Tomorrow I head off to San Diego to give a paper at this conference; there are copies of some of the papers (including mine) online.
This is the same outfit I went to last year (blogged here and here).
Tag Archives | Ethics
Rand Unbound, Part 5
Neera Badhwar’s response to Doug Rasmussen’s Cato Unbound essay is online. Doug will post a response to all three of us later this week, and then there’ll be some back-and-forth discussion.
Alexander of Aphrodisias and Aristotle
I’ll save detailed comments on Neera’s piece for the discussion – and I agree with most of it anyway – but just one quick point: if by the unity of virtue Neera means the thesis that one can’t have any one virtue to a significant degree without having them all, then I agree with her that that’s false (and I also agree that Rand seems, at least sometimes, to have held it). But if she means the thesis that one can’t have any one virtue completely without having them all, then I’d be willing to defend that thesis. In the words of Alexander of Aphrodisias (the leading Aristotelean of the 2nd century CE):
That the virtues are implied by one another might also be shown in the following way, in that it is impossible to have some one of them in its entirety if one does not have the others too. For it is not possible to have justice in isolation, if it belongs to the just person to act justly in all things that require virtue, but the licentious person will not act justly when something from the class of pleasant things leads him astray, nor the coward when something frightening is threatened against him if he does what is just, nor the lover of money where there is hope of gain; and in general every vice by the activity associated with it harms some aspect of justice. (“That the Virtues Are Implied By One Another,” On the Soul II. 18; trans. R. W. Sharples)
(See also section 9 of this piece.)
Rand Unbound, Part 4
Mike Huemer’s response to Doug Rasmussen’s essay is now online.
Since there’ll be some back-and-forth among the authors later on, I won’t comment on his piece now; at any rate, it should be obvious from my own piece where my disagreements with his will lie.
Rand Unbound, Part 2
My contribution to Cato Unbound’s Rand symposium is now online. Not many surprises for readers of this blog: I do my Aristotelean eudaimonist dance, my labortarian/anti-conflationist dance, my anarchist dance, and my thick-libertarian dance. (And I drop in links to lots of my friends.)
Here’s Cato’s summary:
In his reply to Rasmussen’s lead essay, Auburn University philosopher Roderick Long sets out to sort the wheat from the chaff in Ayn Rand’s moral and political thought. Long maintains that “Rand sets out to found a classical liberal conception of politics … upon a classical Greek conception of human nature and the human good,” and he goes on to defend the plausibility of this project.
In particular, Long stands up for Rand’s reliance on a naturalistic teleology to ground her neo-Aristotlean ethic theory, pointing to contemporary philosophical work that supports Rand’s view.
Long is less happy with Rand’s political thought and criticizes her ideas of the “pyramid of ability” and of big business as a “persecuted minority.” Long credits Rand for her trenchant analysis of corporatism, but argues that she was mistaken to deny that corporatism and capitalism go hand in hand. According to Long, Rand’s ideal of voluntary interaction not only implies a radical departure from historical capitalism, but also a more thoroughly anti-statist social order.
Rand Unbound
Doug Rasmussen has a piece on Ayn Rand up today on Cato Unbound as part of their online symposium on Rand. Over the next few days, Neera Badhwar, Mike Huemer, and I will be posting responses.
Belated Austro-Athenian Plug
This news is nearly a year old now, but Geoff Plauché’s excellent dissertation is online. It combines Aristotelean eudaimonism, Austrian praxeology, dialectical libertarianism, Ayn Rand, New Left anti-corporatism, and free-market anarchism. (So, nothing that would interest any readers of this blog ….)