To the reader,
The Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand extolls reason, justice, moral integrity and personal happiness. One would expect Objectivists to embody such traits more consistently than most people. Yet the recent public expulsion from the organized Objectivist movement of the brilliant, prolific Objectivist philosopher, David Kelley, represents only the latest of many scandals and schisms which have rocked the movement. It follows other purges of veteran Objectivist scholars, and disturbing disclosures concerning Ayn Rand's personal life. These events have brought public ridicule upon the philosophy and divided Objectivists into bitter, warring factions.
In past essays -- "Organized Individualism," "The Oasis," and "Individualism As If Individuals Mattered" -- I have discussed some of the causes of these disquieting events. However, the Kelley affair suggests the need for a more definitive statement.
Leonard Peikoff, Ayn Rand's heir, has published an article on the reasons for his public repudiation of Kelley. Kelley's initial evil, according to Peikoff, was his willingness to speak before a libertarian group (one which, ironically, Peikoff himself had appeared before on June 10, 1982). Kelley compounded this "immoral" act, says Peikoff, by presenting a series of rationales reeking of epistemological and ethical subjectivism. By advocating "tolerance" in the realm of cognition, but "moral judgment" in the realm of evaluation, Kelley (Peikoff writes) severs cognition from evaluation -- "fact" from "value." This, he concludes, is a betrayal of Objectivism, which permits no such dichotomies.
Peikoff's argument is complex and abstract. Given his position, past writings and abundant use of Objectivist terminology, some confused readers may give his conclusions about Kelley -- and his interpretations of Objectivism -- the benefit of their doubts.
That would be a disaster. In the following "Open Letter to Objectivists," I argue that Peikoff's interpretation of Objectivism represents a subtle, yet profound perversion of the basic thrust of Ayn Rand's epistemology -- and an unconscionable injustice against Kelley. I also argue that this same perversion of Objectivism epistemology underlies most of the other schisms and scandals that have haunted the movement.
Since Peikoff promises future purges of infidels (see note 1), and a new book interpreting Ayn Rand's philosophy to conform to his new notions (see note 2), it is time to identify what his notions actually entail. At issue is no less than the meaning and future of Ayn Rand's legacy.
Here, I count only on your independence and integrity to counter-balance Peikoff's "persuasion" by means of threatened purges.
-- Robert James Bidinotto, August 1, 1989
Note 1: This has in fact continued, most notably with the subsequent ostracism of prominent Objectivist scholars George Walsh, George Reisman, Edith Packer, Jerry Kirkpatrick and Linda Reardan.
Note 2: His 1991 book, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, did indeed put a rationalistic "spin" on Objectivism. See David Kelley's review, "Peikoff's Summa," in The IOS Journal, Vol. 1, No. 3, Spring 1992. The author has granted blanket permission to reproduce this open letter or make it available on any BBS.
Leonard Peikoff's and Peter Schwartz's recent replies to David Kelley's privately-circulated paper, "A Question of Sanction," represent the most clear-cut expression to date of their continuing perversion of Objectivism, epistemologically and ethically. Unintentionally, Peikoff's "Fact and Value" and Schwartz's "On Moral Sanctions" (The Intellectual Activist, May 18, 1989) also expose (for the first time so explicitly) the premises, motives and methods which have warped and sundered the Objectivist movement from its beginning, and have reduced it to an object of public ridicule.
In David Kelley's "A Question of Sanction" -- his critique of an earlier Peter Schwartz essay, "On Sanctioning the Sanctioners" (The Intellectual Activist, Feb. 27, 1989) -- Kelley explained the principles of moral evaluation as follows:
When we formulate moral principles, we may abstract from...differences of degree [of good or evil]; we omit measurements... But when we apply the principles in forming moral judgments about particulars, we must reintroduce the relevant measurements. Just as one diminishes the good by praising mediocrity, one trivializes evil by damning the venial. If libertarians are no better than Soviet dictators, then Soviet dictators are no worse than libertarians. Those who indulge in moral hysteria -- condemning all moral error with the same fury, without regard to differences of degree -- destroy their own credibility when it comes to the depths of evil: the Stalins, the Hitlers, the Ayatollah. [Kelley, p. 3]
In their rebuttals, Peikoff and Schwartz nowhere address Kelley's point about "a sense of proportion." That is because the process of "moral evaluation," as they define and defend it, has nothing to do with the objective weighing of facts.
Peikoff reiterates the epistemological roots of "objective values" to show that any identification of any fact has moral implications. Values, he argues, "are a type of facts" and "every fact bears on the choice to live... [E]very fact of reality which we discover has, directly or indirectly, an implication for man's self-preservation and thus for his proper course of action." Thus there can be "no dichotomy...between the true and the good." [p. 1.] Justice, he continues, "is an aspect of the principle that cognition demands evaluation...applied to human choices and their products."
Moral evaluation, he says, "means a single fundamental issue: in the human realm, must distinguish the rational from the irrational, the thinkers from the evaders. Such judgment tells one whether a man, in principle, is committed to reality -- or to escaping from and fighting it. In the one case, he is an ally and potential benefactor of the living; in the other, an enemy and potential destroyer... Thus the mandate of justice: identify the good (the rational) and the evil (the irrational) in men and their works -- then, first, deal with, support and/or reward the good; and second, boycott, condemn and/or punish the evil. (One aspect of this second policy is the principle of not granting to evil one's moral sanction.)" [p. 2, parag. 2]
But while it is true that, conceptually, we can distinguish and isolate rational elements of an idea, argument, action or character from its irrational elements, can human beings always be unambiguously designated as one or the other? Peikoff neatly divides all individuals into only two homogeneous groups: the rational and irrational, the thinkers and evaders. The former group includes only those who think consistently, perfectly and continually; the latter group includes all those who don't...to whatever degree.
This affirms Kelley's point that such "moral judgments" lack "a sense of proportion." A man may be extremely moral and rational, but once in a while do or say something stupidly petty (e.g., unfairly insult his wife). However, by a simple-minded either- or, rational-or-irrational criterion applied to the entirety of one's character, that single blemish alone would constitute sufficient grounds to condemn him. His action would "prove" that the man is not "in principle" committed to reason -- hence, he is "in principle" irrational. And more: he is irrational just as Stalin was irrational: both crossed the only boundary line that matters, the "essential" boundary line of morality. Since the only thing that matters is the fact of a moral lapse, nothing further need be considered.
By this approach, there is no such thing as an aberration: the part is equivalent to the whole. A "moral character" is not determined by behavior that is characteristic: it is decided by the incidental -- because typical and incidental behavior are never distinguished. This, of course, spares the fanatic much time and mental effort. He need not weigh carefully a person's total moral character, balancing a lifetime of virtue against a momentary lapse. Any talk of "degrees of evil" are, to him, merely attempts to "evade moral absolutes," to "put loopholes in the laws of logic."
This means, for instance, that one should never dismiss a truly petty aberration even to salvage a valuable, life-long friendship. For "...there cannot be any 'cost-benefit analysis' of justice versus injustice..." says Schwartz [p. 7]. "Moral judgment, and not some pragmatic calculation of losses and gains, is what must precede any decision about whom to associate with." How can a mere friendship matter when principle is at stake? How can values matter when virtue is at stake?
Thus, moral evaluation is not individuated, concrete and particular: it is generic, abstract and platonic. Particular values are irrelevant: virtue -- in the form of "pronouncing judgment" (meaning: condemnation) -- is its own reward. Such platonism, for the fanatic, provides a method of lump categorization -- particularly useful as a way of "writing off" vast portions of the human race. The psychological "pay value" of this approach lies in its usefulness in propping up the fanatic's pseudo-self-esteem, by confirming and demonstrating his own unique concern for "morality."
This is a perversion of objective moral evaluation. Either-or moral thinking is certainly obligatory when defining the right and wrong aspects of ethical situations and issues. One must evaluate each individual element of these in uncompromising, black-or-white terms. This also applies to human actions: we must always distinguish the good from the evil.
But it is a logical non-sequitur to infer that the part equals the whole -- that an isolated moral error in an otherwise good life means a totally corrupt character. Degrees of good and evil do exist, and they do matter. Our response to an individual guilty of some petty lapse should be to encourage his return to integrity -- not to gleefully damn him to eternity. (I emphasize "petty lapse": obviously, chronic or serious irrationality deserves our wholehearted condemnation.)
By dismissing proportionality from moral judgment, Peikoff and Schwartz reduce Objectivist ethics to a level of sophistication more primitive than that of the Catholic Church: even the Pope, after all, recognizes the existence of "venial sins." To the self-styled keepers of the Objectivist flame, however, all sins are equally "mortal," and all sinners equally and eternally damned.
There is interesting hypocrisy here, too. One recalls that, confronted with unpleasant revelation about Ayn Rand's personal life in Barbara Branden's The Passion of Ayn Rand, Schwartz hastened to argue: "Ultimately, what real difference is there if any of the factual allegations made by Barbara Branden...happen to have actually taken place? Any Rand's glorious achievement is her philosophy and her literature. They stand as her testaments, as the only testaments her life requires... Her books are what she should be judged by." [Open letter by Schwartz, Aug. 20, 1986.] It seems that in the exceptional case of Ayn Rand, certain awkward personal facts don't count, and some moral "cost-benefit analyses" are okay.
Besides ignoring proportion, lump categorizing into "moral or immoral" classes also ignores context. It spares one the need to make a conscientious effort to determine all the relevant facts underlying a person's behavior before condemning him.
One need not ask such questions as: Was the act gratuitously malicious -- or was it committed under stress, fatigue, confusion or distraction? How much did the individual really know? How much could he reasonably be expected to know, under the circumstances? Instead, with a blas indifference to all such contextual considerations, one merely lumps people into one of two broad classes -- "thinkers" and "evaders" -- and treats all residents of the "irrational" class as equally evil.
This gives one all the benefits of "moral certainty" without having to expend any of the tedious time, effort and -- yes -- thought that moral evaluation demands.
In fact, this is not "moral evaluation" at all. Valid moral evaluations require consideration of contextual matters -- as in any court of law. But it requires no "judgment" to scream mindless epithets equating all "evildoers," regardless of the nature, scale and circumstances of their actions.
Indeed, the indiscriminate equation of all individuals by ignoring personal context leads to injustice: granting people either more or less credit than they deserve. Presumably, Peikoff would be enraged if some modestly good person were to equate himself morally with Ayn Rand. Why does he have no hesitation, then, in comparing certain lousy academic philosophers with killers like Hitler and Stalin?
This is the heart of Peikoff's position, the argument upon which all else depends -- in fact, the one which has led to his personal Thirty-Years' War against the "immoral" human race, and to the demise of the Objectivist movement.
In method, his argument is purely rationalistic: it starts with a few asserted premises, offered as if they were self-evident truths, then proceeds deductively. In content, Peikoff disputes Kelley's point that...
"It is a gross non-sequitur to infer that because an idea is false, its adherents are evil for holding it." [Kelley, p. 3]
Kelley contends -- quite in accordance with many statements from Ayn Rand -- that one cannot assume that a "wrong" idea or conclusion stemmed from irrationality. A person may be innocently mistaken, simply accepting wrong ideas through "honest error." Such "errors of knowledge" aren't morally blameworthy; only "errors of morality" (irrationality, in the form of evasions and the refusal to think) should be condemned.
Peikoff nominally accepts this -- but proceeds to shrink the realm of possible "honest errors" to miniscule dimensions. This lets him conclude that one can, indeed, infer from the results of someone's thinking whether that person was "rational" or "irrational"; that virtually all mistakes made by adults are really, at root, irrationality; and thus, that those committing such errors are immoral, and deserving of his all-too-eager condemnation.
Peikoff argues that one way to morally judge a man's action is "according to its effects: its effect, positive or negative, on man's life... But human action...is a product of a man's ideas and value-judgments, true or false, which themselves derive from a certain type of mental cause; ultimately, from thought or evasion." [p. 2, col. 1, past parag.]
From this either-or, "thought-or-evasion" premise, he strings a long deductive chain. "Human action is an expression of a volitional consciousness. This is why human action...is morally evaluated." This means we can draw inferences about the mind of the actor, he contends. "The skyscraper's creator, one infers in pattern, functioned on the basis of proper value-judgments and true ideas, including a complete specialized knowledge; so he must have expended mental effort, focus, work; so one praises him morally and admires him. But the murderer...acted on ideas and value- judgments that defy reality; so he must have evaded and practiced whim-worship; so one condemns him morally and despises him..."
Besides describing what one may allegedly infer from actions, Peikoff spells out further "inferences" in the realm of ideas [p. 2, col. 2]. "In judging an idea morally, one must...determine, through the use of evidence, whether the idea is true or false, in correspondence with reality or in contradiction to it. Then, in exact parallel to the case of action, there are two crucial aspects to be identified: the mental process which led to the idea, and the existential results..."
How -- apart from arbitrary psychologizing -- can one perceive "the mental process which led to the idea?" For Peikoff, "...The general principle here is: truth implies as its cause a virtuous mental process; falsehood, beyond a certain point, implies a process of vice..." (Significantly, he is never quite clear what that "certain point" is.)
But what is the moral status of a person who doesn't realize the meaning and consequences of his "bad" ideas? Peikoff refuses to concede such a person's complete moral innocence. "It is possible for a man to embrace an idea blindly, on faith from others or simply by his own whim, without the effort of understanding or integrating it. In such a case, the idea, no matter what its content, reflects negatively on the individual..."
He quickly acknowledges: "Now we must note that falsehood does not necessarily imply vice; honest errors of knowledge are possible" Yet that's all he says on behalf of "honest errors," because "...such errors are not nearly so common as some people wish to think, especially in the field of philosophy."
To illustrate, Peikoff cites the irrational ideological movements of our time. "The originators, leaders and intellectual spokesmen of all such movements are necessarily evaders on a major scale; they are not merely mistaken, but are crusading irrationalists. The mass base of such movements are not evaders of the same kind; but most of the followers are dishonest in their own passive way. They are unthinking, intellectually irresponsible ballast, unconcerned with truth or logic... People of this kind are not the helplessly ignorant, but the willfully self-deluded." [p. 2, col. 2]
Peikoff does admit [p. 3, col. 1] to there being "the relatively small number who struggle conscientiously, but simply cannot grasp the issues and the monumental corruption involved." However, these victims of "a truly honest error of knowledge" are not only few in number, but "this third group consists almost exclusively of the very young...[who] get out [of such movements] as they reach maturity."
Since, therefore, the number of honestly mistaken people in the world is so negligible, he concludes: "We need not pursue the issue of honest errors any further."
Let's unpack this argument a step at a time.
First, consider his opening premise. Ideas, says Peikoff, proceed "ultimately from thought or evasion." But is the lack of a given individual's specific thinking on particular, complex, abstract philosophical issues necessarily the same as "evasion"?
Take a common situation. A blue-collar plumber might not have thought about philosophical issues; and, as a result, he may have accepted any number of mistaken ideas or conclusions. But is this evasion? And is he therefore morally "guilty" and "irrational"?
Given the philosophical environment of the past 2,000 years, given our sorry educational system, given the immediate, narrow, life-serving demands of his own profession -- how is the plumber supposed to know:
Then...is it reasonable for us to expect that he "should" know such things?
The typical plumber will probably never hear about Ayn Rand or her ideas. Even if he does, he may not be able to understand them, or have enough education or intellectual confidence to properly gauge their significance. So he will naturally pick from among those ideas he most frequently hears. Is that "evasion"? Is that what Peikoff calls embracing an idea "blindly, on faith from others or simply by his own whim, without the effort of understanding or integrating it?" Is that what "reflects negatively on the individual"?
Fortunately for those of us who own homes, the typical plumber is professionally conscientious, common-sense-oriented and ambitious -- not a parasite or a predator. His focus is properly on his personal purpose and values; and thus he thinks only about these matters which seem to have some bearing on his own life. But no, he is not an intellectual -- by capacity, inclination or any awareness that he "should" be. In fact, most of his experience with "intellectuals" has been that they are worthless babblers. He concludes that he has no use for their world. Given his context of experience, is that an "irrational" conclusion?
Such innocently mistaken individuals are not a "small minority" of the human race. Contrary to Dr. Peikoff, I have just described over 90% of the human race. Only those sequestered in aloof isolation from general humanity, walled off in exclusive neighborhoods or ivory towers, could conclude otherwise.
Peikoff's starting premise is therefore wrong. "Thought or evasion" does not exhaust the logical possibilities. The logical alternatives are: "thought or non-thought." But "non-thinking" is not necessarily the same as evasion. "To think" means to think about something. Like the plumber, most people do think about subjects they believe are relevant to their well-being. But they see little point in thinking about certain abstract subjects (such as epistemology, or theories of rights). And I doubt they'll be further encouraged to do so by condescending intellectual bullies, who call them "intellectually irresponsible ballast, unconcerned with logic or truth."
Once Peikoff's starting premise collapses, so do all the deductions that lead to his preposterous conclusion: that we can safely draw moral inferences about a person's thought processes based on his ideas, actions, achievements or conclusions.
Though one may draw some positive inferences about a person's character from his successful, life-serving actions or achievements, one cannot assume that he is moral in all aspects and areas of his life. I have met more than one bright, thoughtful individual whose estimable "mental processes" were never matched in action by positive moral deeds. They were platonic hypocrites, living totally in their heads, wasting their abilities by never translating them into anything productive. Are such persons better, morally, than men of modest intellectual abilities who conscientiously apply what little they know? The ancient Romans believed that courage was the most important virtue, because it made all other virtues possible. They had a point.
Similarly, one may not necessarily be able to conclude negative things about a man from his failures or even destructive actions. Why? Because while there is only one path to success and achievement (rationality), there are several paths to failure or destruction. The man who built a skyscraper must necessarily have operated on rational premises -- at least insofar as that aspect of his life is concerned. But the man who does not succeed may have failed through unforeseen circumstances, faulty information, limited abilities, innocent errors -- or, yes, irrationality. However, his failure alone implies nothing conclusive.
As in the case of wrong actions, we also get into trouble drawing firm conclusions about the moral status of those holding false ideas. False conclusions may arise from many sources: limited or invalid information, limited intellectual abilities, limited time to work out an answer, innocent errors of reasoning, etc. Depending on when an innocent error is introduced in a logical chain of deductions, it's possible that such mistakes may be unknowingly compounded, growing to huge proportions. A faulty starting premise may, for example, work its way through an entire ethical system, leading to damaging repercussions (as Peikoff's own erroneous "thought or evasion" premise has in this case). That doesn't necessarily imply irrationality. Yet Peikoff argues otherwise -- that "Falsehood, assuming it reaches a certain scale, is a product of evasion and leads to destruction." [p. 3, col. 2]
To illustrate his point, he contrasts an employee offering his boss a valid idea "for improving the operation of his business," with another employee who comes up "with a stupid suggestion, which flies in the face of the facts." Peikoff concludes we would be correct to draw moral inferences about each man.
Peikoff wants to show we can reliably make moral judgments in such situations; but he shamelessly "loads" his examples to buttress this pre-ordained conclusion. His negative example is not one in which an employee comes up with, say, a plausible suggestion, which seems to be valid, but later proves otherwise. No, Peikoff conjures the image of some jerk making a patently "stupid suggestion."
It is not these obvious cases, however, that are our problem. Would anyone (other than Peikoff or Schwartz) morally condemn a person for offering a plausible suggestion which later proved erroneous? Is that what he would call a proper "inference" of "irrationality"? By this "standard," all of us who have ever made errors balancing our checkbooks are to be morally damned.
One key to Peikoff's perverse interpretation of "objective moral evaluation" is his indifference to the individual's context of knowledge. In this, he has at last displayed some originality in his writings on Objectivism.
Our criminal justice system recognizes that to be judged "immoral," an individual must have (a) acted by free choice, and (b) understood the wrongful nature of his act. These premises are even basic to Roman Catholic teachings concerning moral evaluations of individuals. But again, Peikoff's methodology hasn't even risen to the level of the Pope's. Instead, he divorces cognition from evaluation -- knowledge from moral judgment -- fact from value.
To Peikoff, determining the actor's context of knowledge is irrelevant to pronouncing moral judgments about him. Instead of carefully inquiring into an individual's context of knowledge, we may "infer" -- merely from the bad consequences of his acts, or from the fact of his holding false ideas -- that he "must have evaded" the relevant facts. In such circumstances, one is presumed guilty until proven innocent.
This leads to an interesting problem. If there can be, in effect, such a thing as an "unconscious villain" who may be blamed for doing things he didn't know to be bad, why doesn't Peikoff have a parallel category of the "unconscious hero"? Why don't people who blunder into the right ideas, or do the right things by rote and imitation, deserve any credit? Surely, many mindless parrots of Dr. Peikoff's interpretations might qualify for this honor.
Despite repeated reference to "values" throughout their essays, Peikoff and Schwartz treat them in a strangely impersonal, abstract way.
The Objectivist ethics holds that a value is "that which one acts to gain and/or keep." Values pertain to particular valuers; there can be no such thing as a "value" apart from an answer to the question: Of value to whom, and for what end? The "objective theory of values" holds that a person's particular values should be grounded in the objective requirements of human well-being.
The intrinsic theory of value, by contrast, holds that certain things are inherently valuable "in themselves" -- apart from any particular valuer. "Values" are thus floating abstractions, to be pursued by generic "man." One cannot ask "Why?" about pursuing such values: their pursuit is a general moral imperative, a duty, regardless of individual purposes, context or consequences.
Peikoff perverts Rand's objective theory of value into an intrinsic theory in several ways, starting with his definition of what a "valuer" is [p. 5, col. 2].
"The most eloquent badge of the authentic Objectivist...is in his attitude toward values... In his soul, he is essentially a moralist -- or, in broader terms, what Ayn Rand herself called 'a valuer.' A valuer, in her sense, is a man who evaluates extensively and intensively. That is: he judges every fact within his sphere of action -- and he does it passionately, because his value-judgments, being objective, are integrated in his mind into a consistent whole..."
Observe the curious emphasis. By a proper interpretation of the objective theory of value, the definitive attribute of a "valuer" would be his pursuit of values -- his action on behalf of the things he wants. But to Peikoff, a "valuer" is not primarily somebody out in the world pursuing values; he is merely someone who "evaluates" and "judges." This shifts the definitional focus from any active process of achievement, to a purely mental exercise of judgment-passing. By this view, any passive Walter Mitty can qualify as a "valuer" merely by issuing an incessant barrage of "moral evaluations" -- and thus, from the safety of his armchair, imagine himself the heroic equivalent of a Lindbergh, Edison or Francisco D'Anconia.
Such a person is not a "moralist" in Ayn Rand's sense; he is a cheap moralizer, i.e., one who substitutes verbal evaluations for the moral pursuit of personal values.
This platonic approach to ethics also emerges subtly in how Peikoff and Schwartz argue that certain of their particular values should be treated as universal and generic. Consider their following statements:
"Existentially, an action of man...is good or bad according to its effects...positive or negative, on man's life [emphasis added]. Thus creating a skyscraper is good, murdering the architect is bad -- both by the standard of life." [Peikoff, p. 2] "Now take the case of Ayn Rand, who discovered true ideas on a virtually unprecedented scale... A moral person...greets the discovery of this kind of truth with admiration, awe, even love." [p. 3; emphasis added] "...[I]f you grasp and accept the concept of 'objectivity,' in all its implications, then you accept Objectivism, you live by it and you revere Ayn Rand for defining it." [p. 5; emphasis added] "These smears [against Ayn Rand] represent unjust assaults upon a profound value, and should be denounced..." [Schwartz, p. 6]
Note the elevation of two particulars -- Ayn Rand and skyscrapers -- into universal values. "Man" -- the generic, the abstract -- is treated as a real entity, who, for unspecified reasons, should value Ayn Rand and skyscrapers. Regardless of any specific man's context, these general values should evoke equally intense value- responses (emotions) among all people.
Certainly, skyscrapers are of general value to the human race. But should a skyscraper be of particular value to all men, regardless of personal context? Should, say, a Kansas farmer value any skyscrapers as such, no matter where they are located, for no particular reason other than some presumably intrinsic symbolism about them which all men "should" share?
Likewise, an Objectivist, by definition, should feel admiration for Ayn Rand's achievements, and (if he grasps their full significance) even awe. But love? Love is our deepest response to personal traits which we value in another person -- to the many specific, particular things about him that evoke an intensely individual response. The feeling thus presupposes personal knowledge, involvement and a degree of intimacy.
But one cannot really "love" or "revere" a total stranger -- let alone one long dead. To profess "love" for someone you have never met is to devalue both the emotion and the person. It treats the "love" object not as a real person, but as a mere abstract symbol -- a disembodied, depersonalized repository of "virtue." That, in fact, is what we call infatuation: the kind of "platonic love" typical of young adolescents (or adults frozen at the adolescent level), in which someone is valued for whatever abstract virtues they presumably symbolize, rather than for any specific personality or individuating traits.
It is one thing for a close personal friend to have loved Ayn Rand. It is quite another thing for such person to demand that all Objectivists should "love" her, whether they knew her or not -- any more than they should "love" Thomas Jefferson, Victor Hugo or Aristotle. Such moral-psychological extortion is an insult to Ayn Rand as a real person. And I believe she would have been the first to object to such symbolic dehumanization.
In a similar platonic manifestation, Peikoff inverts the ethical relationship between virtues and values.
In "The Objectivist Ethics," Ayn Rand wrote: "The Objectivist ethics holds man's life as the standard of value -- and his own life as the ethical purpose of every individual man." And: "Value is that which one acts to gain and/or keep -- virtue is the act by which one gains and/or keeps it."
By this view, it is the ultimate purpose (the furtherance of one's own life, happiness and well-being) that gives rise to the need for an abstract moral gauge or standard ("man's life," or, a life conforming to the objective requirements of human well- being). The relationship of these elements is as follows: one's own life is the ultimate moral goal or value to be pursued; "man's life" -- a life lived in rational pursuit of the objective requirements of human nature -- is the moral gauge or standard of action in pursuit of that objective. This standard, in turn, translates into more specific "values" and "virtues." The objective requirements of one's well-being determine the specific ends, or "moral values," which one pursues; and they also determine the means of attaining those values, or "moral virtues."
While rational moral ends and means are logically inseparable and not in conflict, it is crucial to grasp which is which, and which is primary. Under Objectivism, values have primacy over virtues. Virtue is not an end in itself: it is only the pursuit of objective values that gives meaning, purpose and intelligibility to moral virtues and principles. Values -- not virtues -- are at the apex of the ethical hierarchy.
Ultimately, then, one praises an act as "good" or "rational" not for virtue's own sake, but because of its value consequences: the advancing of human life and well-being. Likewise, one condemns as "evil" or "irrational" any act whose value consequences are harmful to human life and well-being. One judges an individual's character the same way: not by what we "infer" that he may be doing or intending within the privacy of his own mind, intellectually, but by what he is doing out in the world, existentially. (See Rand's essay, "Causality Vs. Duty.")
Leonard Peikoff subtly inverts this hierarchy. Consider his example of why we should admire an architect. "The skyscraper's creator, one infers in pattern, functioned on the basis of proper value-judgments and true ideas, including a complex specialized knowledge; so he must have expended mental effort, focus, work; so one praises him morally and admires him." To Peikoff, then, the architect's moral status chiefly lies not in his creation of objective values, but in his (presumably) virtuous mental processes, of which his creation stands as mere evidence for our ethical inferences. A Howard Roark, therefore, should not be admired for his courageous quest to realize his esthetic vision, but for what we infer about his thought processes. We praise, ultimately, not the existential achievement of values, but the mental exercise of virtues.
If this seems peculiar, it is more clearly evident in the negative example Peikoff cites. We condemn a murderer, he argues, not primarily because he destroyed an innocent life, but ultimately because of what his act leads us to infer about his thought processes: "...the murderer...acted on ideas and value-judgments that defy reality; so he must have evaded and practiced whim-worship; so one condemns him morally and despises him..."
By this screwy, platonic interpretation of Rand's ethics, the only real crime, it appears, is thought crime. A victim's bleeding body is a mere residue of a vicious mental deed: what is morally significant is not the value of a human life, but the perpetrator's "evasion" and "whim-worship." The victim's sole importance, ethically, is to provide messy evidence of the perpetrator's Thought Crime -- grist for our deductive inferences.
This view topples value -- particularly, the ultimate value of human life -- from its paramount position in the Objectivist ethics.
But "irrationalism" as such is not some platonic sin, wrong "in itself." Irrationalism is wrong because it destroys the values of human life, happiness and well-being. In fact, only the harmful consequences of irrationalism make it subject to any objective identification or evaluation as "morally wrong." If irrationalism had no consequences for human life and well-being, it would be ethically irrelevant.
Thus, we condemn a murderer not primarily because of the means (the irrational or evasive thought processes) that enabled him to commit his act. We condemn him because of the consequences of his irrationalism: the destruction of innocent human life. We condemn him, ultimately, not for what he is doing inside his skull, but for what he is doing out in the world.
This, incidentally, explains Peikoff's curious lack of proportionality in passing moral judgments. Unlike murders, rapes and robberies, "thought crimes" cannot be quantified or ranked by degree of seriousness. All such "evils" reduce to "irrationality" -- and all irrationality is a single, undifferentiated "evil." This is why Peikoff can sweepingly equate the Libertarian Party with the Soviet regime, or compare David Kelley with Armand Hammer, or claim that meek little Immanuel Kant is more evil than Hitler and Stalin. Who is to say otherwise? If all crimes are purely mental, on what grounds can anyone objectively measure or rank such things?
Far from providing "objective moral evaluation," then, Peikoff's approach is subjectivity at its most ambitious. It relieves him of the need to acquire contextual information about an individual, to weigh and assess confusing particulars, to gauge if the acts under consideration represent a trend or an aberration -- in short, to actually judge the individual. Since there is no way "evasion" or "irrationality" can be quantified except through objective acts, the thought-crime approach allows him to make unlimited, unsupported claims about the subject's degree of depravity. It grants him a carte blanche to plunge into the dim recesses of another's subconscious, making unlimited "inferences" and strained "deductions" from minimal evidence -- supplanting moral judgment with arbitrary psychologizing.
What underlies such perversion of Objectivist ethics? The above examples suggest that Objectivist epistemology -- particularly, the idea of "thinking in essentials" -- has been subtly recast into a platonic weapon.
"Thinking in essentials" means grasping the defining traits which distinguish concepts from each other. This is a critical method of clear thinking, of drawing careful distinctions and making precise identifications.
But the defining, or epistemologically "essential," characteristics of a thing, are not equivalent to the entire entity -- nor are its non-defining traits metaphysically unimportant. However, the platonist acts as if epistemologically "essential traits" are metaphysically "essential traits" -- i.e., that they are the only things which matter about persons or things. To him (for example), since the defining or "essential" characteristic of man is his rationality, therefore a man's body, emotions, subconscious, etc., are irrelevant "non-essentials." Thus people should be loved or despised solely for their expressed convictions and evident intellectual qualities, and excused for any flaws or shortcomings in "non-essential" (i.e., non-intellectual) areas.
The pay-value of such cognitive selectivity lies in its usefulness in evading unpleasant facts of reality -- of simply dismissing them out of hand, as "non-essential."
As already discussed, in passing moral judgments, the platonist ignores the individuating contexts of others. He simply homogenizes men into lump categories of "thinkers" and "evaders," by reference to "essentials" (such as whether or not they agree with Leonard Peikoff's assessment of a book he didn't bother to read.) [Note: the reference here being to Barbara Branden's book, The Passion of Ayn Rand. Peikoff regarded one's response to that book as a moral litmus test; yet he publicly boasted that he himself had not bothered to read it before condemning it.] This permits unimpeded moral condemnations.
It also allows for selective moral exonerations. For instance, as previously mentioned, any of the unflattering facts about Ayn Rand which were reported in Barbara Branden's The Passion of Ayn Rand -- according to Schwartz's "review" of the book -- are, even if true, "non-essential" and irrelevant to any assessment of her moral character; the only "essentials" that matter about her, he said, were the books she wrote and the abstract philosophy she defined. Yet this means that Ayn Rand is to be remembered not as a fully living, breathing person, but as an abstract symbol, whose only (intrinsic) significance was as a philosopher and novelist. Her disembodied intellect was the only thing that ever counted.
Another implication of this view is that it excuses oneself from any self-development other than intellectual. Personal hygiene and grooming, physical fitness, social civility, an emotionally balanced life -- all these are "non-essentials." One may allow himself to become a physical slob or an emotional tyrant, to behave insensitively toward his spouse or children, to indulge in poor manners or bad habits or obsessive preoccupations -- and still demand to be loved or respected by the world, solely for his intelligence and verbalized convictions. This is the cheap, undemanding ethic of the desiccated rationalist, who thinks his pathetically barren existence can be redeemed by "brilliant" pronouncements from his armchair.
The elevation of "essentials" from an epistemological to a metaphysical status is unmitigated platonism. (Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, first Mentor edition, pp. 68-72.) By facilitating selective evasions of facts and relevant contexts, it is also the methodological root of Peikoff's and Schwartz's perversions and distortions in the ethical realm. It is what allows them to engage in rationalistic "deductions" solely from a handful of sketchy "essentials," and to issue "judgments" which routinely evade any "non-essential" (i.e., uncomfortable, ambiguous or conflicting) facts.
This habitual epistemological subjectivity causes one to question their general analytical reliability. How can one be sure which few facts they have retained as "essential" in their various analyses? The same methodology which told us that any unpleasant facts about Ayn Rand in Barbara Branden's book were "non-essential," also told us even more recently that there was no "essential" difference between George Bush and Michael Dukakis; that libertarians are "essentially" the equivalent of the Soviet regime; that Kant was morally worse than Hitler and Stalin; and -- perhaps most grotesquely -- that David Kelley's views constitute "a repudiation of the fundamental principles of Objectivism" equivalent to Armand Hammer's betrayal of America. Are these the people to trust on, say, Middle East politics, or the choices between candidates, or the merits of a book or film?
The Peikoff/Schwartz essays reveal, in condensed form, the premises, motives and methods which have long undermined Objectivism in the court of public opinion. They reveal a platonic perversion of an epistemology of reason and an ethics of rational self-interest, in which relevant facts, motives and contexts are arbitrarily excluded from moral judgments. By this means, a philosophy of reason, justice, achievement and happiness is retooled into an indiscriminately, gleefully wielded moral bludgeon.
At the conclusion of his essay, Leonard Peikoff predicted even more purges of infidels; his astonishing euphemism for such expulsions was "quality control." He reminded me of a scene in the classic film, "Ninotchka." Greta Garbo, playing a fanatical Soviet official in Paris, is asked how things are going back in Moscow. "Very good," she replies grimly. "The last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be fewer, but better, Russians."
But quality is never the result of intellectual purges: the most creative and independent thinkers are the first to go. Virtually all of Objectivism's prominent past representatives (once touted as brilliant and virtuous) have been shown the door. In the wake of Kelley's expulsion, the thought confronting many Objectivists is: If even David Kelley doesn't qualify as being an Objectivist, who does?
The answer, obviously, is: those whose only talents are sycophantic nodding, agreeing and obeying. Considering the "quality" of what Peikoff now "controls" in his rapidly dwindling cult, it appears that -- analogous to the plot of Atlas Shrugged -- there is a "destroyer" loose in the Objectivist movement, draining its brains and leaving it creatively bankrupt. But that "destroyer" is not Leonard Peikoff: it is the retributive power of logic.
One's sense of life -- whether or not one loves this earth, and is confident in his ability to deal with it -- will determine how he views and utilizes the Objectivist philosophy. There are those who see Objectivism as an intellectual map or compass to help them explore a world filled with wonders and challenges. But there are others who view Objectivism as a mental refuge or shield from a world filled with evils and perils. The former see Objectivism as a key to unlock all doors to a rewarding, exciting world; the latter, as a door to slam shut against a threatening, revolting world.
Speaking for the former, David Kelley, wrote that Objectivism "is not a closed system." Speaking for the latter, Leonard Peikoff replied, "Yes, it is" -- and Peter Schwartz added: "Objectivism is a restrictive philosophy."
I urge Objectivists to obtain, read and compare the articles by Kelley, Peikoff and Schwartz, in terms of their respective aims, tones and approaches. Then -- holding in mind images from the Renaissance or Enlightenment -- ask yourself what the cultural consequences of each would be, if implemented in reality. Which represents the true promise of Objectivism? Which represents the only method by which the philosophy can be spread successfully to the outside world?
Objectivism desperately needs benevolent interpreters and patient teachers, to help millions of confused and searching men and women rationally direct their choices and actions. But it emphatically does not need a secular Ayatollah, who props up a shaky self-image with denunciations instead of deeds. It needs no ideological policeman, whose only evident gratification is the bitter, endless, self-righteous pursuit of "evildoers" -- no matter how petty their alleged offenses, no matter what their contexts of knowledge.
In short, Objectivism has John Galt. It needs no Javert.
For further reading, see also my essay, "Understanding Peikoff" and also my essay "Rand Versus Peikoff". These develop themes and provide further background for points made in this essay.
Also highly recommended are David Kelley's monograph, Truth and Toleration, his own extended answer to the issues raised in this controversy; and also his monograph, Unrugged Individualism: The Selfish Basis of Benevolence, a major contribution to the Objectivist ethics. Further information about both monographs may be obtained from the Institute for Objectivist Studies.