trc@houti.UUCP (06/27/83)
Response to Tim Sevener on the basis of moral values and rationality: Your first claim was that the basis for morality should be survival of the species, rather than one's own human life. You offer support for this with the example of a mother dying to save her child. You claim that Ayn Rand would call the latter irrational. It is easy to see why one should value one's own life, regardless of the value of survival of the human species. Can you now provide me with a line of argument that will show me how it can be valuable to an individual that the species survives, if survival of individuals is not worthwhile? I do not claim that survival of the species is not very valuable, and indeed, an individual might very well value it above his continued life. My point is that, without the individual life, no other values are possible. It is his having lived in the first place that would make an individual value the perpetuation of the species. It is the ability to achieve values (freedom) that allows life to be worth continuing. Can you honestly expect a man who has been completely enslaved by all humans, all his physical life, to really CARE whether the race goes on? Would he not, in fact, be right curse humanity and his ill luck at having been born a human? A mother will give her life for her child, not because she wants to preserve the species, but because she wishes to preserve something that she values very highly. (In fact, she might kill the child, to prevent it from dying in suffering - under extreme circumstances, of course.) Whether she has consciously decided it or not, she has weighed the value of the child against the value of continuing life after the child's death. Whether her assessment is right or wrong, it is this choice of greater value that she will act upon. While I think I have presented the view that Ayn Rand would have taken, I must make one more comment here. If you had read her work, you would know that your statement is not true. If you have not read her work or met her, you should not make claims about what she would think is rational. I, and my written thoughts, are fair game, of course. Your second claim seems to be that I said that rationality is the supreme value, and that I am wrong. You state that rationality "merely means choosing the best means to attain certain ends." I presume that you mean "that which nothing else could be more valuable than" when you write "supreme value". Rationality is valuable to humans because it is our means of survival, and because if we totally lost this capability, we would no longer be human. One's own life, *as a human*, is the source and standard of all valid values. This does not mean that one would never value something over one's life. Values are objective - that is, they arise from neither external reality alone, nor the individual mind alone. It is the individual, in reality, that gives rise to values. Since the individual person is what he or she is, and the situation is what it is, the values arising from their combination must turn out exactly one way. Since humans do have a common nature, and some aspects of reality are universal, there is a real basis for human morality. Next, you imply that love is not rational. (And that since people value love, rationality is not the supreme value. Since I do not see rationality as the supreme value, in the sense I think you mean it, and since I think it can be rational to love, I will not address this latter point.) Love itself is not part of rationality. It is an emotion. Emotions can be rational, however, when they match one's situation. It is rational to love someone whom you have reason to value greatly. It would be irrational to love someone who stands for all you hate, and nothing you love. It is irrational to love or hate without reason. It is rational to hate someone that is evil to you. There is another sense in which emotions can be said to be rational or irrational. The source of one's emotions is one's thoughts, over a long period of time. Emotions are the subconscious' indicator of its automatic evaluation of a situation or person, based upon our past thoughts of what is good and bad. Such thoughts may have been either rational or irrational, and so will give rise to rational or irrational emotions. If one has never had clear control over one's thoughts, then one's emotions will be based upon whatever happened to flow into one's head, from parents, teachers, books, or whatever. Tom Craver houti!trc