99Percent

Longboy: In fact, this is a criticism I have of many moral objectivists. They tend to make morality implicitly out to be the only consideration. The truth is, in my opinion, that morality is not all of practical philosophy let alone the only thing that one need consider in order to calculate their best course of action.

If you consider that the consequences of your actions, of anyone's actions, cannot be known for certain and you also consider that we are forced to continually make decisions then you will realize that ultimately we must be moral beings. We cannot escape being moral.

Indeed, philosophy is not all there is when it comes to intellectual life or thought.

I agree, but philosophy is the fundamental base on which all intellectual life or thought rests. Before embarking in intellectual endeavors you must have a solid epistemological, metaphysical worldview and ethical stance or else you are just wandering in the dark.

galiel:You can't. That is the whole point. Objectivitsm and objectivity are not the same thing. Calling Ayn Rand's dogma "Objectivism" is like calling creationism "Intelligent Design".

Well of course, one is a belief and another is a condition. What's your point then?

Longbow

I won't even speculate as to what that kind of handle is supposed to indicate about its author!

How do you mean you cannto escape being moral? Are you saying that it is immorality is impossible? Then why is morality even worth discussing? As for not knowing the consequences of your actions for certain, I don't see how that ties into the fact that you are always moral.

In short, I don't really understand this passage...

99Percent

You are confusing immoral with amoral.

I mean that we are always forced to make moral decisions. If we knew the consequences of our actions then we would just always act on what is best. But since we do not know whether the consequences of action A would result better than the consequences of action B we are forced to act on a moral framework instead. This is what I mean by being moral beings. This is different from animals or robots because they don't consider the future consequences of their actions they just react on their inputs. They are amoral beings.

galiel

Simply precision. Over the course of the thread, "objective thinking" became sloppily replaced with "Objectivism". I wanted to make sure there was no confusing the two unrelated terms.

elwoodblues

Of course they're different. Rand took the idea of an 'objective' reality and built a lot on top of it; we call that construction 'Objectivism'. Two separate entities, though related.

Objectivism is one part of the set of all philosophies that are based on an idea of objective reality. There are others, though Rand's Objectivism is by far the best known and most discussed. The two ARE related, but they're not the same thing. Making the mistake of equating the two is common.

By the same token, you cannot try to say that 'objective' and 'Objectivism' are entirely unrelated terms. They are closely tied. Agree with Objectivism or not, you must admit that it is built on the idea of an objective reality. That is the most defining and characteristic point in the whole philosophy.

Amen-Moses

I don't get this distinction at all, my Cat definitely makes decisions based on future consequences and so did the Flight Control systems I developed in the past. At what point do these become morals? i.e if a robot is built that complies with Asimov's 3 laws is it moral or amoral and why?

Amen-Moses

Murphy

It has always seemed to me a futile endeavor to get a logical explanation of Objectivism from an Objectivist. I intend no offence when I say this. I know several Objectivists and am very good friends with a couple of them. However, their philosophy is bunk. First of all, they believe that one's actions should be based on some absolute scale of good vs evil that is inherant in human nature. That seems downright religious to me. I also have issues with their take on selfishness. According to an Objectivist, if an action you make doens't have the sole purpose of benifiting you than it is an evil action. Altruism is inherently evil in Rand's teachings, though she does misdefine it to an extent. Any action to benefit another human being without any benefit to yourself is the product of someone with a warped nature. Basically, Objectivism is a knee-jerk denial of everything the USSR stood for taken to extremes. One can understand why Rand, having lived in Soviet Russia would feel believe so, but I've never grasped why so many otherwise intelligent people seem to be drawn into her misguided philosophy.

Longbow

I agree. And, I feel exactly the same way about secular humanism.

elwoodblues

I hope you realize what this does. The only way to get a 'logical explanation of Objectivism' left is to trust someone who is NOT an Objectivist. That's like learning about Islam from a Christian. They might mean well, and some of what they think about Objectivism might actually be true, but in the end your 'explanation' will probably be distorted, ill-informed, and simply not reflective of reality.

This kind of reasoning opens the door to denying just about anything, because you're only listening to uninterested bystanders and CRITICS of a system. Longbow's comment puts this quite succinctly.

Please study an idea before you critique it. Inherent in REALITY. The difference is staggering.

That is simply a bloody-minded distortion. Look through Rand's fiction; you find plenty of protagonists risking their life, many times. These people are atheists, almost without exception. Find the sense in that, if your above premise is true.

Your statement above is only true on a very, very superficial level. Dig a little deeper.

And keep in mind that there are all sorts of shades of objectivism.

galiel

Huh? Care to elaborate on this extraordinary, counter-intuitive statement?