COUNTY SOVEREIGNTY No. 5
1996 October 28
 [new address]

Just one article also this time and also dealing with
the next world religion. Argues that Objectivism, the
philosophical viewpoint started by Ayn Rand, needs to
be improved and, among many other things, that special
attention be given to *institutional design*. I beat a
drum once again for county sovereignty and also raise
the issue of citizenship.

Thought to ponder: if Objectivism is to be the
religion or world view of the global elite, will it
not strive for world hegemony instead of county
sovereignty? Not if they are wise, for a world
government could cease to be laissez-faire and impose
taxes from which there is no escape.

A good deal of the discussion gets into technical
philosophical issues, but that's what Objectivism is
all about.

MENDING BETTER THAN ENDING
by Frank Forman
1996 October 28

The allusion is to Aldous Huxley's _Brave New World_,
where the government (running an imagined workable
socialist economy!) pursued a macroeconomic
consumption policy of stimulating aggregate demand
with the slogan, "Ending is better than Mending." That
was the attitude I had taken toward Objectivism and
deployed all manner of argument, rhetoric, and satire
in arguing for its shortcomings. After much thought, I
have reversed myself and apologize to those I
unnecessarily insulted. I have concluded that
Objectivism can be mended and that Ayn Rand was the
*first* Objectivist and that it is up to her fans and
followers to improve on the initial formulation.
Anything that will survive, esp. in the realm of human
ideas, must adapt. The Founding Mother had, as we all
do, limited knowledge in many areas and her initial
conclusions need to be refined. We must get to work.

I argued a few months ago that Objectivism will become
the next world religion. (Send me an e-mail to get it
the article.) I mean here that Objectivism is a belief
system that requires a certain "leap of faith." The
most important is the leap across the is-ought divide.
We just do not know enough about psychology to say
that the Objectivists virtues are universal for
everyone. They are *good enough*, however, for those
with strong characters who want to get on with their
lives and not worry about arcane ethical dilemmas.

I. TWO GREAT SYSTEM BUILDERS

Jimbo Wales had the contumelious temerity and
consummate gall to violate the most sacred of UseNet
traditions and give a direct answer to a question, in
this case what the main achievements of Ayn Rand were.
It was part of an ongoing discussion of why Ayn Rand
is so unpopular in academia. One answer is that our
culture is so drenched in altruism that her emphatic
egoism is taboo. (But the whole large field of
"rational choice theory," which cuts across several
disciplines, belies this.) Another answer is that she
said nothing new, the immediate question that Jimbo
responded to. But I think that her analyses were too
brief, left too much unexplained, let too many
ambiguities hang in the air, engaged too little with
the arguments of other philosophers. (That most
philosophers think she got Immanuel Kant's ideas
hopelessly wrong does not endear her to the
scholarly.) This is the stuff academia delights in,
and until her fans and followers build up a body of
argumentation up to the standards of professional
philosophers, she will continue to be mostly ignored.
Another reason is that both are generalists and do not
fit into any recognized specialty. Academia is highly
bureaucratic.

But a larger reason is that she was one of the
twentieth century's great philosophical system
builders, the other one being Mario Bunge, who is also
generally ignored. Bunge has had two Festschrifts
devoted to his works; so he has had more academic
attention paid to him than Ayn Rand has had, but then
Bunge's writings are far more exact than Miss Rand's.
Yet so many of the authors of essays in these
Festschrifts are just unable to grasp what the merits
of *having a system* are.^ The advantage is this: many
arguments in philosophy (and in life generally) go on
interminably because many of our ideas are still only
approximate. Debaters argue past each other because
they are referring to different ideas, many of whose
ambiguities stem from the ambiguities of ordinary
language. But if an idea or statement fits in quite
coherently with a *system* of other ideas, I will
adopt the idea if I find the system to be a sound one,
until and unless a rival idea fits as well into a
sounder system. Philosophy should undergo paradigm
shifts just like scientific theories do;
unfortunately, philosophers just spin their wheels.

So when Bunge gets around to an offhand remark about
Immanuel Kant on page 197 of the *fifth* volume of his
great _Treatise on Basic Philosophy_, I understand him
perfectly and rejoice in the succinctness of his
treatment: "Recall that Kant had managed to put
together the negative aspects of empiricism and
rationalism, by holding that we can have no experience
without certain a priori intuitions, that things
conform to human thought rather than the other way
round, yet we can know only phenomena, not things in
themselves--all of which is out of tune with the
realistic epistemology inherent in modern science and
technology." Taken out of context, his statement is
merely gratuitous and insulting. Kept in the context
of his stupendous and largely successful efforts to
define, describe, and defend this realistic
epistemology inherent in modern science and
technology, it is at once obvious and profound.
 ^[Let me add that Bunge himself, and a great many
other otherwise distinguished thinkers, is unable to
grasp the difference between a constitution and the
laws enacted thereunder: he (and they) just have ideas
about what a government ought or ought not to be doing
and have no concern with institutional design. Most
Objectivists fail to really understand the distinction
either.]

As with Bunge, so with Ayn Rand and her own system.
Future Objectivists should learn the background math
and science to understand Bunge and proceed to use his
ideas to refine and develop Objectivism. What makes
Objectivism distinct from Bunge's work is not at all
any great difference in commitment to objectivity but
that Ayn Rand extended metaphysics and epistemology to
develop ethics and political philosophy.^ 
  ^[The last volume of Bunge's _Treatise_, _The Good
and the Right_, is a sad, sad disappointment and the
work of a dinosaur liberal, not a system builder. In
fact, Ayn Rand had her ethics and political philosophy
in place before she undergirded it with metaphysics
and epistemology. Bunge's politics were always there,
too, but his work in philosophy was independent of
them. Hence the continuity in Ayn Rand and its absence
in Bunge.]

II. AYN RAND'S ACHIEVEMENTS

On, then, with Jimbo's condensation of Ayn Rand's
principal achievements, which he assimilated from
David Kelley's _Truth and Toleration_ and posted to
humanities.philosophy.objectivism on October 27. 

1.  Metaphysics
    --Rand's view of reality as objective, with the
principle of the primacy of existence stated
explicitly, new formulations of the laws of identity
and causality that solve some age-old problems

2. Epistemology
    --Her concept of objectivity, and her rejection of
the false dichotomy of intrinsicism and subjectivism
    --reason as the faculty of concepts, and her view
of concepts as a mental integration of particulars on
the basis of their similarities
    --reason as a volitional faculty; Ayn Rand's
distinctive view of free will

3.  Ethics
    --values as rooted in life, her solution to the
is-ought problem
    --the virtue of independence
    --the role of productive work as central to human
life
    --her explicit rejection of altruism and the
mind-body dichotomy (and her unique arguments against
both)

4.  Politics 
   --political individualism and rights on an egoist
foundation
   --the view that rights can only be violated by
force

And finally, the integration of all these ideas into a
full philosophical _system_.
------------


Let's look at these one by one:
"1.  Metaphysics
    "--Rand's view of reality as objective, with the
principle of the primacy of existence stated
explicitly, new formulations of the laws of identity
and causality that solve some age-old problems

Mario Bunge explicitly and most scientists implicitly
view reality as objective, but there certainly are
*philosophers* who think that consciousness is what we
have primarily and the world secondarily. This is so
much foolishness, for I know of no philosopher who
does not think there were events happening before he
was born and, indeed, before there was any life. I
don't know whether Ayn Rand was the first to state
explicitly the primacy of existence.

I am not sure what was new about her formulation of
the Law of Identity ("A is A"), but a full-blown
ontology must state quite a lot more about "the
furniture of the world," the title of the third volume
of Mario Bunge's _Treatise on Basic Philosophy_. As
far as I can tell, "A is A," if not a truth of logic
is a statement about the world, meaning that for every
property, P, and every thing, a, either P(a) or not-
P(a), which is an explicit postulate of Bunge's. A
much deeper postulate of his, quite consistent with
Ayn Rand's ideas, is that properties are all positive,
though out statements about them need not be. Thus,
saying "a neutron is not charged" means that neutrons
do not have the property of being charged, not that
neutrons have the property of "not being charged," let
alone the property of being "anti-charged." In
addition, we cannot in general form "or" properties
randomly, meaning we cannot speak of the property of
"being charged OR slouching toward Bethlehem."
However, another postulate says that if two properties
are compatible (if some thing satisfies them both),
then there is an "and" property. So if there is an
animal that is black, there is the property of being a
black animal.

All this rigor is necessary if we are to proceed in
elucidating further concepts, such as (scientific)
laws and law statements, lawful states of things,
lawful changes of states, and then at last, on page
276, start getting into spacetime and causation. Much
of the confusion of what Ayn Rand wrote, on causality
but on other matters as well, stems from the ambiguity
of the verb "to be." So when she says something *is*
so and so, it is not always clear whether she is
proposing a definition or making a direct statement of
fact. Her notion of a *true* definition as one that
has maximum explanatory power is an important one,
hinted at by the great Charles Peirce but never
elucidated by him as far as I know. Alas, many, if not
most, of our definitions fall short of this ideal.

"2. Epistemology
    --Her concept of objectivity, and her rejection of
the false dichotomy of intrinsicism and subjectivism

I don't know how her concept of objectivity differs
from that of working scientists implicitly and Bunge
explicitly, but her triad of objectivity,
intrinsicism, and subjectivism is extremely important.
If only her followers would not toss these words about
so loosely when attacking those they disagree with!
Again, these are concepts need to be nailed down by
the axiomatic method.

   "--reason as the faculty of concepts, and her view
of concepts as a mental integration of particulars on
the basis of their similarities

There is a whole school of philosophers, called
conceptualists (when dealing with the problem of
universals), that wrote long before Ayn Rand did,
among them Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. (I am relying on
the _Encyclopedia of Philosophy_, s.v. "Universals,"
here and am not sure if Ayn Rand belongs to this
school.) In any case, Mario Bunge's solution is to
distinguish conceptual universals pertaining to just
our concepts and substantial universals in the world.
P is a substantial universal in T if the *scope* of P
(which is the *set* of things, a, satisfying P) is T.
Bunge points out that ancient and medieval disputes
over universals considered only conceptual universals,
not substantial individuals. Bunge's split is not the
analytic-synthetic one, and is a topic that the rising
generation of Objectivists should consider in detail.
What is really remarkable is how much agreement there
is between the Master's rigorous development and thie
Mistress' more intuitive one.

   "--reason as a volitional faculty; Ayn Rand's
distinctive view of free will

I doubt that anyone who believe in volition at all
thinks reasoning is not subject to the will! But her
view of free will, I am afraid, is no more adequate
than anyone else's and will not be until we understand
far, far more about neurology than we do at present.
Bunge was not successful either: he did not go very
far beyond just saying that volition is a process
taking place in material things, something no
Objectivist would dispute.

"3.  Ethics
    "--values as rooted in life, her solution to the
is-ought problem

Here I must say that either her derivation is trivial
(in order to value you must remain alive) or else
implicitly incorporates an unwritten Objectivist
Psychology. What is really distinctive about her
ethics is that she has given one appropriate to the
age of capitalism, or certainly one that had not been
articulated before. Hers is a theory of virtue or
aspiration, rather than one of a bunch of rules to
follow (deontology) or some form of other-
regardingness such as utilitarianism. Virtue was
tossed out of ethics along with Christianity, which
had kept it going in the Middle Ages, though with a
different set of virtues than the Greeks emphasized.
She well may have been the first philosopher to reach
back to the Greeks and put virtue back into ethics. It
is certainly an active topic today, along with
"rational choice theory." More than anything else,
Objectivists should expand on her ideas regarding the
psychology of the virtues.

   "--the virtue of independence

Yes, yes. I wonder often whether those who adopt
Objectivism do not have highly independent
personalities to begin with. An informal survey on the
Internet I conducted using the Myer-Briggs personality
test says that most Objectivists, whether construed
narrowly or broadly enough to include Mario Bunge as
well as myself, have the INTJ (Introverted-iNtruitive-
Thinking-Judging) personality type, which is the most
independent of them all and the one best characterized
as that possessed by scientists.

    "--the role of productive work as central to human
life

This is a new virtue indeed. More interesting is that
she would not reject the ancient virtues of prudence,
courage, temperance, and justice, just put less
emphasis on at least the first three. What she would
think of the three "theological" virtues, faith, hope,
and charity is not as obvious as it seems. "Faith"
could just mean a certain presumption of trust in
one's fellow man along the lines with her "benevolent
universe principle". So also with hope and charity.
Where she clearly stands out is in reversing one of
the seven cardinal sins, namely pride. In any case,
she has taken the Protestantism out of the Protestant
work ethic.

    "--her explicit rejection of altruism and the
mind-body dichotomy (and her unique arguments against
both)

Her concept of altruism needs a work over, but I find
more remarkable than her simple rejection of a mind-
body dichotomy, which goes without saying for anyone
who thinks the world is made up (but not reducible to)
material things, is her idea of romantic love. I would
like to see it developed as an aspect of a philosophy
of *aspiration* than one of just rules.

There is some evidence that we are somewhat altruistic
by nature in a way that cannot be accounted for in a
sociobiology that is based on selfish-gene dogma.
(I'll e-mail my piece, "Welfare Bums among the Lions,"
to any one asking for it.) Alas, there are horrendous
semantic problems here. I am not sure how discussion
of ethics could be bettered by the use of the
axiomatic method, though.

"4.  Politics
   "--political individualism and rights on an egoist
foundation

Original, though incomplete. Even so valiant a free-
marketeer as Henry Hazlitt, in _Foundations of
Morality_, which appeared not too long after _Atlas
Shrugged_ (1957) spoke of ethical egoism only briefly,
just to say that hardly anyone espoused it. Now, it
seems all over the place in "rational choice theory,"
but selfishness in this theory includes violating
individual rights.

   "--the view that rights can only be violated by
force

This would follow from her definition of rights, but
whether this is the *true* definition needs much more
work and will have to rely inductively on an
Objectivist psychology that is still in the
background.

"And finally, the integration of all these ideas into
a full philosophical _system_."

Yes indeed! Jimbo left out any further statements
about her political philosophy, which mostly would
follow from her theory of rights, but there are
certain aspects of a social contract--she explicitly
says that government must rest on the consent of the
governed--that need much more focusing on. They imply
a certain amount of altruism, or at least the
willingness for *oneself* to pay the price of liberty,
which is eternal vigilance.

This leads to the most serious omission in Objectivist
thinking, that of citizenship. The willingness to pay
the price of liberty is certainly under the control of
the will, but it is also affect by hereditary factors
that go into shaping personalities. My own theory is
that England was the birthplace of liberty because of
genetic selective factors: England is an island that
has been repeatedly invaded (Romans, Celts, Anglo-
Saxons, Danes, Normans); invaders have the
entrepreneurial spirit of searching for and finding
opportunities to invade; entrepreneurs have strongly
independent personalities because they are always
attempting something new; when raiders settle down,
they become traders; these settled independent men
demand to be let alone. And thus by a selective
process, England was the first country to have a
critical mass of individualists necessary to move
their whole society in the direction of liberty.

Later immigrants, who came to reap the advantages that
a free society confers on its members, do not
themselves have to have as much of the entrepreneurial
spirit as those who first seized freedom for
themselves. They themselves will be more liberty-
loving than those who still remain behind in their
less free countries, but the *children* of the later
immigrants will regress back toward the population
mean of the countries they came from. So the average
innate predisposition of a population that has added
later immigrants that are less than eternally vigilant
will decline. Even bringing this matter up smacks of
that anti-concept "racism," which Ayn Rand called the
"lowest form of collectivism," but this sort of
concern about genetic quality does not contradict her
essay on racism, if that essay is read carefully.

Beyond this question of who should be made citizens,
followers and admirers of Ayn Rand have spent very
little time on institutional design, most especially
the question of federalism. The talk is mostly about
"this is how I, or Objectivism (reified to a thing!),
wants the world to be," rather than with designing
institutions that are most likely to effect those
desires. Thus, I am broadly in favor of County
Sovereignty and will not have higher levels of
government prevent the residents of counties do a
great number of thing that are appalling by
Objectivist standards (welfare state (county!), si;
warfare county, no). Counties cannot do much damage
beyond the cost of moving out (and Americans move
every five years anyhow). It is a very small price to
pay for the not at all unrealistic prospect that the
spirit of liberty will decline and damage imposed on a
nation-wide scale. We retain free will as always and
must insure against it, and insurance is not free.

-----------end of comments on the major achievements
of the first formulation of Objectivism

III. A NEW DEFINITION OF RIGHTS

Here comes my response to a response to a new
definition of rights I have propounded that I think
articulates in a consistent fashion the (meta)ethical
egoism of the Founding Mother. This starts as a
conversation between David Friedman and me on October
25, to which I add new comments.

Me in the first place:
Rather, a definition of rights should read "I have a
right if it would not be against *my* long-term
interest to use force in *retaliation* against your
forceful invasion of that right." How does this sound
to you, David and Jimbo?

David's reply:
It doesn't solve the problem I am offering. Having
redefined "rights" in that way, I then ask the
question that Jimbo, on his definition of rights,
correctly regards as misstated: "In a situation where
you can benefit yourself by violating rights, for
example by stealing a very large sum of money with
very little chance of being detected, should you do
so?"

Frank now:
We had been discussing what I called the Problem of
the Prudent Predator, or more particularly situations
of the sort David gave. An egoist must be consider
only secondarily the damage his actions do to others.
But he should refrain from stealing if doing so
damages *his* character. According to the
unarticulated Objectivist Psychology, yes it would.
Jimbo has pressed the issue deeper and has said his
own character is such that he *would not* and *could
not* yield to temptation. He says he is very glad to
have this character, and I gather that he estimates
that such temptations to steal a million dollars (not
the figure used in this example but one that does get
used in many other cases) will be so few as to be
negligible.

But not everyone is blessed with Jimbo's genetic
parents and perhaps his upbringing, as well as
whatever decisions he made to cultivate his character.
(The youthful George Washington did character
exercises every day.) An egoist ethics must *also*
answer what others with personalities quite different
from Jimob's should do if given an opportunity to
steal a million dollars and get away with it at little
risk. Changing one's character becomes harder and
harder as one gets older (as Aristotle observed).
Besides the opportunity to steal the Megabuck will
probably long be gone by the time one has developed a
character much like Jimbo's.

IV. DIGRESSION ON SUCCESSFUL PRUDENT PREDATORS

In fact, there are hundreds of thousands of people who
*have* appropriated a million dollars in this country.
I am speaking, of course, of the lifetime income of
mid- and upper-level government bureaucrats. I can
testify that the psychological condition of them is
not exemplary: the D.C. area has the highest rate of
alcoholism in the country and the highest rate of
consulting psychiatrists (yes, even higher than Woody
Allen's New York). From my experience, I would group
them into several types:

1. Those who think they are genuinely doing good. This
is the largest category.
2. Those who think that their organization is doing
good, but that they are more or less superfluous and
are sorry about it ("Too much bureaucracy"). This is
the second largest category.
3. Burnt out 2s who regard themselves as superfluous
and are cynical about it but still approve of their
agency's mission ("I'm just in it for me").
4. Burnt further out 2s who are so cynical that they
do not care whether they are superfluous.
5. Those who are more cynical yet and do not care
whether their agency is on the whole doing good. Most
of these are burn-outs; here is where the power-hungry
types, who were probably that way before they came to
work for the government, fit in.
6. Those who realize that their agency is doing harm
and try to reform it from within (lots of them came in
with Reagan--I'm speaking of the Federal government
now).
7. Reformers who are burnt out.
8. The total cynics, like Fred Kinnon in _Atlas
Shrugged_ (never say Ayn Rand had no sense of humor),
fully understand that their agency is doing harm and
try to increase their power. These are very, very few,
as Kinnon was unique in _Atlas Shrugged_. This is the
second smallest category.
9. The malicious. Fewer than _Atlas Shrugged_ would
have you believe. I think it is the smallest category,
for the world of _Atlas Shrugged_ has not come about.

Of course there is a tremendous amount of blanking
out. I can testify to all this because I myself am one
of these prudent predators, somewhere between a 6 and
a 7. I cannot say one way or the other what the net
psychological damage has been. I shall have gone
through life without really knowing the feeling of
being productive. On the other hand, the work is not
too demanding--those who do no work at all are almost
always just parked in a corner and ignored--and so I
have been able to do an incredible amount of reading
in a vast variety of fields. It has resulted in a
book, _The Metaphysics of Liberty_, which was almost
totally ignored by the same academia that ignores Ayn
Rand and Mario Bunge. It may result in further and
better syntheses. I will be proud of them, no matter
what the rest of the world thinks. I don't think I
would have come up with the ideas I have had I become
a college professor, which is what I most wanted to
do. I would have had to have worked much harder
meeting the requirements of being a professor than
getting by in the bureaucracy. I also cannot say how
much guilt I have suffered; it varies too much with my
mood. The upshot is that I do not know whether my
Prudent Predation has paid off. (Had Betsy Speicher
been my mother, the answer would be no!)

V. BACK TO THE DEFINITION OF RIGHTS

I am not sure that the apparent hundreds of thousands,
if not millions, of government predators are really
paying too high a price. There is the fact that the
risk of alcoholism and other disorders is greater in
the D.C. area than the rest of the nation. And the
level of cynicism I observe is not a good sign that
being a government predator is worth it.

However this may be, those who directly and coercively
violate rights certainly pay a higher price
psychologically. In this sense, it is more likely to
be the case that it is not in one's long-run interest
to violate rights. To answer David's specific question
("In a situation where you can benefit yourself by
violating rights, for example by stealing a very large
sum of money with very little chance of being
detected, should you do so?") by saying that I do not
know and definitely not in every possible case.

But what are these "rights"? What does the concept
mean? It does *not* pertain to every activity of mine
that is involved with you. If I mooch of off you, or
otherwise live the life of a second-hander, I am also
harming myself. (In some ways, _The Fountainhead_ was
a psychologically more penetrating book than _Atlas
Shrugged_.) But you have no "right" not to be mooched
off of, at least by any ordinary understanding of the
term. What this boils down to is that you have no
"right" to take back what I have mooched off of you.
You should chalk it up to experience, refuse to deal
with me again, bad-mouth me maybe.

Again, there is that word "right." What can this now
mean in a (meta)ethical egoist context? Only that you
would harm yourself if you *did* forcefully take back
what was only mooched of you. Thus my definition,
which I repeat: "I have a right if it would not be
against *my* long-term interest to use force in
*retaliation* against your forceful invasion of that
right."

Alas, the definition is now so convoluted that a
fundamental question arises: "What is so magical about
the initiation of force that demarcates having a right
(to retrieve stolen property) from not having one (to
retrieve things mooched)? *That* resorting to force
renders *your* use of *your* rational faculties--the
answer trotted out by Ayn Rand's followers but I am
not so sure about how much she depended on this line
of reasoning herself--is not by itself a wholly
satisfactory answer. We need to explicate the
underlying Objectivist Psychology.

Solving this problem will be a big plus, for then we
shall almost certainly have the answers to other
problems that have been vexing Objectivists. Here's
why: we already have enough intuitive understanding
that the punishment should fit the crime: it would
harm the *retaliators* to inflict disproportionate
punishment (*and* to be too lenient, but that's a much
more complicated issue). But if we gain enough
knowledge about why the initiation of force is the
great divide, we shall probably also have gained
enough knowledge to understand why we should delegate
retaliation to governments. The reason Ayn Rand gave,
in "The Nature of Government," is that individuals
cannot be relied upon to prosecute rights violations
objectively. Thus, by ethical egoism, it would have to
be the case that I would harm *myself* by taking
vengeance into my own hands. This has not been argued
for yet, but it is at least arguable, but an
*explicit* Objectivist Psychology needs to be
developed first.

We will also be ready to solve a conundrum that has
been the subject of horrendous blank outs by
Objectivists, namely negative externalities such as
pollution. The Mistress opined that nineteenth century
nuisance laws sufficed to deal with such matters. But
neither she nor anyone else (as far as I know) ever
went into the details. Now 1957 was not only the year
that _Atlas Shrugged_ appeared; it was also the year
that the notion of information costs was first
introduced into economics, namely by Anthony Downs in
_An Economic Theory of Democracy_ (NY: Harper and
Row). Without going into this now thriving branch of
economic theory in elaborate detail, let me just say
that the cost of acquiring information about how to
adjudicate nuisance laws in an optimal fashion is
extremely high. It would be better to have the voters
decide on their desired levels of pollution and set up
auctions for pollution rights. Of course, this
solution is no Platonicly ideal one, either, simply a
better one.

Now, Miss Rand said that a rational man would allow
the government to invade his rights by arresting him
for crimes he did not in fact commit but which the
government had good grounds for suspecting him. She
gave a utilitarian argument, but it needs to be
completed with one saying that it does *my* character
any good to have such a malevolent universe premise as
to be a pig-headed anarchist (or--as I would
convolutely formulate it--it does *your* character no
harm to impose the prospect of arrest on *me*,
provided that the laws and police procedures are
reasonably objective.) If this argument can be made--
it is intuitively apparent to me--a further argument
can be plausibly made that rational men would allow a
rational government to set up an auction for pollution
rights that will be *more* open and objective than the
way we find judges carrying on in practice as they
administer nuisance laws. Rational men would also
empower their counties to empower their states to
regulate levels and run auctions. (The states could
then, in turn, similarly empower the country and the
countries wider units still: this layering should
stave off silly regulations.)

VI. SOME ASTUTE PSYCHOLOGICAL REASONING ALREADY

I close this with reproducing a posting from Jimbo
from October 23. It speaks for itself.

David Friedman   wrote:
>Jimbo finally comes in to add something interesting to the discussion,
>linking this thread with the thread on morality as a commitment strategy
>(i.e. Robert Frank et. al.).

Finally?  Hmph.

>Perhaps you are correct that Meaghan, having succeeded in making herself
>into a good and decent person in the correct belief that doing so will, on
>average, maximize her chances for life and happiness, will find herself
>psychologically unable to murder her fellow passenger and will die as a
>result--from what I have seen her, it wouldn't surprise me. But suppose she
>hasn't been quite that successful in molding herself, at the point when she
>happens to get shipwrecked.

This is a view of human nature that I think is exactly backwards.
The view appears to be that people are _naturally inclined_ to be
vicious murderers, psychological monsters, but through some heroic
effect manage to mold themselves into reasonably decent people in order
to achieve the potential gains from trade to be had.

Actually, I think if there is any 'molding' involved, then for the
vast majority of people, it is in the other direction.  I think that
people are rather more naturally inclined to *not* want to kill other
people, such that it takes very special training (like that imposed
in the Marines, or what have you) for most people to be able to do it.

>Does it not follow from the Objectivist
>position that at that point, if she can shoot her fellow passenger, she
>should?

Let's leave Meaghan out of this, what say?

I have always said that it is possible to come up with extreme situations
in which there is no pleasant outcome, and that such situations are not
particularly helpful in understanding ethics.  As I said last week, I will
always do exactly what is in my own self-interest.  In some extremely
rare "lifeboat" cases, this may make me dangerous to you.  Basically,
what I'm saying is that you don't want to get into a lifeboat with me,
if you are a total stranger or a person I don't really like.

>It will, of course, make it psychologically harder for her to
>finish the job of making herself into a good and decent person, which will
>worsen her prospects for life and happiness--but they will still be well
>above dying of thirst.

Yeah, sucks, doesn't it.  It is a good idea to make advance preparations
so that you don't wind up in such situations!

I'd say that to make a really *good* hard case in which there is no
moral culpability, you have to have something like a powerful but
irrational dictator who plucks you and another person at random
from the streets, arms you both to the teeth, and puts you in a room
with orders to fight to the death.  Somehow you would have to have
realistic assurance that fighting actually *would* save you life,
and that's not the sort of thing readily obtained from crazed
dictators.

Outside of that sort of rather ludicrous example, there are other
questions which come to mind, such as _what the heck were you doing
on the lifeboat in the first place_.  The earth is not a bad place
to live, and you should take actions to prevent getting yourself into
such a tight spot where you have to either die, or kill an innocent
person and subsequently deal with the psychological trauma.

----

My answer to the "prudent predator" question is that living in such
a fashion necessitates a certain inauthenticity which cuts you off from
the many possibilities for valuable interaction with others on an
emotional and psychological level.  Your further questions, it seems
to me,  inquire about the possibility of a "prudent psychopath" who
finds it more convenient to kill than to not kill.  In ordinary society,
such people should be locked up, if possible, before they hurt someone.

>A similar issue arises from the hawk/dove analysis that I offered in the
>other thread. In equilibrium in a reasonably free society, lots of people
>follow the "virtuous" strategy, a few people follow the "hypocrite"
>strategy, and on the margin the payoff is the same to both.

How does my discussion of internal psychological problems resulting
from the hypocritical strategy affect the analysis?  (This is a 
serious game-theory question, not a rhetorical question.)

>Suppose you are
>better qualified for hypocrisy than the marginal hypocrite--a good actor,
>with real talents for fooling people into thinking you are good and decent.
>Should you do it? Are you claiming that the real world is a corner solution
>in which nobody is in this position? 

Yes, I believe that's exactly what I'm claiming.  The only exceptions I
can think of would be people with mental illness to such a degree that
even judging them by normal standards would be a mistake.

VII. FRANK IN CONCLUSION
Objectivism has many, many tasks ahead, but keep one
thing in mind: in the end, we have to get on with the
business of living. We are unlikely to discover all
the principles for an Objectivist Psychology any time
soon. Besides the psychology itself, we also need a
rudimentary guide to when to get on with it. And we
can adopt one attitude Ayn Rand bespoke, that America
was going to Hell in a handbasket and that the number
of rational men in this country was extremely small.
Or we can adopt her other attitude that America is the
greatest country on Earth and is incomparably superior
to the country she fled from. A certain inconsistency
here, a difference of moods, maybe. But the latter
attitude better bespeaks the benevolent universe
premise and is also more in line with the facts.

So cheer up and buckle down to the hard work involved
in mending the philosophy the First Objectivist laid
down.