Failing the crazy test
An unusally poor post by Lemmus Lemmus (real name?) at The Church of Rationality. He (I imagine Lemmus is male) samples 30 pages of Ayn Rand and is not impressed. I am not usually one to stick up for Rand, on the grounds that seeing who does is a faily good heuristic for screening monomaniac crazies. However, on this occasion I will break my own rule. Lemmus:
If we accept that life is an end in itself, by which she means (as is clear from the context) that the preservation of human life must be the one and only aim of ethics…
I disagree with the bit after the comma. You can’t say “by which she means” and then create a straw man like that. Or you shouldn’t. Or both.
The question is over whether you aggregate life being all that matters, and whose life you are talking about. Is the life social (all life matters, the Lemmus reading) or non-existent and personal (my life is all that matters). Rand cared about her life, and nobody else’s. If she could save somebody else at no real cost and wanted to, then fine. If she could but didn’t, fine too. Barbarous, some claim, but consistent.
Lemmus again:
Quality of life doesn’t seem to be a concern for her.
But he quotes this direct from Rand:
To live for his own sake means that the achievement of his own happiness is man’s highest moral purpose.
Happiness is about quality of life, no?
And that’s it with Ayn Rand and me. Of course I could read all of her books and see whether she has addressed this rather obvious objection anywhere, but given that time is a scarce resource I prefer to spend mine on stuff that promises to be more worthwhile.
Change the gender of that paragraph’s subject, ’Ayn Rand’ to ‘Lemmus Lemmus’ and ‘books’ to ‘posts’, and I agree. Or at least, it would be if I adopted that kind of absolutist approach to analysing somebody’s body of thought.
Ross,
“he” is correct.
You haven’t shown my summary of Rand’s axiom is a straw man (nor have I shown it isn’t – it’s a summary, after all). It may well be that the only life Ayn Rand cared about was her own, but that clearly is not part of the argument in that essay, which is all I’m talking about. I hence stand by my claim that she’s being inconsistent.
The way he word is usually used, happiness has a lot to do with quality of life, but she uses it in a very special meaning in that essay which I have a funny feeling you have not read recently.
You seem to have completely misread the last bit you quote. I said, or meant to say, that I could not have an opinion on Rand’s body of work precisely because I wouldn’t read any of her other stuff – the reason being that I’m trying to allocate my time rationally, which means I will not read texts which I have to guess on the basis of experience will not yield a lot of utility for me.