She does discuss, however, the integration of personal values into one’s philosophical system. I was struggling with a possibly similar issue; I had previously regarded rationalism as an end in itself. Emotions were just baggage that had to be overcome in order to achieve a truly enlightened state. If this sounds familiar to you, her works may help.
The short version: You’re a human being. An ethical system that demands you be anything else is fatally flawed; there is no universal ethical system, what is ethical for a rabbit is not ethical for a wolf. It’s necessary for you to live, not as a rabbit, not as a rock, not as a utility or paperclip maximizer, but as a human being. Pain, for example, isn’t to be denied—for to do so is as sensible as denying a rock—but experienced as a part of your existence. (That you shouldn’t deny pain is not the same as that you should seek it; it is simply a statement that it’s a part of what you are.)
Objectivism, the philosophy she founded, is named on the claim that ethics are objective; not subjective, which is to say, whatever you want it to be; not universal, which is to say, there’s a single ethics system in the whole universe that applies equally to rocks, rabbits, mice, and people; but objective, which is to say, it exists as a definable property for a given subject, given certain preconditions (ethical axioms; she chose “Life” as her ethical axiom).
I don’t know that I would call that “objective.” I mean, the laws of physics are objective because they’re the same for rabbits and rocks and humans alike.
I honestly don’t trust myself to go much more meta than my own moral intuitions. I just try not to harm people without their permission or deceive/manipulate them. Yes, this can and will break down in extreme hypothetical scenarios, but I don’t want to insist on an ironclad philosophical system that would cause me to jump to any conclusions on, say, Torture vs. Dust Specks just yet. I suspect that my abstract reasoning will just be nuts.
My understanding of morality is basically that we’re humans, and humans need each other, so we worked out ways to help one another out. Our minds were shaped by the same evolutionary processes, so we can agree for the most part. We’ve always seemed to treat those in our in-group the same way; it’s just that those we included in the in-group changed. Slowly, women were added, and people of different races/religions, etc.
It’s a sticky business, and different ethicists will frame the words different ways. On one view, objective includes “It’s true even if you disagree” and subjective includes “You can make up whatever you want”. On another, objective includes “It’s the same for everybody” and subjective includes “It’s different for different people”. The first distinction better matches the usual meaning of ‘objective’, and the second distinction better matches the usual meaning of ‘subjective’, so I think the terms were just poorly-chosen as different sides of a distinction.
Because of this, my intuition these days is to say that ethics is both subjective and objective, or “subjectively objective” as Eliezer has said about probability. Though I’d like it if we switched to using “subject-sensitive” rather than “subjective”, as is now commonly used in Epistemology.
So, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen this distinction made here, and I have to admit I don’t get it.
Suppose I’m studying ballistics in a vacuum, and I’m trying to come up with some rules that describe how projectiles travel, and I discover that the trajectory of a projectile depends on its mass.
I suppose I could conclude that ballistics is “subjectively objective” or “subject-sensitive,” since after all the trajectory is different for different projectiles. But this is not at all a normal way of speaking or thinking about ballistics. What we normally say is that ballistics is “objective” and it just so happens that the proper formulation of objective ballistics takes projectile mass as a parameter. Trajectory is, in part, a function of mass.
When we say that ethics is “subject-sensitive”—that is, that what I ought to do depends on various properties of me—are we saying it’s different from the ballistics example? Or is this just a way of saying that we haven’t yet worked out how to parametrize our ethics to take into account differences among individuals?
Similarly, while we acknowledge that the same projectile will follow a different trajectory in different environments, and that different projectiles of the same mass will follow different trajectories in different environments, we nevertheless say that ballistics is “universal”, because the equations that predict a trajectory can take additional properties of the environment and the projectile as parameters. Trajectory is, in part, a function of environment.
When we say that ethics is not universal, are we saying it’s different from the ballistics example? Or is this just a way of saying that we haven’t yet worked out how to parametrize our ethics to take into account differences among environments?
I think it’s an artifact of how we think about ethics. It doesn’t FEEL like a bullet should fly the same exact way as an arrow or as a rock, but when you feel your moral intuitions they seem like they should obviously apply to everyone. Maybe because we learn about throwing things and motion through infinitely iterated trial and error, but we learn about morality from simple commands from our parents/teachers, we think about them in different ways.
So, I’m not quite sure I understood you, but you seem to be explaining how someone might come to believe that ethics are universal/objective in the sense of right action not depending on the actor or the situation at all, even at relatively low levels of specification like “eat more vegetables” or whatever.
Did I get that right?
If so… sure, I can see where someone whose moral intuitions primarily derive from obeying the commands of others might end up with ethics that work like that.
“the proper formulation of objective ballistics takes projectile mass as a parameter”
I think the best analogy here is to say something like, the proper formulation of decision theory takes terminal values as a parameter. Decision theory defines a “universal” optimum (that is, universal “for all minds”… presumably anyway), but each person is individually running a decision theory process as a function of their own terminal values—there is no “universal” terminal value, for example if I could build an AI then I could theoretically put in any utility function I wanted. Ethics is “universal” in the sense of optimal decision theory, but “person dependent” in the sense of plugging in one’s own particular terminal values—but terminal values and ethics are not necessarily “mind-dependent”, as explained here.
I would certainly agree that there is no terminal value shared by all minds (come to that, I’m not convinced there are any terminal values shared by all of any given mind).
Also, I would agree that when figuring out how I should best apply a value-neutral decision theory to my environment I have to “plug in” some subset of information about my own values and about my environment.
I would also say that a sufficiently powerful value-neutral decision theory instructs me on how to optimize any environment towards any value, given sufficiently comprehensive data about the environment and the value. Which seems like another way of saying that decision theory is objective and universal, in the same sense that ballistics is.
How that relates to statements about ethics being universal,objective, person-dependent, and/or mind-dependent is not clear to me, though, even after following your link.
Surprisingly, this isn’t a bad short explanation of her ethics.
I’ve been reading a lot of Aristotle lately (I highly recommend Aristotle by Randall, for anyone who is in to that kind of thing), and Rand mostly just brought Aristotle’s philosophy into the 20th century—of course note now that it’s the 21st century, so she is a little dated at this point. Take for example, Rand was offered by various people to get fully paid-for cryonics when she was close to death, but for unknown reasons she declined, very sadly (if you’re looking for someone to take her philosophy into the 21st century, you will need to talk to, well… ahem… me).
It’s important to mention that politics is only one dimension of her philosophy and of her writing (although, naturally, it’s the subject that all the pundits and mind-killed partisans obsess over) - and really it is the least important, since it is the most derivative of all of her other more fundamental philosophical ideas on metaphysics, epistemology, man’s nature, and ethics.
I’ll willingly confess to not being interested in Aristotle in the least. Philosophy coursework cured me of interest in Greek philosophy. Give me another twenty years and I might recover from that.
Have you read TVTropes’ assessment of Objectivism? It’s actually the best summary I’ve ever read, as far as the core of the philosophy goes.
By the way, I fully share yours (and Eliezer’s) sentiment in regard to academic philosophy. I took a “philosophy of mind” course in college, thinking that would be extremely interesting, and I ended up dropping the class in short order. It was only after a long study of Rand that I ever became interested in philosophy again, once I realized I had a sane basis on which to proceed.
She doesn’t, is the short answer.
She does discuss, however, the integration of personal values into one’s philosophical system. I was struggling with a possibly similar issue; I had previously regarded rationalism as an end in itself. Emotions were just baggage that had to be overcome in order to achieve a truly enlightened state. If this sounds familiar to you, her works may help.
The short version: You’re a human being. An ethical system that demands you be anything else is fatally flawed; there is no universal ethical system, what is ethical for a rabbit is not ethical for a wolf. It’s necessary for you to live, not as a rabbit, not as a rock, not as a utility or paperclip maximizer, but as a human being. Pain, for example, isn’t to be denied—for to do so is as sensible as denying a rock—but experienced as a part of your existence. (That you shouldn’t deny pain is not the same as that you should seek it; it is simply a statement that it’s a part of what you are.)
Objectivism, the philosophy she founded, is named on the claim that ethics are objective; not subjective, which is to say, whatever you want it to be; not universal, which is to say, there’s a single ethics system in the whole universe that applies equally to rocks, rabbits, mice, and people; but objective, which is to say, it exists as a definable property for a given subject, given certain preconditions (ethical axioms; she chose “Life” as her ethical axiom).
I don’t know that I would call that “objective.” I mean, the laws of physics are objective because they’re the same for rabbits and rocks and humans alike.
I honestly don’t trust myself to go much more meta than my own moral intuitions. I just try not to harm people without their permission or deceive/manipulate them. Yes, this can and will break down in extreme hypothetical scenarios, but I don’t want to insist on an ironclad philosophical system that would cause me to jump to any conclusions on, say, Torture vs. Dust Specks just yet. I suspect that my abstract reasoning will just be nuts.
My understanding of morality is basically that we’re humans, and humans need each other, so we worked out ways to help one another out. Our minds were shaped by the same evolutionary processes, so we can agree for the most part. We’ve always seemed to treat those in our in-group the same way; it’s just that those we included in the in-group changed. Slowly, women were added, and people of different races/religions, etc.
See this comment regarding this common confusion about ‘objective’...
It’s a sticky business, and different ethicists will frame the words different ways. On one view, objective includes “It’s true even if you disagree” and subjective includes “You can make up whatever you want”. On another, objective includes “It’s the same for everybody” and subjective includes “It’s different for different people”. The first distinction better matches the usual meaning of ‘objective’, and the second distinction better matches the usual meaning of ‘subjective’, so I think the terms were just poorly-chosen as different sides of a distinction.
Because of this, my intuition these days is to say that ethics is both subjective and objective, or “subjectively objective” as Eliezer has said about probability. Though I’d like it if we switched to using “subject-sensitive” rather than “subjective”, as is now commonly used in Epistemology.
So, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen this distinction made here, and I have to admit I don’t get it.
Suppose I’m studying ballistics in a vacuum, and I’m trying to come up with some rules that describe how projectiles travel, and I discover that the trajectory of a projectile depends on its mass.
I suppose I could conclude that ballistics is “subjectively objective” or “subject-sensitive,” since after all the trajectory is different for different projectiles. But this is not at all a normal way of speaking or thinking about ballistics. What we normally say is that ballistics is “objective” and it just so happens that the proper formulation of objective ballistics takes projectile mass as a parameter. Trajectory is, in part, a function of mass.
When we say that ethics is “subject-sensitive”—that is, that what I ought to do depends on various properties of me—are we saying it’s different from the ballistics example? Or is this just a way of saying that we haven’t yet worked out how to parametrize our ethics to take into account differences among individuals?
Similarly, while we acknowledge that the same projectile will follow a different trajectory in different environments, and that different projectiles of the same mass will follow different trajectories in different environments, we nevertheless say that ballistics is “universal”, because the equations that predict a trajectory can take additional properties of the environment and the projectile as parameters. Trajectory is, in part, a function of environment.
When we say that ethics is not universal, are we saying it’s different from the ballistics example? Or is this just a way of saying that we haven’t yet worked out how to parametrize our ethics to take into account differences among environments?
I think it’s an artifact of how we think about ethics. It doesn’t FEEL like a bullet should fly the same exact way as an arrow or as a rock, but when you feel your moral intuitions they seem like they should obviously apply to everyone. Maybe because we learn about throwing things and motion through infinitely iterated trial and error, but we learn about morality from simple commands from our parents/teachers, we think about them in different ways.
So, I’m not quite sure I understood you, but you seem to be explaining how someone might come to believe that ethics are universal/objective in the sense of right action not depending on the actor or the situation at all, even at relatively low levels of specification like “eat more vegetables” or whatever.
Did I get that right?
If so… sure, I can see where someone whose moral intuitions primarily derive from obeying the commands of others might end up with ethics that work like that.
“the proper formulation of objective ballistics takes projectile mass as a parameter”
I think the best analogy here is to say something like, the proper formulation of decision theory takes terminal values as a parameter. Decision theory defines a “universal” optimum (that is, universal “for all minds”… presumably anyway), but each person is individually running a decision theory process as a function of their own terminal values—there is no “universal” terminal value, for example if I could build an AI then I could theoretically put in any utility function I wanted. Ethics is “universal” in the sense of optimal decision theory, but “person dependent” in the sense of plugging in one’s own particular terminal values—but terminal values and ethics are not necessarily “mind-dependent”, as explained here.
I would certainly agree that there is no terminal value shared by all minds (come to that, I’m not convinced there are any terminal values shared by all of any given mind).
Also, I would agree that when figuring out how I should best apply a value-neutral decision theory to my environment I have to “plug in” some subset of information about my own values and about my environment.
I would also say that a sufficiently powerful value-neutral decision theory instructs me on how to optimize any environment towards any value, given sufficiently comprehensive data about the environment and the value. Which seems like another way of saying that decision theory is objective and universal, in the same sense that ballistics is.
How that relates to statements about ethics being universal,objective, person-dependent, and/or mind-dependent is not clear to me, though, even after following your link.
Surprisingly, this isn’t a bad short explanation of her ethics.
I’ve been reading a lot of Aristotle lately (I highly recommend Aristotle by Randall, for anyone who is in to that kind of thing), and Rand mostly just brought Aristotle’s philosophy into the 20th century—of course note now that it’s the 21st century, so she is a little dated at this point. Take for example, Rand was offered by various people to get fully paid-for cryonics when she was close to death, but for unknown reasons she declined, very sadly (if you’re looking for someone to take her philosophy into the 21st century, you will need to talk to, well… ahem… me).
It’s important to mention that politics is only one dimension of her philosophy and of her writing (although, naturally, it’s the subject that all the pundits and mind-killed partisans obsess over) - and really it is the least important, since it is the most derivative of all of her other more fundamental philosophical ideas on metaphysics, epistemology, man’s nature, and ethics.
I’ll willingly confess to not being interested in Aristotle in the least. Philosophy coursework cured me of interest in Greek philosophy. Give me another twenty years and I might recover from that.
Have you read TVTropes’ assessment of Objectivism? It’s actually the best summary I’ve ever read, as far as the core of the philosophy goes.
No I haven’t! That was quite good, thanks.
By the way, I fully share yours (and Eliezer’s) sentiment in regard to academic philosophy. I took a “philosophy of mind” course in college, thinking that would be extremely interesting, and I ended up dropping the class in short order. It was only after a long study of Rand that I ever became interested in philosophy again, once I realized I had a sane basis on which to proceed.