus no value or code of values at all can be derived from facts. So the Popper thinking has bearing here—especially as we are engaging Popperians, at least in this matter.)

Michael

[Daniel Barnes]

Ellen:

>Where do you get the belief that there are Rand followers who think she DID answer the "problem of induction"?

Hi Ellen,

There are a number of different sources for my belief.

1) Rand totally scorned modern skepticism. Yet Hume's problem is considered to be the central to modern skepticism (and irrationalism). She might have at least given it the once over before she declared victory...;-)

2) Further, Hume's problem/s are the source of Kant's startled awakenings. If you genuinely want to understand the problems Kant was trying to solve (unsuccessfully) you have to start with Hume. (If you don't want to understand however, you can safely ignore him!)

3) There may well be a NZ - or more properly Solo - bias to my perceptions. Certainly I remember la Perigo and many others (Peter Cresswell wrote an article calling Hume a fool and a boor, when of course he was neither)mocking anyone who brought Hume up, yet studiously avoiding participating in any actual threads that arose.

4) However we can test how localised my belief is very easily. Simply log on to 4aynrandfans or noodlefood or whatever and start claiming that Rand did not refute Hume's problem. Then see how many agree with you...;-)

Thanks for the fascinating sidelight into the Prof-fessionals BTW.

[Daniel Barnes]

Ellen:

>I noticed in some of your earlier posts that you were seeming to think that people are saying that fact and value have nothing to do with each other. That's not what I'm saying, or I think what Daniel or Dragonfly or Bob is saying either. Instead, the point is that you cannot deduce an "ought" from an "is." You can't directly say, "Here's an is; therefore, here's an ought." You can only get a conditional statement.

Yes, exactly. Hume says that where usually it's either "is" or "is not" (ie deductive logic), you now get this funny new thing, an "ought."

[Daniel Barnes]

Michael K:

>(After all, if no knowledge of facts can ever be true, as Popper posits—it can only be falsified—then knowledge of facts qua facts does not exist, thus no value or code of values at all can be derived from facts. So the Popper thinking has bearing here—especially as we are engaging Popperians, at least in this matter.)

Just a small but key point here, Michael. In fact Popper said that we can in fact get a hold of the unvarnished truth. Knowing the truth is possible (if extremely hard to come by) in Critical Rationalism - you just can never know for sure that it is a final truth.

You see there are two different things here:

1) Knowing a final truth

and

2) Knowing that it is a final truth.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

However we can test how localised my belief is very easily. Simply log on to 4aynrandfans or noodlefood or whatever and start claiming that Rand did not refute Hume's problem. Then see how many agree with you...;-)

Daniel,

LOLOLOLOL...

I want to look into this in Rand's writings. I do know that NB made the claim that she resolved the is/ought problem and Peikoff claims this too.

As for the Internet gladiators, they will charge without even thinking twice...

You see there are two different things here:

1) Knowing a final truth

and

2) Knowing that it is a final truth.

I hate to be pedantic, but doesn't this entail a serious logical problem? Is this observation a final truth itself, and do you know that it is the truth? The way you state it, you sound like it is and you do. I know this is usually asked with some colorful sneering to accompany it, but I am truly curious about what the rationale is. How can there be a final truth for epistemological method that claims that it is impossible to know when you know the final truth?

Believe it or not, though, this is not too far from Rand's thinking. She claimed that concepts are open-ended—to make room for getting to a final truth. She makes a clear distinction between fact ("final truth" in this other manner of speaking) and knowledge (concepts). As a matter of fact, "truth" in Objectivism is epistemological, not metaphysical. It is knowing the mental unit corresponds to the metaphysical fact. But the very fact that a concept remains open-ended by definition means that it is never closed, so you never know when the final truth (the complete fact) is arrived at by definition.

The way this is expressed in Objectivism is that facts are absolute but knowledge is contextual. (I am not including axiomatic concepts here. They are another kettle of unbuttered parsnips.)

Michael

[Ellen Stuttle]

Ellen:

>Where do you get the belief that there are Rand followers who think she DID answer the "problem of induction"?

Hi Ellen,

There are a number of different sources for my belief.

1) Rand totally scorned modern skepticism. Yet Hume's problem is considered to be the central to modern skepticism (and irrationalism). She might have at least given it the once over before she declared victory...;-)

2) Further, Hume's problem/s are the source of Kant's startled awakenings. If you genuinely want to understand the problems Kant was trying to solve (unsuccessfully) you have to start with Hume. (If you don't want to understand however, you can safely ignore him!)

Yes, she did scorn skepticism. Her answer to that was her idea of contextual certainty. But this idea isn't proposed as solving the problem of induction expressed (by Prof M ;-)) in the IOE workshop as "When does one decide that enough confirming evidence exists?" -- which Rand acknowledge as "the big question of induction" and said she "couldn't even begin to discuss."

I don't quarrel with your view that she didn't give adequate basis for scorning modern skepticism. I don't think her "contextual certainty" answer does the job. It's just that I don't know of claims being made that she'd solved the problem of induction. Re that, you write:

3) There may well be a NZ - or more properly Solo - bias to my perceptions. Certainly I remember la Perigo and many others (Peter Cresswell wrote an article calling Hume a fool and a boor, when of course he was neither)mocking anyone who brought Hume up, yet studiously avoiding participating in any actual threads that arose.

4) However we can test how localised my belief is very easily. Simply log on to 4aynrandfans or noodlefood or whatever and start claiming that Rand did not refute Hume's problem. Then see how many agree with you...;-)

Come to think of it -- which I wasn't -- I do recall seeing an occasional slam against Hume from Peter Cresswell on various SOLO threads. I didn't see the article you refer to, though. As you're aware, I don't read SOLO on more than an every now and then particular-thread basis. As to the suggestion of testing response on 4anyrandfans or noodlefood or whatever, I'll borrow a response from Rand to the idea of her running for political office, "I hope you don't hate me that much." No way, man. If someone else wants to try it and report back... You might be right that folks in those venues would believe she did solve the induction problem. The Objectivists I know tend to be amongst the better informed from the old days.

Ellen

___

[Daniel Barnes]

Michael K

>I hate to be pedantic, but doesn't this entail a serious logical problem? Is this observation a final truth itself, and do you know that it is the truth?

No, not at all. This too is a conjecture, that may one day be proven wrong, but has so far withstood many attempts to falsify it. And after much critical thought, I certainly am confident it is true. But I would never consider my strong feelings of confidence as evidence of this theory's truth!....;-) But so far all attempts at absolutely certain knowledge ("justified true belief" in philosophy speak) have failed IMHO, including Rand's "contextually absolute" certainty" -which doesn't even get off the ground, as it is simply an oxymoron - a simple contradiction in terms.

Because as I've said before, something that is "absolutely certain" is certain regardless of context! That's what an absolute is. Rand's various "contextual absolutes", including her theory of knowledge, are nothing more than a trivial play on words.

[Ellen Stuttle]

Also, I don't know where you're getting that Rand claimed "that ALL cognitive concepts include a normative abstraction, thus they are not really different." Do you have a text source for this?

I sure do, and not only one, but I have to hunt them up. I essentially became aware of this from Peikoff's essay, "Fact and Value." Here is a direct quote from that essay:

[i'm skipping Peikoff's rendition to go straight to the AR quote he cites.]

In the objective approach, since every fact bears on the choice to live, every truth necessarily entails a value-judgment, and every value-judgment necessarily presupposes a truth. As Ayn Rand states the point in "The Objectivist Ethics": "Knowledge, for any conscious organism, is the means of survival; to a living consciousness, every 'is' implies an 'ought.'" Evaluation, accordingly, is not a compartmentalized function applicable only to some aspects of man's life or of reality; if one chooses to live and to be objective, a process of evaluation is coextensive with and implicit in every act of cognition.

That doesn't say what you wrote, Michael: "that ALL cognitive concepts include a normative abstraction, thus they are not really different." She says "every 'is' implies an 'ought'" and that evaluation is "coextensive with and implicit in every act of cognition." This isn't stating an inclusionary identity.

Ellen

PS to Darrell: I have read your posts #202 and #93. I see more details to quarrel with in them than I'll probably have a chance to address. I have little time for list exchange. But just letting you know that I am reading what you post.

___

[Daniel Barnes]

>As you're aware, I don't read SOLO on more than an every now and then particular-thread basis.

Know the feeling.

>As to the suggestion of testing response on 4anyrandfans or noodlefood or whatever, I'll borrow a response from Rand to the idea of her running for political office, "I hope you don't hate me that much."

Laughing like a drain!

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Also, on the issue of the participants being called "Prof": This is an abbreviation for "Professional," not for "Professor." Although the usage is explained in an introductory comment, I find it "fudgy," with an impliction conveyed that AR was talking to a whole group of professors. Only 3 of the participants -- Leonard Peikoff, George Walsh, and Ralph Nelson -- could have properly been considered "professors." Most of the others were graduate students; a couple of them I think might have still been undergraduates.

Ellen,

Where is this introductory comment? I tried to look it up because I wanted to quote it, but all I found was the following (my underline with bold).

(p. 129 - "Appendix—Preface" by Binswanger)

Sometimes a question was rephrased several times, with exchanges among several of the participants, before its meaning became clear, and much of that circling around has been eliminated. But I stuck closely to the professors' formulations when Miss Rand's response was to express agreement with what they said.

(p. 156)

Prof. D: I misunderstood, then, something that Professor B said. I thought that he was maintaining that these weren't really concretes, not even concretes with holes in them, so to speak—not even vague concretes.

(p. 285)

AR: It's totally wrong. Professor F is entirely right to bring it up in connection with my statement on causality from Galt's speech. Because actions are caused by entities, and therefore if you divide properties into dispositional properties vs. other properties, you've already denied the law of causality.

I think "Prof." actually does stand for "Professor" regardless of what the person's actual profession was back then.

[i'm skipping Peikoff's rendition to go straight to the AR quote he cites.]

In the objective approach, since every fact bears on the choice to live, every truth necessarily entails a value-judgment, and every value-judgment necessarily presupposes a truth. As Ayn Rand states the point in "The Objectivist Ethics": "Knowledge, for any conscious organism, is the means of survival; to a living consciousness, every 'is' implies an 'ought.'" Evaluation, accordingly, is not a compartmentalized function applicable only to some aspects of man's life or of reality; if one chooses to live and to be objective, a process of evaluation is coextensive with and implicit in every act of cognition.

That doesn't say what you wrote, Michael: "that ALL cognitive concepts include a normative abstraction, thus they are not really different." She says "every 'is' implies an 'ought'" and that evaluation is "coextensive with and implicit in every act of cognition." This isn't stating an inclusionary identity.

I realize Peikoff said "coextensive," but I find that really confusing. How does an abstraction "entail" and "imply" another abstraction and exclude it at the same time?

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

But so far all attempts at absolutely certain knowledge ("justified true belief" in philosophy speak) have failed IMHO, including Rand's "contextually absolute" certainty" -which doesn't even get off the ground, as it is simply an oxymoron - a simple contradiction in terms.

Because as I've said before, something that is "absolutely certain" is certain regardless of context! That's what an absolute is. Rand's various "contextual absolutes", including her theory of knowledge, are nothing more than a trivial play on words.

Daniel,

Thanks for the explanation on being convinced, but not certain.

There is an issue on Rand's use of context that should be mentioned. I have noticed that when people (you included) criticize her for the idea of being contextually certain, they never mention what Rand meant by context. Her context always includes (and usually means) "within what I know up to the present." Obviously it is possible to be certain of a conclusion if you limit it to a body of knowledge (epistemological) and not to all of reality (metaphysical). You would state: "within this body of knowledge, Conclusion A is certain." Here is an example of how she does this from ITOE:

(p. 295-296)

Prof. H: This is a common question relating to induction. Someone is boiling water, and he notices that every time the water gets to a certain temperature, it boils. Now he wants to know: does all water boil at that temperature, or is it only due to some accidental feature about this particular water? How does he determine whether it's accidental or essential?

AR: By whether you can or cannot establish a causal connection between what you have determined to be the essential characteristic of water and the fact that it boils at a certain temperature.

Prof. H: I suppose what I'm asking is: how do you establish the causal connection?

AR: That's a scientific question. But, in essence, what you do is this. Let's say you have to establish the molecular structure of water. How do those molecules act at a certain temperature? And if you see that something happens to the molecules which causes boiling at a certain temperature, you conclude: that's essential to the nature of water, adding the parenthesis: "within the present context of my knowledge." You will later discover that water behaves differently at a different altitude. So you never claim water necessarily, as an absolute, will always and everywhere boil at the same temperature. No, you say, "Within my present context, omitting elements of which I have no knowledge at present, water will always boil at a certain temperature, because boiling is a state depending on certain kind of molecular motions, and water's molecules will always reach that stage at a certain temperature."

But to get to the issue of induction, it is a good idea to understand what Rand meant by it. Here is what she said (ITOE, p. 28):

Thus the process of forming and applying concepts contains the essential pattern of two fundamental methods of cognition: induction and deduction.

The process of observing the facts of reality and of integrating them into concepts is, in essence, a process of induction. The process of subsuming new instances under a known concept is, in essence, a process of deduction.

If we consider a concept to be something like a file folder, we could call the process of starting a new file "induction." After the file folder exists, opening that file and filling it with more information (observations from both percepts and concepts) is "deduction."

I haven't read Hume yet other than the paragraph I quoted elsewhere, so I don't know how this kind of meaning fits with what he was talking about. As I stated earlier, I suspect they are on different wavelengths.

On searching the CD-ROM, I came across this fascinating entry dated April 9, 1959 (Journals, p. 702-703):

My hypothesis is that all consciousness is a mathematical process (or, rather, the function of any consciousness is a mathematical process). To prove this I would have to identify the basic principles common to perception and mathematics. (By perception I mean here the total process of human awareness, from sensations to perceptions to conceptions.) I would have to identify the wider abstractions underlying the processes of concept-formation and of mathematics. And I would have to integrate them with neurology on the one hand (with the physiological part of the integration of sensations into perceptions)—and with metaphysics on the other.

If my hypothesis is true, then algebra might give me the clue to the objective rules of induction—to a kind of "Organon of Induction."

What is fascinating is that Barbara Branden mentioned in The Passion of Ayn Rand that Rand was taking private lessons in algebra near the end of her life.

Michael

[Victor Pross]

I was going to get to the derivation part. I first wanted to establish that there is a connection between cognitive and normative abstractions, since I have seen the contrary not only insinuated, but openly declared ("ethics is subjective, period"). As the man said, "I will return" (to this issue).

Michael,

We then have a common objective, because the above is precisely what I am working on—tonight. We are of one mind that there is a connection between cognitive and normative abstractions. How we see that connection and how we argue for it...may be along the same lines or not. We'll see.

Michael, I truly believe that the real crux of the problem regarding any disagreement between Daniel or Bob and you (and me) is not within the subject matter we are discussing—namely ethics—but rather, as I said before, epistemology. This is where the heart of the issue beats. As you noted, the issue of ethics as been declared “subjective," period—and that type of affirmation springs from a certain epistemology.

Consider your own statement: "...After all, if no knowledge of facts can ever be true, as Popper posits—it can only be falsified—then knowledge of facts qua facts does not exist, thus no value or code of values at all can be derived from facts."

Yes, indeed.

I am very curious to read your arguments to see if they match up to mine. I can tell you now that I am taking a teleological approach, as opposed to a deontological approach. That's all for now.

-Victor

Edited March 15, 2007 by Victor Pross

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I am very curious to read your arguments to see if they match up to mine. I can tell you now that I am taking a teleological approach, as opposed to a deontological approach.

Victor,

For the record, I am not all that learned. I had to look these things up (with all due thanks to The Free Dictionary).

Teleological -

1. The study of design or purpose in natural phenomena.

2. The use of ultimate purpose or design as a means of explaining phenomena.

3. Belief in or the perception of purposeful development toward an end, as in nature or history.

Deontological - Pertaining to deontology.

Hmmmmm...

Deontology - Ethical theory concerned with duties and rights.

There. That's better.

Now what on earth do these different approaches mean in normal language?

Michael

[Daniel Barnes]

Michael K:

>Her context always includes (and usually means) "within what I know up to the present."

Yes, I realise this. Her theory of certainty is therefore completely - and unwittingly - relativistic AFAICS.

Why?, Well 'within what I know up to the present' I can say I am 'absolutely certain' about that knowledge. Should, however, that be shown to be entirely wrong tomorrow by some new facts tomorrow, well, no matter how wrong I was yesterday I can still say I'm 'absolutely certain' today! And if that gets proved false tomorrow - no worries. I am reborn 'absolutely certain' ever anew. And not only can you say you're 'absolutely certain', I can say the same thing too - even when our respective knowledge clashes!

Being 'contextually certain' is, in practice, jargon for plain old ordinary uncertainty (by which I don't mean the emotion uncertainty, but the philosopical term.

[Victor Pross]

I am very curious to read your arguments to see if they match up to mine. I can tell you now that I am taking a teleological approach, as opposed to a deontological approach.

Victor,

For the record, I am not all that learned. I had to look these things up (with all due thanks to The Free Dictionary).

Teleological -

1. The study of design or purpose in natural phenomena.

2. The use of ultimate purpose or design as a means of explaining phenomena.

3. Belief in or the perception of purposeful development toward an end, as in nature or history.

Deontological - Pertaining to deontology.

Hmmmmm...

Deontology - Ethical theory concerned with duties and rights.

There. That's better.

Now what on earth do these different approaches mean in normal language?

Michael

Michael,

The Free Dictionary sucks. For specific philosophical words—such as “ethics” or “metaphysics” and the like, you OUGHT to invest in a philosophical dictionary. When I look up the word “metaphysics," for example, in a standard Webster dictionary, I get a lot of 'god talk' and supernaturalism. A philosophical dictionary is so much more through, covering all stripes of meanings.

When I say “deontological”—I mean a duty-centered approach (subjective) to ethics and as for “teleological”—I mean “goal-directed” (a standard base) as all of life is, human or animal. I won’t dwell on it greatly as it is not the center piece of my argument, but I do touch on it.

-Victor

Edited March 15, 2007 by Victor Pross

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Yes, I realise this. Her theory of certainty is therefore completely - and unwittingly - relativistic AFAICS.

Why?, Well 'within what I know up to the present' I can say I am 'absolutely certain' about that knowledge. Should, however, that be shown to be entirely wrong tomorrow by some new facts tomorrow, well, no matter how wrong I was yesterday I can still say I'm 'absolutely certain' today! And if that gets proved false tomorrow - no worries. I am reborn 'absolutely certain' ever anew. And not only can you say you're 'absolutely certain', I can say the same thing too - even when our respective knowledge clashes!

Being 'contextually certain' is, in practice, jargon for plain old ordinary uncertainty (by which I don't mean the emotion uncertainty, but the philosopical term.

Daniel,

Not exactly, since concept formation is incremental. Remember the file folder bit. A file folder (concept) is both knowledge and it contains knowledge (and it contains other folders that contain other folder, and so on). Later, more complex knowledge can be overturned, but the initial concepts? I cannot, for the life of me, imagine a situation where the knowledge that "water boils at a certain temperature" will ever be overturned. For that to happen, either water will have to be found to be not water, temperature not temperature, or boil not boil. The whole point of Objectivist epistemology is that more complex knowledge is added to simpler knowledge and does not come before it.

Rand had an amusing interaction in the ITOE workshops and unfortunately this point was addressed from the standpoint of mysticism. But it can be easily substituted for your "new facts tomorrow" hypothesis (assuming that we are addressing simple knowledge before complex).

Prof. A: But it seems that the certainty that you were first trying to attach to the idea that water boils under certain conditions is derivative from the degree of certainty you have concerning the idea that a certain amount of energy disrupts the molecules.

AR: If this is supposed to be on the same level, what would the person raising this objection consider to be a different level?

Prof. A: Yes, that's exactly the problem.

AR: That's not the problem. No. That's the method of ruling his objection out. Because you discover that he has no ground for his conclusion that you're on the same level. Look at the facts. You observe that water boils. You discover something in the constituent elements of water that causes it. You know more than you did before. But he tells you, "No, you're at the same place." Then you ask him, "What place do you want to go to? What do you regard as knowledge?"

Prof. E: And then his answer would be that he wants a mystic apprehension of "necessity," which he hasn't yet received. All he has is "contingent" facts.

AR: Yes. And you ask him what does he regard the facts of reality as: a necessity or a contingency? He'll say, "Of course it's a contingency, because God made it this way, and he could have made it another." And you say, "Good-bye."

Notice that Prof. E speculated the "idea that water boils under certain conditions is derivative from ... the idea that a certain amount of energy disrupts the molecules."

How on earth are you going to identify molecules without first identifying water? Or identifying "energy disrupting molecules" without first identifying "to boil"?

The extent of a person's knowledge rests on this basic level, so you could probably extract a principle from this. Something along the lines of, "The simpler the concept in a conceptual chain, the more likely it is to be true."

Also notice that when knowledge is overturned, not ALL the concepts in the conceptual chain are overturned with it—merely those that are affected by the new facts. A really simple example is the concept of a flat earth. This used to be an ancient scientific concept. Once a round earth was verified, the concept "earth" was not thrown out, but the concept of it as flat was.

So Rand's idea of certainty is not completely arbitrary as you seem to insinuate. There is method to the madness.

But let's look even deeper. Is it correct to say that people were certain that the earth was flat and have this be a correct statement? I think so. Back at that time, the conceptual chains supported this. Within that domain of knowledge, the idea worked. Beyond those conceptual chains, people simply didn't know so there was really no cognitive value one way or the other. But I think we are getting more into an issue of semantics over what "certain" means than over a real difference in meaning.

Both Rand and Popper agree that knowledge grows, scientific progress exists, and new knowledge can overturn older incorrect knowledge. If you want to claim that Rand's form of expressing this was bombastic, insulting and overly-rhetorical, and that sometimes she used terms inconsistently, I agree. I even have an article in the works on making a type of glossary with examples. (I am doing this basically for my own benefit because I want to understand her better.)

If you want to say she was flat-out wrong, I disagree. We need to be clear on the meanings of the terms she did use in the contexts she used them to make that claim. So far, when I do that, i.e., look at the meanings and not just the words, I have found her reasoning to be pretty solid. (But not always. You can find where I disagree at several places on this site.)

I do have one caveat, though, and I keep insisting on this point. When I find myself disagreeing with Rand, the problem is usually scope. What is true and highly insightful for a limited range is not valid for the whole kit 'n kaboodle. Many of Rand's critics that I have read so far then make the same error, but going in the other direction. Because an idea is not valid for one part (or more), they try to claim that it is not valid for any part. That's a problem of scope also.

Michael

[Victor Pross]

Michael,

Darrin,

Daniel,

Bob,

Setting the background to the problem:

The negligence and false starts of the subject of ethics by philosophers throughout history to modern times is the cause of so much confusion and disagreement that exist among theorists, who endeavor to discuss ethics without considering WHY they are discussing ethics. I believe we can see that tradition being carried on in this thread. So before I address the question of the is-ought problem, let me set some foundation.

It was Ayn Rand who went to the root in her essay “The Objectivist ethics”:

“What is morality, or ethics? It is a code of values to guide man’s choices—the choices and actions that determine the purpose and the course of his life. Ethics, as a science, deals with discovering and defining such a code.”

And:

“The first question that has to be answered, as precondition of any attempt to define, to judge or to accept any specific system of ethics, is: why does man need a code of values?”

Rand clearly finds the above approach crucial to hold in mind:

“Let me stress this: the first question is not: What particular code of values should man accept? The first question: Does man need values at all—and why?”

Philosophers and theorists who fail to consider the issue as Rand approached it usually conclude that ethics has no groundwork in fact, that the realm of values is forever separated, by logic, by the realm of facts. Ethics, they declare, is concerned with what ought to be the case, while science, say, is concerned with what is the case. It is insisted that the normative recommendations of ethics cannot logically be derived from the descriptive statements of science.

As a result, two theories of ethics have enjoyed a substantial historical trend:

Emotivism: ethics is a matter of emotional expressions and therefore lacks cognitive content.

Subjectivism: ethics is merely a report of one’s personal, subjective preference and it is therefore not prescriptive in a universal sense to pertain to all human beings.

Both of these theories and their offshoots solidified a split between facts and values, and they have elevated the so-called is-ought dichotomy to the rank of a modern axiom. And this fact is playing itself out here on this thread.

Ayn Rand’s radical approach:

Ethics, according to Ayn Rand, (as we well know) is a normative science. [Note: that I call ethics a ‘normative science’ and the designation of “science’ here would have to be argued out in some other post.]

In some other post, I have touched upon the fact that many sciences other than ethics are concerned with ought-judgments, and there is hardly any difficulty in understanding the relationship between “is” and “ought” as displayed in the normative sciences. Medicine, for example, prescribes a set of actions that must be taken in order to preserve or to reinstate health. A doctor prescribes what ought to be done and for this proscription, to be suitable, must be based on objective knowledge. And architecture is another normative science and as such the architect learns what ought to be done in the itinerary of constructing a building, and his ought-judgments must be based on facts. Descriptive sciences, too—such as physics and astronomy--require ought-judgments.

I urge the reader to grasp that both normative and descriptive sciences are centered chiefly on FACTS. The fact that ‘action results from identity’ is universally accepted and used in the fields of physics, chemistry, and the other realms of science.

A normative science is only as valid as the facts upon which it rests. For example, before a doctor can correctly prescribe medicine, he must have accurate descriptive knowledge on which to base his guidance. So it is a mistake from the out-set to suppose that that normative sciences, because they deal with ought-judgments—differ completely from descriptive sciences. Both normative and descriptive sciences are concerned with FACTUAL KNOWLEDGE and both are capable of verification---as both are subject to such judgments as “valid” or “invalid” or “true” or “false.”

I submit that normative and descriptive sciences are equal in that both deal with ABSTRACT PRINCIPLES DERIVED FROM THE FACTS OF REALITY. The only difference lies in which facet of reality they consider along with the purpose for which their principles where employed.

It was Ron Merrill who illuminated this gem insight. In his book, The Ideas of Ayn Rand, p. 107, he touches upon the is-ought issue. He asks the reader to consider the following statements:

‘You ought to format a new disk before attempting to write a file to it.’

‘You ought not to open with 1. P-KNA4.

‘You ought to first examine the equation to see if the variables are separable.

Mr. Merrill then asks the reader to which type statements belong. They are not normative statements, but they are phrased as if they were, he concludes. They are, he says, factual statements, and “they can be logically derived from observation in the same way as any other factual statement.” His finishing statement is truly inspired: “So if we can agree on what morality is to accomplish, we can develop moral rules as factual statements. For normative statements are merely factual statements about means and ends. Here is how we can get from is to ought. [Emphasis mine].

The cognitive and the normative in the science of ethics.

It is said that descriptive sciences are centered on strictly “pure facts while normative sciences are centered on facts as they apply to human beings, or at least we can now say that they are. I spoke of medicine and architecture to serve as examples.

But what about the felid of ethics?

What are the facts of human nature that engender the need for such a science? At this juncture, I will ask you to recall Rand’s pressing query that began this post:

“What is morality, or ethics? It is a code of values to guide man’s choices—the choices and actions that determine the purpose and the course of his life. Ethics, as a science, deals with discovering and defining such a code…Let me stress this: the first question is not: What particular code of values should man accept? The first question: Does man need values at all—and why?”

The answer is yes—because man is a living entity, a biological organism, which faces the alternative of life and death. Rand does not think the relation between facts and values as problematic because, as has been presented and argued above, VALUES REPRESNET A KIND OF FACT. The concept of value, in this context, represents the beneficial or harmful relationship of some aspect of reality to a living organism.

As Rand spelled it out:

“There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or nonexistence. So the attempt to divorce values from the realm of facts is suicidal and idiotic from the outset. Insofar as ethics seeks to discover—not to “make-up” or “invent” or "emote" or "concoct"—but to discover and systemize factual knowledge of values—it is a science. Insofar as ethics seeks to apply this knowledge of values to human goals—it is a normative science.

Again to quote Ron Merrill:

“So we may now feel that the Objectivist argument has given us a firm footing and that we can get from ‘is’ to ‘ought’ by a logical procedure. Morality, we will say, is a process of selecting goals; the appropriate goals are determined by the principle of sustaining human life, based on the facts of human nature—the ‘is’; and moral rules—the ‘oughts’—merely identify the connections between the ends and the means.”

In a letter to John Hospers, Rand is apropos to the spirit of this post:

“Is ethics independent of metaphysics, that is: should man form a conclusion on what he evaluates as good or evil, and act on the basis of this conclusion, regardless of the nature of the universe? Since no values can pursued or achieved (or even conceived of) except in terms of and in relation to physical reality, since man exists in reality and cannot step outside of it…any man or philosopher who chooses to be a ‘subjectivist about values’ simply means that he proposes to act against the objective facts of reality (he proposes to chose goals which contradict his knowledge of reality, and to achieve them by means which contradict his knowledge of reality).”

"For man," writes Rand, "survival is a question---a problem to be soleved." And Darrell summed this 'question': “Rationality is man's essential characteristic, so the life of man qua man means a life lived in a manner consistent with this essential characteristic, that is, a life consistent with reason.”

To conclude:

There are a mass of references in the “real world” that bridge the supposed is-ought gap--but that "gap" can never be bridged because no such gap exists. The is-ought dichotomy is simply a philosophical fantasy propagated by the faulty and subjective laden epistemology of David Hume and his ilk. ("Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions"). The attempt to split "ought" from "is"--in the first place--in any department dealing with man, philosophy or science---most especially ethics--is the attempt to sever normative propositions from cognitive propositions and this is to separate morality from the real world, and done so to a great detriment.

-Victor

Edited July 31, 2007 by Michael Stuart Kelly

[Ellen Stuttle]

Also, on the issue of the participants being called "Prof": This is an abbreviation for "Professional," not for "Professor." Although the usage is explained in an introductory comment, I find it "fudgy," with an impliction conveyed that AR was talking to a whole group of professors. Only 3 of the participants -- Leonard Peikoff, George Walsh, and Ralph Nelson -- could have properly been considered "professors." Most of the others were graduate students; a couple of them I think might have still been undergraduates.

Ellen,

Where is this introductory comment?

Michael, please forgive my using tiger-striped posting, which I know you dislike. However, the posting style you like is near impossible for my eyes to deal with.

Foreword to the Second Edition,

pg. 125, paperback, First Meridian Printing (Expanded Second Edition), April, 1990

A substantial appendix has been added to this edition of Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. The appendix consists of excerpts from four workshops on epistemology that Ayn Rand conducted in New York City between 1969 and 1971. The workshops were opportunities for a dozen PROFESSIONALS [my emphasis] in philosophy, plus a few in physics and mathematics, to ask Miss Rand questions about her theory of concepts, which had first appeared in print in her own magaine, The Objectivist, in 1966-67. I myself took part in the workshops, as did Harry Binswanger, a longtime asociate of Miss Rand's who has performed the complex task of editing these excerpts for publication.

[....]

Leonard Peikoff

Executor, Estate of Ayn Rand

South Laguna, CA

April 1989

[The "Preface" by Harry is something you would find interesting to read, concerning the compression and the editing. It's longer than I want to type in; plus, I worry about "copyright infringement." He describes Cutting, Reorganizing, Line-editing.]

Continued in next post.

Ellen

___

Edited March 15, 2007 by Ellen Stuttle

[Ellen Stuttle]

[MSK] I tried to look it up because I wanted to quote it, but all I found was the following (my underline with bold).

(p. 129 - "Appendix—Preface" by Binswanger)

Sometimes a question was rephrased several times, with exchanges among several of the participants, before its meaning became clear, and much of that circling around has been eliminated. But I stuck closely to the professors' formulations when Miss Rand's response was to express agreement with what they said.

(p. 156)

Prof. D: I misunderstood, then, something that Professor B said. I thought that he was maintaining that these weren't really concretes, not even concretes with holes in them, so to speak—not even vague concretes.

(p. 285)

AR: It's totally wrong. Professor F is entirely right to bring it up in connection with my statement on causality from Galt's speech. Because actions are caused by entities, and therefore if you divide properties into dispositional properties vs. other properties, you've already denied the law of causality.

I think "Prof." actually does stand for "Professor" regardless of what the person's actual profession was back then.

Prof D was Nelson; Prof B was Gotthelf, who might have gotten under the wire by then; Prof F was Walsh. Notice that I earlier said that the three who could properly qualify were Peikoff (who's Prof E), Walsh, and Nelson.

[more in next]

Ellen

___

[Ellen Stuttle]

Lost the server connection. Long delay re-accessing.

[i'm skipping Peikoff's rendition to go straight to the AR quote he cites.]

In the objective approach, since every fact bears on the choice to live, every truth necessarily entails a value-judgment, and every value-judgment necessarily presupposes a truth. As Ayn Rand states the point in "The Objectivist Ethics": "Knowledge, for any conscious organism, is the means of survival; to a living consciousness, every 'is' implies an 'ought.'" Evaluation, accordingly, is not a compartmentalized function applicable only to some aspects of man's life or of reality; if one chooses to live and to be objective, a process of evaluation is coextensive with and implicit in every act of cognition.

That doesn't say what you wrote, Michael: "that ALL cognitive concepts include a normative abstraction, thus they are not really different." She says "every 'is' implies an 'ought'" and that evaluation is "coextensive with and implicit in every act of cognition." This isn't stating an inclusionary identity.

I realize Peikoff said "coextensive," but I find that really confusing. How does an abstraction "entail" and "imply" another abstraction and exclude it at the same time?

Michael

He would have correctly said "coterminus" in the context. And I mixed up sources there, since I thought the "coextensive" part was a continuation of what Rand said. I'm glad, upon rereading, to see that it wasn't, since I found that particularly awkward.

"Abstraction" isn't the applicable term here, but instead "proposition." For example: "All men are mortal" "entails"/"implies" that "Socrates is a man." What's being said is that every factual identification carries a for-me or against-me consequent and hence a built-in actional entailment, that every fact identified means some particular action choice is required.

Re "coextensive," "coterminus" would have been better usage, since the subject is action. An example: The oxygenation of blood is coterminus with the flow of blood through the lungs; the processes occur together, but they are not identical. The process of blood flow through the lungs is causally necessary, in human respiration, to oxygenating the blood which supplies the body with oxygen (though I think there is some small amount of oxygenation peripherally, such as in the nasal passages, but I'm not sure of that). In a similar way, what's being said is that "cognition" necessarily produces "evaluation," that evaluation always occurs along with cognition.

I think this isn't correct as a generalized statement. For instance, the sentence "Napoleon was the emperor of France." Do you immediately have a value response to that? And there are many other such examples. Beethoven had an immediate value response to the news that Napoleon had been crowned as Emperor, but you aren't in Beethoven's circumstance of having intended to dedicate a symphony to Napoleon. You might have the value judgment that being an emperor is bad per se, but this would be, I think, more of a cognitive response than an evaluative response in the sense being talked about, since Napoleon is long dead and not affecting your current life prospects.

Ellen

___

Edited March 15, 2007 by Ellen Stuttle

[Ellen Stuttle]

I am very curious to read your arguments to see if they match up to mine. I can tell you now that I am taking a teleological approach, as opposed to a deontological approach.

Victor,

For the record, I am not all that learned. I had to look these things up (with all due thanks to The Free Dictionary).

Teleological -

1. The study of design or purpose in natural phenomena.

2. The use of ultimate purpose or design as a means of explaining phenomena.

3. Belief in or the perception of purposeful development toward an end, as in nature or history.

Deontological - Pertaining to deontology.

Hmmmmm...

Deontology - Ethical theory concerned with duties and rights.

There. That's better.

Now what on earth do these different approaches mean in normal language?

Michael

I don't know what Victor means, but ethical theories since about post-Kant -- I'm not sure how far back this way of classifying has been used -- have been divided into "consequentalist" and "deontological." "Consequentalist" means that correct action is judged by the results; e.g., "utilitarianism," the "greatest good for the greatest number." "Deontological" means that correct action is considered to inhere in the nature of things, that is to spring from ("de") reality as such ("ontology"). Kant's ethics is the prime example. If you looked up "consequentalist" and "deontological" on the Stamford Dictionary of Philosophy website, I expect you'd find loads of stuff about the history and the differences. A standing debate among Objectivists is whether the O'ist ethics belongs in one or the other category or has aspects of both while being neither.

Ellen

___

Edited March 15, 2007 by Ellen Stuttle

[Brant Gaede]

On Daniel Barnes' blog I found a link to an interesting article by Michael Huemer about Objectivist ethics. It discusses some of the big holes in the theory I've mentioned in earlier posts. Something for our Michael to chew on.

The problem I have with Huemer's essay is not that he starts by giving his overview of Rand's position(s), but that he then analyzes his analysis thus refuting her! Later on he gives exact quotes, piece by piece. I don't have time for this, nor for others' analyses of the analysis and then analyses of the analyses.

What is needed is a better written essay with longer quotes. Best would be a better ethics to displace her claims. All I've seen so far in the little reading on this thread I've done is attempts at displacement from her critics. For the record, she wrote her ethics for her fictional characters and imaginary people. If you want to really critique her start by referring to real people--people as they are, not just what they "might be and should be." Otherwise you won't get there from here, which was Rand's basic problem, frankly. I guess she couldn't face the fact that there is no John Galt there, however, just pretension, her own and other's. Another way to put it is "wishful thinking." Galt has no potential for evil. He grew up never telling a lie or doing something he ought not to have done. He is as innocent as the day he was born. To be like Galt is to be as human as a moral sledgehammer and a complete, phoney, bore. I think Francisco should have beat the shit out of Galt after finding out he was after his woman ("So that's why you wanted me to go on strike!" ).

People first (data) then philosophy. Rand mostly got it backwards. So too, most Objectivists. No Objectivist Ethics can be objective, otherwise. People, you can have these endless discussions going nowhere.

--Brant

(I don't like replying to my own post, but this is really a significant edit. It's just that the original post is buried too deep in the thread.)

There are many heroic, admirable men and women of high moral rectitude and accomplishment who are quite inspirational and I celebrate them all. Randian heroes transmogrified into real people would be such people, even if some, like Ayn Rand herself, might be described as eccentric or difficult. If you artistically compress three generations into one in order to illustrate the collapse of a collectivist world, you heroes won't be able to act naturally or be natural. Francisco would not be going on strike, losing Dagny, with the thought that they might be able to get back together again in sixty years. Etc. When you mix up art and philosophy things can get crazy. Psychology loses because, like water, you can't compress psychology. Ethics must refer to psychology, not just philosophy.

--Brant

Edited March 15, 2007 by Brant Gaede