A Priorism and Politics

Economics Political Theory
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Personally, I think his breakthrough is more one generated by force of personality than it is by a logical breakthrough in his Ethics. He also hit on a hotbutton topic for him personally that happens to have an audience in young people. Namely the terroristic nature of some of the doctrines of religion and the damaging effects of many of the punishment norms that parents use in family units. If it was 20 years ago, I’d call him a secular cult leader, and this is from reading through the forums and interacting with some of the members. Some of the members display a level of hero-worship in some of their responses that would concern me if I saw my child falling into it.

I didn’t get far enough with his philosophical discussion, he sells his book, and I wasn’t in favor of buying something I had rejected as impossible previously. The way I have always viewed it is as I stated before, and is I believe informed by an understanding of Praxeology.

He argues for a Universally Preferable Behavior. Meaning that there are some ethical propositions which are always good for all people in all places. I don’t understand how he argues around the finer points.

My view on the whole issue is that Ethics that look for an objective truth or this solution to the Is Ought Problem are observing an evolutionary selection mechanism in the technical implementation level, and trying to make it a law (theory level) instead of simply accepting localized superiority in the competition with competing ethical values which are less fit.

To put it in more pragmatic terms, lying is generally viewed as BAD, because of a very simple logical explanation. If I don’t trust you, you are a risk I must account for in my plans. If I can count on your information as reliable, then I trust you and choose to work with you more often. You reduce my risks.

Lying will still be preferable in many circumstances. Never tell your wife that a dress makes her ass look fat… If you like her ass that way in those jeans let her know, if it’s becuse there’s a certain fatness (or phatness) to it, that you like, then how you give that information to her is up to you. Some information is harmful to others and not necessary to disclose. So, the fitness of dishonesty will generally be low, but it will not always be less fit. This is IMO bounded to the field of Ethics, and the choice of means and ends is (not ought to be, but IS) up to the human actor who uses it.

Now what I did take away from Objectivism is the preeminence of reality. She, and Molyneux, correctly identify that one cannot arbitrarily choose which behaviors to engage in, the social implications of what you choose does alter the perception of others in your social circle. It does feedback to you within the context of those relationships. But mistaking that phenomena as some means of producing Universallly True Ethical Propositions is, IMO a mistake. It attempts to bridge the Epistemological and Praxeological box from within which we act, and that is a trap from which man CANNOT escape.

Dammit, I started to read his argument for Universally Preferable Behavior… I’ll come back to this later and give you a more direct response.

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Thanks. I’d be interested to hear your response to his “two guys in a room” refrain. So, a certain behavior cannot be considered UPB unless it is universally preferable, and we can test this by considering just two guys in a room. If we want to see if rape is in accordance with UPB, we make it a moral good that “man should rape”. However, we see that each individual is in a quandary since, by definition, rape is not consensual (as soon as there is consent it is just sex), and to resist morality is to be immoral, so each of the men in this room is simultaneously being moral and immoral. Therefore, we see that rape is not UPB, or, said another way, not raping is UPB.

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I’ve been reading through and thinking about these very issues. There’s something really, really tempting and yet I suspect insidious and inaccurate about the way he constructs his argument. In particular he says that UPB for it to be UPB must be the equivalent of a law of gravity.

That is my issue, he does the same thing about argumentation, and a couple of other things. Like that fact that I argue, means that I accept as a premise that Argumentation is a Universally Preferable Behavior. But also that it implies we assume that there is such a thing as objective truth. Now I’m not sure that’s true that we assume that there’s an objective truth.

Let me give an example, and it’s based on his example. We assume that the earth is flat, as an implicit observation from experience. It’s empirically true. And yet we found that this flatness is an illusion from context.

His entire argument feels like an attempt to break out of the box, so to speak, as opposed to what Mises did was accept the box, and explain the behavior of the box. (Praxeological Epistemology)

For example, he says again as a given that the senses give us objective information about reality… And yet we have tons of evidence, that actually the brain fools itself over and over again as a successful convenience. There are interpretation mechanisms in the brain that make inferences and do so all the time, based on some hardwired mechanisms that were sufficiently successful that they thrived and survived (evolutionarily) over and above other hardwiring which failed. But that doesn’t mean the hardwired interpretation mechanisms reflect an objective reality, as much as successfully model objective reality. I think that’s substatially different. And I’m concerned that this blurring that he’s doing is acting like elite level philosophy brought down to the common man, without being good philosophy.

I’ll continue to look at it.

For example if eating to survive is universally preferable, shouldn’t we be eating all the time? Not eating at any point in time would be considered universally not preferable? That type of inversion isn’t actually a correct inversion. This is a bait and switch. The fact that we must maintain a certain level of nutrients in the body in order to remain alive is true. But there is no Universally Preferable Behavior that describes the optimal level of nutrition for every human body. Because of multiple objective factors, and multiple subjective factors. He’s trying to turn complex issues into simple issues when they aren’t. His expansion of NAP for example, and then using his UPB to collapse seven possible axioms down to 3, is one of those issues where I think he’s trying to hard to break out of the box.

I’m not going to disagree that not being raped is preferable to me. But the quandary of rape, is if someone wants to be raped… Hmm… there’s a logical disconnect, in terms of the logic, and yet I’ve known women who had rape fantasies, and engaged in some troubling sexual activity.

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By the way, while I think there may be other reasons, than the ones set forth here, here’s a good link to a very serious and thorough criticism.

This criticism is from a philosophy student, from years ago. At a minimum it makes some obvious points which I was struggling to articulate on my first pass.

My favorite was his pointing out an issue with the way he was mixing up opposite and negation and acting as if they were the same thing.

Negation is to not do something, but opposite, is to truly do the opposite.

The opposite of stealing 100$ is to give 100$, not to not steal. Not stealing is a negation.