Portafoglio

So, I used to be kind of a writer. I used to have evidence of this fact, but time and hard drive crashes have taken their toll. So, I'm a-trying to organize some of my better more respectable stuff. Will probably hit up the sister-in-law for a proper thing, but for now I'm just trying to get everything in one place, i.e. "this post" and/or "the internet."

Coming of Age at Bullworth Academy.

Virtual Virtual War.

Notably missing: "Free Will Isn't Free: Context and Meaning in The Suffering," lost in the great hard drive crash of ought-eight, and seemingly scrubbed from my Gmail by Catholics, masons, and anarchists. What a pisser.

It might be helpful to be able to demonstrate an ability to write competently about things that aren't videogames, but the records are thinner on that. Assuming the automatic ineligibility of solipsistic journal entries and comments on Pandagon and LGM, my forays into political writing consist of some decade-old dead tree archives of HC@FAU's Feminist Student Union, and some short rants about abortion and gun control on here. With some reorganization, and deletion of extant profanity, these could be workable, maybe? I've also long wanted to kick the Twilight posts into a cohesive whole, but I'd miss the interstitials. Ditto the Mortal Kombat Problem. Ditto the torture thing from way back. Or the Rand thing. Hell, I should probably take a look at some of my yawning treatises on my desktop.I'm not sure any of this will help sell my skills to employers, but I do feel considerably less lazy after typing it up.

ETA: Respectable edit of the Newtown piece here.

Objectivist Ethics III

By now, Rand has established her categorical imperative--"survive, goddammit!"--and toward its maintenance, suggested a first principle of government:

The only proper, moral purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence--to protect his right to his own life, to his own liberty, to his own property and to the pursuit of his own happiness. Without property rights, no other rights are possible.

One is here tempted to wonder where property comes from, if it is to be synonymous with human life in our political values. Elsewhere, Rand's answer is similar to Locke's: "property," the concept by which materials cannot permissibly be taken from an individual to whom it "belongs," is created when said individual mixes his labor with it. Work, mentally and bodily, creates property from gross earth.

The trouble with this conceit is that it reeks of the mysticism she so defiantly claims to reject. Nothing in the laws of nature, to which Objectivism claims to owe its origins, corresponds to property. Life and death, troublesome concepts that they are, seem to exist objectively. The empirical evidence toward this conclusion is overwhelming. We can examine plants and animals in any number of ways and determine, physically, whether or not they are alive.

We cannot do this with property. No force field surrounds my car, protecting it from thieves. A physicist examining the car would not be able to determine any essential change in the car were I to sell it while she were examining it: she would not suddenly look up, a puzzled expression on her face, and mutter,"I sense a disturbance in the force...a document changing hands...insurance rates getting higher..." (In this example, the physicist in question is a Star Wars fan, and the car has been sold to a 17-year-old boy in another state.)

What protects the car from thieves--so far--is not a metaphysical fact but a social agreement to establish documentation of "ownership," and to maintain a persistent threat of violence toward those who would seek to challenge the authority of said document. The car ceases to be property when the community ceases to treat it as such. Under feudalism, we are entirely comfortable saying that property is created by soldiers, and you own what you are willing to expend resources to defend. Rand seems to believe that, faced with solidifying borders, technological improvements, mass production and international trade, humans suddenly discovered an a priori law of property that had always been there, written in the very eros of our being, and that it had no relation whatsoever to that earlier, fake "property" concept that had been developing and adapting to changing conditions since prehistory.

Rand treats property as a deontological law, as brutal and uncompromising as the God of Abraham. It must be followed because it must be followed. And because it must be followed, violence that preserves the law must be morally legitimate, whereas violence that threatens the law is forbidden. Rand prefers to express this concept in the form of a mugging--"A holdup man seeks to gain a value, wealth, by killing his victim; the victim does not grow richer by killing a holdup man."

In the interest of being needlessly pedantic and snarky, I would suggest that a "holdup man" is probably hoping to avoid killing his victim, which is why he goes to the trouble of the "holdup" instead of flat-out murdering a stranger and looting their corpse. I am also unclear on whether or not it is strictly correct to call the person who kills the holdup man a "victim," given that only one of them is still breathing. Rand does herself a rhetorical favor by putting this parable in a readily recognized situation, and one that takes place in a society several orders of magnitude more complex, and interdependent, than the noble savage groove she's been rocking so far. It also conceals any essential difference between a wallet held by clothing affixed to the body and a patch of land in another country, or the right to translateFinal Fantasy V into English at some point in the future. It also makes property-defending violence perpetually secondary, despite the fact that the laws of physics give equal claim on any object to anyone. "Objectively," the mugger's seizing of the wallet is no less moral than the "owner's" decision to carry it around in the first place. The distributed threat of violence to protect the social construct, in addition to providing the mugger with an incentive to leave his victim alive in the first place, is primary. The decision that any action is forbidden, and must be deterred with violence, precedes any violence the decision might forbid.

This distinction matters because elsewhere, Rand is keen to note that slavery is not a properly "human" state, and mere survival is not sufficient to rational living. On the contrary, nearly suicidal behaviors can be considered rational if the "life" one risks is one of servitude, terror, and uncertainty. It is difficult to argue with this point, and every moral system acknowledges that there are different kinds of life, and different kinds of death, and one need not act on akrasia to choose the final death of the rebel over the living death of the slave. Rand is in agreement with nearly everyone here. She just happens to have added the caveat that this does not apply to countries with strong property laws, in which case those unable to procure "rational," "independent," "human" survival by their own ingenuity and labor are morally obligated to suffer and die, intentionally remaining in lives of danger and want, even if they could improve their long-term chances of survival by seizing the property of another. They must die, so private property can live.

Objectivist Ethics II

Previously on "The Objectivist Ethics": "an organism's life is its standard of value: that which furthers its life is the good, that which threatens it is the evil."

Righto. So, surviving? Good! And here we have the first common mischaracterization of evolutionary theory we so commonly see in pop culture: that of brutal, unending competition, for survival is a goal that can afford no compromises. Which, I suppose, makes for a fine moral philosophy. The only thing that could really threaten it--and I'm going way outside the box here, so bear with me--would be the repeating failure of certain cells to reproduce perfectly, leading to an utterly unavoidable ceasing of all life functions that nobody could escape, under any circumstances, ever.

So unless the highest moral state of man is that of an invalid sucking oxygen through a mask in a state of shrieking terror as his brain function becomes ever more tenuous, there has to be more to value than the life of the individual.

Moving on, Rand pays homage to Bentham's twin sovereigns, pleasure and pain. She tells us that such sensations begin the process of developing consciousness:

Consciousness--for those living organisms which possess it--is the basic means of survival. [...] The simpler organisms, such as plants, can survive by means of their automatic physical functions. The higher organisms, such as animals and man, cannot: their needs are more complex and the range of their actions is wider. The physical functions of their bodies can perform automatically only the task of using fuel, but cannot obtain that fuel. To obtain it, the higher organisms need the faculty of consciousness. A plant can obtain its food from the soil in which it grows. An animal has to hunt for it. Man has to produce it.

But Man, it turns out, is a tricky biscuit. Because it turns out that bipedal primates can, in fact, get by quite well by hunting, assuming by "hunting" we mean "gathering and scavenging." We did so for a good long time. In fact, "hunting" itself wasn't something we were particularly good at until speech enabled us to enlarge our social circles and transmit knowledge more effectively, alongside such wonderful developments as traps, throwing weapons, and the porting of the popular "wolf" into a more consumer-friendly format. By going oddly Platonic in her tripartite "plant/animal/Man" hierarchy, Rand seems to hope we don't raise our hands and ask exactly what this Man thing is.

Homo sapiens clearly isn't sufficient, and it's unclear where exactly "producing" picks up from previous fuel-acquisition technologies. Man, the productive being, might begin with subsistence farming, or he might begin with Adam Smith's pin factory. But any sub-masculine homo sapiens is certainly capable of grabbing what he finds in his environment, even if he did not produce it. Why wouldn't he, if it helped fuel his survival? Rand and I, surprisingly, have different answers, which shall be covered in the next post, in which Rand tries to sneak a heaping pile of deontology into her theory without her audience noticing the glaring contradiction it creates.

I Don't Own This Post: Thoughts on The Objectivist Ethics

First, as the essay I'll be looking at has been collected in The Virtue of Selfishness, I feel obliged to summarize the intro to that book, lest we end up getting Dworkined on a basic misunderstanding of vocabulary. (I'm pretty sure the use of Dworkin as a verb is my invention. I'm a communist, though: you looters can have it.) In the American English of Rand's day, as well as ours, selfishness is generally contrasted with altruism. The trouble is that altruism being accepted as a good necessarily presupposes that its opposite, selfishness, must be bad. And there is much to be admired about being interested in, skilled with, and dependent upon one's 'self,' whatever that may mean. Self-sufficiency, for example, is generally considered a valorous attribute. Self-awareness even more so. Self-interest, well, that gets us locked up in political lingo, as it's essentially a meaningless concept employed to summarize unrelated ideas.

But, getting back to Rand, selfishness probably ought not to have the exclusively negative connotation that it does. However, the fact remains that it does, and insisting that it be treated otherwise won't promote new ideas so much as require us to rework ever more vocabulary. Which might be useful, over a great deal of time, but it's not really in a philosopher's area of expertise at that point.

I once stumbled upon the website of a man who claimed to have found a way to divide by zero. It's a bold claim, perhaps, but an asterisk is warranted. Because, as many math-oriented people pointed out, the rule against dividing by zero is not a law of nature we found in a pristine state. It's an agreed-upon rule that's part of a larger mathematical structure. We could have designed a system in which dividing by zero is possible, but we did not. So one can certainly divide by zero, as long as they're willing to acknowledge that sundry other mathematical laws will not function in the new system. You'd be starting from scratch.

I leave the parallels to you. Moving on!

What is morality, or ethics? It is a code of values to guide man's choices and actions--the choices and actions that determine the purpose and course of his life. Ethics, as a science, deals with discovering and defining such a code.

The first question that has to be answered, as a precondition of any attempt to define, to judge or to accept any specific system of ethics is: why does man need a code of values?

The Socratics, to whom Rand and I will soon turn, were very fond of this kind of philosophizing, and they had different answers. They were, at least, sensible enough to note that such values existed, and seemed to have existed for as long as there have been human beings, even when there were no philosophers around to tell people about it. The idea of not having values is an empty signifier, like not being on a boat. That something exists, and it is difficult to imagine an alternative to its existence, does not make the question of why less important, of course, but it does set an interesting tone for our reading. The writer does not seem entirely in control of her symbols.

Rand then asks whether a judgment of what is Good and what is Bad is a subjective whim, a "desire experienced by a person who does not know and does not care to discover its cause, or on actual fact. Rand actually uses not merely fact but "metaphysical fact," although she is kind enough to explain in parentheses that she is using metaphysical to mean "that which pertains to reality, to the nature of things, to existence." Which is not, strictly speaking what metaphysical means, and may in fact be its opposite--exactly what relationship do abstract entities immune to empirical testing have to "reality" or "existence" this week? I had a doctor's appointment and couldn't make the last meeting.

Anyway, Rand claims that for most of human history, morality has been decided to be in the "whim" school, primarily expressed through the (literally) arbitrary will of gods, although a few have tried to break out of it into something scientific. Aristotle went with descriptive ethics, neatly avoiding the question of "why?" that so plagues the prescriptive, and others ("neo-mystics" simply reskinned religious dogma as agreed-upon social rules, substituting the "good of society" for the "will of God." Taking a brief aside from my usual concise, ruthlessly on-topic approach, I feel I should note that either of these seem like fine places to start for ethics, assuming the thing that "wills" exists. I'm not sure about God, and though certain people doubt the existence of society, the empirical evidence for society's existence is pretty daunting. Who the fuck is writing all these blogs, anyway?

Credit where credit is due, it is true that individual people exist, and society is just a made-up concept that makes it easier to refer to large groups of them in speech of writing. (We will ignore, for the moment, the possibility that the individual person is also such a made-up concept.) Because we lack the hive-mind technology of the Borg, or even the knowledge base technology of the Cylons, society can be referred to, lauded, or railed against, but it cannot act. And because it is difficult to coordinate the efforts of every individual in a large system to a common end, especially when some of them are dicks, the moral dictates of the will of God/good of society must be enforced by individuals who symbolically take on the identity of society itself and pursue actions that would be prohibited to them as individuals. Through this conception of "society," we have made men into gods.

This is not a minor point. The fact that the snarling beast of chaos can only be kept in check by the also-snarling beast of an army or police force is a serious fucking problem, and deserves to be taken seriously. A police class necessarily legitimizes coercion. The Western approach has generally been to set up so many checks on power that it's a pain in the ass for any of our public servants to step too far out of line, but it's not a perfect system, and the question remains: Who watches the watchers of the watchers of the watchmen? And who watches them?

Having established the shakiness of the persistent "whim" school of values, Rand suggests an alternative: existence. "The concept 'value' [...] presupposes an entity capable of acting to achieve a goal in the face of an alternative." As living organisms, our existence is a pattern of information whose continued function is not guaranteed to us, but must be painstakingly maintained. Because we need to exist and face nonexistence for "value" to exist, reasons Rand, then Good must necessarily be what furthers our existence, and Bad what hinders it.

Things get tricky here, because Rand is unknowingly treading on the territory of a field which did not exist in her time, that of evolutionary psychology. Like it or not, "The Objectivist Ethics" is an apologetics for evo psych. Which doesn't make her claim about morality being necessarily related to existence wrong, but does severely problematize her earlier concept of "whims," because it turns out we've identified those subjective whims, and they're the result of natural selection, i.e. technically random, but the very opposite of chance. We do care enough to discover the cause of these former-whims, and we are learning more daily about said causes. The fact that such subjective ephemera were nearly universal among our species, and that agreement on said principles was largely effective in getting people to pretend not to murder each other or sexually abuse their children, was enough reason to keep them around, despite our inability to locate their origins. (Oh, and hey, C.S. Lewis actually tries to deduce the existence of God from the ubiquity of said rules. Rand, if you're reading, check out that old post. I'm sure you'll get along.)

And now that you mention it, who wouldn't like to see C.S. Lewis fight Ayn Rand?