Anarchoblogs in English

Asset: Feminists strike back in India

Liability: Leonard Peikoff embraces private terrorism against American Muslims

Sometimes the good news is worse than the bad news.

(Note that in this case the badness is in part the result of IP; they had to go ahead with a half-ass production to prevent the rights from reverting.)

The entry on Ayn Rand that Neera Badhwar and I co-authored for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is now online.

While we each wrote a bit of everything, Neera was the principal author for the sections on ethics and social-political philosophy, as well as for the biographical section, while I was the principal author for the sections on metaphysics, epistemology, and aesthetics.

Looking the piece over I see that we devoted something like 35 paragraphs to metaphysics and epistemology, 34 paragraphs to ethics, and only 11 to social-political. That seems about right to me, but will probably surprise many readers who are accustomed to thinking of Rand as primarily a political thinker.

François Reisman, I mean Tremblay, has finally seen through our evil plans. Though Neverfox makes a valiant but futile effort to disguise our true perfidy, it’s all to no avail – we stand exposed as the pack of lying, thieving capitalists we are.

Charles Johnson’s excellent essay “Liberty, Equality, Solidarity: Toward a Dialectical Anarchism,” which appeared in the anarchism/minarchism anthology that Tibor Machan and I edited, is now available online.

Read it now, or the statists win.

Over at Cato Unbound, the Rand symposium has wrapped up with posts from Neera, Doug, me, and a final one from Neera.

A quick reply to Neera’s last, on the pyramid of ability: I certainly don’t doubt that “in every area of human endeavor a few people stand out above others and benefit others much more than they are benefited by them,” and I agree that it “would be odd if this were not the case in business.” If that’s all that Rand meant by the pyramid of ability, I’d have no objection.

But at least much of the time Rand seems to assume that the pyramid of ability corresponds to the hierarchy of the firm, with the best decision-makers gravitating to the top – as when she says: “The standard of living of [a] blacksmith is all that your muscles are worth; the rest is a gift from Hank Rearden.”

Moreover, Rand seems to assume that this generalisation holds, not just under idealised laissez-faire but, at least approximately, in the state-hampered market we live in. And that in particular is a claim that I think we have much reason to reject, both on the basis of everyday experience of what the business world is like, and on the basis of a theoretical understanding of the likely effects of government intervention.

Rand would never suggest that the government bureaucrats regulating a particular industry are likely to be better decision-makers than the people being regulated; quite the contrary! But to the extent that the market is pervaded by governmental privilege in the ways that Kevin Carson et al. delineate, the likelihood that success within the market must be tracking superior performance likewise goes down.

While Neera grants that workers know more about their own jobs than the owners do, she insists that “the owners know more about their work than the people they regulate.” I think that, to a large extent, this is not true under conditions of actually-existing corporatist capitalism, for the same reason that it was not true of state-socialist bureaucrats regulating the economy in the Soviet Union.

In order to regulate your work, I may not need to understand it as well as you do, but there’s a certain minimum extent to which I need to understand it if my regulating is to be useful rather than counterproductive; and what I’m claiming is that under both state socialism and corporatist capitalism, there are governmentally-enabled structural mechanisms that both a) interfere with the transmission of information up the hierarchy, thus making it harder for bosses to find out about the work of those they’re regulating, and b) insulate bosses and boss-driven systems from the ordinary negative effects of lacking such information. In short, Kevin is simply applying to corporatist capitalism the same critique that Mises and Hayek applied to state socialism.

On a different point: I notice that in the comments section of a previous post here, Neera objects to my defense of the unity of virtue (where I suggested, following Alexander of Aphrodisias, that if I am cowardly then I cannot be completely just, since justice sometimes requires courage) by noting that I might conceivably be cowardly only in situations where justice is not at stake; but when it is, “it’s not necessary that my cowardice prevail; my justice might trump my cowardice.”

Here, though, Neera seems to be thinking of the unity of virtue as solely a thesis about motivation; but as I see it, it’s at least as much a thesis about the cognitive aspect of virtue (and thus a thesis about practical wisdom, to get back to another issue that Neera has rightly been stressing). (Actually, I think that, even more strongly, it’s a thesis about how the contents of the virtues are determined, in the metaphysical rather than the epistemic sense of “determined”; but I only need the cognitive point for now.)

In order for me to do the courageous thing in just those cases where justice demands it, I have to be able to identify what justice demands; but, I claim, the coward’s ability to do this is necessarily impaired, at least to some extent. As I put it in the piece I linked to:

I do not count as fully courageous unless I can be counted on to do the courageous thing in every situation, which in turn requires that I be a reliable assessor of which risks are worth taking; but which risks are worth taking might sometimes depend on the requirements of prudence, or justice, or loyalty; to the extent that I am imprudent, or unjust, or disloyal, I cannot be counted on to assess those risks properly in such possible or actual situations, and so I will not be fully just.

In other words, the problem is not just that the coward will see what justice requires but won’t be motivated to comply in cases where what’s required is risky, but that the coward’s confidence about even having identified what justice requires is to some extent ill-grounded, since cowardice itself exemplifies an inadequate responsiveness to what’s worth losing to gain what.

One more thing: I agree with Neera that Greek tragedies can offer good examples of cases where doing the right thing entails suffering for the doer, but I’m puzzled by her choice of Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigeneia as an example, since that seems like a monstrously wicked choice rather than a virtuous one. I’d offer Antigone or Philoctetes as more plausible examples.

In addition, back on the pyramid-of-ability issue again, Bryan Caplan has another response to me here; once again I reply in the talkback.

Addendum: This response by Wendell Hoenir was just pointed out to me; I’ll comment on it later. Gotta prepare for class now!

Two more Cato Unbound posts from me, one a reply to Mike’s latest on whether it’s conceptually incoherent to be indifferent to one’s own interests, and one a belated response to Doug’s earlier question about religion.

I’m back from San Diego, and the Randstravaganza over at Cato Unbound has been continuing apace. (I contributed a few posts from the road, and some more since my return.) So here’s the latest (I’ve altered the order slightly to reflect what people seemed to be replying to rather than when the replies went up):

Doug
Mike
Neera
Me
Mike
Doug
Neera
Doug
Me
Neera
Doug
Mike
Doug
Will
Mike
Me
Doug
Me
Mike

I’ve just sent in a response to Mike’s latest, which will go up either today or tomorrow. The discussion will wrap up tomorrow.

Neera Badhwar’s response to Doug Rasmussen’s Cato Unbound essay is online. Doug will post a response to all three of us later this week, and then there’ll be some back-and-forth discussion.

Alexander of Aphrodisias and Aristotle

I’ll save detailed comments on Neera’s piece for the discussion – and I agree with most of it anyway – but just one quick point: if by the unity of virtue Neera means the thesis that one can’t have any one virtue to a significant degree without having them all, then I agree with her that that’s false (and I also agree that Rand seems, at least sometimes, to have held it). But if she means the thesis that one can’t have any one virtue completely without having them all, then I’d be willing to defend that thesis. In the words of Alexander of Aphrodisias (the leading Aristotelean of the 2nd century CE):

That the virtues are implied by one another might also be shown in the following way, in that it is impossible to have some one of them in its entirety if one does not have the others too. For it is not possible to have justice in isolation, if it belongs to the just person to act justly in all things that require virtue, but the licentious person will not act justly when something from the class of pleasant things leads him astray, nor the coward when something frightening is threatened against him if he does what is just, nor the lover of money where there is hope of gain; and in general every vice by the activity associated with it harms some aspect of justice. (“That the Virtues Are Implied By One Another,” On the Soul II. 18; trans. R. W. Sharples)

(See also section 9 of this piece.)

Mike Huemer’s response to Doug Rasmussen’s essay is now online.

Since there’ll be some back-and-forth among the authors later on, I won’t comment on his piece now; at any rate, it should be obvious from my own piece where my disagreements with his will lie.