Life as the Standard of Value: Ayn Rand's Proof with Harry Binswanger
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- Опубликовано: 17 июн 2021
- What exactly is Ayn Rand’s proof of man’s life as the moral standard? This talk gives the full answer, step-by-step. A brief concluding section analyzes the mistakes in the arguments by Hume and 20th-century philosophers that purport to show that morality is not subject to reason, logic or proof.
Recorded on May 16, 2020 as part of OCON Live! 2020
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Always great to hear from Dr. Binswanger
Yes
The foundation of good is the truth. The foundation of evil is the lie.
He is probably my favourite Objectivist philosopher today. He is always lazer-sharp.
Reduction 11:36
Value 13:55, 22:06
Standard 34:11
Time 59:14
I applaud you, Dr. Binswanger
Great analogy Harry! Following your metaphor, in addition to knowing the ALTRSM-9 virus well, we have to be good at prophylaxis, how to stay immune, potential vaccines and intense treatment for those who develop an advanced stage of the disease.
What one book or source by Rand can I buy that best presents her argument in full? Something that is non-fiction and more formal, that can be used for citation. Thanks.
for the new intellectual , best non fiction ayn rand philosophy
Objectivism the philosophy of ayn rand, written by leonard peikoff, intellectual heir of rand, gives a scholarly and comprehensive overview of objectivism
@@nisa-wk7gm So this is better than Rand's own writing, at least from an academic perspective?
@@neoepicurean3772 I prefer "The Virtue of Selfishness" by Ayn Rand, and, "Philosophy Who Needs It?" by Ayn Rand. Both are short books which you can get thru pretty easily, but are packed with knowledge.
@@neoepicurean3772 Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology is all you need to induce the rest. But if you want metaphysics through to aesthetics, use Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand as he puts it all in one book. Alternatively, be honest and have integrity and read all of her books if you actually want to learn from her.
The issues isn't whether Peikoff is better than Rand, but the issue is your request to have 5 different fields of philosophy compressed into a single book.
Who is Harry's wife? He mentioned her upcoming book that explains that you can't weigh values vs disvalues.
Jean Moroney
@@AndrewMcLay274 Thank you!
So what you’re saying is that Kant, being dutiful, is full of duty, which is phonetically equivalent to being full of doody?
Howdy Doody.
28:48 If a vegetative man begins to act, they will create either entropy or negentropy but they cannot create stasis from a vegetative posture. Any subsequent action would create further change to those initial actions. The initial action creates change and thus stasis evaporates and can never be reinstated because the initial action created change and subsequent changes cause chaos. You cannot have chaos without three actions. #DailyLlamaProof?
the initial action created change and any subsequent attempts to cause stasis only cause chaos. *Edit*
If that's how you view viruses then how do you view prions? It seems more appropriate to call them 'anti-life'.
Who is John Galt? The answer is people who have consciously decided that there is no time value to act in society. Ayn wrote about this phenomena but most don’t understand she was writing about the end of the process and not the beginning. The beginning starts in underprivileged communities where their people drop out. A very large swath of the African American population started this Libertarian trend many years ago and it is seeping upwards as we hear people like Elon Musk make statements that the government needs to stay out of corporate decisions. That comment was the modern beginning of her writings.
Altruism is not possible. There is no possible way of doing good without benefitting. Even if there is no economic or social gain, there is still the internal feeling of doing good and that is benefitting the supposed altruistic person. This mechanism isn’t an outward attempt at doing good. It is an internal attempt at proving to the outward world that the individual behind the action is good. It’s a narcissistic excuse to feel good and placate ones ego at the expense of reality.
36:02
23:23
Do a video about the Libertarian response to Edward Bernays concepts of population control. It’s the designed society we are living in and the subject needs to be thrust into the zeitgeist
4:02 Isn’t the point of a proof that you want to know your theory of ethics is correct? Isn’t it the case that you can’t know it is correct until you prove it? Wouldn’t this be the case even if we were a culture like Ancient Greece, which had a better implicit philosophy? Wouldn’t the Greeks only know that they had good moral habits once they explicitly identified the facts which made their actions good? Isn’t a proof of the objectivist ethics one of the main things even a non-philosopher should understand so that he actually understands for himself what he should do with his life? Wouldn’t people still need a proof even if they did not suffer from confusions such as the is-ought problem? Obviously the is-ought problem changes the way you may present a proof to an audience suffering from it, but that does not change the need for a proof. Perhaps Dr. Binswanger just misspoke.
I don't think he misspoke, I think he was being tongue-in-cheek, he was stating that objectivism is inductive and in a sense self-proving as you attempt to wish to prove things requires that you want things to be objective. I think he was just making a joke that it's not as obvious as one would hope and that it needs to be stated for the people sitting in the back.
Reason is progressive. Man increasingly learns proofs and the method of proof. When philosophy started in ancient Greece, man had 200,000 years of pre-philosophical experience and reasoning. Philosophy didnt start from an empty mind. The Greeks _gradually, step-by-step, progressed beyond faith, tradition and myth. It didnt happen in a blinding thunderbolt from Zeus.
_Discovery Of The Mind in Greek Philosophy And Literature_-Bruno Snell
I believe there is a book, _Before Philosophy_.
Isn't preaching altruism really just preaching obedience? If one is to sacrifice oneself and reason is man's means of self-interest, or of survival, then the sacrifice of reason is the essence of sacrifice and to obey is to sacrifice one's own judgement. To be altruist is to serve and to serve is to treat whom one serves as master or superior to oneself, who is someone one obeys of course. To be altruist is to be obedient to others, in treating others as one's masters to oneself. It calls for a society of sadomasochists, as if there is any love in any sense, of man, involved. Seriously, I guess we serve each other best by getting stupid. Sacrifice your mind in the name of service to mankind, as if being stupid serves man somehow, mankind the species of fools who rely upon each other to keep things stupid. If altruism means the sacrifice of your mind, then it calls for men to serve mankind by being willfully stupid.
It was good, but I did not hear or see a proof...?
The basic flaw of Rand's argument is an equivocation fallacy for what she means by "life."
Early in her argument, she defines life as mere survival. "The standard is the organism's life, or: that which is required for the organism's survival." Reason is valued merely as a means for promoting our survival.
But then later in her argument, she flips this. Reason is no longer a tool for survival, but survival a tool for reason. Switching the standard from "survival" to "survival of a rational being," Rand denounces people who focus on "merely physical survival" and are satisfied with living as a brute or sycophant. Our survival is only useful insofar as it lets us be rational.
Rand presented life as the standard of value. But in reality, by "life" she means "a GOOD life." It's a circular standard, pretending to be a method for determining what is good and evil, but requiring us to already KNOW what is good and evil to apply the method.
Where did she claim that survival is a tool for reason?
The standard is survival and survival of a rational being at the same time, because the second is a sub-classification of the first (for human beings specifically). If one chooses to live, one should choose to act upon one's basic tool of survival, which for human beings is their rational faculty.
@@luukzwart115 That's my functional description of what she does and the logic of her argument.
As you said, "survival of a rational being" is a subset of survival in general. If the standard is survival, with reason as only having instrumental value (which Rand claimed), then we should be indifferent between one subset and the other. The only standard would be "which allows me to live longer," and that can change depending on the circumstance.
But if the standard is "survival of a rational being," then reason no longer has mere instrumental value, but now also has inherent value, as part of the end itself. Perhaps reason is more often than not the best tool of survival we have, but if it merely has instrumental value, we should be willing to give it up the moment it is no longer useful.
This is why Rand contradicts herself. There are cases she admires where someone might purposefully shorten their life which she finds admirable and heroic because someone refuses to give up on reason. This is why she denounces "mere physical survival" and the lives of brutes and sycophants, which would not make any sense is survival really were the standard. The one moment she praises survival, the next she denounces it!
As I said, this is because he real standard isn't "life," but "a GOOD life." She is effectively begging the question, pretending to be logically deducing her ethical theory from first principles, but on closer examination, it is shown she was fudging the numbers and had merely assumed one system of ethics was correct without proving it. It's like someone telling you they built a perpetual motion machine, but then hiding where they installed the battery.
@@JudgeSabo Reason (with sense perception at it's base) is the only tool to know and how to know to act in reality to survive. I don't see in which circumstance reason would be unsufficient (no longer useful) to survive other than a setting in which survival isn't possible at all.
@@luukzwart115 Issue with that stance is that Rand believes other animals are able to survive without reason, living on instinct. So clearly it IS possible for how she is defining her terms.
Further, Rand's notion of what is "rational" is also begging the question for certain values. Rand believes that a thief and a liar lives irrationally. Maybe that is generally true, but it certainly isn't universally true. In certain circumstances, thieves and liars might actual thrive better than the industrious or the honest. Certainly if we look at the long list of dictators in human society, we find plenty of very evil people who nevertheless lived very long lives. Did they live "irrationally"? Ayn Rand would say they were, and would condemn them, despite the fact that their choices let them live a long time at a high quality of life.
Different species have different means of survival yes, so man should adhere to it's own means of survival (reason) just as other animals adhere to theirs in order to pursue life. I hope you agree instinct is obviously not man's means of survival as compared to reason.
Life Is overvalued isn't it.
Values are possible and needed because conditional life requires action to continue. Beyond life, values are impossible.
Life is merely an alternative to non-life, that's all. You should not ascribe to it a value that you would not ascribe to the other.
You are not considering the paradoxical nature of the brain. You are working from the left hemisphere’s view, understanding of the world. Research Dr Iain Mc Gilchrist’s work.
Now how exactly is a brain paradoxical? Wouldn't that mean they cannot exist, which would mean we don't exist? That we are just floating consciousnesses in a jar thinking we are animals with brains?
@@ExistenceUniversity It is paradoxical in how it views and attends to the world. The bottom line is this - the right hemisphere has an eye on predators while the left hemisphere has an eye on prey … I suggest you check out one of the many videos of Dr Iain McGilchrist author of The divided brain and the making of the western world - 20 years to write and full of many case studies.
@@brunoannetta5288 I have a degree in neuropsychology and the left brain right brain is a myth. The brain regions have a general layout, but there is no actual neuroscience left side vs right side. But how is it paradoxically that different brain regions are attached to different senses of the body?
@@ExistenceUniversity Have you looked at any of Iain McGilchrist’s work/videos?
@@brunoannetta5288 Not yet, I will. I'm just sharing the fact that growing research that would be multiple Ph.Ds of more then 20 year added together (if that kind of thing matters to you) that the right/left thing is not fixed or important.
But regardless. Let's assume Dr. McGilchrist is correct. What is paradoxical about having different brain regions doing different stuff depending on what that stuff is connected to?
This is what happens when you give a talk on philosophy when you've done zero research. Every bit of this is such obvious nonsense to anyone even passingly familiar with the history of philosophy that it's laughable. Like the claim that ancient Greece, the collection of polytheistic slave states that considered all non-Greeks "barbarians," is egoistic? Or the claim that Kant said you had to get rid of reason and just follow your feelings? WTF?
What part of what 5:55 to 6:11 did he say that was wrong about Kant?
@@travisvarga1659 Basically the whole thing. While Kant was responding to Hume, he did not think that "intuition" was a sufficient replacement. These types of intuitions was precisely what Hume's arguments attacked. The whole point of Kant's efforts was to ground ethics on a new RATIONAL basis in the face of these objections. This is precisely the focus of his book "The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals." Kant believed he could ground ethics in "a priori" reason, and believed this could be systematically and rationally analyzed through his idea of the categorical imperative. The idea that Kant was just basing everything off of his "intuition" and "feelings" is laughably wrong.
Dont let evidence corrupt your faith.
@@JudgeSabo I have denied knowledge therefore, in order to make room for faith.
-Kant
And you know what you know in your head.
-Cream, 1960s, psychedelic, bluesrock group
@@TeaParty1776 Not a real Kant quote. Also wouldn't be relevant to what I said even if it was.
Ayn Rand's ""philosophy"" is disgusting and has made the world a worse place.
Get thee to a nunnery.
It would be great if you could support your statement by arguments, sir.
27:13