To keep Joe's Return to Reason on a reasonable level, I'll comment on a philosophical point of which we should remind ourselves in light of Diana's remarks that "Never in a million years will I chime in with Bob Bidinotto, Barbara Branden, Robert Campbell, Ed Hudgins, Roger Bissell, Michael Kelly, and the like--as if we're all good, honest, and chummy friends of Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism, albeit with some minor differences of opinion." I hadn't seen this remark before since her site is not part of regular reading and if the remark were merely the result of Diana just being a malicious, nasty person it would not be worthy of discussion. But it reminds us of the deeper problem that as plagued Objectivists for decades.
A commitment to reason and to changing ideas mean attempting to judge accurately whether individuals are misguided in their beliefs -- i.e. make intellectual errors, or whether they evade reality or are consciously dishonest and thus open to the most severe censure. One's judgment in any given case will determine whether one treats others with toleration or not. (And let's not forget that since none of us are omniscient, we must always take care to make certain that we're not mistaken on some issues ourselves or are letting our own rational judgments be overwhelmed by emotions.)
This was one of the issues that led to the ARI-TOC split. David Kelley maintained that we should generally assume that individuals hold honest disagreements with us unless we have evidence to the contrary and thus that we should not simply denounce those with whom we differ as immoral and malicious and refuse to deal with (i.e. refuse to sanction) them.
Of course, in the real world most individuals make mistakes for a mixture of reasons and we each might have different yet honest evaluations about others and thus on what basis one should thus deal with others. Being rational requires making judgment calls, the best that we each can, based on often less-than-perfect evidence.
Thus, for example, I've known priests who are Aristotle experts who have done excellent, cutting-edge work, who have spend most of their time on scholarship, not fighting abortion or convincing people we're all sinful. Rotten bastards, and with whose work in philosophy most Objectivists would agree or appreciate. Of course, on religious issues we would have fundamental disagreements. Do we assume then that such priests are prima facia moral monsters with whom we should have nothing to do, to whom we should never speak, never be on an academic panel with, whose books we should not read? Unless we know other things about their morality -- e.g. they are unrepentant child rapists -- not necessarily so. Perhaps they are rational in much of their lives and work but wrong on religion from a combination of reasons -- honest error, evasion, getting carried away by symbolic or poetic aspects of their religion or whatever.
On the other hand, there are some individuals who one might judge as much more uniformly malicious in evasion of the truth. For example, at a recent Freedom Summit in Phoenix George Smith debated a preacher, Eric Lounsbery, who in his talk, twisting of logic and definitions and, especially, answers to questions, was almost the embodiment of a Toohey-like, slick, smirking Randing villain. (George showed great restraint in sticking to the intellectual arguments.) This is someone I personally would debate only if I thought my audience were not otherwise committed fanatics and thus would see the my opponent's dishonesty so clearly and thus make my case about the dangers of religion.
My point is that in both of these cases one needs to judge as honestly as possible what mix of motives one finds in these individuals, whether one gets something out of dealing with them -- e.g. a good discussion of Aristotle's philosophy of science and causality -- whether someone might honestly take one's association with such a person as an endorsement of ideas with which one disagrees, and many other factors.
I can appreciate Peikoff when he does excellent work -- his "Understanding Objectivism" series is top rate -- even when he is so wrong -- whether through honest error or dishonesty -- on many other matters.
Remarks like Diana's show the hazards of failing to make theses vital judgments. (She simply asserts that those with whom she disagree over the nature of philosophy are not honest and not friends of Objectivism. In my case, Roger Bissell's and I suspect some of the others, she has no evidence of this aside from her disagreement.
See then where the assumption that most disagreements simply can't be honest might lead. Someone could assert that Kelley, Hudgins, et al.simply can't honestly hold the beliefs that we do. Thus we run an organization with "Objectivism" in its name, say we promote the philosophy developed by Ayn Rand, put on conferences, write books, op-ed, etc. that we say are based on the philosophy's principles when in fact, we don't acting through honest convictions but from some sort of dishonesty in our hearts in order to -- what? -- to destroy Objectivism by introducing errors?
This is why religious conflict between members of sects so close to each other are often the most violent -- Protestant versus Catholic Christians, Sunni versus Shi'ite Muslims. Those who fail to make rational judgments in distinguishing between honest disagreements and dishonest ones -- or appreciate the mixed motives of many, tend to act like the ARI types at their worst or religious fanatics.
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