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Work in progress (5)
Some interesting work-in-progress out there to report:
Roderick Long has a very interesting paper up on his website, “Why Character Traits are Not Dispositions,” and I have some comments on it there (only tangentially related to the main claims of the paper, I have to admit). The paper is relevant to some of the discussion we’ve been having here on moral luck (and is also a good way of helping me buy time to produce my long-promised third installment on that topic). The link goes to a post on the Alabama Philosophical Society meeting in Pensacola in October. It’s a very impressive line-up, and I’m sure putting it together was as much work as writing a paper on character traits and dispositions.
The Atlas Society’s Roger Donway has just announced the “online publication” of a co-authored piece (with Robert Bradley) on Gabriel Kolko‘s A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916, originally called The Triumph of Conservatism. The link takes you to a page of description on The Atlas Society’s website; there’s a link there to the PDF version of the published essay in The Independent Review. The Bradley-Donway essay was in fact published six months ago, but apparently the six-month embargo is up, hence my scare-quoted reference to it as a new “online publication.”
I suppose a third work in progress is IOS’s own Fall Seminar on concepts, to take place exactly a week from now at the Glen Ridge Community Center. Everything’s in place for that, and Carrie-Ann and I are really looking forward to it. I’ll try to post a few things here on concept-related material within the next few days. Meanwhile, here’s something to chew on.
Irfan
P.S., 7:05 pm: I myself am at work on some annotations (posted on a different part of the IOS website) of Rand’s Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. I have a long annotation on the first paragraph of the book, which I take pretty conclusively to imply an “open” as opposed to “closed” conception of Objectivism (if a “closed” conception can even be coherently stated in a way that contrasts clearly with an “open” conception, which I doubt, since I don’t think anyone has ever managed to do it). Anyway, I just finished with a commentary on sentence (1) of IOE [!], but the commentaries on sentences (2) and (3) should be shorter (should be), because their logic just follows from what I say about (1). I’m hoping to put more stuff on IOE (beyond the first paragraph) up on that page in advance of next Saturday’s epistemology seminar.
TAS Seminar (fifth in a series): moral luck, depression, and productiveness
This second installment on moral luck is about analyzing cases of moral luck. Actually, I’m really just going to focus on one case and one variant on it. Here’s the first installment.
In my TAS talk, I asked the seminar participants if they could think of cases in which a person’s moral assessment was affected by something out of the assessed person’s control. Here’s an example I got. I’m going to state it essentially as I heard it—despite some ambiguities in the statement—because resolution of those ambiguities is part of the analysis of the case.
Informal account: Suppose that a person is suffering from clinical depression and that the causes of the depression are outside of the depressed person’s control. Suppose that the depression is severe enough to make him incapable of action. Being incapable of action, he can’t work. Since he can’t work, he can’t exercise the virtue of productiveness (which is a virtue on the Objectivist account of the virtues). Default on the exercise of a virtue is a moral failing. So if the depressed person can’t exercise the virtue of productiveness, he doesn’t exercise it, and if he doesn’t exercise it, he has a moral failing. It follows that a fact outside of the depressed person’s control deprives of him of the capacity for virtue, and determines our negative moral assessment of him. Whether we blame him or not, in not exercising a major moral virtue, he is morally defective or deficient.
I think this informal account can be represented as a hypothetical syllogism as follows:
1. If a person is clinically depressed due to causes outside of his control, he is incapable of action.
2. If a person is incapable of action, he is incapable of productive work.
3. If a person is incapable of productive work, he is incapable of exercising the virtue of productiveness.
4. If a person is incapable of exercising the virtue of productiveness (or any moral virtue), he has a moral failing.
5. If a person has a moral failing, we are entitled to make a negative moral assessment of him.
6. Hence if a person is clinically depressed due to causes outside of his control, we are entitled to make a negative moral assessment of him.
If we then suppose that a specific person fits the description in the antecedent of (6), we can infer the consequent. The consequent violates the Control Principle I discussed in a previous post, and thereby entails the existence of moral luck.
In my view, this argument is unsound, and its unsoundness exemplifies a pattern behind many arguments against CP and for moral luck.
An initial problem: Depending on one’s view of the psychology of depression, one might contest the idea that depression ever arises entirely from causes beyond one’s control. If carefully handled, I think this may well be a legitimate move—I think it probably applies to a very large number of cases of depression—but invoking it would take us too far afield and into overly complex territory. So I note it to set it aside because whether true or false, we don’t really need it for the case at hand. For present purposes, let’s just grant that people can be depressed from causes completely out of their control—or else stipulate that that’s the case under discussion—and that at a sufficiently severe level, depression adversely affects motivation to a very drastic degree.
How drastic a degree? If we consider premise (1), it’s clear that there’s an ambiguity in the consequent—in the idea of an “incapacity for action.” Let’s distinguish two sub-cases here. Either (a) we take the quoted phrase absolutely literally, or (b) we take it in a somewhat weaker-than-literal sense.
(1a) If we take it literally, then the depression in the example has destroyed the agent’s capacity to act. In that case, all bets are off for moral assessment. If the agent can’t act at all, then nothing is in the agent’s control. In that case, CP is left in place, and there’s no need to affirm moral luck. We simply mourn the person’s fate and the solution becomes psychiatric care.
(1b) Suppose we take it less literally. On this construal, the point is not that depression utterly destroys the agent’s capacity to act, but that it is sufficiently debilitating as to destroy the agent’s capacity for successful productive work. The agent may well be able to perform various actions, but cannot perform or complete a single work-productive action (or a sufficient number of them). For now (I’ll end up revising this), let’s construe this to say that the person cannot perform the actions necessary to keep the job he has or to get a new one. Call this the action* sense of action. So we have to modify (1) accordingly, understanding “action” as “action*.”
That brings us to premise (2). If a person is incapable of action*, it now seems plausible enough (indeed trivial) to say that he’s incapable of productive work. Let’s grant this for now as well (I’ll end up revising this, too).
What about premise (3)? If a person is incapable of productive work, is he incapable of exercising the virtue of productiveness?
My answer is “no.” In “The Objectivist Ethics,” Ayn Rand draws a distinction between productive work (the action) and productiveness (the virtue).[1] In a recent discussion note in Reason Papers, Carrie-Ann and I defend the view that productiveness is the lifelong trait that enables the agent to make productive work the central value in his life. On our view, the exercise of the virtue of productiveness is not restricted to times and places when and where the agent is actually engaged in (the activity of) productive work. It’s expressed in any action that enables the agent to make productive work central to his life, whether or not that action is itself an instance of productive work. For instance, sleeping is not an instance of productive work, but the decision to sleep early and rise early may be an instance of the virtue of productiveness: it may be an instance of the agent’s making the most productive use of his time. (I don’t mean, of course, that the virtue of productiveness requires compliance with the “early to bed and early to rise” maxim in all cases. I just mean that the maxim can be an exemplification of it in a given case.)
A proviso we didn’t mention in the RP discussion: judgments concerning the agent’s productiveness have to be relativized to a realistic assessment of his capacities and options. If the only action open to me is X, but X functions to make productive work central to my life, then X is an instance of productiveness, even for values of X that for most people most of the time seem too rudimentary or primitive to count as the exercise of a virtue. For most of us most of the time, managing to swallow our own saliva does not seem like the exercise of a virtue. But if you lost your swallow-reflex, and had to re-learn it from scratch, trying-to-swallow-your-own-saliva might be an instance of heroic virtue. Likewise, walking, talking, or turning one’s head.
Suppose that I’m depressed. I am incapable of action* and can’t go to work. But I can still think. I can cognize my situation, and can make efforts to deal with it, even if just in thought. So I am capable of volitional action. Suppose I do make such efforts, efforts aimed at overcoming my depression, and restoring productive work to its central place in my life. Suppose ex hypothesi that we assume that I am incapable of productive work right now (or for the foreseeable future). Even if we make this assumption, the fact remains that I am exercising the virtue of productiveness because I’m doing what’s required to restore productive work to its proper place in my life. Even if restoration wasn’t an instance of productive work, I would insist that it was an instance of productiveness.
Hence premise (3) is false, and its falsity renders the rest of the argument irrelevant as evidence for moral luck.
In fact, the depressed person who can’t work (in the conventional sense of get or keep a job) can’t, on the Objectivist view, be adversely judged for a lack of productiveness unless she volitionally gives in to her depression. Even if she does give in, our negative judgment of her would have to be tailored to her adverse circumstances. I myself was clinically depressed about 25 years ago, and it was a horrible experience, almost impossible to describe to those who haven’t experienced it. Having had it, I’m apt to temper my judgments of others undergoing it (without going so far as to suspend judgment entirely). If she doesn’t give in—if her action is the best it could be under the circumstances—she isn’t blameworthy, and (pace many Aristotelians) she doesn’t fall short of what moral virtue requires. There is, on this picture, no moral failing at all. There is no room for moral luck, either. The case is perfectly compatible with CP.
The depression example prompts reflection on at least one variant, one that will end up requiring some amendments to what I’ve just said above. About thirteen years ago, a friend of mine developed a form of brain tumor—malignant by location as the medical terminology has it. It rendered her unable to work at a conventional job for the entire duration of her illness. And given the nature of the condition (and the effects of the treatment), she has no prospect of returning to a conventional job at any time in the foreseeable future. So at face value, it seems pointless to describe her actions as restoring productive work to a central place in her life, since (in the conventional sense, at least) that doesn’t seem possible. How to handle this case?
My inclination is to revisit the (conventional) idea of productive work and broaden it an unconventional way. The basic idea behind productive work is that the agent is producing the causal means of her own self-sustenance. At a minimum, to have a case of productive work, we need a producer enacting a process that yields some discrete product, where both process and product serve causally to promote the producer’s existence qua human, and the activity as a whole serves a plan of some kind. (I don’t mean this as an exhaustive analysis of productive work.) This broad conception of productive work doesn’t require having a job in the conventional sense (as I earlier assumed). In the broad sense I intend, a woman who fights every day against illness to sustain her life and sanity is producing the means of her own sustenance in a much clearer and more obvious way than many conventional paradigms of productive success. So it doesn’t matter that such a person will never have a paying job. What matters is that she is working to keep herself alive.[2]
Have I overbroadened “productive work” to include all virtuous action? After all, even leisure promotes the agent’s life and flourishing. So is leisure on my view a form of productive work? That implication would trivialize both concepts.
I don’t think the implication follows. As I see it—and implicitly, as I’ve described it—productive work is scheduled, structured activity in the service of a plan. A leisure activity may well be planned (you can plan a trip, or schedule time for a walk, etc.) but leisure qua leisure is unscheduled and unstructured. In other words, the leisurely moments of a leisure activity are unplanned downtime—they’re pure rest from productive work. To the extent that you are planning a leisure activity (not engaging in it), that is productive work. It may not be a job—it’s not “work related” in the conventional sense—but it is still work in a different sense. Booking a ticket to your favorite vacation spot is work. Vacationing at your favorite vacation spot is leisure.
This account makes it sound as though we spend most of our lives engaged in productive work, whether on the job or not. That, I think, is what Rand meant by saying that productive work is the central organizing value of a human life. Productive work on her view (and mine) is inescapable even in organizing leisure in the right way. We only stop producing for brief moments of rest, like the brief rests in a musical piece. Otherwise, whether we’re at work or not, we’re very often producing—whether we’re paid for it or not, whether we do it in the conventional way or not, whether we do it in the service of fun or seriousness, whether it’s socially recognized as work or not, whether it’s valued or not. (I am not certain that Rand would agree with my way of putting things, but that by itself wouldn’t deter me from putting things as I have.)
I think the above analysis of productive work is very clearly applicable to my friend’s life. When she is actively coping with her condition, she engages in work. When she rests, she is at leisure. Note that even in quantitative terms were she to spend more time resting than working, in qualitative terms it’s the work that does the causal work in sustaining her life, not the rest. So work is central even in that case.
All of this may seem very distant from CP and moral luck, but I don’t think it is. At least half of the problem with the literature on moral luck derives from its extremely conventional conception of the demands of morality—a conventionality abetted by philosophers like Bernard Williams who (in my view) confected and then institutionalized a straw man conception of Morality for purposes of the debate on moral luck, and then spent a good deal of the debate discussing “it” and knocking it down.
Whether you buy that diagnosis or not, I think my general point remains true: philosophers have discussed moral luck by helping themselves to large moral assumptions that they’ve then used to underwrite their commitments to moral luck. I’ve helped myself to some assumptions, too. But that just suggests that the debate about moral luck takes place in the context of broader assumptions about the nature of morality. I’ll return to that when I discuss more cases (the conventionally discussed ones) in the next post.
(Thanks to Carrie-Ann Biondi, Nathaniel Branch, Kate Herrick, and Shawn Klein for very helpful discussion of these issues.)
[1] NB: The virtue is “productiveness,” not “productivity.” The latter term seems to me to involve maximizing assumptions lacking in the former, but I don’t think Rand’s egoism is a maximizing ethic, despite the common tendency to describe it as one.
[2] This is what I take Rand to mean when she says that “production is the application of reason to the problem of survival” (Capitalism, p. 17). I think Rand clearly meant to distinguish “productiveness” (the virtue) from “productive work” (the activity), but I am not sure whether she had something specific in mind in using the terms “production” and “productive achievement.” Off-the-cuff, I would say that whereas “production” names the activity open to every functioning human being, “productive achievement” refers to productive activities at the highest levels of human functioning, open to those with great native talent, under conditions favorable for the cultivation and expression of those talents. But this is a very tentative impression; I wouldn’t lay much weight on it.
The TAS Graduate Seminar (first in a series)
Carrie-Ann and I returned late Saturday night from a week at George Washington University for The Atlas Society’s Graduate Seminar–my first engagement with “organized Objectivism” in sixteen years, and her first engagement with it as such. I had invested a great deal of time and energy in my preparations for the seminar, had sold the seminar itself to many people, and had high expectations for it. But now that it’s over, I must confess to having very mixed feelings about it, feelings that reflect my misgivings about organized Objectivism as such in its current form. On reflection, I’ve come to the conclusion that I can at present neither participate in nor recommend participation in the activities of the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) or The Atlas Society (TAS). While I think ARI is the more morally problematic–but also the more intellectually rigorous–of the two institutions, I think the problems I encountered at TAS are sufficiently severe to preclude participation in it for the foreseeable future.
In fairness, I should begin by mentioning the “asset” side of the [ledger].* The topic of the seminar, as remarked earlier on this blog, was applied ethics. The seminar began with a series of presentations on issues in epistemology and method relevant to ethics: the role of hierarchy and context in the application of ethical theory; the nature of judgment, ethical and otherwise; the epistemology of definitions (especially of moral terms); and the use and abuse of thought-experiments in ethical theorizing. It covered some important mid-level issues in ethics as well: the nature of emergencies, conflicts of interest, moral luck, and racism. There were some very good discussions of nitty-gritty issues in applied ethics proper, including some distinctively Objectivist issues (e.g., the requirements of the trader principle and the principle of sanction), some issues not much discussed among Objectivists (e.g., the ethics of social science research, the ethical treatment of animals, environmental ethics)–and some fairly standard issues discussed in a distinctively Objectivist way (e.g., the nature and limits of truth-telling). One of the most philosophically challenging presentations fell into a category of its own: what are the ramifications (one presenter asked) of Attention Deficit Disorder on the Objectivist theory of volition and moral responsibility? It occurred to me while listening to this last talk that one of my mentors was right to insist, as he often did, that we have much to learn from those with disabilities, and much to lose from ignoring them from the hauteur that springs from false pride.
All of the issues addressed were important. Many of them were addressed in a competent, responsible way. Many of these, in turn, were addressed in a distinctively Objectivist way that would not have been possible outside of a seminar geared to an Objectivist context. Beyond that, the discussions were often intense and productive. I learned a great deal from them that I would not otherwise have learned or had the opportunity to discuss. I met some old friends, and made some new ones, including people whose names I had heard for years but had never met. So I am very far from saying that the seminar was worthless. On the contrary, all of the preceding in it deserved praise–in some cases, high praise. Over the course of the week, I identified no less than twenty topics addressed at the seminar potentially worth blogging here. I doubt I’ll get to blogging even a small fraction of those, but I’ll try to blog some of them, if only to give readers an idea of some of the important ground that was covered at the seminar.
Having said that, many of the problems I observed at the seminar were, to put the matter bluntly, an offense against the practice of philosophy and of inquiry quite generally. I said that many of the presenters presented their material in a competent, responsible way. But some did not. I think candor compels the assertion that some of the presentations given were shockingly deficient in argument, evidence, and coherence. This would be a relatively minor issue, or at least a remediable problem, if the atmosphere of the seminar had been conducive to an open airing of the relevant problems. But it wasn’t. This latter defect–a defect of openness obvious to just about every participant in the seminar–calls into question The Atlas Society’s much-advertised claim to practice an “open” form of Objectivism not practiced elsewhere. With all due respect, I must dissent from this claim, and insist that those who make such claims acquire more inductive evidence about the rest of the Objectivist movement before they make them. Movement Objectivists should also (let me suggest) stop deriding academic philosophy and start learning something from it. The fact is, there is more openness at the average academic conference–I’ve run five in the last five years–than there was at the TAS Graduate Seminar.
I have on principle refused to participate in activities sponsored, even remotely, by the Ayn Rand Institute since I learned of its existence in the early 1990s. I have resisted ARI’s attempts (since the 1990s) to recruit me into that organization, as well as its attempts (which they dishonestly deny) to try to hire me as a member of its faculty. I refuse to sanction ARI in any form, and have repeatedly made that fact known, in private and in public. Nonetheless, I have (until recently anyway) interacted with ARI-affiliated scholars under the auspices of The Ayn Rand Society, and in other non-ARI-sponsored contexts as well. I know from more than a decade of first-hand experience that it is simply false to assert that ARI scholars are, qua ARI-affiliated, less “open” than scholars associated with TAS. On the contrary, ARI-affiliated scholars have been clever enough to create organizations for themselves that permit them sufficient insulation from the direct supervision of ARI’s leadership to do high-quality philosophy, but involve enough sacrificium intellectus to permit them the imprimatur of orthodoxy.
I don’t mean to imply that these scholars’ modus vivendi is morally justified, nor do I mean to imply that the strategic maneuverings involved permit genuine exemplifications of the virtue of independence. For the most part, I regard them as cynical ploys intended to buy time and space as the ARI-types wait with baited breath for Leonard Peikoff’s demise–the hope being that the death of the Revered Leader will at last bring them the academic freedom they so desperately crave but are too afraid to demand. The fact remains, however, that the ARI scholars’ strategy has bought them time and space, which they’ve used with some skill. I know from first-hand experience that discussions by ARI-affiliated scholars take place in a fashion that mimics the independence required by the unfettered search for truth. Mimicry is a poor substitute for the real thing, but it is better than a great deal of what I encountered last week at TAS.
In “The Argument from Intimidation,” Ayn Rand makes the following remarks:
There is a certain type of argument which, in fact, is not an argument, but a means of forestalling debate and extorting an opponent’s agreement with one’s undiscussed notions. It is a method of bypassing logic by means of psychological pressure (Virtue of Selfishness, p. 162).
The essential characteristic of the Argument from Intimidation is its appeal to moral self-doubt and its reliance on the fear, guilt, or ignorance of the victim. It is used in the form of an ultimatum demanding that the victim renounce [or accept] a given idea without discussion, under threat of being considered morally unworthy (pp. 162-63).
All this is accompanied by raised eyebrows, wide-eyed stares, shrugs, grunts, snickers, and the entire arsenal of nonverbal signals communicating ominous innuendoes and emotional vibrations of a single kind: disapproval.
If those vibrations fail, if such debaters are challenged, one finds that they have no arguments, no evidence, no proof, no reason, no ground to stand on—that their noisy aggressiveness serves to hide a vacuum—that the Argument from Intimidation is a confession of intellectual impotence. (p. 164)
Unfortunately, Rand did not discuss the possibility that arguments from intimidation might become the lingua franca of Objectivist discourse, but the TAS seminar demonstrated beyond any shadow of a doubt that they have become just that. (ARI demonstrated it back in 1989.) For five days, almost every participant in that seminar was subjected, repeatedly, to exactly the sort of argument from intimidation that Rand condemns in the passages above. For five days, a group of adults supposedly committed to the primacy of existence and the virtue of pride endured outright abuse while trying their best to act as though abuse was a metaphysically normal condition for philosophy, or the price of inquiry for interaction with self-avowed “experts” on Objectivism. For five days, seminar participants were laughed at and reprimanded for asking questions, were made the objects of bizarre and unpredictable temper tantrums, and were involuntarily obliged to witness maudlin displays of uncontrolled emotion offered in presentations supposedly intended to make claims on their credence. In five days, the only push-back offered in response to this behavior came from a guest auditor in the seminar (not me), who objected (on one occasion) to sarcastic laughter as a response to a legitimate question. One criticism by a non-official participant in response to five days of abuse by a member of the faculty. In twenty-six years of higher education, I’ve never seen anything like it.
The behavior I’m describing here is not appropriate to a philosophy seminar, or to any forum dedicated to rational discussion. Intimidation is to discourse what lies are to love and force-initiations are to human interaction generally. Each transgression subverts the activity it invades, leaving its victims torn between the requirements of the activity itself and the imperative of self-defense against the transgression. That is the dilemma every TAS Seminar participant faced for five solid days. Do I continue doing philosophy or do I stop to defend myself against the abuse coming my way?
I took the first option until the last minute of the seminar, then boycotted the final dinner in protest against the whole sequence. From now on, however, I refuse to do philosophy under the conditions of hysteria, belligerence, authoritarianism, dogmatism, and systematic procedural irregularity that I encountered at the TAS Seminar. Anyone who wishes to do philosophy under such conditions is welcome to do it on their own turf. But they will have to do it without me.
By contrast with what I encountered at TAS (and that I know is the policy at ARI), IOS is open to Objectivists and non-Objectivists alike, regardless of their degree of agreement or disagreement with Objectivism. You can, at our events, feel free to think that Objectivism is all true, or all false. You can feel free to think that it’s a heroic achievement, or a rationalization for evil. And you can feel free to speak your mind on any of that. But you must do so in a way that is intelligible as argument. You must do it in a way that respects the autonomy of your interlocutor. You must do it in a way that demonstrates your consistent commitment to the requirements of epistemic virtue and the moral demands of discourse. You must bear the burden of proof for your assertions, or concede that you haven’t met them or can’t (at least temporarily). If you’re making a presentation, you must answer the objections asked of you, or else take issue with the legitimacy of the question, or defer the question for now (but grant its legitimacy), or concede your inability to provide an answer (at least temporarily). You need never concede what you have not been given sufficient reason to concede. But you must not shift the burdens of your dialectical incapacities onto innocent victims because they have committed the crime of observing that your arguments fail.
Whatever the value of the discrete discussions we had, the TAS Seminar violated these precepts. Each one of us “tolerated” (and was expected to tolerate) epistemic and discursive vice for five days. Meanwhile, we wondered (some of us wondered) why the seminar had, by its last session, collapsed into a bizarre hybrid of a dysfunctional marriage and a fundamentalist madrasa. In fact, there was no need to wonder. I’ve heard Objectivists of the Kelley camp talk up a big storm about how “tolerant” they are. But tolerance was not meant for vice: vice finds its home among the indiscriminately tolerant. That’s what we saw enacted before our eyes for five days.
The bottom line is that the underlying causes for the resort to intimidation have to be uprooted within organized Objectivism (which will often mean “uprooting” the people who practice it from the positions of power and authority they hold in “the movement”). Until and unless this happens, I intend to remain uninvolved and unaffiliated with either TAS or ARI (or any of its affiliates, offshoots, or front organizations). People who attend ARI or TAS events may feel free to attend IOS events, as long as they can sign on to our mission statement without deceptive mental reservations. But I don’t intend to attend either ARI or TAS events for the predictable future, and can’t recommend either organization to anyone else. These organizations will have to learn a different mode of interaction before they can expect rational people to come to their seminars in the expectation of doing philosophy. As far as I can see, ARI will never learn, and TAS has a long way to go.
I’ve spent the last twenty-plus years of my life in rejection of Leonard Peikoff’s “Fact and Value,” but I’ve always thought that Peikoff got some things absolutely right. This passage–the ellipses tell you what I reject in Peikoff’s view–makes the relevant point:
The most eloquent badge of the authentic Objectivist, who does understand Ayn Rand’s philosophy, is his attitude toward values (which follows from his acceptance of reason). An Objectivist is not primarily an academician or a political activist (though he may well devote his professional life to either or both pursuits). In his soul, he is essentially a moralist—or, in broader terms, what Ayn Rand herself called “a valuer.”
A valuer, in her sense, is a man who evaluates extensively and intensively. That is: he judges every fact within his sphere of action—and he does it passionately, because his value-judgments, being objective, are integrated in his mind into a consistent whole…. Any other approach to life comes from and pertains to another philosophy, not to Objectivism.
It is perhaps too early for there to be a mass movement of Objectivists. But let those of us who are Objectivists at least make sure that…in the quest for a national [or global] following we are not subverting the integrity of the philosophy to which we are dedicated. If we who understand the issues speak out, our number, whether large or small, is irrelevant; in the long run, we will prevail.
If we engage in quality-control now…whatever the short-term cost and schisms, the long-range result will be a new lease on life for mankind. If we don’t, we are frauds in the short-term and monsters long-range.
I think it’s time (probably long past time) to acknowledge that the problems with “quality control” began with Ayn Rand’s own insistence on packaging arguments from intimidation and gratuitous psychologizing into her own prose. The problems continued with NBI’s suborning the same tendency and institutionalizing it. They continued again under ARI’s domination of the Objectivist movement, and they have now, despite its illustrious past, infected TAS’s academic programs as well.
Things need not be this way. There is another way to do philosophy, a way that makes truth the goal of inquiry, that dispenses with intimidation and dogmatism, and that achieves what Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle set out to achieve 2,400 years ago for the discipline. It’s time for the organized Objectivist movement to discover it. Those of us who have discovered it, and live it, will not accept less.
Irfan
*I had originally written “equation,” but that mixes metaphors.
[Thanks to Carrie-Ann Biondi and Michael Young for extensive discussion, in real time, of the TAS Seminar, and to Roderick Long and Kirsti Minsaas for enduring my long and anguished emails on the subject. All four of the preceding offered some valuable reality-checking on the subject, but none of them is responsible for the views I express here.]
P.S., August 22, 2013: I should perhaps remind readers that the views expressed in this email are exclusively my own views, not those of the Institute for Objectivist Studies. Positions taken by the Institute are co-signed by Carrie-Ann Biondi and Irfan Khawaja. All other views are exclusively the view of the signed author of a given post, and only of that author. To clarify a point that’s been raised in private correspondence: I do indeed take my post to be an attack on TAS’s fidelity to its announced mission of promoting “open Objectivism.” I see no reason to retract anything I said in the original post.
—Irfan Khawaja
Some announcements, and a message for our Governor
The IOS blog will be on hiatus for about a week, as I’m off to The Atlas Society’s Graduate Seminar tomorrow, where I’ll be “lecturing” (or something like that) alongside TAS faculty Alexander Cohen, David Kelley, Shawn Klein, and Will Thomas, on topics in applied ethics. I’m looking forward to a first in-person meeting with IOS guest blogger Matt Faherty there as well.
Meanwhile, in other IOS-related activity, Roderick Long is off lecturing on economics at the Institute for Humane Studies’s “Revolutionaries, Reformers, and Radicals” seminar at Bryn Mawr.
In yet other IOS-related activity: I’ve been making promises for a few months now about putting up the first of our IOS Annotations of Ayn Rand’s works–Kirsti Minsaas’s bibliography on Ayn Rand’s The Romantic Manifesto. Kirsti has for decades now been a prolific writer on the subject of Rand’s fiction and aesthetics, and she’s put together an extremely insightful bibliography for readers looking to understand the claims of The Romantic Manifesto in the light of rival and allied claims on the same (or similar) topics. Carrie-Ann and I are very grateful for the work Kirsti’s put into this, and grateful as well for the insightful and supportive correspondence we’ve had since the inception of IOS. I’d originally wanted to embed hyperlinks for each of the works Kirsti mentions before announcing the bibliography itself, but having delayed this long in announcing it, I figured I’d announce the bibliography for now, and insert the links at a later date–another promise sure to be delayed in the delivery.
Having made a number of promises, however, let me make one more. You may by now have heard Governor Chris Christie’s criticisms of Senator Rand Paul on foreign policy. Foreign policy is a complex topic, and Senator Paul’s views on it are eminently debatable. But, I for one, would like our governor to stop bullshitting us with rhetoric of this kind:
“You can name any number of people who have engaged in [those debates], and he’s one of them …,” said Christie. “I want them to come to New Jersey and sit across from the widows and orphans and have that conversation. And they won’t, ’cause that’s a much tougher conversation to have.”
Christie warned, “The next attack that comes that kills thousands of Americans as a result, people are going to be looking back on the people having this intellectual debate.”
A piece of advice for the Governor: at a certain point, a person of intellectual integrity has to stop waving the bloody shirt of 9/11, stop hiding behind widows and orphans, stop playing to the peanut gallery, and stop relying on his citizens’ endless tolerance of his endless capacity for blowhard rhetoric.
English: Governor of New Jersey Chris Christie (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Here’s a promise: I don’t have far to travel to “come to New Jersey.” And I don’t have the slightest difficulty about having a conversation with widows or orphans (of a sufficiently mature age) about the need for a frankly, unapologetically isolationist foreign policy for these United States. If Governor Christie would like to arrange such a conversation, he’ll find me more than game to have it anywhere in this state, in front of any adult audience in it. Give it a try, Governor. You may find some of us more fond of “tough conversations” than you realize.
Perhaps it’s time to remind Governor Christie of the days in the mid 2000s when every day’s edition of the Trenton Times brought news of Americans being killed by the droves in such places as Afghanistan and Iraq. Maybe we ought to make those “widows and orphans” part of “the conversation” as well–along with lots of other widows and orphans who might qualify.
Whatever one’s opinions on foreign policy and war, Governor Christie and his ilk should be put on notice that waving a bloody shirt and an American flag in our faces is not the way to have a conversation about anything. If they’d like to try doing things that way, they should be ready for some push back. I remember what 9/11 was like, thanks very much. In fact, I knew some of the people who died in it, and I visit the 9/11 Memorial at Eagle Rock Reservation just about every month. My father saw 9/11 happen in real time and space from the parking lot of Christ Hospital in Jersey City, and operated on some of its victims in the hospital itself.
We aren’t fooled by the governor’s “come to New Jersey” rhetoric. In fact, you shouldn’t need to be from New Jersey to see through it. But it helps.
Irfan
Hudgins on Egypt: the never-ending Objectivist love affair with Ronald Reagan
Ed Hudgins of The Atlas Society welcomes the military take-over in Egypt (none dare call it a “coup”) on the (legitimate) grounds that the election of Muhammad Morsi as president entailed a form of majoritarian theocracy. I don’t disagree with a narrow and cautious version of that claim. But in compliance with the principle of Objectivist political discourse that requires the abolition–in the name of “essentialism”–of all complexity, Hudgins forgets to mention that the military’s coup has also been endorsed by the ultra-Salafist partisans to the right of the Muslim Brotherhood (the National Salvation Front), who will now want (and probably get) a piece of the action under the new regime. Celebrations would be premature.
What I really object to, however, is the partisanship of the following claim:
In disputed elections the Brotherhood candidate Mohamed Morsi was elected president and a new constitution that the Islamists favored was adopted. But a democratic process is not an end in itself. Rather, it is a mechanism for protecting the liberty of individuals. George W. Bush foolishly heralded democracy out of its proper context. The 2006 electoral victory of Hamas thugs in Gaza, and the murderous and repressive regime they established should have made this point clear.
Yet during the 2011 revolution in Egypt Obama failed to articulate those principles. This should have come as no surprise. After all, in 2009, with hundreds of thousands of Iranians in the streets demanding an ouster of their Islamist despots, Obama refused to raise a voice for their liberty.
By contrast Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were loud and clear in their support for the millions of people suffering under communism, a message that gave hope and inspiration to those in the Soviet bloc struggling against repression.
Obama followed his moral cowardice over Iran with support for Morsi.
The first paragraph is fine. The second paragraph strikes me as longer on assertion than on argument. The third is a travesty. I’m old enough to have lived through the Reagan years–and old enough not to be fooled by rhetoric about Reagan’s supposedly elevated moral stature. Yes, people suffered under communism, but they suffered under other rights-violative regimes as well. How loud and clear was Ronald Reagan about apartheid South Africa, about Chile’s Pinochet, or about Pakistan’s Zia ul Haq? The answers, I’m afraid, are not a credit to the “Reagan legacy,” and have been an unacknowledged, invisible, but self-imposed albatross around the necks of his supporters.
For Reagan’s support, until nearly the very end, of apartheid South Africa, try this article on for size. My point is not that Reagan was a racist who literally favored apartheid, but that he wasn’t loud and clear in his support for those who suffered under P.W. Botha’s regime. As a teenager, I made sure to follow Reagan’s every word on South Africa, hoping for some clear sign of repudiation of the apartheid government. It was a years-long, often cringe-making, exercise in dashed expectations.
I don’t often invoke Edward Kennedy as a moral authority figure, but when it came to criticism of Reagan’s foreign policy in Central and South America, Kennedy was essentially correct. He nails the issues in this piece, written in 1987.
As for Reagan’s praise for Zia-ul-Haq–whose regime left something to be desired in the human rights department–have fun reading this set of speeches, in which the doughty moralist Reagan says nothing of moral substance, and lets Zia drone on about the imperatives of freedom and justice.
Reagan and Zia, 1982.
The Reagan years were not the happy face epoch that Reagan’s latter-day partisans would have us believe that they were. While Reagan et al managed to get us out of the economic doldrums induced by Carter et al (I’ll give him/them that), the Reagan years were, as far as our foreign policy was concerned, an immensely depressing time. And the truth is that we haven’t quite figured out how to negotiate the issues we encountered back then. The left made its excuses for the Soviet Union during World War II; the right followed suit and made excuses for anti-communist regimes during the Cold War. Ideologically speaking, there were few clean hands in this debate, and there are few to be found.
The intellectual manifesto of the Reagan years was Jean Kirkpatrick‘s essay, “Dictatorships and Double Standards” (Commentary, November 1979), which I read to death as a budding IR student and aspiring Foreign Service officer in the late 1980s–and was bandied about as gospel in certain circles, assuming the status that the works of Francis Fukuyama, Bernard Lewis, and Samuel Huntington were later to assume. This was the passage that provided the blank check for Reagan’s moral laxity about right-wing dictatorships:
Traditional autocrats leave in place existing allocations of wealth, power, status, and other re- sources which in most traditional societies favor an affluent few and maintain masses in poverty. But they worship traditional gods and observe traditional taboos. They do not disturb the habitual rhythms of work and leisure, habitual places of residence, habitual patterns of family and personal relations. Because the miseries of traditional life are familiar, they are bearable to ordinary people who, growing up in the society, learn to cope, as children born to untouchables in India acquire the skills and attitudes necessary for survival in the miserable roles they are destined to fill. Such societies create no refugees.
A bit of warmed-over Burke, a bit of a priori handwaving. As an IR student, I remember reading and re-reading this passage over and over on the premise that it must mean something determinate but somehow beyond my ken; that she wouldn’t have written it that way if it weren’t somehow true; that her failure to provide evidence for her claims was really an indication of my ignorance of the evidence for them. She put things so authoritatively; who was I to judge? The greatest discovery I made when I discovered Objectivism was the repudiation of the self-repudiation implicit in that rhetorical question. Thomas Paine puts it this way in his argument with Burke in The Rights of Man:
Ignorance is of a peculiar nature: once dispelled, it is impossible to re-establish it. It is not originally a thing of itself, but is only the absence of knowledge; and though man may be kept ignorant, he cannot be made ignorant. The mind, in discovering truth, acts in the same manner as it acts through the eye in discovering objects; when once any object has been seen, it is impossible to put the mind back to the same condition it was in before it saw it.
Those of us who lived through the Reagan years saw and heard too much to be able to pretend now that Ronald Reagan was some kind of moral paragon. There’s no great virtue in becoming ex post facto cheerleaders for the world well lost. Nor, as a corollary, is there some virtue in pretending that Obama represents some sui generis evil of which Reagan was innocent. Truth to be told, Obama makes somewhat more sense than Reagan ever did. But truth also to be told, there is no yawning moral gap between them.
In any case, the time has come for a more candid and critical Objectivist discourse (and right-wing discourse generally) about Ronald Reagan. As a teenager in the mid-1980s, I longed for the day when he would leave office, and felt gratitude the day he did. He was no moral hero. In too many ways to count, he was an embarrassment. And he remains one. We should kick our hagiographical addiction to his rhetoric and image and either come to terms with historical reality–or move on.
Irfan
Roderick Long joins IOS Advisory Board
Carrie-Ann and I would both like to welcome Roderick Long to IOS’s Board of Advisors. Roderick is Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University; he also blogs at Austro-Athenian Empire and Bleeding Heart Libertarians, runs the Molinari Institute and Molinari Society, and is active with the Center for a Stateless Society and the Alliance of the Libertarian Left. He is the co-author, with Neera K. Badhwar, of the entry for “Ayn Rand” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; the co-editor (with Tibor Machan) of Anarchism/Minarchism; and the author of Reason and Value: Aristotle Versus Rand, a critique of the Objectivist epistemology and ethics from a neo-Aristotelian perspective (with commentaries by Fred D. Miller Jr. and Eyal Mozes, published in 2000 by The Objectivist Center). He was, until recently, editor of the Journal of Libertarian Studies; currently co-edits The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies; and is on the editorial board of Reason Papers. (Enough, already.) He produces written work more quickly than most mortals can read it, but it’s always worth reading, so click some of those links and get started—you’ll learn something.
Carrie-Ann surmises that she met Roderick in 1992 when she was a graduate student in the Philosophy Department at Bowling Green State University, and he was a Visiting Scholar at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center—both students in Fred Miller’s spring 1992 tutorial on natural rights. I’m pretty sure that I first met Roderick at the 1993 Summer Seminar of the original IOS, where he gave the first of the two lectures that eventually became Reason and Value. Roderick and I spent the following summer talking Aristotle at an IHS Jacqueline Hume Fellowship at George Mason University—he was my faculty advisor—and then met up again for the 1994 IOS Summer Seminar, where he gave the second of the two Reason and Value lectures, and I gave one on Objectivist Ethics.
In any case, Carrie-Ann and I have both learned more from Roderick than we can possibly enumerate here. We’re looking forward to having him on the Board.
Irfan and Carrie-Ann
P.S., We forgot to add in our first paragraph that Roderick is also the author of the recent Gezi Park revolt in Istanbul, Turkey.
Funky exchanges of ideas
Photo credit: Nogwater, Flickr site
I just got back from Congress 2013 at the University of Victoria, where my views on Israel and Palestine were met with reactions ranging from puzzled (or intrigued) interest on the one hand, to skepticism, rejection, hostility, and derisive misrepresentation on the other. Just the “funky exchange of ideas” I was looking for when I went. But more on the talk, and the reception to it (along with commentary on the conference) later this week. I also happened to read Jason Brennan’s The Ethics of Voting (Princeton, 2011) en route, which I highly recommend, and which turned out to be highly relevant to my own argument. I basically agree both with Brennan’s conclusions and with his arguments for them, but would dispute some of the specific moves he makes along the way. Incidentally, Reason Papers will be featuring a symposium on Brennan’s book in our forthcoming issue (now delayed a bit to July), with contributions by Bryan Caplan (George Mason), Randall Holcombe (Florida State), Nikolai Wenzel (Florida Gulf Coast), Ezekiel Spector (Universidad Torcuato di Tella), and a response by Brennan himself (Georgetown).*
Toronto’s Globe and Mail has the story on Congress 2013 itself:
Jean-Paul Boudreau, Ryerson University’s dean of arts, spent last week scouting Congress 2013 and said it was “fantastic.” But he is also bidding to host the gathering in 2017 with an ambitious plan to push more events out into the city. “You can’t just say to the community, come in and listen to, uh, Jean-Paul’s arguments on how he’s rethinking 17th-century French texts,” he said.
Dr. Boudreau describes Congress as “a beautiful, overflowing fountain of ideas” – its massive scope makes it attractive, but also impossible for any one visitor to grasp more than a few drops of the overflow.
He imagines a map for Congress resembling Toronto’s subway routes, but with “idea stops” that can be navigated through the delegates’ smartphones, allowing them to find interesting events and tag them to watch later as podcasts if they can’t make it live. He wants to reach out to alumni from the business world and “bring them home” to Congress. And he hopes to partner with cultural hubs like the Art Gallery of Ontario or Royal Ontario Museum, which can tap “their networks in the city.”
“Let’s create a real funky exchange of ideas that create new opportunities that really excite and motivate the academic as well.”
Congress 2014 will be at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario. Worth attending, in my view, especially for us cloistered Americans, if only to experience the subtle (but real and significant) differences between Canadian and American academic culture. And anyway, interesting questions in political philosophy arise anytime you cross an international border.
In other funky exchanges of ideas, Chris Sciabarra reports that the newest JARS–in its new incarnation–is almost ready to go. He appropriately calls it the beginning of a “new era” for that journal. Lots of interesting stuff there worth checking out.
Meanwhile, over at the Atlas Society, Phil Coates is engaging in a third (yes, funky) round of the conversation begun there and continued here, on the future of The Atlas Society. If I respond, I’ll do so here at the IOS blog.**
Irfan
*In an earlier version of this post, I mistakenly included Daniel Klein in place of Nikolai Wenzel. I should add that the symposium was organized and guest-edited by Joshua Hall of Beloit College.
**Actually, I ended up responding at length to Coates at The Atlas Society’s blog (the link above takes you there). Another day, another blog post, another broken promise….
Work in progress (2)
Some more work in progress by IOS-types….
David Kelley (Atlas Society) has just announced a webinar for 9-10 pm Eastern time, this coming Monday, June 3rd. The topic is “Rand Versus Hayek,” and is based in part on Kelley’s paper “Rand Versus Hayek on Abstraction,” in Reason Papers vol. 33 (Fall 2011) [18 page PDF]. Carrie-Ann and I saw Kelley give a version of this talk to an overflow audience at the Students for Liberty Conference this past February in Washington, DC; about 120 students were crammed into the room, sitting on the floor and in the aisle, but held in rapt attention. For a variety of reasons, the Rand and/vs. Hayek topic itself is heating up not just among Objectivists and libertarians but among people outside of either camp, so this is a good time to be discussing it.
A bit of web searching produced a few interesting hits of papers relevant to Kelley’s topic, generally more Hayekian than Objectivist. (Objectivists have been late to the party.) Here is Glen Whitman’s “The Rules of Abstraction.” Here’s an older piece by W.P. Baumgarth, “Hayek and Political Order: The Rule of Law.” Here’s Linda Raeder, “Hayek on the Role of Reason in Human Affairs.” Arthur Diamond, “Hayek on Constructivism and Ethics.” And Steven Horwitz on Hayek and Rand in JARS. Readers interested in keeping up with Hayek talk should bookmark or follow Greg Ransom’s Taking Hayek Seriously, and Jeffrey Friedman’s Hayek Project. In engaging with Hayekians, no matter how vehemently you reject Hayek’s thought, I’d advise against taking this head-in-the-sand methodological approach, care of Harry Binswanger.
(I should say that I know of Hayek’s arguments only from the comments of writers who agree with him, but I’m pretty sure I’ve got it right; if not, I hope someone will correct me.)
A quick response to the audacity of Binswanger’s hope: as a methodological point, you can’t legitimately criticize an author you haven’t read, and you shouldn’t expect to be taken seriously enough to be corrected after you’ve done so.
On a completely different topic, Shawn Klein (Rockford College) reports at his Sports Ethicist blog that he’s gotten a paper accepted for the upcoming conference of the International Association for the Philosophy of Sport this September at Cal State Fullerton. Here’s the first paragraph of his abstract for “Work and Play: Similarities and Parallels”:
The concept of play is one of the most discussed concepts in the philosophy of sport. The relationship between play and work, however, is less explored. But when it is, the assumption is that work and play are radically separate activities. In this paper, I want to challenge this assumption and argue that a clearer understanding of these activities shows us important parallels between work and play.
Click here for the rest, and for more information. By coincidence, Shawn’s topic dovetails with a discussion we’ll be having about the relation between productiveness and leisure in Reason Papers this summer.
Finally, Roderick Long (Auburn University) is doing his bleeding heart libertarian-thing in Istanbul, Turkey with this paper, and is then off to Athens to give a paper on “Shakespeare, Godwin, Kafka and the Political Problem of Other Minds.” Here’s a link that’ll take you to that paper–and to his flight itinerary.
Now that my grades are in, I’m looking forward to reading some of this stuff.
Irfan
Planning underway for Spring 2014 IOS Seminar in Philosophy
I’m happy to report that plans are under way for an IOS Spring Seminar in Philosophy—date, time, and location TBA, but tentatively planned for spring or early summer of 2014.
In keeping with our recent seminar focus on epistemology, the topic will be “Perception and Intuition,” as understood both within Objectivism and within the Anglo-American ‘analytic’ tradition, and focusing on recent and forthcoming work by David Kaspar (St. John’s University), David Kelley (Atlas Society), and myself. Among the questions to be addressed:
–What, exactly, is “perception,” whether as Objectivists understand that term, or as analytic philosophers do?
–What is the difference, as Objectivists put it, between “perception” and “perceptual judgment”? What, exactly, is the object of perception, and how does perceptual content provide the basis for conceptual knowledge?
–What is an “intuition”? What epistemic work do intuitions do, and how (if at all) do they do it?
–It’s often asserted that intuitionism is either false or useless because people’s intuitions differ, and further appeal to intuitions can’t resolve the differences we have. How good an objection is this? How do intuitionists handle it?
–Do recent findings in cognitive science undermine the reliability of perception, perceptual judgment, or intuitions?
–Are intuitions an ineliminable feature of thought and argumentation? If we do away with them, what’s left?
–What role, if any, does perceptual judgment play in the formation of moral judgment? Is an empiricist moral epistemology ultimately committed to making moral judgments on the basis of physical appearance? If so, what role do such moral judgments play? What role shouldn’t they play?
Like our fall event, the spring seminar will be a day-long event, but divided three ways. The first part of the event will be an author-meets-critics session with David Kaspar, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at St. John’s University, and author of the recently-published book, Intuitionism (Bloomsbury Academic, 2012). Here’s a recent review by Kaspar in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews on “the new intuitionism.”
The second part of the event will focus on recent work by David Kelley (Atlas Society), on the perception of causality, based on Kelley’s 1986 book, The Evidence of the Senses, and related work on concept-formation.
The third part of the event will focus on a (currently) nascent project of mine on the relation between moral judgment and perceptual judgments of physical appearance. Here’s a version of that project I presented at the 2012 Felician Ethics Conference. Here’s coverage by blogger Ari Schulman of The New Atlantis of a version I presented in 2011 at the International Society for MacIntyrean Enquiry, along with my response, and a rejoinder by Schulman.
Things are still in the planning stages for this event, so stay tuned for more information….
Irfan
The Institute for Objectivist Studies 