| | Bill (post #117): Your odyssey and mine have, er, "ominous parallels." In fact, EXACT parallels. I recall the same "infinite regress" logic being used to back up the First Cause argument in the Sunday school classes of my early youth. In fact, the completion of my "conversion" to Objectivism also didn't occur until about the age of 20 -- and it was also Nathaniel Branden's brief essay on the First Cause argument in The Objectivist Newsletter that did it for me, too!
Knowing that -- and knowing that our examples can be multiplied to many, many other individual cases -- I find it totally wrongheaded to conclude that a belief in God/the "supernatural" necessarily implies "evasion" or some character flaw. Many of America's Founders were deists, on grounds of reasoning quite similar to that of Aquinas and the scholastics; but they were most emphatically not "mystics" in the way that Rand describes them in Galt's Speech and elsewhere. (See Henry Steele Commager's brilliant history The Empire of Reason for dazzling portraits of Enlightenment philosophes, and their commitment to reason.)
A wider issue, raised by Joe, concerns what to make of the term "evil." It's a good point...but in its effect, I think it only reinforces the thrust of Barbara Branden's message, rather than refutes it.
For Rand, there was a bright-line distinction between "evil" and "errors of knowledge" -- between evasion and mistakes in reasoning. The blurring of that distinction by many Objectivists is perhaps understandable, though. It is very easy for a skilled novelist like Rand to concoct characters whose motives and mental workings she makes transparent to readers. So when we encounter actions by people in real life that seem, on their face, similar to those of the villains in her novels, it's tempting to assume the same motives.
But the same actions can be taken for a multitude of reasons and motives. It is thus far less certain how we, in daily life, can infer the extent of "evasions" that may or may not be occurring inside someone else's skull.
Barbara points out that since we do not have any privileged access to the inner workings of another's consciousness, it is extraordinarily difficult to determine whether someone is "evading," and hence "evil" -- and certainly to pronounce some sweeping judgment on his whole moral character. She therefore invites us to reconsider the promiscuous use of the term "evil." So does Joe, if perhaps for different reasons. But it gets us to the same place, really.
This doesn't imply skepticism or moral relativism. We certainly must uphold a moral standard of good and evil and apply it objectively to actions, based upon their real-world consequences to human life, well-being, and happiness. That's not only possible; it's a moral necessity. As we do so, we can describe, in common parlance, various ideas as "true" or "false," regarding correspondence with the facts of reality -- i.e., they are either "correct" or "mistaken." Loosely speaking, we sometimes characterize them as "good" or "bad," in the sense of their being "helpful to human life" or "destructive" -- if and when they are implemented in action.
But notice that caveat. There are dangers in attributing moral designations to ideas per se, and thus to those who hold them.
The conceptual distinction between "true or false" and "right or wrong" is important and useful, as it goes to the issues of someone's knowledge, intentions, and choice. This is clear in the criminal justice system, which must constantly distinguish between simple error and malicious evil. This (broadly and imprecisely) constitutes the distinction between a "tort" (a harm, usually accidental or unintended) and a "crime" (a deliberate, knowing violation of someone's rights). Generally speaking, for someone to be convicted of a crime requires sufficient evidence that (a) the perpetrator knew that what he was doing was wrong or illegal, (b) he intended the consequences of his actions, and (c) he had a choice in the matter.
By direct analogy, the same considerations ought to apply to moral judgments of people. Isn't there a fundamental difference between someone who deliberately does harmful things, and someone who does harmful things by accident? Is it just to equate the two -- and to call both individuals "evil"?
As idle notions or speculations never acted upon, ideas hardly seem to merit "good" or "evil" designations; nor do those who merely believe them without acting on them. What do we gain, exactly, by calling such people "evil" rather than simply "mistaken"?
More importantly: What do we potentially LOSE if we inflate what may be some isolated error, or an action that causes unintended harm, into a fundamental character flaw, impelling us to damn the individual in toto and have nothing to do with him? How many potential values do we lose in our own lives if we define "evil" so promiscuously that we cut ourselves off from others at the first sign of an intellectual error?
Here is where I believe that classical virtues such as "prudence" or "wisdom" come in. Wisdom or prudence, in my view, is rationality leavened with context and experience.
Context and experience tell us that not everyone who disagrees with our philosophical views is malevolent, or intends harm and destruction, or is about to act upon the most harmful logical implications of his mistaken views, or is immune to changing his mind. Thus, to treat people as if they are "evil" simply for holding mistaken ideas within the privacy of their skulls is not rational. It contradicts what we know about the people in our lives. In fact, it can be quite stupid, cutting us off unnecessarily from many potentially valuable social, personal, and professional relationships.
But in my forty-odd years of observation, such stupidity is no stranger to the Objectivist movement.
(Edited by Robert Bidinotto
on 8/10, 10:45am)
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