[97] in Discussion of MIT-community interests
Re: Objectivist morals
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Michael E Rolish)
Fri Apr 20 11:27:55 2001
Message-Id: <200104201527.LAA24254@all-night-tool.mit.edu>
To: "Josiah D. Seale" <jdseale@MIT.EDU>
cc: mit-talk@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 20 Apr 2001 10:09:11 EDT."
<BLEJJJDGNEIJGAGOJNHNKEHHCMAA.jdseale@mit.edu>
Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2001 11:27:35 -0400
From: Michael E Rolish <merolish@MIT.EDU>
I'm seeing variants of the thought expressed by Dostoevsky:
"If God is dead, then all is permissible."
No. If you people actually read Rand, you'd see her
explanation of this false dichotomy. If man is to live,
then he has to live by a set of principles, just like a
scientist has to work by laws and principles. Her point
is that people have to base their morality on the facts
of reality, not divine order or whatever you feel like.
Indeed, what goes around comes around...this is the law
of causality.
Bust on Objectivism all you want...the truth is that Rand
is the first philosopher I've seen who hasn't treated
philosophy as some sort of mind game, but as it should be:
the integrating science, a guide to life.
Finally, principles are not axioms. Axioms are concepts
which cannot be proved, for they are the foundation of
all proofs. To put it another way, to try and contradict
an axiom (e.g. for Objectivists, saying reality is a figment
of one's imagination) you have to automatically presuppose
it as a given.
Mike Rolish
"A philosophical detective must seek to determine the truth
or falsehood of an abstract system and thus discover whether
he is dealing with a great achievement or an intellectual
crime. A detective knows what to look for, or what clues
to regard as significant. A philosophical detective must
remember that all human knowledge has a hierarchial structure,
he must learn to distinguish the fundamental from the
derivative and above all else--at its fundamentals." -AR
