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[Fenrir]

Pure objectivism from a philosophical and more importantly sociological standpoint ignores the concept of 'humanity'. Humans are objects, nothing more, and emotions, thoughts, subjective realities, and ideas of justice are thrown out as unimportant details.

This line of reasoning (which I understand isn’t yours) seems to reach its conclusions by slipping in connotations. If you stripped out the implications of “objects” and “nothing more”, it seems to get “Emotions don’t matter because stuff is real.”

I should probably do some reading about objectivism to be sure I understand, because I have never encountered this before.

[KaelGotDwarves]

By all means, do read more on philosophical objectivism and the various ontological and epistemological schools.

I fully admit my bias against objectivism- after all I spent much time studying and traveling through regions affected by genocide.

[Mutagen]

Is it so undesirable to leave it up to individuals to decide what to do with their own money, time, and resources as they see fit?

Individuals have limited scope, unequal resources, and are generally incapable of making the kind of collectivist decisions that objectivists so loathe, not necessarily because they are individuals, but because by definition they can only really see their  own viewpoint and have a deep-seeded desire for self-benefit that will cloud their judgement, and that is only overwritten by a strong desire to commit self-sacrificial actions.

This is the reason for our attempts to create a collective consensus by taking an pooling an amount of money, time, and resources from each individual and then deciding altogether how we all can benefit the most from it. This does not deprive the individual of all independent action as only a portion of these resources are taken for this purpose, and without doing so all collective action is either impossible or at best unstable and fickle (coughcoughandrewryancoughrapturecough).

So, an individual cannot make rational decisions, but a million individuals can?

[MetalSlimeHunt]

So, an individual cannot make rational decisions, but a million individuals can?

An individual cannot usually make rational societal-scale decisions, but the consensus of a million individuals have much better odds of doing so. This is the same logic behind having a legislative body with many individuals instead of a philosopher-king. While philosopher-kings, or in your context individuals capable of making rational decisions for everyone better than everyone, sometimes do come along, this is the very rare exception rather than the rule.

Human beings are very lacking in the ability to recognize long-term and large-scale plans and threats without intense devotion to them. This is an evolutionary failing, but one we can compensate for through putting our minds together on such things.

[Frumple]

Scale. Individuals can only very rarely make rational decisions on a scale beyond the very, very small (usually individual, sometimes close group), and even in the rare cases they're able to, only in very specific circumstances or regarding specific issues.

Collective action allows (if not guarantees, of course) for corrective measures to be applied to human's naturally short-sighted rational capacity.

And ninja'd! MSH says it quite well.

[Flying Dice]

Is it so undesirable to leave it up to individuals to decide what to do with their own money, time, and resources as they see fit?

Individuals have limited scope, unequal resources, and are generally incapable of making the kind of collectivist decisions that objectivists so loathe, not necessarily because they are individuals, but because by definition they can only really see their  own viewpoint and have a deep-seeded desire for self-benefit that will cloud their judgement, and that is only overwritten by a strong desire to commit self-sacrificial actions.

This is the reason for our attempts to create a collective consensus by taking an pooling an amount of money, time, and resources from each individual and then deciding altogether how we all can benefit the most from it. This does not deprive the individual of all independent action as only a portion of these resources are taken for this purpose, and without doing so all collective action is either impossible or at best unstable and fickle (coughcoughandrewryancoughrapturecough).

So, an individual cannot make rational decisions, but a million individuals can?

That was a beautiful strawman. An individual cannot make decisions which benefit society as a whole because individuals are, by and large, concerned with their own well-being. An individual has neither the resources nor the large-scale vision necessary to make large-scale decisions that serve an interest that does not align with their own. If one individual is allowed to decide what to do with the resources of one million individuals, they will likely make a selfish or wasteful decision. If one million individuals come to a collective agreement of what to do with their resources, the result will likely be much more generally beneficial.

[kaijyuu]

You cannot expect any particular one individual to act rationally, but you have a better chance of many particular individuals doing so. While some individuals act rationally concerning the topics we're discussing (altruism and such), definitely not everyone does.


Man, x3 ninja.

[Newbunkle]

Force and the threat of punishment were used to take away my natural ability to share my planet's living space and resources, and use them for my survival and prosperity.

Apparently that's okay, but forcing the minority who benefit from increased privileges at my expense to pay for any of the consequences is wrong.

I have been deliberately relegated to a lower class without my consent, which impacts my freedom by forcing me to serve the more privileged to obtain access to things I should never have lost.

Why not leave it up to private charity? If I decide someone deserves more of our resources than I do let me choose to donate them when I see fit.

Somehow it's okay to take equal human beings and enforce a difference in status - disempowering the many for the benefit of a few - but not okay to expect people to take additional responsibilities along with the additional rights.

I suppose that's why I object to objectivism, or at least the way it's used to rationalise the abuse of the poor by people who support the undemocratic, minority control of our resources. I'm not a big fan of the economic authoritarianism.

[Truean]

Rand lived in a perfect and imaginary world.

Effort = Reward.... A thousand times no, because the world isn't "fair...." Right now, there are an enormous amount of underemployed or unemployed people that Rand would've happily written off, though they don't deserve this. These people had jobs/were productive/etc. Whatever happened wasn't their fault.... Heck, the book Atlas Shrugged literally lets the United States collapse.

Every conflict has two sides (or more) and one of them almost always loses. Does that mean... anything? The fact that they lost? We feel all disappointed at the losing baseball team that got beat by the Yankees in the World Series, but COME ON #2 isn't a bad spot. We bitch when our team loses the big game forgetting that they're in the #2 spot. Never mind the fact that, I couldn't play in a major league game if my life depended upon it half so well as the #2, "losing" team. It was a good game and the "losing" team certainly contributed something, because without them, there wouldn't be a World Series of Baseball.

Then there's the bell curve. Basically all of statistics says you're going to have a bell curve (of some type) distribution. The idea that if we all worked extra special hard that we could be these Atlas Shrugged Superhero characters isn't true and can't be true.  It's the same thing as saying you can be an Astronaut, or President of the United States.... Yeah, it's technically possible, but entirely improbable/not gonna happen.

Then there's what other people do to you, directly, indirectly, and even unintentionally. Let's say you're kicking ass and doing great professionally for a bit then. Suddenly, a family member you care about greatly gets severely injured/killed. Let's say somebody hits your car and severely injures you but doesn't have insurance/you can't collect a court judgment against them and now you're seriously injured. Wow, still have that superhuman amount of devotion Rand worships? Let's say you have kids and they're born with special needs; how do you and the kids manage? Same thing with crime. No, you're not going to get restitution back in full most of the time. It's not practical/possible to manage that. Finally, let's consider the economy. A HUGE part of "luck" is when you come into the working world: during boom or bust. You could have the best [insert business or profession here] ever, but if everybody's broke and unemployed  then they can't afford your awesome [service/good/employment], so it doesn't matter.

The number of people making a decision isn't conclusive, fine. She has one point, one. She basically points out argument ad numerum (Argument to numbers as correctness). A bad decision made by one person is as bad as one made by a thousand. What she fails to point out, is that the individual can be just as wrong as a thousand. The implication is that an individual can make a better choice than a group (basically her deal) but that's no more true than saying a group can make a better choice than an individual.

Simply speaking, shit happens. Effort does not always equal reward. Rand doesn't account for chance/luck/outside factors/imbalances in resources/etc. Instead she basically says that if anything bad happens to you, then it's your fault because you could've somehow either prevented it or compensated for it. There is a reason that her most famous books are fiction.

[Eagleon]

Reading Fountainhead I was struck mostly by how poorly Rand seemed to understand people. She didn't seem to get that altruism is supported by egoism, and never in opposition - we have a psychological need to belong, empathize, and comfort, because we're dependent on our parents and our surroundings to provide for us. Unless we're severely neglected, we learn from the very beginning that making other people happy gets us what we want. We may suffer a little to donate to the poor, but we satisfy a craving every time we do. Unless we're in a state of confusion, we never deviate outside of what we think might benefit us. We literally cannot reject the impositions the world puts on us without rejecting the outside world entirely. That is just as close as thinking is to being fundamental to humanity.

If she had recognized this, or in general if she had been required to submit to corporate culture at any point of her life, I think she would have seen that capitalism is the ultimate in ethical altruism - we make compromises and sacrifice tremendous portions of our lives to earn more tokens, to be redeemed for product with values set beyond our reasonable control. The freedom of the owner of the company then dominates in a very real way over the lives of those under him. 'Professional' behavior and regimen is what is required of us, even though we suffer from it. The only real way to satisfy her ideal for every person to be a happy, productive 'independent' is to revert to a smaller, more distributed social structure, which our population simply doesn't fit into.

[Mutagen]

What about metaphysics or epistemology? Rand will always be remembered for her ethics and politics, but I'd be most interested in possible objections to her notions of objective reality and the efficacy of consciousness in grasping it. (I'll admit I'm sort of at a loss with the sophisticated philosophical objections; talk of alternative realms, things in themselves and such just makes my brain hurt)

[Bauglir]

I find that, when applied to society, there's a great tendency for objectivists to conflate "Anyone can succeed" with "Everyone can succeed", and to ignore the influence of chance.

From a philosophical perspective, I feel like that while there almost certainly is an objective reality, it's filtered through the perception of every individual, and those perceived realities are deserving of consideration as much as the one they're a reflection of. Similarly, while I agree that one's own happiness is a worthwhile pursuit, I think it's short-sighted to say that it is the only worthwhile pursuit. There can be a lot of back-and-forth about the degree to which every other proposed purpose ultimately boils down to pursuit of personal happiness, but by the time it really becomes mutually compatible with moral systems that have different higher purposes, the term has become meaningless and you have to get down to discussing what it's right to derive happiness from. Again similarly, I think that it's fair to say that humans are objects, but to do so you have to be willing to accept that objects may possess all the qualities that make humans special (whatever those might be). You can't do something like say "The human mind is an arrangement of electrical impulses, so there is no soul!" All that says to me is, "Ah, so we've made some progress toward understanding the nature of the soul. An arrangement of electrical impulses, eh? Fascinating that something so beautiful could arise from that."

I think Objectivism has ideas worth understanding. I think that its primary failing is that it's too big a fan of black-and-white declarations of what is or is not. It has an idea, and then declares that that idea is the final word on the subject, and no other answer is necessary or desirable. I feel like this is one of the major problems people tend to have with objectivists in general - objectivists have a tendency to do this with a frequency and volume that is really quite amazing. Usually, religious fundamentalists are the major other group that tends to argue, "No, you're wrong, because we already have the answer." And I think that there's probably a lot of parallels in the way other people react to those groups.

[Eagleon]

What about metaphysics or epistemology? Rand will always be remembered for her ethics and politics, but I'd be most interested in possible objections to her notions of objective reality and the efficacy of consciousness in grasping it. (I'll admit I'm sort of at a loss with the sophisticated philosophical objections; talk of alternative realms, things in themselves and such just makes my brain hurt)

It's nice in theory, but it simply doesn't fit with reality. Intuition does often lead to new knowledge. We can't be purely rational beings without sacrificing a huge portion of our intelligence, because of the physical structure of our brain. We have a subconscious, we don't focus on every detail at once, and unless you're very simple, going through each and every step in solving a problem is hardly the best solution every time. Yes, analysis does have its place, but for instance, say you have the list 0, 2, 3, 4, 5...9. You look at maybe the first three numbers, see that the sequence ends in 9, and correctly intuit that it might be the first 9 digits. Then your brain quickly and very accurately picks out any discrepancies, like 426 or 4H6, because our vision system is more sophisticated than a chaotic mess of pixels. Is the conclusion that the sequence is 0 through 9 then irrational just because there's some minute chance that the 0 character was actually O?

[Mutagen]

Sorry, double post.

[Mutagen]

I'm with you there Bauglir. The ARI type fanatics are scarcely distinguishable from religious fundamentalists, and they really do a disservice to their own alleged philosophy by their dogmatism.

What about metaphysics or epistemology? Rand will always be remembered for her ethics and politics, but I'd be most interested in possible objections to her notions of objective reality and the efficacy of consciousness in grasping it. (I'll admit I'm sort of at a loss with the sophisticated philosophical objections; talk of alternative realms, things in themselves and such just makes my brain hurt)

It's nice in theory, but it simply doesn't fit with reality. Intuition does often lead to new knowledge. We can't be purely rational beings without sacrificing a huge portion of our intelligence, because of the physical structure of our brain. We have a subconscious, we don't focus on every detail at once, and unless you're very simple, going through each and every step in solving a problem is hardly the best solution every time. Yes, analysis does have its place, but for instance, say you have the list 0, 2, 3, 4, 5...9. You look at maybe the first three numbers, see that the sequence ends in 9, and correctly intuit that it might be the first 9 digits. Then your brain quickly and very accurately picks out any discrepancies, like 426 or 4H6, because our vision system is more sophisticated than a chaotic mess of pixels. Is the conclusion that the sequence is 0 through 9 then irrational just because there's some minute chance that the 0 character was actually O?

Well, I may be going out on a limb here, but I would say that the context is very important, as we have time/knowledge/information constraints in the real world. If your life hung the balance of the answer, and you had time, knowledge, and access to the information to analyze the problem fully, I think it would be fair to say that going with your gut would be a bad idea.