In The Virtue of Selfishness Ayn Rand sets out the basis for her Objectivist ethics. “An organism’s life is its standard of value: that which furthers its life is the good, and that which threatens it is the evil.” The problem with this definition, of course, is that it runs headlong into the is/ought fallacy: we can’t go from descriptions of the world to making prescriptions about how things should be done. Simply describing facts about the world does not give us moral guidlines for our behavior.
Rand, however, is aware of this problem, and provides a response to it …
In a passage in his essay ‘Of National Character’, David Hume offers this defence of political treachery:
Treachery is the usual concomitant of ignorance and barbarism; and if civilized nations ever embrace subtle and crooked politics, it is from an excess of refinement, which makes them disdain the plain direct path to power and glory…
It is frequently noted (especially around here) that the original meaning of philosophy is philos sophia, ‘love of wisdom’, and that this definition greatly informed how the Greeks practiced the discipline in its earliest days. Therefore, it is sometimes claimed, philosophy today is defined by ‘love of wisdom’ and must pursue similar goals and proceed by similar means as it did in its earliest days…
A curiosity in my webtraffic stats has brought something to my attention: a recent post on a racialist hate site has lifted the race-related comments of Hume, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Kant that I’ve collected here and posted them in a radically different context …
This post is a follow-up to Augustine’s Devils, and best read after the earlier entry, as they are saintly partners in crime. By way of summary, Augustine seemed to have thought that devils, ‘incubi’, were ‘satisfying their lust’ upon wanton women. Here, in Summa Theologica, Aquinas accepts the story without hesitation …
Saint Augustine, most revered of Church Doctors, was convinced that devils were fornicating with wanton women:
There is … a very general rumour, which many have verified by their own experience, or which trustworthy persons who have heard the experience of others corroborate, that sylvans and fauns, who are commonly called ‘incubi,’ had often made wicked assaults upon women, and satisfied their lust upon them …
In response to a recent scandal over the racist and misogynistic comments of a white American talk-show host, respected gender theorist Snoog Dogg (Doggystyle, The Doggfather) dismissed claims that his own philosophical position bears some similarity to the now retired (and disgraced) DJ. Dogg, known for thoughtful ruminations on gender issues For All My Niggaz and Bitches, Bitch Please and I Miss That Bitch, made the following subtle distinctions to MTV in an apparently impassioned phone-in …
In his 1844 anti-authoritarian critique of Western society, The Ego and His Own, Max Stirner argued that the incest taboo was merely a Christian prejudice that needs to be discarded along with the rest of Christian morality:
Take notice how a “moral man” behaves, who today often thinks he is through with God and throws of Christianity as a bygone thing. If you ask him whether he has ever doubted that the copulation of brother and sister is incest, that monogamy is the truth of marriage, that filial piety is a sacred duty, then a moral shudder will come over him at the conception of one’s being allowed to touch is sister as wife also. An whence this shudder? Because he believes in those moral commandments …