image optimizations

content/post/pansychism-is-a-red-herring.md

@@ -3,7 +3,7 @@ title: "Pansychism Is a Red Herring"
 date: 2020-04-03T16:49:27Z
 tags: ["panpsychism", "theism", "consciousness"]
 topics: ["philosophy", "theology", "psychology"]
-image: /img/panpsychic.png
+image: /img/panpsychic.jpg
 draft: false
 ---
 

content/post/rand-aristotle-and-modern-moral-philosophy.md

@@ -0,0 +1,40 @@
+---
+title: "Rand, Aristotle, and Modern Moral Philosophy"
+date: 2020-09-20T19:32:26Z
+tags: ["academia","ayn rand","aristotle","ethics"]
+topics: ["philosophy","psychology"]
+image: /img/aristotle-vs-rand.jpg
+draft: false
+---
+
+A common line of attack on Ayn Rand, from “professional” academic philosophers, is to go after her for her defense of egoism. This has always seemed disingenuous to me. Or, at best, uncharitable. The argument goes something like this:
+
+- Ayn Rand defended selfishness as a virtue
+- Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic did the same thing
+- Socrates humiliated Thrasymachus in that dialogue
+- Therefore, Ayn Rand’s defense of selfishness is obviously wrong
+
+But, anyone trained as a philosopher should be able to recognize the problems with this argument without much effort. Firstly, what does Ayn Rand mean by “selfishness”? Well, she defended a variety of “ethical egoism”, which basically means that the self is the focus of your ethics. But what does that focus amount to? Here, is where the mistake in this argument gets interesting. Thrasymachus was indeed, also an “ethical egoist”. His egoism was a variety known as *hedonic* egoism. What this means, is that the standard by which right and wrong is adjudicated comes down to whatever satisfies the most powerful person in the room, in the moment a choice is made. Is this the egoism that Ayn Rand subscribed to? In a word: NO.
+
+According to the traditional definition, rational egoism sets the standard at “self interest”, where “self interest” is whatever rationally satisfies the needs or desires of the individual. This definition is nearly identical to hedonic egoism, because it is grounded in a utilitarian calculus in which the self is at the center, rather than the group. It’s only real difference with hedonic egoism, is that it allows for long-term consequences to factor into the decision-making judgment. This is not what Ayn Rand was talking about.
+
+Ayn Rand’s “rational egoism” is one grounded in what she thought was “objective value” (this is part of the reason she called her philosophy “Objectivism”). She often couched her argument in terms of an opposition to altruism (the polar negative of egoism). Altruism, she argued, denied the fundamental objective value of human existence, by making the preservation of the self the standard of evil. The idea is, that any *moral obligation* (implicit or explicit) to “give a dime to a beggar”, is tantamount to a “first mortage on your life” — i.e., that you owe your existence to others, as a matter of moral law. But, if it could be shown that the value in your individual existence is self-sufficient and independent of the claims or demands of any other individual, then egoism is the proper stance.
+
+Rand tried to make this case by way of Aristotle, and this is where her theory is actually vulnerable. But because very few modern moral philosophers have spent any time reading Aristotle, and fewer yet have read Ayn Rand, what you get from them is the high school caricature objection I outlined above.
+
+What was Rand’s argument for the objective value of man? It borrows several elements from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. So, a bit of background is necessary to begin with. First, Aristotle’s project in the Ethics, was to account for the different kinds of living beings he observed. The first step was to identify three distinct kinds, of life: plants, animals, and humans. He made this distinction by looking at the kinds of behaviours each form of life engaged in, and grouping them as such. Plants took in sunlight, soil, and water, and grew to completion where they stood, from seed. They have a “sensory” faculty, only in the sense that they knew when to blossom, and throw new seed. Animals seemed to share this nutritive faculty with plants. However, they did much more than plants. They were able to move around, and they used their mobility to hunt for food, which they ingested for energy. They also procreated by way of sexual intercourse, and some of them nursed their young (such as horses and dogs). Both the nutritive faculty of plants and the apetitive faculty of animals is something that appeared to be present in humans, according to Aristotle. But humans also seemed to possess a special behavior not seen in plants or animals. In particular, man was capable of calculating courses of action to take, before taking them — unlike animals, which seemed driven entirely by their appetites. What’s more, man seemed uniquely capable of contemplating universal truths, and the first principles of existence. This, Aristotle called the rational principle in man.
+
+These faculties: nutritive, appetitive, and rational, were part of the composite metaphysical being of the living things under investigation. A union of form and matter, in which the form defines what activities the being is capable of actualizing. In living things, this compound is called Hylomorphism, and is colloquially understood as the union of body and soul, where soul contains the “principle” of the living thing. Plants have a “nutritive” soul. Animals have an “appetitive” soul. Men have a “rational” soul.
+
+For Aristotle, this distinction was not actually meant to signify a difference in *moral value*. I don’t think he would have understood what we mean when we use the term “moral value”. Instead, this was a metaphysical description. An attempt to account for what living things do, how they come into being and go out of being, and to identify what their fully actualized states were. This last point is essential, because for Aristotle, all living things are aiming at “completion”, or “perfection” (as the medievals put it). A fully perfected acorn, is an adult oak tree. A fully perfected tadpole, is a frog. A fully perfected human being, is an adult that is capable of exhibiting consistent virtue. Now, there is a larger teleological story to this. Namely, that the contemplative faculty in man’s mind must eventually find its home in the rational principle that governs the universe (the “prime mover”). Thus, there is a theodicy involved in Aristotle’s ethics, in which there is a teleological direction to everything, driven by the Divine Mind. But, this still assigned no such thing as a unique “objective value” to man.
+
+What Ayn Rand did, was to borrow Aristotle’s distinctions, and placed them into a hierarchy of “objective” value. It’s just “objectively better” to be a rational being, than not to be, and just “objectively better” to be a living being, than a non-living being. It is tempting at this point, to raise the Humean objection. Why should man’s rational faculty be treated as the thing that gives him moral worth? Isn’t this just sticking an arbitrary flag in the ground? Why not his capacity to hold his breath under water, or his capacity to walk on two legs? I suspect Aristotle himself might have raised such an objection, if he were faced with the idea of an “objective value” which was to be assigned to a creature, based on any attribute. For Aristotle, the point of isolating attributes was to identify what *defined* the creature, not what *makes it valuable*.
+
+But this is yet another misunderstanding of Rand’s position. She was not arguing that the rational faculty itself was what gave man his objective value. Rather, it was *a particular use of that faculty* that pointed to the existence of an objective value. Namely, man’s use of his rational faculty to evaluate. Particularly, his use of reason to identify and pursue the things he needed to preserve and perfect his life. She took the fact of the basic desire to live, as evidence of the objective value of life, and man’s capacity to reason out the means of satisfying that desire, as evidence of man’s peculiar value among living things. In short, she took the power to evaluate to be the moment of creation of objective value. Every time I apply for a job, or read a book, or eat a meal, I am reaffirming these objective values of life, and in particular, *human* life. Thus, any ethic that pitted men against men in some zero-sum equation of life-for-life, or bound men into obligations that forced them into a state of self-denial, was evil, because it was life-denying.
+
+If this conception of value creation seems peculiarly obtuse, or perhaps even incomprehensible, you’re not alone. It’s a massive soft-spot in her ethical system. Not just because it is subject to Hume’s is-ought problem, but also because she provides no real metaphysical theory for the assignment of value at all — or rather, the elevation of the desire for life, to the state of an objective value. Rand herself is quite explicit (indeed, quite proud) of the fact that these are asserted as fundamental and incontravertable *axioms* of her theory. In other words, they cannot be explained, because they are “brute facts” of reality. So, if the “professional” philosophers were not as lazy as I suspect them of being, this might be a legitimate line of attack open to them, if they were so inclined to oppose Ayn Rand.
+
+But they don’t do this, and there’s a good reason for it. Most of them are atheists (or agnostics). And so was Ayn Rand. Why is this important? Well, because both Plato and Aristotle offer up attempts to explain this last step. Namely, a Divine Mind. In a word: GOD. The medieval Christian church has since developed an extensive and sophisticated theology around that theory, that frankly puts Ayn Rand to shame. But it also puts most modern moral philosophers to shame as well. I’m already well over my word quota for this essay. So, I can’t go into more detail here on this point. But suffice to say, Ayn Rand’s visceral hatred for religion is something she shares with modern “humanist” philosophers, and because of this, the only objection the Humanists can offer up against Ayn Rand, is the shameless appeal to collectivist utilitarian concerns, or our natural revulsion to “selfishness”. Even Ayn Rand recognized this herself, which is why she titled her essay, “The Virtue of Selfishness”. She was trolling the Humanists.
+
+```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 28 November 2021]```
+

content/post/sociopathy-dressed-up-as-bioethics.md

@@ -22,3 +22,6 @@ Also, this is the classic medical version of the trolley problem. In the hypothe
 He then reiterates the kidney argument. Only this time, makes the mistake even more obvious. The kidney donor -- as he rightly points out - is making a fully informed consensual choice, and his choice WILL benefit one other person, a person that the donor values . But in the case of intentional infection, he openly admits, there is only a "potential" to help others somewhere else. The benefit is only probable, and highly abstract. In other words, this option is really about satisfying researcher preferences, not actually doing good medicine.
 
 All of this in six minutes. It's appalling to me, how far up their own asses these academics have crawled. The Q&A after the speech is almost entirely dedicated to relative mathematical probability calculations comparing infection and vaccine discovery. It's like we've handed our entire civilization over to a gaggle of autistic sociopaths.
+
+```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 28 November 2021]```
+

content/post/the-loss-of-self-awareness.md

@@ -3,7 +3,7 @@ title: "The Loss of Self Awareness"
 date: 2020-06-29T22:13:16Z
 tags: ["gilbert and sullivan", "satire", "meaning", "self-knowledge"]
 topics: ["philosophy", "psychology", "sociology"]
-image: /img/not-a-pipe.png
+image: /img/not-a-pipe.jpg
 draft: false
 ---
 

content/post/two-liberalisms-mill-vs-lock.md

@@ -0,0 +1,37 @@
+---
+title: "Two Liberalisms: Mill vs Lock"
+date: 2020-11-07T19:27:36Z
+tags: ["property","harm","liberalism","locke","mill"]
+topics: ["philosophy","politics"]
+image: /img/mill-and-locke.jpg
+draft: false
+---
+
+I want to suggest an idea from an observation that’s been made many times before. Namely, that what the modern center-left now likes to call “classical” and/or “social” Liberalism, is a muddle of two strains of thought in the Enlightenment, that both stand in opposition to Rousseau; but that the latter strain smuggles him back in through the kitchen door.
+
+The division in the Enlightenment between Rousseau and Hobbes is so famous it’s practically a cliché at this point. Is human nature fundamentally good, or fundamentally bad? Is society a super-organism with a sovereign head, or a collection of self-interested agents, who need to be threatened to stay in line? Those debates will continue ad nauseam, I am sure. That’s not what I mean by the title of this post. Rather, I want to explore the distinction between Locke and Mill. It is THIS distinction that, I think, identifies the lanes of separation we see between American libertarianism, and American liberalism (or “classical liberalism”, and “social liberalism” ).
+
+John Locke is, more or less, the father of the modern conception of property rights. What most folks don’t know, is that this conception of property is almost entirely biblically based. When you take an undergraduate course in political philosophy, you will be directed to read Locke’s Second Treatise on Government. If you are of a skeptically curious disposition, you will end up quite frustrated by the end of the first few chapters, because it seems like Locke believed that none of his initial assumptions and opening moves needed any justification whatsoever. They were just axiomatically the case. For example, that a man has a right to the disposition of his own body. But Locke actually DIDN’T just assume these things. In fact, in the *first* Treatise, he is extremely explicit about where the justification comes from: Genesis.
+
+In a nutshell, he believed that when God cast Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden, he did not give them a *right* to property, he cursed them with an *obligation* to property. You’ll recall that, as part of the punishment for disobeying his command, God ordered Adam to toil in the dirt for his own survival. Locke inferred from this, that God must have intended for us to make full use of what we found on the earth, in order to fulfill the purpose he set for each of us, individually, as his children. Locke reasoned that, if this was the case, then an exclusive claim to what we needed to that end must also be inferred. For, how else were we to meet the demands of his curse? Surely, God was strict in his punishment, but wouldn’t have been so perversely cruel as to make it impossible for us to satisfy the punishment.
+
+In addition to this, Locke inferred in the opposite direction that if God was the artisan of our lives — the laborer who fashioned each of us into existence — then it must be he, and he alone, who holds exclusive claim to our lives and their product, in equal measure, one man to the next. From this, we get Lockean individualism, the “right” to property (as an extension of our singular relationship with God), and the sacredness of individual human life (as the sole property of God, who is the sovereign of all lives).
+
+This is a fairly radical departure from the thinking of his day, which argued that the royal sovereign was God’s appointed custodian, and that the rest of us were the charges of the sovereign, who in the end, must answer to God. It is from Locke also, then, that we get our concept of “individual sovereignty”, which he argued for more thoroughly in the Second Treatise. But without this foundation, the Second Treatise just sounds like a bunch of floating assertions.
+
+The reason we’re all directed away from the first Treatise, is because Locke’s religious conviction is an embarrassment to the modern left. The Enlightenment, on their view, was a repudiation of superstition. But if modern self-ownership and property rights are entirely dependent on the pillar of Genesis, well, then we have a rather uncomfortable secret to hide. But it is this hidden secret, I think, that is what makes Locke so attractive to American libertarians. He essentially validates the Protestant individualism built into the political culture of the United States. It is the vague realization of this, I believe, that puts folks like Dave Rubin on a path toward reconciliation with Christianity.
+
+The rest of the left, however (at least, the traditional academic left), are far more friendly to John Stuart Mill. While religious himself, Mill rarely mentions religion in his philosophical works, and where he does, it functions only as metaphor, and never as a sustaining premise in any of his arguments (unlike Locke). In addition to this, Mill was quite an admirer of Rousseau. He quotes Rousseau (and Kant) two or three times both in Utilitarianism, and On Liberty. Mill helped promote the 19th century “back to nature” movement that inspired American Transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau. That ideal was itself a product of Rousseau’s pastoral word paintings of noble savages in the golden past, pacifistically extracting their livelihood directly from the natural bounty of earth (itself, a re-invention of a myth from Hesiod’s “Works and Days” ).
+
+Mill’s Liberalism was, at least in part, a response to Rousseau. His project was an attempt to inject paternalistic utilitarianism into society, as a way to achieve the ideal society Rousseau had in mind, without having to abandon modern civil structures (something Rousseau despised). He imagined that liberty (enabled by means of his own “harm principle” as a framework for governance) was a tool to be used in service of the “common good”. Put more precisely, Mill imagined that the equitable distribution of beneficence (aka pleasure) across the whole of society, was made possible by re-imagining the role of the state not as caretaker of an individuals’ right to care for himself, but as a caretaker of the individual himself, in the aggregate.
+
+The state existed, like parents at a community center play date, to marshal citizens toward activities that would be for their own good, “on the whole”. While Locke and Mill shared the conviction that every individual was in some way sovereign, this was a sentimental metaphor for Mill, rather than a metaphysical fact of nature. The value that mattered, was not so much the individual’s relationship with God — which, by Mill’s time, was something considered to be private business between the individual and God — but his “well being”, or “flourishing”, which was something that could be quantified in utilitarian terms, and measured by the state. That information could then be used to “make progress”, which is to say, engineer social circumstances in such a way, so as to meet the utilitarian standard of improvement in “well-being” or “flourishing” . From this, we get commitments to things like women’s rights, but also to things like abortion and the aversion to gun ownership.
+
+The key distinction between the two Liberalisms, then, is this: Millsian Liberalism sidelines the importance of religion as a basis for human dignity, replacing it instead with an arbitrary standard of “improved conditions”, which is a flexible concept that travels with the times. Lockean Liberalism, on the other hand, is a metaphysical theory at bottom, positing a relationship to a divine creator, and inferring all manner of political liberties and obligations from that relationship. It is easy to see why the two also posit wildly different understandings of economics and ethics.
+
+But it should be pointed out, in closing, that neither of these forms of Liberalism are derived from the collectivist idealism of Rousseau. Even as simpatico as Mill seems to be with Rousseau, he would have rejected Rousseau’s conception of a “general will” (though, Mill had his own version), and would have insisted on a political hierarchy anathema to Rousseau’s absolutist egalitarianism, because that hierarchy was necessary to facilitate Mill’s paternalistic utilitarianism. It is in this sense, ironically, that Mill is more traditional than Locke, because his utilitarianism is far more compatible with paternalistic Royalism, than Locke’s individualistic propertarianism.
+
+It is vitally essential for American Conservatives to be aware of these distinctions, going forward, because as the American republic begins to disintegrate in the coming decades, they will need to carefully select for themselves, which of the metaphysical, ethical, and social theories from the left that have permeated American society from its founding, they will want to *conserve* — and that will largely depend on how well they can reconcile those ideas with their own notions of traditionalism, constitutionalism, republicanism, Christianity, and libertarianism.
+
+```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 28 November 2021]```
+

content/post/two-visions-of-justice.md

@@ -3,7 +3,7 @@ title: "Two Visions of Justice"
 date: 2021-04-21T21:06:08+01:00
 tags: ["justice", "equality", "liberty"]
 topics: ["philosophy"]
-image: /img/lady-justice.png
+image: /img/lady-justice.jpg
 draft: false
 ---
 

content/post/what-is-a-community.md

@@ -3,7 +3,7 @@ title: "What Is a Community?"
 date: 2020-04-04T16:54:39Z
 tags: ["social media", "fandoms", "locals"]
 topics: ["philosophy", "psychology", "sociology", "technology"]
-image: /img/community.png
+image: /img/community.jpg
 draft: false
 ---
 

content/post/why-a-right-to-self-defense.md

@@ -3,7 +3,7 @@ title: "Why Do You Have a Right to Self Defense?"
 date: 2021-11-23T23:16:16Z
 tags: ["rights", "self-defense", "law", "ethics", "nihilism", "gorgias", "imago dei"]
 topics: ["philosophy","politics", "theology"]
-image: /img/rittenhouse.png
+image: /img/rittenhouse.jpg
 draft: false
 ---