Date: Sun, 12 Nov 95 09:00:48 CST From: "John B. Hodges" Message-Id: <32466.jbhodges@BEV.NET> To: mhuben@world.std.com Subject: 18k essay, Why I left, current views Nov. 12, 1995; Why I am a former Objectivist and former Libertarian. Mike Huben writes: (begin quote) One of my eventual projects for my Critiques of Libertarianism web site is to present something on folks who have left, like yourself. If you have any material about why people leave, including your own personal history, I'd be very interested to get ahold of it. What first cracks the certainty, what conspicuously doesn't work, what was the turnoff, etc....(end quote) The problems I first became aware of are not the ones I would use for argument now. Rand taught (I think correctly) that as a subject in philosophy, politics derives from and depends on ethics. I first noticed problems in her political theory, but Rand makes errors at the very beginning of her ethics. (More on this point at the end of this essay.) Furthermore, in my personal history, I left Objectivism not only because of Rand's errors but also because of my own. So, this will be a selective history, with comments from my current perspective. I stumbled upon Ayn Rand at the age of 17, in the summer of 1969. She was far more impressive than any other writer I had encountered in High School. She served as my introduction to systematic philosophy. I was a fanatic Randian for about a year. (Made myself obnoxious to my classmates. Felt very isolated.) Read everything Rand had published up to that time, including the collected 4 years of THE OBJECTIVIST NEWSLETTER, most back issues of THE OBJECTIVIST, and her Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Read the books Rand sold through her bookservice, including GOD AND PHILOSOPHY by Antony Flew, and the works of the Austrian economists, Menger, Bohm-Baverk, Mises, Hayek. Also the essays of Frederic Bastiat, and ECONOMICS IN ONE LESSON by Hazlitt. In this first year, I became troubled by questions I could find no answer to in Rand's writings. One political issue of the day was whether the voting age should be lowered from 21 to 18. Attempting to reason it out, I concluded that IF the government was a "proper" one, consisting only of the DEFENSE of rights, no taxes or draft or economic regulation, then EVERYONE should have the right to vote, including newborns; but if the government was one that violated rights, then NOBODY had the moral right to vote. A byproduct of this was that I realized I had no justification for majority rule. (Rand had no theory of legitimacy for the authority of government; she took it for granted that anarchism was impractical, but articulated only limits to government authority, not any grounds for it.) In the Fall of 1970 I became a college freshman, and met other Objectivists for the first time. One introduced me to the Society for Individual Liberty (SIL), an anarcho-capitalist organization. They answered my puzzles (and also sold a much larger list of books.) Individual rights, as Rand presents them, logically imply anarchism. I was an anarchist by conviction for about six months, and one by sympathy for much longer. I was not convinced that anarchism was practical, but continued to believe in Rand's principle that there can be no conflict between the moral and the practical. Either we would find a way to make it practical, or we would find an error in the ethical logic. (I still believe, by the way, that natural rights theories, taken straight, imply anarchism; I consider this a refutation of natural rights theories.) I decided to major in Economics, and for the next few years was a happy Libertarian. My leading lights were Milton Friedman, Friederic Hayek, and the "public choice" theorists (e.g. Mancur Olsen, James Buchanan). During these years I read some anarchist writers, (Spooner, Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin) and more importantly Henry George (PROGRESS AND POVERTY, and THE LAND QUESTION) who clearly belonged in the libertarian tradition but whose books were not sold by libertarian sources. George (and some of the anarchists) showed me that the usual arguments for absolute private property in land do not work. One of my friends at college told me of a Objectivist group he had belonged to that had dissolved. One guy had seen another's $5 bill lying on a table, and later raised the question "Why would it NOT have been to my self-interest to take your $5?" The group had debated fiercely and found no solution. When I could, (summers, Xmas break, etc.) I attended meetings at the SIL house, discussing things with Jarrett Wollstien, Roy Childs, and others. I raised this question with them, and did not get any fully satisfactory answer. The primary principle of Rand's ethics is rational self-interest; individual rights are derivative. How do we make the derivation in a way that will work in all times and circumstances? How can it be said that it is always, in all cases, NECESSARILY, in your self-interest to respect other people's rights? To this day I have not found any good answer; I think that it is not always, not NECESSARILY, rational to be moral. The question of "Why be ethical" is basic; there are a number of reasons, and a society CAN be arranged so that for the vast majority of people, almost all the time, the reasons are sufficient, and immorality is suppressed to a tolerable level. But, contrary to Rand, there ARE conflicts of interest among rational men. Throughout human history there have been successful swindlers (prophets and priests) and successful thieves and parasites (Royal families, landlords, slave- owners and slave-traders.) For most of history, and arguably even today, the richest and most powerful got that way by force and fraud. Individual rights and private property were the first principles of my (libertarian) politics. After realizing that my grounds for them were shaky, I began to look harder at ethics. Ethics, in turn, depends on metaphysics and epistemology; what is the self, what is your true self-interest, and how do you know? I took enough courses in metaphysics and the philosophy of religion to become thoroughly confused; got snared by religion. Thus I definitively left Objectivism. Recovered my atheism in the early 1980's, but for awhile I was a libertarian who practiced Yoga. One result was that I became vegetarian, and read DIET FOR A SMALL PLANET by Frances Moore Lappe'. She showed that the normal, perfectly "pareto-optimal" operation of the free market results in millions of tons of humanly edible grain being fed to cattle, for a net loss of food value of about 95%, while millions of people are starving. The market places value (i.e. prices) on things according to the effective demand for them, counted against the opportunity costs of producing one thing rather than another; "effective demand" in turn is people's desires weighted by their ability to pay. So, the market counts the desire of affluent people for meat as more important than the desire of destitute people for grain. I got my B.A. in Economics and entered graduate school. (Spent many years, off and on, in graduate study of Economics, ultimately finishing all but thesis on a Master's degree.) Graduate-level economics deals with a lot more "messy cases", non-perfect markets, public goods and externalities, information problems, etc. One messy case that impressed me was milk. Milk is heavy, so shipping costs are high. It is perishable, must be processed (pasteurized, bottled) and sold quickly. It is produced by cows, which cannot be temporarily laid off; you must feed them or slaughter them. Because of the shipping costs, milk processors are typically local monopolies. Free-market negotiations between processors and farmers would be very one-sided; the processor, by refusing to buy, could drive a farmer out of business in days. Further, cows are subject to a disease called Brucelosis, which can be passed to humans (lots of them children) in milk; the disease in humans is not fatal but nasty and hard to cure, and can cause permanent damage. Pasteurization is not enough, herds must be kept free of it, contaminated milk discarded. In the real world, the government regulates prices and practices, and inspects herds; with all my background, I could see no better way. Rand makes the distinction between the subjective, objective, and intrinsic theories of ethical values; I did not understand this distinction in the mid-1970's. Like many libertarians, I believed that rights were intrinsic; "natural rights" existed independently of and prior to historical human customs and institutions. This was an essentially religious kind of belief; between my study of graduate level economics, and my utter confusion about ethics and metaphysics, I lost this belief around 1977. One messy case that persuaded me was water. Water law in the western U.S. is very libertarian in its basic approach; people have rights to take X quantity from a river, may then sell it etc. But the river often has less in it than people have rights to; much litigation results. Eastern water law is "riparian", not market-oriented. Usually there is plenty to go around but the quality varies significantly. The bottom line is that water flows where, when, and in the quantities and qualities that it will; laws assigning rights of use try to cope with an inherently unruly physics. Property rights to water are impossible to regard as anything but human contrivances. The objective theory of ethical values says that ethical values are tools for a purpose. (We might say, for achieving an objective.) Rand writes, in "Causality Versus Duty" (begin quote): Reality confronts man with a great many "musts", but all of them are conditional; the formula of realistic necessity is: "You must, if-" and the "if" stands for man's choice: "-if you want to achieve a certain goal." (end quote.) Leonard Piekoff writes commentary on this passage in his book (OBJECTIVISM: THE PHILOSOPHY OF AYN RAND) (p. 244, begin quote): The field of ethics itself, including all moral virtues and values, is necessitated by the law of causality. Morality is no more than a means to an end; it defines the causes we must enact if we are to attain a certain effect. (end quote.) Rand's ethics are a consequentialist system, with the value of an action deriving from it's consequences for the goals of the actor. Goals are chosen; indeed, if a person's actions are not automatic, must be chosen. There are many possible goals that might be chosen. The goal of Utilitarianism, for example, is to maximize the average happiness of all sentient beings. Classical Epicureanism's goal is maximizing the long-term happiness of the individual. Aristotle's ethics aimed at a goal usually translated as "flourishing". The ultimate goal of a system is it's standard of value. Identifying the ultimate goal precisely is important for any consequentialist system. Leonard Piekoff explains the goal of Objectivism in chapter 7 of his book. (OPAR, Pages 211-214, begin quotes): Goal-directed entities do not exist in order to pursue values. They pursue values in order to exist... That, in effect, is what plants and animals (and rational men) do. It is why they act and what they act for.... Thus we reach the climax of Ayn Rand's argument. Only the alternative of life vs. death creates the context for value-oriented action, and it does so only if the entity's end is to preserve its life. By the very nature of "value", therefore, any code of values must hold life as the ultimate value.... The disinctively Objectivist viewpoint here, let me repeat, is not that life is a precondition of other values- not that one must remain alive in order to act.... Objectivism says that remaining alive is the GOAL of values and of all proper action.... Morality... is the science of human self-preservation. (end quotes.) But, this is not true. This is the fundamental error at the root of Rand's ethics. According to modern biology, plants and animals do not seek, ultimately, to preserve their own lives. They pursue another goal. From Robert Trivers' excellent textbook SOCIAL EVOLUTION (begin quotes): Evolution (descent with modification) happens because of two other facts: inheritable variation and differences in reproductive success. In each species some individuals leave many surviving offspring, some leave few, some leave none. If individuals with some inheritable variations happen to leave more surviving offspring than others, then these genetic variations will become more numerous in the population. (Because herring gulls are a well-studied species, he uses them as an example.) (Pages 15, 16): "In summary then, natural selection refers to differential reproductive success in nature, where reproductive success is the number of surviving offspring produced.... We are now in a position to return to our original questions. How is it that herring gulls are organized to do something, and what exactly are they organized to do? Our answer: Gulls have been subject to natural selection...for eons, and this selection has continually woven together those traits that give their possessors high reproductive success in the environments in which they found themselves. The result of this selection is individual gulls today who are organized to maximize the number of their surviving offspring.... This view of herring gull life... does not rest alone on plausibility and faith in our...logic. ..we can check to see whether variation in gull traits is associated with variation in reproductive success. We can further check to see whether traits shared by many individuals are those that usually give high reproductive success. In the next chapter we shall see that for gulls there is now a variety of such measures, most of which show powerful selection acting on breeding traits... I hope we shall also see, throughout the book, that the hypothesis of organization to maximize individual reproductive success uniquely explains a whole world of facts concerning the way living creatures act." (End of quotes from Robert Trivers.) Another excellent author to read on this point is Richard Dawkins, THE SELFISH GENE and THE RIVER OUT OF EDEN. Closing with a summary of my own core view. There is a built-in goal of biological life, genetic reproductive success, also called "inclusive fitness" by biologists. For nonhuman life, this goal could be described as "promote the health of your family", where "health" is defined as "survival ability" and "family" is "all who share your genes, to the degree that they share your genes". Human beings are a special case in at least two ways. First, our self-awareness and free will give us the ability to choose our goals; inclusive fitness is only the "default option", toward which our nature will incline us unless we consciously choose to pursue something else. Second, humans are more than carriers of genes; we have original thoughts, we create, receive, modify, and transmit culture. Therefore, for human beings, "inclusive fitness" would as legitimately include our cultural kin as our genetic kin. The goal I advocate adopting, therefore, is "promote the health of your circle". The boundaries of your circle are your choice, but it would be entirely natural to include yourself, your genetic kin and descendants, your cultural kin and descendants. (Near kin commonly receive more concern than distant kin.) Adopting this as your ultimate goal gives an ethic that is consequentialist, objective, and Aristotelian. "Health", defined as "survival ability", seems to me to imply and include, as derivative values, most if not all of the other things commonly regarded as valuable; knowledge, strength, wealth, wisdom, etc. If you draw the boundaries of your circle at your own skin, you might thereby follow Objectivism version 1.0; at the other extreme, all life on Earth is genetically related to some degree. Human beings, simply because they are all one species, share 99.6% of their genes in common. There is nothing irrational about such broad concern, though it is rare. James Rachels, THE ELEMENTS OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY, page 128ff: "[By the 'Social Contract' conception,] Morality consists in the set of rules, governing how people are to treat one another, that rational people will agree to accept, for their mutual benefit, on the condition that others follow those rules as well....the key idea is that morally binding rules are the ones that are necessary for social living....We agree to follow the moral rules because it is to our own advantage to live in a society in which the rules are accepted." In other words, if you want to maintain peaceful and cooperative relations with your neighbors, don't kill, steal, lie, or break agreements. As Shakespeare wrote, "It needs no ghost, Milord, come from the grave, to tell us this." Because my chosen circle of concern includes my descendants, my political ideal is sustainable civilization. Reading the history of life on Earth has impressed me with the rarity and value of "the way we live now". For three billion years the highest form of life was blue- green algae. For a million years the human species made fire and stone tools, and lived by hunting and gathering in small tribes. For ten thousand years most of us lived by peasant agriculture, which is no fun. It would be a great tragedy if our civilization crashed and burned a few hundred years after discovering the scientific method. I would like to see a civilization based on reason and freedom last for geological ages. Rand told the story of the battle in the 20th century between capitalism and socialism. Many students of Objectivism have valued, not only their own lives as rational productive traders, but also the victory in this larger struggle. Marxist socialism is now dying out. The rising threat to reason and freedom seems to be mysticism and theocracy. If we want our civilization to be long-lived, we must also face the challenge of sustainability- stabilizing our population, establishing a long- lived peace, developing forms of industry that do not poison our water and air, forms of agriculture that do not create deserts, energy sources that will supply us for millennia. For our long-term health, we will also want to develop the ability to alter the orbits of the apollo asteroids, whose orbits cross the orbit of Earth. Colonizing the solar system would not be a bad idea, either. John B. Hodges, jbhodges@bev.net A Green Social Contract, for ourselves and our posterity.