Losonti Tokash wrote:This is more a question for NUA since he's the most knowledgeable person I know when it comes to philosophy but oh well.
neato
So a friend of mine is basically advocating objectivism without outright saying it. So far he's saying "public good" is an undefinable term (no one had used the term until he declared it thus), collective interest can't exist because we're all individuals, and how altruism states the sole purpose of human life is to sacrice oneself for the survival of others. That last one is apparently a dig at Kant, but I'm not super familiar with him beyond "don't do anything you would not advocate for every single person."
There's some other stuff about how capitalism protects the rights of individuals in the system and how any force or compulsion is illegitimate but I'm trying to figure out how that even works.
The main question: where would I find a decent discussion of objectivism and its flaws that isn't from an objectivism advocacy group? Google is filled with those and not many critiques that are unsupportive.
okay
so there's something to get out of the way first
if he's talking about the 'virtue of selfishness' or whatever, assuming he does so, he's probably basically just being an ethical nihilist already and there's not much you can do aside from shake your head and be aware that it's almost certainly just a phase that young and invulnerable white men go through. i'm not saying that it's going to be a complete waste of time to talk to him, but generally if he retreats to the fact that you can't analytically or deductively prove to him that he shouldn't just always act for his own happiness, you don't really have a lot of options aside from not reinforcing his philosophy. however, you mention that he believes in 'rights', which is sort of painting a target on himself since he basically gave up the game there by admitting that other people do have an inherent worth that he thinks should be protected or nurtured by some system. this leads very well into
1. the idea of the 'public good' being undefinable doesn't make sense; how one defines public good determines one's social and political philosophy (see below). when he's saying that capitalism is good because it protects people's "rights", he clearly thinks that capitalism has value because it adequately services the public in some way. more importantly, he believes in "rights" for people, which necessarily implies a public good, in that this concept of "rights" constitutes a public good where everyone in a society just has them just by virtue of being human beings living together. to break it down a little, political philosophy is really just about determining how to deal with a bunch of people forced to live together in a shared space (and how to organize them, etcetera, but that's just building more complicated goals from that basic problem); the public good is just what you consider the right way to do that. if he's saying people have rights that need to be protected, you have a foothold; you can jump off from philosophy and start making empirical arguments about how capitalism is bad at protecting rights.
2. 'collective interest is wrong because we're all individuals' is basically just a hot load of bullshit. humans are not wholly autonomous beings, and i'm not just saying this as an evolutionary-biological argument (but that's a pretty valid argument to use if he's talking about what the human condition is, tbh), but as a philosophical one. our basic existence is tied up in context to the world around us and in relation to other people. we create and think in language as a way to communicate our thoughts to each other, and in fact we don't invent language ourselves but use words given/taught to us by others to try to fit to our own need to express ourselves, thereby giving up (in a way) one of our most basic privacies - what ideas we have in our head - over to others, and others' words, so that we can relate to them and be a part of their lives. i could go into reams of philosophy over this, but basically, you know, no man is an island, we're social animals, etcetera. there's actually some cool new neuroscience about how when we're relating well to other people and objects and not having any problems that require us to analyze them they start to light up in our brains just like our limbs or parts of our bodies, and how this provides empirical evidence for a bunch of weird german philosophy i really like, but that doesn't really help you it's just me geeking out over my area of interest.
but anyways
dooey jo made a good point on how this just feeds into the inherent incoherence of his idea; he believes that capitalism is good as a system for providing for people's rights (and, therefore, people) so he clearly sees some value in a bunch of people working together organically to produce a greater good, even if he doesn't admit it.
3. It's not hard to find examples of how capitalism creates rather than deflates the use of illegitimate force, but here's the basic philosophical reason why it's wrong: basically, capitalism posits ever-increasing prosperity in a world with scarce resources. this means that capitalism is always seeking growth - more producers, more resources, more product, and most importantly, more consumption, to keep the system running. this means that capitalism must always be seeking to open new markets, and marx correctly diagnosed that in the insatiable quest to create new markets, capitalism will naturally turn to imperialism. You don't need me to tell you that most of America's military adventures in the past century have come down to protecting the interests of United Fruit or oil interests or whatever. now, your friend can argue that this is the result of statism and its corrupting influence or what have you, but that's not only wrong but missing the point. this kind of behaviour started in the gilded age (when america's government was largely non-interventionist) because that's when america's corporations started to conglomerate and become large enough and wealthy enough that they could exercise enough power to mold what had previously been a government largely in line with libertarian principles (barring standard 19th century stuff like high tariffs and social conservatism and the like) into an organ for their own advancement. it was a symbiotic relationship, of course, but the point is that leaving power in the hands of systems which are unaccountable and only interested in making more money and growing more so they can make more more money naturally produces an entity which will use force to enlarge its sphere, and create the conditions that make that sort of statism an inevitability. it's not the corporations' fault, per se, or them being bad objectivists, they're just doing what they're meant to do - grow and maximize profits for their shareholders. for the big capitalists, there's no reason not to use the state as a tool not unlike any other entity. the only way to prevent this is if you have strong and vigorous regulation in place separating the government from the corporate and then - surprise! you don't have a libertarian state any more.
also, if you're having trouble figuring out his deal with the illegitimacy of force, just remember that his idea of 'force' is almost certainly incoherent if he thinks that poor people don't have any compulsions on them in an anarcho-capitalist society but are being compelled by taxes in canada. idk exactly what his definition is so i'm not going to assume, but you'll probably find it pretty easily if you just interrogate him over what exactly it means and push him into edge cases.
also, if he's dissing kant in that manner based on altruism, then he's almost certainly parroting rand almost directly, and rand had no fucking clue what she was talking about when she critiqued kant, so you're safe there.
as far as sites with a good discussion of rand, i apologize, but i don't really know, to be honest, since social and political philosophy isn't my focus and academics generally never took rand seriously enough to include her in stuff that undergrads learn. but basically, if he's talking about people's rights, he already believes in a public sphere of life even if he doesn't admit it, and it should all fall apart from there.
um, i dunno if any of that was helpful, but i thought i should post since you mentioned me
and this is really badly written and edited but i need to get to class
edits: for missing words and grammars
