Amartya Sen suggests we look at our intuition about what we mean by fairness, and gives an example three (coincidentally, as in the example with the pie) people argue in effect that:
1) Fairness is about equal distribution (i.e. tending towards socialism)
2) Fairness is about the making best use of whatever w.r.t. “the greatest good for the greatest number”
3) Fairness is about being able to keep what you produced (i.e. tending towards “taxation is theft”)
He argues that anyone not dwelling in some cloud cuckoo of the mind designed by Marx, Rand, or whomever is likely to see merit in all three claims, and can’t totally trash any of them, but the social contract theorists take the wrong-headed approach that we must settle the question once and for all, and then what? Well if we’ve discovered the absolute truth then it’s our duty to impose it on everybody else.
The interpretation I come away with is if we go and start looking for the most glaring examples of unfairness by any of the three versions (without trying to rank them), and try to make a significant move towards resolving that. No overarching theory or contract required; no getting everyone in alignment first.
Ayn Rand, either the John Galt speech in Atlas Shrugged, or her book Objectivist Epistemology. This is not a passing bit pulled out of context, she really does reiterate this over and over as a key to understanding—also sometimes equating it to Aristotle’s great discovery that A = A.
If you construe “existence” as the set of all things that exist, then it is a refusal to accept Russell’s paradox (We can’t define sets in terms of something more elementary, but we can think about properties they should not have—and a set belonging to itself is not a good thing—i.e. leads to a contradiction).
Speaking as someone who has never read a word written by Ayn Rand, how the hell does one get from there to anything approaching “fairness” or “morality”? Genuinely asking here.
That’s quite a big mystery that I’m far from solving. I’m pretty much with Hume that you can’t get “ought” from “is”. As with the Bible, the Koran, and the Book of Mormon, I couldn’t bear the sort of exclusive attention it would take to read Atlas Shrugged, so I listened to it on audio—all 60+ hours. I made a late discovery that Audible.com lets you speed up their audio, and so towards the end was listening to it at 2x normal speed. The John Galt speech lasts 4 hours in normal time or 2 at 2x speed. He supposedly just appeared with some pirate radio system or hijacked the state’s system and proceeded to lecture the world for 4 hours, and the implication is that after this event, everything will be different. The language has a lot in common with those other books I mentioned: lots of “blah, blah, blah, and this is an intolerable abomination”.
Anyway, for remedial education, if you are one of these people like me who hasn’t read everything, audio can help a lot, and there is a treasure of public domain texts on audio at Librivox.org in case you didn’t know. I’m starting to listen to Kant. 2x speed won’t work, but I think 1.4x may for me. Sometimes I find slow reading more distracting to the other ongoing activity such as driving than I find fast reading. Audacity software can change the effective speed of MP3 files (without producing a chipmunks like effect).
As usual I’ve free associated a bit but hope there is something useful in it.
Anyway, if Objectivists are claiming to have reached morality from tautology, I’m inclined to throw that in with all the other nonsense they spout that I know for a fact to be wrong. Now that you say it, I do recall seeing something along the lines of “the fundamental truth that A=A” in an Objectivist … I don’t want to say rant, it was pretty short … but I don’t recall noticing an actual, rational argument in there so it’s probably trivially wrong.
Incidently, the mid-20c school of thought called “General Semantics” held that A != A (or at least not always), and their logo was an A with a bar over it; I think it may have helped inspire the early cognitive psychologist Albert Ellis to invent a new language called E Prime which was simply English with all forms of the verb “to be” removed. He is supposed to have written one book in E Prime, and as far as I know that was the end of it.
Anyway General Semantics preceded Ayn Rand, so maybe it ticked her off.
I can’t tell what your point of view is on this. E. seems to be arguing (rightly imho) that we have an interest in other people’s “truths”.
It may help to know that “Well if we’ve discovered the absolute truth then it’s our duty to impose it on everybody else.” wasn’t my attempt at establishing a real norm, but rather I was following a not too uncommon (or rather not uncommon enough) way of thinking.
The syllogism we desire to avoid runs: “I think Susie said a bad thing, therefore, Susie should be set on fire.”
Yes, I’d like to avoid that sort of ..um.. proposal—I can’t quite see why one would call it a syllogism.
Yes, I’d like to avoid that sort of ..um.. proposal—I can’t quite see why one would call it a syllogism.
People would act as if it is a syllogism if they had one of the relevant (and not especially uncommon/unrealistic) premises. It would be a syllogism like...
Amartya Sen suggests we look at our intuition about what we mean by fairness, and gives an example three (coincidentally, as in the example with the pie) people argue in effect that: 1) Fairness is about equal distribution (i.e. tending towards socialism) 2) Fairness is about the making best use of whatever w.r.t. “the greatest good for the greatest number” 3) Fairness is about being able to keep what you produced (i.e. tending towards “taxation is theft”)
He argues that anyone not dwelling in some cloud cuckoo of the mind designed by Marx, Rand, or whomever is likely to see merit in all three claims, and can’t totally trash any of them, but the social contract theorists take the wrong-headed approach that we must settle the question once and for all, and then what? Well if we’ve discovered the absolute truth then it’s our duty to impose it on everybody else.
The interpretation I come away with is if we go and start looking for the most glaring examples of unfairness by any of the three versions (without trying to rank them), and try to make a significant move towards resolving that. No overarching theory or contract required; no getting everyone in alignment first.
I’m not sure what other method we could use for defining fairness.
One might use a system of objective ethics based on an epistemology whose bedrock foundation is “Existence exists!”.
It’s been tried.
Well, that sounds about as likely to correctly define the word “fair” as to correctly define the word “banana”.
Source?
Ayn Rand, either the John Galt speech in Atlas Shrugged, or her book Objectivist Epistemology. This is not a passing bit pulled out of context, she really does reiterate this over and over as a key to understanding—also sometimes equating it to Aristotle’s great discovery that A = A.
If you construe “existence” as the set of all things that exist, then it is a refusal to accept Russell’s paradox (We can’t define sets in terms of something more elementary, but we can think about properties they should not have—and a set belonging to itself is not a good thing—i.e. leads to a contradiction).
Speaking as someone who has never read a word written by Ayn Rand, how the hell does one get from there to anything approaching “fairness” or “morality”? Genuinely asking here.
That’s quite a big mystery that I’m far from solving. I’m pretty much with Hume that you can’t get “ought” from “is”. As with the Bible, the Koran, and the Book of Mormon, I couldn’t bear the sort of exclusive attention it would take to read Atlas Shrugged, so I listened to it on audio—all 60+ hours. I made a late discovery that Audible.com lets you speed up their audio, and so towards the end was listening to it at 2x normal speed. The John Galt speech lasts 4 hours in normal time or 2 at 2x speed. He supposedly just appeared with some pirate radio system or hijacked the state’s system and proceeded to lecture the world for 4 hours, and the implication is that after this event, everything will be different. The language has a lot in common with those other books I mentioned: lots of “blah, blah, blah, and this is an intolerable abomination”.
Anyway, for remedial education, if you are one of these people like me who hasn’t read everything, audio can help a lot, and there is a treasure of public domain texts on audio at Librivox.org in case you didn’t know. I’m starting to listen to Kant. 2x speed won’t work, but I think 1.4x may for me. Sometimes I find slow reading more distracting to the other ongoing activity such as driving than I find fast reading. Audacity software can change the effective speed of MP3 files (without producing a chipmunks like effect).
As usual I’ve free associated a bit but hope there is something useful in it.
… wow.
Anyway, if Objectivists are claiming to have reached morality from tautology, I’m inclined to throw that in with all the other nonsense they spout that I know for a fact to be wrong. Now that you say it, I do recall seeing something along the lines of “the fundamental truth that A=A” in an Objectivist … I don’t want to say rant, it was pretty short … but I don’t recall noticing an actual, rational argument in there so it’s probably trivially wrong.
Incidently, the mid-20c school of thought called “General Semantics” held that A != A (or at least not always), and their logo was an A with a bar over it; I think it may have helped inspire the early cognitive psychologist Albert Ellis to invent a new language called E Prime which was simply English with all forms of the verb “to be” removed. He is supposed to have written one book in E Prime, and as far as I know that was the end of it.
Anyway General Semantics preceded Ayn Rand, so maybe it ticked her off.
Is that where van Vogt’s Ā come from?
Yes.
Sorry, no idea.
Why? As Eliezer says here:
I can’t tell what your point of view is on this. E. seems to be arguing (rightly imho) that we have an interest in other people’s “truths”.
It may help to know that “Well if we’ve discovered the absolute truth then it’s our duty to impose it on everybody else.” wasn’t my attempt at establishing a real norm, but rather I was following a not too uncommon (or rather not uncommon enough) way of thinking.
Yes, I’d like to avoid that sort of ..um.. proposal—I can’t quite see why one would call it a syllogism.
People would act as if it is a syllogism if they had one of the relevant (and not especially uncommon/unrealistic) premises. It would be a syllogism like...
Susie said a bad thing
People who say bad things should be set on fire
Therefore, Susie should be set on fire.