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Tuesday, March 19, 2024

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Tony Flood writes,

I enjoyed this, Bill. I can imagine the shrieks from the Randroids. (I left a sort of memento of those days here; I remember Rothbard reading it on his couch and approving of it heartily.) The temerity of you to insinuate that she, the heir of Aristotle and Aquinas, didn't understand Kant!

Some professionals dismissed her, but not all. I knew Doug Rasmussen when he (with Doug Den Uyl) produced the anthology The Philosophical Thought of Ayn Rand (a project of which she disapproved). I had about ten contributors. I can't find my copy; maybe I donated it.

The best non-Randroid admirer, in my opinion, is Chris Matthew Sciabarra, whose well-researched Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical digs into her education in the last days of Czarist Russian (especially the influence of Lossky, Kant's Russian translator). I corresponded with Chris in the early days of email, always trying, unsuccessfully, to figure out what he meant by "dialectics." (I tried to push Lonergan, for whom dialectics was one level in an eight-level methodological chain, on him.)

I just wanted to share these tidbits with you. If they provoke questions, just shoot. Tony

While your point was whether Rand understood Kant, not whether Kant was right ... I'd like to address Kant's ethics anyway. It's clearly wrong to say that acts have moral worth only if done from duty. If it were true, a man who performed great acts of charity, relieving the suffering of thousands, with no idea that such behavior was virtuous, couldn't be called a good man, which is contrary to intuition. Or, borrowing your own example, the claim that a husband and wife having conjugal relations is of no value unless they would do it without taking any pleasure in the act cannot be right; the pleasure is a natural reward of the act, and if either party isn't enjoying it something has gone wrong somewhere.

No, it must be the case that acts have moral worth when they're in accordance with duty, or the good, regardless of our motives for doing them. And what we mean by calling a man virtuous is that his inclinations have been so trained that he would never choose to act against the good, feeling no conflict between duty and inclination.

I can even see how Rand came to her misunderstanding of Kant's theory. If the only times you know your acts have moral worth are when you do them from duty and against inclination, and it's important to you to prove yourself worthy, you will of course look for opportunities to act against inclination when it would benefit others - and to regard your self-imposed suffering as proof of your increasing morality. (As in a Calvin & Hobbes strip, where Calvin, parodying his father, says "Go do something you hate! Being miserable builds character!") It's not a necessary consequence of Kant's theory to recommend this course, but it's one many people draw from it ... and it's what Rand meant to attack.

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