This is starting to get quite funny, actually. Why do you feel any uneasiness? Why do you follow your drive to remove it? What allows you to act to remove it to begin with? Only life gives rise to wants and the need to satisfy them. (It might just be that by “life” and “satisfaction of wants” we are referring to approximately the same phenomenon.)
That’s what I’ve been saying. Satisfaction/uneasiness, i.e. the state of your quest to achieve your ends, is a strict praxeological matter. The content of your ends, and whether there have any necessary contents, is a normative matter. Man acts to make himself or the world better off than they would be had he not acted. This is a formal, praxeological, positive description about action. I am concerned, on the other hand, with the specific, normative contents of action. We are discussing different things.
I disagree. The whole of Rand’s ethics is to show this is in fact often false. There are simple biological stimuli that are beyond our control and reward basic life-sustaining behaviour. But many conscious actions feel good that are objectively not in your interests. Your social climate might impart feelings of guilt upon you if you don’t constantly sacrifice yourself, if you don’t do as others command, if you don’t lend all your money to your friend, if you don’t give up that career in order to stay with your girlfriend. Self-destructive practises of altruism might feel good. Hedonism as well. Lying on a resume might feel good, but in the long run is likely to turn out bad for you. Or living a life of debauchery , drugs, and crime. Living is more than simply breathing and having a pulse. Every action you take has a long-run consequence on your life, and many times, when those consequences are far removed we ignore them. That doesn’t make them any less real.
I’m not saying no good actions feel good. I’m saying your emotions and sensations are not a consistently reliable to all and every actions. This seems to me to be obvious. A disciplined egoism requires that you give up short-term gratifications in order to pursue your rational self-interest.
No, you’re trying to divorce ends from means and you cannot.
The problem is that - by assigning an incorrect ultimate end (life) - you are bound to come to ridiculous prescriptions for the choices of intermediate ends (or means-ends). If we say, for example, “the ultimate end of man is to fly”, then we might say that “vigorously flapping your arms for 30 minutes each morning is a good and healthy activity which all moral people will engage in.” The correct identification of the ultimate end is crucial to determining the contents of normative ethics.
As for “life” being the ontological precondition for acting, I am not disputing this. But life, in this sense, is merely a description of a physical system, that is, the vibration of atoms within my cells that permit the messages from the cells’ DNA to be communicated to the respective parts and keep the whole system alive and functioning. This is a question for the physical sciences and biology, not for praxeology.
Praxeology is the study of what humans do (and, with certain qualifications, why). While “being alive” is a physical precondition for acting, apprehension of this ontological fact within the mind of the acting individual is not. I do not need to understand the first thing about my biology or the physics of atoms and polymers in order to act. I act based solely on the indivisible consciousness which is presented to me at every waking moment. How that consciousness works, what’s under the hood, whether I have an incorporeal soul, these are all questions that might be interesting to study but are irrelevant to the question of action. However it works, it works, and I must act to avoid uneasiness and seek satisfaction of my wants.
Hence, I do not need to value being alive because I could not value being alive if I have no idea what it even means to be alive (i.e. the physical preconditions of living, such as not eating poisonous mushrooms). I can and must act even if I do not know what makes me alive, therefore, I can act without valuing life. I can mistakenly eat poisonous mushrooms in the effort to satisfy my hunger. Such an action is not immoral. Even if I knew the mushroom was poisonous and I ate it out of “high time preference” (Rothbard, EoL), I would still not be engaging in immoral behavior.
I don’t deny this. But, as a matter of praxeology, we have to explain why people do what they do. However, I think that to say that making incorrect choices for one’s own interests is immoral is to confuse the question of social order (morality, ethics, law) with the question of calculation (how to achieve a given end). The two are clearly separate.
Let me re-quote Bastiat: “[consumption] suggests to the mind a coarse and material connotation, accurate undoubtedly for physical wants, but not for wants of a higher order. The raising of wheat, the spinning of wool are concluded by an act of consumption. Can the word consumption be also applied to the works of the artist, the songs of the poet, the deliberations of the jurist, the sermons of the priest? … pardon me if I often use the word satisfaction to apply to all our wants and to all our desires, since I think it better corresponds to the wider scope that I feel justified in giving to political economy.”
There are no wants or desires which fall outside of the scope of alleviation of felt uneasiness and satisfaction of wants. This is how the external (and internal) world is presented to us by our conscious minds whenever we are awake and in our senses. We all act, at all times, in response to our own psychic stimuli (excepting the insane, drugged, etc.) Even the desire to act rationally (according to the principles of logic, cause-and-effect, objective facts, etc.) is a response to subjective psychic stimuli. We are always acting to achieve satisfaction, even if that satisfaction is the result of low time-preference, deferred consumption, careful calculation and based on objective facts, logic and cause-and-effect.
I’d never think a Rand thread would get this in depth, and I can’t take it seriously when the poster has Ralph Wiggum as his default pic (I hear the voice when I begin to read).
Of course they are separate! That’s why I’m trying to deal with the former and not the latter. All you are doing is saying that man does what he does in order to get what he wants. I’m discussing what he should want!
You claimed that life is the ultimate value, that is, in order to act you must value life. I assert that this claim is false. We’re clearly going in circles at this point.
@tunk: My claim is that point 4 in the OP syllogism is false, therefore, there is no reason to believe your conclusion in the OP. The purpose of this syllogism is to probe the truth/falsity of point 4 in more depth.
What do I mean by this? It’s a quite simple proposition once you grasp it.
As I said above, “If you have a standard […], you have some parameter you are trying to maximize. You “should” reject all alternatives that fail to maximize that parameter. E.g. if you want to win a marathon, you should train. […] Decisions can only be made in light of a standard […] [they] are what allow you to choose one state of affairs over another”. Without a standard you can make no evaluations and no choices.
If your goal is “life” – i.e. the promotion of optimal conditions for the operation of your essence across your natural life span – then there are certain things you “ought” to do. Faced with the alternative between being obese or doing regular exercise, for example, you “ought” to do the latter. Faced with the alternative between spending an afternoon bonking yourself on the head with a hammer or doing your math homework, you “ought” to do the latter. (For self-evident reasons, I hope.) But before all of these alternatives, you are faced with one basic alternative: acting or not acting, choosing or not choosing. Life says you “ought” to do the former. An agent with life as an ultimate value “ought” to act and choose. Consequently, an agent that acts and chooses has life as their ultimate value.
Does the latter necessarily follow the former? Yes, once you realize that there is no other standard that precedes choice and action and gives rise to them in the way life does. “Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action”. As I wrote above:
Perhaps my constant quoting of myself puts some off. But, for some reason, it seems to me nobody puts it better. And if you want something done right…
Anyway, I hope this is lucid, so people can start discussing my actual argument as opposed to strawmen.
I can agree to this (I think that’s point 3 in the OP).
I believe Mises explicitly rejects this idea in HA - we have no choice in the matter of whether to choose. We are simply born into the world and we must choose, we must act, and that’s that. In any case, I would dispute this claim.
I think you’re abusing normative language here. We don’t say that “in order to be a negatively charged particle, the electron ought to move away from other electrons. To do otherwise, would be to choose not to be an electron.” We don’t speak this way because it (wrongly) implies that the electron has a choice in the matter. As I said above, humans do not have the choice between choosing and not choosing. By virtue of existing, you are choosing at all instants. Even if you simply lie down on the ground from this moment until you perish you are choosing not to get up.
I think this is the crux of our disagreement. Because you believe we have some kind of primordial “pre-choice”, you imagine that we can “choose life”. But I reject this view. We do not choose life. We are alive and choice (action) is thrust upon our conscious mind whether we want it or not as a consequence of being alive.
I was actually waiting for somebody to make that point. It means I’m finally being understood. (Though not refuted quite yet.)
First of all, we are concerned only with conscious, living beings here, entities that can engage in goal-directed action. As Rand writes in TOE, “Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies; its chemical elements remain, but its life goes out of existence.” A non-living being – e.g. atoms, rocks, plants – does not have to do anything in order to maintain its existence; living being does.
Incidentally, Michael Huemer responded to this claim in his critique of TOE: “it is not true that positive action is never required to preserve a non-living thing’s existence. A cloud, for instance, must absorb more water in order to continue to exist.” Of course, this is complete casuistry. What identifies an action as goal directed is “self-generation”, “value-significance”, and “goal-causation”, all of which come from life. Harry Binswanger explains this in The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts.
Now, I actually reject, along with you, the belief of some Objectivists that there is such a thing as a “premoral choice to live” that precedes all rationality and on which no judgements can be passed, so that ultimately we really can’t make any moral evaluations about sucide bombers. But I also reject the thesis that this means that there is “no choice in the matter of whether to choose” life – at least in the sense in which you use it, as if it rips away the foundations for ethics. On the contrary, every choice is a choice of life. To say that decision-making can’t be avoided is just to confirm what I’ve been saying from the start, which is that life qua flourishing is man’s natural end.
If you could somehow choose not to make choices, you wouldn’t be living being. Because you are a living being that pursues life, you can make choices. This is the meaning of that rather opaque phrase in A Groundwork For Rights: “Living being acts to live. It is […] both the terms of the relation as well as the relation itself. This is what it means to be an end in itself.” Rasmussen also cites against Tibor Machan a devastating reductio ad absurdum from Douglas Den Uyl of exactly the position you reject, which may be instructive here:
@tunk: It seems to me that Long, yourself et. al. are equivocating on the word “life.” That word is heavily overloaded and can refer to many different kinds of things. It can refer to the biological definition of life (which is itself disputed, for example, some biologists believe that bacteria are alive but viruses are not, etc.), there is quality-of-life, there is “life in the abstract”, i.e. plant-animal-human life in a Zen Buddhist sense, there is having a life (doing things, going places, meeting people) and so on. Too many kinds of life.
Can you break down in other words what you mean by “life”? I don’t mean to be obtuse nor am I trying to “wear you down”.
Are you claiming that it is objectively immoral to make choices which mitigate against my own life, for example, smoking cigarettes? Is it not possible for me to weigh my value for the length/quality of my life with the pleasure I receive right now from smoking cigarettes?
The derivation of “flourishing” from “life” and the moral implications is where Smith’s books are really useful. It is not an equivocation to maintain that the two are the same goal. Flourishing doesn’t refer to a mere subjective feeling, since Rand maintains feelings are not a guide to rational self-interest. (That an action makes you feel good is a necessary but not sufficient condition for its being in your rational self-interest.) Objective flourishing means surviving in the most optimal way.
Some people reject this argument on the basis of the distinction between needs and wants, or the quantity and quality of life, maintaining survival only requires the former. But these are false distinctions, or at least not clear-cut ones. The quantity of your life depends on the quality, and vice versa. And the sheer number of things that qualify as “needs” exponentially increase with the progress of civilization. (Demanding the unnecessary is the definition of human progress.)
The first requirement of flourishing is rationality, “the master virtue”, from which all others derive. You must make an honest effort to identify the facts of reality and make honest and valid judgements and inferences about them. Since every decision you make has some potential ramification, large or small, minute or drastic, on your existence, it becomes clear that for the most part it is not a good idea to live by making quick ad hoc calculations on the spur of the moment. The instant you err or overlook important information could mean death. Instead, it’s a good idea to formulate some principles in advance, incorporating the widest possible knowledge, and adhere to them without waverance so as to minimize the risk involved in decision-making. (Of course, the application of your principles depends on the context.) These for Rand are Rationality, Honesty, Independence, Integrity, Justice, Productiveness, and Pride.
I remember that Huemer objects to all this on the grounds that Rand has to show, for her argument to be valid, that as soon as you do something immoral you die. This is, of course, false. You could, at any moment, point to “live bad guys”, immoral people who happen to have a pulse. Yet mere appearances tell you nothing about whether their long-run survival is assured. As Smith puts it, this is like being a doctor, seeing a patient walk into your clinic, and concluding, “You’re fine; after all, you’re alive!” Just because you can get away with cheating on a principle in a particular instance does not make cheating a valid norm, in the same way that the fact you might survive if you jaywalk with a blindfold doesn’t make blindfolded jaywalking a good street-crossing policy. And indeed, “bad guys”, if they survive and flourish for long periods, can only do so to their extent that they practise Randian virtues more times than not.
So, someone who “cheats” is pitting themselves against their fellow man, undermining the kind of society that makes it possible for them to pursue their values. They have to commit more wrongs to cover up the first wrongs, increasing the chance of being caught. It is only possible to cheat insofar as there remains anyone off of whom you may be a parasite, which decreases in likelihood the more you cheat. And of course, people who lie, kill, rape, steal, etc. usually foster severe inner psychological proglems. Whereas all of this can be avoided by treating your fellow man with dignity and who represents a potential value to you in trade. This is why egoism isn’t predatory, but in fact demands a lot of discipline from you.
Tl;dr: with regards to smoking, you will most likely not drop dead as soon as you take one puff. But the more you do it…
OK, I think we’re getting closer to understanding where exactly we differ…
I’m with you all the way up to this point (and including your prior self-quote).
This is where we part ways. Flourishing/life can only be an ultimate end if it is a subjective state of affairs. The reason this is the case is because we cannot (presently) bridge the gap between praxeology (what men do) and psychology (why they do it) and because the study of human action is plagued with the observer effect (observing someone changes their behavior) among other problems. We are learning more and more every day about the objective criteria for our own happiness through neurobiology, evolutionary psychology and other scientific disciplines. But we are still light-years away from a really comprehensive, objective understanding of the human mind. You are right that it is tautological to say that “the ultimate end is satisfaction of wants” since an end is a goal which is, by definition, something which is striven for in order to increase one’s satisfaction with his or her state of affairs. But it’s the best we have at this point. Mises says pretty much this in the opening of HA but I can’t seem to find the cite right now.
But who decides most optimal except yourself? Optimal flourishing is itself subjectively ascertained.
I think all of this mitigates against the idea that flourishing is in any way objective.
In Misesian terminology, this would be “calculation” not rationality. Rationality (the use of logic/reason) is a refined or honed sort of calculation. Calculation per se does not require long, tedious deductions. It is the nature-given capacity of the human mind to make “quick-and-dirty” assessments, however inaccurate they may be, of the best course of action to achieving one’s own satisfaction (by which I mean something like a subjective sense in which you use the word “flourishing”).
It should be made clear that the pursuit of “satisfaction” in Misesian terminology does not imply some kind of blind satiation of instict-driven lust or hunger. Satisfaction is what the acting individual expects to increase as a result of whatever effect he attempts to bring about by his actions. For example, the hunter-gatherer who decides to forgo getting high on some natural intoxicant in order to gather food for winter is acting on the basis of calculation. From our position of superior historical and technological knowledge, we can see that the hunter-gatherer could make many objectively better choices from the point-of-view of his own flourishing/satisfaction but his failure to do so is not for a lack of the utilization of his capacity for reason (calculation) but, rather, results from the circumstances of inferior knowledge and social advantages (division-of-labor) in which he finds himself.
Have you read Human Action or at least the first few chapters of it? I recommend the first several chapters of Economic Harmonies by Bastiat, as well. Bastiat is a much more conversational writer and he covers much of the same ground as Mises, though Mises is more technically accurate wherever they disagree.
That’s all fine, but I still maintain that the fact that I can weigh my own life (quantity and quality) against other considerations means that my life cannot possibly be an ultimate value/end. An ultimate value/end must be something which - no matter what I do - I cannot help but valuing/striving for. The very fact that I can weigh other considerations against my own life and objective flourishing means that these cannot be my ultimate end.
One issue I have with Tunk’s exposition is that, in acting, people don’t necessarily choose life in general. At the very least, they choose only their own lives. Nothing necessitates them extending that into a general principle.
It seems to me at this point the only divide between us is misunderstandings. The life-as-the-ultimate-value argument usually, in fact, cannot be presented without people severely misconstruing it. (Especially on a board full of ethical skeptics.) C’est la vie.
Yes, obviously, only the individual can flourish and can know that he flourishes. I don’t dispute that. But that’s not the point.
(One of Rand’s central claims, as a side note, is indeed that value an isn’t “intrinsic” phenomenon, it isn’t a property of objects to be found “out there”; instead, it is agent-relative: something only has “value” if someone places a value on it. This premise isn’t crucial, however. It could be that there is intrinsic value. It makes no difference either way since life qua ultimate value is agent-relative as far as the meta-ethics for egoism is concerned.)
When I said “subjective feeling”, I was only attempting to guard against the misinterpretation that “flourishing” simply means feeling good. Feeling good is a necessary but not sufficient condition for flourishing, since lots of destructive practises can make you feel good, at least in the short term. The point is to feel good as a result of doing the right things.
Who evaluates whether you are doing the right things? When I say “objective” flourishing, I mean objective dependent on the context of the individual. That’s to say, if I was provided with every relevant bit of information about you, who you are, where you are going, your ambitions, your failures, your past, present, and future, your loves, your hates, your virtues, your vices, etc., I would be able at any given time to inform you whether your actions will contribute to your long-term survival. This is life’s function as an objective standard. Of course, human beings are not omniscient. In reality, the individual must adopt whatever ends he and only he judges are necessary for his flourishing (I don’t mean that people always are independent, but that they should be, since the burden of living can fall only on you; not that you can never accept aid from others, but that you must judge first whether that aid is proper to accept), and he could very well err. An honest mistake made in light of a serious attempt to do the right thing is not immoral, by Rand’s standards. A deliberate evasion of that duty, however, would be.
But this does not erode flourishing’s objective status. Life is still a standard; it still distinguishes things you should do from things you shouldn’t. The only qualification is that what fits into these categories is more often than not left for you to discover. In practise, life’s objectivity is relative, but relativity is not the negation of objectivity.
No, no, no. Rationality qua moral virtue is an entirely different thing from rationality qua praxeological category. The latter is reason as a means to anything*,* whatever the acting agent has in mind. The former is reason as a means to life. Smith’s exposition lays it out clearly:
If you make a “quick and dirty assessment” for practical purposes, you are not necessarily doing anything immoral. Take Greg Nyquist for example, who tries to argue otherwise:
Whatever this shows about Rand’s rather intemperate writing style, none of it disproves anything relevant to her ethics. (I don’t ever recall Rand ever maintaining that human beings don’t have emotions, or that emotions have nothing to do with how people often engage in decision-making, or that our emotions should be suppressed. She, and I, only said emotions are not reliable guides to what’s in your self-interest.)
I’m not maintaining that every action you take should be the result of some deep, long, learned meditation. As Smith put it, reason is not rocket science. A wise generalization based on experience would obey the requirement of rationality qua moral virtue, which is merely that you orient yourself to the facts of reality. The only immorality, fundamentally, is evasion of reality. If you think you might be sick and you make an educated guess that you are probably not and have no reason to think you are enormously, catastrophically wrong, you are practising rationality qua virtue. (Though I’d see a doctor just to be sure.) If, however, you do have such a reason, and you willfully ignore it, you are not practising rationality qua virtue. That’s all.
For egoism, principles are means to the end of life. (For praxeology, on the other hand, the end could be anything and necessitates no morality.) When I said that “it’s a good idea to formulate some principles in advance, incorporating the widest possible knowledge”, I meant that life cannot be achieved by making quick guesses as to what it would require. Because life is such a large, complex, multi-faceted phenomenon, comprising a wide range of experience – every action you take has some impact on your life, one of the reasons it is so basic as a value – its “means” are not frivolous schemes but virtues and traits of character to be seriously pondered and cultivated and perfected throughout the whole of one’s existence.
Again, this doesn’t challenge anything I’ve said. Yes, rationality is not an end in itself, but only a means to ends. It guides you along the path to achieving your goals, whatever they may be. Rationality, for both praxeology and ethics, is wanting A and not wanting B, and so doing C and giving up D. All ethics does is fill in the blanks.
I’ve only read MES. Why? Everything I know about praxeology suggests to me ethical egoism is not incompatible with it.
…No.
This is the most common point against natural law. If there is such a thing as a moral code to be discovered by reason, then everyone would have discovered it and everyone would be practising it. Since people, in point of fact, disagree on the contents of natural law or whether it exists, we can conclude it does not exist. But this completely misses the point. The purpose of a natural ethic is not to establish some kind of moral safety net below which you cannot fall, that human beings never morally err. The point of a natural ethic is to establish what is moral error and what isn’t.
Note that life is not a “goal” like any other. If I “strive for” a business deal or a wedding ring, the demand is satisfiable in the sense that it is possible to say that I could reach a final state of having “achieved” it. This is why “satisfaction” is a possible label for the relation between particular means and ends. (Of course, as praxeologists, we know that that an instance of satisfaction is immediately supplanted by disatisfaction, so aggregate satisfaction stays the same. As you said, dissatisfaction is a preliminary of action.)
Life is different. It is not a state but a process. You are acting to optimize it every time you act, since action is optimization of the standard of life at the most basic level. That does not mean you are optimizing it at all other levels. Your “life bar” at levels 29, 42, or 3 could be 80%, 50%, 20%, etc., at any given moment. But that doesn’t change the fact that it could feasibly be at 100% (at least, ideally, in the same way the economy could ideally be in equilibrium), and that if it was you would be better suited to achieving your goals. The role of the ethicist is simply to give you some prudential advice by which you could, in fact, better achieve your goals.
If you value (act to gain and/or keep) a ham sandwich at a deli, you are also valuing what makes your valuation possible. Not just the lettuce, the meat, the buns, but the capital and labour required for the sandwich and the extensive division of labour economy from which these arose. (That’s where your money went, after all.) You may not necessarily be conscious of this, but it is an objective fact regardless. If it was made aware to you that you were in dire prospects of losing the conditions under which the ham sandwich you so highly value could be assembled and purchased, you would undoubtedly rush to defend your values. (unless you decided it wasn’t worth it.)
I think the idea of an ultimate end scares people because it’s as if I’m shoving moral obligations down your throat, when I am not. Morality is practical advice for economical achievement of what we know from praxeology to be the end of individual action: making yourself better off. If you don’t like that, then don’t act. Whoops, you can’t.
True. There is a very destructive meme of moral nihilism that has suffused the developed world. Any suggestion that there is a definite right and wrong is met with shock and revile. That said, I think we really do disagree on the foundations for ascertaining right and wrong mainly because I see morality as primarily a social problem not an individual problem. I don’t think there is any “right” or “wrong” for Crusoe alone on his island… I’m pretty sure from what you’ve written that you would disagree with me on this (but you are in agreement with Rothbard/Hoppe/etc. on this point). It is my view that morality only enters the picture once Friday is on the island along with Crusoe and interpersonal conflict becomes possible.
In my view, morality is not merely the art of choosing right ends but the art of choosing ends in a way that is harmonious with others, that is, choosing your ends in such a way that your own well-being is maximized even after taking into account the responses of others to your actions. For example, the thief may choose to steal a Sony PSP and he may take it home and enjoy it for a few days until the store’s investigators locate his home. Now he’s got a problem bigger than the enjoyment he was deriving from his free Sony PSP. On net, it’s probably a loss for him from the point-of-view of his own well-being (but only he can ascertain this for himself).
This is all uncontroversial and I’m sure you agree with the example but where (I think) we differ is over whether moral/immoral behavior is possible for Crusoe alone on his island. To help you understand why I hold my view, ask yourself why does morality matter? Why does it matter whether what I do is right or wrong?
I think it’s a problem because it means that one can choose his life over the lives of others. As repugnant as it may be to say, serial murderers like Jeffrey Dahmer murdered others to relieve some uneasiness they felt otherwise. In so doing, they saw themselves as undoubtedly serving their own lives. But they certainly weren’t serving life in general, as their actions lead to the deaths of others.
Rothbard/Hoppe/et. al use “ethics” to mean the interpersonal restrictions that ought to govern human action, and “morality” for what individual action ought to be. I’m used to using both “ethics” and “morality” in the way Rand did (perhaps irresponsibly), as interchangeable terms for the latter, and “politics” for the former. (E.g. the non-aggression principle prohibits murder and not lying.)