EDIT: Helen suggests that we outsource our eros to the state, too. I shudder to think what this might look like.
Last night’s Yale Political Union resolution (”Your poverty is your problem”) unsurprisingly failed to pass.[1] Consider that this is an environment in which statements like, “Well, if private charity could get everyone out of poverty, and the state could only get most people out of poverty, it’d be a tough call,” are par for the course. Consider also that our guest was Yaron Brook, President of the Ayn Rand Institute, and that the affirmative in the debate oscillated between decrying the welfare state (thumbs up) and advocating objectivism (thumbs down).
Still, Dr. Brook was an extremely engaging speaker, and if not entirely convincing then at least more eloquent in support of Ayn Rand than most people I know. (Confession: My first real exposure was in 4th grade, when my best friend read Atlas Shrugged because he liked trains. He’s better now.)
As Dara pointed out, though, the Randian system suffers from a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of coercion. If I were to hold a gun to the head of a suicidal man, I would be emplying force but not actually coercing him. On the other hand, if my mother were very upset with me, she wouldn’t have to use any force to make me do what she wanted: I care enough about what she thinks that her opinion can function coercively. Now, obviously, I don’t have to do what my mother wants, though I want her approval; similarly, I don’t have to do what a gunman wants, though I want to live. To say that I should intentionally condition myself not to care about my friends and family is as ridiculous and contrary to human nature as saying I shouldn’t care about my own life. I am neither a beast nor a god, and thank goodness for it!
Having thus rejected objectivism, the more interesting question is about the relationship between the state and the poor. I am unconvinced by the claim that if we had a truly free market everyone would have as much money as they deserved — culture matters too much for that, and no matter what people claim, human beings are not purely rational.[2]
So what happens when the state starts taking care of the poor, the elderly, and the sick? Well, we don’t do it ourselves. It suddenly becomes possible to walk past a hungry person, because we can tell ourselves that the government will take care of the problem. Taxes let us fulfill our societal obligations by writing a check, which is easier and far less personal than any kind of meaningful interaction.
If the poor person on my street corner is just another item on the list of things the state spends money on (toilet seats for the Pentagon; the War on Drugs; human beings), I stop seeing him as a person. It becomes easy for me to complain about my hard-earned money going to strangers, to call it theft and to resent these people whom I’ve never seen. Dehumanizing my fellow man is bad for me, bad for him, and, obviously, bad for any hope of creating community.
The other major argument against the welfare state is the one that Robert Nisbet makes: the kinds of intermediate institutions that filled most of the economic and social functions in people’s lives — guild, church, and family — were displaced by the state in the name of freedom and efficiency. “The real significance of the modern state,” Nisbet says, “is inseparable from its successive penetrations of man’s economic, religion, kinship and local allegiances, and its revolutionary dislocation of established centers of function and authority.”
A student summed this up in his speech: “A society that lives economically through the state must consent to live socially thought the state.” We know what that looks like, and it isn’t pretty.
The problem, then, is to be sure that individuals in a community do love one another, and do care for one another. If they don’t, people will go hungry. But if the state steps in, people will stop being people.
[1]This is, of course, a tragedy of unparalleled proportions, mostly because I’m Floorleader of the Right, and thus responsible for that side of the debate. My opponent counterpart on the Left should not be permitted to beat me with any regularity.
[2] This is probably just as well. If I were purely rational, I would probably be majoring in Electrical Engineering, like my father and the RE keep telling me to, and then I would have a really boring life.
“To say that I should intentionally condition myself not to care about my friends and family is as ridiculous and contrary to human nature as saying I shouldn’t care about my own life.”
This is very true. And you are right that it is absurd to advocate such an anti-life, anti-social philosophy. I am an Objectivist, and I’m happy to report to you that in my 5 years of studying this philosophy, I have not come across one principle in it that even remotely suggests what you have said above.
Indeed, exactly the opposite! Objectivism *explicitly* exhorts a person to select his friends and consider his family members as great personal values (of course, there should be a reason why you choose someone as a friend or consider a relative a very close and valuable one). Objectivism points out that it is indeed rationally selfish to value your dear ones, protect them if necessary, nurture your relationship with them, and enjoy the values they have to offer you and mutatis mutandis. Why is this selfish? Does it mean that all our actions are ultimately selfish?
NO.
Objectivism offers an ethical theory of rational selfishness, where selfishness means the *upholding* of the self—the upholding of self-worth or self-value—and the nurturing of the values necessary, meaningful, or relevant to the self. This entails the nurturing of people that one cares about. It involves the benevolence engendered in encoutering productive fellow humans who have values to offer and improve your own life.
This also implies that there are some actions consistent with the upholding of the self (i.e., that they are selfish actions) and there are some actions that are degrading to the self, destructive to the self, dismissive of the self, uninterested in the self (i.e., that these actions are not selfish, but selfless, self-abnegating, self-destructive, or other-centric).
There is so much more to Objectivism than your little statement above. If you’re curious, you may wish to examine the philosophy just a little more in depth and perhaps investigate whether or not Objectivism has a coherent system and solution to the task of human survival.
“I don’t have to do what my mother wants, though I want her approval; similarly, I don’t have to do what a gunman wants, though I want to live.” This is an equivocation on the nature of coercion. Your mother’s approval is hers to give: you can take it, by complying with her request, or leave it. Your life, however, does not belong to the gunman: it belongs to you. The gunman can’t give you your life, because you already own it. The only way he take it from you is by using physical force, and the initiation of physical force is what Objectivism seeks to banish from human relationships. A government that forces some people to give money to other people is doing the same thing as the gunman.
Further: ff you decide to do without your mother’s approval, you do so on the basis that other values come higher in your hierarchy. But without life, no other values are possible.
There is perhaps no greater challenge for an Objectivist in a debate than to overcome the audience’s inexperience with thinking in principles and their lack of understanding that the concepts behind such principles are formed and used hierarchically.
Any discussion of the initiation of force within a philosophical context rests upon the more fundamental principle of individual rights. Note that individual rights give rise to private property rights. Without a proper concept of individual rights, there is no way to judge who is stealing from whom – if at all, or who is initiating force and who is responding/retaliating in self-defense, if at all.
Watching “who throws the first punch” is a useless concrete-bound mode of thinking. It could be you are watching a boxing match. Or an undercover policeman seize an escaped felon. Assisted suicide is not a violation of an individual’s rights, nor generally speaking, is a parent’s exercise of a certain range of control over a child. The violation of individual rights – the initiation of force – can also be words which represent a credible threat of physical action. The attempt to distinguish between “force” and “coercion” misses the speaker’s attempt to describe the underlying genera of action – the violation of an individual’s right to his own life, and to the control of his own property.
For example, when a restaurant owner eventually resorts to having a bouncer eject an unruly, uncooperative, and loudly foul-mouthed patron, it is an act of force, but a retaliatory force. The initiation of force was by the patron, even if the patron never physically touched anyone. The patron violated the owner’s right to control what goes on in his/her business (and the implied contract for the orderly use of the facility in return for payment).
It is certainly possible, and common, in such a limited comment forum for someone to read the above explanation and respond by repeating exactly the same type of error that this explanation is attempting to resolve. That is, to ignore the broader concepts and to attempt to split hairs by coming up with endless what-if’s for every situation. There are answers to such questions, but note there is an unlimited range of specific situations. Without applying principles, one will struggle over each instance and a discussion goes on forever.
If you are unfamiliar with applying principles, each situation might appear unrelated and may require a long explanation. For example, both email source spoofing and writing a bad check are species of fraud, in the genera of an initiation of force. Principles are absolute but are applied contextually. They are not the answers, they are the guide to the answers.
Given how common it is for professors to shovel out reams of unintegrated nonsense, I can understand your dismissive response when you didn’t understand what Dr. Brook was saying. However, I suggest you reassess you premises and read a bit more, this time being careful to build an understanding of the underlying principles. It really does take hard work. But there is nothing more worthwhile. Good luck.
“If the poor person on my street corner is just another item on the list of things the state spends money on (toilet seats for the Pentagon; the War on Drugs; human beings), I stop seeing him as a person. It becomes easy for me to complain about my hard-earned money going to strangers, to call it theft and to resent these people whom I’ve never seen. Dehumanizing my fellow man is bad for me, bad for him, and, obviously, bad for any hope of creating community.”
I agree with you, but my experience has been that people are perfectly capable of dehumanizing others in need without the welfare system as well. When most students walk past the panhandlers on York or Chapel, do they think “Argh, someone who wants me to give them money, but what do I care, at least they get welfare,” or “Argh, someone who wants me to give them money, but I don’t want to interact with them”?
I was at the Union debate that my compatriot has described, and we heard a few different pieces and versions of the things I see people posting here. I’d like to offer two of my own interpretations, for the sake of argument. The first is my understanding of self-interest (for though I wouldn’t count myself an Objectivist, I am effectively an athiest). The second is what I see as false hope for the principle of coercion (which I will post separately).
“Ergo” described Objectivism with a broad understanding of self-interest, which is good to hear. There are Objectivists who take the hardline, “selfishness means only me” approach, but in my experience there are egoists of every stripe who do that, and if I may be so bold I think that attitude reflects a refusal to grapple with what it means to be human.
As far as plausible understandings of selfishness go, I’ve only rarely found myself in a disagreement over what self-interested people want and need, and actually never with another egoist. When there’s agreement over the facts on the ground, the difference between Objectivists and people who take unkindly to Objectivism is really a question of emphasis. (I’ve also found a similar distinction between Right and left libertarians. The left focuses freedom from the state, while the Right looks to the rise more effectively moralistic institutions. Same ball game, different score board.)
I don’t think I’ve ever met an Objectivist whose favorite part of the philosophy was metaphysics. (So if you’re really into “A is A”, this won’t apply to you.) Those I’ve met like it for its compelling explanation of the self-interest that they intuitively appreciate. Objectivists, like libertarians, possess the helpful intuition that “altruistic” government programs often cause harm. But sensible Objectivists have to stumble over themselves to use Rand’s language. If they dare to mention anything about loving their children, it had better be followed by some explanation of contract theory. Some people might enjoy the company of others, sure, but the Objectivist must remember that a solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short life is equally valid.
Objectivists apply their intuition in such a weird way, as though to deny that human beings need each other on a fundamental level. We know full well that a man who lives alone demeans his own humanity no less than the man who chooses slavery to the state. We know full well that ’tis better to give than to receive, and that this fact reflects something profound about what man is. Yet Objectivist rhetoric tries to ignore these fundamental realities. Why? What worth is it to extoll childish selfishness alongside the great virtues? What do Objectivists get for pretending that man is not a political animal, or for curtailing our discussion of morality to origins and not destinations?
They convince the rest of the world to ignore them. That’s what.
As for the principle of coercion, I think it’s another case of an helpful intuition applied weirdly. We all know that there’s something wrong with murder, and Objectivists and libertarians are well acquainted with the problems of state management of an economy. It seems natural to focus on the common thread: coercive force.
The important realization here is that the underlying truth in these cases is an economic one. People forcing other people around tend not to have their best interests at heart, just as governments tend to have questionable goals when they manipulate markets. There’s also the deep and interesting problem of information: markets and natural exchange allow dispersed knowledge to be collected into price signals and other neat evolutionary processes; central planners have no access to that knowledge. I like to imagine I get just as much a kick as any Objectivist out of applying these economic approaches to questions of politics.
It takes more than a little leap, though, to suggest that the fundamental differences between physical force and other types of motivation persist on the moral level. When Dr. Brook was taking questions after his speech, the last one went something like, “Can my stomach ever be a gun?” I seem to remember Dr. Brook dismissing the question on the grounds that one might imagine he would, for of course, guns are force coming from other people; your stomach is inside of you. That is certainly a distinction, but is it really the important one? If I rob a store because someone has a gun to my head making me do it, we all agree I’m not doing anything wrong. But if you rob the same store because you’re starving, we say you shouldn’t have done that. I think it’s very important to ask ourselves what the fundamental difference is, and whether our answer to that question is really compelling. Obviously, society wouldn’t work too well if people went around breaking into buildings every time they wanted a sandwich, but that’s an ECONOMIC explanation, not a moral one. And if the moral difference is supposed to be that the gun was outside of me, while your stomach was inside of you, I simply do not find that compelling.
There are also plenty of situations that ostensibly don’t involve coercive force which I find objectionable. There used to be a practice in India (please excuse any inaccuracy on my part) whereby a widows would throw themselves upon their husband’s funeral pyres. No one forced the widows to do that, but I imagine that Indian society would have ostracized any widow who didn’t. When the British took over, they found the custom barbaric and forcefully ended it. I don’t know about you, but I think the British made the right call.
There are two distinct aspects of the Indian situation that need to be considered. The first is probably the more obvious: I’m trying to provide an example whereby social pressure looks a lot like coercive force. I think that anyone morally opposed to force will at least have a hard time convincing himself that pressuring widows to suicide is any kind of acceptable. Remember, I’m intentionally avoiding economic reasoning; I understand that it can be problematic for a government to dictate morals. Rather, I’m speaking to personal morality. I’m trying to emphasize the absurdity of the notion that the only way a man telling his neighbor to kill herself can be wrong is if he’s got a gun in his hand when he’s doing the telling.
Situations like that one are enough to convince me to abandon any hope of building a morality based solely on force, but there is a second, more subtle point that should be stressed. This point is that most of the women throwing themselves onto those pyres probably didn’t even need to be pressured. Social pressure doesn’t usually work like a utilitarian calculus, with a woman stopping to consider the relative costs of pissing off her village. No, social influence works much earlier and much more deeply, shaping the life you lead and the choices you make before you’ve lived long enough to face them.
Objectivists tend to think of rational man as though it is possible for a person to stop and consider every single choice he makes in his life. I want to point out how starkly impossible that is. Consider that most Objectivists live in America. That means that they will probably work salaried jobs (daily), live in a house (on a street), possibly have a family (keeping the children produced), save for retirement (their own, not their parents’), and eat three meals a day (occasionally with fermentations of fruit or grain). Of these facts we can be almost certain, simply by knowing that our Objectivists live in this country. Will these Objectivists actually make all these choices for themselves? I could never do justice to the sheer variety of possible life choices that we face, and how few of them we actually bother to think about. Sure, a man of reason could theoretically choose to do everything differently from his neighbors. But no one ever does. And in an important way, it’s really impossible. There are simply too many choices to actually make them all ourselves. It’s remarkable how well humans are adapted to social living, because we’d never be able to reason ourselves through it if we weren’t.
In my experience, a lot of Objectivist thinking is based on the notion that reason can guide a man through life. It should be clear enough that, in absolute proportions, the vast majority of your life is chosen for you by human society. Not that we must do things a certain way, but that we do do things a certain way. There is a very real sense in which the conditions of your birth irrevocably determine most of your life (and I don’t mean your economic station). If we really want to, we can define some morality of force that pays no attention to this kind of coercion, but these distinctions just aren’t compelling. A morality that treats man as though he is a being of pure reason that objectively evaluates his world is simply dealing with beings who do not inhabit this planet.
Of course, plenty of religions and systems of morality try to treat humans as something we’re not. Vegans try to pretend that we’re not supposed to eat meat. Buddhists try to pretend that all our world is suffering. (Though admittedly, back in the day, Buddhists had a point.) But no philosophy bold enough to call itself “Objectivism” should be dealing with people as anything other than what they are, and that means accepting the fact that people aren’t meant to make all of their own decisions.
Point being, our intuitions about force are not wrong. They are profoundly true, when we’re talking about governments and markets. But when we’re talking about individual morality, it’s important to face the fact that physical coercion is not all that different from the forces that normally guide a healthy human life. These forces can be good, or they can be bad. Likewise, if I steal all my friend’s stuff that’s bad, but if I force my friend to kick his methamphetamine habit, that’s probably good. It’s no less silly to focus on one kind of force than it is to pretend that force always comes from a place of evil.