A Morality of Choice
There is a great deal of work left to do to turn the completed draft of The Prophet of Causation into a published book, including sorting through all the typos you all found, looking at feedback from several reviewers, and deciding how to publish it. In the meantime, I wanted to share a snippet from some correspondence I had with Neera Badhwar, an academic philosopher who co-wrote a generally accurate overview of Ayn Rand’s ideas for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
She gave me permission to reproduce her original note, which prompted some responses that I thought my readers might find interesting.
Approaching various aspects of Rand’s philosophy through the idea of causation seems really interesting. However, I think that Rand’s central idea that the ultimate goal, and source, of all our values, and the foundation of ethics, is survival is mistaken. If you interpret survival thinly, then it’s just false. If you interpret it thickly as happiness in a moral life, then it’s plausible as a goal, but it can’t be the foundation of ethics without circularity.
I discuss this in the latest version of my and Roderick’s Stanford piece on Rand, which I’m attaching if you’re interested. (It has still to appear in the SEP, as the referee sent us additional comments.)
Just two comments on two statements you make:
“The basis of morality is “take what you want.” We are goal-directed beings who assert the needs of our survival and go after them.”
Without context, this actually sounds terrible! Even worse than Trump’s policy.
“Morality, in this view, is a body of factual knowledge about the causal connections between our choices and their effect on human survival—looked at from the perspective of our need to make those choices.”
I suppose you mean that it’s a body of hypothetical imperatives, but I don’t think [hypothetical imperatives] are entirely factual. They depend on what we want or value, and knowing what we ought to value is not a purely factual issue.
I found all of this very interesting, and it led to some interesting new formulations. Here’s my response (with a few minor additions I came up with while preparing it for publication here).
