NationStates Jolt Archive

So, Melkor Unchained and I have been having a longstanding argument about whether modern liberal or Objectivist views of politics are the best theory concerning the operations of the state in the economic realm. We reached the conclusion that the disagreement stems from a divergent opinion of moral philosophy. I'm a rule utilitarian, and he believes in the Objectivist conception of ethics. Anyway, this thread is designed to discuss the differences and desireability of the two competing theories. That preface was not designed to exclude other people's participation. Something thought-provoking and insightful would of course be welcome. I'd just prefer not to hear "Objectivists are selfish assholes" or "utilitarians are Nazis" one-line style posts.

With that out of the way, I'll launch into the discussion at hand.

Rule Utilitarianism:
1. Utilitarianism can be broadly traced into two distinct schools of thought: act utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism. Act utilitarians believe that each particular action or consequence should be evaluated on whether that action itself is in the interests of the greatest good for the greatest number, whereas rule utilitarians believe that one should evaluate whether the a rule violated by the action is for the greatest good. I'll give an example. One is torture. If torturing a particular criminal would be the quickest way to get a confession, an act utilitarian would say that one should torture them, because it would spare the state the expense of a trial and would generally be more efficient. A rule utilitarian, however, would see the ban on torture as being more valuable to society than the expedition of the trial, and thus would not torture the suspect.

This has a few advantages over act utilitarianism. It avoids the hackneyed charge of the justification of genocide or racism because it would help the majority of the population, as the prohibitions against those practices are more valuable to society as a whole than the benefits that would be gained to a particular subset as a result of those actions. It also allows for some moral check on the utilitarian calculus.

To illustrate one of the advantages of utilitarianism over Objectivist ethics, let's take an extreme case. A nation armed with nuclear weapons is losing a war, badly. It's running out of funds, and is rapidly approaching the point of nuclear launch, unless it can enough funds and support to bring the war back to a stalemate and negotiated peace. A rule utilitarian would say that a nuclear war should be prevented at all costs. This rule, then, would require the confiscation of private property to support the war effort. Human extinction via nuclear weapons is in my mind perhaps the worst consequence of any action. The only way to prevent it would be adopting a utilitarian decision-making framework.

Let's leave the hi-tech world of nukes and modern war and go way back, to the beginnings of human society. In order to survive, people banded together and formed cooperative units. They combined their efforts, and instead of claiming all of the resources as their own private property, realized the necessity of sharing and cooperative venture in order to survive the perils of the natural world at the time. Thus, humanity came to be the dominant species on earth as a result of an inborn utilitarian impulse.

This impulse, then, came to effect the way governments came be structured. Government itself is an inherently utilitarian and anti-Objectivist organization. Here's an explanation (I'm quoting myself on another thread, I felt this explanation was pretty good):
No, it's contingent on your acceptance of the legitimacy of the state. If it's cool for the state to use your resources to protect society from crime or foreign invasion, then you've inherently accepted the idea that the role of the state is to provide for the welfare of its citizens. If that's true, then the state also has to provide for those who've been fucked over. The conception of "debt to society" is much more complicated than it initially seems.

If government's purpose is to safeguard lives, then it has a duty to protect the lives of those individuals threatened by societal apathy and indifference to their plight. Their lives will be lost without government intervention: that's no different than a police officer walking right by a murder or the army failing to stop an invasion in that they are both derelictions of the state's duty to safeguard life.

Additionally, Objectivist conceptions of property are inherently contradictory. Here's the reason: Objectivists believe that each person's property rights begin where another's end, and that no one can take away what's mine. However, situations will always arise where two people or groups have competing interests for the same property. The worker could get extra money if wages were higher, but the capitalist could make more money if the workers wages were cut. Who deserves the extra money? Who decides who gets it? From an Objectivist standpoint, both results suck. If one lets the market take its course, the capitalist's superior resources will wear down the workers, and the capitalist will accrue more and more wealth at the extent of the working class. The wages will gradually grow to subsistance level at most, at the least preventing the workers from getting the fruits of their labors and at worst starving them to death. However, if the government intervenes on the side of the worker because the government's role is to safeguard the health of its citizens, then the natural flow of property and the market is disrupted. Additionally, if an exception is created for virtual corporate slavery, when is it OK for the government to make more exceptions? Why wouldn't this legitmize things like welfare and social security? It does. The only way a consistant stance on this issue can acheived is a rule utilitarian perspective - a consistant rule that the most disadvantaged should be favored in situations of competing rights to property because that would benefit the most people in society in the greatest way would resolve the situation.

Finally (this post is long enough as is), the phrase "the greatest good for the greatest number" is commonly misunderstood. It does not simply mean that whatever benefits the greatest number is the best course of action; that would disregard the greatest good part of the phrase. Greatest good means that we can't just let 49% of the population wither away and die while 51% are having a ball. That wouldn't be the greatest good. Rather, society/the government would work to help as many people as possible while not leaving anyone in positions of abject despair.

Meh. I'll take the Kantian state over either one.. if such a thing existed.. of course neither do Objectivist states or Rule Utilitarian states..

Interesting post Deleuze. I expect Mel to post his arguement soon, I don't want to comment before he does :D

One quick question though, right here:

No, it's contingent on your acceptance of the legitimacy of the state. If it's cool for the state to use your resources to protect society from crime or foreign invasion, then you've inherently accepted the idea that the role of the state is to provide for the welfare of its citizens.

It seems that you are supporting tacit consent as real consent with regards to allowing the state to use your resources. If you can I would like to see the rule utilitarian reasoning as to why that is so.

Well, that actually helps me understand utilitarianism. I had heard of the term but was unaware that it was the opposite of Objectivism.

Having researched "Atlas Shrugged," as I understand it the basis or at least a representation of Objectivist philosophy, I would say that I agree emphatically with Utilitarianism. How can the greatest good for the greatest number, when implemented correctly and with wisdom, turn out bad? The very idea seems to exclude the possibility of having more bad than good come from an action. Granted, it is more difficult to strike an acceptable balance in Utilitarianism than it is to "live for oneself alone" aka objectivism, but in principle, Utilitarianism will always turn out good, whereas Objectivism seems a quite selfish recipie for abuse, cruelty, and disaster.

I would argue in fact that if humans had evolved with Objectivist philosophy hardwired, we would still be essentially "lone wolf" cave men, not much futher advanced as a species in 2005 CE than in 20,000 BCE. This would be because it would have been, strictly speaking on an individual level, in everyones personal interest to horde any food gained, not to share technological discoveries, and to kill each other upon sight as possible rivals for food/mates - and of course they would have stuff one could steal. Each of those actions might have been best for one personally, but for society and humanity as a whole, it would be disasterous if everyone acted that way. Mankind evolved by forming clans, societies, civilizations - working together, sharing with and aiding his fellows, not by acting in his personal best interests alone.

Utilitarianism all the way for me.

Meh. I'll take the Kantian state over either one.. if such a thing existed.. of course neither do Objectivist states or Rule Utilitarian states..
Don't get me started on Kant. This isn't the time or the place. However, I will say that the most logical interpretation of Kant, that which allows principled exceptions, is very, very similar to rule utilitarianism.


It seems that you are supporting tacit consent as real consent with regards to allowing the state to use your resources. If you can I would like to see the rule utilitarian reasoning as to why that is so.
To me, this is not an issue of moral philosophy. It's an issue of political theory. If you accept that the role of the state is to safeguard the health of its citizens, then it's inconsistant to say that they can only do so when the cause of death is murder rather than starvation. If you accept that policing is an acceptable use of state power, and that you're willing to give your resources to the state in return for this funciton, you can't make a principled objection to the state doing the moral equivalent in a slightly different manner.

Therefore, the consent isn't tacit at all. The consent was given in a different place. I'm logically applying the originally justification of the state itself, contrasting it with Objectivist principles, and saying that they're inconsistant.

No, it's contingent on your acceptance of the legitimacy of the state. If it's cool for the state to use your resources to protect society from crime or foreign invasion, then you've inherently accepted the idea that the role of the state is to provide for the welfare of its citizens. If that's true, then the state also has to provide for those who've been fucked over. The conception of "debt to society" is much more complicated than it initially seems.

It is not the role of the government to provide for the welfare of its citizens. The role of the government is to provide for the freedom of its citizens.

The worker could get extra money if wages were higher, but the capitalist could make more money if the workers wages were cut. Who deserves the extra money? Who decides who gets it? From an Objectivist standpoint, both results suck. If one lets the market take its course, the capitalist's superior resources will wear down the workers, and the capitalist will accrue more and more wealth at the extent of the working class

You act as if there are only workers and only capitalists, and that all the members of each sime have the same values and behave in the same way. Those are ridiculous assumptions.

And I suppose that you can economically or logically show that the capitalist will be able to exploit the worker because of his superior resources.
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In the end, utilitarianism is bunk because it is impossible to define utilitarian values or what constitutes the greater good. Since utilitarian values cannot be accurately or fairly determined, the individual must be allowed to determine his/her own values.

It is not the role of the government to provide for the welfare of its citizens. The role of the government is to provide for the freedom of its citizens.
That was something Melkor said on another thread (http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=424389&page=2&pp=15), and was directed more at him. Even still, you're playing specious semantics. How do the military and the police protect the freedom of the citizens of a country? By preventing them from being killed or oppressed by outside forces, right? I can't well exercise my liberty if I'm dead, can I? I also exercise it any better if I was dead from starvation or murder. Therefore, letting people starve is the moral equivalent of murder AND is the antithesis of providing for their freedom.

You act as if there are only workers and only capitalists, and that all the members of each sime have the same values and behave in the same way. Those are ridiculous assumptions.

And I suppose that you can economically or logically show that the capitalist will be able to exploit the worker because of his superior resources.
No, I don't. Calling this interpretation of my argument simplistic would be a compliment. I was using an example to illustrate my point: that there can be contradictions in property rights. The capitalist and worker is one such example. There are others, like tenant farmer and landlord. It's also impossible to deny that there are situations like the one I described that arise. Historically, they already have. Point is, all I have to do is find one contradiction in property rights to prove the whole system to be inconsistant bunk. And I've found that example. In mathematics, if a theorem is proven false in a special case, it's discarded as a false theorem. Same thing here.

And yes, I can. I'll start with something you didn't mention - history. Read your 19th century American history again. Then get back to me. Economically, the group with superior resources wishes to acquiere more resources and wealth. This creates a demand for someone or something that can help them accomplish this end, and inevitably something forms to fit in that market niche. Of particular note are the Pinkerton "detectives," who were professional strikebreakers who were employed to make sure that when wages were slashed, there was little discontent. Logically, in a system in which capital is king, the group with more capital tends to win.

In the end, utilitarianism is bunk because it is impossible to define utilitarian values or what constitutes the greater good. Since utilitarian values cannot be accurately or fairly determined, the individual must be allowed to determine his/her own values.
Again, wrong. It's based on the concept of utility, that is, ability to be a contributing part of society. Dead people don't contribute so well. Neither do starving or disease-ridden people. Death, in the utilitarian view, is the worst position for any human because any possibility that they could become a participating member of society has been eliminated. Therefore, to maximize the greater good, we try to save the lives of the dying and help homeless and out of work people back into society. This doesn't mean fuck the terminally ill or elderly though. In act utilitarianism, it probably would. But a rule utilitarian would say that the disrespect for human life that would be fostered in a culture that permits us to let them die would have much worse consequences for society than letting those people die, as it would cause be able to see life as having no inherent value and not do anything for those that could be helped. Additionally, the struggles of the terminally ill and the wisdom of the elderly inspire and educate enough to make up for the cost of supporting them, if we're going to be totally dispassionate and inhuman about it.

firstpage-itize.

Meh. I'll take the Kantian state over either one.. if such a thing existed.. of course neither do Objectivist states or Rule Utilitarian states..

Could you explain what exactly a Kantian society would be like? I've never really 'got' Kant's theory - it always seemed really convolated and dense to me.

My reply to this thread will be admittedly slow in coming, as I will have to essentially start with the core concepts of Objectivism and work backwards from there. Philosophy is nothing without a solid, working foundation and there is no conceivable way I could begin to expound upon all of this in one night. Add to this that I've had something of a lengthy, stressful day at work and it's all too likely that I'll miss a few important concepts in my haste.

Though I must admit I'm tempted to address some of the misconceptions I've seen regarding Objectivism in this thread already, but I really ought to save my ammo since I will touch upon those concepts in my treatise anyway.

My reply to this thread will be admittedly slow in coming, as I will have to essentially start with the core concepts of Objectivism and work backwards from there. Philosophy is nothing without a solid, working foundation and there is no conceivable way I could begin to expound upon all of this in one night. Add to this that I've had something of a lengthy, stressful day at work and it's all too likely that I'll miss a few important concepts in my haste.

Though I must admit I'm tempted to address some of the misconceptions I've seen regarding Objectivism in this thread already, but I really ought to save my ammo since I will touch upon those concepts in my treatise anyway.
Sounds fun.

Oh, indeed. I expect it will be too long for one post.

Oh, indeed. I expect it will be too long for one post.
That wouldn't surprise me.

I am definitely looking forward to Melkor's treatise. :D

Deleuze.

One of the standard criticisms of telological ethical schemes, which all forms of utilitarianism essentialy are, is that they require at the present moment, the time at which the judgement as to what act to make or rule to follow, a knowledge of the future consequences of that act or rule. It is fairly easy to overcome this with regard to act utilitarianism in that the act selected will depend upon the beliefs of the agent under the circumstances, and as a judgement has to be made, even if it is to do nothing (an act in itself) then the present beliefs of the future consequences are as good a guide as any other.

However with rule utilitarianism, this criticism is sharpened. You adopt a rule that you will feel will be that that generates the greatest good, but you have to adopt that rule under neutral circumstances. If you were to adopt it under any specific circumstances then it may be those circumstances themselves that lead to the riule being the best, and thus rule utilitarianism is reduced to act utilitarianism in the act of selecting the rule. This being the case, it is not possible to argue that some rule has to be adopted under those (neutral) circumstances as it can be argued that some act has to be taken, because those neutral circumstances never obtain, it is a pure abstraction.

This invalidates the belief of the agent at the time of deciding, as there is no time of deciding, and no circumstances defined from which the present beliefs of the agent can be derived. Thus you are left with a choice between a strict requirement for omnipotence, an acceptance that rule utilitarianism is only act utilitarianism dressed in fancy clothes, or a blind faith in your judgement.

I await the post by Melkor Unchained to see what his presentation of objectivist ethics is.

Deleuze.

One of the standard criticisms of telological ethical schemes, which all forms of utilitarianism essentialy are, is that they require at the present moment, the time at which the judgement as to what act to make or rule to follow, a knowledge of the future consequences of that act or rule. It is fairly easy to overcome this with regard to act utilitarianism in that the act selected will depend upon the beliefs of the agent under the circumstances, and as a judgement has to be made, even if it is to do nothing (an act in itself) then the present beliefs of the future consequences are as good a guide as any other.

However with rule utilitarianism, this criticism is sharpened. You adopt a rule that you will feel will be that that generates the greatest good, but you have to adopt that rule under neutral circumstances. If you were to adopt it under any specific circumstances then it may be those circumstances themselves that lead to the riule being the best, and thus rule utilitarianism is reduced to act utilitarianism in the act of selecting the rule. This being the case, it is not possible to argue that some rule has to be adopted under those (neutral) circumstances as it can be argued that some act has to be taken, because those neutral circumstances never obtain, it is a pure abstraction.

This invalidates the belief of the agent at the time of deciding, as there is no time of deciding, and no circumstances defined from which the present beliefs of the agent can be derived. Thus you are left with a choice between a strict requirement for omnipotence, an acceptance that rule utilitarianism is only act utilitarianism dressed in fancy clothes, or a blind faith in your judgement.
Tag to respond soon. Sleep beckons.

I'm relatively new to these boards, and I had never heard an explanation of rule utilitarianism (hell, I had never even heard of the distinction between it and act utilitarianism, and I've taken more than my share of philosophy and political science classes). It sounds so far like I have agreed with at least parts of rule utilitarianism my entire life, and just never knew that it was formalized or elegantly outlined like this. Thanks, Deleuze.

Tag to respond soon. Sleep beckons.

Until the morrow, then: Boa Noite, durma bem.

At it's base level wither the state/society be rule utilitarian, act utilitarian, or Objectivist the elderly and terminally ill have no value in those societies. Even in a rule utilitarian society if the person cannot directly contribute to the continuation and strengthening of that society they lose their value. While you do state that their value is still thier in the form of wisdom and experiance the utilitarian society would gather that knowledge from them and then let them die naturally, not waisting it's resourses on the old. The terminally ill in these societies have no value to offer, for they can't work to support themselves let alone contribute to the society as a whole, and they more than likely don't have the wisdom and experiance of age, so they would be left to die naturally. For example when simply grazing a herd of zebras will keep the ederly, young and the sick in the middle of the pack while at the same time when the pack takes off due to an attack the ederly and sick get left behind, while the pack still instinctivly protects its young. They value the ederly and sick yet still understand their value in feeding them to the lions to save the young. The Objectivist is the Cheetah on the plains that attacks alone to feed itself and at best it's young, but only until the are self sufficent.

I'll start with my understanding of Utilitarianism; if I'm getting any of this wrong someone should probably correct me, as I cant accurately refute it on false premises. Of course I can't resist a few editorials here and there, but I think the core concepts of Utilitarianism are reproduced here with at least some modicum of accuracy.

Utilitarianism is often broken down to the core concept of "the greatest good for the greatest amount." This is something of a misleading premise on which to found one's philosophy, since almost every area of philosophical thought is concerned with this same basic concept; the development of philosophy in and of itself appeals to this idea almost universally. Even Objectivism, in some twisted sense, advocates this idea. As we more closely examine the principles behind just what constitutes the 'greatest good,' we find that the concept of 'good' is the bone of contention from every philosopher from Aristotle to Plato to Kant to Hegel to Rand.

Utilitarianism as we know it was first manifest in the 18th century: via the ideas of Jeremey Bentham and a few others, though it traces its roots [like many philosophies] to ancient Greece; most notably the scholar Parmenides. Parmenides [and Bentham] regarded 'pain' and 'pleasure' as the universe's only two absolutes, which is just about as ridiculous as it sounds. From this he derived the rule of utility: that the good is whatever brings the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people. The Metaphysical flaw in this line of thinking is already evident, as it ignores every other absolute in the universe in favor of these two, and nothing else. These are potentially conflicting ideas; so eventually he did away with the second half and amended the sum of his thought to simply "the greatest happiness." Modern Utilitarianism does not recognize this flaw in thinking, and adheres almost fully to his original hypothesis. Mill and Bentham both made the mistake of failing to think past Parmenides in this regard; which is curious considering their philosophical debt to him.

The differences between act Utilitarianism and rule Utilitarianism originated with the publication of John Sturat Mill's book Utilitarianism; wherein Mill more or less introduced the concept of rule Utilitarianism. Mill commits a common epistemological error in basing his funadmental philosophical theory solely where the previous generation left off. This is a widespread problem in philosophy, which I will expound upon when I get around to Objectivism.

Here I must note that there are at least two subsets of Utilitarianism that Deleuze omitted; negative Utilitarianism [which advocates the reduction of evil rather than the promotion of good] and Preference Utilitarianism, which defines utility more or less in terms of preference satisfaction. Preference Utilitarianism is too subjective for just about any practical application I can think of, since preferences change from person to person based on value-judgements and circumstances.

FOr the sake of simplicity, I'm going to go ahead and use Bentham's Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation as my primary source, seeing as this seems to be the basis of modern Utilitarianism. The majority of my counterarguments to it will be based on Bentham's epistemological and metaphysical mistakes. Before I continue, I must ask: is this appropriate canon or should I direct my attention to another source?

Utilitarianism as we know it was first manifest in the 18th century: via the ideas of Jeremey Bentham and a few others, though it traces its roots [like many philosophies] to ancient Greece; most notably the scholar Parmenides. Parmenides [and Bentham] regarded 'pain' and 'pleasure' as the universe's only two absolutes, which is just about as ridiculous as it sounds. From this he derived the rule of utility: that the good is whatever brings the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people. The Metaphysical flaw in this line of thinking is already evident, as it ignores every other absolute in the universe in favor of these two, and nothing else.

Please name a few of these other absolutes in the universe. I have always looked at absolutes with suspicion, but usually in a different context.

As for getting involved in this argument myself,
a) I don't know enough
b) Major e longinquo reverentia

Let the showdown commence...

Please name a few of these other absolutes in the universe. I have always looked at absolutes with suspicion, but usually in a different context.

As for getting involved in this argument myself,
a) I don't know enough
b) Major e longinquo reverentia

Let the showdown commence...
Patience, my good friend; All will be addressed in due time. To define them now would be to jump ahead of myself.

At it's base level wither the state/society be rule utilitarian, act utilitarian, or Objectivist the elderly and terminally ill have no value in those societies. Even in a rule utilitarian society if the person cannot directly contribute to the continuation and strengthening of that society they lose their value. While you do state that their value is still thier in the form of wisdom and experiance the utilitarian society would gather that knowledge from them and then let them die naturally, not waisting it's resourses on the old. The terminally ill in these societies have no value to offer, for they can't work to support themselves let alone contribute to the society as a whole, and they more than likely don't have the wisdom and experiance of age, so they would be left to die naturally. For example when simply grazing a herd of zebras will keep the ederly, young and the sick in the middle of the pack while at the same time when the pack takes off due to an attack the ederly and sick get left behind, while the pack still instinctivly protects its young. They value the ederly and sick yet still understand their value in feeding them to the lions to save the young. The Objectivist is the Cheetah on the plains that attacks alone to feed itself and at best it's young, but only until the are self sufficent.


Perhaps caring for the elderly or terminally ill WOULD be rule utilitarian because it would do great things for the morale of those who will inevitably become the elderly and teminally ill (read: pretty much all of us). The benefits of living in a society where we can count on care in illness and old age might outweigh the costs of supporting those people (whom we ourselves will almost inevitably eventually become).

That was something Melkor said on another thread (http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=424389&page=2&pp=15), and was directed more at him. Even still, you're playing specious semantics. How do the military and the police protect the freedom of the citizens of a country? By preventing them from being killed or oppressed by outside forces, right? I can't well exercise my liberty if I'm dead, can I? I also exercise it any better if I was dead from starvation or murder. Therefore, letting people starve is the moral equivalent of murder AND is the antithesis of providing for their freedom.

You are equating not-helping with hurting. Allowing someone to hurt themselves is completely different from allowing someone to be hurt by others.

You are saying that government must provide for the safety of the individual, that the military protects him/her from being harmed. I am saying that the government must provide for the liberty of the individual, that the military protects him/her from being oppressed.

No, I don't. Calling this interpretation of my argument simplistic would be a compliment.

Not at all, you are assuming that all employers will agree upon wages, and that no employer will offer another employer's worker a better salary.

If, on the market, wages are lower in value than the labor provided, arbitrage will occur until wages and labor are in equilibrium again.

Your argument was simplistic because it ignored several basic economic principles.

I was using an example to illustrate my point: that there can be contradictions in property rights. The capitalist and worker is one such example. There are others, like tenant farmer and landlord.

There is no contradiction whatsoever. The fruits of the capitalist's labor are his property, the fruits of the worker's labor are his property.

It's also impossible to deny that there are situations like the one I described that arise. Historically, they already have. Point is, all I have to do is find one contradiction in property rights to prove the whole system to be inconsistant bunk. And I've found that example. In mathematics, if a theorem is proven false in a special case, it's discarded as a false theorem. Same thing here.

Labor is the root of all property. There is no property without labor. If you can find a situation where two persons' labor was indistinguishable and inseperable, there might be a problem with property rights.

And yes, I can. I'll start with something you didn't mention - history. Read your 19th century American history again. Then get back to me. Economically, the group with superior resources wishes to acquiere more resources and wealth. This creates a demand for someone or something that can help them accomplish this end, and inevitably something forms to fit in that market niche. Of particular note are the Pinkerton "detectives," who were professional strikebreakers who were employed to make sure that when wages were slashed, there was little discontent. Logically, in a system in which capital is king, the group with more capital tends to win.

The Pinkerton detectives were murderers and extortionists. They committed economic theft and would be punished were the free market truly pursued.


Again, wrong. It's based on the concept of utility, that is, ability to be a contributing part of society. Dead people don't contribute so well. Neither do starving or disease-ridden people. Death, in the utilitarian view, is the worst position for any human because any possibility that they could become a participating member of society has been eliminated. Therefore, to maximize the greater good, we try to save the lives of the dying and help homeless and out of work people back into society. This doesn't mean fuck the terminally ill or elderly though.[/QUOTE]

All decisions and acts are not matters of life and death. How do you determine the greater good of a new line of SUV's? How do you determine the greater good of a brand of soda?

toppage

Also, why is it that so many people seem to be equating Objectivist thought with people not forming societies? The whole idea of Objectivism starts off with Aristotle's notion that man is primarily a rational and social animal. Both parts of this are important. Without a society, there is no way to protect everyone's individual rights beyond the might of that individual, and you cannot have large-scale capitalism.

Personally, I'm antisocial as hell and would love to go live off on my own somewhere enjoying the company of my few good friends. But this has nothing to do with my liking Objectivism. It has to do with my not liking most people. Even I have to admit that my chosen vocation, science and scholarship in general, works infinitely better in the framework of a society where others are exposed to my findings and writings and, much more importantly, I am exposed to theirs. Without a culture of scholarship, all science is just reinventing the wheel.

The Kat

toppage

Also, why is it that so many people seem to be equating Objectivist thought with people not forming societies? The whole idea of Objectivism starts off with Aristotle's notion that man is primarily a rational and social animal. Both parts of this are important. Without a society, there is no way to protect everyone's individual rights beyond the might of that individual, and you cannot have large-scale capitalism.

I think I can answer this, at least in part.

I believe it is because, like liberalism in the classical sense, obectivisim defines the idea of freedom as something along the lines of:

the state of being in which an Individual is free to do/not do or be/not be a certain thing he or she wishes to do without interference (interference being specifically illegitimate interference in the liberal sense by other individual actors) or the potentiality of interference (because if the potential is there, one is constantly worried about one's freedom- thus to be truly free one should be assured of one's freedom).

[I should note that I feel this is an insufficient definition of freedom, but within the context of objectivism I think it would be generally accepted]

If this is the accepted definition, I think it must then follow that a person is most free when in isolation from others- only then can he or she be fully free. Even in an anarcho-capitalist society, for example, he or she would not be free- there would always be the potential for interference.

Given that objectivism places freedom as the sole important moral value, it then follows that an objectivist would be most free, and thus most morally complete, alone and in isolation.

edit1

also, an individual who wants nothing would also be entirely free by this definition, if wanting nothing is actually a possibility

edit2

Deleuze, are you the same guy who posted/posts on Internet Infidels about rule utilitarianism or did you read his work?

edit3

Just rereading this thread, I don't see a major difference between rule utilitarianism as elaborated here and Rawlsian Liberal Egalitarianism, what am I missing?

I dunno about Rawlsian Liberal Egalitarianism, but I can say from a philosophical standpoint rule utilitarianism is completely untenable. Either your standard of right is to maximize the good or not. If you come to a situation where the established rule goes against something you know to promote the greatest good, what do you do, follow the rule or promote the good? The former would mean you weren't consequentialist, the latter would make you an act consequentialist. I don't like utilitarianism/consequentialism, but at least the act utilitarians are upfront about what their actual standard of right is and are consistent. The entire reason philosophers came up with utilitarianism/consequentialism in the first place was because they were trying to combat what they saw as "rule worship".

The Kat

To be honest I'm not one for moral philosophy, I'm going to try to keep up but for the most part I'm interested in watching the proceedings. I have a few questions about Alien Born's arguement, not meant as challenges so much as filling in the conceptual gaps I have of rule utilitarianism (I haven' read Bentham, or Mill's Utilitarianism)

However with rule utilitarianism, this criticism is sharpened. You adopt a rule that you will feel will be that that generates the greatest good, but you have to adopt that rule under neutral circumstances. If you were to adopt it under any specific circumstances then it may be those circumstances themselves that lead to the riule being the best, and thus rule utilitarianism is reduced to act utilitarianism in the act of selecting the rule. This being the case, it is not possible to argue that some rule has to be adopted under those (neutral) circumstances as it can be argued that some act has to be taken, because those neutral circumstances never obtain, it is a pure abstraction.


The way I see act utilitarianism is for every act to maximize utility regardless of circumstances. The way I see rule utilitarianism is to create a process that will maximize utility while upholding certain principles. Results are key for act utilitarianism, circumstances not so much. Results aren't too important for rule utilitarianism as long as the process is run properly. Circumstances, of course, will influence the process of rule utilitarianism, but that does not cause it to devovle into act utilitarianism because the process, which upholds core principles, will still be in effect.

So what I'm asking is. Why should rule utilitarianism be concerned with consequences? Why should it have to operate in neutral circumstances when it's purpose is to take advantage of non-neutral circumstances (not unlike English Common Law) and provide a more favorable decision than act utilitarianism?

Either your standard of right is to maximize the good or not.

Isn't that a false dilema? Why can't I say an exceptable standard of right is to promote the greatest good in the context of rules whose aim is to promote the greater good?

If you come to a situation where the established rule goes against something you know to promote the greatest good, what do you do, follow the rule or promote the good? The former would mean you weren't consequentialist.

Isn't the whole point of creating rules, for rule utilitarianism that is, to create a framework with which to rationally and consistantly decide the greatest good. If the purpose of the rule is to promote the greatest good, to achieve that result, then why are we non-consequentialist by following the rule?

The entire reason philosophers came up with utilitarianism/consequentialism in the first place was because they were trying to combat what they saw as "rule worship".

I'll take your world on that, I don't know. But I figure the arguement itself is more important than the creators intent for it.

The way I see act utilitarianism is for every act to maximize utility regardless of circumstances. The way I see rule utilitarianism is to create a process that will maximize utility while upholding certain principles. Results are key for act utilitarianism, circumstances not so much. Results aren't too important for rule utilitarianism as long as the process is run properly. Circumstances, of course, will influence the process of rule utilitarianism, but that does not cause it to devolve into act utilitarianism because the process, which upholds core principles, will still be in effect.

So what I'm asking is. Why should rule utilitarianism be concerned with consequences? Why should it have to operate in neutral circumstances when it's purpose is to take advantage of non-neutral circumstances (not unlike English Common Law) and provide a more favourable decision than act utilitarianism?

Rule utilitarianism is based on the idea that you can define general rules that will produce the greatest good to the greatest number if they are followed. Now a general rule has to be just that, general. If it takes into accounts the circumstances then it is not a general rule, but a specific decision, i.e. an act. The example that Deleuze gave (I wonder if his name is Giles?) of a rule was that of torturing is wrong. Now this I could support if it were to be based on some duty or right of the other to respect etc. But to support it because this rule will produce, in the long run, the greatest good for the greatest number requires omniscience. I can easily set up a situation wherein the greatest good for the greatest number is obtained by breaking the rule.
Think of a mad inventor who has developed some new, cheap, non polluting, reliable energy source. But he will only release his findings if a certain mass murderer in prison is tortured. What now of the rule? We did not predict this situation when we created the rule. It is unlikely, true, but it could happen. So for rule utilitarianism to work, we have to be able to predict the future implications of the rule before adopting it. The alternative is to describe it as act utilitarianism with rule guidance. But then you get into a very nasty slippery slope argument.

If it were not concerned with the outcome, but only with the principles that define the action, then it would not be utilitarianism. It would be some other form of ethical system depending on the basis of the principles. English common Law is not utilitarian. I hesitate to define what it is, but it is based on duties and rights rather than predicting the future utility of a present act in any way. (It is probably some variant on Aristotelian virtue ethics given its age and origin.)

Thank you AB, I have a much better understanding of your criticisms now.

Just as a minor point, I only referenced English Common Law because I was emphasizing process and exceptions, I would agree that it is not entirely utilitarian in nature.

Well I want to see more people. Write damn you! :p

Aww crap, I replied to this and it didn't post for whatever reason. But I think AB said it pretty well. Still, damn you browser!

Well I want to see more people. Write damn you! :p

Hey, I'm working on it. I'm waiting to hear back from Deleuze as to whether or not my chosen source is acceptable or not; depending on which school of Utilitarianism he subscribes to or what particular philosophical canon, I have to base my counterarguments on it instead of wasting my time with concepts he doesn't adhere to.

Why not just address all the consequentialist theories at the same time? They all depend on a conception of objective good which, at its heart, is really an idea of intrinsic value (value apart from a valuer). If you read G.E. Moore, more or less the 20th century god of consequentialism, he says this himself. All you have to do to refute consequentialism is explain that there can't be value without a valuer, but that this doesn't make value non-objective (or unimportant).

That said, I've seen what most consequentialists think of as "the greater good"...I don't wanna live in that world, man!

The Kat

Why not just address all the consequentialist theories at the same time? They all depend on a conception of objective good which, at its heart, is really an idea of intrinsic value (value apart from a valuer).


Wait, doesn't objectivism refer to a conception of objective good: specifically freedom? I was under the impression that objectivists felt freedom was an objective, absolute moral good deductible from observation...

That may or may not be the case...I've never heard it described that way. Freedom is certainly an important value. I don't think even that is an intrinsic value though. The possibility of freedom presupposes the existence of rational creatures which can be free, which then become the valuers of freedom.

My understanding of why freedom is important is because without it a person's survival is no longer in their own hands. Our survival depends on our freedom to use our reason, which is the primary way humans get by in the world. I really wish I had extrudable claws from my fingertips and really sharp canines...sadly I don't, so reason it is.

I should add that while I greatly admire Ayn Rand and her ideas and agree with many, if not most, of those ideas, I am hardly what you would call a strict Objectivist. The lady and I have many points of disagreement, notably on things like sex roles and the environment. I am not going to thump Atlas Shrugged or any other of her works as if it is some king of Gospel, and I'm alarmed at the number of professed Objectivists who do.

I owe a lot to Ayn Rand, but I also owe a lot to philosophers of the classical liberal tradition and other traditions as well. Dogma never solved anything, in philosophy or science.

Having researched "Atlas Shrugged," as I understand it the basis or at least a representation of Objectivist philosophy, I would say that I agree emphatically with Utilitarianism. How can the greatest good for the greatest number, when implemented correctly and with wisdom, turn out bad?

Mankind evolved by forming clans, societies, civilizations - working together, sharing with and aiding his fellows, not by acting in his personal best interests alone.

Utilitarianism all the way for me.

Okay, I would like to defend Objectivism.

Since you have read Atlas Shrugged, I ask you this:

Hank Rearden was the inventor and business owner of "Reardon Steel". He is a paragon of Objectivist Principle, a monk in the non-existant order, so to speak.

How, if Objectivism is a selfish, cave-man belief system, does Hank eat? Where does he live? Objectivism does not promoting killing competitors for food or money, it promotes forming a positive economic relationship with them!

Your study of Objectivism has fallen short, clearly. Objectivism is strongly centered on fair, free-market capitalism. We all have strengths and weaknesses. Objectivism tells us to MARKET (sell) our strengths and shore up our weaknesses. This always requires a societal framework and necessitates cooperation with others. It also often requires specialization and subjecting oneself to the will of society.

In Atlas Shrugged, Hank was a law-abiding business owner even as the Wesley Mouch's of the world passed laws designed to destroy him! No cave man would willingly continue to hunt while his weaker companions stayed back at the cave and plotted to steal the meat. But that is exactly what Hank did in the novel, and for a reason.

Hank did not kill Wesley Mouch, Hank made Reardon Steel and sold it to a buyer and bought food to eat using that money. He even gave some of that money to Mouch. Hank is not anti-social, quite the opposite! Those who seek to gain something from nothing (Mouch, both character and character trait) are antisocial!

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As for the Utilitarian perspective, it is a restatement of the same philosophy behind Democracy. The majority rules the minority. The strong control the weak. Cave-man beliefs.

I live in a Republic, where the majority rules EXCEPT where it regards the Bill of Rights. The Bill was written for the individual, the minority. Not even a 100% majority MINUS ONE of voters can force me to worship their god, take my free speech or my guns or my property (without due process). I alone have the authority to resist such changes to the system, because some things are not under the purview of government and/or other men, though they often think differently. That is the critical difference between Democracy and Republic.

The Utilitarian perspective also lacks this safety. What is good for the greatest number is subjective. Whether you compare good to acts or good to rules, the majority trumps the minority and you are risking another Auschwitz (sp?)... Where are the core morals of this philosophy? You say, "with wisdom", but this is not an objective value nor a stated principle.

Objectivists, per Rand, are law-abiding until such time as they cannot continue to live under said law. In other words, only when the Looters have destroyed all the wealth and threaten their actual life do they act aggressively to defend themselves. It is only human to aggress when cornered, this is not a political principle but common sense, human nature. The Objectivist is a creature of reason, law and rules. And of self-preservation.

Objectivists obey the market restrictions, the labor laws, the currency values and so on because that is the overhead (or cost of doing business) in a fair, free market. Surely they could profit better in a skewed or unfair market, but eventually those repercussions will return to them- The market will suffer if monopoly or corruption reigns. Only a fair market is CONTINUOUSLY profitable, although any good mathematician realizes that you can cheat and win in the short term- But it violates Objectivist Ethics.


With regard to the rediculous claims that Capitolism inevitably leads to the centralization of power/money in the hands of the business owners and the impoverishment of the worker... What can I say? Karl Marx lives on!

Bill Gates is unbelievably wealthy. He employs bankers, lawyers and analysts to guard his wealth. His wealth pays for thousands of government jobs. Bill Gates owns several homes and vehicles. These purchases provided jobs to the carpenter, the roofer, the auto industry worker and everyone else in those companies. Bill Gates is, by any Objectivist ***OR*** Utilitarianist perspective, far more economically-important to EVERYONE than any poor person ever will be. That's right, an honest UTILITARIAN would kill a poor person over Bill Gates if that was necessary, because both by rules and acts he is the greater economic GOOD for the majority.

Do the business owners inevitably profit from any sale? Of course. But this Marxist belief that a preset amount of dollars all funnel upwards into the Evil-Corporate-Pig-Fascist-Capitalist's pocket is just plain voodoo economics. Ever heard of economic growth???

Simple fact is, Socialist/Marxist countries have slow growth rates compared to Capitalist systems. And when you continue down the slippery slope to a Communist/Stalinist system, your growth actually becomes a steady DECLINE with increasing poverty instead of wealth.

Speaking of wealth, another factor in economic growth is the distribution of wealth among the population. America has a severe inequality of wealth distribution, but not so severe as to prevent growth. In fact, our unequal distribution of wealth promotes growth and has allowed us to have a large population of people at or near the "poverty line" (the lowest quintile or lowest 20% of the population with regards to possession of wealth). This lowest quintile (who are considered "impoverished" by staticians and economists) live in safe, modern homes with running water and sewer lines, electricity powering televisions with cable programming, drive cars and talk on cellphones. They have a strong desire and ability to increase this wealth. Their initial wealth as well as their ability to rise on the social ladder are both hallmarks of a healthy economic theory in action, despite what Marx had to say and what most on this debate board believe.

The only major factor besides the type of system being implemented by government and the wealth distribution in the nation, is the SIZE of that government itself. There is a value to strong government in that it promotes a FAIR, FREE MARKET, but the law of diminishing returns applies: If government gets too big, it becomes a strain on the economy and starts to slow growth.

Government does not need to be all-pervasive to protect the Market, because the Market is self-correcting.

If a strain is placed upon it by, say, a corporation drawing profit without spending that money back into the system (the Marxist presumption), then eventually market indicators like stagnant inflation (or stagflation, as they called it during the 1970s) will occur. The market will not grow due to lack of capitol, but prices will rise as entities in the system attempt to yield more profit. The value of the monetary unit drops even as the economy recedes.

This is a terrifying prospect, but also a necessary result of unfair market practices. The Securities Exchange Commission (http://www.sec.gov) is a Federal law enforcement entity specifically designed to hunt down and prosecute those who threaten our economy in this way.

In a properly functioning economy, the evil corporation draws profit and re-invests it in any of the following ways: In savings (bank makes money on loans), stocks (stock brokers make money as does the company offering the stock), R&D (new markets mean new sales and thus economic growth), internal expansion (more hiring of employees), external expansion (splitting into mutliple companies with specialization, hiring contracters to build new buildings) and even just increasing the CEO's paycheck (thus meaning his personal investment/spending rises, booming the economy in the luxury markets as he buys yaghts, bigger cars and houses and hires a maid or even just puts it away in a college fund for his kid).

In short, the most profitable corporation, complete with evil genius CEO, only helps our economy to grow. And that evil genius doesn't want to violate the fair trade rules lest he reduce his future profits. And if he decides to do so anyway, to make a quick and fraudulent dollar, there is a prison cell waiting for him, just like MARTHA STEWART.

Here are a few good links to economic information supporting my arguments:

http://www.house.gov/jec/growth/govtsize/govtsize.htm
http://www.worldbank.org/depweb/beyond/global/intro.html
http://www.iie.com/publications/papers/baily1003.pdf

Okay, I would like to defend Objectivism.
-snip-


I don't think you're defending objectivism here really. What you're saying is that a free market is the best way to organize a society, correct? If that's your argument, you're effectively utilitarian- i.e. we should maximize the good, and the best way to do so is through free market means. An objectivist (in theory) does not care how effective a free market is. An objectivist belies that the free market, and the rights associated with it, is the only MORAL way to organize a society. So even if an objectivist was presented with a superior social organization (in terms of productivity, though I'm not saying such a thing is possible: just accept it for the sake of argumet) which was not based on individual property rights, they would not accept it as valid.

I understand why libertarians feel a free market, classical liberal society is the best way to organize society, but as I said this is a utilitarian rationale! I would like to know why liberal/objectivist society is the only moral system.

Objectivist Patriots,

Say what you want about utilitarianism and objectivism, I'm learning here so I won't question you. But I will respond the to economics portion of your posts.

First you say that the notion that free-market capitalism tends to concentrate economic power into increasingly fewer hands is ridiculous, but then you provide an example of Bill Gates? Don't you see that is an example of the concentration of economic power? No one argues that the wealthy horde their wealth, of course they send it back out in the form of wages and investments. But, just as your example with Bill Gates, the wealthy do have economic power, people work for them, people are dependant on their employement. How are you disproving concentration of economic power? I don't see it.

Do the business owners inevitably profit from any sale? Of course. But this Marxist belief that a preset amount of dollars all funnel upwards into the Evil-Corporate-Pig-Fascist-Capitalist's pocket is just plain voodoo economics.

And yet later you acknowledge,

America has a severe inequality of wealth distribution

So which is it OP?

In fact, our unequal distribution of wealth promotes growth and has allowed us to have a large population of people at or near the "poverty line" (the lowest quintile or lowest 20% of the population with regards to possession of wealth). This lowest quintile (who are considered "impoverished" by staticians and economists) live in safe, modern homes with running water and sewer lines, electricity powering televisions with cable programming, drive cars and talk on cellphones.

Depending on which school of economic thought you subscribe to, economic growth is either caused by advances in productivity and/or the increase of aggregate demand in either consumption, investment, or government spending. I am not familiar with any theory that argues inequities in the distribution of wealth cause or facilitate growth. Perhaps you would like to outline such a theory for us.

Furthermore, to my knowledge the poverty line is roughly $17,000 a year. I'm not sure how you can manage such luxuries if you have to support a family on that salary. You better have evidence that those under the poverty line enjoy "cable programming, drive cars and... cellphones".

If government gets too big, it becomes a strain on the economy and starts to slow growth.

Once again, depending on the school of thought you subscribe to, the size of government is either direcly irrelevant to growth, or quite the opposite of what you say (more government spending encourages growth).

Government does not need to be all-pervasive to protect the Market, because the Market is self-correcting.

Assuming perfect competition, yes.

If a strain is placed upon it by, say, a corporation drawing profit without spending that money back into the system (the Marxist presumption), then eventually market indicators like stagnant inflation

I have never heard of that kind of explanation for stagflation before...

But anyway, no Marx does not make that presumption at all.

In short, the most profitable corporation, complete with evil genius CEO, only helps our economy to grow.

Well... ok, but that isn't saying much because:

1) As an organizational structure of economic activity, corporations, by definition, have to be part of economic growth and recession.

2) No one who characterizes corporations as evil argues that they are bad for growth. There are other, less economic, criticisms.

But anyway, that's enough hijacking for now.

Meh. I'll take the Kantian state over either one.. if such a thing existed.. of course neither do Objectivist states or Rule Utilitarian states..

That might actually work. Imagine a state that couldn't declare war because if war became the universal law, we'd all be killing eachother. That might be a state I would be willing to take seriously for once.

I hate objectivism, myself, though. Too selfish.

Meh. I'll take the Kantian state over either one.. if such a thing existed.. of course neither do Objectivist states or Rule Utilitarian states..

I'm all for Dadaist policies.

"Jam yesterday, and jam tomorrow, but never jam today."

and

"Every man his own football"

Objectivism may seem selfish, but in reality it prevents slavery. As a society, we must rely on ourselves to make decisions. If we are forever depending upon government to "regulate" free enterprise and property rights, to ensure "fairness" we are in effect surrendering our authority to it. I would say "If were to be damned, let's be damned for what we really are." To explain, the fact that government has to monitor free market transactions to ensure equal distribution of wealth suggests that individuals don't care enough about their fellow citizens to do this themselves. This being the case, the human race is so far gone that there is nothing government can do to change this trend.

Can anyone explain to me why (personally) they think selfishness is bad? I wholeheartedly admit to being a selfish person and yet I think I'm not so bad to be around. I have close friendships and a long term relationships and am, as far as I know, a moral person.

In my opinion, people who are truly selfish will want to treat others well because they understand that is how to live happily. If I violate the rights of others, I'm forfeiting my own rights.

So...selfishness is negative why?

Again, wrong. It's based on the concept of utility, that is, ability to be a contributing part of society. Dead people don't contribute so well.

Call me an economist, but I've always learned that utility means how much pleasure an individual derives from a specific thing. The death of someone who desires to be dead may very well increase aggregate utility, since that person has a negative utility from living (hence why he wants to die, to bring his utility up to zero).

Death, in the utilitarian view, is the worst position for any human because any possibility that they could become a participating member of society has been eliminated.

Refer above. Death has more utility than life for someone who desires to kill himself.

Therefore, to maximize the greater good, we try to save the lives of the dying and help homeless and out of work people back into society.

I say the rule protecting private property is more important than the individual exceptions of a single homeless person. You can say the opposite. In this respect, we can both be rule utilitarians and still never reach an agreement--because we have different conceptions of utility. A homeless person's utility is increased by being give money, but the people giving the money then have their utilities decreased, and by different amounts, dependong on how much value they place on money, rights, social justice, etc.

Additionally, the struggles of the terminally ill and the wisdom of the elderly inspire and educate enough to make up for the cost of supporting them, if we're going to be totally dispassionate and inhuman about it.

In your opinion, yes, because you value the inspiration and the education over the money. But someone else might value the money. In that case, we're comparing apples and oranges. There is no legitimate way for you to say "MY preferences are greater than YOUR preferences", or vice versa. In which case, a completely objective rule utilitarian would be at a stalemate. In every possible situation.

*******

Fact: People have different values. This is true even of rule utilitarians. An objectivist can claim to be a rule utilitarian simply by saying that objectivist rules such as private property, etc., are more valuable to society than the single exceptions (maybe the value to society is security or freedom or indvidual independence, etc.)

There is no way to measure "utility" to society. You may think that a person is more useful to society as a soldier, while I think he is more useful to society as a mechanic, because you value a strong army, while I value well-repaired cars, etc. There's an entire field dedicated to the problems of aggregating individual utility in society--it's called economics.

Because people have different values, the only way you can truly maximize overall utility is to allow those people to live by their values and freely choose to associate or not associate with others, which becomes largely in line with objectivist ethics.

Depending on which school of economic thought you subscribe to, economic growth is either caused by advances in productivity and/or the increase of aggregate demand in either consumption, investment, or government spending. I am not familiar with any theory that argues inequities in the distribution of wealth cause or facilitate growth. Perhaps you would like to outline such a theory for us.

Inequities in wealth are caused by the fact that people have different preferences with regard to saving and consumption. A person who values present consumption over future consumption (i.e. saving) will have less money than a person who values future consumption over present consumption.

Although inequities in wealth don't have to be tied into economic growth, they more often than not are an effect, and not a cause of said growth. In the long-run, growth comes from increasing an economy's capital stock, so the people that choose to buy more capital stock and invest in it, rather than buying consumer goods, become richer, while those who prioritize consumer goods do not become as rich as fast. Thus, the main causes of wealth inequality are (a) people's ability to do useful work, and (b) people's difference in preferences between present and future consumption.

Of course, this only applies to income, not net worth. The gaps in net worth (higher than the gaps in income) are for those two causes, and the third cause of inherited wealth, although this is only a major factor in a very small percentage of the population.

Once again, depending on the school of thought you subscribe to, the size of government is either direcly irrelevant to growth, or quite the opposite of what you say (more government spending encourages growth).

Have you ever heard of the crowding out effect? Government debt increases demand for bonds, which raises the interest rate, and prevents private spending. Government taxation likewise reduces investment (since all of G is spent, whereas private income is spread between consumption [short-term growth] and saving/investment [long-term growth]). While government spending can lift the country out of a recession (assuming that a surplus already exists, if there is no surplus and the government has to borrow money, then that negates the effect of the government spending), but under normal economic circumstances or in the long-run, a large government tends to hurt economic growth more than it helps it.

I have never heard of that kind of explanation for stagflation before...

Actually, that can be one cause for stagflation. If a large amount of money just sits idly, then the supply of money decreases, which increases interest rates, thus lowering economic growth and sending the economy into recession. To make up, the Fed prints more money, which causes inflation.

Here's my promised response:

Rule utilitarianism is based on the idea that you can define general rules that will produce the greatest good to the greatest number if they are followed. Now a general rule has to be just that, general. If it takes into accounts the circumstances then it is not a general rule, but a specific decision, i.e. an act. The example that Deleuze gave (I wonder if his name is Giles?) of a rule was that of torturing is wrong. Now this I could support if it were to be based on some duty or right of the other to respect etc. But to support it because this rule will produce, in the long run, the greatest good for the greatest number requires omniscience. I can easily set up a situation wherein the greatest good for the greatest number is obtained by breaking the rule.
The thing about consequentialist systems is that consequences are never 100% predictable. Take sports as an example. Everyone was sure that Red Sox would lose to the Yankees in last year's ALCS, down 3-0. All the predictable signs pointed to it. But something happened, and they won. What does this mean for our argument? That no utilitarian system is perfect. If you had asked me that at the beginning, I would have readily proferred that concession. This is a comparative discussion, and no system is perfect. My goal is to prove that utilitarian morality is net more useful than objectivist morality.

To actually answer the substance of the above argument, consequences may not be entirely predictable, but they generally can be to a high degree. If not, a discussion ensues over the best course of action, and the majority of the time, a beneficial course of action emerges. Considering that the default decisionmaking paradigm of status quo governements is utilitarian, the system has caused human society to grow and prosper by generally doing a good job predicting the right consequences. People can be wrong about whether the rule is good; that's ok. The more democratic the society is (generally), the more likely it is to correctly evaluate consequences - read Walter Lippman's The Indispensible Opposition.

The question in a rule utilitarian system is whether the rule itself is desireable and whether that rule is in the greatest good for the greatest number. It also, however, permits exceptions - as long as those exceptions themselves create a consistant rule. So having the consistant rule that if a particular action that violated existing moral rules had to be taken in order to prevent a nuclear war, then that would become a new, consistant rule.

(I did name the nation after him; postmoderns have cool names in general and Deleuze was the one, I think, with the best adjective - Deleuzan).

Think of a mad inventor who has developed some new, cheap, non polluting, reliable energy source. But he will only release his findings if a certain mass murderer in prison is tortured. What now of the rule? We did not predict this situation when we created the rule. It is unlikely, true, but it could happen. So for rule utilitarianism to work, we have to be able to predict the future implications of the rule before adopting it. The alternative is to describe it as act utilitarianism with rule guidance. But then you get into a very nasty slippery slope argument.
The way to check the slippery slope you describe is by making exceptions that create new rules. If the exception becomes a rule for that sort of specific circumstance, then the exception can't be misapplied in the manner described in a slippery slope. Additionally, slippery slope is often considered a logical fallacy for a reason.

It's true that utilitarianism creates complicated circumstances. Often, utilitarian analyses may come down to the question of whether there's a fate worse than death. The point is, through a process of debate and discussion, rule utilitarianism will generally find the solution that does the greatest good for the greatest number. What that may be is a major subject for debate, but I tend to think that's one of the better things about utilitarianism, as I tend to like democracy.

If it were not concerned with the outcome, but only with the principles that define the action, then it would not be utilitarianism. It would be some other form of ethical system depending on the basis of the principles. English common Law is not utilitarian. I hesitate to define what it is, but it is based on duties and rights rather than predicting the future utility of a present act in any way. (It is probably some variant on Aristotelian virtue ethics given its age and origin.)
I know little about English Common Law. Not my area.

Objectivist Patriots,

First you say that the notion that free-market capitalism tends to concentrate economic power into increasingly fewer hands is ridiculous, but then you provide an example of Bill Gates? Don't you see that is an example of the concentration of economic power? How are you disproving concentration of economic power? I don't see it.

So which is it OP?

I am not familiar with any theory that argues inequities in the distribution of wealth cause or facilitate growth. Perhaps you would like to outline such a theory for us.

Furthermore, to my knowledge the poverty line is roughly $17,000 a year. You better have evidence that those under the poverty line enjoy "cable programming, drive cars and... cellphones".

No one who characterizes corporations as evil argues that they are bad for growth. There are other, less economic, criticisms.



Bill Gates is the perfect example because he exists, along with many other ultra-wealthy persons, without collapsing the economy and making us all slaves who uprise a la Marx. Most of us Americans are doing quite well for ourselves. But we are mostly Middle Class.

If you examine the lowest quintile, or lowest 20% of the population in terms of wealth (poverty in a broader sense than the government figure you are quoting, poverty COMPARABLE to other nations), they also have an excellent standard of living compared to the lowest quintiles in the majority of the world or even Europe. Of course, the European standard is very similar, very good, but my examination of Bill Gates and the lowest quintile belies this rediculous belief regarding the amassing of wealth by the wealthy making the poor more poor.

I'm not denying that capitalism makes the rich richer! I'm denying that it makes the poor poorer! It makes the rich more wealthy AS WELL AS making the poor more wealthy.

If the Marxist model were true, we'd still be living in the Little House on the Prairie while a few wealthy railroad barons partied in New York City. It just isn't true. The industrial revolution and the capitalists it rejuvenated brought a higher standard of living to everyone, but not without growing pains and some social work- Like don't put children in mines for 19 hours a day... stuff like that.

Yes, yes, yes, CORPORATIONS MUST BE CONTROLLED AND WATCHED FOR VIOLATIONS OF THE LAW, COMMON SENSE, AND HUMAN RIGHTS AND DIGNITY. And that is the lawful role of government, yes.

But the wealthier Bill Gates legally gets, the wealthier our economy will be. He cannot make money if the economy is in shambles, for one. For two, the economy trickles down (***dodges*** the Reagan-haters ahead of time) and there are simply very few people living in terrifying poverty in this country BECAUSE OF men like Bill Gates. He is a major part of the "rising tide" which "lifts all boats".

There are abundant programs made possible by the heavy tax payments of all the working people which equalize any unintended consequences of capitalism (not that I believe they exist, mind you).

Our inequality of wealth directly promotes competition thanks to a little emotion I call GREED. Every inner city kid I know wants THINGS. Hell, everybody I know wants THINGS. Status Symbols. BLING. And there is a way for them to get those things by partaking in the economy. There is a large degree of upward mobility built-in to our economy. The fact that two of the most powerful politicians in modern USA are wealthy (no, SUPER-RICH) blacks tells you this. I'm not positing a theory, I'm using logic.

When the slaves were freed, they were all in poverty. So how did some get rich? How did it happen against the all-pervasive backdrop of racism they faced? Is it mere accident? Nope, they worked for it. And a bunch of other blacks went on government assistance and haven't done a damn thing since.

Another example- My father grew up incredibly poor on an Indian Reservation here in the USA. Yes, I am half-Indian. His family was well BELOW the poverty line. My father was a hard worker and eventually ended up as a Federal Agent making a salary that placed him on the upper edge of Middle Class. My mother was able to stay home and raise the kids without working, a rarity in the 1980s!!!

And my mother was the daughter of a share-cropper! He owned no land; he owed a large portion of his crop yield to the owner each year. If the crops didn't do well, he could have been booted from his home! They were below the poverty line as well; my mother didn't have running water or electricity in her home until she was a teenager. Today she makes a comfortable Middle Class wage as a professional secretary and could easily support herself in comfort even without my father or the wealth they have accumulated together.

Thankfully, they both planned ahead for their future retirements and will be able to retire soon in comfort. But how did that happen, how did my parents go from rags to riches while men like Bill Gates were stealing all the damn money???!!! Hmmm... I wonder.

Both my parents were the "disenfranchised poor" the wealthy children of priviledge on this board are always crying about. Both of them got educated at their own expense and then worked their asses off to have MORE WEALTH THAN THEIR PARENTS DID. I intend to repeat this feat. It isn't hard. But it only works well under Capitalism.

With regard to your questioning the possesion of cars and cellphones by the lowest quintile of wealth among Americans- Have you been around the ghettos of Los Angeles, Boston, Detroit, D.C. or Chicago lately?

Our most economically-depressed areas are filled with cars and cellphones and expensive drugs... Nobody has to work, thanks to government assistance. Do you think Middle Class gunowners like me are the ones responsible for the high gun crime in this country? Or do you think it might be shiftless inner-city gangbangers with an EBT (new foodstamps) Credit Card in their pocket who've never worked and never will???

No, you'll bring up the tiny few homeless who are mostly psych patients you liberals kicked out of "abusive" mental hospitals in the 1980s! :) Or the rare family that has fallen on hard times and fails to avail itself of the myriad public and private options that house and feed financially-troubled families.

I work in the system here, mostly with the poor. Liberalism depends on envy of the wealthy by the poor to keep the game going. If US Liberals actually talked straight to the poor of this nation, if Teddy Kennedy would have his accountant go into the barrios and ghettos and trailer parks of this nation and teach these people about financial planning and educate them on how money really works, you'd see even MORE economic growth in this country...

You'd see the end of poverty in America. But as much as the Republicans suck the you-know-what of Corporate America, the Democrats are fueling the Marxist Fires of Class-Envy and preventing their constituents from learning the truth of how to be successful in this nation.

My goal is- Everybody Wealthy. There is a way to do that, but not if we tear apart the economic system which makes it possible in favour of a dead ideology.

That might actually work. Imagine a state that couldn't declare war because if war became the universal law, we'd all be killing eachother. That might be a state I would be willing to take seriously for once.

I hate objectivism, myself, though. Too selfish.

Kantian ethics and objectivism can have some stuff in common too...

If the state seizes property for some purpose, and that were to become universal law, then everyone would go around stealing each other's things. Clearly, this isn't desirable, and therefore, redistribution is not justified.

Kant's ethics are, however, quite irrational... Game theory proves this.

Kantian ethics and objectivism can have some stuff in common too...

If the state seizes property for some purpose, and that were to become universal law, then everyone would go around stealing each other's things. Clearly, this isn't desirable, and therefore, redistribution is not justified.

Well, not really, because the imperative there wouldn't been 'everyone should take from one another' but 'everyone should give a certain amount of wealth to the state', which is certainly universalizable.

Kant's ethics are, however, quite irrational... Game theory proves this.

I don't see how this is possible. Game theory could show that given self-interested actors, Kantian ethics would not be followed, however I don't see how it can show that Kant's ethic system itself is irratioal. Game theory doesn't ever tell us anything about morals per se: it is only a tool to look at how idealized actors would behave in idealized circumstance if their only motivation was self-interest and they were perfectly rational.

Perhaps I am misunderstanding your statement though?

You are equating not-helping with hurting. Allowing someone to hurt themselves is completely different from allowing someone to be hurt by others.
Starving to death because of lack of resources is not allowing someone to hurt themselves. They're trying to get a job to feed themselves; they just can't find one. Let's say someone is falling off a cliff. Would refusing to catch them be murder? Of course it would - you made a conscious decision that they should die. Same thing.

You are saying that government must provide for the safety of the individual, that the military protects him/her from being harmed. I am saying that the government must provide for the liberty of the individual, that the military protects him/her from being oppressed.
You conceed that death=oppression. If death is oppression, then the state has a duty to protect those people from dying. They can't exercise their liberty if they're dead.

Not at all, you are assuming that all employers will agree upon wages, and that no employer will offer another employer's worker a better salary.

If, on the market, wages are lower in value than the labor provided, arbitrage will occur until wages and labor are in equilibrium again.

Your argument was simplistic because it ignored several basic economic principles.
It's called a hypothetical. They're used to illustrate potential flaws in arguments. Laugh and say it's impossible all you want, but when you take off your ideological blinders and read a history book, you'll see that the inevitable result of a government who refuses to regulate the market is horrific oppression. I'm tired of describing the scene in the United States at the turn of the 20th century over and over again; if someone wants to contest my argument historically, do it.

There is no contradiction whatsoever. The fruits of the capitalist's labor are his property, the fruits of the worker's labor are his property.
GAK! That's my point. How do you decide what constitutes the fruits of someone's labor? Resources here are zero-sum; the higher wages the workers have, the less money goes back to the CEO, and vice-versa. How do you determine who's work is worth what? And if you say a totally unimpeded market, go back to my last paragraph.

Labor is the root of all property. There is no property without labor. If you can find a situation where two persons' labor was indistinguishable and inseperable, there might be a problem with property rights.
Sure. The CEO organized and raised the funds for the factory; the laborer works in the factory. Both were integral in creating the goods which bring profit to the factory, who has greater rights to that property?

The Pinkerton detectives were murderers and extortionists. They committed economic theft and would be punished were the free market truly pursued.
Thank you. Thank you very much. You conceed all of the analysis in my last post as to why lack of government intervention would necessitate the Pinkertons. And if we legitimate government intervention in this case, what's to prevent the government from saying that modern CEO's severance packages are economic theft from their workers, especially since you've constructed the government as arbiter of what constitutes economic theft? This is not a consistent position.

All decisions and acts are not matters of life and death. How do you determine the greater good of a new line of SUV's? How do you determine the greater good of a brand of soda?
Simple. These things are products of a capitalist economy. Banning them would be impinging on fair market functions. Capitalism is the best system of economics. Keep the SUV's, because capitalism is better for society than the amount of damage the SUV's may do to the environment. Unless someone can find evidence that this line of SUV's will flood the market and tank the economy, or that they'll cause irreprable damage to the economy that will lead to human extinction. A consistent rule exception can be created out of the latter, whereas the former would prove why the line of SUV's wouldn't be in line with the first rule. The potential for debate is one of the beauties of utilitarianism.

Again, I don't want to hijack. Kreisau if you want to continue the debate how about about through telegrams or another thread?

Inequities in wealth are caused by the fact that people have different preferences with regard to saving and consumption. A person who values present consumption over future consumption (i.e. saving) will have less money than a person who values future consumption over present consumption.

Interesting, though I don't know why you quoted me. I didn't speak about the reasons for inequities in the distribution of wealth.

Although inequities in wealth don't have to be tied into economic growth, they more often than not are an effect, and not a cause of said growth. In the long-run, growth comes from increasing an economy's capital stock...

Well you aren't contradicting me, you are just choosing Keynesian economics over Business Cycle, or Neoclassical, economics. To each his own.

Have you ever heard of the crowding out effect?

Sure. But again you aren't contradicting what I said, only qualifying in which cases government can create growth.

under normal economic circumstances or in the long-run, a large government tends to hurt economic growth more than it helps it.

Well, you haven't really shown why that is so. The idea of crowding out effects just suggests that a certain economic effects will experience opposing forces. This is true for a number of economic effects, not just government spending, and yet the economy continues to grow.

We continue to grow in the face of massive government debt. We continue to grow despite our low rate of savings.

Why? Well we can point to the positive balance of our capital account. Does that mean that we are a nation of debtors? Possibly, but we have a positive balance of income. But anyway, this is about theory so the current situation isn't too important I suppose.

What we need to do is seperate large government from large government debt. Debt-based growth is largely borrowed prosperity, I won't argue with that. But a large government with a balanced budget won't necessarily harm the economy in the long-run.

Actually, that can be one cause for stagflation.

Oh sure it can be for stagflation in general. But I was refering specifically to the recent episode in U.S. history, I wasn't clear on that.

Oh, by the way.

Government debt increases demand for bonds, which raises the interest rate, and prevents private spending.

That is wrong but in the right direction. Demand for bonds increases bond prices which decrease the interest rate of bonds. Increased government debt increases bond supply, which decreases bond price, which increases the interest rate of bonds. If you just switch demand with supply then you are gravy.

dont yell at me, but i didnt read all of the previous posts, and i doubt that ill come off as intelligent as most of you (with the philosophical buzzwords flying about) but here is how i see it.

People dont like to share! The initial behaviour as a child is to horde your french fries, horde your legos and horde your...ummm? bandaids. Basically we can see that he who has the most crap wins. This is the initial drive and therefore the most primal response.

Does this make it favorable?

It is also impossible to be a solid staunch utilitarian because, like it or not, we have an ego. The basic unit of thought is "I", me and my! So to be a utilitarian youd have to be an unfeeling vulcan.

Then again it is also impossible to be a solid and staunch objectivist because, again, like it or not we respond to the pain of others. Our heart goes out to them and empathy is something everyone has a little bit of, even though the basic unit of life and thought and comprehension is "I" me and my, we and ours is also a component, otherwise wed still be living in huts and foraging for berries.

Again, to make a broad proclamation, i think that all of these little economic/social/ethical dilemmas boil down to the dichotomous conflict between the desire to help people and the desire to hurt them, or alternately to hold ourselves back or further ourselves because each of the above actions (helping and hurting) has the product of holding ourselves back or furthering ourselves.

so there it is, we just have to balance these conflicting drives to find harmony...

Call me an economist, but I've always learned that utility means how much pleasure an individual derives from a specific thing. The death of someone who desires to be dead may very well increase aggregate utility, since that person has a negative utility from living (hence why he wants to die, to bring his utility up to zero).
I will, thanks. Different words have different meanings in different disciplines. Then again, I may have used the wrong word for the concept I expressed, but I don't think so. Anyway, my statement still stands.

Refer above. Death has more utility than life for someone who desires to kill himself.
Not in my conception of utility.

I say the rule protecting private property is more important than the individual exceptions of a single homeless person. You can say the opposite. In this respect, we can both be rule utilitarians and still never reach an agreement--because we have different conceptions of utility. A homeless person's utility is increased by being give money, but the people giving the money then have their utilities decreased, and by different amounts, dependong on how much value they place on money, rights, social justice, etc.
First, the rule protecting private property is still intact - this is one of those exceptions I've referred to. Second, under my conception of utility, the rule that the unfortunate should be cared for precedes a slight violation of property rights. Third, if you believe in government, you already acceeded to the non-absolute nature of property rights - as governments will always take people's money to fund themselves. I've explained this earlier on this thread.

In your opinion, yes, because you value the inspiration and the education over the money. But someone else might value the money. In that case, we're comparing apples and oranges. There is no legitimate way for you to say "MY preferences are greater than YOUR preferences", or vice versa. In which case, a completely objective rule utilitarian would be at a stalemate. In every possible situation.
You realize we're talking about this in the context of how a government should be constituted. In a democratic society, this differences become ironed out in the process of debate. Democracy would also be the government of choice in a rule utilitarian society - I dare anyone to provide a historically more successful large-scale form of government.

Fact: People have different values. This is true even of rule utilitarians. An objectivist can claim to be a rule utilitarian simply by saying that objectivist rules such as private property, etc., are more valuable to society than the single exceptions (maybe the value to society is security or freedom or indvidual independence, etc.)
Why, though? Why are those rules more valuable. Because "It's my money, and I earned and you can't have it. That's not cool." If there could be a justification in terms of the consequences for society and not some unquantifiable claim about fairness rooted in egocentrism. Refer back to my utility.

There is no way to measure "utility" to society. You may think that a person is more useful to society as a soldier, while I think he is more useful to society as a mechanic, because you value a strong army, while I value well-repaired cars, etc. There's an entire field dedicated to the problems of aggregating individual utility in society--it's called economics.
I got it, I got it! Authoritarianism is bad. People tend not to function well in jobs they don't place themselves in or wish to be in. People still have freedom of choice, because that's the system which maximizes people's utility. Therefore, it doesn't matter what I think about them. As a rule (since we're talking about rule utilitarianism), giving people choice of profession will on the whole produce the most utility.

Because people have different values, the only way you can truly maximize overall utility is to allow those people to live by their values and freely choose to associate or not associate with others, which becomes largely in line with objectivist ethics.
Wow, we agree. Except for the last line. That portion may be in line with certain aspects of objectivist ethics, but not the "fuck the starving and sick" aspect. Letting people choose their jobs is compatible with higher income taxes. See, oh, more or less the entire world.

you all seem to be forgetting your high school economics class!!!!


The first thing we learned was that there is ultimately not enough to go around so not everyone will have everything they want.


My mom puts it like this, there has to be janitors and burger flippers, its all just a race to the finish line and the ones who are flippers or janitors got screwed along the way (sometimes to their own fault, and othertimes not) and didnt finish the race, but there can only be so many winners. Its the way of life, even a socialist like george orwell conceded to the point that there will always be three classes.

I dunno about Rawlsian Liberal Egalitarianism, but I can say from a philosophical standpoint rule utilitarianism is completely untenable. Either your standard of right is to maximize the good or not. If you come to a situation where the established rule goes against something you know to promote the greatest good, what do you do, follow the rule or promote the good? The former would mean you weren't consequentialist, the latter would make you an act consequentialist. I don't like utilitarianism/consequentialism, but at least the act utilitarians are upfront about what their actual standard of right is and are consistent. The entire reason philosophers came up with utilitarianism/consequentialism in the first place was because they were trying to combat what they saw as "rule worship".

Why not just address all the consequentialist theories at the same time? They all depend on a conception of objective good which, at its heart, is really an idea of intrinsic value (value apart from a valuer). If you read G.E. Moore, more or less the 20th century god of consequentialism, he says this himself. All you have to do to refute consequentialism is explain that there can't be value without a valuer, but that this doesn't make value non-objective (or unimportant).
Read my more recent posts. I've answered both of these arguments.

That said, I've seen what most consequentialists think of as "the greater good"...I don't wanna live in that world, man!
Examples?

*snip*
edit2

Deleuze, are you the same guy who posted/posts on Internet Infidels about rule utilitarianism or did you read his work?

edit3

Just rereading this thread, I don't see a major difference between rule utilitarianism as elaborated here and Rawlsian Liberal Egalitarianism, what am I missing?
Addressing all the snippage, thank you. I agree, and will likely refer to it later.

edit2: I don't know him nor have I read what he wrote. My ideas come from some bizarre permutation of primary literature, secondary literature, and my own vaguely unique contributions and twists.

edit3: Rawls wouldn't believe there could be exceptions to his two principles of justice. Even in the face of human extinction, no actions could be taken to circumvent the principles. Rule utilitarians would, in my mind, disagree. Additionally, a conservative with a different conception of valuable rules could interpret rule utilitarianism to mandate different courses of action than I do, whereas in a Rawlsian state, actions are basically predetermined by principles.

Deleuze- just a quick question, how do you defend against the argument that rule utilitarianism inevitably collapses back into pure utilitarianism?

i.e. The rule which best maximizes utility is simply "in all cases maximize utility".

Also, how do you defend against the charges leveled by Rawls by Rawls at utilitarianism in general in A Theory of Justice? (i.e. utilitarianism does not take seriously the difference between people, etc)

edit3: Rawls wouldn't believe there could be exceptions to his two principles of justice. Even in the face of human extinction, no actions could be taken to circumvent the principles. Rule utilitarians would, in my mind, disagree. Additionally, a conservative with a different conception of valuable rules could interpret rule utilitarianism to mandate different courses of action than I do, whereas in a Rawlsian state, actions are basically predetermined by principles.
I don't know if I agree with you here. I'm not really sure, but it seems to me if the first principle of justice promises us all the maximum set of rights compatible with equal rights for all (paraphrasing), and a given event threatens extinction of all right for all, that the first principle of justice would allow for reduction of some rights in order to maintain the rest. Certainly in terms of the ethics he describes in the Justice as Fairness articles overlapping consensus would allow a political community to act to avoid such a disaster.

The thing about consequentialist systems is that consequences are never 100% predictable. Take sports as an example. Everyone was sure that Red Sox would lose to the Yankees in last year's ALCS, down 3-0. All the predictable signs pointed to it. But something happened, and they won. What does this mean for our argument? That no utilitarian system is perfect. If you had asked me that at the beginning, I would have readily proferred that concession. This is a comparative discussion, and no system is perfect. My goal is to prove that utilitarian morality is net more useful than objectivist morality.
OK. So are we to be optimistic or pessimistic utiliutarians, and on what basis should we decide this.
Additionally, being net more useful is a utilitarian, rather than neutral means of assessment. If Objectivism (and I know little about it, not being a student of Ayn Rand) does not seek utility, then the measure is biased. Surely you should be setting out to prove that utilitarianism is more correct in some agreed manner. (A point that you will have to discuss with Melkor)

To actually answer the substance of the above argument, consequences may not be entirely predictable, but they generally can be to a high degree. If not, a discussion ensues over the best course of action, and the majority of the time, a beneficial course of action emerges. Considering that the default decisionmaking paradigm of status quo governements is utilitarian, the system has caused human society to grow and prosper by generally doing a good job predicting the right consequences. People can be wrong about whether the rule is good; that's ok. The more democratic the society is (generally), the more likely it is to correctly evaluate consequences - read Walter Lippman's The Indispensible Opposition.
So the rule is only a rule so long as that rule is useful. A little too ad hoc for my liking as a system. What purpose does the rule serve other than to aproximate and simplify decisions. If this is the case then rule utilitarianism is a sort of approximate act utilitarianism, and suffers the worst of the teleological problems combined with the worst of the deontological problems. I.E. you have a rule to follow, which supposedly determines the good, but when it doesn't do this according to some more fundamental determination of the good can only be determined by knowledge of the future. The system is asking people to blindly follow rules and then saying they should only break these rules when the unknowable determines that they should.

The question in a rule utilitarian system is whether the rule itself is desireable and whether that rule is in the greatest good for the greatest number. It also, however, permits exceptions - as long as those exceptions themselves create a consistant rule. So having the consistant rule that if a particular action that violated existing moral rules had to be taken in order to prevent a nuclear war, then that would become a new, consistant rule.
This means that you end up with as many rules as there are situation types. An unworkable system it seems to me. Can you not just stik with act utilitarianism which has its problems, but does not retain these and add new ones on top?

(I did name the nation after him; postmoderns have cool names in general and Deleuze was the one, I think, with the best adjective - Deleuzan).
I have a great deal of difficulty with the French academic tradition in particular, so I am more than a little biased on this point. (Too closed and cliqué)


The way to check the slippery slope you describe is by making exceptions that create new rules. If the exception becomes a rule for that sort of specific circumstance, then the exception can't be misapplied in the manner described in a slippery slope. Additionally, slippery slope is often considered a logical fallacy for a reason.
As noted above, you end up with an unmanageable number of rules, wel beyond the number that a person could keep in mind. As ethical systems are supposedly guides to action, practical in their nature, this seems to be a major drawback to rule utilitarianism. Yes slippery slope arguments are often considered fallacies, because they are often misused. Here however it is not a fallacy. You create a rule for the exception, then you create a rule for the exception of the exception. It is a recursive procedure. Eventually you have as amny rules as there are distinct circumstances, so rule utilitarianism has become, iteratively, act utilitarianism.

t's true that utilitarianism creates complicated circumstances. Often, utilitarian analyses may come down to the question of whether there's a fate worse than death. The point is, through a process of debate and discussion, rule utilitarianism will generally find the solution that does the greatest good for the greatest number. What that may be is a major subject for debate, but I tend to think that's one of the better things about utilitarianism, as I tend to like democracy.
If you are concerned with generating rules, with theoretical activity, then yes you can debate and argue and arrive at a solution that will probably (remember the omniscience problem) do the greatest god for the greatest number. However that is not an ethical system then, as it is divorced from the day to day life, the practical living of people. The buyer in the supermarket faced with a choice between expensive organic carrots or cheaper normal carrots can not set up a think tank to discuss the implications of this choice from amongst her fellow shoppers. He needs to decide in a few seconds what is the 'right' purchase. The woman faced with the stranger crawling in through her bedroom window has to decide instantly what to do. These are the true ethical decisions, and they are ones that utilitarianism, in any form has a problem with.


I know little about English Common Law. Not my area.
It wasn't me that introduced it. Not really my area either (Despite being English)

This is Kreisau by the way; just my utilitarian country as opposed to my ideological country.

Not in my conception of utility.

What was your conception of utility then? Even if it is overall social good, everyone has a different idea of what is good for society (i.e. differences as to the ends of society). Who gets to determine what society pursues as a monolithic whole? Alluding to a later example, Person A might believe that society is best served by having freedom of career choice, because that is what he values, while Person B might believe that society could really use more mechanics, such that he is willing to force people (or at least "persuade" them, through things like subsidies and tax benefits) to become mechanics, and believe that that outweighs the rule. Both are acting according to rule utilitarian principles; they are just aiming for different goals.

First, the rule protecting private property is still intact - this is one of those exceptions I've referred to. Second, under my conception of utility, the rule that the unfortunate should be cared for precedes a slight violation of property rights. Third, if you believe in government, you already acceeded to the non-absolute nature of property rights - as governments will always take people's money to fund themselves. I've explained this earlier on this thread.

I never claimed that such a right was absolute; but then again, neither is the rule that teh unfortunate should be cared for.

You realize we're talking about this in the context of how a government should be constituted. In a democratic society, this differences become ironed out in the process of debate. Democracy would also be the government of choice in a rule utilitarian society - I dare anyone to provide a historically more successful large-scale form of government.

Democracy is hardly meant to be a large-scale form of government. For a person who's vote counts for one in a hundred million, his say in the government is about the same as if he were living in a dictatorship. Democracy works best in decentralized, local entities where everyone's voice can be heard. A large government's job should be to prevent local governments from getting out of hand and oppressing the majority, while local governments should focus on democracy.

If a large country has two regions, an east and a west, and the west has 51% of the population, and the east has 49%, wouldn't it be better if the national government left most decisions up to the local governments in east and west rather than the people in the east succumbing to the values of those in the west?

The Roman Empire was a very large scale government, rather despotic--and lasted for five hundred years.

Why, though? Why are those rules more valuable. Because "It's my money, and I earned and you can't have it. That's not cool." If there could be a justification in terms of the consequences for society and not some unquantifiable claim about fairness rooted in egocentrism. Refer back to my utility.

But why should your rule of valuing consequences for society be valued above my rule of valuing the individual's autonomy? Both are grounded in, as you say, an "unquanitfiable claim about fairness." You think that it's fair for Person A to involuntarily support Person B; whereas I think it's unfair. It comes down to a difference in values--not just the means, but also the ends. I believe that the ends of government is to protect life, liberty, and property. Now, in doing so, it can sometimes abridge those rights (i.e. taxing people to fund a military), but in the end, a government is justified if those rights are better protected with the government than without. You believe basically the same thing, only with social welfare instead of rights.

Neither of us can prove that our stances are correct--after all, neither is correct--it's all a matter of personal values, which is why I believe in decentralization, so more people are able to live by and express their values.

I got it, I got it! Authoritarianism is bad. People tend not to function well in jobs they don't place themselves in or wish to be in. People still have freedom of choice, because that's the system which maximizes people's utility. Therefore, it doesn't matter what I think about them. As a rule (since we're talking about rule utilitarianism), giving people choice of profession will on the whole produce the most utility.

Well, since you're into the whole exceptions thing, then what about an exception if there's a lack of soldiers or a lack of mechanics? Rule utilitarianism with exceptions quickly turns into act utilitarianism.

Giving people the freedom to do what they want with as much of their money as possible also maximizes people's financial security and therefore utility, but why is that different from teh choice of profession? They are both regulated by the same market forces in a capitalist society.

Wow, we agree. Except for the last line. That portion may be in line with certain aspects of objectivist ethics, but not the "fuck the starving and sick" aspect. Letting people choose their jobs is compatible with higher income taxes. See, oh, more or less the entire world.

I never said it wasn't; but if you can abridge the rule with regard to property, why not with regard to career choice? After all, we could use more mechanics...

And as for the last line that I wrote, if your value system holds that utility is best achieved when all rights are absolutely protected, then there becomes no contradiction between objectivism and rule-utilitarianism. A person could very well believe that freedom is more important to someone than a welfare check, could he not? Objectivism deals with the proper ends (all things should be directed towards the end of protecting rights), while utilitarianism deals with means (the means are justified when the result from them is better than the precedent set from using them). The two do not directly go against each other.

Sure. But again you aren't contradicting what I said, only qualifying in which cases government can create growth.

You said that all schools of economics hold that the government is either irrelevant, or increases growth. I said that the government can increase growth, be irrelevant, or decrease growth... thus presenting a third option and contradicting your statemenet.

Well, you haven't really shown why that is so. The idea of crowding out effects just suggests that a certain economic effects will experience opposing forces. This is true for a number of economic effects, not just government spending, and yet the economy continues to grow.

Government spending is what is usually referred to by crowding out, because it does in fact crowd out private sector spending to a great degree.

We continue to grow in the face of massive government debt. We continue to grow despite our low rate of savings.

Our government debt isn't massive (Massive means more than GDP), and a low rate of savings allows growth--just slower growth.

Why? Well we can point to the positive balance of our capital account. Does that mean that we are a nation of debtors? Possibly, but we have a positive balance of income. But anyway, this is about theory so the current situation isn't too important I suppose.

Doesn't almost every country have a positive balance of income? I'm not saying that we can't grow, I'm just saying that government debt decreases growth, not stops it.

What we need to do is seperate large government from large government debt. Debt-based growth is largely borrowed prosperity, I won't argue with that. But a large government with a balanced budget won't necessarily harm the economy in the long-run.

Yes it will, since it crowds out private sector investment and also lead to inefficiencies, since government spending skews the market as it cannot gauge prefernces and changes in preferences as quickly as people can, while they are operating with knowledge of prices.

Many European countries have less debt than the United States, yet grow slowly and are less allocatively efficient because of government spending skewing the market away from true preferences.

That is wrong but in the right direction. Demand for bonds increases bond prices which decrease the interest rate of bonds. Increased government debt increases bond supply, which decreases bond price, which increases the interest rate of bonds. If you just switch demand with supply then you are gravy.

I used the wrong terminology. I meant the demand for lonable funds, not bonds. My apologies.

Soderkreisau,

I'll send my responce in a telegram... eventually.

Alright... well, I was going to go ahead and do this massive comparison between Objectivist and Utilitarian epistemology and metaphysics, but this thread has attracted far more attention than I had really expected. Bearing this in mind, I'm just going to go straight for the jugular.

Utilitarianism has two main problems, one metaphysical and one epistemological:

First, it enthrones 'pain' and 'pleasure' [and by extention, 'happieness' and 'unhappiness'] as the Universe's only two absolutes. This is a horrible misuse of both concepts: pain and pleasure are emotions. They are reactions of the human mind to perceived data or objects--and while the two do in fact play a large role in our behavior, they are hardly the only two absolutes. An absolute is anything you can point to and define: my pants are absolute but that doesn't make them a legitimate basis for philosophical thought. An absolute is anything with identity, which is more or less any physical object or concept that we can name.

In so glorifying these two emotions, Utilitarianism more or less makes these two emotions the standard by which all action--and therefore all thought--should be judged. Given that happiness or lack thereof is a response of subjective value judgements on the part of an individual, it essentially boils down to a form of mysticism; it doesn't demand that we reason our actions, it merely asks that we judge whether or not said action makes us [or others] 'happy' or 'sad.'

Which brings me nicely to the second flaw in Utilitarianism: it implies that an action is capable of making people happy in and of itself. Emotional responses are the result of an individual's reaction to an object weighed against their value-judgements: the object or concept in and of itself does not have the power to dictate emotion to a person; only the individual can do that through a process of cognition.

The idea that an action is intrinsically possible of dictating emotion appeals--obviously-- to a school of philosophical thought known as 'intrincism' which holds that conciousness is merely an empty vessel waiting for reality to write the truth inside one's soul. It contends that cognition is an passive process, and that by perceiving an object alone we are able to judge it without active thought. Science has rendered this school of thinking wholly obsolete; note that we expend calories when we think, thus proving cognition is an active--and volitional process.

The remainder of one's complaints about Utilitarianism essentially stems from one or both of these fundamental flaws in its philosophy.

If you are concerned with generating rules, with theoretical activity, then yes you can debate and argue and arrive at a solution that will probably (remember the omniscience problem) do the greatest god for the greatest number. However that is not an ethical system then, as it is divorced from the day to day life, the practical living of people. The buyer in the supermarket faced with a choice between expensive organic carrots or cheaper normal carrots can not set up a think tank to discuss the implications of this choice from amongst her fellow shoppers. He needs to decide in a few seconds what is the 'right' purchase. The woman faced with the stranger crawling in through her bedroom window has to decide instantly what to do. These are the true ethical decisions, and they are ones that utilitarianism, in any form has a problem with.
I hope you don't mind my interjecting:
I have two problems with this statement. First, why wosuld it necessarily be so that the system used for determining a course of action at the collective political level be the same as at a individual level? Utilitarianism is, as far as I know, a political theory, not a comprehensive moral theory as such. As you say, it is impossible for an individual to judge everything at all times against utilitarian rules. However, I don't think it then follows that these utiltiarian rules are then useless as a guide for government. I think this is comparable to the different levels of comprehensiveness Rawls ascribes to liberalism- in the case of most political theories (and all liberal theories) moral codes at a state level and a personal level are not intertwined or insepperable. Believing in Christianity as a comprehensive moral theory and liberalism as a political theory is not incoherent as such, for example. The same may be true for utilitarianism.

My second point would be that objectivism would have nothing to say about your carrot dilemma. Objectivism tells us that we should be free to choose, but not what our choices should be. In this way it is the same as utilitarianism in that it is a political theory not a comprehensive moral theory.

Utilitarianism has two main problems, one metaphysical and one epistemological:

First, it enthrones 'pain' and 'pleasure' [and by extention, 'happieness' and 'unhappiness'] as the Universe's only two absolutes. This is a horrible misuse of both concepts: pain and pleasure are emotions. They are reactions of the human mind to perceived data or objects--and while the two do in fact play a large role in our behavior, they are hardly the only two absolutes. An absolute is anything you can point to and define: my pants are absolute but that doesn't make them a legitimate basis for philosophical thought. An absolute is anything with identity, which is more or less any physical object or concept that we can name.


I would not say this is true of utilitarianism today. While the jury is still out, as it were, in regards to what the good is that should be maximized, I do not believe any contemporary philosopher advocates the pleasure/pain model, which I believe originates with bentham?

For example, I think one of the more prominent measures of good would be the meeting of ends- i.e. the best society is the one in which the most ends of people are met, whatever those may be.

Just as a near totally random aside, I'd like to note that whenever anyone talks about utilitarianism, they're talking not about absolute utility but utility/capita.


Which brings me nicely to the second flaw in Utilitarianism: it implies that an action is capable of making people happy in and of itself. Emotional responses are the result of an individual's reaction to an object weighed against their value-judgements: the object or concept in and of itself does not have the power to dictate emotion to a person; only the individual can do that through a process of cognition.

I'm not sure that this is so. If a given utilitarian action does is undertaken, and the individual does not cognitively recognize this as increasing his happiness (or whatever measure is used), the action is a failure in its utilitarian ends. So in essence, if a policy does not cause people to become more happy, it is not utilitarian- whether this is cause as a direct result of the action, or after a process of value judgement, seems to me irrelevant. Though perhaps I am misunderstanding you here?

At any rate, given that utilitarianism doesn't necessarily recquire a pain/pleasure (eudaimonic is the technical term if I remember correctly) model, I think at least part of your argument there is moot.
note that we expend calories when we think, thus proving cognition is an active--and volitional process.


I'm not sure that active implies volitional. Certainly a seizure is active and expends calories, but it is not volitional by any standard.

I would not say this is true of utilitarianism today.
Sorry. It is.

While the jury is still out, as it were, in regards to what the good is that should be maximized, I do not believe any contemporary philosopher advocates the pleasure/pain model, which I believe originates with bentham?
No, it came from Parmendies, a Greek philosopher.

For example, I think one of the more prominent measures of good would be the meeting of ends- i.e. the best society is the one in which the most ends of people are met, whatever those may be.
Right. Just about any philosophy would agree with you here: this isn't the issue. What the issue is, in effect, is just what consitutes these ends being met. I can go over to my neighbor's house and give her my entire paycheck, I can mow her lawn and clean her cat's litterbox, but that doesn't guarantee her happiness. Utilitarianism makes the mistake os assuming that it does.

Just as a near totally random aside, I'd like to note that whenever anyone talks about utilitarianism, they're talking not about absolute utility but utility/capita.
Can't say I disagree with that.

I'm not sure that this is so. If a given utilitarian action does is undertaken, and the individual does not cognitively recognize this as increasing his happiness (or whatever measure is used), the action is a failure in its utilitarian ends.

Wait, so you're saying that things make us happy and we don't know it? That sounds like a damning endictment of cognition to me; and furthermore it justifies any number of actions on the basis that 'it's for your own good, whether you know it or not. I know what makes me happy; I know what makes me pissed off. To imply that I don't amounts to an insult in my mental faculties.

So in essence, if a policy does not cause people to become more happy, it is not utilitarian- whether this is cause as a direct result of the action, or after a process of value judgement, seems to me irrelevant. Though perhaps I am misunderstanding you here?
This is a common error in philosophical thought. It implies that actions are the cause of other actions , bypassing the need for entities altogether. This is as false in philosophy as it is in physics; if you really think actions cause other actions you merely need to replace a billiard ball on a pool table with a soap bubble or an egg and the results will be much different than if you had used the cue as you were supposed to. Entities cause actions.

At any rate, given that utilitarianism doesn't necessarily recquire a pain/pleasure (eudaimonic is the technical term if I remember correctly) model, I think at least part of your argument there is moot.
No offense, but you really need to examine the philosophy of Bentham, Mill, and Parmendies if you really think you understand Utilitarianism. The rejection of 'pain' and 'pleasure' as the two guiding absolutes amounts to the rejection of Utilitarianism as we know it.


I'm not sure that active implies volitional. Certainly a seizure is active and expends calories, but it is not volitional by any standard.
I said it was an active process, and thereofre a volitional one, not a volitional process, and therefore an active one. Here we're getting into the difference between automated brain functions and concious ones, which we can debate all night if we wanted to; but comparing an involuntary seizure to an active thought process is... [i]laughable at best.

Sorry. It is.

Well, that's not so. For example, you have schools of thought such as eudaimonism (sp?) which proposes a happiness/suffering model over a pain/pleasure model. You have models such as preference satisfaction, which I described above (i.e. the best system is that which satisfies the most preferences). Utilitarianism is not monolithic. If you wish I can probably find you an article describing various branches, providing you have access to a library.

No, it came from Parmendies, a Greek philosopher.
My mistake.

Right. Just about any philosophy would agree with you here: this isn't the issue. What the issue is, in effect, is just what consitutes these ends being met. I can go over to my neighbor's house and give her my entire paycheck, I can mow her lawn and clean her cat's litterbox, but that doesn't guarantee her happiness. Utilitarianism makes the mistake os assuming that it does.

I don't think so. For example, objectivism would not agree with the statement:
"the best system is that which satisfies the most preferences",
as this term could conceivably imply restricting the rights of some in order to fufill the preferences of many.
Many other philosophies are based on the idea that people's percieved preferences are different from their actual preferences (i.e. marxism) so at best they would have to modify a preference satisfaction model. However, any system which justifies itself by preference satisfaction is necessarily consequentialist, which the system you support is emphatically not.

Wait, so you're saying that things make us happy and we don't know it? That sounds like a damning endictment of cognition to me; and furthermore it justifies any number of actions on the basis that 'it's for your own good, whether you know it or not. I know what makes me happy; I know what makes me pissed off. To imply that I don't amounts to an insult in my mental faculties.

Sometimes the things that are best for us are not what we want (this is essentially the basis of paternalism, but that is a different argument). I suggest we leave this here as it would be a fairly serious tangent. That aside, many political theories are premised on a difference between perceived knowledge and actual/revealed knowledge.

This is a common error in philosophical thought. It implies that actions are the cause of other actions , bypassing the need for entities altogether. This is as false in philosophy as it is in physics; if you really think actions cause other actions you merely need to replace a billiard ball on a pool table with a soap bubble or an egg and the results will be much different than if you had used the cue as you were supposed to. Entities cause actions.

sure, but I don't see how this matters. Whether the utilitarian policy makes you happy or whether it's results make you happy, I don't see how this in any way damages it as a theory. Utilitarians are going to say more spending money will make us happier on average, and they'd likely be right- the actual process that occurs that results in this happiness is not important.

No offense, but you really need to examine the philosophy of Bentham, Mill, and Parmendies if you really think you understand Utilitarianism. The rejection of 'pain' and 'pleasure' as the two guiding absolutes amounts to the rejection of Utilitarianism as we know it.

hm, this isn't so, as I addressed above there are different measures of utility (again, the main ones being pleasure/pain, happiness/suffering, and preference satisfaction; also there have been attempts to merge utilitarianism with Kantian philosophy). I think if you dig a little deeper this will become obvious. Preference satisfaction is quite prevalent in some academic discourse, or so I am led to believe at any rate.

I said it was an active process, and thereofre a volitional one, not a volitional process, and therefore an active one. Here we're getting into the difference between automated brain functions and concious ones, which we can debate all night if we wanted to; but comparing an involuntary seizure to an active thought process is... [i]laughable at best.
Let me see if I understand you right. You are saying that brains are active (kalorie consuming) rather than passive, and consequently this shows volition, correct? I don't think this follows at all. I think any naturalistic approach to proving volition is going to be very difficult- our brains are not manifestly different from animal brains, but I doubt you would invest them with the same level of cognition as a person.

At any rate, are you saying that thought is cognitive because it's active? I'm not clear on this, sorry.

I hope you don't mind my interjecting:
I have two problems with this statement. First, why wosuld it necessarily be so that the system used for determining a course of action at the collective political level be the same as at a individual level? Utilitarianism is, as far as I know, a political theory, not a comprehensive moral theory as such. As you say, it is impossible for an individual to judge everything at all times against utilitarian rules. However, I don't think it then follows that these utiltiarian rules are then useless as a guide for government. I think this is comparable to the different levels of comprehensiveness Rawls ascribes to liberalism- in the case of most political theories (and all liberal theories) moral codes at a state level and a personal level are not intertwined or insepperable. Believing in Christianity as a comprehensive moral theory and liberalism as a political theory is not incoherent as such, for example. The same may be true for utilitarianism.

My second point would be that objectivism would have nothing to say about your carrot dilemma. Objectivism tells us that we should be free to choose, but not what our choices should be. In this way it is the same as utilitarianism in that it is a political theory not a comprehensive moral theory.


Fair comments. As I doing a masters in an aspect of Moral philosophy at the moment I tend to be a little bit single track minded. Utilitarianism was proposed as a moral theory initially, not as a political one. On the political philosophy side of the debate I have little to contribute right now. Get back to me in a year or so when I can open up my perspectives a little more again..

Well, that's not so. For example, you have schools of thought such as eudaimonism (sp?) which proposes a happiness/suffering model over a pain/pleasure model.
Happiness and pleasure are essentially synonymous. Same with pain and suffering. I see no validity in this statement.

You have models such as preference satisfaction, which I described above (i.e. the best system is that which satisfies the most preferences). Utilitarianism is not monolithic. If you wish I can probably find you an article describing various branches, providing you have access to a library.
To which I would counter that the best system is that which satisfies all preferences and takes into account our nature as human beings; ie. Objectivism.

I don't think so. For example, objectivism would not agree with the statement:
"the best system is that which satisfies the most preferences",
as this term could conceivably imply restricting the rights of some in order to fufill the preferences of many.
Conceivably, yes. See above.

Many other philosophies are based on the idea that people's percieved preferences are different from their actual preferences (i.e. marxism) so at best they would have to modify a preference satisfaction model. However, any system which justifies itself by preference satisfaction is necessarily consequentialist, which the system you support is emphatically not.
Right. The only system that recognizes our inherent traits as humans and ecourages us to foster them somehow does not appeal to both perceived and 'actual' preferences? Please.

Sometimes the things that are best for us are not what we want (this is essentially the basis of paternalism, but that is a different argument). I suggest we leave this here as it would be a fairly serious tangent. That aside, many political theories are premised on a difference between perceived knowledge and actual/revealed knowledge.
What? Again, this implies that I don't know what my actual preferences are; likewise it assumes that you, [the third party reader] also don't know what you want out of life. Are you going to stand for this endictment of your psyche? I'm not. Fuck that.


sure, but I don't see how this matters.
I'm sorry. Think harder.

Whether the utilitarian policy makes you happy or whether it's results make you happy, I don't see how this in any way damages it as a theory. Utilitarians are going to say more spending money will make us happier on average, and they'd likely be right- the actual process that occurs that results in this happiness is not important.
I already addressed this in my previous post. Actions do not cause other actions. Happiness lies within the interests of the indivicual; not within the act itself. You're arguing in circles here.


hm, this isn't so, as I addressed above there are different measures of utility (again, the main ones being pleasure/pain, happiness/suffering, and preference satisfaction; also there have been attempts to merge utilitarianism with Kantian philosophy). I think if you dig a little deeper this will become obvious. Preference satisfaction is quite prevalent in some academic discourse, or so I am led to believe at any rate.
Yes, and I already answered to this. Pleasure and pain are subsets of happiness and unhappiness, just as preference and non-preference are. You're arguing circles again.

Let me see if I understand you right. You are saying that brains are active (kalorie consuming) rather than passive, and consequently this shows volition, correct?
Depends on the process. Cognition is volitional, automated responses such as adrenaline spikes, pupil widening in response to light levels, and memory storage are not.

I don't think this follows at all. I think any naturalistic approach to proving volition is going to be very difficult- our brains are not manifestly different from animal brains, but I doubt you would invest them with the same level of cognition as a person.
What?

At any rate, are you saying that thought is cognitive because it's active? I'm not clear on this, sorry.
Concept-formation, evaluation, and the application of logic are all volitional processes. Does that help?

Happiness and pleasure are essentially synonymous. Same with pain and suffering. I see no validity in this statement.

I'm not sure this is true, certainly it has been debated exstensively. Pleasure, in general usage, is associated with physical experience (i.e. a certain act is pleasurable, while happiness is a more complex feeling which may not be in any way associated with a physical experience.

There are several cases I can think of where the two clearly differ. First, take the case of S/M. A masochist may feel physical pain, but experience happiness from it. So at the very least we need to differentiate between the two terms- I think it makes no sense to conflate the two, nor do I see a point in doing so.

The second case would be the case of animals. While most of us would say that animals are largely capable of feeling pleasure or pain, we would not generally say they are capable of more elaborate responses such as happiness/suffering. This distinction is actually very important in discussing utilitarians, as utiltiarians disagree in terms of whether animals should be included in the utility calculus.
Essentially,
pleasure/pain: hedonistic utilitarianism
happiness/suffering: eudaimonic utilitarianism
To which I would counter that the best system is that which satisfies all preferences and takes into account our nature as human beings; ie. Objectivism.

I have two objections here:

first, I think you do not understand the context of preference as it is used in preference utiltarianism. It is not the same as utility as understood in classical economics or as in objectivism. A utilitarian of this sort would see a preference for health care, for example, as a valid preference in terms of calculating utility, whether or not the individual could normally afford it. To simply things greatly, if most of a population has a preference for universal health care, preference utilitarians would enact such a policy, despite the fact that some do not prefer it. This would maximize the preferences satisfied in this case. Clearly an objectivist would not agree with this.

Secondly, I don't believe that you have shown that there actually IS a fundemental human nature, much less that this nature leads to objectivism. given that this is a thread largely about the validity of objectivism, I think it is incumbent that you do so.

Right. The only system that recognizes our inherent traits as humans and ecourages us to foster them somehow does not appeal to both perceived and 'actual' preferences? Please.

Okay, again I don't think you can make this argument until you show that humans have inherent traits, and that these traits are only recognized through objectivism.

Also, even in the context of objectivism I think you can see certain situations where perceived and actual preferences differ. First, the insane may have preferences (i.e. eating their own poo, or something) that are clearly not 'what is best for them', or their actual preferences. Children may believe what is best for them is to eat only candy, but this is also not so. So to put it simply:
perceived prefernce: what we believe is best for us
revealed preference: what is actually best for us.

What? Again, this implies that I don't know what my actual preferences are; likewise it assumes that you, [the third party reader] also don't know what you want out of life. Are you going to stand for this endictment of your psyche? I'm not. Fuck that.

That's all very well, but I never said that revealed preferences was a fact, nor that I believed in it. You stated, essentially, that in regards to the proposition that the best system is that which maximizes preference satisfaction:

Right. Just about any philosophy would agree with you here: this isn't the issue. What the issue is, in effect, is just what consitutes these ends being met. I can go over to my neighbor's house and give her my entire paycheck, I can mow her lawn and clean her cat's litterbox, but that doesn't guarantee her happiness. Utilitarianism makes the mistake os assuming that it does

Which is clearly not true in any moral theory that assumes the existence of revealed knowledge. I don't believe in Marxism any more than you do, but that doesn't change the fact that Marxists would certainly disagree with the above system (the best system maximizes preference satisfaction), as would any who disagree with consequentialism, which you yourself do.

Also, upon reexaming that quote, utilitarians don't assume that a given policy guarantees an increase in hapiness across the board, merely on the aggregate. So no, mowing your neighbours lawn may not make her happy, but a policy of lawn mowing can be reasonably said to increase utility (because either most of us find lawn mowing unpleasurable/suffering, or because most of us have a preference for a mown lawn).

I'm sorry. Think harder.

Lets look at it this way.

Utilitarianism is based purely on end results: this is why it is consequentialist.

A given policy may predictably result in an increase of utility. For example, giving every person in society a free car (providing there was no downside to this as it were) would predictably result in an increase in utility- most of us would derive pleasure/be more happy/have a preference for a free car.

Thus it is the result not the process that matters. If we look at it this way:
utility(after policy) - utility(before policy)

and the result is positive, we have a successful utilitarian
policy. The mechanism that actually changes utility does not in fact matter, as long as the utility changes for the positive on the aggregate.

I already addressed this in my previous post. Actions do not cause other actions. Happiness lies within the interests of the indivicual; not within the act itself. You're arguing in circles here.

If I know an individual would derive pleasure/happiness/a satisfied prefence from a free new car, and I give him/her a new car, utility would increase, correct?

Yes, and I already answered to this. Pleasure and pain are subsets of happiness and unhappiness, just as preference and non-preference are. You're arguing circles again.


No, I don't think I am. Please see my above comments.

Depends on the process. Cognition is volitional, automated responses such as adrenaline spikes, pupil widening in response to light levels, and memory storage are not.

Okay, then what does your original statement that the brain consumes kalories have to do with any thing at all?


What?
Looking at the brain from a scientific approach is not going to tell us anything about cognition, given that our brains are not manifestly different from other animals, physiologically speaking. I'm saying that it is hard/impossible to use biology to prove reason/cognition.

Concept-formation, evaluation, and the application of logic are all volitional processes. Does that help?

Not really. I was under the impression that you thought you could prove the above statement (that given attributes are volitional) through brain activity. Perhaps I misunderstood. In that case, however, I'd wonder how you konw that they are volitional processes.

However, give that this last point is largely peripheral, and we do not seem to be understanding each other, perhaps it is best dropped altogether.

I'm not sure this is true, certainly it has been debated exstensively. Pleasure, in general usage, is associated with physical experience (i.e. a certain act is pleasurable, while happiness is a more complex feeling which may not be in any way associated with a physical experience.

There are several cases I can think of where the two clearly differ. First, take the case of S/M. A masochist may feel physical pain, but experience happiness from it.
Which makes it 'happiness.' Or 'pleasure.' The terms are interchangeable here and just about everywhere else. Thank you.

So at the very least we need to differentiate between the two terms- I think it makes no sense to conflate the two, nor do I see a point in doing so.
Now you're just ignoring the obvious and trying to mold objective definitions to meet your needs.

Main Entry: happiness
Part of Speech: noun
Definition: satisfaction
Synonyms: beatitude, blessedness, bliss, cheer, cheerfulness, cheeriness, content, contentment, delectation, delight, delirium, ecstasy, elation, enchantment, enjoyment, euphoria, exhilaration, exuberance, felicity, gaiety, geniality, gladness, glee, good cheer, good humor, good spirits, hilarity, hopefulness, joviality, joy, jubilation, laughter, light-heartedness, merriment, mirth, optimism, paradise, playfulness, pleasure, prosperity, rejoicing, sanctity, seventh heaven, vivacity, well-being

The second case would be the case of animals. While most of us would say that animals are largely capable of feeling pleasure or pain, we would not generally say they are capable of more elaborate responses such as happiness/suffering. This distinction is actually very important in discussing utilitarians, as utiltiarians disagree in terms of whether animals should be included in the utility calculus.
Asking me to consider animals when discussing philosophy is like asking me to put a hockey net on a basketball court.

Essentially,
pleasure/pain: hedonistic utilitarianism
happiness/suffering: eudaimonic utilitarianism
We've already been over this. The four terms are synonymous


I have two objections here:

first, I think you do not understand the context of preference as it is used in preference utiltarianism. It is not the same as utility as understood in classical economics or as in objectivism. A utilitarian of this sort would see a preference for health care, for example, as a valid preference in terms of calculating utility, whether or not the individual could normally afford it. To simply things greatly, if most of a population has a preference for universal health care, preference utilitarians would enact such a policy, despite the fact that some do not prefer it. This would maximize the preferences satisfied in this case. Clearly an objectivist would not agree with this.
Yes, and the method by which we would fund such a program would be to levy a tax on the people who did not wish to participate in the program. TANSTAAFL.

Just because a certain group of people wants something doesn't make it admissable to cornhole the property rights of those who don't. If your neighbors have a preference to live in your house and farm out your land to make it a commune, preference Utilitarianism tells us this is perfectly OK to do. To put it in simpler terms: a large group of people doing a wrong thing is still a wrong thing. Preference Utilitarianism enthrones collective caprice as the be-all end-all of human nature, and demands that the rest of us remain pliable to its wants.

Secondly, I don't believe that you have shown that there actually IS a fundemental human nature, much less that this nature leads to objectivism. given that this is a thread largely about the validity of objectivism, I think it is incumbent that you do so.
My jaw is literally hanging open after reading this one. I have some difficulty approaching this as it seems to imply that you don't believe any two people share any common traits. To be honest, if you refuse to see these basic similarities I'm surprised you've managed to subsume individuals under the larger concept "humanity."

We all have more or less the same behvioral tendancies; we prefer abundance to scarcity, we do things because we want to do them or we have to do them, and we alone of all the animals are rational.

Okay, again I don't think you can make this argument until you show that humans have inherent traits, and that these traits are only recognized through objectivism.
Lets deconstruct this statement. In saying that I have to 'show that humans have inherent traits,' you're implying they have no inherent traits. By your reasoning, therefore, we can stipulate that man could have five legs or none, he could have one brain or a dozen, he could fly or walk.

From a mental standpoint, if you're sane, the same basic instinctive drive motivates us all, ie, we want what's best for us and our families. Are you honestly trying to tell me that you've never noticed this before? Objectivism allows us to determine just what these needs are and it encourages us to make these needs a reality. Under a more Utilitarian moral framework, a specific set of needs may be deemed by the collective as being 'unnecessary' or 'anti-utility' thus the individual is deprived of his right to pursue a specific set of needs.

Value hierarchies and happiness are too varied as concepts to be subsumed under a universal standard like Utilitarianism. The folks who want welfare can pay for welfare without taking my money; and they'll probably do a better job of sending it to the people who actually need it. Just like how the people who drive pay for our roads. Do you see our roadways falling apart because it's not tax-funded? Do you see the USPS going out of business because its run on user fees?

Also, even in the context of objectivism I think you can see certain situations where perceived and actual preferences differ. First, the insane may have preferences (i.e. eating their own poo, or something) that are clearly not 'what is best for them', or their actual preferences. Children may believe what is best for them is to eat only candy, but this is also not so. So to put it simply:
perceived prefernce: what we believe is best for us
revealed preference: what is actually best for us.
This is turning into a slippery-slope, authoritarian type "this is what's good for you, whether you know it or not" argument and I'm not interested in continuing it. This is, by far, the most sinister portion of your argument. The fact that you're resorting to using children and maniacs as the basis for your argument speaks volumes as to the weakness of it.

That's all very well, but I never said that revealed preferences was a fact, nor that I believed in it. You stated, essentially, that in regards to the proposition that the best system is that which maximizes preference satisfaction:

Right. Just about any philosophy would agree with you here: this isn't the issue. What the issue is, in effect, is just what consitutes these ends being met. I can go over to my neighbor's house and give her my entire paycheck, I can mow her lawn and clean her cat's litterbox, but that doesn't guarantee her happiness. Utilitarianism makes the mistake of assuming that it does.

Which is clearly not true in any moral theory that assumes the existence of revealed knowledge. I don't believe in Marxism any more than you do, but that doesn't change the fact that Marxists would certainly disagree with the above system (the best system maximizes preference satisfaction), as would any who disagree with consequentialism, which you yourself do.
Maybe it's because I just woke up and it's still early [for me] but I'm having trouble making sense of this: I'll get back to it at some point.

Also, upon reexaming that quote, utilitarians don't assume that a given policy guarantees an increase in hapiness across the board, merely on the aggregate. So no, mowing your neighbours lawn may not make her happy, but a policy of lawn mowing can be reasonably said to increase utility (because either most of us find lawn mowing unpleasurable/suffering, or because most of us have a preference for a mown lawn).
Thus, the only method of determining the preference of any given policy is to have someone go door to door and go "would you like us to do x so you don't have to do it?" That would cost more taxes, which would take more money out of my pocket, which would reduce the respect for my property to nothing. TANSTAAFL.

Lets look at it this way.

Utilitarianism is based purely on end results: this is why it is consequentialist.

A given policy may predictably result in an increase of utility. For example, giving every person in society a free car (providing there was no downside to this as it were) would predictably result in an increase in utility- most of us would derive pleasure/be more happy/have a preference for a free car.
Context dropping. You're assuming that this manner of magical action is somehow even possible, while failing to take reality into account. If we wanted to play that game, I could say "well, wouldn't it just be swell if we all lived on clouds and played harps all the time instead of dealing with this bullshit?"

I certainly wouldn't have a problem taking a free car under these circumstances, but it's not really even worth considering as a possibility since it's not going to happen.

Thus it is the [i]result not the process that matters. If we look at it this way:
utility(after policy) - utility(before policy)
This is one of those 'ends justifies the means' type arguments, and like your earlier 'this is good for you whether you know it or not' argument it's a slippery slope that puts too much power in the hands of those in charge. It's almost impossible to deny that humans have a propensity for mishanding power, so using this kind of logic they can justify just about anything they should choose to do with said power.

and the result is positive, we have a successful utilitarian
policy. The mechanism that actually changes utility does not in fact matter, as long as the utility changes for the positive on the aggregate.
And who gets to determine just what consitutes a 'change for the positive on the aggregrate?' Society? Society is too large to correspond with itself instantaneously on matters like this. You may go your whole life, for instance, without meeting someone who approves of $GOVERNMENT PROGRAM, yet your congressman tells you every time you write to him that the program is benefiting a large amount of people that you can't see or access. Whos to say he's telling the truth? It's another slippery slope argument here that panders toa preference for authoritarianism. Someone has got to be making these decisions, and that same someone is generally the guy who gets to decide what's best for society.

If I know an individual would derive pleasure/happiness/a satisfied prefence from a free new car, and I give him/her a new car, utility would increase, correct?
Well, it depends on the circumstance. It depends how you paid for the car: if you had to pilfer from 300 peoples' paychecks, for example, than no, I would say that utility would not increase.


No, I don't think I am. Please see my above comments.
You're doing slightly better this time around.

Okay, then what does your original statement that the brain consumes kalories have to do with any thing at all?
:headbang:

It means that gaining knowledge is something we have to work towards.



Looking at the brain from a scientific approach is not going to tell us anything about cognition, given that our brains are not manifestly different from other animals, physiologically speaking. I'm saying that it is hard/impossible to use biology to prove reason/cognition.
So the fact that we expend effort to think and grasp concepts makes... no difference? If intrinsicism were true, this expenditure would not take place. Like I said before, intrinsicism contends that cognition is a passive process.

If you do twenty jumping jacks, it's an active process and it expends calories. Thinking is no different; thinking is the jumping jacks of the mind. Honestly, I'm getting a bit exasperated with this.

Not really. I was under the impression that you thought you could prove the above statement (that given attributes are volitional) through brain activity. Perhaps I misunderstood. In that case, however, I'd wonder how you konw that they are volitional processes.

However, give that this last point is largely peripheral, and we do not seem to be understanding each other, perhaps it is best dropped altogether.
Peripheral my ass. That said, I have no idea how to explain this concept any further; if I could draw you a picture I would. This particular tangent reminds me of the old adage; 'You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.'

Which makes it 'happiness.' Or 'pleasure.' The terms are interchangeable here and just about everywhere else. Thank you.
Well, I gave you a few examples in which they are not really interchangeable. To say that when a masochist is whipped he or she does not feel pain is inaccurate, but it is also inaccurate to say he feels only pleasure. So if in only for the sake of presicion we should keep the two seperate. Not that it has great bearing on the argument at hand really.

Now you're just ignoring the obvious and trying to mold objective definitions to meet your needs.
Well, no, what i'm trying to do is ensure we are using the same meanings for words- in any philosophical discussion it is necessary to define terms.

Asking me to consider animals when discussing philosophy is like asking me to put a hockey net on a basketball court.
This makes no sense at all. If utilitarianism is ONLY about pleasure/pain, and animals feel pleasure/pain, then it follows that maximizing utility demands we consider animals as well (a pleasure/pain dichotomy does NOT imply
rationality; it seems obvious that non-rational beings can feel pleasure and pain in their simplest definition). Moreover, certainly the treatment of animals is a moral, and consequently philosophical discussion. I don't see why you feel that animal rights are 'non-moral'.

We've already been over this. The four terms are synonymous
No, we haven't. You've claimed they're synonymous, and I've given reasons why they should not be considered the same. At the absolute least, we should concede that people have preferences that give them no pleasure in the coventional sense of the word (unless pleasure is redefined into preference satisfaction, which I think would be both silly and unnecessary- if we have a word that is already sufficiently descriptive, why conflate it with another?).

Yes, and the method by which we would fund such a program would be to levy a tax on the people who did not wish to participate in the program. TANSTAAFL.

okay, but absolute property rights are not a component of utilitarianism. Utilitarianists only care about rights in the sense that they maximize utility. If a right (i.e. property) stands in the way of greater aggregate utility, then it should be abridged by society. Moreover, equating tax with theft is incoherent unless we assume that property rights cannot include an obligation to pay tax- we cannot assume this in utilitarianism. The assumptions which underlie objectivisim (ie. universal absolute rights) are not assumed in utilitarianism, so referring to them in this context is incoherent.

Just because a certain group of people wants something doesn't make it admissable to cornhole the property rights of those who don't. If your neighbors have a preference to live in your house and farm out your land to make it a commune, preference Utilitarianism tells us this is perfectly OK to do. To put it in simpler terms: [i]a large group of people doing a wrong thing is still a wrong thing. Preference Utilitarianism enthrones collective caprice as the be-all end-all of human nature, and demands that the rest of us remain pliable to its wants.

See you have a serious problem in your resoning here- you cannot say that doing a given thing is wrong, plain and simple, because objectivists say it is so! Utilitarians DON'T see tax, for example, as wrong, because the ends are right- consequentialism, by definition, justifies actions by their ends.

In laymens terms, you can't say tax is wrong without justifying the statement, because what we are arguing is the definition of right and wrong! It's not self-evident that tax is wrong if we do not believe in natural rights; utilitarians do not believe in natural rights; thus utiltarians will not necessarily believe tax is wrong.

My jaw is literally hanging open after reading this one. I have some difficulty approaching this as it seems to imply that you don't believe any two people share any common traits. To be honest, if you refuse to see these basic similarities I'm surprised you've managed to subsume individuals under the larger concept "humanity."

The fact that all humans reason (which is of course debatable; children, madmen, etc are clearly human but do not reason by our standards) does not mean their fundemental nature is to reason. All humans also poop, but that does not mean their nature is to poop. Humans share traits, but the fact that these traits are shared does not tell us much about the 'nature' of humanity.

We all have more or less the same behvioral tendancies; we prefer abundance to scarcity, we do things because we want to do them or we have to do them, and we alone of all the animals are rational.

What's your point here? Humans are (generally) rational, but no moral law necessarily follows from this (objectivists will say it does, but I have never seen this argued convincingly).

Lets deconstruct this statement. In saying that I have to 'show that humans have inherent traits,' you're implying they have no inherent traits. By your reasoning, therefore, we can stipulate that man could have five legs or none, he could have one brain or a dozen, he could fly or walk.

Well, if you are going to make a positive statement about something, it is a general rule that you should show evidence/reasoning for it. For example, if I were to say that all humans are fundementally purple, you would expect me to justify it. I am not saying humans have no inherent traits, merely that I do not/cannot accept a given trait is universal, natural, and is the defining trait of humanity just because you say it is so.

From a mental standpoint, if you're sane, the same basic instinctive drive motivates us all, ie, we want what's best for us and our families. Are you honestly trying to tell me that you've never noticed this before? Objectivism allows us to determine just what these needs are and it encourages us to make these needs a reality. Under a more Utilitarian moral framework, a specific set of needs may be deemed by the collective as being 'unnecessary' or 'anti-utility' thus the individual is deprived of his right to pursue a specific set of needs.

Okay, I don't think you're getting the point here- under utilitarianism, the individual does not have the same rights as under objectivism. Yes, objectivism assumes rights are natural and absolute, but this is not to say that ALL moral theories accept this (in fact, objectivism is the only one that does).

Value hierarchies and happiness are too varied as concepts to be subsumed under a universal standard like Utilitarianism. The folks who want welfare can pay for welfare without taking my money; and they'll probably do a better job of sending it to the people who actually need it. Just like how the people who drive pay for our roads. Do you see our roadways falling apart because it's not tax-funded? Do you see the USPS going out of business because its run on user fees?

None of this is an objectivist argument- by arguing that the BEST way to run public institutions is through free market, you are making a utilitarian argument (i.e. the best way to maximize utility in the matter of highways is to make them private entities).

I will argue below that the "universal standard" understood by objectivism is at best not well argued, at worst incoherent.

This is turning into a slippery-slope, authoritarian type "this is what's good for you, whether you know it or not" argument and I'm not interested in continuing it. This is, by far, the most sinister portion of your argument. The fact that you're resorting to using children and maniacs as the basis for your argument speaks volumes as to the weakness of it.

well, this is not my argument, but the argument made by some branches of moral philosophy. I will make an argument against objectivism below.

Thus, the only method of determining the preference of any given policy is to have someone go door to door and go "would you like us to do x so you don't have to do it?" That would cost more taxes, which would take more money out of my pocket, which would reduce the respect for my property to nothing. TANSTAAFL.

No, I believe Daleuze and rule-utilitarians would say the best way to determine agregate preference is through political discourse, i.e. public democracy of some sort.

Context dropping. You're assuming that this manner of magical action is somehow even possible, while failing to take reality into account. If we wanted to play that game, I could say "well, wouldn't it just be swell if we all lived on clouds and played harps all the time instead of dealing with this bullshit?"

Well, it was of course an extreme metaphore. However, let us look at something less extreme. Is it not fair to say that in a given society, aggregate utility would be increased were the government to cut personal taxes, providing these tax cuts did not greatly impact public services?

This is one of those 'ends justifies the means' type arguments, and like your earlier 'this is good for you whether you know it or not' argument it's a slippery slope that puts too much power in the hands of those in charge. It's almost impossible to deny that humans have a propensity for mishanding power, so using this kind of logic they can justify just about anything they should choose to do with said power.

Utiltarianism is a form of consequentialism, all forms of consequentialism justify the means by the ends, this is the essentially the definition of the word!

Also, I would appreciate it if you would not conflate the arguments I make for myself with those I use as an example to show how an idea may be constestable- I do not believe myself in revealed preference, but I do believe it is important to examine in understanding the nature of a consequentalist argument. This is why I brought it up. As yet I have made no major argument of my own, merely commented on your own.

And who gets to determine just what consitutes a 'change for the positive on the aggregrate?' Society? Society is too large to correspond with itself instantaneously on matters like this. You may go your whole life, for instance, without meeting someone who approves of $GOVERNMENT PROGRAM, yet your congressman tells you every time you write to him that the program is benefiting a large amount of people that you can't see or access. Whos to say he's telling the truth? It's another slippery slope argument here that panders toa preference for authoritarianism. Someone has got to be making these decisions, and that same someone is generally the guy who gets to decide what's best for society.

This is why Daleuze supports a democratic desicion making process. If the policies are not increasing aggregate utility, the people will vote the bums out, as it were.


So the fact that we expend effort to think and grasp concepts makes... no difference?
As I said before, expending effort does not seem to imply an active process. If expending effort implied an active process, then seizure, which DO expend effort, would be an active process.

If intrinsicism were true, this expenditure would not take place. Like I said before, intrinsicism contends that cognition is a passive process.

Well, breathing is a passive process (correct?) but we expend effort doing so.

So my question is, in what way does expending effort imply 'activeness' if clearly passive activities require effort?

okay, I have to go, tommorow I'll post a more complete attack on objectivism, based on the fallacy of natural rights.

Dude, honestly. I'm just about over this. You keep throwing synonyms at me and demanding that they be interpreted differently. Color me defeated if you wish, but I have no further interest in pursuing this rather circular logic.

EDIT: I'll respond to the isolated new points, but I'm ignoring all of this "Happiness isn't pleasure" bullshit since I've already effectively bitchslapped that supposition. Assume anything I don't quote and respond to has already been accounted for somewhere else; I'm getting tired of repeating myself.

okay, but absolute property rights are not a component of utilitarianism. Utilitarianists only care about rights in the sense that they maximize utility.
Which makes them mystics , and worse yet, they are death-worshippers [by ignoring property rights you're ignoring the rights of the individual to live his life according to his principles, thus ignoring, essentially, his right to live at all]. Property is an extention of the self; property is what we can point to and say "this is what I have for the work I've done."

I'm wary of responding to this since you use the word 'absolute' in your definition of property rights, and I suspect you're misusing the concept as Deleuze did the last time we discussed this. A proper Objectivist framework for this concept would be [i]reasonable or rational property rights.

If a right (i.e. property) stands in the way of greater aggregate utility, then it should be abridged by society.
This speaks for itself. Disgusting.

Moreover, equating tax with theft is incoherent unless we assume that property rights cannot include an obligation to pay tax- we cannot assume this in utilitarianism. The assumptions which underlie objectivisim (ie. universal absolute rights) are not assumed in utilitarianism, so referring to them in this context is incoherent.
We may have differing definitions of 'theft' but I define 'theft' as "The seizure of assets or property by a third party without consent of the proprietor."

Also, I would like you to find the phrase "universal absolute rights" anywhere in Objectivism.

See you have a serious problem in your resoning here- you cannot say that doing a given thing is wrong, plain and simple, because objectivists say it is so! Utilitarians DON'T see tax, for example, as wrong, because the ends are right- consequentialism, by definition, justifies actions by their ends.
And slaveowners in the South saw nothing wrong with keeping Africans in bondage. Many Republicans see nothing wrong with the Patriot act. Axe murders see nothing wrong with hacking people limb from limb. If someone refuses to acknowledge the truth, or to consistently apply reason to one's thinking, it's not my fault and it doesn't make me wrong.

I've already denounced the 'ends justifies the means' philosophy. I don't care to repeat myself.

In laymens terms, you can't say tax is wrong without justifying the statement, because what we are arguing is the definition of right and wrong! It's not self-evident that tax is wrong if we do not believe in natural rights; utilitarians do not believe in natural rights; thus utiltarians will not necessarily believe tax is wrong.
And in layman's terms, tax is wrong because theft is wrong. Government is not an extention of society because it's held to an entirely different standard. What they do with the money is in most cases irrelevant; I'd still be arrested if I stole from your paycheck and used the money to buy lunch for a bum, and moreover, it would [i]still be wrong for me to do that.

Don't get me wrong, taxation can be a valid function of government, provided the tax does things that benefit the people who pay for this shit. That's how money works: you give something, you get something.

No, I believe Daleuze and rule-utilitarians would say the best way to determine agregate preference is through political discourse, i.e. public democracy of some sort.
Make up your mind. First you were talking about preference utilitarianism, now you're switching to rule utilitarianism. They're two different things.

Before I say anything substantive, my short take on the last discussion:
I did a quick google search on the happiness/pleasure issue. They're used as synonyms in the literature that immediately came up. However, the difference between hedonistic and eudaemonic utilitarianism was mentioned. Of course, no explanation was provided. So this seems difficult to resolve.

First, it enthrones 'pain' and 'pleasure' [and by extention, 'happieness' and 'unhappiness'] as the Universe's only two absolutes. This is a horrible misuse of both concepts: pain and pleasure are emotions. They are reactions of the human mind to perceived data or objects--and while the two do in fact play a large role in our behavior, they are hardly the only two absolutes. An absolute is anything you can point to and define: my pants are absolute but that doesn't make them a legitimate basis for philosophical thought. An absolute is anything with identity, which is more or less any physical object or concept that we can name.

In so glorifying these two emotions, Utilitarianism more or less makes these two emotions the standard by which all action--and therefore all thought--should be judged. Given that happiness or lack thereof is a response of subjective value judgements on the part of an individual, it essentially boils down to a form of mysticism; it doesn't demand that we reason our actions, it merely asks that we judge whether or not said action makes us [or others] 'happy' or 'sad.'

Which brings me nicely to the second flaw in Utilitarianism: it implies that an action is capable of making people happy in and of itself. Emotional responses are the result of an individual's reaction to an object weighed against their value-judgements: the object or concept in and of itself does not have the power to dictate emotion to a person; only the individual can do that through a process of cognition.

The idea that an action is intrinsically possible of dictating emotion appeals--obviously-- to a school of philosophical thought known as 'intrincism' which holds that conciousness is merely an empty vessel waiting for reality to write the truth inside one's soul. It contends that cognition is an passive process, and that by perceiving an object alone we are able to judge it without active thought. Science has rendered this school of thinking wholly obsolete; note that we expend calories when we think, thus proving cognition is an active--and volitional process.

The remainder of one's complaints about Utilitarianism essentially stems from one or both of these fundamental flaws in its philosophy.

I don't endorse this as a measure of utility. To my mind, utility of an individual means ability to participate in and contribute to society. Utilty of an action refers to its ability to contribute to that end; namely increasing the most utility. Death, in this system, is the worst consequence in the simplest sense as it destroys the possibility for an individual to be able to be a part of society. However, this changes in questions of varying complexity. For example, in the case of torture, a society in which torture was legitimized and accepted would be one which would stifle positive change and progress and would make it terminally impossible for more people to participate in society than the short-term consequences of not torturing a prisoner.

Now map this conception of utility into a rule utilitarian system. From the earlier conversations on this thread, it's clear that my conception of rule utilitarianism is more of a blend between rule and act than either a traditional conception of both. Standard act utilitarianism fails to see the long-term consequences of actions; it only evaluates consequences in terms of immediate gains or benefits from that one action rather than other actions or societal trends legitimized by that action. Standard rule utilitarianism is too dogmatic, and probably isn't utilitarian in the strictest sense of the word in that it constructs absolute rules that can't be disregarded regardless of consequences. The balance I seek, in terms of the exceptions explained earlier, constructs a nice balance between the two poles, both of which have reasonably damaging flaws.

The reasons I prefer this system of ethics over an Objectivist one are myriad, and are mostly explained in my first post and in my responses to Vittos Ordination. I'll restate one of the largest ones here, because I feel that it's been largely misunderstood.

Objectivism believes that people have a right to the property that results as a fruit of their labor, and that this right is inviolable because it belongs to them - any taking of property without consent is theft. What determins who deserves what property is the free market. Here's the problem, though - what does a free market mean? There are two possible definitions - one free of government interference, and another where everyone is given equal opportunity to succeed in the market.

The problems with conception 1: Bad things tend to happen when the market is left absolutely to its own. From an Objectivist standpoint, the worst is probably monopolies, trusts, cartels, and corporate slavery. The first three involve a group of individuals banding together to stifle competition - essentially enshrining their right to property over that of other people. The last is allowing a few to dominate society to an extent that the majority of people can't hope ever to be able to function in the market, as they're bound by the resources of massive corporations to work for them at no more than a subsistence wage, with money that could only be spent at company stores - at the price of your job. One last time, I'll mention this is empirically the case. Just before the 20th century, these situations were the case in the unregulated, Social Darwinist-influenced American private sector.

This, of course, is unacceptable to Objectivists. Everyone should be able to advance in society according to their ability to succeed in the free market. Therefore, they propose conception 2, which allows the government to regulate the market to break up monopolies, trusts, and cartels while stopping practices such as company stores or the hiring of Pinkerton "detectives." However, if the government can interfere in the market to protect an individual's right to property and ability to participate in the market, where do you draw the line? It's true that someone born to a family with less financial resources is disadvantaged at birth by less access to quality educational facilities. That means they're less able to exercise their potential in the market. Does that justify the government taking someone else's money and giving it to them in terms of welfare checks? If breaking up monopolies is legitimate, why isn't this? The CEOs stand to profit a lot from them. Either way, Objectivism is a fundamentally incoherent and contradictory philosophy of political ethics.

EDIT: I'll respond to the isolated new points, but I'm ignoring all of this "Happiness isn't pleasure" bullshit since I've already effectively bitchslapped that supposition. Assume anything I don't quote and respond to has already been accounted for somewhere else; I'm getting tired of repeating myself.


Let me ask you this at least. If utilitarianism fundementally appeals to emtion, because it appeals to pleasure, and pleasure and preference satisfaction are the same thing, doesn't that mean that all satisfaction of preference is emotional? That seems wrong at face value to me. Even objectivists contend that through reason our preferences can be objective, correct?

That aside, how have you proven they're the same thing? You keep saying it, but I don't believe you shown it to be true. I will give one more example:
An addict may take pleasure from a drug, but it does not increase his happiness.

Which makes them mystics , and worse yet, they are death-worshippers [by ignoring property rights you're ignoring the rights of the individual to live his life according to his principles, thus ignoring, essentially, his right to live at all]. Property is an extention of the self; property is what we can point to and say "this is what I have for the work I've done." [/quote
Well, in terms of the second point, it seems ambiguous at best in terms of utilitarianism vs. objectivism. Objectivism ignores other proposed rights (specifically positive rights) which may be necessary to allow an individual a right to live according to his principles, or perhaps live at all. Let me ask you this: which man is best able to meet his own moral ends: the man who has some restriction on property rights but is ensured the basics of life, or the man with unlimited rights, but who cannot access the basics of life?

I also think you should keep in mind that utilitarians (generally speaking) do not believe in objective moral knowledge; there is no moral statement that can be said to be objectively true. I believe this to be based largely on Hume's law (it is impossible to derive an objective 'ought' from an 'is'), but I could be mistaken in that regard. So utilitarians do not believe that the process of reason can give us any objective moral code. This is not to say that they do not feel reason has any place in morality, but rather the acceptance that moral codes must be based on certain unknowable assumptions.

[quote]I'm wary of responding to this since you use the word 'absolute' in your definition of property rights, and I suspect you're misusing the concept as Deleuze did the last time we discussed this. A proper Objectivist framework for this concept would be [i]reasonable or rational property rights.
Okay, I'm making a longer point at the end based on this.

This speaks for itself. Disgusting.

Hardly. Let me propose a hypothetical. Suppose there is a man who by his very existence, but through no will of his own, carries a virus utterly lethal to every other human. The only way to stop this virus from destroying mankind is to infringe this man's rights in some way- whether executing him or imprisoning him. Is it not just to do so? Can it be said that all should die so one man's freedom is maintained? I do not think this question 'speaks for itself', no matter what way you look at it.

We may have differing definitions of 'theft' but I define 'theft' as "The seizure of assets or property by a third party without consent of the proprietor."

That's fair enough, but it is not clear that this is the only correct/moral definition of theft.

Also, I would like you to find the phrase "universal absolute rights" anywhere in Objectivism.

Okay, let me rephrase- rights in objectivism are viewed as universal, in that they apply to all people in all times, and inalieable, in that they can never be legitimately altered or changed. Is this more in line with your thinking?

And slaveowners in the South saw nothing wrong with keeping Africans in bondage. Many Republicans see nothing wrong with the Patriot act. Axe murders see nothing wrong with hacking people limb from limb. If someone refuses to acknowledge the truth, or to consistently apply reason to one's thinking, it's not my fault and it doesn't make me wrong.

Well, objectivists see nothing wrong with letting children starve. An objectivist would have no basis for outrage were one man to watch another die, even if saving the man would take virtually no effort on the part of the other. An objectivist sees nothing wrong with allowing children to grow up entirely without education, or sick, or cold, or hungry. So it's not entirely fair for you to throw stones.

Moreover, a utilitarian would object to virtually, if not all, of the acts you list above (clearly the axe murdering is not increasing aggregate utility, the suffering of the slaves would most likely be understood as greater than the satisfaction derived from their slaveowners).

I've already denounced the 'ends justifies the means' philosophy. I don't care to repeat myself.

Denounced doesn't mean disproven. Just because you find something intellectually distateful, doesn't make it wrong/false. If you mean you've disproven consequentialism, I'd suggest you send your prove to a university, as you'd most likely be given tenure on the spot.

And in layman's terms, tax is wrong because theft is wrong.
This is something that should be proven, not simply asserted! It is not enough to say that such and such a thing is wrong, you have to show that it is wrong.

Government is not an extention of society because it's held to an entirely different standard. What they do with the money is in most cases irrelevant; I'd still be arrested if I stole from your paycheck and used the money to buy lunch for a bum, and moreover, it would [i]still be wrong for me to do that.

Wrong within an objectivist framework, not in another! When we are having a discussion about the validity of a thing, you cannot justify it with the presumptions which underlie it!
Basically, you're saying 'stealing is wrong because it's wrong to steal', which is a tautalogy.

Make up your mind. First you were talking about preference utilitarianism, now you're switching to rule utilitarianism. They're two different things.
Not really; preference utilitarianism referes to the measure of utility (what exactly are we maximizing) while rule utilitarianism refers to the method of maximization (how should we maximize utility). So preference based, rule utilitarianism is certainly a possibility.

Just as a further point, I do not myself believe utilitarianism (or objectivism for that matter) are coherent moral/political systems; my arguements so far have been based on your mischaracterization of utilitarianism.

Okay, so we've talked a bit about utilitarianism, I'd like to make a few points in regards to objectivism. As an introduction, I'd like to say that first, I am using objectivism as described in. Second, I'm assuming we can all agree that it is necessary in making a statement to show it is true- i.e. intution is not enough to make an objective moral claim.

Objectivism, as I see it, is flawed from its very foundations. Objectivists make objective claims about the nature of man that are not necessarily self-evident. They define various terms, especially freedom, in ways that are not self-evident and not properly justified.

To begin with, lets look at what objectivists actually say in respect to the nature of man, the nature of freedom, and the nature of rights.

Let us look at the arguments here.

1) First, A = A. That is to say, obejctivists believe that the apparent world is the only world, that objective observation gives us 'true' observations: that existence exists. This seems intuitively correct; however, this has been debated consistently and inconclusively for centuries- Descartes is probably the most well known example. However, given that this is a reasonable assumption for most of us to make, I have no objection here.

This is necessary to objectivism because objectivism makes claims to the absolute; without A = A, you could never makes such a claim.

2) Objectivism holds that sensory information is objectively valid, and that logic is the only means to knowledge.

This is certainly more contentious. While objectivists must hold sensory perception to be true (otherwise we could never be certain of our perceptions, and could thus never be certain that when we perceive A, what we perceive actually IS A). However, it is neither logically true, nor scientifically true, that sensory information is valid. For example, when certain chemical are ingested, 'objectively' false senses are perceived. So it cannot be so that all sensory information is valid and objective; it follows then that we can never be sure if our observations are valid; it thus follows that we can never make objective statement based on observations.

3) I am going to quote a website for this statemet:
Objectivism holds that knowledge of ethics, like other knowledge, must be obtained by reason. Because it holds reality and reason to be objective, Objectivism asks: what in reality gives rise to ethics? Objectivism's answer: man is a living being who has to act in a certain way to keep himself alive. Unlike Animals, which are hard-wired to behave in ways that preserve their lives, humans are capable of acting in ways that will actually harm human survival: they can, for example, commit suicide and murder. Therefore, to survive and to thrive, man must distinguish between that which helps him survive and thrive, and that which harms him. In short, he must have an ethical/moral code: a system of judging right from wrong.

Let us suppose we accept the validity of point 2 (which we may or may not do). I think there is a very big problem in this argument: throughout it, the survival of the individual and the species are conflated. It is said originally that a man must act in a certain way to keep himself alive; it is then said that certain actions hurt human survival in general. This does not follow at all. For example, let us look at murder- this is seen as hurting mankind in the above argument- however it is certainly true that murdering another may help a human survive! So it is not at all clear here what is meant- are we intended to protect our own survival, or that of the species?

In terms of an individual, it is self-evident that we must determine what hurts us and what harms us in order to survive. However, it is not clear that this helps us in terms of ethics. It is possible I may best ensure my survival by stealing what i can, and killing what gets in my way.

If in fact it is the species that must survive, I think this is a tacit acknowledgement that the whole is more important than the parts. Moreover, if this were the case, the raison d'etre of man would not be to survive individually, but to procreate.

Finally, it is not clear what is meant here by 'thriving'.

okay, this is enough for today; I have exams tommorow, tuesday and wednsday, so I will check back if I have time.

by the way, I am referencing
http://www.mondopolitico.com/ideologies/atlantis/whatisobjectivism.htm
for quotes, etc.

Before I say anything substantive, my short take on the last discussion:
I did a quick google search on the happiness/pleasure issue. They're used as synonyms in the literature that immediately came up. However, the difference between hedonistic and eudaemonic utilitarianism was mentioned. Of course, no explanation was provided. So this seems difficult to resolve.
Meh. Makes little difference to me; I still treat them as meaning more or less the same thing. This is called "splitting hairs." Mallberta is excellent at it [more on him later].

I don't endorse this as a measure of utility.
Then you're not Utilitarian. Basically what I've done here is defined Utilitarianism and you've turned around and said "That's not me."

To my mind, utility of an individual means ability to participate in and contribute to society. Utilty of an action refers to its ability to contribute to that end; namely increasing the most utility.
To which I would argue that I would have a greater agrregate value to society if I were in school right now, which would be a distinct possibility if I hadn't been taxed . Thanks to my tax money, the government has another few thousand dollars to piss away, and I'm still working a dead end job that I can't get out of, and I can't go to school yet. Thanks to this system, I may now have to spend the rest of my life paying off student loans. Loans--I may remind you-- that go to the very same banker fat cats that so many liberals love to villify [not saying you are].

Is [i]that what you'd call utility? Hampering my ability to participate in society as I see fit in order to, say, pay for a fighter jet or put up a streetlight?

Death, in this system, is the worst consequence in the simplest sense as it destroys the possibility for an individual to be able to be a part of society.
This ignores the fact that many, many, many people form no contribution to society for their entire life. A Utilitarian moral framework would justify funneling my paycheck into the pockets of a bum who will use it for crack and a 40 of Miller High Life. Death isn't the only thing that can destroy the possibility for an individual to be a part of society; the individual is perfectly capable of doing that while he's still alive.

And he needs to be held accountable for it.

Now map this conception of utility into a rule utilitarian system. From the earlier conversations on this thread, it's clear that my conception of rule utilitarianism is more of a blend between rule and act than either a traditional conception of both. Standard act utilitarianism fails to see the long-term consequences of actions; it only evaluates consequences in terms of immediate gains or benefits from that one action rather than other actions or societal trends legitimized by that action. Standard rule utilitarianism is too dogmatic, and probably isn't utilitarian in the strictest sense of the word in that it constructs absolute rules that can't be disregarded regardless of consequences. The balance I seek, in terms of the exceptions explained earlier, constructs a nice balance between the two poles, both of which have reasonably damaging flaws.
Well, that's your values and you're welcome to them, but I would prefer to scrap any such morality if I discovered problems like this. Basically the premise here is "well, they're both fucked up so I'm just going to throw them together and see what happens." The result isn't likely to be any less flawed than the sum of it's parts: it'd be like trying to make an omlette with bad eggs and moldy cheese.

Objectivism believes that people have a right to the property that results as a fruit of their labor, and that this right is inviolable because it belongs to them - any taking of property without consent is theft. What determins who deserves what property is the free market. Here's the problem, though - what does a free market mean? There are two possible definitions - one free of government interference, and another where everyone is given equal opportunity to succeed in the market.
A misnomer; those concepts go hand in hand. I will admit, however, that Objectivism is a tad optimistic in the sense that it asks us to not be idiots when interacting with said market. A lot of people like to whine about how monopolies spring up and such; but that wouldn't happen without a sufficient demand.

The problems with conception 1: Bad things tend to happen when the market is left absolutely to its own.
Bad things tend to happen in reality. Deal with it.

From an Objectivist standpoint, the worst is probably monopolies, trusts, cartels, and corporate slavery. The first three involve a group of individuals banding together to stifle competition - essentially enshrining their right to property over that of other people.
Yes, to an extent. But a monopoly is just as much a function of an abscence of legitimate competition as it is the product of collusion or irrational greed.

The last is allowing a few to dominate society to an extent that the majority of people can't hope ever to be able to function in the market, as they're bound by the resources of massive corporations to work for them at no more than a subsistence wage, with money that could only be spent at company stores - at the price of your job. One last time, I'll mention this is empirically the case. Just before the 20th century, these situations were the case in the unregulated, Social Darwinist-influenced American private sector.
Yes, and like I said, we won't put up with that shit anymore.

This, of course, is unacceptable to Objectivists. Everyone should be able to advance in society according to their ability to succeed in the free market. Therefore, they propose conception 2,

No we don't.

It's true that someone born to a family with less financial resources is disadvantaged at birth by less access to quality educational facilities. That means they're less able to exercise their potential in the market. Does that justify the government taking someone else's money and giving it to them in terms of welfare checks?
No.

If breaking up monopolies is legitimate, why isn't this? The CEOs stand to profit a lot from them.
I've touched on monopolies already; a monopoly is more or less the product of an inept market so long as there's a level playing field to begin with. A lot of people like to jump in with an argument along the lines of "well, then the companies could just get together and prevent any new forays into the market," and that would be subversive to free enterprise on a number of levels; and would be a rare justification for state interference.

A natural monopoly is OK; one that arises simply because the company is superior at all facets of production and distribution and for no other reason. Coercive monopolies, as I described above, are not.

Either way, Objectivism is a fundamentally incoherent and contradictory philosophy of political ethics.
I'd still like to see you prove this. The only "contradictions" I've seen from you came from stolen concepts and misunderstood ethical theory.

Then you're not Utilitarian. Basically what I've done here is defined Utilitarianism and you've turned around and said "That's not me."
That's the same thing as saying Mao Zedong wasn't a Communist because he advocated revolution by peasants rather than the Proletariat. The idea behing my philosophy is Utilitarian in the way the philosophy is applied, just has a different definition of utility. We agree it should be maximized. Same overall concept.

To which I would argue that I would have a greater agrregate value to society if I were in school right now, which would be a distinct possibility if I hadn't been taxed . Thanks to my tax money, the government has another few thousand dollars to piss away, and I'm still working a dead end job that I can't get out of, and I can't go to school yet. Thanks to this system, I may now have to spend the rest of my life paying off student loans. Loans--I may remind you-- that go to the very same banker fat cats that so many liberals love to villify [not saying you are].
I tend to agree with you. Taxes for people like you should be significantly lower than they are right now. But if the government were to create scholarship funds from the wealth of people with much more money, there could be a much larger increase in aggregate utility, because someone with 30 million doesn't add much more if they have 40 million, or 200 million, to begin with. They still have more money than they know what to do with.

Even so, there do need to be slight taxes on people in similar situations in order to pay for the essential services of government - police, military, etc. We can't just think of it as a few thousand dollars - multiply that few thousand by the amount of people who pay it, and that's a lot of money. A lot of money the government needs to function properly.

Is [i]that what you'd call utility? Hampering my ability to participate in society as I see fit in order to, say, pay for a fighter jet or put up a streetlight?
Or the money to prevent murders? Or track down terrorists? And I don't know what your job is, but my guess is that it does contribute something to society.

That being said, it makes me uncomfortable to comment on your personal situation, because I don't know what it is. Also, comments in this realm that may be intended to be innocuous often become offensive. Please tell me if I said something to offend.

This ignores the fact that many, many, many people form no contribution to society for their entire life. A Utilitarian moral framework would justify funneling my paycheck into the pockets of a bum who will use it for crack and a 40 of Miller High Life. Death isn't the only thing that can destroy the possibility for an individual to be a part of society; the individual is perfectly capable of doing that while he's still alive.
There may be some people who do that, that's fine. But I tend to believe that the majority of poor people aren't poor because they blow all their money on drugs or like to be poor. It's because society fucked them over; there are more people than there are jobs, and they can't get those jobs. If the government helps support them, they can survive while continuing to get a job, or, at the very least, funnel that money back into the economy by buying food, medicine, etc.

What people don't destroy is their potential to contribute to society. Somebody may be an alcoholic, but they could be cured if they go to rehab. It may not have a hundred percent success rate, but anything is better than zero - letting them die while rich dilletantes crash three Mercedes and aren't accountable for their behavior because they've got the money to cheat the system and the police are too stretched out to fight their high powered lawyers.

And he needs to be held accountable for it.
That's why we have a penal system, which, as I recall, is funded by tax dollars.

I also tend to think rehabilitation can work.

Well, that's your values and you're welcome to them, but I would prefer to scrap any such morality if I discovered problems like this. Basically the premise here is "well, they're both fucked up so I'm just going to throw them together and see what happens." The result isn't likely to be any less flawed than the sum of it's parts: it'd be like trying to make an omlette with bad eggs and moldy cheese.
That's not a substantive qualm - it's argument by false analogy. You didn't isolate any specific reasons the synthesis should be rejected. My argument was that the flaws in each system can be repaired by taking aspects of each one and putting them together. Until you actually give reasons why this synthesis on its own wouldn't work, this analysis still stands.

A misnomer; those concepts go hand in hand. I will admit, however, that Objectivism is a tad optimistic in the sense that it asks us to not be idiots when interacting with said market. A lot of people like to whine about how monopolies spring up and such; but that wouldn't happen without a sufficient demand.
Not necessarily true. At all. Read your own posts on the other thread we talked about this on. You said that company stores were an impediment to the free market and that the government would ban them. That means that the lack of government interference is not the same thing as a totally free market. Which is where the contradiction arises.

Bad things tend to happen in reality. Deal with it.
I like to deal with bad things by stopping them. These are easily preventable.


Yes, to an extent. But a monopoly is just as much a function of an abscence of legitimate competition as it is the product of collusion or irrational greed.
Not in the context of trusts and cartels. Industry leaders come together and say "Hey, do you know how we can make a killing? If we stop competing, and set the prices together!" That doesn't happen nowadays because of government regulation. But in a regulation-free market, this has empirically been the rule.

Yes, and like I said, we won't put up with that shit anymore.
Then you just contradicted our earlier statement. I'll quote it here for more effect.A misnomer; those concepts go hand in hand.

No we don't.
Yes you do! You just contradicted yourself. You said the government would ban company stores. But that means that the market isn't totally free of government regulation. You said that a market with cartels isn't a free market. That necessitates the second definition. "Philosophy is nothing without..."


No.
First, quote the entire context of what I was saying. You skipped the logical connection between my statement and regulation of company stores.

Second, respond with logic and argument, not one-word answers. I pointed out a logical inconsistancy in your position, and basically just sort of thumb your nose at me.

I've touched on monopolies already; a monopoly is more or less the product of an inept market so long as there's a level playing field to begin with. A lot of people like to jump in with an argument along the lines of "well, then the companies could just get together and prevent any new forays into the market," and that would be subversive to free enterprise on a number of levels; and would be a rare justification for state interference.
I more or less answered this above. If the government can regulate trusts, where do you draw the line? Go back to my post before this one as to why you can't logically say the government can regulate cartels or company stores but can't give out welfare checks.

A natural monopoly is OK; one that arises simply because the company is superior at all facets of production and distribution and for no other reason. Coercive monopolies, as I described above, are not.
But what happens if that company starts doing all the bad shit to their workers I mentioned earlier? Does the govenrment step in?

Oh, and for information's sake, when you say "constructive monopolies," do you mean the same thing that I do when I say "cartel?" I defined it earlier.

I'd still like to see you prove this. The only "contradictions" I've seen from you came from stolen concepts and misunderstood ethical theory.
Above.

Meh. Makes little difference to me; I still treat them as meaning more or less the same thing. This is called "splitting hairs." Mallberta is excellent at it [more on him later].

hmm, that's not very nice. I've been nothing but pleasant to you, I don't believe this kind of ad hominem is necessary. Moreover, don't you think it's important in a discussion on utilitarianism that we look at the different ways that utility is measure/conceived?

I don't think properly defining terms should be seen as 'splitting hairs' in a philosophical context.

Mall, saying "Person x is splitting hairs" is definately not an ad hominem. If you think it is, I'm really, really sorry for you.

A more extensive reply is pending. Deleuze; I think we're talking past each other again, I'll explain in greater detail after I finish my monster post to Mallberta.

Mall, saying "Person x is splitting hairs" is definately not an ad hominem. If you think it is, I'm really, really sorry for you.

Actually, you're right, I took the comment more personally than necessary. You have been generally fairly terse (and not very philosophical, in the sense of good argument), so I mistook your mistake.

That being said, given that I repeatedly justified my reasoning for differentiating between various measures of utility, and your only response was essentially: "no they're the same thing!", without any argument whatsoever, I think it's hardly fair to categorize it as 'splitting hairs'.

okay I'm conitinuing my argument from yesterday:

1) First, A = A. That is to say, obejctivists believe that the apparent world is the only world, that objective observation gives us 'true' observations: that existence exists. This seems intuitively correct; however, this has been debated consistently and inconclusively for centuries- Descartes is probably the most well known example. However, given that this is a reasonable assumption for most of us to make, I have no objection here.

This is necessary to objectivism because objectivism makes claims to the absolute; without A = A, you could never makes such a claim.

2) Objectivism holds that sensory information is objectively valid, and that logic is the only means to knowledge.

This is certainly more contentious. While objectivists must hold sensory perception to be true (otherwise we could never be certain of our perceptions, and could thus never be certain that when we perceive A, what we perceive actually IS A). However, it is neither logically true, nor scientifically true, that sensory information is valid. For example, when certain chemical are ingested, 'objectively' false senses are perceived. So it cannot be so that all sensory information is valid and objective; it follows then that we can never be sure if our observations are valid; it thus follows that we can never make objective statement based on observations.

3) I am going to quote a website for this statemet:

Objectivism holds that knowledge of ethics, like other knowledge, must be obtained by reason. Because it holds reality and reason to be objective, Objectivism asks: what in reality gives rise to ethics? Objectivism's answer: man is a living being who has to act in a certain way to keep himself alive. Unlike Animals, which are hard-wired to behave in ways that preserve their lives, humans are capable of acting in ways that will actually harm human survival: they can, for example, commit suicide and murder. Therefore, to survive and to thrive, man must distinguish between that which helps him survive and thrive, and that which harms him. In short, he must have an ethical/moral code: a system of judging right from wrong.


Let us suppose we accept the validity of point 2 (which we may or may not do). I think there is a very big problem in this argument: throughout it, the survival of the individual and the species are conflated. It is said originally that a man must act in a certain way to keep himself alive; it is then said that certain actions hurt human survival in general. This does not follow at all. For example, let us look at murder- this is seen as hurting mankind in the above argument- however it is certainly true that murdering another may help a human survive! So it is not at all clear here what is meant- are we intended to protect our own survival, or that of the species?

In terms of an individual, it is self-evident that we must determine what hurts us and what harms us in order to survive. However, it is not clear that this helps us in terms of ethics. It is possible I may best ensure my survival by stealing what i can, and killing what gets in my way.

If in fact it is the species that must survive, I think this is a tacit acknowledgement that the whole is more important than the parts. Moreover, if this were the case, the raison d'etre of man would not be to survive individually, but to procreate.

Finally, it is not clear what is meant here by 'thriving'.

okay, this is enough for today; I have exams tommorow, tuesday and wednsday, so I will check back if I have time.

by the way, I am referencing
http://www.mondopolitico.com/ideolo...objectivism.htm

okay continuing

4) Objectivism holds that right and wrong can be determined only with reference to the nature of man: that one must have man's life as his standard and then figure out all of the means objectively required by the nature of reality in order to achieve life (i.e., in order to survive and to thrive).

This point is, of course, also troubling, given we acknowledge that it is not clear from the above point whether it is the individuals survival, or the species survival, which is to be taken into account. It has not been shown sufficiently that man's life should be our standard- if it is true that individual survival is paramount, then murder in self-interest should be acceptable if only to ensure survival. If human survival in general is paramount, it is not clear at all that the atomized individual plays any role at all.

The state 'objectively required' is not clear either- what can be considered objectively necessary in the process of 'thriving'?

Objectivism asserts that life, for man, is achieved with rationality: the full use of ones mind and intelligence in thinking and understanding.
This surely cannot be a proper definition of rationality- any creature fully using it's mental capacities should be regarded as rational, unless intelligence/thinking is predicated on the property of being human- in which case, this should be argued, not asserted/assumed.

Reason, for man, is a vital necessity without which he would perish.
This doesn't make very much sense, especially if we look at this from a historical, evolutionary perspective. Presumably there is a moment, if reason/intelligence is a trait only native to humans, that intelligence was 'born' as it were. At a certain point a group of pre-humans became intelligent. however, before they became intelligent, they were clearly surviving without reason, and it does not necessarily follow that their new intelligence would mean they could ONLY survive through the use of it. Reason is an asset that helps survival, but human survival is not predicated on reason alone. In fact, I would argue that the capacity to act together (i.e. socially) has done as much as reason to ensure human survival. The capacity to reason without the capacity to socialize (which cannot necessarily be tied to reason- non-rational creatures clearly have social traits) would not be very helpful, historically speaking. One man with a spear is still hardly an even match for a tiger.

Accordingly, Objectivism holds reason to be man's highest virtue/good.
This too I think is plagued with flaws- what is being said here is that
1) Man needs reason to survive (which is contestable)
2) Survival is the highest virtue (which as I've described is neither clear nor consistent throughout this argumentation)
3) So reason is greatest good man possess.

Given that 1 and 2 are suspect at best, 3 is not obviously true.

Let me ask you this at least. If utilitarianism fundementally appeals to emtion, because it appeals to pleasure, and pleasure and preference satisfaction are the same thing, doesn't that mean that all satisfaction of preference is emotional?
Pretty much, yeah. It's a pretty subjective concept, which is why I have no respect for a philosophy that is based on it.

That seems wrong at face value to me. Even objectivists contend that through reason our preferences can be objective, correct?
How, may I ask, is it 'wrong' that preference satisfaction is a product of our values? And to answer your question, yes.

That aside, how have you proven they're the same thing? You keep saying it, but I don't believe you shown it to be true. I will give one more example:
An addict may take pleasure from a drug, but it does not increase his happiness.
His happiness and his pleasure is his own damn business. I've proved that they're the same thing by quoting a goddamn Thesaurus! If I could draw a picture I would.


Well, in terms of the second point, it seems ambiguous at best in terms of utilitarianism vs. objectivism. Objectivism ignores other proposed rights (specifically positive rights) which may be necessary to allow an individual a right to live according to his principles, or perhaps live at all. Let me ask you this: which man is best able to meet his own moral ends: the man who has some restriction on property rights but is ensured the basics of life, or the man with unlimited rights, but who cannot access the basics of life?
The gist of this, from what I can gather is that 'rights, in order to exist in the first place, must be infringed upon.' A man with 'unlimited rights' [please be aware that I use this term very cautiously, as rights are by no means 'unlimited' under Objectivism, they are reasonable] has 'access to the basics of life' only if he chooses to excersise those rights. They're congruent terms, not polar opposites.

Just out of curiousity, did you borrow that concept from Thomas Hobbes?

I also think you should keep in mind that utilitarians (generally speaking) do not believe in objective moral knowledge; there is no moral statement that can be said to be objectively true. I believe this to be based largely on Hume's law (it is impossible to derive an objective 'ought' from an 'is'), but I could be mistaken in that regard. So utilitarians do not believe that the process of reason can give us any objective moral code. This is not to say that they do not feel reason has any place in morality, but rather the acceptance that moral codes must be based on certain unknowable assumptions.
This is patently obvious, and like I mentioned earlier it stems from the initial metaphysical and epistemological flaws in Utilitariaism, which as of this writing have not been adequately answered to. Facts are Objective. If one bases his philosophy on the facts of the universe, it becomes objective.

You [and many others] say "there is no moral statement that can be said to be objectively true," to which I would counter and say "Yes, there is. Anything that is anti-life is wrong. This applies to both life itself and its extentions; freedom and property." This can be misconstrued on a number of levels, most commonly by invoking an extreme example; something along the lines of 'what if someone breaks into your house,' or 'what if you're on a desert island and there's no food left so the only logical recourse is to resort to cannibalism to keep oneself alive.' Pretty much all of these stipulations pander to a 'him or me' type situation, where the individual's preference for his own life needs to take precedence.

Hardly. Let me propose a hypothetical. Suppose there is a man who by his very existence, but through no will of his own, carries a virus utterly lethal to every other human. The only way to stop this virus from destroying mankind is to infringe this man's rights in some way- whether executing him or imprisoning him. Is it not just to do so? Can it be said that all should die so one man's freedom is maintained? I do not think this question 'speaks for itself', no matter what way you look at it.
Here you're ignoring the remainder of humanity's right to live in favor of the individual's. It in no way resembles a consistent application of reason to let this person interact with society as normal, for obvious reasons. That said, I think if someone were quarantined for having a virus like this, the quarantine itself would be the least of his concerns.

What you're doing here is making a blanket statement by justifying it with a one-in-a-million type situation. Since you failed to specify the context of the statement at first, I was likewise forced to respond with an equally vague assumption.

That's fair enough, but it is not clear that this is the only correct/moral definition of theft.
Here we go with word games again... Christ, spare me. This implies that definitions are subjective; it implies that one can be justified in saying "apples are blades and oranges are razors, therefore I can shave with fruit salad."

Definitions are objective. Anyone who evades said definitions is evading reality.

Okay, let me rephrase- rights in objectivism are viewed as universal, in that they apply to all people in all times, and inalieable, in that they can never be legitimately altered or changed. Is this more in line with your thinking?
Get rid of 'universal' and replace it with 'rational.' I've noticed the opponents of Objectivism love to swap out the latter for the former, which puzzles me on a number of levels. Objective rights, like any other concept we can think of, are contextual.

Well, objectivists see nothing wrong with letting children starve. An objectivist would have no basis for outrage were one man to watch another die, even if saving the man would take virtually no effort on the part of the other. An objectivist sees nothing wrong with allowing children to grow up entirely without education, or sick, or cold, or hungry. So it's not entirely fair for you to throw stones.
Here you're pandering to emotions again, using extreme examples to validate your staggeringly assumptive thought. Come to think of it, I don't even know why I'm dignifying this with a response. Bad things like this happen in the continuum we know as 'reality' and while they're deplorable in their own right it's in no way justified to infringe upon my rights to try and stop these problems--they will never be stopped, only minimized.

If I want to do something about these things, I'm perfectly justified in attempting to ease this kind of suffering by virtue of my own volition.

Moreover, a utilitarian would object to virtually, if not all, of the acts you list above (clearly the axe murdering is not increasing aggregate utility, the suffering of the slaves would most likely be understood as greater than the satisfaction derived from their slaveowners).
Jesus. I'm not saying that a Utilitarian would condone any of this, the point of that statement is it's possible to be wrong when you think you're right. It never ceases to amaze me the number of people who fail to grasp that concept.

Denounced doesn't mean disproven. Just because you find something intellectually distateful, doesn't make it wrong/false. If you mean you've [i]disproven consequentialism, I'd suggest you send your prove to a university, as you'd most likely be given tenure on the spot.
What the hell else do you want me to do? I've proven, using reason, that this is more or less an emotion-based viewpoint. Emotions, as I'm sure we can all agree, are not a valid basis for discerning the truth about reality. Therefore, it is not a legitimate basis for philosophical thought. Emotions are not without merit; don't get me wrong, but they should not be the basis by which all moral action should be judged.

There you have it. Again. Should you choose to continue evading, that's not my problem.

This is something that should be proven, not simply asserted! It is not enough to say that such and such a thing is wrong, you have to show that it is wrong.
Clarification needed; are you asking me to prove why tax is theft or why theft is wrong?

Wrong within an objectivist framework, not in another!
And since Objectivism, as its name and all concepts therein imply, is based in Objective Fact, this means it is objectively wrong.

When we are having a discussion about the validity of a thing, you cannot justify it with the presumptions which underlie it!
Basically, you're saying 'stealing is wrong because it's wrong to steal', which is a tautalogy.
Fine: it's wrong because it's the seizure of one's property [therefore one's life, therefore the product of one's labor and time] without their consent and without observable benefit to the person who was stolen from. Is that better?

Not really; preference utilitarianism referes to the measure of utility (what exactly are we maximizing) while rule utilitarianism refers to the method of maximization (how should we maximize utility). So preference based, rule utilitarianism is certainly a possibility.
Alright, I suppose I see what you're saying here; at any rate it didn't seem to be logically connected in its original context. Like with Deleuze, we're sort of getting into freak mutations of Utilitarianism now, as it seems neither of you are advocating rule or act Utilitarianism anymore, but rather some combination of both.

Just as a further point, I do not myself believe utilitarianism (or objectivism for that matter) are coherent moral/political systems; my arguements so far have been based on your mischaracterization of utilitarianism.
Go back and read my first post, I think even Deleuze would agree I know what Utilitarianism is and just what its founding principles are.

Okay, so we've talked a bit about utilitarianism, I'd like to make a few points in regards to objectivism. As an introduction, I'd like to say that first, I am using objectivism as described in. Second, I'm assuming we can all agree that it is necessary in making a statement to show it is true- i.e. intution is not enough to make an objective moral claim.

Objectivism, as I see it, is flawed from its very foundations. Objectivists make objective claims about the nature of man that are not necessarily self-evident. They define various terms, especially freedom, in ways that are not self-evident and not properly justified.

To begin with, lets look at what objectivists actually say in respect to the nature of man, the nature of freedom, and the nature of rights.

Let us look at the arguments here.

1) First, A = A. That is to say, obejctivists believe that the apparent world is the only world, that objective observation gives us 'true' observations: that existence exists. This seems intuitively correct; however, this has been debated consistently and inconclusively for centuries- Descartes is probably the most well known example. However, given that this is a reasonable assumption for most of us to make, I have no objection here.

This is necessary to objectivism because objectivism makes claims to the absolute; without A = A, you could never makes such a claim.

2) Objectivism holds that sensory information is objectively valid, and that logic is the only means to knowledge.

This is certainly more contentious. While objectivists must hold sensory perception to be true (otherwise we could never be certain of our perceptions, and could thus never be certain that when we perceive A, what we perceive actually IS A). However, it is neither logically true, nor scientifically true, that sensory information is valid. For example, when certain chemical are ingested, 'objectively' false senses are perceived. So it cannot be so that all sensory information is valid and objective; it follows then that we can never be sure if our observations are valid; it thus follows that we can never make objective statement based on observations.
Um.... telling me that my perceptions of reality are slightly altered while I'm tripping on acid or when I'm drunk hardly invalidates my senses for the remainder of my waking life. Just because consciousness can be altered via a certain means does not mean that they're wholly invalid. I've noticed my opponents on this forum like to assume that because an exception exists, the rule that it's founded upon is completely invalid.

Objective fact, or in this case, sensory data, is nothing without context, just like any other concept or object or knowledge you should care to name.

3) I am going to quote a website for this statemet:


Let us suppose we accept the validity of point 2 (which we may or may not do). I think there is a very big problem in this argument: throughout it, the survival of the individual and the species are conflated. It is said originally that a man must act in a certain way to keep himself alive; it is then said that certain actions hurt human survival in general. This does not follow at all. For example, let us look at murder- this is seen as hurting mankind in the above argument- however it is certainly true that murdering another may help a human survive! So it is not at all clear here what is meant- are we intended to protect our own survival, or that of the species?
Like I mentioned above, this is one of those examples people love to throw at us; they generally assume that since we declare murder as being objectively wrong based in the context of everyday life, we see no room for such an act, universally, absolutely, ever, ever, ever, ever in a million years. I can't say as I blame them; it's only natural to contend with that which we don't agree with or don't understand.

However, as I said before, these concepts are nothing without context, and the example here isn't very specific. It's a common misconception that our 'Moral Objective' is something along the lines of 'don't kill or steal,' which is an overly simplistic way of looking at things. If I were asked to deliver a definition of the 'Moral Objective' while standing on one foot, I would posit that it would be the furtherance of our rational self interest [not universal self interest, not irrational or infinite self interest, please don't make the mistake of juxtaposing these words again; it seems to be a common tactic]. In the above example, the reason for pursuing the death of an individual is perfectly valid: he is all too likely to harm me as a result of his habits or that crazy virus you mentioned earlier or what-have-you.

In terms of an individual, it is self-evident that we must determine what hurts us and what harms us in order to survive. However, it is not clear that this helps us in terms of ethics. It is possible I may best ensure my survival by stealing what i can, and killing what gets in my way.
This is a tricky argument I can't say as I agree with. Again, it's not a very specific example and it fails to tell us under just what circumstances it would be rational to steal and kill to survive: it makes an arbitrary statement that is, in this context, not rooted in any perceivable data. Since the context of reality has been removed, and replaced with a vague, open-ended statement, I can't really answer to it.

If in fact it is the species that must survive, I think this is a tacit acknowledgement that the whole is more important than the parts.
In a certain context, it is. It would be pretty hard to have a prosperous society without... well... without society, but that doesn't mean we should worship society as a God or let it make all my decisions for me. This is another misconception about Objectivism, that we despise all other people and that we would shun all contact with them for fear of being subsumed by the collective. Just as emotions play a role in our thinking, so too does society play a role in our life. However, to me this does not justify the supremacy of either concept to reason.

Pretty much, yeah. It's a pretty subjective concept, which is why I have no respect for a philosophy that is based on it.

Okay, but then objectiviststs say it is rational to pursue our self-interest (i.e. satisfy our preferences) and that consequently self-interest is an objective moral good, correct? Isn't the foundation of objectivism the assertion that self-interest is always objectively moral in as much as it preserves our lives (and allows us to thrive, whatever that mean). So it seems to me that objectivists are say preference satisfaction is rational and objective, while you are saying the opposite.

How, may I ask, is it 'wrong' that preference satisfaction is a product of our values? And to answer your question, yes.

I don't think it's wrong that preference satisfaction is a product of our values- I do think it is wrong to categorize preference satisfaction as emotional or mystical (in the language of Rand). I also don't think that as a rule objectivists DO classify preference satisfacton (i.e. self-interest) as mystical or emotional, but as something that is self-evidently true.

His happiness and his pleasure is his own damn business. I've proved that they're the same thing by quoting a goddamn Thesaurus! If I could draw a picture I would.

Quoting a thesaurus is hardly proof, in a philosophical context: that much should be obvious. All it is is an appeal to authority. If, rather, it is an appeal to common usuage, I could make the same claim about tax/theft- theft is commonly defined as the unlawful seizure of assets. Clearly stating that something is defined in a given way in a given context tells us nothing about its philosophical 'correctness'.

The gist of this, from what I can gather is that 'rights, in order to exist in the first place, must be infringed upon.' A man with 'unlimited rights' [please be aware that I use this term very cautiously, as rights are by no means 'unlimited' under Objectivism, they are reasonable] has 'access to the basics of life' only if he chooses to excersise those rights. They're congruent terms, not polar opposites.

What I was intending was more the sense that freedom alone does not guarantee us anything, not survival nor meeting of ends. A starving man has no use for freedom if it does not lead him to food. Meaningful freedom (options which can actually be realized) may have necessary preconditions.

Just out of curiousity, did you borrow that concept from Thomas Hobbes?

Not really, though certainly hobbes influence the entire modern political science canon. This is more rooted in the positive rights tradition (Rousseau, Montesqieu, etc.)

This is patently obvious, and like I mentioned earlier it stems from the initial metaphysical and epistemological flaws in Utilitariaism, which as of this writing have not been adequately answered to. Facts are Objective. If one bases his philosophy on the facts of the universe, it becomes objective.

Scepticism denies that facts are objective. Our entire scientific institution denies that facts are objective. Logic presumes that in absence of proof facts are not objective. So why should we accept a priori that facts are indeed objective?
I would certainly characterize the groundless insistence that facts are objective (or more properly, that man can KNOW them objectively) as a major flaw in objectivism, not in utilitarianism. Utilitarians at least admit that there is nothing that can be known for certain (i.e. that there is no moment of metaphysical truth).

You [and many others] say "there is no moral statement that can be said to be objectively true," to which I would counter and say "Yes, there is. Anything that is anti-life is wrong. This applies to both life itself and its extentions; freedom and property." This can be misconstrued on a number of levels, most commonly by invoking an extreme example; something along the lines of 'what if someone breaks into your house,' or 'what if you're on a desert island and there's no food left so the only logical recourse is to resort to cannibalism to keep oneself alive.' Pretty much all of these stipulations pander to a 'him or me' type situation, where the individual's preference for his own life needs to take precedence.

This is logically totally wrong. Let us look at your maxim
Anything that is anti-life is wrong.

how do we know this to be true? It is not self-evident. You have provided no evidence to make an objective claim!

So from your first statement we must ask:
Why is it wrong to be anti-life?
From this, we either have to say it is foundational and self-evident, which is not logical, or we continue regression, or we look for circular arguments, none of which will provide us with logical proof. This is known as Agrippa's Trillema, if I remember correctly.

Here you're ignoring the remainder of humanity's right to live in favor of the individual's. It in no way resembles a consistent application of reason to let this person interact with society as normal, for obvious reasons. That said, I think if someone were quarantined for having a virus like this, the quarantine itself would be the least of his concerns.

So then you would agree that in this case utilitarian consequentialism is acceptable (the rights of agent A should be abridged to protect the rights of other actors)?

What you're doing here is making a blanket statement by justifying it with a one-in-a-million type situation. Since you failed to specify the [i]context of the statement at first, I was likewise forced to respond with an equally vague assumption.

Ususally we use vague, specific examples in political philosophy in order to isolate a concept and evaluate it. Note that objectivism does the same thing in the process of showing rights naturally evolve from the fact of life.

Moreover, this is the essence of scientific investigation (and political science certainly uses ideas like scientific investigation). If I make a theory about the world, and you show it to be false, no matter how rarely, my theory is incorrect.

A great example would be Newtonian physics verus Relativity. Einstien showed Newton to be wrong in certain, rare and extreme, circumstances. We accept this to mean that Newton's theory is wrong (though of course still useful).

Here we go with word games again... Christ, spare me. This implies that definitions are subjective; it implies that one can be justified in saying "apples are blades and oranges are razors, therefore I can shave with fruit salad."

Definitions are objective. Anyone who evades said definitions is evading reality.

This is ridiculous. Look in the dictionary- note that words have multiple definitions, depending on context! Clearly then definitions are not objective!

My statement "theft is the unlawful cofiscation of property" is prima facia as valid as your "theft is any confiscation of property", especially given both are evident in popular usage!

Get rid of 'universal' and replace it with 'rational.' I've noticed the opponents of Objectivism love to swap out the latter for the former, which puzzles me on a number of levels. Objective rights, like any other concept we can think of, are contextual.


So the if rights are not universal, nor are they absolute, then are they not limited to some (this is, in effect, what non-universal implies- if not everyone has rights, then some must have less rights than others) and shifting?

Here you're pandering to emotions again, using extreme examples to validate your staggeringly assumptive thought. Come to think of it, I don't even know why I'm dignifying this with a response. Bad things like this happen in the continuum we know as 'reality' and while they're deplorable in their own right it's in no way justified to infringe upon my rights to try and stop these problems--they will never be stopped, only minimized.

There are good reasons why the above examples are important. The first is the matter of intuition. If we accept, as skepticim and logic suggest we should, that there are no moral objects, then the root of our morality must be intuition (i.e. I know that murder is wrong because I intuit that it is wrong; it is self evident in the context of my human intuition). Thus intuition can be a useful tool for analyzing political precepts. I gave examples above where objectivism can lead to results that we tend to understand as intuitively wrong (neglecting children seems wrong to all of us, though we might not know why). Of course intuition can be used against utilitarianism as well.

If I want to do something about these things, I'm perfectly justified in attempting to ease this kind of suffering by virtue of my own volition.

Okay, but we would normally say it is immoral (it is wrong) to let others suffer because I can't be bothered to help them.

Essentially, are you justified in letting a man drown when you could just as easily say him? I think objectivism (most branches of liberalism would say that letting him drown is right, but clearly evil, or something to that effect. Only objectivism, in this tradition, claims to be a comprehensive moral system rather than a political system) is the only moral theory that would say letting him drown was morally acceptable. I also think most of us would acknowledge, were we honest with ourselves, that this would be wrong.

Of course this is not a logical attack against objectivism, but substansive points are not out of place entirely in moral discussion.

What the hell else do you want me to do? I've proven, using reason, that this is more or less an emotion-based viewpoint. Emotions, as I'm sure we can all agree, are not a valid basis for discerning the truth about reality. Therefore, it is not a legitimate basis for philosophical thought. Emotions are not without merit; don't get me wrong, but they should not be the basis by which all moral action should be judged.

I'm going to leave this for now pending a discussion on whether preference satisfaction is emotional or rational, okay?

Clarification needed; are you ask me to prove why tax is theft or why theft is wrong?

Well, both really. Why don't you just show me that the definition "theft is all confiscation of property" is the only rational defintion, rather than "theft is all unlawful/immoral confiscation of property".

And since Objectivism, as its name and all concepts therein imply, is based in Objective Fact, this means it is objectively wrong.

:( I certainly don't think you've shown that objectivism is objectively correct, as I'm discussing below. I think we've already shown that objectivism is contextual, even in it's foundation.

Fine: it's wrong because it's the seizure of one's property [therefore one's life, therefore the product of one's labor and time] without their consent and without observable benefit to the person who was stolen from. Is that better?


Not really, because it leads to regression. WHY is this seizure wrong? and this of course leads to a further why, and so on. See Agrippa's trillema above.

Alright, I suppose I see what you're saying here; at any rate it didn't seem to be logically connected in its original context. Like with Deleuze, we're sort of getting into freak mutations of Utilitarianism now, as it seems neither of you are advocating rule or act Utilitarianism anymore, but rather some combination of both.

As I said, there is no monolithic conception of utilitarianism (virtually every utilitarian's theory differs in these and other ways). But yes lets leave this be, I feel satisfied at our comprimise (utility is not necessarily what you claim it is, but if often is conceived in that way). Just remember that sweeping statements about utilitarianism are difficult, because it is not a monolithic theory.

Um.... telling me that my perceptions of reality are slightly altered while I'm tripping on acid or when I'm drunk hardly invalidates my senses for the remainder of my waking life. Just because consciousness can be altered via a certain means does not mean that they're wholly invalid. I've noticed my opponents on this forum like to assume that because an exception exists, the rule that it's founded upon is completely invalid.

It necessarily follows that if we can't say our observations are objectively true, we can't say conclusions drawn from these observations are true! If we say that A+B=C, but we don't know the value of A and B, we can say nothing about C.
I think we can certainly say at this point that while observation may be generally true, it is certainly not objective.
In other words, it is a matter of general truth that observations are valid, but not OBJECTIVE truth.
Objective fact, or in this case, sensory data, is nothing without context, just like any other concept or object or knowledge you should care to name.

This makes no sense to me, given that if we say: context+observation=fact
But observation is the only way to determine context! So it seems impossible to say that context provides a framework for determining whether our observations are correct, because we need our observation to determine our context. This is clearly circular reasoning, or so it seems to me.

Like I mentioned above, this is one of those examples people love to throw at us; they generally assume that since we declare murder as being objectively wrong based in the context of everyday life, we see no room for such an act, universally, absolutely, ever, ever, ever, ever in a million years. I can't say as I blame them; it's only natural to contend with that which we don't agree with or don't understand.

Okay, but this is not an extreme example- this is the basis of objectivist phiosophy as understood by Rand! You can't dismiss it as a 'wacky situation', because it's necessary to the formulation of the political theory you espouse.

However, as I said before, these concepts are nothing without context, and the example here isn't very specific. It's a common misconception that our 'Moral Objective' is something along the lines of 'don't kill or steal,' which is an overly simplistic way of looking at things. If I were asked to deliver a definition of the 'Moral Objective' while standing on one foot, I would posit that it would be the furtherance of our rational self interest [not universal self interest, not irrational or infinite self interest, please don't make the mistake of juxtaposing these words again; it seems to be a common tactic]. In the above example, the reason for pursuing the death of an individual is perfectly valid: he is all too likely to harm me as a result of his habits or that crazy virus you mentioned earlier or what-have-you.

Okay, but again look at this specifically within the context that this is how objectivists justify their philosophy.


This is a tricky argument I can't say as I agree with. Again, it's not a very specific example and it fails to tell us under just what circumstances it would be rational to steal and kill to survive: it makes an arbitrary statement that is, in this context, not rooted in any perceivable data. Since the context of reality has been removed, and replaced with a vague, open-ended statement, I can't really answer to it.

If you can't answer to it, then you need to reexamine your philosophy. I will likely give this a more substansive response later, but at the moment I have an appointment.

In a certain context, it is. It would be pretty hard to have a prosperous society without... well... without society, but that doesn't mean we should worship society as a God or let it make all my decisions for me. This is another misconception about Objectivism, that we despise all other people and that we would shun all contact with them for fear of being subsumed by the collective. Just as emotions play a role in our thinking, so too does society play a role in our life. However, to me this does not justify the supremacy of either concept to reason.

Actually I would argue shunning other people is rational and necessary following objectivist ethics, but I won't go in to this now (it is related to my post on freedom leading to isolation).

Again, you really need to look at the actual underlying theories of objectivist. THese are not situation I am pulling out of my hat- this is the Rand/Peikoff (sp?) try to show self-interest, etc as objective. If you don't believe it when they say it, how can you consider yourself and objectivist?

Our entire scientific institution denies that facts are objective.

Ladies and Gentlemen, my work here is done.

Ladies and Gentlemen, my work here is done.
That statement was a bit silly. But you can't say that yet. The rest of his post actually had some very insightful and interesting things to say.

Oh, and for fun, since we're on the topic, I'll write a bit from different perspectives as to why facts aren't objective.

Lacanian/Pschoanalytic: There's an element of the world that we and individuals can never understand, called the real. Human perception is never perfect; there are always things that we overlook or miss or just plain refuse or can't see. The real, therefore, interrupts all of our planning and perception. We believe that what we understand is the whole of reality, but it's not - we're missing something that could make a crucial difference in our perceptions. No reality we perceive exists as we perceive it and because we don't know what the real is, that reality is mutable. Therefore, "facts" are objective.

Foucauldian: Each individual perceives the world in a different way. Any event or fact seems different to you than it does to me. Musical taste is a good example - what sounds like a good song to one person sounds awful to someone else. Because each individual perceives reality in a different way, you can't say that there's one monolithic reality - just a series of localized ones. Any attempt at imposing that standard of reality is dangerously normative.

Those are, of course, simplifications of two very complex authors. But it was interesting to bring up, although they are neither Objectivists nor utilitarians and don't even agreee with each other.

Lacanian/Pschoanalytic: There's an element of the world that we and individuals can never understand, called the real.
Nuts to that. My computer is real, I can see it; it is there. Therefore, I can perceive and understand the Real. Gravity is real, I can see it working every day: I drop my keys and I understand that they will fall to the floor. I release a balloon and I understand that it will rise in accordance with the gasses in it. If other occurances were in fact possible, say if the balloon could rise or fall, or it could emit music like a radio, or turn into a pumpkin, then this viewpoint would have merit.

Human perception is never perfect; there are always things that we overlook or miss or just plain refuse or can't see. The real, therefore, interrupts all of our planning and perception. We believe that what we understand is the whole of reality, but it's not - we're missing something that could make a crucial difference in our perceptions. No reality we perceive exists as we perceive it and because we don't know what the real is, that reality is mutable. Therefore, "facts" are objective.
Of course human perception is far from perfect, but the fact of the matter remains that it is essentially all we have, along with our rationality and raw intelligence. We can't directly perceive time in the purest sense of the word, but that doesn't make us any less able to understand and measure it. Facts are based on objective sensory data, and whether an element of that data is missing or not, it's discovery and incorperation to the previously formed concept does not contradict the old one.

For example, when we say "There are nine planets in the Solar System," the discovery of the tenth would not damn this statement to a falsification; there are, in fact, still nine planets there.

Foucauldian: Each individual perceives the world in a different way. Any event or fact seems different to you than it does to me. Musical taste is a good example - what sounds like a good song to one person sounds awful to someone else.
Musical taste is a horrible example; musical taste is an emotional reaction based on the standards we have devised for art. We're still hearing the same configuration of notes ie, the actual perception of the sounds themselves are identical, what varies is our response to it. That does not mean that the objective basis for our perception varies from person to person, it just means we react to this information in different ways, based on how our minds work or our upbringing or what-have you. If I say the Who rules, that's not a fact anymore than it would be if I said they were mediocre.

Because each individual perceives reality in a different way, you can't say that there's one monolithic reality - just a series of localized ones. Any attempt at imposing that standard of reality is dangerously normative.
As I said before, we don't perceive it in different ways unles we're permantnelty tripping on acid, psychotic, or both. If people have varying perceptions of reality, its basic properties would be highly contentious: you'd have people arguing over what color the sky is or how large a football field is. Our perceptions of reality are not subjective, our responses to it are.

Those are, of course, simplifications of two very complex authors. But it was interesting to bring up, although they are neither Objectivists nor utilitarians and don't even agreee with each other.
And they were both full of shit, if this synopsis is actually accurate.

Ladies and Gentlemen, my work here is done.
Let me explain.

what exactly is a fact?

A fact, in our general understanding, is something that we know to be true:
so how do we know something to be true?
A statement is true if the premises which underlie it are true.

But science, as a philosophy, holds that no premise can be (objectively) true. This is because our understandings of nature are never objective: we make theories of what a thing is or how it behaves, but these theories are necessarily falsifiable, and subject to revision. Scientific method is not rooted in a theory of natural objectivity, but that of skepticism.

So let us take, for an example, the idea of causality (that a given action results from another action; that the reason a body moves is that some force is applied to it, for example). This is commonly accepted as a fact, and seems self-evident at first light.

However, through the scientific method we have observed that causality is NOT a fact- quantum particles, as best we can observe, do NOT in fact follow the 'fact' of causation. So it follows then that the 'fact' of causality is not a fact as such- it is not true, because the premise which underlies it (all actions are the result of other actions) is not true.

We must also recognize that it is impossible, scientifically speaking, to observe a thing objectively (measuring an outcome changes that outcome; i.e. measuring the speed of an electron changes it's direction).

So what we must conclude is that science is fallible, (this is self-evident as all scientific hypotheses are falsifiable) and then observation does not tell us the whole 'truth' of a situation.

No scientist will ever speak of 'facts', because a scientist does not deal in 'fact'- he deals in theories, and the support or falsification of these theories.

To elaborate still further, it is meaningless to assert that a scientific 'fact' is objective, because it will necessarily be reviewed constantly, and inevitably changed, through the process of scienitific method.

Thus in short, objectivity is something that is fundementally denied both by scientific method and scientific experience.

Nuts to that. My computer is real, I can see it; it is there. Therefore, I can perceive and understand the Real. Gravity is real, I can see it working every day: I drop my keys and I understand that they will fall to the floor. I release a balloon and I understand that it will rise in accordance with the gasses in it. If other occurances were in fact possible, say if the balloon could rise or fall, or it could emit music like a radio, or turn into a pumpkin, then this viewpoint would have merit.
I got it! Let's play the come up with incredibly simplistic examples to try to disprove a complex theory game! The Real by definition can't be understood. Just saying you can see your computer doesn't mean you grasp the real. It interrupts our actions and prevents their success, but that doesn't mean we can figure out what it is until after it happens.

I'll explain this in terms of two political theories: Authoritarian Communism and Objectivism; polar opposites, but theories to which Lacan's ideas are equally applicable. Communists propose a perfect world where everyone gets along; a cooperative Utopia of perpetual harmony. However, something fucked it up. Some people didn't like the Communist system. So what happened? They were exterminated, as they were manifestations of the Real which interrupted an idealistic theory (This idea is not directly Lacan's; it comes from a guy named Stavrakakis extrapolating on Lacan).

The same thing happens in an Objectivist free-market paradise. Some people don't succeed in this free market society. What happens to them? It wouldn't be relevant, because the people with the power to change it would be too excited by the allure of profits and riches to feel the need to help them. The poor are left to die. Thus, every system that claims to be able to fix the world's flaws has its own flaws - manifestations of the Real. Often we can't figure out what those they are, but in a few cases we can isolate the symptoms.

Of course human perception is far from perfect, but the fact of the matter remains that it is essentially all we have, along with our rationality and raw intelligence. We can't directly perceive time in the purest sense of the word, but that doesn't make us any less able to understand and measure it. Facts are based on objective sensory data, and whether an element of that data is missing or not, it's discovery and incorperation to the previously formed concept does not contradict the old one.
You may discover something you perceive to be fact, but the unseen and not comprehended Real may radically alter the nature of what you believe to be fact.

For example, when we say "There are nine planets in the Solar System," the discovery of the tenth would not damn this statement to a falsification; there are, in fact, still nine planets there.
That's a semantic game and one specific case in which the Real manifests itself in a different way - the statement "The solar system is made up of 9 planets" would be the one altered. The essential nature of the Real is that we can't understand it - so it's silly to give an example of where it doesn't exist, because for all you know, it does.

Musical taste is a horrible example; musical taste is an emotional reaction based on the standards we have devised for art. We're still hearing the same configuration of notes ie, the actual perception of the sounds themselves are identical, what varies is our response to it. That does not mean that the objective basis for our perception varies from person to person, it just means we react to this information in different ways, based on how our minds work or our upbringing or what-have you. If I say the Who rules, that's not a fact anymore than it would be if I said they were mediocre.
Note that you don't refute the theory; only one particular example.

Many people claim that there is an objective musical standard - that certain bands are definitively "good" music and others are definitively "bad." Those people were assumed in that comment. I disagree; I think taste is subjective and no one really can say "That band is bad." But I digress.

People still perceive different things in different ways. Ever looked at piece of modern art? When I see it, I may see a donkey. When you see it, you may see a horse. Similar, but they'r different perceptions of what was depicted on the canvas. Art, like literature or certain words, mean different things to different people. Before you say something about "cultural upbringing creating different standards," that just proves my point. Each of these people see different things because of who they are. How do we know which is the "real" or "correct" one? How can we definitively say which is the correct one? You can't.


As I said before, we don't perceive it in different ways unles we're permantnelty tripping on acid, psychotic, or both. If people have varying perceptions of reality, its basic properties would be highly contentious: you'd have people arguing over what color the sky is or how large a football field is. Our perceptions of reality are not subjective, our responses to it are.
This is above. And also, how do you know that what I call red isn't what you call blue? If you saw red as I perceive it, it could be your blue. We don't disagree on whether any particular object is red, but we differ on what red IS - a perceptual difference that would be impossible to notice.

And they were both full of shit, if this synopsis is actually accurate.
I could write an entire page that just says "Ayn Rand is full of shit," but that wouldn't help my argument.

This is soooo very Ayn Rand... Deleuze and Malliburta, you guys are actually cracking me up. :)

Here is the deal:

Perceptions can be wrong. Reality is not EXACTLY the same for everyone. Yes, we agree.

However, that your senses are not foolproof does not invalidate their use as a viable means of gathering information about the world. We can all agree on most things, that they happened and in a certain way. The places we DISAGREE will be on the portions that we have ASSUMED WITHOUT EVIDENCE OR "PROOF".

We agree 9/11/01 happened, we agree that it was Muslim extremists from Saudi. We don't always agree on the WHY; but what proof is there for us about why, THAT WE CAN PERCIEVE?

Cars are not foolproof, but you don't propose we quit using them for travel, do you?

If you truly do not believe in an objective reality that we all share, then I truly have nothing more to discuss with you guys.

Keep in mind that the same experts who don't believe in any truths or coincident reality are all the same ones who lock up people for being crazy or disturbed because they hear voices and see things nobody else can!!! LOL.

But I disgress. The HUGE detail of Objectivism that you guys keep missing is this- Selfishness is a virtue, BUT NO MAN IS AN ISLAND. There is a BUT in there with the selfishness thing.

A caveman who violently kills competition and never allows other people to donate (or sell) their efforts is not serving his own best interests- his best interest lies in advancing society so that he can log into a website for 3 hours a day and yell at people about political theory!!! :)

This is soooo very Ayn Rand... Deleuze and Malliburta, you guys are actually cracking me up. :)

Here is the deal:

Perceptions can be wrong. Reality is not EXACTLY the same for everyone. Yes, we agree.

However, that your senses are not foolproof does not invalidate their use as a viable means of gathering information about the world. We can all agree on most things, that they happened and in a certain way. The places we DISAGREE will be on the portions that we have ASSUMED WITHOUT EVIDENCE OR "PROOF".

We agree 9/11/01 happened, we agree that it was Muslim extremists from Saudi. We don't always agree on the WHY; but what proof is there for us about why, THAT WE CAN PERCIEVE?

Cars are not foolproof, but you don't propose we quit using them for travel, do you?

If you truly do not believe in an objective reality that we all share, then I truly have nothing more to discuss with you guys.

Keep in mind that the same experts who don't believe in any truths or coincident reality are all the same ones who lock up people for being crazy or disturbed because they hear voices and see things nobody else can!!! LOL.

But I disgress. The HUGE detail of Objectivism that you guys keep missing is this- Selfishness is a virtue, BUT NO MAN IS AN ISLAND. There is a BUT in there with the selfishness thing.

A caveman who violently kills competition and never allows other people to donate (or sell) their efforts is not serving his own best interests- his best interest lies in advancing society so that he can log into a website for 3 hours a day and yell at people about political theory!!! :)

This is all very well and good, and generally I would agree with you. However, I don't think what you're saying here applies to the context we were examining it. The entire objectivist system is presmised on things we can show to be evidently wrong! It's all very well and good to say that we can get information from observation, but when we have an ethical theory which says that observation is objectively valid, and this (obviously invalid) premise is necessary to the rest of the theory, we have a really big problem.

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A caveman who violently kills competition and never allows other people to donate (or sell) their efforts is not serving his own best interests- his best interest lies in advancing society so that he can log into a website for 3 hours a day and yell at people about political theory!!! :)

Upon rereading this post this part really jumped out at me. Here is the perfect example of revealed preference versus true preference.

The cave man believes he is acting in his best interests by oppressing others. This is his revealed preference. However, according to this poster, it is not his "true" preference- his true preference lies in the developement of society. This is of course an incoherent idea when looked at through the objectivist lens, but it serves to illustrate a prior point nicely.

Just as a point of interest, if we accept what this poster does in that individuals have 'true' preferences, and that their interests do not lie in pursuing revealed interests as such, but in pursuing true preferences, we end up at moral/political systems far removed from objectivism (we would end up with something like Marxism or nationalism of some kind).

To put it in short:
Objectivists say
Agents are free when they are free from the obstruction of other to be/not be do/not do a given thing.

If we accept TRUE preferences, we can make this look like this

True agents (i.e. the inner agent which wants to pursue true ends rather than revealed end; the inner moral person, if you will) are free when they are free from obstructions (external and internal) to be/not be do/not do their TRUE preferences.

SO we can immediately see that when we allow for true selves, we usually end up in situations where the statement 'forced to be free' is true and valid, which is a disctinctly illiberal notion.

There are some exceptions to this, civic republicanism for example, but that's for a different thread I think.
Deleuze could you check your TMs?

-snip-
Now, do you oppose all taxes as stealing from individuals?
Fair enough if you don't think tax money should be spent on other people etc, but what about public goods?
Interestingly enough, you talked about a streetlight. Did that have a reason? Did I miss something on an earlier page (it is so hard to keep reading all those words...)?
Free markets don't provide streetlights. They don't provide Light Houses and so on...
But since many public goods are fairly essential to our way of life, someone has to provide them. And that someone has to be the government if the market isn't gonna do that. And thinking that people are gonna provide public goods at a loss out of the goodness of their heart is a bit of a stretch, don't you think?

Gravity is real, I can see it working every day: I drop my keys and I understand that they will fall to the floor. I release a balloon and I understand that it will rise in accordance with the gasses in it. If other occurances were in fact possible, say if the balloon could rise or fall, or it could emit music like a radio, or turn into a pumpkin, then this viewpoint would have merit.

But gravity is not universal, according to quantum theory. There is no known explanation for gravity, nor does it apply at all times in all places.

Moreover, you're making a logical fallacy here- just because your keys fall to the ground every time in the past, does not mean they will again. This is not an important point, and I don't think we need to discuss it, but logically it is not true that a when a body behaves one way in the past, it will continue to behave that way in the future.

SO again, you're looking at a case of GENERAL truth, not OBJECTIVE truth.


Facts are based on objective sensory data, and whether an element of that data is missing or not, it's discovery and incorperation to the previously formed concept does not contradict the old one.

I think I addressed the idea of facts more or less fully in my other post. Also, I think we have shown that sensory data cannot be 'objective' by any definition.

As I said before, we don't perceive it in different ways unles we're permantnelty tripping on acid, psychotic, or both.

You can't prove this without resorting to foundationalism, regression or circular reasoning.

If people have varying perceptions of reality, its basic properties would be highly contentious: you'd have people arguing over what color the sky is or how large a football field is. Our perceptions of reality are not subjective, our responses to it are.

I think deleuze addressed this point fairlly well. I would just add in that it is not true that we all agree on how large a football field is- I may understand a football field as a great length, while you do not. We may understand that it is: bigger than a car, smaller than a river, or something to that extent, but our actual perceptions of it are not the same.

And they were both full of shit, if this synopsis is actually accurate.

I actually don't think you really addressed the points brought up at all here. Moreover, you seem to be continuing to put forward arguments (i.e. observation is objective) that you have not shown to be true, and that I've attacked quite heavily without any real response on your part.

I got it! Let's play the come up with incredibly simplistic examples to try to disprove a complex theory game! The Real by definition can't be understood. Just saying you can see your computer doesn't mean you grasp the real. It interrupts our actions and prevents their success, but that doesn't mean we can figure out what it is until after it happens.
Now you're just diving head first into mysticism. The 'Real' since it can't be perceived by or senses [or, conveinently, it can't even be grasped by any of us] is more or less something that exists above nature, ie. the supernatural. The 'Real' since it has no grounding in observable reality is essentially an arbitrary statement. In effect, it is no different from claiming there are gremlins on Venus; it can't be proven or disproven.

Arbitrary statements are neither true nor false, since false statements have some relation to actual data. Arbitrary statements cannot be answered to because cognitively, nothing has been said. I can no more disprove them than you can justify them, and I find it curious how the defenders of the arbitrary systematically ignore the onus of truth, instead asking me to disprove their proposed positive.

Technically, from a debate standpoint, it is bad form to respond to an arbitrary statement; it is best ignored and left alone.

I'll explain this in terms of two political theories: Authoritarian Communism and Objectivism; polar opposites, but theories to which Lacan's ideas are equally applicable. Communists propose a perfect world where everyone gets along; a cooperative Utopia of perpetual harmony. However, something fucked it up. Some people didn't like the Communist system. So what happened? They were exterminated, as they were manifestations of the Real which interrupted an idealistic theory (This idea is not directly Lacan's; it comes from a guy named Stavrakakis extrapolating on Lacan).

The same thing happens in an Objectivist free-market paradise. Some people don't succeed in this free market society. What happens to them? It wouldn't be relevant, because the people with the power to change it would be too excited by the allure of profits and riches to feel the need to help them. The poor are left to die. Thus, every system that claims to be able to fix the world's flaws has its own flaws - manifestations of the Real. Often we can't figure out what those they are, but in a few cases we can isolate the symptoms.
Everything has its flaws; Utilitarianism has to steal from me to feed people I have nothing to do with. The poor are left to die... so what? I'll deal with that if I'm poor, stop trying to bother me with your pity-parties in the meantime.

We already covered that this is an emotional appeal, and we've already covered that emotions are not a valid means by which we can discern the nature of reality. It would be like if I went to the beach to hunt for change underground and used a broom instead of a metal detector. You talk about compassion and helping, the basis for which differs from person to person and then you invoke a teary appeal like this, thus implying that policies can and should be built on widly differing emotional data.

You may discover something you perceive to be fact, but the unseen and not comprehended Real may radically alter the nature of what you believe to be fact.
As per my arbitrary statement clause above, I will not be responding to these arguments about 'the Real' until you can make some kind of statement about it that has something--anything to do with reality. This 'unseen force that we can't comprehend' crap doesn't fly with me.

Note that you don't refute the theory; only one particular example.
What the fuck?! It was the example you brought up!

People still perceive different things in different ways. Ever looked at piece of modern art? When I see it, I may see a donkey. When you see it, you may see a horse. Similar, but they'r different perceptions of what was depicted on the canvas. Art, like literature or certain words, mean different things to different people. Before you say something about "cultural upbringing creating different standards," that just proves my point. Each of these people see different things because of who they are. How do we know which is the "real" or "correct" one? How can we definitively say which is the correct one? You can't.
The painter can. Besides, seeing different objects within a work of art does not mean that the brushstrokes have changed, it does not mean that the shape or configuration of the painting is any different: the x factor is not our perception, it is our imagination. It does not mean that the object of our perception has changed in any way from person to person. It is our response to the data that varies, not the data itself.

So help me God, if you say "you haven't disproved the theory, just one example" to this too, I'm taking my ball and going home.

This is above. And also, how do you know that what I call red isn't what you call blue? If you saw red as I perceive it, it could be your blue. We don't disagree on whether any particular object is red, but we differ on what red IS - a perceptual difference that would be impossible to notice.
This happens to some people, it's called being colorblind.

I could write an entire page that just says "Ayn Rand is full of shit," but that wouldn't help my argument.
That's fine, I'm not Ayn Rand. Besides, I think you've been trying to do this for some time already, and I'm not particularly impressed with the results.

Now you're just diving head first into mysticism. The 'Real' since it can't be perceived by or senses [or, conveinently, it can't even be grasped by any of us] is more or less something that exists above nature, ie. the supernatural. The 'Real' since it has no grounding in observable reality is essentially an arbitrary statement. In effect, it is no different from claiming there are gremlins on Venus; it can't be proven or disproven.

Right, but you've been making consistent claims to knowing the "real"ness of various things (you, and objectivists in general, claim to know the real, natural status of man). Moreover, you've made several claims that have no basis in observable reality (i.e. observation is objectively true is clearly a false statement, as I've shown both anecdotally and logically).

Now, do you oppose all taxes as stealing from individuals?
Depends on what the money is being used for. It it brings a real, observable benefit to the people who are paying it, then fine: that's how money works, you spend it, and you get something back for it.

Fair enough if you don't think tax money should be spent on other people etc, but what about public goods?
See above. Roads, infrastructure sysem, courts, etc bring an observable benefit to me and to the others who pay for them.

Interestingly enough, you talked about a streetlight. Did that have a reason? Did I miss something on an earlier page (it is so hard to keep reading all those words...)?
Free markets don't provide streetlights. They don't provide Light Houses and so on...
They don't? Odd, somehow I was given to believe that inventions are spawned by the promise of being rewarded by them. Silly me.

But since many public goods are fairly essential to our way of life, someone has to provide them. And that someone has to be the government if the market isn't gonna do that. And thinking that people are gonna provide public goods at a loss out of the goodness of their heart is a bit of a stretch, don't you think?
I pretty much answered to this already, 'public goods' probably isn't the best way of phrasing the basic necessities which I would endorse spending my money on, 'public necessities' is. Yes, the government should have a role in providing the basics which benefit me, such as water systems, roads, bridges, streetlights, and the like. It should not have a role in spending my money on things which bring no tangible benefit to me such as welfare.

They don't? Odd, somehow I was given to believe that inventions are spawned by the promise of being rewarded by them. Silly me.
Fair enough.
But this point I don't get. The reward for having a light house is not of a monetary nature. A lighthouse is a non-rivalry good (just because one looks at it doesn't mean another can't) and non-excludable (you can't stop someone from looking at it, ie you can't charge a usage fee).
That would make it pointless for an inventor to build a lighthouse, since he couldn't sell it.
He could sell the idea though.

Fair enough.
But this point I don't get. The reward for having a light house is not of a monetary nature.
Sure it is. Someone--be it a shipping company, or a prospector or, hell, even the government has to buy up the land and purchase [at the very least] the raw materials to construct this lighthouse; someone has to hire workers to build it, and before even that they've got to hire miners and buy refining equipment to gather the required metals from the earth, but I'm sure this is usually done by another agency. These costs are factored in to the price offered by whoever is putting up the structure in the first place, and it obviously has to be set up in such a way as to turn a profit for doing it. Assuming, of course, it's a privately constructed lighthouse.

A lighthouse is a non-rivalry good (just because one looks at it doesn't mean another can't) and non-excludable (you can't stop someone from looking at it, ie you can't charge a usage fee).
That would make it pointless for an inventor to build a lighthouse, since he couldn't sell it.
He could sell the idea though.
There's a lot of truth to this, but as mentioned above there's got to be some incentive offered to the builder and to the workers involved before any idea like this is going to get off the ground--but lighthouses are more or less just a more large-scale example of my streetlight example. It's pretty much the same premise.

That said, modern inventions like the GPS system [which I'll note was also devised for promise of a profit] are likely to make lighthouses less of a necessity than they already are.

I pretty much answered to this already, 'public goods' probably isn't the best way of phrasing the basic necessities which I would endorse spending my money on, 'public necessities' is. Yes, the government should have a role in providing the basics which benefit me, such as water systems, roads, bridges, streetlights, and the like. It should not have a role in spending my money on things which bring no tangible benefit to me such as welfare.

I'm not sure I agree with you here either. There are many who do not need roads, bridges, streetlights, and the like to meet their moral ends (think of deep econologists). Moreover, there are some who would prefer to build these things themselves (because labour has moral value for them, or something). I don't think you can say that these 'public goods' have 'observable benefit for everyone'. In fact, they may have just the opposite- a deep ecologist may reject streetlights as a frivolous waste of energy. So unless you assume we all have the same ends (i.e. capitalist consumer society, which would indeed demand the goods you outlined) then I don't see how this could be.

Moreover, I think we could see that welfare DOES provide a tangible benefit to us all, but I will make a bigger post later to this effect.

-snip-
But building a light house is merely a service. Who ordered the lighthouse? What does that person, who pays the build team, the land owners and so on have to gain monetarily.
He can't get anyone to pay for using his lighthouse as a guide not to crash into the cliffs.

Hey, Melkor, any chance you respond to my earlier post on the original subject? It's not a criticism or anything, I'm just hoping it wasn't forgotten.

Hey, Melkor, any chance you respond to my earlier post on the original subject? It's not a criticism or anything, I'm just hoping it wasn't forgotten.
Where is it? I can't find it...?

Everything I can see so far [from you] has been answered to but dammit if this thread hasn't gotten so long...

Where is it? I can't find it...?

Everything I can see so far [from you] has been answered to but dammit if this thread hasn't gotten so long...
Yeah, I know. Post 77, page 6.

Oh OK, I see it now. Looks like I was busy with Mallberta at the time [I'm not anymore] so I must've missed it. I'll get to it after I run to the store; thanks for pointing it out.

Oh OK, I see it now. Looks like I was busy with Mallberta at the time [I'm not anymore] so I must've missed it. I'll get to it after I run to the store; thanks for pointing it out.

Why not? You didn't address anything I had to say. If this is the best you can do to defend objectivism, I'm fairly disappointed. Though not really suprised, I haven't found it a very defensible moral theory in general.

That's the same thing as saying Mao Zedong wasn't a Communist because he advocated revolution by peasants rather than the Proletariat. The idea behing my philosophy is Utilitarian in the way the philosophy is applied, just has a different definition of utility. We agree it should be maximized. Same overall concept.
Well, you do have a point here. In fairness, though, we did agree to examine Utilitarianism vs. Objectivism, so all I really had to go on at the time were resources outlining Utilitarianism itself. If you vary from Utilitarianism in any significant regard, be it Metaphysically or Epistemologically, I had no way of knowing this at the time, so the best I could do was respond against their traditional definitions.

If the object here is to attack or attempt to discredit your Metaphysical or Epistemological beliefs, then I first must know what they are.

I tend to agree with you. Taxes for people like you should be significantly lower than they are right now. But if the government were to create scholarship funds from the wealth of people with much more money, there could be a much larger increase in aggregate utility, because someone with 30 million doesn't add much more if they have 40 million, or 200 million, to begin with. They still have more money than they know what to do with.
I think this was a concept we had touched upon in one of our previous threads. My counter to it can still be seen there, but I will always maintain that an abundance of property does not make it any more justified to pilfer a certain amount of said property. Those people earned their money just like I earned mine, so why hold them to a different standard because they [presumably] worked harder?

A typical reply to this is usually involves invoking an example wherein $CORPORATE_HONCHO got where he is through extortion, lies, and falsehoods: in which case I can see no reason why he shouldn't get what's coming to him. The problem here is that many people love to assume this is the only road to success; that everyone in power is there today by building an empire based on extortion.

The second example I run across frequently is the issue of an inheretance, or claiming that it's justified to tax an estate because the recipients of that estate did not earn their money. It seems like a sound concept on the surface, but we have to remember that a Death Tax [like a Sales Tax!] is a double tax. That money was already taxed once when it came in, and now it's being taxed again whether you spend it [Sales Tax] or hoard it [Death Tax]. Double taxation is [rightfully so] prohibited by our Tax Code, yet we do it anyway.

Even so, there do need to be slight taxes on people in similar situations in order to pay for the essential services of government - police, military, etc. We can't just think of it as a few thousand dollars - multiply that few thousand by the amount of people who pay it, and that's a lot of money. A lot of money the government needs to function properly.
We can both agree that police, military, and courts are a legitimate function of our government. It is my belief that we should focus our effots on these three necessities, while examining reasonable avenues for other programs, such as road building and city maintenance.

Or the money to prevent murders? Or track down terrorists? And I don't know what your job is, but my guess is that it does contribute something to society.
A valid point but again, I don't see my government doing a particularly good job at these things. I'll concede that many of the results of this spending can't be made public, but Al-Qaeda is still alive and people still get shot in my city. I think we should focus on these concepts [crime, security] instead of allowing ourselves to be sidetracked by other things, like the war in Iraq [to illustrate this point in accordance with your second example] and the War on Drugs [the first].

The US government has proven at every turn to be fantastically irresponsible with the money it takes in. I see no reason to give it more.

That being said, it makes me uncomfortable to comment on your personal situation, because I don't know what it is. Also, comments in this realm that may be intended to be innocuous often become offensive. Please tell me if I said something to offend.
Fair enough. But my point here is that I'm much more productive to society sitting in a classroom and earning a degree [which is something I want to do] than a bum is by 'earning' a free bowl of soup.

There may be some people who do that, that's fine. But I tend to believe that the majority of poor people aren't poor because they blow all their money on drugs or like to be poor. It's because society fucked them over; there are more people than there are jobs, and they can't get those jobs. If the government helps support them, they can survive while continuing to get a job, or, at the very least, funnel that money back into the economy by buying food, medicine, etc.
I would venture to guess that the unemployment rate is a function of many things, but not the least of which is strenuous government regulation on industry; our minimum wage for example is such that employers can afford to do things like make all their applicants fill out an enormous personality test--a test that if you make the mistake of answering honestly results in your not getting the job. Employers have to be more picky now because they have to pay their register jockeys $5 an hour, and now the feds are looking to hike that rate again.

Major corporations are starting to outsource now because American labor is just impractical and expensive, especially considering the volume of labor they need done. Eliminating runaway government spending solves all of these problems; it allows us to lower the minimum wage and create more jobs.

What people don't destroy is their potential to contribute to society. Somebody may be an alcoholic, but they could be cured if they go to rehab. It may not have a hundred percent success rate, but anything is better than zero - letting them die while rich dilletantes crash three Mercedes and aren't accountable for their behavior because they've got the money to cheat the system and the police are too stretched out to fight their high powered lawyers.
Go to rehab? With what money? Mine? Fuck that. Look, I'm not trying to undermine anyone's compassion here; I'm not saying that these people deserve to die and I'm not saying they deserve to live in the conditions in which they are living now. What I am saying is it's not cool to take from me to cover everyone's ass from these situations. The fact of the matter is, the poverty rate in this country is, if memory serves, slightly over 10% of our population. Does it really take a significant share of the resources of the other 90% to feed and clothe them?!

In a purely capitalist society, for example, there is nothing wrong with you and, say, 10,000 of your closest friends forming a commune where you work to provide food and basic goods for each other, using the wages you earn at your job for charitable purposes. If you are really people of conscience and principle, no one should have a problem with this.

That's not a substantive qualm - it's argument by false analogy. You didn't isolate any specific reasons the synthesis should be rejected. My argument was that the flaws in each system can be repaired by taking aspects of each one and putting them together. Until you actually give reasons why this synthesis on its own wouldn't work, this analysis still stands.
This is hard to do since, as you mentioned above, I have no knowledge of your Metaphisical and/or Epistemological beliefs. Still, I do not see the failure in this analogy; flawed ingredients seldom make a working whole. God knows I've found my share of problems with it already; if you want my reasons why the 'synthesis wouldn't work' you need merely examine our posting histories in regards to each other.

Not necessarily true. At all. Read your own posts on the other thread we talked about this on. You said that company stores were an impediment to the free market and that the government would ban them. That means that the lack of government interference is not the same thing as a totally free market. Which is where the contradiction arises.
Bullshit. A monopoly wouldn't exist without people spending money hand over fist to buy whatever the company was selling. Furthermore, we're talking past each other when we speak of 'government interference.' I'm getting the impression that you're categorically including the concept of 'enforcement' with the concept of 'interference,' which is slightly off the mark.

Government interference should exist only when a contract has been breached or only when a corporation is initiating the use of force against its employees, the consumers, or any other entity you should care to name.

I like to deal with bad things by stopping them. These are easily preventable.
More power to you; really. I'm not being sarcastic here. If you want to stop these problems, the power lies within you. If someone can stand to gain ridiculous amounts of profit in a capitalist system and hoard the results of his labor, someone like you is cabable of standing to gain ridiculous amounts of money and distributing the results of your labor. Do what you want with your property, but goddamn it keep your hands off mine.

Not in the context of trusts and cartels. Industry leaders come together and say "Hey, do you know how we can make a killing? If we stop competing, and set the prices together!" That doesn't happen nowadays because of government regulation.
Yes, it's called 'collusion.'

But in a regulation-free market, this has empirically been the rule.
No, it's been the rule in an enforcement free market. Regulation in the context to which I refer to it is exasperating practices like corporate welfare and trade restrictions.

Then you just contradicted our earlier statement. I'll quote it here for more effect.


Yes you do! You just contradicted yourself. You said the government would ban company stores. But that means that the market isn't totally free of government regulation. You said that a market with cartels isn't a free market. That necessitates the second definition. "Philosophy is nothing without..."
That's just the enforcement-regulation dicotomy again. It's not a contradiction if you stop to think about it for a moment; a free market isn't very free if there's just one really big company selling everything. Hell, it's basically Communism. There should always be room for competition, but if it can't rise on its own merits, then too bad.

This is where the distinction of the coercive monopoly versus the natural monopoly comes into play. But, since I've already described the difference, I'll just leave it at that for now, unless an elaboration needs to be made.

First, quote the entire context of what I was saying. You skipped the logical connection between my statement and regulation of company stores.

Second, respond with logic and argument, not one-word answers. I pointed out a logical inconsistancy in your position, and basically just sort of thumb your nose at me.
I was answering your question; I think we both know why I feel it is not justified to fund welfare with my money. We've been over the concept several times already, and my reasoning for this one-word answer can be found by looking up and reading over just about any of my previous posts. You should know by now that I'm not very enthusiastic about repeating myself.

Breaking up monopolies--in some cases is legitimate because it is the initiation of force against the free market. Collecting welfare from me, likewise, is the initiation of force against my property.

I more or less answered this above. If the government can regulate trusts, where do you draw the line? Go back to my post before this one as to why you can't logically say the government can regulate cartels or company stores but can't give out welfare checks.
I think I answered to this above too, but if I'm wrong feel free to elaborate since I fail to see just how enforcing reasonable trade practices places any merit to the idea of pilfering from my pocketbook.

But what happens if that company starts doing all the bad shit to their workers I mentioned earlier? Does the govenrment step in?
Yes.

Oh, and for information's sake, when you say "constructive monopolies," do you mean the same thing that I do when I say "cartel?" I defined it earlier.
I don't know, I'll check. Maybe, who knows.

Why not? You didn't address anything I had to say. If this is the best you can do to defend objectivism, I'm fairly disappointed. Though not really suprised, I haven't found it a very defensible moral theory in general.
I'm done with you because, quite simply, you're failing to listen to reason, you're trying to justify your hackneyed attacks on Objectivism with apalling statements like "facts are not objective."

I haven't responded to you since that statement for a reason; it's all I need to see to validate my rejection of everything you have to say thereafter. Deleuze, on the other hand, is making some sense.

I'm done with you because, quite simply, you're failing to listen to reason, you're trying to justify your hackneyed attacks on Objectivism with apalling statements like "facts are not objective."

I haven't responded to you since that statement for a reason; it's all I need to see to validate my rejection of everything you have to say thereafter. Deleuze, on the other hand, is making some sense.
Okay, and I gave you a whole lists of reasons validating my statement. Which you did not respond to at all, despite the fact that:
A) the statement is true through logical reasoning
B) the statement is true by the definition of scientific method
C) the statement is true by empirical 'fact'

So it's all very well for you to say it's hackneyed, but a total dismissal of an argument based on both epistimology and general observation is pretty silly, especially given you didn't justify that dismissal at all.

Okay, that being said I'll make a few more arguments.

1) Objectivism defines freedom in an incoherent manner

There are two ways to look at this argument, just as there are (from a theoretical standpoint) essentially two ways to look at freedom. The first I've already stated earlier in the thread, but I'll repost it.

No matter what way you look at freedom it reduces to:

agent x is free from obstruction y to do/not do be/not be z

where x is the defined agent
y is the defined obstruction
z is the defined end

Negative liberty is the form of freedom most often associated with objectivism. Negative freedom states that:
x (an individual) is free from y (human coercion) to do z (revealed end)
This is clearly the most coherent understanding of objectivist theory. Individual are the preoccuping concern of objectivism, quite explicitly, and as you've already expounded, it is only 'revealed' ends that count.
So first of all we can see a few things here.

The first thing we notice is that there is no way to value (Z). It could be anything. Z could very well be the killing of other agents. So when a society/group of individuals works to restrain agent x from his end, they are reducing his freedom. So, if we say that freedom is paramount, we are in something of a dillema.

The second thing we notice is that there are two ways to increase freedom. The first is to eliminate Y(human obstruction). This is obviously what objectivism tries to do, and I think this is all very well.

However, it is also true that we can increase freedom by elimiating z (revealed ends). In this case, it could be so that agent x could live in a deeply oppressive society, and be as free as anyone in an objectivist state, as long as he did not have a preference for something forbidden.
Lets look at this another way. The agent lives under the Nazis. Many of his civil liberties are restricted. However, he only wants food and drink, which the Nazis do not forbid him. Thus, he is totally free under the Nazis, because none of his ends (Z) are forbidden to him.

This tells us three things, essentially.
First of all, that retreating to the 'inner citadel' (giving up 'wants', essentially) described by Berlin can make us free, no matter the political system.

The second is that objectivism has no way to say that community liberty is connected to individual liberty- no matter the extent that my fellow citizens are oppressed, as long as I am not directly oppressed, I am free. This runs very counter to our general understanding of freedom.

The third is that there is no way to measure the value of different freedoms. If I have no want for religious freedom, but want to drive very fast, then traffic laws reduce my freedom more than a ban on religious practice. (We can also look at this from the perspective of an area of private space- if we have no way to measure different 'freedoms', then our area of freedom reduces by the same amount no matter which freedom is reduced).

The second way to look at freedom is from the perspective of positive freedom. Positive freedom reduces to
agent x(the true individual as opposed to the revealed individual) is free from y(obstructions from human sources, internal sources, and enviromental sources) to do/not do be/not be z(true end: telos, in aristotelian language. In common language, that which is truly best for the individual).

Interestingly enough, objectivism, while rarely associated with positive freedom, is possibly more coherent from this angle. This is because objectivism makes human freedom the true end of all people; regardless of what we think we want, what we really want, were we to truly know ourselves, is freedom.

So objectivism states, in this context, that a person is free when:

the true individual is free from human obstruction to do/not do be/not be free.

at first glance this looks fine. However, of course we realize that the objective z(freedom) is not properly defined. There is no way, as I see it, to define freedom in this context without descending into circular reasoning.

however, were we to do some how escape this logical trap, we would still have some serious problems. The most important one is the denial of objectivist reasoning itself. Given this definition, it would be fine to interfere with individual ends, so long as those ends were not directed expressly towards freedom. It is impossible to look into this problem very deeply, however, because there is no way to define z (freedom) in this context, at least as I see it, without quickly becoming incoherent.

Property is an extention of the self; property is what we can point to and say "this is what I have for the work I've done."

My possesions do not define me.

Well, you do have a point here. In fairness, though, we did agree to examine Utilitarianism vs. Objectivism, so all I really had to go on at the time were resources outlining Utilitarianism itself. If you vary from Utilitarianism in any significant regard, be it Metaphysically or Epistemologically, I had no way of knowing this at the time, so the best I could do was respond against their traditional definitions.

If the object here is to attack or attempt to discredit your Metaphysical or Epistemological beliefs, then I first must know what they are.
I thought the object was to examine the application of these theories to political ethics.

But anyway, my epistemological views are again kind of a mash-up. I do believe that facts are objective in a broader sense; however, I don't think we should treat them that way. Why? Because they're unquestionably perceived differently by different people. There is one correct interpretation of events, but it's near impossible to know which interpretation is that correct one. Therefore, although reality may be objective, it can't be treated as such. I personally think that if facts weren't objective, utilitarianism (even in the traditional sense) couldn't function very well.

I gave a brief outline of my metaphysical ideas when I first explained my permutation of rule utilitarianism.

I think this was a concept we had touched upon in one of our previous threads. My counter to it can still be seen there, but I will always maintain that an abundance of property does not make it any more justified to pilfer a certain amount of said property. Those people earned their money just like I earned mine, so why hold them to a different standard because they [presumably] worked harder?
In utilitarian language, because taxing that wealth would provide greater overall utility for society, as a rule, whereas taxing those who need all of their money in order to contribute the most to society would only have a minimal tax burden. In Objectivist language, because once they have a certain level of money, taxing it doesn't hurt their ability to exercise their rational freedom.

A typical reply to this is usually involves invoking an example wherein $CORPORATE_HONCHO got where he is through extortion, lies, and falsehoods: in which case I can see no reason why he shouldn't get what's coming to him. The problem here is that many people love to assume this is the only road to success; that everyone in power is there today by building an empire based on extortion.
There are tons of honest businesspeople; if I didn't think there were any, I wouldn't be a capitalist. Taking money from them is justified because their road to success, however honest, involved accruing profits which inherently come at the expense of other people. That degree of inequality is inevitable to an extent; there need to be incentives in order to encourage success and a desire to better oneself. However, it doesn't need to be irrational to the extent that it allows for much more poverty than could otherwise exist. At that level of wealth, taxes don't really hurt the capitalist, but that money could do wonders for society as a whole. It's a compromise doesn't hurt anyone.

The second example I run across frequently is the issue of an inheretance, or claiming that it's justified to tax an estate because the recipients of that estate did not earn their money. It seems like a sound concept on the surface, but we have to remember that a Death Tax [like a Sales Tax!] is a double tax. That money was already taxed once when it came in, and now it's being taxed again whether you spend it [Sales Tax] or hoard it [Death Tax]. Double taxation is [rightfully so] prohibited by our Tax Code, yet we do it anyway.
I haven't studied the Tax Code to any degree of depth, so I can't respond to this very well in economic terms. I read an article at one point that explained why that interpretation of the inheritance tax was false; I'll see if I can find it again. Morally, however, it's justified for all the same reasons any other tax is.

We can both agree that police, military, and courts are a legitimate function of our government. It is my belief that we should focus our effots on these three necessities, while examining reasonable avenues for other programs, such as road building and city maintenance.
That's fine in principle; focus is a broadly defined term. However, I think that because governments were created to better the lives of their citizens, the government isn't doing its job if it's just doing those three and change things.

A valid point but again, I don't see my government doing a particularly good job at these things. I'll concede that many of the results of this spending can't be made public, but Al-Qaeda is still alive and people still get shot in my city. I think we should focus on these concepts [crime, security] instead of allowing ourselves to be sidetracked by other things, like the war in Iraq [to illustrate this point in accordance with your second example] and the War on Drugs [the first].

The US government has proven at every turn to be fantastically irresponsible with the money it takes in. I see no reason to give it more.
We both agreed no system is perfect. In a democracy, sometimes the people elect bad leaders. The current President is one such example. He let al-Qaeda get away by not spending enough time in Afghanistan and getting sidetracked in Iraq so soon. But that's not a reason to condemn the entire government structure. If you look at things in the broader historical sense, the US government has done pretty damn good things for its citizens.

Fair enough. But my point here is that I'm much more productive to society sitting in a classroom and earning a degree [which is something I want to do] than a bum is by 'earning' a free bowl of soup.
Thus, you shouldn't have to pay as much tax as you do. Liberal utilitarians don't want to increases taxes for EVERYONE. It's stupid to deal in absolutes. It just intuitively makes more sense that people who have so many resources that losing more wouldn't affect them at all should have to pay more.

I would venture to guess that the unemployment rate is a function of many things, but not the least of which is strenuous government regulation on industry; our minimum wage for example is such that employers can afford to do things like make all their applicants fill out an enormous personality test--a test that if you make the mistake of answering honestly results in your not getting the job. Employers have to be more picky now because they have to pay their register jockeys $5 an hour, and now the feds are looking to hike that rate again.

Major corporations are starting to outsource now because American labor is just impractical and expensive, especially considering the volume of labor they need done. Eliminating runaway government spending solves all of these problems; it allows us to lower the minimum wage and create more jobs.
I don't agree with your analysis of the minimum wage. If companies have to pay more for each worker, then they have less money to spend on stupid personality tests. If there's a demand for work, they won't waste time on dumb things like that. There will always be stores that need "register jockeys" in this country; the service industry isn't gettting outsourced as I can't buy food from a restaurant in India for lunch today. I think a lot of unemployment problems can actually be solved by a. giving people the resources to get training in a job that needs more people and b. increasing government spending on public works to provide more people employment. The (b) has an incredible track record historically in terms of effects on employment levels.

Not only that, but let's say we were to lower the minimum wage. Some people may be employed for that level. But our current minimum wage is barely a subsistence wage. It's hard to survive making that amount of money. Lowering it wouldn't help anyone, because the supposed beneficiaries would still be in a situation that they couldn't survive in.

Go to rehab? With what money? Mine? Fuck that. Look, I'm not trying to undermine anyone's compassion here; I'm not saying that these people deserve to die and I'm not saying they deserve to live in the conditions in which they are living now. What I am saying is it's not cool to take from me to cover everyone's ass from these situations.
If they don't deserve to die, why isn't it cool to take your money? Not only that, but most of the money you pay, most likely, doesn't go to welfare. Further, welfare provides a demonstrable benefit to you. It reduces crime by eliminating incentives to steal and/or murder, and would everyone out, including you or me, if something went horribly wrong in our lives.

The fact of the matter is, the poverty rate in this country is, if memory serves, slightly over 10% of our population. Does it really take a significant share of the resources of the other 90% to feed and clothe them?!
There are more things to survival than food and clothing, drink and medicine being two good examples. You also want to make the people self-sufficient, so there should be enough resources to help them get jobs. This is one of those things that would require some calculations to figure out.

In a purely capitalist society, for example, there is nothing wrong with you and, say, 10,000 of your closest friends forming a commune where you work to provide food and basic goods for each other, using the wages you earn at your job for charitable purposes. If you are really people of conscience and principle, no one should have a problem with this.
Except that this would never work, for a variety of reasons., Communism, when surrounded by capitalism, will always fail, even if it's not state-sponsored, because the acquisitive potential in a capitalist system would cause people to try to take more than their fair share of the commune's resources. Also, I don't think pure communism is a particularly good system; people should be rewarded for their efforts. But in order to be a part of a cooperative governmental society, everyone has to pitch in to help out the collective good.

Even if it worked in that localized degree, government intervention would help a hell of a lot more people.
This is hard to do since, as you mentioned above, I have no knowledge of your Metaphisical and/or Epistemological beliefs. Still, I do not see the failure in this analogy; flawed ingredients seldom make a working whole. God knows I've found my share of problems with it already; if you want my reasons why the 'synthesis wouldn't work' you need merely examine our posting histories in regards to each other.
Meh. The fact that this argument continues implies that neither of us have been convinced that the other has pointed out a fatal flaw.

Bullshit. A monopoly wouldn't exist without people spending money hand over fist to buy whatever the company was selling. Furthermore, we're talking past each other when we speak of 'government interference.' I'm getting the impression that you're categorically including the concept of 'enforcement' with the concept of 'interference,' which is slightly off the mark.
I see where that's coming from. I did include enforcement with interference.

Government interference should exist only when a contract has been breached or only when a corporation is initiating the use of force against its employees, the consumers, or any other entity you should care to name.
You have to define those terms first. In my mind, a CEO is using force against the homeless by placing billions of dollars in a bank account while the homeless guy starves to death.

More power to you; really. I'm not being sarcastic here. If you want to stop these problems, the power lies within you. If someone can stand to gain ridiculous amounts of profit in a capitalist system and hoard the results of his labor, someone like you is cabable of standing to gain ridiculous amounts of money and distributing the results of your labor. Do what you want with your property, but goddamn it keep your hands off mine.
Except that solution will never effectively address the problem. It's too optimistic to think that enough truly philanthropic people will become the world's business leaders to deal with poverty on anywhere near the same scale that government can. There's a reason why most business leaders donated more money to Bush than the poor.

That's just the enforcement-regulation dicotomy again. It's not a contradiction if you stop to think about it for a moment; a free market isn't very free if there's just one really big company selling everything. Hell, it's basically Communism. There should always be room for competition, but if it can't rise on its own merits, then too bad.
You miss the elegance of my initial example by getting caught up in the tangent. When a company begins to pay ridiculously low wages because they've taken over the market (we can say even on their own merits) you said lower in this post that the government would step in to change that. However, how is that justified? The functioning of the free market caused those wages to go to where they were, so it should be the CEO's right to keep the profits accrued in this manner. But in doing so, he's preventing the workers from getting just compensation for their work. The government's operations here are not to protect the free market. It's to help their citizens. And you've said repeatedly that the government could do this in your government. How is this consistant?

I was answering your question; I think we both know why I feel it is not justified to fund welfare with my money. We've been over the concept several times already, and my reasoning for this one-word answer can be found by looking up and reading over just about any of my previous posts. You should know by now that I'm not very enthusiastic about repeating myself.
My argument wasn't about welfare. My argument was the contradiction I wrote about in the line above this one and probably expressed better in an earlier post.

I think I answered to this above too, but if I'm wrong feel free to elaborate since I fail to see just how enforcing reasonable trade practices places any merit to the idea of pilfering from my pocketbook.
Because it justified state intervention to help their populace.

Yes.
I talked about this above.

I thought the object was to examine the application of these theories to political ethics.

But anyway, my epistemological views are again kind of a mash-up. I do believe that facts are objective in a broader sense; however, I don't think we should treat them that way. Why? Because they're unquestionably perceived differently by different people. There is one correct interpretation of events, but it's near impossible to know which interpretation is that correct one. Therefore, although reality may be objective, it can't be treated as such. I personally think that if facts weren't objective, utilitarianism (even in the traditional sense) couldn't function very well.

I gave a brief outline of my metaphysical ideas when I first explained my permutation of rule utilitarianism.
And this, my friend, is the root of just about every philosophical disagreement we're ever going to have. I don't understand people who can't bring themselves to call a spade a spade; in a political or ethical sense these are generally the same people that don't want to call a lunatic a lunatic: it's a very common trend among liberals. Those Columbine shooters weren't just fucking nuts, it had to be those violent video games!

To an Objectivist, murder is murder, rape is rape, and theft is theft. It is perfectly possible to know which interpretation is the correct one, if you apply your intellect correctly and level your head with the facts of reality. What I see when I read something like that is a statement to the effect of: "I'm not going to trust myself about the conclusions I reach about reality, using my senses and my mind." I am dismayed at the statement on a number of levels.

In utilitarian language, because taxing that wealth would provide greater overall utility for society, as a rule, whereas taxing those who need all of their money in order to contribute the most to society would only have a minimal tax burden. In Objectivist language, because once they have a certain level of money, taxing it doesn't hurt their ability to exercise their rational freedom.
We've already been over this both in this thread and in our previous one. The arguments posted here [probably by both of us] are beginning to bear a strong physical resemblance to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

There are tons of honest businesspeople; if I didn't think there were any, I wouldn't be a capitalist. Taking money from them is justified because their road to success, however honest, involved accruing profits which inherently come at the expense of other people.
Examine what you just said here. You said, in effect: "Honest businesspeople earn their fortunes at the expense of others." This is not honesty; an honest capitalist engages in trade, not sacrifice. If he pays his employees a decent wage and he doesn't gouge the customers, he's not exploiting anyone.

That degree of inequality is inevitable to an extent; there need to be incentives in order to encourage success and a desire to better oneself. However, it doesn't need to be irrational to the extent that it allows for much more poverty than could otherwise exist. At that level of wealth, taxes don't really hurt the capitalist, but that money could do wonders for society as a whole. It's a compromise [that] doesn't hurt anyone.
Again, we've been over this. Just because something can be done doesn't mean it should be done. Sure, maybe it would be a better use of Bill Gates' money to put up a soup kitchen in every county, but is that--or should that be my decision to make? Hell no.

I haven't studied the Tax Code to any degree of depth, so I can't respond to this very well in economic terms. I read an article at one point that explained why that interpretation of the inheritance tax was false; I'll see if I can find it again. Morally, however, it's justified for all the same reasons any other tax is.
Wait, you're saying a double tax is morally justified? How can you sleep at night? If the government is allowed to tax my money when it comes in, then tax it again when it goes out no matter what I do with it, then basically the stipulation is "there is nothing you can do with your property that won't result in us taking more." You'll pardon me if that makes me want to axe kick a senator in the spine.

That's fine in principle; focus is a broadly defined term. However, I think that because governments were created to better the lives of their citizens, the government isn't doing its job if it's just doing those three and change things.
No, actually, governments were put together to solidify control of the region and basically to pit it against other governments for resources and livestock and such. I can pretty safely guarantee that most early governments weren't what we'd call 'liberal' today, nor were they likely very interested in 'bettering the lives of their citizens.'

We both agreed no system is perfect. In a democracy, sometimes the people elect bad leaders. The current President is one such example. He let al-Qaeda get away by not spending enough time in Afghanistan and getting sidetracked in Iraq so soon. But that's not a reason to condemn the entire government structure. If you look at things in the broader historical sense, the US government has done pretty damn good things for its citizens.
Oh, I agree. I agree completely--and the reason we've done so many great things for our citizens is because we're allowing them to better themselves to an extent that is not possible in nearly any other nation on the planet. However, I will always be interested in making things better. For me.

Thus, you shouldn't have to pay as much tax as you do. Liberal utilitarians don't want to increases taxes for EVERYONE.
You know, I find it interesting how the Left loves to plead to our emotions on one hand and say "but we're all people! Why can't we get along?!" on one hand and then turn around with their next breath and tell me we all need to be treated differently and held to different standards based on how much money we make and what we choose to do with it.

It's stupid to deal in absolutes.
The feeling I'm getting here is that you're not actually trying to say "it's stupid to deal in absolutes," since reality is absolute and we deal with it every day; this is a much broader statement than I think you intended. What you should be saying is "It's stupid to drop the context" of whatever fact, be it physical or moral, that you are dealing with.

It just intuitively makes more sense that people who have so many resources that losing more wouldn't affect them at all should have to pay more.
If it makes such sense I'd be able to follow it. I can't make heads or tails of what you're trying to say here.


I don't agree with your analysis of the minimum wage. If companies have to pay more for each worker, then they have less money to spend on stupid personality tests.
Tell that to every entry level position I applied for last summer. Also, the costs of the tests are negligible; they just make a whole bunch of copies of it--I can't even believe you'd say something like this; it doesn't make any sense.

If there's a demand for work, they won't waste time on dumb things like that. There will always be stores that need "register jockeys" in this country; the service industry isn't gettting outsourced as I can't buy food from a restaurant in India for lunch today.
Speaking as someone who works in the service industry, I should hope we don't all have to resort to this to make a living.

I think a lot of unemployment problems can actually be solved by a. giving people the resources to get training in a job that needs more people and b. increasing government spending on public works to provide more people employment. The (b) has an incredible track record historically in terms of effects on employment levels.
Ah, the old 'simplest way out' theory. Give the government money to create jobs. Occasionally, I'll admit, something probably comes up every once in a while to justify this, if perhaps we needed a whole lot of labor for a big--and most of all worthwhile--project. A good example of a government job nowadays would be something like a recycling sorter, which is more or less a funadmentally makework job with no real contribution to... anything. Here, again, you're assuming that the action in and of itself will produce 'utility' or 'happiness' or 'preference satisfaction,' without regard to its effects--we have to raise taxes to create those jobs and keep them up to maintain them. We have to, in effect, turn to the government and ask them to solve the problem for us. Fundamentally this appeals to the same argument we've already been over dozens of times--taking money from my pocket or food from my table to provide for someone else. I think we both know where an argument like this is going to lead.

Not only that, but let's say we were to lower the minimum wage. Some people may be employed for that level. But our current minimum wage is barely a subsistence wage. It's hard to survive making that amount of money. Lowering it wouldn't help anyone, because the supposed beneficiaries would still be in a situation that they couldn't survive in.
You're only looking at half of the picture here. The other half, which you're ignoring, is the elimination of runaway government spending and the abolition of the income tax. Without these things, we could have employers charging folks $3 or $4 an hour on paper, and they'd be taking home just about the same amount of cash as they are now. For example, I make $7.25 an hour and I work 40 hours a week. Generally when my check comes, I've got about 85-90 hours on it, 5 or 10 of which are overtime. That's $580 gross pay for the first 80 hours, and my overtime grosses at about $100 on a good check. That's 680 gross; I'm lucky if I take more than 510 home. What the fuck does the government need with a quarter of my paycheck?!

Obviously your argument to this would be something like "tax the hell out of the rich," but wheres the logic in that? Liberals love to tell me that "we're all people" and "why can't we all get along?" and "don't discriminate," then they turn around and try to feed me this shit about how rich people need to give us our money back; how tyhey should be treated differently because of the amount of money they make.

If they don't deserve to die, why isn't it cool to take your money? Not only that, but most of the money you pay, most likely, doesn't go to welfare. Further, welfare provides a demonstrable benefit to you. It reduces crime by eliminating incentives to steal and/or murder, and would everyone out, including you or me, if something went horribly wrong in our lives.
That's a nice way to think about it, but the reality is Welfare more than likely has no effect on crime at all. I lived in downtown Akron for a year and I'm here to tell you, welfare didn't help any of those cats. Go check out the streets sometimes--go live in it and then come back here and tell me how many great things welfare is doing for the poor.

There are more things to survival than food and clothing, drink and medicine being two good examples.
Don't take everything so literally. You know what I meant.

You also want to make the people self-sufficient, so there should be enough resources to help them get jobs. This is one of those things that would require some calculations to figure out.
People already are self-sufficient, they don't need my help with that. And yes, they need jobs, but jobs should be earned, not given. In this country, employers have this crazy idea that they should only hire people that actually make sense to hire.

Except that this would never work, for a variety of reasons., Communism, when surrounded by capitalism, will always fail, even if it's not state-sponsored, because the acquisitive potential in a capitalist system...
Stop right here. 'Acquisitive potential,' or more accurately, 'acquisitive propensity' is going to exist in any society. It's part of our nature to want more and better things for ourselves. Don't blame the system for creating something that was already there to begin with.

would cause people to try to take more than their fair share of the commune's resources. Also, I don't think pure communism is a particularly good system; people should be rewarded for their efforts. But in order to be a part of a cooperative governmental society, everyone has to pitch in to help out the collective good.
And we do 'pitch in' when we help ourselves and we do it right, as opposed to wasting our time and bending over backwards to help out our neighbors too. 'Collective good,' eww.

You have to define those terms first. In my mind, a CEO is using force against the homeless by placing billions of dollars in a bank account while the homeless guy starves to death.
What? Are you serious? You've got some explaining to do.


Except that solution will never effectively address the problem. It's too optimistic to think that enough truly philanthropic people will become the world's business leaders to deal with poverty on anywhere near the same scale that government can. There's a reason why most business leaders donated more money to Bush than the poor.
Examine this statement closely. You're basically telling me that because these people don't or wouldn't do it on their own, the government should make them do it because it's 'right'. Every time in human history that governments have been able to make someone do something because it was 'right', things have ended poorly for more or less everyone.

Of course they donated their money to Bush--I wouldn't have done it but its their money. In a Capitalist system, the fact that they have this money means that society has traded with them. It always kills me when people complain about how a company spends 'their' money, many people like to assume that the money is still sort of theirs even though they've already checked out and they've got a receipt and everything. I've got news for you folks: when that money leaves your hands, by damn, it's gone. You shouldn't have a right to decide what happens after that, period. It would be like if my neighbor sold me a playstation and I went over there to whine about all the weed he bought with the money.

You miss the elegance of my initial example by getting caught up in the tangent. When a company begins to pay ridiculously low wages because they've taken over the market (we can say even on their own merits) you said lower in this post that the government would step in to change that. However, how is that justified? The functioning of the free market caused those wages to go to where they were, so it should be the CEO's right to keep the profits accrued in this manner. But in doing so, he's preventing the workers from getting just compensation for their work. The government's operations here are not to protect the free market. It's to help their citizens. And you've said repeatedly that the government could do this in your government. How is this consistant?

Easy. The concept of welfare and the concept of intervention in the first example rest on completely different bases. In the first example, the government is protecting someone from harmful opposition. They're not--or at least they shouldn't be--taking anything that the CEO doesn't already have, since hopefully he hasn't been running things like this for any length of time [since, as you said, they've risen on their own merits]. In the second, they're actively taking money from me and from the aforementioned rich guy to pay for someone else's misfortune. Once again this falls back to that same argument, an argument which we've ironically discovered the root of.

I really think it's gettin' to be about that time; this argument is getting pretty circular.

Hey Deleuze: http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showpost.php?p=9071459&postcount=92.

Just noticed this. Enjoy!

Ok, to begin with I better acknowledge that noone has replied to my earlier post re: definition of freedom in regards to objectivism. I'm not really sure why, as it's a criticism of 'liberalism' in general that's been made several times, in fairly high (academic) profile. Certainly Charle Taylor's criticism has merited intense discussion.

That being said, I'm going to put forward a political theory called 'Civic Repulicansim'. This theory finds it's roots in an underlooked area of political philosophy, and is descended from Aristotle, Machiavellie, Montesquies, Heidegger and Arendt.

Basically Civic Republicanism takes something of a middle ground between liberalism (Locke, Mills, Rawls, etc) and communiataurianism (Sandel is probably the best known example of this. In as much as it rejects positive rights theories in general, it is also opposed to Hegel and Hegelians (including Marx and socialists in general).

The object of this theory is to develope a consistent theory of politics which both acknowledges individual rights, as well as individual duties.

This will be a brief introduction, I will flesh it out more comprehensively later.

Probably the first thing we must look at is the civic republican's idea of freedom versus slavery. To begin with, we need to go back to the traditional 'Maginot Line' which defines liberal ideas of freedom.

As discussed above, this means that an actor is free when:
actor x is free from human obstruction to do/not do be/not be a stated preference. This is the definition of freedom seen in liberalism in general, including objectivism.

The example I want to draw here is that of a given actor. This actor is a slave: that is to say, another actor could interfere in any of his actions at any time. However, this 'owner' choose not to interfere: as such, the slave is able to do anything he wants to do. However, this slave also knows that at any time, his preferred actions may be interfered with.

Let us compare this to another actor who is free of ownership. This actor, like the slave, can do anything he pleases. However, he knows he will never be interfered with.

The liberal/objectivist definition of liberty would tell us these two actors are equally free: neither experiences intereference with his prefered action.

A civic republican, on the other hand, does not see the 'slave' as free at all: he belives he could be interfered with, and as such he is qualitatively NOT free. We are not free unless we believe ourselves to be free.

This leads us to the next point: freedom versus the law. We know that liberals/objectivist say we are naturally free: outside of a legal framework, we are free to do or be however we want to be. This is evident in all liberal philosophy.

However, this is not true for the civic republican. He realizes that outside of a legal framework, each actor realizes he could be interfered with at any time. His freedom of action is not guaranteed: he is deeply vunerable to the actions of others. So, in effect, he is in the same place as the slave: able to do what he pleases, but knowing he could be interfered with at any time.

So how does the civic republican become 'free'? He enters into a legal and civil society that guarantees this freedom. He is not free outside of a society that guarantees his freedom. We should contrast this to the liberal idea of freedom: laws, for the liberal, necessarily REDUCE individual freedom.

We then conclude that an individual is not only more free in society, but that society actually CREATES this freedom through law and a society which recognizes this law.

Okay that's pretty good for a start. I will flesh this out in the next few days. Any comments or criticisms should be limited to what I have actually discussed here, not what this actually entails, because I will discuss the ramifactions of this theory further on.

I hope at the least you will find this interesting.

Easy. The concept of welfare and the concept of intervention in the first example rest on completely different bases. In the first example, the government is protecting someone from harmful opposition. They're not--or at least they shouldn't be--taking anything that the CEO doesn't already have, since hopefully he hasn't been running things like this for any length of time [since, as you said, they've risen on their own merits]. In the second, they're actively taking money from me and from the aforementioned rich guy to pay for someone else's misfortune. Once again this falls back to that same argument, an argument which we've ironically discovered the root of.

What's the difference? In your case, the governemnt is interfering with your property (your right to dispose of property as you will) and in the other case they are interfere with the corporations right to dispose of ITS property as it wills.

In the traditional libertarian/objectivism idea of 'just property', a property is justly aquired if it is aquired without 'force or fraud' (i.e. Nozick's "transferrance of justice", I can't remember the paper of the top of my head). A corporation could certainly aquire a monopoly without force or fraud, just as you make your paycheck without force or fraud. How then could a government intervene without interfereing against a group of individuals who've aquired their property fairly without simply doing it for the good of society?

Unless I'm totally confused here: Are you saying it IS ok for property rights to be interfered with for the good of society if the situation warrants?