Jon Hersey

Catherine, agreed that it’s great we still have (substantial) freedom of speech!

I don’t think a market needs to be “maintained” in the sense of requiring regulation. I just think a true free market doesn’t exist until force has been extracted from social relations. A legitimate government is one whose sole function is to extract force from social relationships and thereby protect rights. In that case, what would it mean, as you say, “to submit to an entity which rules by coercion its not a voluntary choice”?

In my view, it would mean only that if one initiates force, one will be met with force. In a “state of nature” prior to the organization of a government, that force would be wielded by whomever happened to take it upon himself to respond to me, and there would be no preset limits on what his response should be. By contrast, a legitimate government puts objective limits on the use of retaliatory force, such that responses to force are measured and fair. I don’t see how that is an imposition on anyone.

Fraud is indirect physical force because the defrauder forcibly holds on to some value of yours and/or withholds some value owed to you. Embezzlement is a straightforward example of fraud and of indirect physical force. The embezzler physically takes wealth that doesn’t belong to him, withholding it from its rightful owner.

In his Advanced Seminars on Objectivism, Peikoff answers a question about libel (just after the 1-hour mark in lecture 14 on Government). He says that for libel to be a rights violation, it has to demonstrably deprive a person of property (like if someone libels Rand and then book sales immediately drop). I’ve heard some Objectivists make another argument: Libel deprives a person of his property in the form of the reputation he has earned. This, though, seems like a very hard case to make, because you cannot objectively prove that others have lowered their opinions of a person on account of someone’s libel—and if those people lower their opinions on the basis of non-objective charges, then what is their opinion actually worth?

I’m not sure I see a real difference between evasion and failing to seek facts one suspects are relevant. In Atlas, Rand described evasion as “the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment.” I think the basic question here is: How active does this have to be in order to legitimately be called evasion?

I would relate the basic psychological process to how it feels to edit an article. I’m reading along, and everything is flowing smoothly, but then I read something and get a vague, uneasy feeling. I’m not really sure why. I face a choice. (1) I can acknowledge the feeling and ask what caused it: Is there a problem with the text, or did I misread it, or do I need to expand my vocabulary? Or (2), I can ignore this feeling, which is effectively a “hunch” or “clue” that—if I am to remain in full-focused awareness—something requires investigation, and keep on reading. I think this is basically how most people experience the need to increase their awareness, and then they either do increase it, or ignore the feeling and fail to ask the requisite questions—even though they do suspect that they are on shaky ground in doing so.

The more I think about the decision to live as pre-moral, the more confusing I find it.

We simply are alive, and most of us never make a conscious choice to live. The issue we actually confront is not the choice to live but the choice, of some, to die. The choice to take one’s life does not seem to be pre-moral. Rather, it is the subject of serious moral evaluation, both for the person contemplating suicide and for others who hear that someone has taken his life or attempted to. The person contemplating taking his own life likely asks himself at some point whether doing so is moral; a parent may think it immoral to commit suicide given his chosen responsibilities to his children, and a Japanese businessman might think it immoral to remain alive after losing his job or bankrupting his company. Likewise, I think others properly can pass judgment on the moral legitimacy of a suicide. Granted, they may not have the full context; in particular, they can’t access the data of a person’s psychological state. But they can say, “Well, he had X responsibility, and he totally shirked it, which is immoral.” I don’t see what would be wrong with that. This also seems borne out by Peikoff’s denunciation of the person who decides to commit suicide without good cause (OPAR, 248). If the choice to live were pre-moral, how could we, as outsiders, evaluate that person’s choice?

FWIW, Darryl Wright addresses this question in “Reasoning about Ends,” the lead-off essay in Metaethics, Egoism, and Virtue (25-32). His position seems to be that we feel that life is worth living even before thinking about or making the choice that it is. He writes, “If it is not particularly hard to experience one’s life as a value, then there are easily accessible non-deliberative grounds for making the choice to value one’s life.” He suggests there’s something defective about those who don’t “experience one’s life as a value,” and thus “The existence of nondeliberative grounds for the choice [to live] also supplies justification for a negative verdict on those who (again, in some fundamental way, rather than due to evil circumstances) do not value their lives” (29). I don’t disagree that we feel (or “experience,” I don’t know exactly what he means by that term) that life is worth living, but I’m not sure how this really grounds moral judgment about a person who doesn’t feel/experience it and who chooses to commit suicide. If the choice to live were pre-moral, it would be pre-moral and outside the realm of moral judgement. But the basic problem with this whole approach seems to be the idea that this is a choice that we actually confront. Rather, it is our default state, and we confront only the obverse, the choice to die, which, it seems, is not pre-moral.

Finally, to address your question directly, I think what you describe is an accurate description of apathy and depression, but not the choice to die. The choice to die is the choice to pursue a certain, permanent relief from suffering. For him, simply remaining in existence does not solve the problem of psychological and perhaps physical pain.

Recall that the virtues are applications of rationality to narrower contexts; they are aspects of what rationality demands, and we separate them for ease of focus and study. The overarching virtue is rationality.

Both of your examples are of people whose basic mistake is belief in God, which means accepting the arbitrary on faith, which fundamentally undermines a person’s basic means of living. This, most definitely, is a vice, and its consequences could have ramifications in any area of one’s life, and thus on one’s ability to practice any virtue. Recall also that the virtues are distinguished by the area of reality on which they focus our attention. Although Aquinas and Valjean both lack integrity insofar as they fail to consistently act on rational principles, their basic error (and thus vice) is more fundamental; it’s that, in a crucial area of their lives, they act not on their own rational judgment but on faith in their feelings and the say-so of other people. That is, both fail to practice the virtue of independence. Because they don’t, they don’t adopt rational principles by which to act with integrity.

Tom, think about the discovery of the relevance of RH as an addition to the file folder containing our knowledge of blood compatibility. In order to grasp it, we first need knowledge of blood type compatibility. Only because we know that A bloods are compatible can we discover an additional causal factor. If no other relevant causal factors existed, then simply knowing that “A bloods are compatible” would be sufficient for our purposes of blood transfusions (and the like). But our knowledge that A bloods are compatible is not an “out-of-context absolute.” We never (properly) hit upon knowledge and then decide, “I now know everything causally relevant here.” Rather, we must acknowledge that we know what we know, but that other things may be causally relevant. Discovering those things adds detail to our knowledge, but it does not contradict it.

I’ve heard (but haven’t independently researched) that the Alexander Wiener, who discovered RH factor, was one of the scientists who also discovered blood type. Apparently, he wasn’t stopped in his tracks by the new discovery. It further clarified the causal knowledge he’d already attained.

Thanks, Steve.

The passages in question are these:

“The first words a child learns are words denoting visual objects, and he retains his first concepts visually. Observe that the visual form he gives them is reduced to those essentials which distinguish the particular kind of entities from all others—for instance, the universal type of a child’s drawing of man in the form of an oval for the torso, a circle for the head, four sticks for the extremities, etc. Such drawings are a visual record of the process of abstraction and concept-formation in a mind’s transition from the perceptual level to the full vocabulary of the conceptual level” (ITOE, 13).

Peikoff writes, “A word is the only form in which a man’s mind is able to retain such a sum of concretes. If a man, deprived of words, were to perform only the steps indicated so far, he would have before his mind a complex, unwieldy phenomenon: a number of similar objects and a resolve to treat them and everything like them together. This would not be a mental entity or a retainable mental state. . . . A concept without a word is at best an ephemeral resolve” (OPAR, 79).

Rand says we retain our first concepts visually, whereas Peikoff says the only form in which we can hold concepts is via a word. Seamus’s answer, if I recall correctly, was that these don’t conflict because words are visual. However, “visually” is much broader than “in the form of a word,” and the stick-figure example Rand gives is not a word. I think, strictly speaking, these passages do conflict, but that the omission is an understandable choice given Peikoff’s goal of condensing the entire philosophy into one book. The issue, though, could have been avoided by simply cutting the world “only” from his first line above.