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Re:Ayn Rand and radical evil 2 Years, 3 Months ago
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There can be no good or evil [radical or otherwiwse] without the capacity to predicate it on omniscience and omnipotence. Good and evil are human artifacts.
Sans that [which most folks call "God"], all you are left with is human reason.
And that is a very poor substitute for God.
No human vantage point is even close to omniscient and omnipotent. It is merely an existential point of view reflecting all the prejudices that come with it.
Simply name a moral issue [abortion, pornography, the role of government etc] and I will demonstrate this.
The nihilist.
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Re: Ayn Rand and radical evil 2 Years, 3 Months ago
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"....aren't most people radically evil to a certain degree, in that they do things they know are wrong?"
What if two people do exactly the opposite convinced that what they are doing is right?
For example, John decides to turn Jane in to the police for having an abortion because he is convinced that abortion is evil in a state where abortion is construed legally to be murder. Mary, on the other hand, decides to hide Jane from the police because she is convinced that making abortion illegal is evil instead.
How do we determine which behavior is really evil? And what if we can't?
The nihilist.
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Last Edit: 2010/02/16 08:11 By neither/nor.
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Re: Ayn Rand and radical evil 2 Years, 3 Months ago
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Indeed, I recognize that problem.
Actually, on re-reading Szavieur, I see that my objection didn't really make sense. He is not defining a type of person who is radically evil, but saying it's a precondition of doing evil that we first set aside the moral sense as absolute.
This is interesting to consider. When I do wrong impulsively, is there an act of repudiation of my conscience before or during the act? Or does my vanquished conscience only appear in reflection, after the fact?
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Solitude, my mother, tell me my life again. -- O.V. de Milosz
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Re:Ayn Rand and radical evil 2 Years, 3 Months ago
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To neither/nor: I'm not debating the existence of right and wrong, here. Maybe drinking kiwi juice is a sin for all it matters to this thread. And I happen to think omniscience not only is unnecessary for moral knowledge, but that it's almost the opposite of the kind of information state we need to be in to correctly do ethics. In other words, completely pace the standard reading of Aristotle (say), ethics is the most precise science there is, on pain of some of the demands normative reality making on us being outside of our awareness and therefore unable to serve for starting or other points in our practical reasoning (what ethics is about, ultimately).
fourfold: there's the thing. Why suppose (if I'm reading you rightly) that at the outset of our moral lives, or arching over that life, we make this general decision for or against our autonomy? I haven't gone over Kant's argument for this claim enough to confidently restate it here right now. But I will say that it resonates with my own... I guess you could say moral experience. There was a point in my life when I think I had something like a revolution in my heart and mind or, if you will, a point at which I first became aware of myself as turning my life around from sin to grace (and not in the Christian sense).
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Re:Ayn Rand and radical evil 2 Years, 3 Months ago
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"I'm not debating the existence of right and wrong, here. Maybe drinking kiwi juice is a sin for all it matters to this thread."
If nothing else Ayn Rand situated good and evil out in the real world where, for all practical purposes [and thus paradoxically], rational human behavior was said to be predicated on metaphysical assumptions about the relationship between philosophy, epistemology, deontology and human behavior.
My point is that human behavior cannot be encompassed ethically other than as particular existential vantage points that are merely subjective [subjunctive] reflections of how we come to understand our own identity----a sense of "self" [a sense of reality] situated in actual historical, cultural and experiential contexts.
But the only way to fully explore this is by situating words like these in particular circumstantial contexts and exploring the limitation of language itself in examining questions like this.
the nihilist
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Re:Ayn Rand and radical evil 2 Years, 3 Months ago
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neither/nor wrote:
If nothing else Ayn Rand situated good and evil out in the real world where, for all practical purposes [and thus paradoxically], rational human behavior was said to be predicated on metaphysical assumptions about the relationship between philosophy, epistemology, deontology and human behavior.
Okay, but what does this have to do with Kant's concept of radical evil?
My point is that human behavior cannot be encompassed ethically other than as particular existential vantage points that are merely subjective [subjunctive] reflections of how we come to understand our own identity----a sense of "self" [a sense of reality] situated in actual historical, cultural and experiential contexts.
But the only way to fully explore this is by situating words like these in particular circumstantial contexts and exploring the limitation of language itself in examining questions like this.
I don't know what this means, exactly. Can you give me an example? If you ask yourself, "Should I do <em>x</em>?" what kinds of thinking do you think are involved in answering that kind of question?
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Last Edit: 2010/02/17 12:53 By Szavieur.
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