In my experience talking to Randians, and in my reading of Rand, I think Randians have an unusually demanding view of knowledge. They tend to think that a person knows X only if a person has a fully sound and reasonably complete philosophical theory supporting X, in addition to all the standard sorts of justifications we tend to think people need to have. For instance, if you say that the earth is spheroid, they will ask you how you know, and won't be satisfied with standard sorts of evidence. They'll instead insist you give a full philosophy of science, which in turn requires some general epistemology and metaphysics. If you say it's wrong to kick babies for fun, they'll want you to give a full ethics, then metaethics, then epistemology, etc. Otherwise, they claim you don't actually know.
I'm not sure Rand's actual philosophy *implies* this view. But Rand and Randians generally seem to believe it.
Rand was talking about ethical theory and philosophical knowledge, not commonsensical knowledge. Ethical theory must show all the way down to the roots why there is good and bad, right and wrong, and why certain obvious beliefs are true. She was well aware that people know that murder, assault, theft, and so on are wrong, and that they can produce sound arguments for them: "Other people's lives don't belong to you," "It hurts," "It's their property, not yours," and finally, to those who say they don't care, "What if someone did that to you?" Such commonsensical knowledge does not require a philosophical theory. If it did, we'd never get off the ground. Rands 's heroes have a great deal of moral knowledge, even though, with one exception, they don't produce a full-fledged theory to validate it.
Kant, likewise, held that we are aware of the promptings of the good will, and thus of our duties - we don't need philosophy to tell us our duties. In fact, his philosophy seems to be an attempt to give a philosophical justification for the moral beliefs he already held about our duties, such as the duty to develop our talents, the duty to not commit suicide etc.
Rand was talking about ethical theory, which must show all the way down to the roots why there is good and bad, right and wrong, and why certain obvious beliefs are true. She was well aware that people know that murder, assault, theft, and so on are wrong, and that they can produce sound arguments for them: "It's their life, not yours to take," "It hurts," "It's their property, not yours," and finally, to those who say they don't care, "What if someone did that to you?" Such commonsensical knowledge does not require a philosophical theory. If it did, we'd never get off the ground. Rands 's heroes have a great deal of moral knowledge, even though, with one exception, they don't produce a theory to validate it.
Kant, likewise, held that we are aware of the promptings of the good will, and thus of our duties - we don't need philosophy to tell us our duties. In fact, his philosophy seems to be an attempt to give a philosophical justification for the moral beliefs he already held about our duties, such as the duty to develop our talents, the duty to not commit suicide etc.
I don't know of any good reasons to regard ethical intuitionism as compelling. I don't have realist intuitions in the first place, and the extent to which people in general do is an open empirical question.
Sure, many people have normative moral attitudes and standards, but it's not clear whether there is any principled distinction between moral and nonmoral norms; it may be that morality is a historical invention, a kind of made up domain that emerged in some cultures and not others.
Even if morality were itself pancultural, there's little compelling empirical evidence to suggest people think about or construe morality as a body of stance-independent moral facts. Realist intuitions may be a parochial phenomenon largely distinctive to academic philosophers and WEIRD populations.
I'm not a fan of Rand's (meta-) ethics while I am inclined towards something like ethical intuitionism. Nevertheless, I'm not sure the critique of Rand is entirely fair. (You surely know her work better than I do, so I'm not sure that it's not fair, either.) Compare the start of your first quote with something like this:
No scientist before Isaac Newton has given a rational, objectively demonstrable, scientific answer to the question of how gravity works.
This seems plausible, and yet can be affirmed without claiming that people didn't know that when they let go of the sorts of objects they had ready to hand in their daily lives, they would fall to the ground. Their knowledge of gravity wasn't perfect for a host of reasons, but it doesn't mean that they wholly lacked knowledge of gravity. Similarly, one could think that there was no rational, scientific, objective code of ethics until (pick your favorite metaethicist), but need not deny that before Huemer, or Rand, or Mill, or Kant, or Aquinas, or Aristotle, or Plato, or the Bible (etc.) people frequently made correct judgments of right and wrong.
Also, while ethical intuitionism may offer an explanation of how we know (many) ethical truths, it doesn't explain what makes them true. We can "see" that torturing babies for fun is wrong, but could go on to offer an explanation of why it's wrong - i.e., we could provide a "rational, scientific, objective code of ethics". Maybe wrongdoing could be defined as violating human flourishing, the value of which might be grounded in humans as bearers of the imago Dei. Or perhaps it could be Kant's categorical imperative, or some consequentialist justification, or something else. But one can know that something is wrong (or right) without having an account of why it's wrong (or right).
(Parallels: someone might have a vague sense of God's presence, but then obtain a more defined, clearer and more systematic understanding through natural and/or special revelation. Or, one might grasp the truth of a geometric theorem at sight, but then go on to prove it from axioms and come to understand in a deeper way why the theorem is true.)
On another topic, Tyler Cowen referred to your piece on free will in one of his Marginal Revolution posts 2-3 days ago. I liked the piece, and agree with almost everything there. One disagreement is minor, and I have a proposal I think you could easily accommodate.
You suggest that we have control over our beliefs, and my impression is that you think our control is direct. This seems mistaken: I could offer you money to believe that there's a pink elephant in a tutu dancing in front of you, but I don't think you can simply decide to believe it, regardless of the financial incentive. You might pretend to believe it, or lie and claim that you believe it, but unless you have some sort of superpower absent among the vast majority of the population, you can't really bring yourself to believe it--at least not directly.
However, you might be able to do various things, over time, such that you can eventually believe things you currently find false or at least extremely improbable. This sort of thing happens regularly, and leads to conversions to or away from religious belief, and from one political view to another, and so on. A person pays prolonged attention to apologia from a different perspective, tries to see the world from this new point of view, gets to know these people and experiments with living life their way. Engaging in these practices often brings about some degree of belief change. But this is indirect, and not something we have direct control over.
I don't think this undermines anything else you wanted to say in that essay, as it doesn't undermine moral responsibility, libertarian freedom, or the chance to mature and improve one's beliefs. On the plus side, it seems to square with how most people's beliefs - certainly those substantive beliefs that inform their dearest values - tend to change. My recollection of the literature is that this approach, indirect doxastic voluntarism, was often embraced by philosophers - including those who, like you and I, who embrace libertarian free will and agent causation - while direct doxastic voluntarism was seen as psychologically unrealistic, at least in the typical case. But if you think there are good arguments for the latter I'd be interested in reading more!
I apologize for being extremely late to the party, but I am better trying to understand these viewpoints and can't find good criticisms elsewhere. I am also extremely short on time, having only 30 minutes or so per day to advance my understanding. My view is the Popperian one. Knowledge is created through a process of conjecture and criticism. One starts with a problem, creatively conjectures a solution that conflicts with other potential solutions, and then applies criticisms tentatively retaining those solutions that survive the criticisms. One moves forward with these solutions constituting one's "knowledge," which is just information that solves a problem (never perfectly).
Moral knowledge is created in this same way, but it deals more specifically with the problem of what to do next (I first encountered this idea listening to David Deutsch). The question of why we need moral knowledge is like the question of why we need any knowledge at all. It solves our problem.
This Ethical Intuitionism seems to require that we start from somewhere, but I can't see a justification for why we need start somewhere. Again, we just begin with a problem. In the case linked, the idea that it is wrong to go punch Robin seems to me to be put the wrong way around. The question is, "what should I do next?" One then considers many possible courses of action, one of which may be punching Robin. Most are quickly dismissed for having no good explanation. We need explanations to grow knowledge because we require criticisms, so there will always exist the explanation of why a particular course of action survived the critical process. However, the generalization process that it would probably be wrong to punch anyone else never occurs. We do not generalize this way in the course of creating any other type of knowledge (induction is impossible but Popper solved this problem), and to say we do this when creating moral knowledge would somehow make it magical. What am I missing here--that is what criticisms does Ethical Intuitionism offer of MY view?
Someone with functioning depth perception can accurately reach out and touch something, without being aware of the mathematics involved. A person with functioning moral intuition can behave ethically without knowing the arguments which explain why.
“What alternative is there? Ethical intuitionism – the view that some moral premises are obvious on their face, and therefore require no proof.”
Require no proof for what? To gain mindshare? For other people to form expectations about them, and react accordingly? Or to defeat a skeptic? For most purposes, non-obvious and perhaps even mistaken moral premises need no proof either.
“the point of moral argument is to build on the obvious, not prove what every decent person already knows.”
“Decent” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Slavery was obviously moral for a long time before it became obviously immoral. Moral condemnation of persons who were considered decent or even exemplary in their own time has become a popular hobby. But I should not pass judgement on a philosophy in response to a one-sentence summary. Didn’t Huemer have a post about it on his Substack a few months ago?
“Murder is wrong” is a tautology. Knowing which sorts of killing count or don’t count as murder (wrongful killing) is where moral knowledge is required.
In my experience talking to Randians, and in my reading of Rand, I think Randians have an unusually demanding view of knowledge. They tend to think that a person knows X only if a person has a fully sound and reasonably complete philosophical theory supporting X, in addition to all the standard sorts of justifications we tend to think people need to have. For instance, if you say that the earth is spheroid, they will ask you how you know, and won't be satisfied with standard sorts of evidence. They'll instead insist you give a full philosophy of science, which in turn requires some general epistemology and metaphysics. If you say it's wrong to kick babies for fun, they'll want you to give a full ethics, then metaethics, then epistemology, etc. Otherwise, they claim you don't actually know.
I'm not sure Rand's actual philosophy *implies* this view. But Rand and Randians generally seem to believe it.
Rand was talking about ethical theory and philosophical knowledge, not commonsensical knowledge. Ethical theory must show all the way down to the roots why there is good and bad, right and wrong, and why certain obvious beliefs are true. She was well aware that people know that murder, assault, theft, and so on are wrong, and that they can produce sound arguments for them: "Other people's lives don't belong to you," "It hurts," "It's their property, not yours," and finally, to those who say they don't care, "What if someone did that to you?" Such commonsensical knowledge does not require a philosophical theory. If it did, we'd never get off the ground. Rands 's heroes have a great deal of moral knowledge, even though, with one exception, they don't produce a full-fledged theory to validate it.
Kant, likewise, held that we are aware of the promptings of the good will, and thus of our duties - we don't need philosophy to tell us our duties. In fact, his philosophy seems to be an attempt to give a philosophical justification for the moral beliefs he already held about our duties, such as the duty to develop our talents, the duty to not commit suicide etc.
Rand was talking about ethical theory, which must show all the way down to the roots why there is good and bad, right and wrong, and why certain obvious beliefs are true. She was well aware that people know that murder, assault, theft, and so on are wrong, and that they can produce sound arguments for them: "It's their life, not yours to take," "It hurts," "It's their property, not yours," and finally, to those who say they don't care, "What if someone did that to you?" Such commonsensical knowledge does not require a philosophical theory. If it did, we'd never get off the ground. Rands 's heroes have a great deal of moral knowledge, even though, with one exception, they don't produce a theory to validate it.
Kant, likewise, held that we are aware of the promptings of the good will, and thus of our duties - we don't need philosophy to tell us our duties. In fact, his philosophy seems to be an attempt to give a philosophical justification for the moral beliefs he already held about our duties, such as the duty to develop our talents, the duty to not commit suicide etc.
I don't know of any good reasons to regard ethical intuitionism as compelling. I don't have realist intuitions in the first place, and the extent to which people in general do is an open empirical question.
Sure, many people have normative moral attitudes and standards, but it's not clear whether there is any principled distinction between moral and nonmoral norms; it may be that morality is a historical invention, a kind of made up domain that emerged in some cultures and not others.
Even if morality were itself pancultural, there's little compelling empirical evidence to suggest people think about or construe morality as a body of stance-independent moral facts. Realist intuitions may be a parochial phenomenon largely distinctive to academic philosophers and WEIRD populations.
Hi Bryan,
I'm not a fan of Rand's (meta-) ethics while I am inclined towards something like ethical intuitionism. Nevertheless, I'm not sure the critique of Rand is entirely fair. (You surely know her work better than I do, so I'm not sure that it's not fair, either.) Compare the start of your first quote with something like this:
No scientist before Isaac Newton has given a rational, objectively demonstrable, scientific answer to the question of how gravity works.
This seems plausible, and yet can be affirmed without claiming that people didn't know that when they let go of the sorts of objects they had ready to hand in their daily lives, they would fall to the ground. Their knowledge of gravity wasn't perfect for a host of reasons, but it doesn't mean that they wholly lacked knowledge of gravity. Similarly, one could think that there was no rational, scientific, objective code of ethics until (pick your favorite metaethicist), but need not deny that before Huemer, or Rand, or Mill, or Kant, or Aquinas, or Aristotle, or Plato, or the Bible (etc.) people frequently made correct judgments of right and wrong.
Also, while ethical intuitionism may offer an explanation of how we know (many) ethical truths, it doesn't explain what makes them true. We can "see" that torturing babies for fun is wrong, but could go on to offer an explanation of why it's wrong - i.e., we could provide a "rational, scientific, objective code of ethics". Maybe wrongdoing could be defined as violating human flourishing, the value of which might be grounded in humans as bearers of the imago Dei. Or perhaps it could be Kant's categorical imperative, or some consequentialist justification, or something else. But one can know that something is wrong (or right) without having an account of why it's wrong (or right).
(Parallels: someone might have a vague sense of God's presence, but then obtain a more defined, clearer and more systematic understanding through natural and/or special revelation. Or, one might grasp the truth of a geometric theorem at sight, but then go on to prove it from axioms and come to understand in a deeper way why the theorem is true.)
On another topic, Tyler Cowen referred to your piece on free will in one of his Marginal Revolution posts 2-3 days ago. I liked the piece, and agree with almost everything there. One disagreement is minor, and I have a proposal I think you could easily accommodate.
You suggest that we have control over our beliefs, and my impression is that you think our control is direct. This seems mistaken: I could offer you money to believe that there's a pink elephant in a tutu dancing in front of you, but I don't think you can simply decide to believe it, regardless of the financial incentive. You might pretend to believe it, or lie and claim that you believe it, but unless you have some sort of superpower absent among the vast majority of the population, you can't really bring yourself to believe it--at least not directly.
However, you might be able to do various things, over time, such that you can eventually believe things you currently find false or at least extremely improbable. This sort of thing happens regularly, and leads to conversions to or away from religious belief, and from one political view to another, and so on. A person pays prolonged attention to apologia from a different perspective, tries to see the world from this new point of view, gets to know these people and experiments with living life their way. Engaging in these practices often brings about some degree of belief change. But this is indirect, and not something we have direct control over.
I don't think this undermines anything else you wanted to say in that essay, as it doesn't undermine moral responsibility, libertarian freedom, or the chance to mature and improve one's beliefs. On the plus side, it seems to square with how most people's beliefs - certainly those substantive beliefs that inform their dearest values - tend to change. My recollection of the literature is that this approach, indirect doxastic voluntarism, was often embraced by philosophers - including those who, like you and I, who embrace libertarian free will and agent causation - while direct doxastic voluntarism was seen as psychologically unrealistic, at least in the typical case. But if you think there are good arguments for the latter I'd be interested in reading more!
I apologize for being extremely late to the party, but I am better trying to understand these viewpoints and can't find good criticisms elsewhere. I am also extremely short on time, having only 30 minutes or so per day to advance my understanding. My view is the Popperian one. Knowledge is created through a process of conjecture and criticism. One starts with a problem, creatively conjectures a solution that conflicts with other potential solutions, and then applies criticisms tentatively retaining those solutions that survive the criticisms. One moves forward with these solutions constituting one's "knowledge," which is just information that solves a problem (never perfectly).
Moral knowledge is created in this same way, but it deals more specifically with the problem of what to do next (I first encountered this idea listening to David Deutsch). The question of why we need moral knowledge is like the question of why we need any knowledge at all. It solves our problem.
This Ethical Intuitionism seems to require that we start from somewhere, but I can't see a justification for why we need start somewhere. Again, we just begin with a problem. In the case linked, the idea that it is wrong to go punch Robin seems to me to be put the wrong way around. The question is, "what should I do next?" One then considers many possible courses of action, one of which may be punching Robin. Most are quickly dismissed for having no good explanation. We need explanations to grow knowledge because we require criticisms, so there will always exist the explanation of why a particular course of action survived the critical process. However, the generalization process that it would probably be wrong to punch anyone else never occurs. We do not generalize this way in the course of creating any other type of knowledge (induction is impossible but Popper solved this problem), and to say we do this when creating moral knowledge would somehow make it magical. What am I missing here--that is what criticisms does Ethical Intuitionism offer of MY view?
Someone with functioning depth perception can accurately reach out and touch something, without being aware of the mathematics involved. A person with functioning moral intuition can behave ethically without knowing the arguments which explain why.
“What alternative is there? Ethical intuitionism – the view that some moral premises are obvious on their face, and therefore require no proof.”
Require no proof for what? To gain mindshare? For other people to form expectations about them, and react accordingly? Or to defeat a skeptic? For most purposes, non-obvious and perhaps even mistaken moral premises need no proof either.
“the point of moral argument is to build on the obvious, not prove what every decent person already knows.”
“Decent” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Slavery was obviously moral for a long time before it became obviously immoral. Moral condemnation of persons who were considered decent or even exemplary in their own time has become a popular hobby. But I should not pass judgement on a philosophy in response to a one-sentence summary. Didn’t Huemer have a post about it on his Substack a few months ago?
“Murder is wrong” is a tautology. Knowing which sorts of killing count or don’t count as murder (wrongful killing) is where moral knowledge is required.