Four Essays on Objective Morality

Thanks to Roderick Fitts, guest blogger at Noodlefood, for bringing the availability of the January 2008 issue of the Social Philosophy and Policy journal to my attention. That particular issue focused on the subject of "Objectivism, Subjectivism, and Relativism in Ethics" and featured numerous esssays of which I have read four that interested me.

Tara Smith's The Importance of the Subject in Objective Value: Distinguishing Objective from Intrinsic Value is a thorough review of the crucial distinction that Ayn Rand makes between the her concept of objectivity, which argues for a relational view of concepts, including moral concepts, and what she calls "intrinsicism," which is in fact what many people assume objectivity to consist of, but is in fact a failed attempt to divorce the subject from the object which ultimately and inevitably collapses into subjectivism.

Darryl F. Wright's Evaluative Concepts and Objective Values: Rand on Moral Objectivity attacks a related aspect of the same question. He discusses in some detail the underlying Objectivist epistemology and defends it from some critics. He then proceeds to show that what exactly moral objectivity involves, including its link to the goal of self-preservation.

Tibor R. Machan's Why Moral Judgements can be Objective attempts demonstrate the Ayn Rand approach succeeds in providing an objective morality, or as he puts it "there seems to be nothing amiss in the Randian idea of objectivity in ethics." While the overall thrust of this essay is reasonable, and it is clear that Machan is sympathetic to Objectivism, I couldn't help noticing an unfortunate lack of commitment to the very ideas that Machan presents. For example, he concludes that

...it is most likely true that objectivity is possible in ethics, provided that knowledge is conceived in an essentially non-Platonist, non-idealist fashion and provided that “objective” is not taken to mean that moral values are intrinsic.

It seems to me that Machan concedes too much to rather unworthy critics with the above statement.

Finally, I thought that Douglas B. Rasmussen's The Importance of Metaphysical Realism For Ethical Knowledge was probably the most interesting essay I read. Rasmussen discusses the views of philopher Hilary Putnam in some detail. Putnam claims that moral objectivity is possible despite denying any underlying metaphysical reality in way similar to Kant. Rasmussen carefully lays out Putnam's sometimes varying positions on the matter and shows conclusively that Putnam's attempt to present an objective morality without an objective reality fails. What was most fascinating about this particular essay is that the political implications of Putnam's views are also discussed. Thus the essay serves as a good illustration of the power of basic philosophy, including metaphysics and epistemology, to influence both ethical and political ideas.

Scott Powell Concludes Kant vs. Columbus

Don't miss Scott Powell's exciting conclusion to his previously mentioned series of articles. Here's an excerpt:

A proper assessment and celebration of Columbus’s work, however, cannot be validated by more research or the uncovering of a still more detailed picture of the past. It can only be defended by grasping on an abstract level that “the Discovery of America” is the objective term necessitated by the full context of the Story of World up to that point and–of equal importance–by the context of developments beyond it.

Heinrich von Kleist and the Origin of the Romantics

I suspect that much of the time when Objectivist mention that they believe Immanuel Kant to be the most evil man in history, they probably get stared at as some kind of lunatics. After all, Kant was not a violent man, but rather an "Enlightenment Philosopher." In an interesting post on the German Romantic Poet Heinrich von Kleist, Wolfgang of the German site Objektivismus Heute (Objectivism Today) writes of a book review (entitled, appropriately enough, "O the mind! The unfortunate mind!") in the German newspaper Die Welt, in which the author of the review notes that the origin of von Kleist's Romanticism can be traced to what he termed a "Kant-crisis" (in German, Kant-Krise). Wolgang quotes the review as follows:

Sieht man Kleist als Romantiker, dann ist das Urerlebnis die Kant-Krise. "Wenn alle Menschen statt der Augen grüne Gläser hätten", schreibt Kleist 1801, dann würden sie die Welt für grün halten. Da er aus der Kant-Lektüre schließt, dass unser Bild von der Welt nur ein Produkt der Werkzeuge ist, mit denen wir die Welt betrachten, da er infolgedessen Abschied nimmt vom Glauben der Aufklärung, dass wir die Welt begreifen und dann handelnd verändern könnten, muss er den Verstand entthronen. Der neue oberste Herrscher ist das Gefühl - das "herrliche Gefühl"...

<snip>

Here's my rough translation:

If we regard Kleist as a Romanticist, then the foundational experience is the Kant-crisis. "If all human beings had on green spectacles instead of eyes," wrote Kleist in 1801, then the world would be assumed to be green. Since, as a result of his Kant reading, he concludes that our picture of the world is only a product of the equipment with which we view the world, and thus departs from the Enlightenment belief that we can understand the world and then actively change it, he must dethrone the rational mind. The new highest ruler is the feeling -- the "magnificent feeling"...

Here we have the results of Kant's ideas clearly laid out for us. The idea that the mind cannot know reality means that the mind is impotent, so we might as well rely on our feelings. Ideas have consequences and as more and more 19th century intellectuals such a Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche pondered, rather than challenged, the implications of Kant's ideas, the 20th century culmination in fields far beyond poetry was not far behind. For details see Dr. Peikoff's book http://www.peikoff.com/op/index.htm.

Around the Blogosphere

Columbus vs. Kant
That's the name of a fascinating series of posts on Scott Powell's Power History Recommends blog. There are three parts so far and I can't wait for the fourth. Here's a brief excerpt. Check it out:

Kant’s philosophical assault on man’s faculty of reason paved the way for the historical assault on Columbus by preventing a key avenue of development from ever occuring in Western historiography. By aborting the general study of abstractions as cognitive tools, Kant prevented historians from adopting the epistemological stance necessary to define and defend the most crucial instrument in the systematization of history: historical abstractions.

Consciousness and Medicines
Leitmotif has a couple of interesting posts on Daniel Dennett's view of consciousness (no such thing), as well as a leftist view on medicines (who needs them).

Correction: The utilitarians are a kind of combination of Epicurus and a certain aspect of Christianity, not Kant as such. Epicurus was a hedonist. He advocated that the standard of moral value is happiness. Christianity, among other things, advocates "love thy neighbor as thyself." If one puts the two together one gets that the standard of moral value is your neighbor's pleasure or as the utilitarians usually put it, "the greatest happiness of the greatest number." Of course one is allowed to count one's own pleasure but only as one among all the others.