Subject: personal: direct reason

From: Mark Sulkowski <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 1994 17:55:23 -0500 (EST)

From: Bryan Douglas Caplan <[email-masked]>
>What do I have in mind?  Well, imagine that you have the choice of a
>miserable life, or death.  Of course, if you were happy, you would indeed
>strive to live more, so a happy life would better serve the end of life
>than a miserable one.  But a happy life is not an option; you must choose
>between misery or death.  Now in this hypothetical, I simply don't see how
>your argument could lead to any other conclusion than: Choose the miserable
>life.  Now if the misery is horrible and will never end (suppose you are
>in a Soviet concentration camp in 1930), it is simply far from clear that
>you ought to choose to go on living.  This suggests to me that happiness
>is indeed good in intself; and while you are quite correct that
>psychologically, happiness leads to a desire to go on living, and therefore
>promotes life, this thought experiment convinces me that happiness is
>of independent value.

	I see what you are getting at.  Unfortunately, this subject is
so vast it is difficult for me to cover all of the bases at once.

	I will agree that death can be preferable to misery (such as that
of a concentration camp).  I think Ayn Rand would agree with you on this one.
While she believes that the concept of "value" comes from the alternative of
life and death, the life of a human being is not composed merely of a beating
heart and pumping blood.  Human Life is an achievement that is composed of a
particular kind of activity (rational pursuit of values).  In a sense, the
person in the concentration camp would not really have a human life, at least
with respect to his own moral decision-making.  Suicide would not be sacrifice
for him.

>[Incidentally, are you claiming your argument as the right interpretation
>of Rand, or is it your alternate theory?  I think that I remember quite
>a bit of textual evidence against your reformulation, but I can't say
>I'm sure.]

	I don't recall.  I specifically recall Ayn Rand saying that human
life and happiness are two aspects of the same achievement.  Happiness
is the emotional reward of a successful human life.  It stands to reason
(direct reason?) that happiness is justified by the supposed goodness of
this achievement.  (I'm assuming here that the good quality of a successful
human life has already been argued successfully.)

>On the wrongness of murder. [...] Now I
>don't buy the Randian argument (I don't know if she ever stated it
>explicitly, but I did ask Peikoff once and he seemed to know her view)
>that murder is wrong because it undermines YOUR rationality, independence,
>or other virtues.  Undermining one's rationality and independence may
>well be awful, but is THAT why we consider Hitler such an evil man?

	No, of course not.  But, then again, few of "us" are Objectivists. :)

	The reason we consider him so evil is that he killed so many people.
He was a THREAT to other people's lives.  Clearly anti-social.

	Murder may very well be "wrong" for the reasons that Peikoff mentions,
but it is far more "wrong" from the victim's point of view.  Hitler was an
evil to his own rationality, sociality, independence, sense of life, etc.
But he was a far greater evil to those he threatened; and since so many died
by his orders, he was great evil indeed.  It seems that Peikoff was looking
at the issue from the wrong end of the telescope (with respect to your
concerns.)

	And yes, I notice that you basically agree with me just below.

>Surely there are other people who were much more irrational than he was,
>to the point of being unable to even take care of themselves. No, Hitler
>was bad because it is wrong to harm the innocent, and murder is the
>greatest of harms.

	Actually I would say that the concentration camp scenario is
the most likely candidate for the greatest of harms, although it may
be exactly on par with murder in some ways.  But that's not important now.

>(Statement #1)  Or because individuals have rights,
>and there are some things that no one may do to them, and murder is
>the violation par excellence of these rights.  (Statement #2)  Or because
>murder is wrong.  (Statement #3)  All of these are good arguments, and
>there are undoubtably very many more.
>Now if I were laying down my philosophic system, I would prefer #2.

	If I were doing the same, I'd prefer to know why murder is wrong.

>But the point is that there are many routes to knowing that murder is
>wrong, which accounts for the wide dissemination of this piece of moral
>knowledge.

	Well, on that I will agree.

>Now I would hasten to add that I think that the wrongness of murder
>(and other moral principles involving others) is CONSISTENT with self-
>interest.  Here is my argument.
>1. Murder is wrong.  (From above)
>2. In order to have a virtuous character, one must refrain from willfully
>committing wrong actions, especially radically wrong actions such as murder.
>(Direct reasoning on the relationship between wrong actions and virtue.)
>3. Knowing that you have a virtuous character strongly contributes to
>happiness. (Judgment of empirical psychology -- from observation.)
>4. Happiness is central to your self-interest.
>Therefore: Refraining from murder is in your self-interest.
>But notice that in order to prove this in a non-circular manner, I had
>to PREVIOUSLY know that murder was wrong for reasons other than its
>detrimental effects on your self-interest.

	Interesting.  I'll think about this one.

>And by the way, thanks for all of the thoughtful comments.

	Thank you for yours.

>P.S. I have a letter I wrote to my friend, which critiques and reconstructs
>Rand's ethics on the foundation of direct reason.  Interested?

	Sure thing.  I'll read it carefully.

Mark       | "It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty
Andrew     |  gods or no god.  It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."
Sulkowski  |                                      -- Thomas Jefferson