| | Wolf, thanks for the reply.
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Ed,
Dragonfly warned early in this thread that not all decisions derive from the facts of nature:
The argument to defend that fallacy is that humans have universal needs to be able to survive and that you can objectively derive from those needs what they "ought" to do. Now this may be true for example for the need to eat: if you want to survive you "ought" to eat regularly. But that is hardly an ethical issue. ==================
Here's the rub, it's not 'the need to eat, here & now' (which could include stealing food) -- it's the need to eat over an entire lifespan. This is what Cal and Wolf do not integrate or understand, that morality is life-long and society-wide.
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My question to you was what is objectivity (by which I mean a rational decision which results in the discovery of a value of fixed intrinsic worth) and by what standard is that judgement made?
Your answer appears to be something that is 'good for all men'. By providing that answer you ignore the areas of personal choice,
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Not 'ignore' -- but discount. If, in the business of living a human life, someone 'chooses' to not take care of their health (they choose to not value it anymore), then their choice is objectively wrong and morally reproachable. They made a wrong personal choice.
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But even your list of 'universals' is unsatisfying and with one exception, is subjective, i.e., in the eye of the beholder, e.g., beauty, mental health, self esteem. These concepts all require definitions, but out of context they are floating abstractions impossible to define.
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Wolf, you are like the skeptic who wails and moans that, because there is a split-second that separates night from day -- and we aren't aware of WHICH millisecond it actually is -- that we can't ever know the difference between night and day.
Beauty
As to beauty, the positive existence of "taste" (as in 'good' taste, and 'bad' taste) and, especially, the possibility of 'improving' your tastes, points out that beauty is not in the eye of the beholder -- beauty is in the eye of the beholder who, simultaneously, is a man of good taste. When folks' taste improves, they're able to more highly appreciate beauty. They are changing, beauty is not. Beauty is objective (though we each, subjectively, have to refine ourselves in order to deeply appreciate it).
Mental Health
First of all, I share some of your disdain for psychology as a science. It seems impossible to separate it from one's philosophy (skeptics will always interpret psychological data one way, and mystics will always interpret it another, and Objectivists tend to disagree with both of them). Even so, mental health is not a floating abstraction. It is identifiable and even measurable. There are 2 measures of mental health, commonly found going hand-in-hand ...
1) the lack of persistant, pain-causing mental activity
2) the presence of a 'joy-desire'
When either of these 2 things goes awry -- it can be said that the individual is not currently mentally healthy. If you ask an individual who has been through a time when one or both of these things went awry, then they will tell you that they were less mentally healthy then -- a point that can be confirmed via personal introspection of one's own life.
Self Esteem
Self esteem is 'high regard for self.' While there are psychological mechanisms that tend to make one want "esteem at any price" -- or pseudo-self-esteem -- there are also objective ways (ie. building character and virtue) to truly earn your own self-respect. The existence (in the world) of a counterfeit self esteem DOES NOT discredit the existence of genuine self esteem in the world.
Ed
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Every prescription is a description, since all statements about reality, including normative or ethical statements, are simply statements of fact - statements about what exists.
