Over thirty million copies of English-language editions of Ayn Rands books have been sold since the 1940s, with many more in dozens of other languages, and sales have not slowed down [1]. This articles sub-title captures the heart of why her workespecially her fictionhas enduring appeal, despite academia and the popular press being generally...

Over thirty million copies of English-language editions of Ayn Rands books have been sold since the 1940s, with many more in dozens of other languages, and sales have not slowed down [1]. This articles sub-title captures the heart of why her workespecially her fictionhas enduring appeal, despite academia and the popular press being generally hostile even to the mention of her name. The quotation appears in the last part of The Fountainhead, Rands 1943 novel that put her on the cultural map. A young man recently graduated from college rides his bicycle through the hills of Pennsylvania, wondering whether life is worth living and whether he should pursue his dream of being a composer. He longs to see others achievements as tangible products of their quest for happiness, if only to see that its possible. Suddenly, he is confronted with a newly finished summer home community that seems to spring organically from the sides of the hills. He notices a man perched on a boulder who serenely gazes over the beautiful homes in the valley below. After finding out that the manHoward Roarkis the architect responsible for the scene before them, he thanks Roark and confidently rides off into his future armed with the courage to face a lifetime.

Many readers have been inspired by these words, amazed at the story unfolding before their eyes. Its unusual to encounter literature that embodies such benevolent, life-affirming values. This is an extraordinary kind of Heros Journey. Filled not only with heroes meeting challenges with the assistance of friends against ones foes, it also contains the message that philosophy mattersfor everyone. How well or poorly your life goes depends on whether you hold the right ideas or not. The Fountainheadas well as Rands 1957 magnum opus, Atlas Shruggedpaints a world where happiness and joy are attainable through using ones mind to pursue ones passion with integrity and to face and overcome obstacles with reality-oriented determination. Its a universe where achievement is possible; self-esteem is earned through productive work; and voluntary interactions foster intensely rewarding personal, social, and professional relationships. And its a reality that any person can choose to help create every day of ones life.

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"Rand's work contains the message that philosophy mattersfor everyone. How well or poorly your life goes depends on whether you hold the right ideas or not." ___

Journeying through the rest of Rands corpusher fiction as well as her non-fiction philosophy, which she named Objectivismis challenging and rewarding. The essentials of Objectivism are: reality exists, we can know reality objectively through our senses and the use of reason, ones own happiness is ones highest moral purpose (egoism), limited government is justified only for the protection of individual rights, people should be free to trade the fruits of their work (capitalism), and the purpose of art is to project and experience in concrete form ones vision of life. Many people have been engaged and inspired by these ideas, ideally using them as springboards for further thought about whats true and how best to live. There are also many who reject Rands ideas, though few of those have bothered to read her work carefully (or at all) before passing judgment on it.

A small sample of vitriol hurled at Rands work in popular media includes: complete lack of charity; execrable claptrap and a personality as compelling as a sledge hammer; crackpot . . . an historical anachronism and a wretched novelist; an absurd philosophy and a total crock. [2] Both supporters and detractors of her work have also noted the derision that many philosophers have for it, dismissing her work contemptuously on the basis of hearsay or laugh[ing] out of the room anyone bringing up her name [3]. Add to the vitriol some of the oft-repeated myths about Rands views:

(1) She is Conservative and high priestess of the acute Right on the American political spectrum. [4]

(2) She takes Nietzschean individualism to an extreme. [5]

(3) In upholding selfishness, individuals should never care about anyone else, even regarding them as totally expendable tools to be manipulated. At best, charity or benevolence is a minor virtue. [6]

(4) She was an unabashed apologist for dog-eat-dog capitalism, allowing the rich to cozy up to government in plutocratic fashion. [7]

The ad hominem attacks above are best brushed aside into the dustbin of history. Mischaracterizations can be dispelled by examining Rands work for what it says. First, Rands views dont fit neatly into either the political Right or Left. She was a radical for individual rights who rejected the false dichotomy between personal and economic freedom, and rejected being labeled Conservative or Libertarian. A portion of the Rightnamely, some Libertarians and Tea Party membershave supported parts of Rands theory. However, a staunch anti-religion naturalist, she angers many on the Right by defending rights to abortion, free speech, and drugs regardless of her own stance on the moral worth of those activities. She angers the Left even more by opposing welfare-state redistribution and defending rights to private property and keeping ones income. [8]

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"Rands defense of capitalism is grounded in her view of egoism. We each need to create the material and spiritual values needed to live as humans. We gain immeasurably through exchanging values voluntarily with others." ___

Regarding the second myth, Rand read some of Friedrich Nietzsches works when she was in college. She undeniably shares with him a polemical writing style and acknowledges that she admires his sense of mans potential for greatness. This is stated at the same time, though, as Rand expresses her profound disagreement with what she sees as Nietzsches mysticism, irrationalism, subordination of reason to the will-to-power, and malevolent view of the world. [9] Her greatest intellectual debt is owed instead to Aristotlemetaphysical and epistemological realist and defender of reason and virtue ethicswho she regarded as the greatest of all philosophers. [10]

The third myth vanishes when we examine Rands version of egoism. An egoist is one who regards oneself as the ultimatenot the onlybeneficiary of ones actions. Heroes in all of Rands novels risk their lives for the sake of valuesincluding other peoplethey hold dear. She defends ones choice to assist strangers in emergency and everyday contexts out of good will toward other living beings, so long as doing so is not a sacrificial duty that jeopardizes ones well-being. Rand even dubs as psychopaths those who are totally indifferent to anything living. [11] How does this square with egoism? It begins with a proper conception of the self. We are human beingsnot animalswith a reasoning mind to be integrated with ones emotions. Goals worth pursuing for ones long-term survival can be achieved only in certain ways, namely, by exercising virtues such as rationality, productiveness, pride, independence, integrity, honesty, and justice. These virtues demand the best of our selves, precluding the initiation of force against other persons or attempts to gain benefits from them through deceit or fraud. [12]

The fourth myth has been the most persistent, for defending capitalism on moral grounds requires fighting against millennia of prejudice against money-making. Think, for example, of the Biblical proverb of how its easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to gain entrance to Heaven or how Shylock is scorned for making money on loans in Shakespeares The Merchant of Venice. Rands defense of capitalism is grounded in her view of egoism. We each need to create the material and spiritual values needed to live as humans. We gain immeasurably through exchanging values voluntarily with others. Rand calls this the trader principle. Those who seek to gain resources through coercive meansthe ones Rand depicts as villains in her novelsare either private criminals or political cronies who violate individual rights. Genuine businessmen dont seek political favors or otherwise subvert the rule of law. When free to trade voluntarily, they innovate, produce job opportunities, and increase living standards. In short, they create wealth by applying their minds to the task of living, leading to win-win outcomes. [13]

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"President Donald Trump is an alleged Ayn Rand acolyte", but being a fan of Rands work is not the same as understanding her views, applying them properly, or living up to them consistently in ones own life." ___

It should be apparent by now why so many people find Rands work appealing. Her views, thoughlike any otherscan and should be scrutinized, critiqued, and developed where needed. Philosophers who have taken her work seriously disagree about how to understand some of Rands key ideas. For example, there are rival interpretations of what she means by the claim that our ultimate aim is life, or survival as man qua man, and whether this is equivalent to eudaimonism, the view that flourishing (which centrally involves virtue) is our ultimate aim. [14] Some eudaimonists argue that virtue, not life, is the ultimate value and that it might conflict with egoism, which would create problems for Rands ethical theory. More than anything, though, Rands philosophical system is under-developed in some ways. She herself refers to her non-fiction collections as outlines, previews, and introductions to material that she had intended to write book-length treatments of (though she didnt end up doing so). [15]

Having addressed some of the most significant misunderstandings of Objectivism, we can ask: What accounts for the persistent hostility and misrepresentation? The reasons are several. Some people might assume that such depictions accurately represent Rands views, and then they repeat those falsehoods. Such individuals can instead withhold comment until dispelling their ignorance of the source rather than rely on someone elses judgments about it.

Others read Rands work and disagree partially or entirely with her views. This is unsurprising, given that she challenges many sacred cows, including religion, altruism, determinism, collectivism, and subjectivism. While a relative few in this category engage in fair and honest discussion about her ideas [16], many either misunderstand Rand and end up mischaracterizing her views or willfully misrepresent them to dissuade others from taking her seriously. Its unfortunately easier to demonize ones opponents than to argue with them.

For others, their rejection of Rand is based less on the content of her views than on her sense of life. Its fashionable, especially among academics and public intellectuals, to be jaded, cynical, and ironic. Rands workwith its hallmarks of benevolence and heroismthankfully exhibits none of these. It instead offers a spirit of youthful optimism that provides resilience needed to achieve a good life and endure with grace lifes unavoidable challenges. In addition, professional philosophers are put off by Rands dearth of footnotes and bibliographical apparatus as well as her non-analytic, polemical style that attacks others views with little exposition of them.

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"Whether one agrees with Rands provocative views or not, its valuable for philosophers to take them seriously and study them carefully. Her theory provides a systematic alternative to other schools of thought and challenges the academys conventional wisdom to keep us on our intellectual toes" ___

Yet others, who claim to be fans or supporters of Rands work, accidentally contribute to perpetuating falsehoods about her views. One need only look to a list of some prominent politicians and entrepreneurs to see this phenomenon. For example, President Donald Trump is an alleged Ayn Rand acolyte, accused of stack[ing] his cabinet with fellow Objectivists, such as Rex Tillerson and Michael Pompeo. In addition, Travis Kalanicks ignominious fall from the heights of Uber CEO-hood has been described as the latest Icarus-like plunge of a prominent Rand follower, and Andrew Pudzer, an avid Ayn Rand reader, withdrew from his nomination as Secretary of Labor due to allegations of worker mistreatment at his fast-food chains [17]. These individuals may have been inspired by reading Rands works to follow their lifes path. However, one is hard-pressed to call any of them Objectivists, since they either reject key tenets of Rands theory by being religious or have chosen to act in some ways antithetical to it by cutting crony deals or performing other vicious deeds. Being a fan of Rands work is not the same as understanding her views, applying them properly, or living up to them consistently in ones own life. There are plenty of good people living their lives in a principled waywhether as CEOs, teachers, or mechanicswho have been inspired by Rands ideas. Their moral decency doesnt make headline news, though.

Whether one agrees with Rands provocative views or not, its valuable for philosophers to take them seriously and study them carefully. Her theory provides a systematic alternative to other schools of thought and challenges the academys conventional wisdom to keep us on our intellectual toes. She reframes traditional philosophical questions in ways that cut through what she considers to be false dichotomies: mind/body, reason/emotion, moral/practical, duty/utility, intrinsic/subjective, nature/nurture. This leaves conceptual space to offer and defend a third way on a range of significant philosophical issues.

Rand offers Objectivism as a philosophy for living, not just contemplating, not just existing and getting by. We have minds equipped to deal with the world, a world where we can be efficacious. So long as there are individuals committed to their own happiness, voluntary cooperation, reaching for the best within themselves, and creating the social and political institutions needed for achieving these values in a free and responsible way, Rands work will continue to speak to countless numbers of people in all walks of life. But dont take myor anyone elsesword for it. Exercise the virtue of independence and read Rands work for yourself. Youll see firsthand what the enduring appeal is all about.

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[1] Allan Gotthelf and Gregory Salmieri, eds., A Companion to Ayn Rand (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), p. 15 n. 1.

[2] Bruce Cook, Ayn Rand: A Voice in the Wilderness, Catholic World, vol. 201 (May 1965), p. 121; John Kobler, The Curious Cult of Ayn Rand, The Saturday Evening Post (November 11, 1961), p. 99; Dora Jane Hamblin, The Cult of Angry Ayn Rand, Life (April 7, 1967), p. 92; Geoffrey James, Top 10 Reasons Ayn Rand Was Dead Wrong, CBS News Moneywatch (September 16, 2010), accessed online at: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/top-10-reasons-ayn-rand-was-dead-wrong/.

[3] Neera Badhwar and Roderick Long, Ayn Rand, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (September 19, 2016), accessed online at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ayn-rand/; James Stewart, As a Guru, Ayn Rand May Have Limits. Ask Travis Kalanick, The New York Times (July 13, 2017), accessed online at: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/13/business/ayn-rand-business-politics-uber-kalanick.html.

[4] Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, Psyching Out Ayn Rand, Ms. (September 1978), p. 24. See also, e.g., Jonathan Chait, Wealthcare: Ayn Rand and the Invincible Cult of Selfishness on the American Right, New Republic (September 14, 2009), accessed online at: https://newrepublic.com/article/69239/wealthcare-0; Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 4.

[5] Stewart, As a Guru, Ayn Rand May Have Limits. See also, e.g., Gene Bell-Villada, On Nabakov, Ayn Rand, and the Libertarian Mind (Newcastle on Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013), chap. 5.

[6] See James, Top 10 Reasons Ayn Rand Was Dead Wrong, Skikha Dalmia, Where Ayn Rand Went Wrong, Forbes (November 4, 2009), accessed online at: https://www.forbes.com/2009/11/03/where-ayn-rand-went-wrong-opinions-columnists-shikha-dalmia.html, and Michael Huemer, Why I Am Not an Objectivist, accessed online at: http://www.owl232.net/rand.htm, for the former view, and Badhwar and Long, Ayn Rand, for the latter.

[7] Gerald Jonas, Reviewed This Week (four sci-fi novels), The New York Times (August 30, 1998), accessed online at: http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/08/30/reviews/980830.30scifit.html. See also, e.g., James, Top 10 Reasons Ayn Rand Was Dead Wrong and James Hohmann, The Daily 202: Ayn Rand Acolyte Donald Trump Stacks His Cabinet with Fellow Objectivists, The Washington Post (December 13, 2016), accessed online at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2016/12/13/daily-202-ayn-rand-acolyte-donald-trump-stacks-his-cabinet-with-fellow-objectivists/584f5cdfe9b69b36fcfeaf3b/?utm_term=.d56b46b8c78c.

[8] Rands public policy views are scattered over dozens of essays, but a general synthesis can be found in John David Lewis and Gregory Salmieri, A Philosopher on Her Times, in Gotthelf and Salmieri, A Companion to Ayn Rand, pp. 351-402.

[9] Ayn Rand, Introduction, in her The Fountainhead, 25th anniversary ed. (New York: New American Library, 1968), p. x.

[10] Ayn Rand, The Objectivist Ethics, in her The Virtue of Selfishness (New York: Signet, 1964), p. 14.

[11] Ayn Rand, The Ethics of Emergencies, in Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness, pp. 43-44.

[12] Rand, The Objectivist Ethics, pp. 22-32.

[13] See Rand, The Objectivist Ethics, pp. 32-34, and Ayn Rand, What Is Capitalism? and Americas Persecuted Minority: Big Business, in her Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: Signet, 1966), pp. 11-34 and 44-62.

[14] See, e.g., Allan Gotthelf, The Morality of Life, in Gotthelf and Salmieri, A Companion to Ayn Rand, pp. 73-104; Gregory Salmieri, Egoism and Altruism, in Gotthelf and Salmieri, A Companion to Ayn Rand, pp. 130-56; Neera Badhwar, Well-Being: Happiness in a Worthwhile Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Lester Hunt, Flourishing Egoism, Social Philosophy and Policy, vol. 16, no. 1 (1999), pp. 72-95; and Roderick Long, Reason and Value: Aristotle versus Ayn Rand (Poughkeepsie, NY: Objectivist Center, 2000).

[15] The task of developing Objectivist-inspired work that interprets and fleshes out lacunae in Rands system falls to others. See, e.g., Tara Smith, Ayn Rands Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Tara Smith, Judicial Review in an Objective Legal System (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015); and Allan Gotthelf and James Lennox, eds., Concepts and Their Role in Knowledge: Reflections on Objectivist Epistemology (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013). All of these works engage with the wider philosophical literature in ways that Rand did not.

[16] One such exception is an excellent piece by John Piper; see his The Ethics of Ayn Rand: Appreciation and Critique, Desiring God (June 1, 1979; revised October 9, 2007), accessed online at: http://www.desiringgod.org/articles/the-ethics-of-ayn-rand. A Christian who thinks that Rand is mistaken about rejecting theism, Piper nonetheless offers a careful, nuanced articulation of her ethical egoism. Would that all critics were to take such care with the views of their interlocutors.

[17] Hohmann, The Daily 202: Ayn Rand Acolyte Donald Trump Stacks His Cabinet with Fellow Objectivists; Stewart, As A Guru, Ayn Rand May Have Limits.

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The Courage to Face a Lifetime: On the Enduring Value of Ayn Rand's Philosophy - IAI News

Choose life, that thou mayest live, thou and thy seed. Deuteronomy 30:19 (The Israel Bible)

IDF medics operate a field hospital of injured Syrians near Israels northern border. (IDF Blog)

For the first time in Israels history, top surgeons throughout Israel and the Israel Defense Force (IDF) gathered to learn a new medical technique which stops bleeding in cases of trauma without an incision. Trauma specialists from South Africa, the US and Sweden came to the Holy Land to teach and demonstrate the groundbreaking procedure. The workshop took place on Kibbutz Lahav in Israels southern region, with eighty medical personnel in attendance.

LIBI USA is honored to have sponsored this trailblazing three-day workshop which will, no doubt, save lives in Israel and worldwide, shared Dr. John A.I. Grossman, Chairman of LIBI USA, the official welfare fund of the IDF, with Breaking Israel News. It was also a unique opportunity for medical professionals to unite in Israel, as saving lives is a Jewish and Israeli priority.

Dr. Grossman referred to the Biblical commandment of pikuach nefesh, the preservation of human life. This commandment, derived from the Book of Leviticus, is so basic to Judaism is that it takes precedence over all others.

So you shall keep My statutes and My judgments, by which a man may live if he does them. Leviticus 18:5

The Talmud emphasizes that one should live by the commandments, not die by them. One who is zealous in saving a life is praised and one who hesitates to save a life is considered as one who has shed the persons blood themselves, which the sages describe as piety of madness. In fact, to save and preserve a life, one must desecrate the Sabbath and even eat on the fast day of Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year.

This is a new technique which requires specialized training in a controlled setting to master, explained Colonel (res.) Dr. Ofer Merin, Director of the Trauma Unit and Preparedness of Mass Casualty Events at Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem and Commander of the IDF Field Hospital and General Staffs Surgical Hospital Unit, to Breaking Israel News. We are truly grateful to Dr. Grossman and LIBI USA for funding these life-saving workshops as simulated trauma scenarios with the use of REBOA are crucial to master this new technique.

Resuscitative Endovascular Balloon Occlusion of the Aorta, or REBOA, is used when a person is rapidly bleeding to death. It involves the placement of a flexible catheter balloon into the aorta to control haemorrhaging in traumatic injuries and then inflating the balloon, which stops the bleeding.

The head of the Trauma and Combat Medicine Branch for the IDF, Lieutenant Colonel Dr. Avraham Yitzhak, was part of the team of experts learning and assessing the effectiveness and practicality of using REBOA on Israeli soldier trauma victims. This important workshop united civilian and army surgeons to train in the cutting edge REBOA technology. Because of this workshop, the IDF might have an additional way to save lives, Dr. Yitzhak told Breaking Israel News. We are grateful to LIBI USA for sponsoring these days.

Dr. Yitzhak also discussed the IDFs commitment to pikuach nefesh. IDF physicians have three levels of oaths they take concerning the saving of lives, he said. We have the Hippocratic Oath, which every doctor in the world is obligated to uphold. In addition, we have the Oath of Maimonides and the oath of the Israeli Medical Corp, My Brothers Keeper.

The essence of the Oath of Maimonides, named for its originator, a 12th century scholar of Jewish law and philosophy, is to watch over the life and health of Gods creatures without egoism.

The essence of the Israeli Medics Oath is that medics will give everything, including their own lives, for the State of Israel and its people and will treat friend or foe alike, in all conditions, and never leave anyone in the field.

In Israel, we tend to be busy with trying to live fulfilling lives or dieing at the hands of our enemies, shared Dr. Yitzhak. IDF medics risk their lives to give correct care to everyone, including wounded Syrians across our border, humanitarian aid to people all over the world and even medical care to our enemies.

Unfortunately, we havent taken the time and arent good at explaining to the world how ethical, moral and valuing of life we are. This workshop helps to build that knowledge worldwide and gain life-saving skills in addition.

To donate to LIBI USA and support the IDF, please visit here.

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IDF Medics to Learn Groundbreaking Trauma Procedure - Breaking Israel News

In a city of glass, where people who are just Numbers living in glass-brick houses, and everyones daily routine is determined by the Tables of the Hours set down by the Well-Doer, one particular Number, D-503, is developing a dangerous affliction. He is nurturing a soul. This could put his life and that of his loved ones in mortal danger, because in this future One State, where logic rules, sex is rationed and love banned, a budding soul is an indication of developing individuality and separateness. But the state believes: nobody is one, but one of. We are so alike...

We, Yevgeny Zamyatins chilling account of a future world state ruled by Reason is arguably one of the granddads of dystopia. Initially available as secret samizdat editions (1921) in the erstwhile Soviet Union, the book was smuggled out of USSR and first appeared in English in 1924 published by EP Dutton, New York. The novel was an immediate hit in western intellectual circles though its author, under attack from Soviet authorities, had to seek exile in France where he died in poverty. Here perhaps for the first time, fiction had engaged head on with the imagined workings of a totalitarian dictatorship in a manner never attempted before.

But did dystopian fiction really hit the road with Zamyatins We? Leaving aside the academic argument that any fictional work about a utopia has the elements of a dystopia embedded in it and that such writing about a utopia takes us back all the way to Platos Republic and Thomas Mores Utopia, let us look at this snippet from a short story written in 1891 by the well-known humorist author Jerome Klapka Jerome. A man has woken up from 1000-year-long sleep, and finds himself in London where he needs a bath:

No; we are not allowed to wash ourselves. You must wait until half-past four, and then you will be washed for tea. Be washed! I cried. Who by?

The State. He said that they had found they could not maintain their equality when people were allowed to wash themselves. Some people washed three or four times a day, while others never touched soap and water from one years end to the other, and in consequence there got to be two distinct classes, the Clean and the Dirty.

This story about London, 1,000 years after a socialist revolution, is a snapshot introduction to dystopia, where the best laid plans for a state of equality have resulted in completely undesirable consequences. Jeromes story seems to have influenced and inspired the anti-utopian fiction that followed.

A running theme and essentially what lies at the heart of all dystopian writing is the conflict of freedom and happiness. In Zamyatins book, the government of the One State (United State in Zilboorgs translation) has curtailed all freedoms. A poet talking about paradise tells the character D-503 how Adam and Eve were offered a choice between happiness without freedom, and freedom without happiness, and how they stupidly chose the latter. The government of the One State claims to have restored this lost happiness to its subjects.

Its a pity that this mighty little book is hardly ever discussed in this country. Our introduction to dystopian fiction has been through the works of two British authors Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. Some would of course mention here Jack Londons The Iron Heel, popular in the last century and of which a Bengali translation also exists. But for most others, it is the prophetic vision of Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four which between them, introduced us to the dystopian tradition a kind of writing, increasingly popular in our present times, when we always seem to be a step away from the scary possibilities of an anti-utopia.

Huxleys novel, published in 1932, which ended up in some of the top reading lists of our times, presents us with a nightmarish vision of a distant future where genetic modification, hypnopaedia and Pavlovian conditioning have created a caste-system based on intelligence and aptitude. The uncanny clairvoyance of this work and its literary brilliance have ensured its place in the pantheon of dystopia before which all practitioners of this form pay obeisance or offer a hat tip.

Numerous works come to mind and it could be a literary detectives favourite pastime to spot traces of Brave New World in the works of Margaret Atwood, to hear its echo in a scene from David Mitchell or perhaps to remember, while reading Doris Lessings Mara and Dann, how those bands of men in post ice age Ifrik (Africa) who all looked the same, resemble Huxleys Bokanovsky groups of individuals created from single embryos.

True to the dystopian school, the question of freedom versus happiness is also central to Huxleys plot. There we find a primitive world of freedom and instincts existing within the ordered dystopia of the World State, in an electric-fenced New Mexican reservation from which we get John or The Savage, one of the principal characters of the book. Again, in one of many poignant scenes of this novel, the sleep-learning specialist, Bernard Marx and the foetus technician, Lenina Crowne, hover over the dark frothing waves of the English channel in their helicopter, and Lenina says:

I dont know what you mean. I am free. Free to have the most wonderful time. Everybodys happy nowadays.

He laughed.

Yes, Everybodys happy nowadays. We begin giving the children that at five. But wouldnt you like to be free to be happy in some other way, Lenina? In your own way, for example; not in everybody elses way.

Quite obviously the similarities between We and Brave New World are not hard to find and in fact, while reviewing Zamyatins book, George Orwell went so far as to say Huxleys novel might have been partly derived from We, which Huxley later denied.

In fact this equally applies to Nineteen Eighty-Four, which seems to have drawn quite a bit of inspiration from the Russian novelist. Charringtons antique shop and the shabby little room upstairs which has preserved an old world charm seems to echo the Antique House in Zamyatins We, just as the character OBrien, who pretends to be a member of the secret Brotherhood working against Big Brother in Nineteen Eighty-Four reminds us of the character S-4711, one of the Guardians in We. But the DNA of dystopian fiction has many common sources and certain foundational themes, so it is nothing out of the ordinary to discover traits of one work in the storyline or characters of another.

Orwells Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949, a book stamped for ever in the psyche of all freedom-loving individuals, was set in the dehumanised totalitarian state of Oceania ruled by Big Brother. Here the protagonist Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth, which is responsible for propaganda. Similarly the Ministry of Peace is responsible for War while the Ministry of Love conducts torture and maintains law and order.

Surveillance, the cruelty of the state and the Partys quest for absolute power are the running themes of Orwells novel, which brings it closer to Zamyatins We, while the dystopia of Brave New World, milder on the surface but with an ending equally dehumanising, is managed through genetic engineering, mental conditioning, fostering of consumerism and the use of the magic drug soma.

Like the other two books, Nineteen Eighty-four also delves into the freedom-versus-happiness question. As the protagonist Winston Smith is incarcerated and tortured in the chambers of the Ministry of Love by the large and burly OBrien, who is an Inner Party member, many thoughts pass through his mind:

He knew in advance what OBrien would say. That the Party did not seek power for its own ends, but only for the good of the majority. That it sought power because men in the mass were frail cowardly creatures who could not endure liberty or face the truth, and must be ruled over and systematically deceived by others who were stronger than themselves. That the choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better.

Greater good and happiness have almost always been the guiding principle for utopias which have often morphed into dystopias depending on what we are looking for. In her essay about Brave New World, Margaret Atwood lucidly illustrates this point when she writes:

Brave New World is either a perfect-world utopia or its nasty opposite, a dystopia, depending on your point of view: its inhabitants are beautiful, secure and free from diseases and worries, though in a way we like to think we would find unacceptable.

In our present times when the assaults on freedom by despots, increased surveillance from the humble CCTVs to the Five Eyes Alliance, climate change and its looming dangers, new gene technologies and the frankenfood threat and above all runaway consumerism have pushed us closer to dystopian scenarios, we find Huxley and Orwell drawing hordes of readers. Let us take a little time to look back at these three foundational works of a robust literary tradition.

A few weeks ago a certain method of ante-natal care with its roots in ayurveda, championed by the Garbh Vigyan Sanskar project of Arogya Bharati, was in the news for promising the best babies in the world. This drew the criticism it deserves. Critics cited ethical issues and lack of scientific knowledge but the fact remains that genetic engineering has reached a stage where we are only a few decades away from creating so-called designer babies using methods like Easy PGD (Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis). Brave New World naturally comes to mind as does Margaret Atwoods works.

It is the year 632 AF (After Ford), Henry Ford having acquired a god-like stature, we are in the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre where humans are produced in bottles, and, using various techniques right from the embryonic stage, are predesigned to be intelligent, stupid, morons, hard workers and so on.

The opening chapter sets the tone with powerful descriptions that blend scientific language with evocative use of words. The Director of the London Hatchery, Thomas, is showing some students the facilities for storing bottled embryos which are subjected to various shocks, chemical stimulations and processes that will slot them into lives of Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas or Epsilons the lowest in the caste rank:

And in effect the sultry darkness into which the students now followed him was visible and crimson, like the darkness of closed eyes on a summers afternoon. The bulging flanks of row on receding row and tier above tier of bottles glinted with innumerable rubies, and among the rubies moved the dim red spectres of men and women with purple eyes and all the symptoms of lupus. The hum and rattle of machinery faintly stirred the air.

The story is plotted at one level around the conflicts between the Alpha-plus sleep-learning specialist Bernard Marx and Thomas, the Director. Everyone feels that there is something wrong with Bernards conditioning because he is not reconciled to his destiny of a super-intelligent Alpha like the others. He doesnt enjoy wasteful games like Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy, is averse to promiscuous sex which is the norm, and is not happy with his condition, unlike other citizens of the World State. The Director has warned him a few times, threatening to send him off on exile to Iceland but things havent changed.

At this juncture Bernard and the foetus technician Lenina go on a holiday to the New Mexican reservation of Malpais where, they come across the ageing Linda and her son, the yellow haired John (the Savage), among the villagers. It turns out that John the Savage is the Director Thomas naturally born child. Thomas had abandoned Linda after he lost her in a storm while on a visit to the reservation.

The hard contours of a dystopian society do not yield easily to the literary approach but Brave New World is a master class in how it should be done. With its carefully etched characters, the scintillating wit, a brilliant mix of irony and laughter, and the well-oiled engine of a plot centred on the tensions between Thomas, Bernard and Lenina, this book easily surpasses the other two in literary qualities if not also in the diamond-edge of its satire.

Bernard sees an opportunity to teach the Director a lesson. He brings John and Linda back to London with him where, in a hilarious scene, the Savage, runs and falls on his knees before the Director and a roomful of Hatchery workers:

...John! she called. John!

He came in at once, paused for a moment just inside the door, looked round, then soft on his moccasined feet strode quickly across the room, fell on his knees in front of the Director, and said in a clear voice: My father!

The word (for father was not so much obscene as with its connotation of something at one remove from the loathsomeness and moral obliquity of child-bearing merely gross, a scatological rather than a pornographic impropriety); the comically smutty word relieved what had become a quite intolerable tension. Laughter broke out, enormous, almost hysterical, peal after peal, as though it would never stop. My father and it was the Director! My father! Oh Ford, oh Ford!

John The Savage, who has read only one book in his life The Complete Works of William Shakespeare becomes somewhat of a celebrity; an oddity in fact for his language is peppered with the quotes from the Bard, in Londons elite circles. But he finds the life of this brave new world, quoting from Shakespeares The Tempest, hard to digest, falls in love with Lenina, openly incites rebellion by throwing away soma rations, and finally meets a sad end.

In his Foreword to a new edition of the book written in 1946, Huxley wrote that if he would write the book again he would give the Savage a third option between the primitive Indian reservation of New Mexico and the utopian London. This would be in a place of decentralised economics, human-centric science, cooperation and the pursuit of mans Final End. Such a society he did attempt to portray in his last book, Island, which never climbed the heights of Brave New World.

Orwells novel, unlike Huxleys, foregrounds the harshness of totalitarian rule and the political philosophy that begets such a monster. While the Huxleian dystopia is a sort of soma-infused, predestination-soaked, pseudo-paradise, in Orwells Oceania and Airstrip One (England) deadly torture and surveillance by the Thought Police (which is always on the lookout for thoughtcrime) helps to maintain public order.

There is continuous war among the three world powers, Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, and rocket bombs fall now and then on London. Big Brother, whose picture is everywhere, rules Oceania with an iron hand where, at the Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith works at revising historical facts.

The ruling political ideology is Ingsoc (English Socialism) and power belongs to Inner Party members (with Big Brother at the top) followed by Outer Party and finally the hapless proles who dont count for much.

Winston begins to keep a diary in his room, away from the gaze of the two way telescreen, where he records the internal restless monologue running through his head, his observations and innermost thoughts. He knows that if this is discovered he will be put to death. Yet he writes on the beautiful creamy paper, DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER.

The story develops slowly and the beginning drags a bit where the way of life in Airstrip One lived through the characters, the iron hand of the Party, the worship of Hate and the workings of the various ministries are drilled into the readers mind in a mechanical fashion. Perhaps this treatment suits the subject and is meant to echo the heartlessness of the ruling powers and the emptiness of lives, giving the reader a sense of all that is lost in this Orwellian anti-utopia.

Winston falls in love with Julia who works in the Fiction Department, churning out novels and finds a refuge for both of them in a little room above Mr Charringtons antiques shop. In this little shop and the room above it, the old world of beautiful objects seems to be preserved in a time capsule.

It was a heavy lump of glass, curved on one side, flat on the other, making almost a hemisphere. There was a peculiar softness, as of rainwater, in both the colour and the texture of the glass. At the heart of it, magnified by the curved surface, there was a strange, pink, convoluted object that recalled a rose or a sea anemone.

What is it? said Winston, fascinated.

Thats coral, that is, said the old man. It must have come from the Indian Ocean. They used to kind of embed it in the glass. That wasnt made less than a hundred years ago. More, by the look of it.

Its a beautiful thing, said Winston.

It is a beautiful thing, said the other appreciatively. But theres not many thatd say so nowadays.

But soon Winston and Julia are snared by OBrien, an Inner Party member who pretends to belong to the secret Brotherhood conspiring the downfall of the Party. OBrien arranges to send him a forbidden book The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, by Emmanuel Goldstein, which he reads in the apparent safety of the room above Charringtons shop. But soon enough they are arrested.

Torture follows, Winston confesses to real and imaginary crimes and the final defeat comes next when he and Julia betray each other. With this defeat of love it seems there is nothing left to defend anymore. And surely enough, we find a changed Winston in the final pages.

The enduring quality of Orwells novel flows from the lengths he goes to in describing the propaganda machinery, the degree of surveillance, the means of torture, and the dehumanising effects of totalitarianism which includes among other things, children spying on and reporting against their parents and the development of a precise official language called Newspeak, much of which, in various degrees, are to be found in the world today. And once again, all these powers lording over these dystopias concur on one singular aspect they are enemies of freedom. Freedom is Slavery is one of the party slogans of Big Brothers Oceania.

Zamyatins We, like Nineteen Eighty-Four begins with a somewhat flat narration and almost one-dimensional characters which we soon realise is a way to portray how human beings have been reduced to cogs in a wheel and. in this case, just numbers. But here we do have a slightly curious plot to draw our attention.

The narrator, D-503, is the builder of the spaceship Integral, which will carry the message of happiness from the One State to other worlds with the hope of subjugating their inhabitants to the rule of Reason. The book is a collection of records kept by the narrator and is marked by mannerisms and a curious mathematical vocabulary which is an echo of the rule of logic and mathematics that guides the life of the numbers inhabiting the earth and which also establishes the fact that D-503 is a mathematician. This is from a report in the State newspaper and as we have seen in the other works it begins with an attack on freedom and an emphasis on the desirability of happiness:

One thousand years ago, your heroic ancestors subjected the whole earth to the power of the One State. A still more glorious task is before you: the integration of the indefinite equation of the Cosmos by the use of glass, electric, fire-breathing Integral. Your mission is to subjugate to the grateful yoke of reason the unknown beings who live on other planets and who are perhaps still in the primitive state of freedom. If they will not understand that we are bringing them a mathematically-faultless happiness, our duty will be to force them to be happy. But before we take up arms, we shall try the power of words.

In this future state, Guardians, who are the secret police, keep tabs on everyone and crime is punished with torture and execution by The Machine. Sex is rationed with a system of pink slips and, as the story progresses, a female number, O-90 with lovely blue eyes is assigned to D-503. People are allowed to lower the curtains of their transparent apartments only for these assigned hours of physical intimacy.

But soon enough our narrator meets another woman, I-330, whip-like with dazzling white teeth, and gets strongly attracted to her. They have a tryst in his flat where, breaking the rules, they smoke and imbibe a greenish alcoholic drink, probably absinthe.

I-330 invites him to the Ancient House which is at the edge of the Green Wall that surrounds the city of glass. Meanwhile the whip-like woman, who is a secret revolutionary belonging to the MEPHI, impresses upon him to take command of the trial launch of the Integral and land it outside the Green Wall. The plan succeeds but the Guardians have infiltrated their ranks and so they have to return.

The Wall, border, fence, etcetera constitute a standard trope of dystopia, separating the realm of civilisation and happiness from the areas inhabited by primitives, where reason still doesnt have a foothold. Where, often, independence, driven out from dystopia, has found a somewhat comfortable refuge.

Family is another structure that those in power in these anti-utopias hate because it represents what Bertrand Russell in The Scientific Outlook a book which some say might have had an influence on Huxley describes as a loyalty which competes with loyalty to the State. Sure enough, family bonds are tenuous in Nineteen Eighty-Four, where it has become an extension of the Thought Police while in Brave New World and We, the family unit no longer exists.

The rule of logic and mathematics in every sphere of life in Zamyatins novel is echoed in D-503s descriptions I noticed her brows that rose to the temples in an acute angle like the sharp corners of an X, while the growing irrationality within himself is thus recorded, Now I no longer live in our clear, rational world; I live in the ancient nightmare world, the world of square roots of minus one. The square root of minus one as all students of high school maths know is the imaginary number i which in this context would stand for individuality and separateness to be contrasted with the faceless collective We of Zamyatins world.

On the Great day of Unanimity each year, when a farcical election is held to return power to the Well-Doer (Benefactor in future translations), it is suddenly found that many have risen in dissent, refusing to vote for the leader. The MEPHI has spread its roots and a ruthless counter-offensive begins. Large sections of the population, including D-503, are subject to The Operation to remove the centre of fancy from their brains which will turn them into human tractors. In the end, the narrators fate is somewhat similar to Winstons in Nineteen Eighty-Four, while I-330 and others are tortured and sentenced to death.

Zamyatins We is a book that grows upon you as you read it for the first, second or third time. With its mathematical similes, the cold antiseptic settings through which faceless numbers, robbed of imagination and independence, go about fulfilling their duties to the state, always under the shadow of the Well-Doer and his murderous Machine, the book reminds us about all that is precious in our lives, all that is worth fighting for till the last of our breath.

There have been many debates as to who was right about the future Orwell or Huxley? It has been pointed out that with the fall of the Soviet Union the Orwellian world of a totalitarian dictatorship collapsed for ever. But still in corners of the world like North Korea, we find situations that seem to be taken straight out of Nineteen Eighty-Four, just as in Trump-era United States, we find echoes of censorship and control over facts imagined by Orwell.

However, in predicting the course science might take, and in imagining the possibility that humanity would squander away freedom at the altar of desire and consumerism, Huxleys Brave New World stands out as a book more conscious of the pulse of rulers and ruled alike.

In his 1958 book Brave New World Revisited which among other things predicts how thw population explosion will become a strain on the worlds resources, Huxley, comparing his dystopia to Orwells, wrote:

The society described in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a society controlled almost exclusively by punishment and the fear of punishment. In the imaginary world of my own fable, punishment is infrequent and generally mild. The nearly perfect control exercised by the government is achieved by systematic reinforcement of desirable behaviour, by many kinds of nearly non-violent manipulation, both physical and psychological, and by genetic standardisation.

Huxleys insights that non-violent manipulation works far better than terror and that the trivial pleasures of a consumer culture will steal freedom from us are an apt characterisation of our times. Neil Postman beautifully summarises the work of these two authors, when he writes:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.

Reading these three books and reflecting on the above words, it wouldnt be a thoughtcrime to believe that we are already swimming breathlessly in the choppy waters of a dystopian present.

Rajat Chaudhuri is a Charles Wallace Trust, Korean Arts Council-InKo and Hawthornden Castle fellow. He has advocated on climate change issues at the United Nations and has recently finished writing his fourth work of fiction about environmental disaster.

Excerpt from:

Orwell vs Huxley vs Zamyatin: Who would win a dystopian fiction contest? - Scroll.in

Richard Hirschi's June 14 letter quoted Ayn Rand as if her words were holy writ. Rand disciples should see on Google "Problems with Ayn Rand's philosophy." They'll find several logical fallacies in her position of ethical egoism.

Also, they should consider the current occupant of the White House, a perfect example of egoism run amok. Everything is about him, either for him or against him. He is centered on praise and attention at all times. These are also the characteristics of spoiled kids. Everything is about what they want, and what they hate. If they don't grow up and accept society's norms, they'll be Mr. Trump or Ayn Rand (who was a lot like Trump in her private life).

We who have grown up are not thieves, as Rand claimed, nor are we collectivists, as Hirschi wrote. We own property, stock, businesses, etc. We just want to avoid what happened to Kansas under Gov. Brownback. The state cut taxes for the rich and businesses, forcing steep cuts in funding for public schools, highways, and other needed services (check it online). It didn't improve the economy as promised. It just left the state broke, with a lousy credit rating.

Read the original post:

Mailbag: The limits of ethical egoism - Albany Democrat Herald

Egoism is the concept of acting in ones own self-interest, and can be either a descriptive or a normative position. Psychological egoism, the most well-known descriptive position, holds that we always act in our own self-interest. In contrast to this, ethical egoism is a normative position: it claims that one should act in ones self-interest as this makes an action morally right, such that the claims of others should never have weight for oneself unless their good can serve ones own good. Similarly, rational egoism maintains that, in order to act rationally, one must act in ones self-interest, and the fact that an action helps another person does not alone provide a reason for performing it, unless helping the other person in some way furthers ones own interests.

All these positions deserve to be critiqued: psychological egoism in that people find the greatest happiness and meaning in states where they are self-giving, for example when in love, parenting a child, or contributing to society; and ethical egoism by the challenge of numerous philosophical and religious ethical systems that place self-interest within the context of contributing to the greater good.

Psychological egoism holds that every human has only one ultimate goal: his or her own good (where this good can variously be defined as welfare, happiness or pleasure). This description is verified by widespread and frequent observations of self-interested behavior. For instance, we often motivate people to act in certain ways by appealing to their self-interest in the form of rewards and punishments, while acts which appear altruistic are often shown to be motivated by self-interest. Likewise, one can find a non-altruistic explanation for the apparently altruistic behavior of organisms in general. Worker bees are an interesting case in point: although they seem to act solely for the sake of their hive with no concern for their own welfare, sociobiologists offer an account of this behavior in terms of their genes survival. They hypothesize that natural selection favors altruistic behavior in either cooperative relations in which all members benefit (reciprocal altruism) or familial relations (kin altruism). Both forms of altruism are concerned with the survival of ones genes: acts of reciprocal altruism increase ones chances of survival, and therefore ones genes chances of survival, while ensuring the survival of ones relations ensures the survival of a percentage of ones genes. For a worker bee, ensuring the survival of her sister worker means that she has ensured the survival of half of her genes. Thus, sociobiologists typically claim that, on a genetic level, altruism cannot exist. However, psychological egoism is a stronger position, as it claims that, regardless of what happens on a genetic level, the individual him or herself is motivated by thoughts of self-interest. Thus, while it allows for action that does not accomplish its goal of maximizing self-interest, as well as action that is at odds with ones intentions (a weak will), most forms of psychological egoism rule out both altruistic behavior and acting solely out of respect for ones duty. Importantly, psychological egoism allows for goals other than ones own self interest, but claims that these goals are then means to realizing ones own well-being.

There are in turn two forms of psychological egoism. Exclusive egoism makes the strong claim that people act exclusively out of self-interest, and therefore altruistic behavior does not, in fact, exist. On the other hand, predominant egoism makes the weaker claim that people seldom act unselfishly, and when they do so, it is typically only because their sacrifice is small and the beneficiaries gain is much larger, or when they are partial to the beneficiary in some way: when the beneficiaries are, for example, friends, lovers or family.

Exclusive egoism allows for no exceptions; this means that one instance of someone who does not act exclusively out of self-interest is sufficient to show that exclusive egoisms thesis is empirically false. Imagine a soldier throws himself on a grenade in order to prevent other people from being killed. His motivation for this act of self-sacrifice might quite plausibly be his desire to do his duty or to save the other peoples lives, while attempting to explain his action in terms of self-interest would appear to be a wholly implausible move. The exclusive egoist may want to defend her position by arguing for some kind of ulterior self-interested motive, such as pleasure. Perhaps our soldier believes in an afterlife in which he will be rewarded ten-fold for his apparently selfless act on earth, or perhaps, if he had not hurled himself on the grenade, he would be overcome by guilt and a concomitant sense of self-loathing. In both cases then, he is, at least from his perspective, acting in his self-interest by acting in this apparently selfless manner. There are two problems with this response. The first is that, while it might explain many instances of apparent self-sacrifice as motivated by egoistic concerns, it does not necessarily cover all cases. The psychological egoist must argue that all instances of ostensible altruistic behavior are in fact motivated by self-interested desires. If, for instance, our soldier disagrees with this, and claims that his action was truly altruistic in motivation, the exclusive egoist must respond that he is lying or is deceiving himself. At this point, however, exclusive egoism turns out to be trivially true, which means that it is unfalsifiable, since there is no empirical instance that could in principle disprove the hypothesis. As with the trivially true statement all ostriches that live on Mars have gold and purple polka dotted wings, this version of psychological egoism provides no useful information and therefore fails as an empirical theory. It does not allow us to distinguish, for instance, between our soldier and the soldier who thrusts a child onto the grenade in order to save himself. Whereas we generally think that the latter is behaving selfishly, while our soldier is acting in a selfless manner, exclusive egoism maintains that both soldiers are equally selfish, because both are acting in their self-interest.

Alternatively, the psychological egoist might opt for a non-trivial response to the soldier counter-example. She could argue that, as infants, we have only self-regarding desires; desires for our own well-being, for instance. However, as we grow older, we find that desiring things for their own sake eventually satisfies our self-regarding desires. We then come to desire these things for their own sake. For example, I might detest exercise, but also find that exercising results in physical well-being; after a while, I will begin to desire exercise for its own sake. This would preclude the common objection to psychological egoism, that one must desire things other than ones welfare in order to realize ones welfare. However, then the psychological egoist will have moved away from exclusive egoism. It may be true that our soldier would not have had a present desire to save others, unless saving others was connected in the past with increasing his welfare, but this does not mean that his present desire is selfish. At this point, the psychological egoist could adopt the weaker stance of predominant egoism which allows for exceptions, and thereby forestall counter-examples like our heroic soldier; moreover, predominant egoism is both an empirically plausible and non-trivial position.

In her novel, Atlas Shrugged, Russian emigre Ayn Rand sketches the portrait of a man who feels responsible for himself and no one else. John Galt is the archetype of the individual who practices what Rand calls the virtue of selfishness: a man for whom true morality consists in resisting the temptations of self-sacrifice, sympathy and generosity. In the fictional figure of John Galt we find the embodiment of egoism as an ideal. Similarly, the move from psychological egoism to ethical egoism is a move from a descriptive to a normative position. Ethical egoism claims that for ones action to count as morally right it is both necessary and sufficient that one act in ones self-interest. Precisely how one acts in ones self-interest is a matter of some divergence among ethical egoists. As with psychological egoism, ethical egoism comes in both a maximizing and a non-maximizing flavor: the former holds that self-interest must be maximized for an action to count as ethical, while the latter simply claims that one should act in ones self-interest and thus leaves the possibility for acting in others interest open. There is also a distinction between short-term and long-term interests: I might gain a short-term benefit by stealing from my friends, but experience a long-term loss when they discover the theft and I lose those friends. In addition, ethical egoism can also apply to rules or character traits, as well as acts. Finally, acting in ones self-interest means acting for ones own good, but this good can variously be defined as ones happiness, pleasure or well-being. There are various permutations of these conceptions, but considering that the arguments for and against them are generally relevantly similar, I will very broadly define ethical egoism as the thesis which states that in order for ones actions to count as ethical, one should act to promote ones self-interest, where self-interest is taken to mean ones own good.

There are several arguments in support of ethical egoism. Ethical egoists occasionally appeal to the findings of psychological egoism as support for their normative claims; however, regardless of whether psychological egoism is true or not, the jump from a descriptive to a normative position is fallacious, as one cannot use supposed existing conditions as justification for how one ought to behave. A more valid move is to argue that, as psychological egoism is true, it is impossible to motivate people on non-egoistic grounds. Thus, ethical egoism is the most practical moral theory, or the most capable of motivating people to act ethically. However, as we have seen, exclusive egoism just seems false, and substituting it with predominant egoism loses the crucial claim that it is impossible to motivate people to behave altruistically. On the other hand, if psychological egoism is true, it follows from psychological egoism that I cannot intend to perform an action which I believe is not in my self-interest. However, if I am wrong, and this action is in my self-interest, then ethical egoism stipulates that I should perform an action that I cannot intend. The appeal to psychological egoism therefore fails to ensure its practicality.

However, this is not necessarily a shortcoming of an ethical theory, as part of the value of an ethical theory may lie in its offering us an ideal for us to live up to. Setting aside the appeal to its supposed practicality, ethical egoists might alternatively claim that ethical egoism best fits our commonsense moral judgements. For instance, it captures the intuition that I should not let others exploit me, and unlike consequentialism, allows me to keep some good for myself, like a house, even though giving this house to someone else might benefit him slightly more. Moreover, it stipulates that it is often in ones best interests to ostensibly take other peoples interests into account so as to secure their cooperation. I derive a much larger long-term benefit if I act generously and compassionately towards my friends, for example, than if I steal from them, even though theft might provide the greatest short-term benefit to me. Nevertheless, it appears that ethical egoism is also at odds with some of our most deeply held ethical beliefs. It mandates that one should only ever help someone else if doing so benefits oneself, which means that one is not morally obligated to help those who cannot help or hinder one. Imagine I can easily save a drowning child, but none of the players in this scenario can offer me any beneficial cooperation in return for saving the child (like praise) or negative retaliation for failing to help (like scorn). Further, say that I am indifferent to the situation presented to me, and regardless of what I do, I will feel no sense of guilt or pleasure, then ethical egoism will remain silent as to whether I should save the child. Moreover, if there is some slight uncompensated sacrifice I will have to make, like getting my shoes wet, then ethical egoism will tell me to refrain from saving the drowning child. However, we generally think that, in this case, there is a moral obligation to save the child, and ethical egoism can neither explain how such a duty might (validly) arise, nor generate such a duty. Ethical egoism therefore appears to be morally insensitive to situations which we ordinarily think demand great moral sensitivity. We can further see that ethical egoism will potentially generate counter-intuitive duties in situations where the individual in need of help cannot reciprocate (like physically or mentally disabled people) or where the sacrifice one might need to make is not compensatable. Ethical egoism will, for instance, condemn the action of the soldier who throws himself on the grenade as ethically reprehensible, precisely because it entails an irreversible sacrifice (loss of life) for the soldier, while we ordinarily think it is an ethically admirable action, or at the very least, not a morally repugnant one.

Furthermore, a number of critics have argued that egoism yields contradictory moral imperatives. There are generally two inconsistency charges against ethical egoism. The weaker of the two lays this charge: say ethical egoism recommends that X and Y buy a particular item of clothing on sale, since buying this item is, for some reason, in the self-interest of each. But there is only one remaining article; hence, ethical egoism recommends an impossible situation. However, the ethical egoist can reply that ethical egoism does not provide neutral criteria: it advocates to X buying the article of clothing for X, and advocates to Y that Y buy the article for Y, but ethical egoism has nothing to say on the value of X and Y buying the same article of clothing.

The second inconsistency argument claims that, in any given situation, the ethical egoist must aim to promote her own self-interest, but if her brand of egoism is to count as an ethical theory, she must simultaneously will that everyone else also act to promote their own self-interest, for one of the formal constraints on an ethical theory is that it be universalisable. Say I am a shopkeeper, and it is in my best interest to sell my products at the highest practically possible profit, it will generally not be in my clients best interests to buy my products at these high prices. Then if I am an ethical egoist, I am committed to recommending a contradictory state of affairs: that I both sell the products at the highest possible price and that my customers pay less than the highest possible price. The ethical theorist, however, can respond that, although she morally recommends that the customers pay less than the highest possible price, this does not necessarily mean that she desires it. Jesse Kalin provides an analogy with competitive sports: in a game of chess, I will be trying my utmost to win, but I will also expect my opponent to do the same, and I may even desire that he play as good a game as possible, because then the game will be of a far higher standard. If the analogy with competitive gaming holds, it is therefore not inconsistent for me to recommend both that I attempt to sell my products at the highest possible price and that my customers attempt to buy them at lower than the highest possible price.

However, this move to making an analogy with competitive games cannot preclude the worry that ethical egoism is not sufficiently public for it to count as an ethical theory. What is meant by this is that ethical egoism is at odds with public morality (which generally appears to value altruism) and one can therefore imagine many cases in which the ethical egoist might find it in her interests not to profess ethical egoism. Imagine I am an ethical egoist and I donate a large sum to a charity because it gives my company a good image and I receive a large tax deduction for doing so. Then it is most definitely not in my best interests to reveal these reasons; rather, it is to my advantage that I pretend to have done so out of a spirit of generosity and kindness. Leaving aside worries of duplicitous and unreliable behavior, it does not seem as if ethical egoism can truly be made public without the ethical egoists interests being compromised. Yet it seems as if an ethical theory requires precisely this ability to be made public. Moreover, although it meets the formal constraints of an ethical theory it must be normative and universalisable as noted above, it also fails to provide a single neutral ranking that each agent must follow in cases where there is a conflict of interests. Just what makes for a moral theory, however, is contentious, and the ethical theorist can subsequently respond to any argument against ethical egoisms status as an ethical theory by claiming that the failed criteria are not really constraints that an ethical theory must adhere to. A more elegant solution, however, is to move to rational egoism, which might provide the ethical egoist with non-ethical reasons for adhering to ethical egoism.

Rational egoism maintains that it is both necessary and sufficient for an action to be rational that it promotes ones self-interest. As with ethical egoism, rational egoism comes in varying flavors. It can be maximizing or non-maximizing, or can apply to rules or character traits instead of actions. Certain versions might claim that acting in ones self-interest is either sufficient but not necessary, or necessary but not sufficient for an action to count as rational. However, as with ethical egoism, relevantly similar objections to and defenses for the various species of ethical egoism can be made. The salient common feature amongst all variants is that all claim that the fact that an action helps another person does not alone provide a reason for performing it, unless helping the other person in some way furthers ones own interests. Stronger versions might also hold that the only underived reason for action is self-interest.

In support of their thesis, rational egoists most commonly appeal to the way in which rational egoism best fits our ordinary judgements about what makes action rational. However, as we saw with the soldier counter-example, both psychological and ethical egoism fail to make sense of his action, and rational egoism will similarly generate a counter-intuitive response to this example. It will classify his action as fundamentally non-rational because it has permanently violated his self-interest. However, we would ordinarily characterize his action as rational, because it realizes his strong non-self-interested preference to save the lives of others. In other words, we take the safety of others to be a legitimate motivation for his action, whereas his hurling himself on a grenade in order to save a chocolate cake would ordinarily be seen as non-rational. Yet rational egoism would not allow us to distinguish between these two cases, because it does not recognize the demands of others as alone providing one with reason to act in a certain way.

Rational egoism furthermore appears to make an unjustified weighted distinction between ones own self-interest and the good of others. Imagine I decide that I should act to increase the good of brown-eyed people over that of others. Justifying this preferential treatment on the grounds that brown-eyed people just are more deserving of preferential treatment is not rational. James Rachels argues that ethical (and here, rational) egoism, makes a similarly unwarranted or arbitrary move, because it claims that I ought to act in one persons interest (myself). The rational egoist might want to respond that non-arbitrary distinctions can be made by ones preferences. The fact that I like oranges and not apples makes my decision to buy apples rather than oranges non-arbitrary, and similarly, my preference for my own good makes my commitment to achieving my own good non-arbitrary. However, as we have seen, there are cases (as with the soldier example) where I might lack a preference for my own welfare. In these instances, rational egoism cannot give me a reason to pursue my self-interest over that of others. Nevertheless, rational egoism might hold that, in these cases I am wrong, simply because we must take it as a ground assumption that our own good comes before that of others. In other words, the preference for ones own good needs no further justification than the fact it is ones own good that one is pursuing. When it comes to the preferential treatment of brown-eyed people, we generally do not accept their being brown-eyed as a good reason for their preferential treatment, but when it comes to acting for our own good, we seem to take the fact that it is our own good as a reasonable justification for doing so; we do not ask why acting in ones own good is pertinent.

However, although this may be so, this argument does not demonstrate that acting to promote ones own good is always sufficient or necessary for an action to count as rational. There are instances where we take an action to be rational, but where the agent makes no reference to pursuing his own good as justification for performing the action. The villagers of Le Chambon provide us with a real-life example of this. Le Chambon was a pacifist French village responsible for saving the lives of several thousand Jews from the Nazis, often at a great risk to the inhabitants. The reason they gave for this altruistic behavior was that it was simply their duty to help anybody in need. Here, no reference is made to their own good (and indeed, their own welfare was often severely jeopardized by their actions), and we generally take their concern for the others welfare as a good reason for their actions.

At present, there seems to be no good reason to accept the theses of psychological, ethical or rational egoism. Nevertheless, egoism in general presents us with a useful insight into the moral life by pointing out that, contra what many of us might suppose, morality and self-interest do not necessarily conflict. Indeed, there may be many cases in which there are good self-regarding reasons for acting ethically and egoism forces us to question whether we pay sufficient attention to legitimate self-interest when assessing moral situations.

A small selection of literature in popular culture dealing with ethical egoism and altruism.

All links retrieved September 14, 2013.

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Egoism - New World Encyclopedia

Green Party chairman Arnold Cassola says he has no regrets at ADs decision not to take an easy ride on PN votes

Alternattiva Demokratika chairperson Arnold Cassola with deputy chair Carmel Cacopardo

Alternattiva Demokratika, which has been contesting elections since 1992, ended up with just over 0.8% of the popular vote similar to its 2008 outing reaching once again a nadir in popularity.

As expected, the result was a bad one, said Prof. Arnold Cassola, whose party refused to take the cue of former Labour MPs Marlene Farrugia Democratic Party to contest on the PN ticket. Farrugia could now be in line for a seat in parliament after amassing over 3,000 votes on the tenth district, a PN stronghold.

Expected, because we decided to stand up for our principles and values before our personal egoism, that is, the easy way of riding on the PNs votes and trying to get into parliament with their number ones and inherited votes.

Cassola said that his partys principles had come at the cost of a social media barrage of name-calling and insults, saying he had been punished by being called barri (bull), muqran (cuckold), Judas and traitor.

But worse than that, for being principled we were demonised by the PN party machine that encouraged its supporters to close ranks and to avoid casting any preference votes for our candidates, Cassola added.

At one point, The Malta Independents own editor Stephen Calleja wrote that voting for AD, which has only ever commanded a maximum of over 5,000 votes in its history, would be a vote for Labour.

With hindsight, am I sorry that AD did not join the supposed coalition and that at the moment I am not in the running for a seat in parliament, on a par with craftier politicians than us? The answer is absolutely not.

On the contrary I am even more convinced that we did the right thing by not pandering to hunters, to the Armier shantytown owners, to the Gozo tunnel aficionados in order to get votes, but stood strong sticking to our values.

Cassola said AD had lost 3,000 votes from the last election, when the party was chaired by Michael Briguglio, who in this election took a stand in favour of the Forza Nazzjonali coalition between the PN and PD, and publicly lent his face to the effort.

Being the Chair of AD, the major responsibility for this loss is obviously mine. In the following weeks AD will have to take stock of the situation and chart the way forward for the future. But your precious 2,500 and over number one votes cast for AD make us proud. We know that out there, there are Maltese people who appreciate politicians standing up for ones principles and looking at politics not just as an opportunistic way of getting a seat in parliament, Cassola said.

The academic did not suggest he would resign, although he had already resigned after the 2008 election before taking up the position again after the resignation of fellow academic Michael Briguglio in 2013.

Indeed, Cassola might have attempted a slight dig at his predecessor, even if not mentioned by name. We are of course wounded but certainly not dead, as someone in the Maltese intelligentsia might have wished.

Your precious support gives me the strength to continue looking Prime Minister Joseph Muscat in the eye and to remind him that if he does not kick out Konrad Mizzi, Keith Schembri and Brian Tonna out of Castille, if he does not immediately convene a Constitutional convention to reform our comatose institutions, then he is leading our country into a sure future of moral and ethical decline With your help, AD can continue to be a leading beacon of honesty, consistency and credibility in Maltese politics.

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'Wounded but not dead' Cassola says AD right in not joining PN - MaltaToday

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Free ethical relativism Essays and Papers - 123helpme

Illustration: Living together in differences. (Special)

JAKARTA, NETRALNEWS.COM - Diversity on this planet Earth is already a necessity. Diversity is also actually the most beautiful gift of the Creator. So denying diversity is silliness.

The diversity is not only in humans with all the aspects that surround it, such as social, economic, political, cultural, religious and so on, but also in biodiversity: the flora and fauna.

For humans, in particular, there are not only men and women, but there are also thousands of tribes, languages, skin colors, and so on. And all of it was created by the divine greatness, not because we asked for it.

Reconstruction of Differences

The presence of a person or something can only be accepted with gratitude. Behind the gratitude, there is also a sense of responsibility to maintain it. Different religions as well as different tribes must be accepted and cared for, mutually nurturing and mutually developing them.

It is strange that the pluralist reality is not accepted for mutual enrichment, but instead serves as a source of prejudice that leads to the birth of various kinds of conflict. Tragically, the conflict often runs at a fairly high frequency and gets some sort of justification as a necessity. In fact, the conflict is actually due to a conflict of interest due to personal egoism.

Then, what must be done is to reconstruct diversity or pluralism in a more appropriate framework of understanding. It needs to be continuously conscious with theological or religious approaches, that diversity must be accepted for mutual care, mutual respect and mutual growth.

By mutual acceptance and mutual respect, everything in that difference can progress toward a better stage of life.

That is the moral and ethical foundation in living life on this planet earth. It is actually a common commitment in our being Indonesians, when it is liberated and established. The ideals with the fighters against the invaders are to build a just and prosperous life together.

Learning to Live in a Difference

There is, therefore, no other smoother path and a more beautiful way of life, in addition to continuing to learn to accept the differences and to unceasingly bring togetherness in the distinction. We learn tolerance, mutual respect and mutual respect, aka accept each other deficiencies and advantages.

Likewise the right hand should receive the left hand, although the left hand feels less functioning because it cannot write, or because of rheumatic attack or stroke. Or, the left eye is smaller than the right eye, but they must accept each other and help each other to more clearly see the desired object.

That is, as great as any medical science and sophisticated whatever medical technology, under the microscope we still cannot distinguish blood from which tribe, what religion, sex and so forth, because all of it is God's creation.

The rest, cultural or ethnic prowess and any proud superiority of religiosity of any ethnic or religious entity will be useless if there is no sincerity and desire of each entity to learn to behave appropriately in difference.

This means what is needed is the seriousness and sincerity to continue learning to be a pluralist or diverse citizens. That's where intelligence in living together. Or, says a pluralist Chung Hyung, that pluralism is the most enlightened position when dealing with other entities in difference.

But, above all, there is one thing in the author's mind, about why we are at odds with each other, or why we are still difficult to live together in differences? Below is a snippet of phrase from Gus Mus (KH.A. Mustofa Bisri) that can be a common musing.

Atheist is despised for being godless

Theist is despised because of different gods

Same god is despised because of different prophets

Same prophet is despised because of different religious schools

Same religious schools are despised because of different party

Same party is despised because of different opinions.

Do you want to live alone on the Earth to satisfy the lust of greed?

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Why Is It Difficult to Live Together in Differences? (A Reflection) - Netralnews

God grant me the serenity

To accept the things I cannot change;

The courage to change the things I can;

And the wisdom to know the difference.

Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups are more immoral than individuals.

Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail

Many years ago in the kitchen of my grandparents home, I read on a wall-mounted plaque the words of wisdom written by Reinhold Niebuhr in the above quotation. I would learn many years later that Niebuhr was a great theologian and social philosopher of the 20th century. Niebuhr often described himself as a Christian realist and even his well-known prayer quoted above reveals something of the core and wisdom of his Christian realism. That is, Niebuhr would consistently argue for reform to promote social justice, but within the limits and constraints of human nature and its contingencies. Social justice would provide provisional and not ultimate solutions. His thought represented a reaction against nave and utopian reform efforts in late 19th- and early 20th-century America.

His ideas have influenced millions conservatives and liberals alike. Presidents Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama have specifically identified Niebuhr as an important intellectual influence. Similarly, and perhaps even more significantly, Martin Luther King Jr. studied Niebuhrs thought while at Crozer Theological Seminary and Boston University. And, yet, Niebuhrs thought cannot be categorized simplistically as liberal or conservative. There is no ideological category for his thought as a whole, though some elements could be called liberal and other elements could be called conservative.

The King quotation reflects further evidence of Niebuhrs realism in approaching questions of the common good. Derived from Niebuhrs Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), King was invoking Niebuhrs teaching that in every group there is less reason to guide and check impulse, less capacity for self-transcendence, less ability to comprehend the needs of others, and therefore more unrestrained egoism than the individuals who compose the group reveal in their personal relationships. Writing from jail, King was arguing from his own experience that Niebuhrs teaching was accurate and true that groups supporting racial segregation were much more difficult to persuade otherwise than persuading individuals alone of this injustice.

Niebuhr linked empirically observable group dynamics to his Christian realism and argued that generally group egoism and pride is more difficult and virulent than individual egoism and pride. Group loyalties can become so strong that conformity to group norms defines individual virtue. In contrast, the individual standing alone has a greater capacity to check egoism, appeal to an ethical standard and render a more impartial and ethical judgment.

Niebuhrs argument continues to have relevance. Although groups of all stripes are important to America, Niebuhr reminds us from a theological perspective emphasizing pride and egoism that there are potential group dynamics and pressures running contrary to the common good. When class, sectarian, ethnic, gender or any other basis for group identity demands increasing levels of commitment and loyalty, the pressures to belong to the group may well override the individuals responsibility for independent, critical thought. This is a formula for pluralistic divisiveness rather than the promotion of the common good and national unity. And so, yes, we celebrate the pluralistic diversity of groups in America, but we remember Niebuhrs caution that selfish and divisive egoism is not confined to the individual, but actually even more accentuated with groups.

As we personally reflect on our own group associations, may we have the wisdom to know the difference between those group actions that are egoistic, selfish and self-serving and those group actions which we all applaud in contributing to our common good.

Ed Yager is a professor of political science at Western Kentucky University.

Ed Yager is a professor of political science at Western Kentucky University.

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Reinhold Niebuhr and our common good - Bowling Green Daily News

Jewish theology has abundant philosophical and ethical principles pertaining to society, culture, economics, and human interaction. The Hebrew Scriptures, and other Jewish sacred writings, offer a myriad of teachings aimed at ordering society according to justice and mercy.

On a personal note, having formally studied both Catholic Social Teaching and Jewish theology and social ethics, I can say that there is tremendous overlap. Both traditions share a similar set of principles, operate from similar foundations, and reach overlapping conclusions. There are certainly differences in nuance but both traditions benefit from engaging the other.

If I had to draw out some nuances of the Jewish vision of social justice they would start with the strictness and immediacy the commanding nature of the Jewish tradition. There is an immediacy and a strong sense that every Jew MUST obey these commandments. Granted, Jews are imperfect like all human beings, and thus often fail to achieve even their own ideals. Additionally, and sadly, our culture works to erode the urgency and necessity of the Jewish vision of social justice. Yet at the end of the day, we can argue over whether government need be involved, who delivers the food, who pays for it but our hungry brother and sister MUST be fed, or we fail as Jews and human beings.

Another nuance to draw attention to most Jews, although certainly not all, tend to locate themselves on the left side of the political spectrum. Jews in America have a rich set of connections to progressive causes. Reform, Reconstructionist, Renewal, Conservative, and even Modern Orthodoxy (to some extent) the majority movements in Judaism fully accept womens equality (women can be rabbis, equal pay for equal work, etc.), racial equality (voting rights, non-discrimination, equality under law), LGBT acceptance (same sex marriage, LGBT rabbis, and welcoming LGBT individuals and couples to our communities), and a general willingness to harness government to achieve social justice ends.

Two excellent books on Jewish Social Justice are Judaism and Justice, by Rabbi Sidney Schwarz, and There Shall be No Needy, by Rabbi Jill Jacobs.

PRINCIPLES OF JEWISH SOCIAL JUSTICE

Human Dignity/Dignity of All Creatures (Kavod habriyot) Human beings share in the Divine image as persons capable of love and creativity and all creatures possess an inherent dignity that derives from their nature and the fact of their existence. Accordingly, the proper response to this dignity is love, respect, and justice.

Loving Kindness (Chesed) the general attitude of wanting the good for others, the acts that are inspired by such, along with a willingness to cultivate openness, generosity, and hospitality toward all of good will shorthand for affirming human dignity at all times.

Justice (Tzedakah) the concept of justice in Judaism also includes the concept of charity giving to another his or her due includes ensuring that everyone have the basic needs met. It is therefore properly a matter of justice, and not kindness or charity, to help the poor, the sick, the vulnerable, the marginalized, or the needy. Seeking and pursuing justice for all people in all circumstances is a primary Jewish directive and a requirement of affirming human dignity.

You Shall Not Stand Idly By (Lo Taamod) passivity or inaction in the face of evil or need is not permitted. One may not stand idly by when anothers blood is being shed, or when another is being abused, or when another is in need.

Love your neighbor as yourself (vahavtalreachakamocha) we are commanded to affirm and work for the good of all, to love others as we love ourself, to refrain doing to others what we would not want done to ourselves, and to predispose ourselves to the service of others.

Love the Stranger (Ahavat Ger) it is somewhat easy to love those closest to us and those who love us in return. It is also somewhat easy to love those like ourselves. Torah commands us more than 30 times to love the stranger as well to love those unlike ourselves. Implicit in this command is the prohibition of turning people into others or marginalizing people. To the degree that we reinforce unjust marginalization is to the degree we sin against love.

The Way of Peace (Darchei Shalom) violence is to be avoided at all costs, except for self-defense. Peace among people and among nations is highly cherished in Judaism as with all people of goodwill.

JEWISH ECONOMIC ISSUES

The Dual Nature of Property & Material Goods Genesis, and later texts in Tanakh, as well as Talmud, lay out the dual nature of property that human creativity and labor may allow one to justly claim private ownership of some property or good, but that this ownership carries with it responsibilities toward the common good and, more importantly, that rights of private ownership arent absolute or unlimited. All of creation is intended for the human family and all living creatures, therefore, all property has a universal destination which permits the taking/utilization of property through taxation and other legitimate means for the sake of the common good, and imposes strict obligations on sharing from surplus wealth with the needy.

The Biblical concept of the Jubilee year and seven year cycles of debt forgiveness are connected to this understanding of property and land. At regular intervals, debts should be forgiven and land returned to its original state a resetting of economic equilibrium allowing for a leveling of the economic playing field. While such actions may be impractical in todays economic realities the underlying intent is to maintain a level and fair economic playing field and allow maximum participation in the creative sector for all. Further, debts should be handled with mercy.

Gleaning The Hebrew scriptures command that farmers not harvest all of their crops, leaving some behind near the edges and corners of the property for the poor and hungry. Harvesting all of ones crop is therefore a sin against the poor. The implications of this commandment in modern business and economics is profound, although sadly neglected.

Humane Wages Torah repeats several times the worker is due their wages. And those wages are to be in accord with human dignity and afford the worker the ability to care for and feed his or her family.

Honesty in Business Torah is filled with references to accurate scales, honest measuring devices, and just weights. The implication here is the strict need for honesty in business dealings.

Helping the Needy Torah contains abundant references to the requirements of generosity, mandates to approach the poor with an open hand, the scandal of letting a neighbor go without basic needs, and the value of helping others attain self sufficiency.

The Role of Government in general, the above responsibilities apply primarily to individuals and local communities, implying a sense of subsidiarity and solidarity as necessary social principles. Torah treats political power with suspicion and warns the Jewish people repeatedly about excessive trust or reliance on government. This is not to say that government has no role in creating a just and humane society, rather it is simply a reminder of priorities as well as the dangers inherent in political power turning oppressive.

A CULTURE OF LIFE

Torah, and other Jewish texts, cast a vision of what a humane culture looks like its just, merciful, hospitable, loving, compassionate, attends to the needy, values all life, cares for the environment, treats all animals humanely, and promotes peace.

Jewish tradition understands that such a vision remains an ideal in our imperfect world. It is the responsibility of every Jew to engage in Tikkun Olam the healing of the world to help all attain this vision of a world redeemed.

Jewish realism recognizes that too often we engender a culture of what might be called, the imperial self, where ego driven behavior is rewarded, honored, and glorified. In a world lacking attunement to spiritual values, the individual ego (defined as the selfish will to power) is free to run amok without much restraint.The Jewish metaphor for such a culture is Egypt Mitzrayim the place of narrowness, restriction, and bondage the primary symbol of the culture of the imperial self.

What was Egypt all about that made it so terrible? Why is Egypt the biblical archetype for slavery, death, and oppression? Political, economic, and social structures emerge based on the five primary traits of the imperial egoist culture as portrayed in Torah (hat tip, John Dominic Crossan):

Materialism/Consumerism is dysfunctional thinking that equates a good life with having more things. This mindset leads to constant accumulation of material goods as a means to happiness. Within a consumerist culture, all other human goods eventually become subjugated to the pursuit of material gain. As the dysfunction spreads, even the mechanisms of consumerism itself begin to fray work loses its dignity, wages grow stagnant as the owner-elite skim ever deeper from the gains of productivity. Plutocracy, wealth inequality, cultural bifurcation, and the loss of meaningful creative opportunity tear the social fabric.

Slavery in its actual form is rare in developed nations. Yet its actual practice continues in many parts of the world and more subtle forms of slavery exist even in the developed countries. A fundamental precept of justice is that a worker is due their wage and the benefit of their labor. Obviously, others may also benefit from such labor, but only in a system of free and fair cooperative agreements. Many of the industrialized economies are now witnessing deteriorating terms and conditions for workers, exploitation, and ownership and upper management unfairly benefiting from the work of those deemed below them.

Patriarchy (understood as abusive sex and sexuality)is the result of complex attitudes, practices, and biases that allow men to exercise undue control over women (or the strong over the weak), preventing their full participation across society, as well as the oppression of many sexual minorities who serve no interest to the male sexual power elites. The dignity of the individual person is lost as they are treated as an object of sexual gratification, a means to an end of ego sexual fulfillment. The Ego Imperial culture promotes hyper-sexualization. Often, exploitive sexual practices are favored and furthered including promiscuity, pornography, abusive fetishes, prostitution (the commodification of sex) and subtle (and not so subtle) forms of sexual abuse and control. Marriage, committed relationships, and family life suffer as a result.

Elitism is a fundamental preference for the powerful, the wealthy, and those who sit atop the hierarchies of social and cultural control. Driven by the dictates of rampant, uncontrolled egoism, the elite use those below them to further their own ends. In this sense, the elite become social parasites and create abusive structures that denigrate the poor, the marginalized, the misfits, the elderly, the young, the ill, the undereducated, and those who do not demonstrate social utility. Elitist culture treats those below it as disposable means to the ends of self-aggrandizement.

Violence is the natural result of the glorification of the imperial ego. Tensions, divisions, and hostilities are fostered and even manufactured on all societal levels as a way of furthering the control of the political and economic elite. Violence is seen as an acceptable means to social control and permeates all aspects of the culture. On the level of geopolitics, war is used a tool of empire building and for exploiting weaker and poorer nations.

The Culture of Life and Love

Judaism is rooted in an alternative cultural and social vision one based on the channeling of egos drives toward cooperation, the promotion of justice, compassion, equality, and service.

The fundamental program of Torah is the mastery of self so one may find fulfillment and a sense of proper place in the cosmos through kenotic love.

The Jewish vision of dignity and good news has been called a culture of life, a program that has animated the better aspects of Western culture for thousands of years.

The social vision of the Hebrew scriptures is fundamentally subversive to that of the vision of the culture of the imperial self.

Simplicity is not the denial of the goodness of the material world, rather it is the refusal to equate the quantity and quality of material goods with a life of value and purpose.

Freedom is the primary experience of the Exodus and therefore a core Jewish value. Many things compete for our attention and devotion, and therefore our freedom. We are only free to the degree that we choose to give ourselves to things that deserve our dignity.

Gender Equality is the opposite of patriarchy and the result of a deep appreciation for diversity. It is also a fundamental stance against all forms of sexual abuse and degradation. Sexuality is intended for intimacy, love, and pleasure not manipulation, debasement, or an expression of violence.

Egalitarianism is the antidote to elitism and the skewing of power to the few.

Peace is the radical opposite vision to violence.

The basic thrust of Torah properly understood is toward a culture that embodies simplicity, freedom, gender equality, egalitarianism, and peace. May this vision be realized soon and in our time.

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There is so much more within Jewish tradition concerning social justice and a humane culture of life. Unfortunately, I cant cover every issue in this blog post. I welcome your comments, objections, thoughts, and insights.

Continued here:

A Jewish Social Vision Jewish Theology, Pt. VI - Patheos (blog)

Out of the shadows Helena Born and Helen Tufts on Squibnocket Beach in Marthas Vineyard, 1896. Photograph: Courtesy of Verso Books

Last year, believe it or not, was the year of Utopia. A perfect society: happy, prosperous, tolerant, peaceful this idyll was widely commemorated, although its location, appropriately, was nowhere (from the Greek ou-topos: U-topia). The occasion was the 500th anniversary of Thomas Mores Utopia, a splendid little book (in Mores words) that, over the centuries, has found echoes in innumerable dreams and schemes, especially on the left.

Socialism has always harboured utopian visionaries, although they have not always been welcome there. From the communities of universal harmony sponsored by Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, Henri de Saint-Simon and their early 19th-century followers (dismissed by Marx and Engels as purely utopian); to the libertarian-communist Edens of William Morris, Edward Carpenter and other fin de sicle New Lifers; to the free-loving, free-living arcadias of 1960s radicals, utopianism has been alternately embraced and repudiated by the left. The scope of socialist aspirations has widened and narrowed with changing times. Today, in a climate of ascendant neoliberalism and far-right populism, the aspirations have dwindled to the point where even the modest social-democratic ambitions of Jeremy Corbyn and his followers are slated as cranky utopian fantasies by their Labour party detractors.

All socialist utopias involve some refashioning of gender relationships. This has been true from the start. Between 1825 and 1845, Britains first socialists the Owenites, after the capitalist-turned-communist Owen produced a root-and-branch critique ofwomens oppression along with strategies to eradicate it, ranging from practical measures such as reform of the marriage laws and the introduction of birth control, to the creation of communities where private property would be abolished, childcare collectivised and nuclear households replaced by cooperative family arrangements. With these changes, the Owenites promised, women, married or single, would become mens social equals; no woman, with or without children, would need aman in order to survive. Or, as one woman told a socialist meeting in 1840: When all should labour for each, and each be expected to labour for the whole, then would woman be placed in a position in which she would not sell her liberties and her finest feelings.

In the 1830s, Owenite feminism travelled from Britain to the US via Owens son Robert Dale Owen, a strong believer in womens reproductive rights, and the celebrity freethinker Frances Wright. A handful of communities were established where marriage was by joint declaration, with no swearing of eternal fidelity or wifely obedience. These communities were short-lived, as were the half-dozen Owenite communities in Britain, and by the late 1840s the movement had died out. But the links between utopianism, socialism and feminism survived to reemerge inthe 1880s, strengthened by the rise of the womens suffrage movement in the intervening decades.

A host of thinkers and organisations appeared in Britain and America dedicated to building a new Jerusalem free from sex slavery. The US east coast was especially rich in visionaries. Most were obscure, with few adherents and few traces left behind them. But in the mid-1970s, Sheila Rowbotham found a little book in the British Library written by one of them, Helena Born, who originally came from Bristol, and edited by an American named Helen Tufts. Later she discovered that Tufts had kept a personal journal. These findings set her on a four-decade search that has resulted in Rebel Crossings, a collective biography of a half-dozen transatlantic radicals ofthe late 19th century.

Rowbotham is a leading feminist historian, and an unapologetic utopian. Rebel Crossings opens on a personal note: I first discovered the little group of rebels in this book when I, myself, was young and convinced the world wasabout to change for the better. Now in her 70s, Rowbotham came of age politically in the salad days of the New Left, when young lefties like her were seeking an alternative to communism under Stalin. She looked for her alternatives in the campaign for nuclear disarmament, in the History Workshop movement and, above all, in womens liberation, which became for her, as for many leftwing women at the time, her political home.

New Left men could be pretty old-school when it came to women. In 1969, Rowbotham published an influential pamphlet attacking the marginalisation of women by the male-dominated revolutionary left and arguing for feminism as a whole people question: Our liberation is inextricably bound up with the revolt of all those who are oppressed [and] their liberation is not realisable fully unless our subordination is ended. The following year she faced down an audience of (mostly male) students who laughed at her call for research into womens history. In the decades since, she has published dozens of books and articles chronicling the histories of women, especially female freethinkers such as those in Rebel Crossings.

I met Rowbotham in those early days in the womens movement. She had just published her first book Women, Resistance and Revolution (1972) which changed my life. I was a PhD student writing a boring dissertation on the USliberal philosopher John Dewey. Iread her chapter on Utopian Proposals, ditched Dewey, and embarked ona study of utopian socialism and feminism in Britain (published as Eve and the New Jerusalem in 1983 and reissued last year).

For Rowbotham, history writing was not an academic exercise but a political act: her declared purpose in writing Women, Resistance and Revolution was to produce a work that would aid the continuing effort to connect feminism to socialist revolution. Today her hopes for a socialist revolution have faded, but the ambition to link the pastand present in radical ways is still present. My aim, she writes in Rebel Crossings, is subversion sustained by humour and enjoyment.

Born and Miriam Daniell were friendsin 1880s Bristol who campaigned for womens suffrage, aided local strikers and played leading roles in the Bristol Socialist Society. Robert Nicol was a Scottish union militant and Miriams lover. In 1890, the three young people migrated to Boston, Massachusetts, where they experimented with a host ofisms, including Marxism, anarchism, transcendentalism and something called ownerism (self-ownership). They read Emerson, Thoreau, Carpenter, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Walt Whitman (a special hero), andwrote for journals with titles suchas Liberty, the New Age and the ComingLight.

Miriam gorgeous, charismatic and the boldest of the trio embraced Russian nihilism and a mystical feminism centring on woman as the universal redeemer. Helena, a more tough-minded individual (fearless and repellent was her self-description), became the directing liberator of the Boston Comradeship of Free Socialists and wrote articles denouncing capitalist alienation and feminine fripperies. Both women were bravely defiant of social convention: Miriam had left behind a husband in Bristol, while Helena became the lover of a married man, an Irish-born anarchist named William Bailie.

Both also died young: Helena in her early 40s, Miriam in her mid-30s, after giving birth to a daughter named Sunrise, a small, helpless bundle of utopia who became the stepdaughter of the socialist novelist Gertrude Dix, who succeeded Miriam as Robert Nicols lover. After Helenas death, William Bailie married Helenas friend Helen Tufts, a Boston-born feminist who in the 1920s was expelled from the Daughters of the American Revolution for exposing a DAR blacklist of social reformers and other anti-patriots. Ifthats patriotism, she bit back, Ill have none of it.

Rebel Crossings vividly evokes thesebusy, entangled lives, with their campaigning and propagandising and romancing, criss-crossed by doctrinal disagreements and ethical dilemmas made more acute by relentless soul-searching and grasping at moral absolutes. All six of Rowbothams protagonists were religious freethinkers, but their radicalism was shot through with the missionary zeal of a spiritual elect. Dear Comrade, Miriam wrote to a friend, let us if we think we see higher heights and purer lights than another not shun that climbing Soul but bend to point the way we take. Pragmatism had little part to play here, including in their free-love commitments, which were passionately ideological. Love waits not upon social or political changes, Helena wrote to William at the height of their romance. It creates them. Love is the great equaliser.

She vividly evokes these busy, entangled lives, with their campaigning and propagandising and romancing

But if love equalised hearts, it left many social inequities intact. Beyond all teaching and preaching is actual living, Tufts reminded her comrades. But actual life often disappointed, as new world modes of relating bumped up against old world habits and attitudes. Jealousy, rivalry, prejudice raised their heads; low bodily needs got in the way of the higher life, especially for the women. A woman who behaved as though her rights were equal to mans would be treated equally, Helen maintained; but daily life with her William was not always an egalitarian dream. Wm hardly ever wipes the dishes, but he says I cant understand where all these dishes come from! she confided to her journal. My dearest would like to forget dishes after he has used them.

Its easy to smile at some of this, and Rowbotham does smile now and then. But she never condescends. These were brave spirits whose courage she admires, and whose struggles to balance altruistic service and egoism, union and personal desire earn her sympathy. And her empathy: she has known such struggles. She has lived them, or rather experiences very like them as have I, and many other women who share our political past.

For any veteran of 1970s socialist feminism, reading Rebel Crossings is likely to be a mixed pleasure, summoning up a radical past that feels sadly distant yet uncomfortably close, as itreawakens memories of our own utopian moment, with its courage and confusions, its open-hearted visions and myopias. Like the books protagonists, we knew what we wanted aworld where all would live freely andunselfishly, with equal status, resources and opportunities and we sought to live our lives in the shape of our ideals, forming anti-patriarchal sexual relationships and communal households intended to prefigure the egalitarian society to come.

We were whole life revolutionaries, and the future belonged to us. But we underestimated the inequalities among us (of class, race, cultural advantage, financial resources) and the obstacles we faced, both internal and external: our conflicting desires (for unity, independence, work, children); our muddles over men; the personal hostilities, disguised as political disagreements, that cut across sisterly solidarities; but above all, the relentless momentum of our times, as the postwar settlement that had kindled our optimistic dreams gave way to tooth-and-claw neoliberalism and the dystopian nightmare we now see before us.

Rebel Crossings is crammed with hopeful visions from the past, but on the present it strikes a melancholy note. Watching globalised capitalism in action appropriating free expression, raiding collective spaces, shredding non-marketable aspirations, social solidarity and fellow feeling Rowbotham is forced to recognise that a good society, along with a new radical and emancipatory social consciousness, will take longer to realise that I imagined. Like many in my generation, I accept this reality rationally, but emotionally find itineffably baffling.

In the wake of 2016, Rowbothams bafflement is widely shared and not just by one-time utopians. And yet last month some five million women took to the streets in 673 marches worldwide. On seven continents we marched, against Trump and all that he represents: demagoguery, xenophobia, misogyny, racism, sexism, homophobia. Our banners echoed the call ofRowbothams long-ago rebels, for a future of liberty, love and solidarity. For most of us, this was thefirst glimmer of light in a dark time. Hardly utopia, but a moment of genuine hope, born not in some nowhere land of political fantasy but here and now, in this very world, which is the world of all of us (Wordsworth) the only placefrom which real hope, and determination, can spring.

Rebel Crossings: New Women, Free Lovers and Radicals in Britain and the United States is published by Verso. To order a copy for 21.25 (RRP 25) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over 10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of 1.99.

Excerpt from:

Rebel Crossings by Sheila Rowbotham review feminist utopian dreams - The Guardian

If youve been reading along in this series of posts about the basics of a Jewish theology, thank you. Im thinking there will likely be 3 or so more posts in this series after this one.

Lets turn our attention to Jewish ways of thinking about human nature, morality, and salvation. Again, my thoughts are colored by Reform and Liberal Jewish approaches to these topics, and Im aware of the diversity of opinion within Jewish thought.

Human Nature

The opening chapters of Genesis, and then the remainder of Torah, seems to indicate that to be human is to be a unique, personal expression of the divine/evolutionary impulse in the world. Metaphorically, we speak of our sharing in this impulse as our sharing in the divine image as persons we possess an inherent dignity, an ontological value, and a sense of worth that is grounded in our very being and is not merited or earned.

As persons we are unified, self-aware flesh. Our existence melds material and immaterial realities, and that the exact relationship of the mind-soul to the body is a mystery. As persons, we are inherently social, relational, and capable of love our flourishing is interdependent on others flourishing as well we are only as whole as the least of our brothers and sisters.

Our wholeness is illusive. Instead of affirming our connection to nature and to others, we too often experience fragmentation, alienation, and separation the results of egoism and selfish living treating nature and others as a means to an end and not ends in themselves. We find ourselves living in disequilibrium, harming others, the environment, and ourselves.

Denying our connectedness with nature puts us at risk of peril. If our culture and spirituality is out of balance with nature, everything about our lives is affected; family, workplace, school, and community all eventually become unbalanced because neglect or abuse of nature is essentially neglect and abuse of self.

Denying our connectedness to others also risks peril. Humans are inherently social animals that cannot exist without community; we engender culture with our very being. Interconnected/Interdependent on one another, kindness and social cooperation make sense from a practical, evolutionary point of view we can only truly thrive when others thrive this insight is foundational for an integrated spirituality of wholeness.

The way to healing is through restoring healthy relationships, cultivating awareness of our interconnectedness with the ecosystem and the rest of the human family. Humans are capable of transcending ego and living lives of kenotic love in service and harmony with nature and others. We are fully ourselves when we give ourselves away to things that deserve us and reflect/enhance our inherent dignity.Our survival and thriving depends on such right relationships.

Morality

Jews have crafted their moral views through an ongoing conversation with Torah and experience, reason and tradition much the way some Christian traditions do (in particular, Im thinking of Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Anglicanism.)

Jews make their moral decisions and form their views in conversation with the past while living in the present. Neither aspect of the conversation trumps the other.

In a general sense, this manner of moral reasoning has been called the Natural Law tradition. Most Jews wouldnt be overly familiar with the term, but in essence, its the manner of their moral reasoning.

Morality is an integral part of our natural identity. Right human behavior is predicated on human flourishing and empathetic reciprocity, conveyed in the core truth of love your neighbor as yourself treating others, as we would like to be treated. It is an ancient, universal ethical imperative known through human reason. Judaism, and all religion, is at its best when it reinforces this truth.

The insights for living a good life arise from a reasoned, teleological reflection on our own nature and our relationships to others. This vision offers a formal framework within which to conduct our moral reasoning. Our motivation for virtue is a matter of our own integrity, following the logic of our very being.

Human moral understanding has evolved throughout our history. Ethical convictions concerning slavery, patriarchy, marriage, warfare, and many other subjects have changed. Certainly, contemporary Jews do not hold the same moral opinions as did our ancient ancestors and thats often a good thing.

To note the evolving nature of human moral understanding is not to assert subjectivism or relativism. Our understanding of moral truth changes, not necessarily the truth itself. Most accept an ethical understanding that slavery was always morally wrong we humans merely came to see that truth over time.

Jewish ethics has always stressed the social dimensions of morality. We are only as well off as the least of our brothers and sisters.The essential human challenge is to affirm our dignity and interconnectedness with others and nature and overcome the isolating, selfish egocentric tendencies. The path of life is this we can tame our ego and find our right place in the world by living lives of kenotic love, caring for each other and the ecosystem and attuning to the cycles, patterns, and rhythms of nature.

Salvation

Tying the above themes together, we come to understand that the central Jewish metaphor for the human challenge is the the Exodus event which is symbolic of each persons liberation from the narrowness of egoism, set free to live a life of goodness in harmony with others in the wilderness.

Salvation is the totality of individual and collective actualization and fulfillment the alignment with Power of Salvation it is an ongoing process of love.

The majority Jewish interpretation of Genesis does not lead to conclusions of original sin. There is no Fall in Jewish theology that must be overcome or reversed. Humans, created in the divine image, are not separated from the divine there is no chasm between God and humankind, no rift, no cosmic debt no eternal gap. (The Genesis accounts are about many things human maturation, moral awareness, even the change from hunter gather social structures to agricultural forms but a divine curse or some form of eternal separation are not Jewish interpretations.) Human nature is certainly imperfect and limited. Sin is a reality. But the capacity for goodness and evil is inherent in human nature.

Much of Torah is about sacrificial love. Kenotic love is vital to our wholeness. When we give ourselves to realities that deserve us we are returned to ourselves healed, whole, and transformed through divine energy reconnected to nature and others. Flowing from the insight of empathetic reciprocity we further grasp other foundational moral imperatives care for the needy and lowly, seeking a just society, welcoming the stranger, and drawing in the unjustly marginalized.

Kenotic love opens us toward wholeness now we need not wait for some sense of cosmic wholeness or salvation that occurs at our death. Love provides meaning to our lives nihilism is simply not a realistic option; to choose such a path is absurd. We cannot live with integrity as a nihilist; for every action we take implies that we find our life imbued with meaning.

Meaning is found on the journey the meaning of life is not some grand mystery revealed on our deathbed with cloudbursts and trumpets its found now in the present moment to live for the past or future is to live in futility. We can only live in the present moment it is all we have the past is gone and the future does not yet exist.

Our journey will seemingly end no one knows what happens when we die. Judaism doesnt engage in much speculation, either. Yet we do know that wisdom lies in embracing the core spiritual truth of our interconnectedness with others and with nature, and therefore our need for kenotic love, and our need to live according to the cycles of nature.

Jewish hope is rooted in this love endures beyond death how we live our lives now matters both in the present moment and in the world to come. Something of us transcends death may that something be a blessing toward a better world.

Excerpt from:

Human Nature, Morality, & Salvation Jewish Theology Pt. IV - Patheos (blog)

By Malual Jangdit

The theoretical analysis is aimed to explore the multi-dimensional speculative reasons for persistent ethnic conflict, abject poverty and poor development as the outcomes of the weakness of Kiirs administration in the Republic of South Sudan. In essence, the historical and contextual analysis is based on an empirical knowledge rather than a mere assumption to illustrate the weakness of Kiirs administration such as political sleaze and corruption, prejudicial acts of violence and kleptocratic oligarchy. Therefore, the article uses devil theory, political and social and political crises arise from the deliberate actions of misguided leaders rather than as a natural result of conditions as a guiding principle to depict the ramifications of the weakness and wickedness of Kiirs administration. Thus, the theoretical framework is to depart from simplistic explanations of weak structure of Kiirs administration and provide a framework and contextual theory for a more comprehensive approach to nation building, peace and reconciliation, and post-conflict development strategy in ethnically divided societies. Moreover, the devil theory of ethnic violence affects the lives of all the citizens across the nation. As a consequence, the philosophical analysis will explain to what extent should Kiirs administration solve the social and political crises arise from the deliberate actions of weak leadership such as economic deterioration, tribal killings, ethnic division, and lack of constitutional, institutional and political transformation, including the absurd notions of self-indulgence and iniquitous practices as a fundamental approach to improving the weak structure of Kiirs government. Hence, a thematic intention is designed to focus on the consequences of inconsistent and weak structure of the Kiirs administration such as rampant corruption, neo-patrimonial regime and lack of transformational leadership, lack of constitutional reform, lack of ethnic diversity and institutional and political transformation, absurd notions of self-indulgence and iniquitous practices, an embezzlement scandal and disadvantages of incompetence and predominance of militarism as well as kleptocratic oligarchy, a small group of people having control of the country. Since the independence of South Sudan in 2011, the persistent ethnic conflict, and poverty ravaged the country due to the fact that Kiirs administration has failed to curb the corruption and work for peace and reconciliation as well as development as a holistic approach to improving the deplorable situation and reconciling the divided nation. In fact, it is universally true that South Sudan is the failed state, experiencing the extremely economic collapse, and inability to provide public services due to the weak structure of the government and primitive communalism, a greater loyalty to an ethnic group. To provide evidence, the argument is based on the political corruption, an impenetrable and ineffective bureaucracy, judicial ineffectiveness, military interference in politics and cultural situations in which traditional leaders such as Jieng Council of elders wield more power than those who are working in the national government. We know that the country is not governed by the elected members of parliament rather than the tribal self-appointed leaders. For example, Jieng Council of Elders is a largest ethnic bloc working for a common interest of Dinka rather than the national affairs. Not only Jieng Council of Elders, but the Nuer primitive elites are working for the interest of Nuer people rather than the national affairs likewise Equatoria primitive elites are doing a similar thing. However, the article is written to denounce such as Dinkanism, Nuerism and Equatorianism as an effective approach to unifying the divided nation and promote unity and nationalism as well as patriotism, proudly loyalty and devotion to the nation rather than tribal supremacy and discrimination that tore the country apart. Apart from a belief of the superiority of social group that a person belongs to, I continue arguing that the use of powers by government officials for illegitimate private gain is a result of weakness of Kiirs administration as well as a root cause of economic deterioration not limited to currently ethnic killings. For example, the case of 16 people who got involved in an embezzlement scandal by forging the signature of President described the weakness of Kiirs administration. Not only corruption as the main controversial issue, but the targeted killing of people because of their ethnicity or based on the tribal lines is another factor that Kiirs administration has failed to tackle it. In fact, Kiirs administration has failed to curtail an act of atrocious terror such as the human trafficking and ethnic killing of the passengers. We have heard the sad news and seen the ghastly images of the people who got killed on Juba-Nimule or Juba-Yei Roads in which Tiger and Mathiang Ayoor have failed to tackle the terrorists. Thus a kidnapping and targeted killing of the innocent people carried out for political purpose is clearly an act of terrorism. However, Kiirs administration is reluctant to draft the Terror Act and pass it as a legal framework that shall prevent the ethnic killing. Therefore, I argue that South Sudan needs a national army rather than a tribal army such as Mathiang Ayoor, Equatorian Arrow Boys and Nuer White Army in order to curb the social crimes of ethnic killings and wanton culture of cruelty. In this piece of writing, the weakness of Kiirs administration is seen as an obstacle to nation building rather than the nation disintegration and collapse. In order to achieve peace and reconciliation, there must be a change of neopatrimonial regime as well as the political, cultural, and leadership transformation. Such transformations would bring peace and reconciliation rather than a mere assumption of calling for National dialogue without concrete framework and ethical approach. In essence, the civilian abuses, human rights violations and war crimes taking place currently as the outcomes of imperfect Kiirs administration. For us to achieve peace and reconciliation including development, Kiirs administration needs to be destroyed through cold-war rather than the uprising leads by the truculent warlord, Dr. Riek Machar who spares not even the children, and disabled and elderly people. Thus, re-establishing the new administration is the best strategy that shall unite the people of South Sudan and promote ethnic diversity regardless of ethnicity, sex, age and culture. We have seen now where the country is going and to what extent Kiirs administration failed the nation. I think there is no single person who can argue that today South Sudan is not the failed state. I provided significant evidence to prove that South Sudan is the failed state due to the social crises of the ethnic killing and rampant corruption that Kiirs administration failed to tackle them. I have not disclosed the human rights abuses committed by both tribal armies (Mathiang Ayoor and White Army as well as Equatorian Arrow Boys) if needed be I am titled to reveal the act of terror and atrocities I have witnessed. In war-torn states such as Juba, Bor, Malakal and Bentiu, we heard the sad news and saw the bodies of those who were killed during the civil war in 2013-16. In fact, SPLA-IG and SPLA-IO committed the human rights abuses and war crimes against humanity and thus human rights violation and abuses created ethnic division between Dinka and Nuer as well as Dinka and Equatoria. Nonetheless, I suggest that neither SPLM/A-IG nor SPLM/A-IO is not right group to unite divided nation due to the fact both parties breached the public trust. In fact, many people have developed a cynical distrust of politicians and this is why Non-Dinka are against Dinka as well as Dinka against Nuer as well as Equatoria. In order to create ethnic diversity, the ruling party should adopt a peaceful and reconciliatory approach as the means of unifying the divided primitive society. On top of that, I still argue that the policy of giving the position based on the tribal lines is not the best procedure that Kiirs administration should use as a means of political mollification. On the other hand, I suggest that the Transitional Government of National Unity could have not appointed two vice presidents rather than one vice and prime minister. James Wani Igga could have been appointed as the prime minister with the same powers of second vice president and then Taban Deng Gai as the vice president with the same powers he has now. Thus structuring of the Transitional Government of National Unity would be much better than giving two people one position. I dont understand why Kiirs administration prefers to give two people one position. Hence, Kiirs administration needs to be realistic and fair rather than politically idealistic and nave. This idealistic practice provides significant evidence on the weakness of Kiirs administration. Moreover, the theoretical framework illustrates the dishonest exploitation of power for personal gain such as the ghost names in the organised forces. In general, the military and police leaders have ghost names and thus political corruption contributes to the current economic crisis in the country. In addition, the misuses of the public funds contribute to the poor development in the public sectors. For example, there are no good road, education and healthcare despite the humanitarian assistance, development grants and foreign loan that the government is getting from donors such as US-AID, EU, World Bank and IMF. For example, in the USAID press Office, it is reported that, In addition to $1.7 billion in humanitarian funding, the U.S. government also provides community level peace-building programs and long-term development assistance to the people of South Sudan, such as basic education and health services. (USAID Press Office, UNITED STATES ANNOUNCES NEARLY $138 MILLION IN ADDITIONAL HUMANITARIAN ASSISTANCE FOR SOUTH SUDAN, August 22, 2016). It is clear that the USAID provides assistance, however, the individuals use the assistant grants for their personal gain rather than to prioritize development. In such a situation, I suggest that the victims of corruption and ethnic killings should stand up and denounce the corrupt system for the sake of development, prosperity, liberty and individual welfare. In my analysis, I argue that South Sudan could have been a welfare state if it is not administered by the hedonistic leaders who got involved in self-indulgence as a way of life or have a lack of self-control in pursuing their own pleasure or satisfaction as well as a belief that pleasure or happiness is the most important goal in life rather than nation building, peace and reconciliation. Thus, the philosophical analysis demonstrates the political unrest as the outcomes of the weak leadership. On the other hand, I suggest that the ruling authority should develop a strategic and comprehensive approach to put an end the social crisis and political unrest as an essential method of curbing the ethnic killing, eradicating poverty and promoting peace and development. Thus the political analysis is to depart from simplistic explanation of the weak structure of the Kiirs administration, and rampant corruption and provide a framework and contextual theory for a more comprehensive approach to neo-patrimonial regime and lack of transformational leadership, constitutional reform, and ethnic division to illustrate the social crises arise from deliberate acts of kleptocratic system. The theoretical analysis is designed to demonstrate a system of social hierarchy where patrons use state resources in order to secure the loyalty of clients in the general population. It is an informal patronclient relationship that can reach from very high up in state structures down to individuals in the villages. Thus neo-patrimonialism illustrates the kleptocracy. Therefore, the philosophical analysis reveals kleptocratic oligarchy in which those in power exploit national resources for their personal gains rather than to work for nation building, peace and reconciliation. In fact, the wicked leaders in Kiirs administration use their power to exploit the natural resources to bribe their supporters in order to hold on power. For example, Riek Machar uses the stolen money to pay the White Army to fight for him including many primitive Nuer elites. On the other hand, Mathiang Ayoor stands firmly to die for Kiir Mayardit and this tribal self-defence is a cause of state collapse. However, Riek should avoid mobilizing his kinsmen to topple the government because the government does not belong to a tribe. On top of that, the kleptocratic system involves an embezzlement scandal of the public funds at the expense of the wider population, sometimes without even the pretense of honest services such as the fake contracts e.g. Sorghum Saga. The theoretical and contextual framework is based on the dictatorship, oligarchy, military junta or other form of autocratic and nepotistic government. The corrupt leaders spend the public funds on luxury things, concubines and lavish lifestyle which are not the reasons of making separation in 2011. In essence, thus explanation describes how the corrupt leaders working in Kiirs administration secretly transfer public funds into hidden personal numbered bank accounts in foreign countries to enrich themselves. For example, the case of 75 people who stole 4 billion US dollars and Gadaffi Investment that involved in a case of 8 million US dollars provide significant evidence on corruption, how the government top officials use the public funds to enrich themselves rather than using the money for making good road and infrastructures. I suggest that 4 billion dollars could have constructed many roads across the nation. Therefore, I argue that for the people of South Sudan to achieve development as well as peace and reconciliation, the current ruling party should be dismantled and re-established a new party and a fresh leadership that would provide services to the public. Another point is amnesty. Kiirs administration gave amnesty to renegades such as John Olony and Gabriel Duop Lam etc for the sake of peace and reconciliation rather than taking them to the court for the war crimes and civilian abuses. Thus official pardon motivates many people to rebel against the government. For example, Riek Machar and David Yau Yau are good example of those who shed blood to get the ministerial position and high rank in the military such a political mollification of awarding the criminals with a high position in the government is another weakness and root cause of defection. Absolutely, I argue that if Kiirs administration had indicted Riek Machar for his war crimes he committed against the civilians in Bor in 1991, he did not get another chance for forming another armed struggle that riven the nation. In fact, I argue that South Sudan is the only country in the world where the human rights abusers are given a ministerial position rather than prosecuting them. The rebels should not be appointed in the high positions for killing the civilians rather than indicting them. Therefore, I argue that Kiirs administration should use meritocracy, a social system that gives advantages to people on the basis of their abilities and achievements rather than their crimes committed against the civilians. Therefore, neopatrimonialism shows the lack of constitutional reform, prejudicial acts of violence as well as a breach of civil liberty in the country. On the other hand, I suggest that Kiirs administration shall implement the new polices based on the human rights convention to give an individual freedom and right to live as an essential approach to govern the dilapidated nation. South Sudan is experiencing the economic crisis due to the foreign exploitation and predatory pricing practice as well as the lack of marketing control that led to devaluation. In Juba, the foreign business people take the control of the market by supplying the goods from the neighbouring countries and in return, collect the hard currency (US dollars) and send dollars back to their native countries leaving the country without hard currencies. However, the government is failed to put restriction on remittance as an effective method of controlling devaluation efficiently. Not only price discrimination, but an issuance of a fake contract plays a negative role in progress and development as well as reconstitution of the kleptocratic government. For example in 2012, an Indian Printing Company was given a contract to go and print the constitution, however, the company took the money and hard copies that disappeared like a fleeting shadow. In essence, Kiirs administration did not track the criminals and this is why there is no constitution at the moment. There is no legal system in the country. People committed atrocities and flout the rules, but there is no law to charge and convict them. The thugs kill people as a lack of criminal law and justice, but the authority cannot apprehend the offenders due to the weakness of Kiirs administration. For example, in Rumbek, the young people are committing human rights abuses, but the President did/ does not want to go and address them or set up the panel that will deal with the human rights violations and civilian abuses of killing people on loan. I think you heard the sad news of a man who was going to Wau for holiday when the terrorists hijacked his car and killed his entire family on loan. However, the President did not bother himself to pay a visit to the area where he was killed and addressed the people in that area. What sort of a leader is he? Thus reluctance to focus on the social crisis provides significant evidence that my writing is a powerful argument that revealed the failure of the kleptocratic government. On the other hand, the criminals from Pibor are abducting the young children in Bor, but the President did/does not bother himself to go to Pibor and address those who abduct the kids and kill the parents. Not only the president, but his entire administration (cabinet) is keeping quiet to raise a motion about human trafficking, child abduction and random killing in the parliament and pass the new laws and orders (Child Abduction Act, and Serial Killing Act) rather than embezzling millions of pounds for personal gain. Nonetheless, I suggest that Kiirs administration should develop a holistic approach to improving the imperfect system. For example, the employment is not based on the qualification rather than the family relationship. This nepotism is a setback to peace and reconciliation. Many people who fail to get a job due to the lack of their family members in Kiirs government take arms against the government. In essence, I argue that the weakness of Kiirs administration is a root cause of all the crises in the nation. In consequence, I suggest that neo-patrimonial regime contributes to the institutional tribalism. Notwithstanding, I suggest the practice of giving special treatment to a relative is another issue that leads to the failed state. Not only corrupt system, but the licentious culture of immorality and wickedness plays a negative role in creating an ethnic division. However, this piece of writing aims to denounce the institutional tribalism and neo-patrimonial regime as an essential approach to put an end the tribalism as a peaceful method of creating a just society and unifying community based on the gender quality, individual liberty and justice as well as regardless of ethnic, cultural and political affiliation rather than the society based on the tribal lines, gender inequality, unequal employment opportunity and discrimination. The theoretical analysis is focused on the unfair treatment of one person or group usually because of prejudice about tribe, ethnicity, age and gender as it is a case in the country. The theoretical analysis deplores the lacks of transformational leadership, constitutional reform, and ethnic division. The article highlights a leadership approach that causes change in individuals and social systems. In its ideal form, it creates valuable and positive change in society as an essential approach that Kiirs administration should adopt in order to put an end the social crises of tribalism and nepotism that riven the nation. The empirical analysis reveals favoritism shown by the officials in Kiirs administration to their relatives and friends especially in appointing them to the good positions. Thus nepotism creates ethnic division, civil war as well as ethnic killings in a guise of democratization. In the country, the thugs, militants and the powerful figures in Kiirs government are abusing the civilians due to the lack of constitutional reform. The militants detain many civilians without trial and thus arbitrary arrest and detention explains the prejudicial acts of violence and an obscene misuse of power and thus gives us a good example of weakness of Kiirs administration. Nonetheless, the government should work hard to end the prejudicial act of violence as the underlying principles of improving the weak structure of Kiirs administration as well as harmonic approach to the current national dialogue at stake. Not only neo-patrimonial regime, lack of transformational leadership, constitutional reform, and ethnic division, but the absurd notions of self-indulgence and iniquitous practices, as well as corrupting and methodological schemes of an embezzlement scandal. To provide significant evidence, theoretical analysis will look at the case of embezzlement scandal in the office of the President and to what extent should Kiirs administration tackle the issues of embezzlement scandal. In this case, the ruling authority is not working hard to end the social crisis of scandal. This piece of writing shows the absurd notions of self-indulgence and iniquitous practices such as hedonism, a philosophical doctrine that holds that pleasure is the source of moral values. For example, all the government officials buy the expensive V. cars, and live in the hotels. The government officials spend the millions of Pounds on luxury life, and concubines. However, the theoretical approach deplores such as self-gratification, intemperance, and profligacy. In essence, I argue that Kiirs administration should stop paying for officials accommodation in the hotels, reducing the office and travel allowance, and screening the ghost names in the payroll as an effective approach to reduce the lavishness that costs the government a lot of millions of Pounds. Last but not least, the theoretical analysis is structured to explain the disadvantages of incompetence and predominance of militarism. In South Sudan, a government policy of investing heavily in and strengthening the armed forces describes a ramification of militarism. Therefore, the holistic approach examines the militant attitude of the organised forces such as military and police forces. In fact, Mathiang Ayoor and White Army committed the terrible atrocities against the civilians. Not only Mathiang Ayoor and White Army, but the generals are abusing the civilians, but the government is keeping quiet to condemn the brutal and cruel treatment of the civilians. In essence, I argue that Kiirs administration has failed to manage the country affairs and control the bad behaviour. Therefore, it depends on the people of South Sudan to decide their fate whether to perish at the hands of the invisible devil or stand up against the neo-patrimonial regime. In the country, I argue that the Ministry of Labour should screen all the employees as we know that millions of the workers are not qualified. In the most cases, the government should take the incompetent workers to the training as the best way of improving their work skills. Not only that, but a desire or willingness to use strong, extreme and forceful methods to achieve something and thus political radicals with a militant unwillingness to compromise on an issue is another weakness of Kiirs administration. In the country, the military forces use the over-speeding that resulted to hit-and-run, but the government does not bother to apprehend the criminals who killed the innocent people. The military and police forces on duty stop the civilian cars and ask for a logbook and who fails to show his or her logbook is detained and asked to pay for bribery. Instead of asking for the driver license, they ask for logbook and this wicked approach describes the militant extremism as an outcome of kleptocratic system. Thus, Mathiang Ayoor, Tiger and White Army are committing terrible atrocities and human rights abuses against the civilians, however, Kiirs administration is reluctant to take a major action against the culprits. In Juba, the criminals kill people every day, but the criminals are not apprehended due to the lack of taking the initiative by acting proactively rather than dragging its feet and this lack of disinclination describes the weak structure of Kiirs administration. This week, the United Nations declared the famine in the country as an outcome of civil war, ethnic violence and displacement. In fact, millions of people fled the country during 2013-2016 civil wars in which the government has failed to provide food and humanitarian assistance. Millions of children are malnourished and thousands of displaced people have no food yet the government is spending the money on buying the military weapons rather than providing food to the starved internal displaced persons. I suggest that, instead of spending the money on the military weapons, it would be good to provide food stuff and humanitarian assistance to the displaced persons. In this point, what was a reason for the people of South Sudan to make separation if they knew that they would not be able to govern themselves or reconcile to live in peace and harmony? For us to achieve peace and reconciliation as an effective appraoch to eradicate extreme poverty, we must to depose the leaders of Transitional Government of National Unity including the invisible Devil, Riek Machar Teny, the warlord and warlock who caused the suffering to the people of South Sudan. The people of South Sudan are suffering because of KiiRieks greediness and fiendish desire to hold on power. In fact, the famine could have not hit the country if it was not the wickedness of KiiRieks selfish desire for leadership. KiiRieks power struggle caused an unendurable and unbearable suffering due to their self-esteems and egoism. On the other hand, Kiirs administration needs to write a new constitution and put the term limit as an essential way of ending the power struggle as well as a guiding principle to govern the nation peacefully rather than sticking to the neopatrimonial regime that leads to the ethnic violence. Riek Machar on the other hand, needs to disavow uprising as a means of ending the ethnic violence between Dinka and Nuer. The ideas expressed are based on the eye-witness account rather than a hypothetic theory that damages the reputation of Kiirs administration or denies the achievements of Kiirs administration.

Reference:

Author: Malual Jangdit Political Analyst and Writer Canterbury, Christchurch New Zealand malualg@yahoo.com

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The Weakness and wickedness of Kiir's Administration: South Sudan in political and ethnic crisis - Borglobe

Psychological Egoism and Ethical Egoism

Sandra LaFave West Valley College

Psychological Egoism

Psychological egoism is the claim that people always act selfishly, to foster their own self-interest or happiness. Psychological hedonism is the claim that people always act to attain their own pleasure and avoid pain. Psychological hedonism is also called the pleasure principle.

In these notes, Ill give arguments against psychological egoism. However, the same arguments apply against psychological hedonism.

Is psychological egoism a fact (a true claim)? If it is true, ethics is in trouble, because most traditional ethical systems demand at least occasional altruism (unselfish behavior). If psychological egoism were true, altruism would not be possible. We would have to explain apparent (what appears as) altruism as self-interest. For example, we wouldnt say Mother Teresa is altruistic; wed say that shes self-interested. Shes using the poor to attain her own long-term spiritual goals.

In fact, people who think psychological egoism is true (such as Thomas Hobbes and Ayn Rand) often use it as a premise in an argument to deny the validity of traditional ethics altogether:

1. (Psychological egoism): People always and invariably act to foster their own self-interest.

2. Traditional ethical systems demand at least occasional altruism (non-self-interested behavior).

3. In demanding altruism, traditional ethical systems are demanding the impossible. (They might as well demand that people fly.)

4. Any ethical systems that demands the impossible is silly and stupid.

5. Traditional ethical systems are silly and stupid.

6. We should adopt a more realistic system, ethical egoism, which demands that we pursue self-interest.

But psychological egoism is a surprisingly weak claim. If it is false, then the above argument against ethics is unsound. Here are some reasons not to take psychological egoism seriously.

Critique #1: Psychological egoism is not true, on face value, in a simple, naive sense. That is, it's easy to think of counterexamples cases that falsify the generalization that all human acts are selfish, i.e., cases of people acting unselfishly. It certainly appears that people sometimes act in ways that are not in accord with their own interests: the soldier who falls on the grenade to save his buddies, the person who runs into the busy street to save a child about to be run over, etc. Psychological egoism is only true if you adopt what Rachels calls the strategy of redefining motives. That is, you insist on claiming that people are really acting selfishly even when they appear to be acting unselfishly.

But this strategy has two problems. First, if all human actions are self-interested, then self-interested actions become, by definition, identical with actions. That is, these two expressions denote exactly the same set of actions, and thus are substitutable for each other. It then becomes impossible to disprove the claim that all human actions are self-interested, because the claim, after substitution, becomes a vacuous tautology: All human actions are human actions.

Try to imagine what it would take to disprove the claim that all human actions are self-interested. The claim would be definitely disproved if we could come up with one human action that wasn't self-interested, i.e., a counterexample. But if by definition all human actions are self-interested, there can be no possible counterexample. If there are no possible counterexamples, then the claim all human acts are self-interested is not falsifiable. If the claim is not falsifiable, then according to the verificationist criterion, the claim is meaningless.

So the claim all human acts are self-interested is either tautologous (true by definition, and therefore uninteresting, like All circles are round) or unfalsifiable (and therefore meaningless).

Besides, even if the egoist still insists on claiming that all human acts are self-interested, the egoist must deal with the puzzling fact that some acts appear to be non-self-interested. Now the anti-egoist could say, Okay, I still think you egoists are wrong to say there are no unselfish acts. But even if there arent any, your position is no threat to ethics. There are still the self-interested selfish acts and the self-interested acts that appear to be unselfish. Saying all human acts are self-interested doesn't make that empirical distinction go away. And that empirical distinction is where ethics can start. Well grant for the sake of argument that all human acts are self-interested, and then simply say that ethics sometimes demands that people perform those self-interested but seemingly unselfish acts. The claim that all human acts are self-interested is no problem, as long as some acts appear altruistic. And they do.

Critique #2: Self-interest and interest in the welfare of others aren't necessarily incompatible. One might be perfectly self-interested and look out for the interests of others e.g., a shopkeeper who never cheats his customers simply because he knows honesty is good for business.

Critique #3: Psychological egoism relies on an oversimplified conception of human motives. Of course it is true that we often get satisfaction or good feelings from acting unselfishly. But it is not necessarily true that we perform unselfish acts solely for the sake of that satisfaction. P1 commits a fallacy assuming that given two events E1 and E2, E2 occurring after E1, that E2 was the intended result of E1. But everyone knows the following argument is not valid; its a kind of post hoc fallacy:

P1: E2 happens after E1

C: E2 is the intended result of E1.

Suppose, for example, that you are a soldier and you save your friend's life in combat, and you also happen to receive a medal for that. Call E2 your receiving the medal, E1 your act of saving your friend's life. It does not follow from the fact that you received the medal (or self-satisfaction, or good feelings, or whatever) after saving your friend's life that your intention in saving him was to get the medal. Similarly, it doesn't follow that if you get some good feelings or self-satisfaction after saving your friend's life that you saved his life in order to get those good feelings. You didnt save your friend in order to feel good; rather, you feel good because you saved your friend.

Another example: you see your child run into a busy street. A car is driving very fast toward the child. You see that you can save the childs life if you run out into the street and grab the child in your arms. Realizing this, do you now stop and calculate how much happiness youll receive if you save the child? Do you say to yourself, Gee, it would make me feel really good to save my child. So I guess Ill do it! No. You feel good after saving the child because you saved the child. You didnt save the child in order to feel good.

In general, you feel good when you get things you already value. You dont derive the value of something by estimating how good youd feel if you had it. Its goodness doesnt come from that; rather, your good feelings about having it come from the fact that you think its good, independently of whether you have it.

Ethical Egoism

Hobbes argued that psychological egoism implies ethical egoism. In other words, Hobbes claimed that the following argument is sound:

P1: (Psychological egoism or hedonism): People always and invariably act as to foster their own self-interest, in accordance with self-love, or the pleasure principle, etc.

C: (Ethical egoism): People should always act so as to foster their own interests.

Ethical egoism has never been a mainstream view in ethics. Here are some counterarguments:

1. The ethical egoist conclusion (people should always act so as to benefit themselves) not only does not follow from psychological egoism (the premise) but is actually inconsistent with it! The ethical egoist thinks we should pursue self-interest because we cant help but do so. But if we must pursue self-interest, as the premise states, then whats the point of saying we should? If psychological egoism is true, we cant act any other way. In other words, ethical egoism only makes sense if psychological egoism is false, i.e., if we have a genuine choice.

2. The premise of the argument (psychological egoism or hedonism) is highly questionable, for the reasons given in the first part of this handout. If you reject psychological egoism, then the argument for ethical egoism is unsound because its premise is false.

3. Ethical egoists think that people will be happiest if they look out for themselves and not concern themselves with others But is this where true human happiness lies? Many other writers e.g., Erich Fromm, John Stuart Mill, and most major world religions claim that as a matter of fact, people who systematically disregard the interests of others are not as happy as people who maintain caring relationships. So, for example, selfish Mr. Burns on The Simpsons isnt cant be be as happy as Marge Simpson.

4. Ethical egoists such as Ayn Rand often talk as though theres a conflict between my happiness and the happiness of others. This seems just false. The happiness of others is not inconsistent with my happiness; in fact, the happiness or well-being of others might be a necessary component of my happiness. Happiness is not a zero-sum game: its not like theres only so much happiness to go around, so that if I get some, somebody else loses some! This is whats wrong with Harry Brownes big red ball argument. Its clearly a dubious analogy.

5. It's not clear how an ethical egoist would act as a moral advisor or moral judge in cases where the egoist's happiness is involved. Suppose I am an ethical egoist, so I believe that everyone ought to act for his/her own benefit. Say Terry wants to have sex with you, and youre thinking about it, but you're not really sure it's a good idea, so you and Terry discuss it. Suppose Terry knows it would be better for you if you didn't sleep with Terry; but Terry also thinks it would be in Terrys interest if you did. Now you ask Terry what you should do. What answer does Terry give, supposing Terry is an ethical egoist? Remember Terrys view is that everyone ought to act to benefit him/herself. Does Terry give you the advice that benefits you or the advice that benefits Terry?

6. Some writers say ethical egoism is ultimately inconsistent. To be inconsistent is to be guilty of self-contradiction. So the argument against egoism is that ethical egoists must ultimately contradict themselves. Since self-contradiction is a big problem in logic, showing that someone is guilty of it is an excellent refutation technique.

To show that egoists are guilty of self-contradiction, the argument is: suppose everyone were consistently selfish (selfish all the time), and, as often happens in life, some misfortune arises and the egoist now needs the unselfish help of another. If everyone is a consistent egoist, the egoist wont get the help he needs. So in the interests of self-interest, an egoist must reject egoism, at least sometimes; in other words, the egoist must be inconsistent. The egoist really doesnt want everyone to be selfish all the time, because ethical egoism, if adopted universally, would lead to undesirable social consequences.

Interestingly, in Egoism and Moral Skepticism, James Rachels argues that ethical egoism is not inconsistent. You can explore that interesting argument yourself.

7. According to Rachels, the best argument against ethical egoism is its unacceptable arbitrariness. The egoist arbitrarily assumes his interests come before those of other people. But as a matter of fact, no one person matters that much more than others. Egoism is like racism. Racism assumes that the interests of one race count more than the interests of others, for no good reason (i.e., arbitrarily). Likewise, egoism assumes that the interests of one person count more than the interests of others, for no good reason.

How Egoism Might be True

This deep egoism would also be true if seeking the good of others were, as a matter of fact, the major and most gratifying source of happiness for people. Is it? Note that this question (What makes people happiest?) appears to be empirical, and thus resolvable one way or the other using ordinary methods of observation and experiment. Do you think it's really an empirical matter? If it is, what are the facts?

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Psychological Egoism and Ethical Egoism

3isminthewaythatpost-ChristianWesterncivilizationhasdone.Aristotle's view is that we have duties to ourselvesas well as to other people (e.g. friends) and to the

polis

asa whole. The same is true forThomas Aquinas,Christian WolandImmanuelKant,whoclaimthatthereareduties to ourselves as Aristotle did, although it has been arguedthat, for Aristotle, the duty to ones self is primary.

[17]

Ayn Randargued that there is a positive harmony of in-terests among free, rational humans, such that no moralagent can rationally coerce another person consistentlywith his own long-term self-interest. Rand argued thatother people are an enormous value to an individualswell-being (through education, trade and aection), butalso that this value could be fully realized only under con-ditions of political and economic freedom. According toRand, voluntary trade alone can assure that human inter-action is

mutually

benecial.

[18]

Rands student,LeonardPeikohas argued that the identication of ones inter-ests itself is impossible absent the use of principles, andthat self-interest cannot be consistently pursued absent aconsistent adherence to certain ethical principles.

[19]

Re-cently, Rands position has also been defended by suchwriters asTara Smith,Tibor Machan,Allan Gotthelf, David Kelley,Douglas Rasmussen,Nathaniel Branden, Harry Binswanger,Andrew Bernstein, andCraig Biddle. PhilosopherDavid L. Nortonidentied himself an ethi-calindividualist,and, likeRand, sawaharmonybetweenan individuals delity to his own self-actualization, orpersonal destiny, and the achievement of societys wellbeing.

[20]

5 Criticisms

Accordingtoamoralism,thereisnothingwrongwithego-ism, but there is also nothing ethical about it; one canadoptrational egoismand drop morality as a superuousattribute of the egoism.Ethical egoism has been alleged as the basis forimmorality. Egoism has also been alleged as being out-side the scope of moral philosophy.Thomas Jeersonwrites in an 1814 letter to Thomas Law:Self-interest, orratherself-love, oregoism,hasbeenmoreplausiblysubstitutedasthebasisof morality. But I consider our relations withothers as constituting the boundaries of moral-ity. With ourselves, we stand on the groundof identity, not of relation, which last, requir-ing two subjects, excludes self-love connedto a single one. To ourselves, in strict lan-guage, we can owe no duties, obligation re-quiring also two parties. Self-love, therefore,is no part of morality. Indeed, it is exactly itscounterpart.

[21]

In contrast, Rand saw ethics as a necessity for human sur-vival and well-being, and argued that the social impli-cations of morality, including natural rights, were sim-ply a subset of the wider eld of ethics. Thus, for Rand,virtue included productiveness, honesty with oneself,and scrupulousness of thought. Although she greatly ad-mired Jeerson, she also wrote:[To those who say] that morality is socialand that man would need no morality on adesert islandit is on a desert island that hewould need it most. Let him try to claim, whentherearenovictimstopayforit, thatarockisahouse, that sand is clothing, that food will dropinto his mouth without cause or eort, that hewill collect a harvest tomorrow by devouringhisstockseedtodayandrealitywillwipehimout, as he deserves; reality will show him thatlife is a value to be bought and that thinking isthe only coin noble enough to buy it.

[22]

In

The Moral Point of View

,Kurt Baierobjects that eth-ical egoism provides no moral basis for the resolution ofconicts of interest, which, in his opinion, form the onlyvindication for a moral code. Were this an ideal world,one in which interests and purposes never jarred, its in-habitants would have no need of a specied set of ethics,accordingtoBaier. This,however,isnotanidealworld.Baier believes that ethical egoism fails to provide themoral guidance and arbitration that it necessitates. Farfrom resolving conicts of interest, claimed Baier, ethi-cal egoism all too often spawns them. To this, as Rachelshas shown, the ethical egoist may object that he cannotadmitaconstructofmoralitywhoseaimismerelytofore-stall conicts of interest. On his view, he writes, themoralist is not like a courtroom judge, who resolves dis-putes. Instead, he is like the Commissioner of Boxing,who urges each ghter to do his best.

[23]

Baiers is also part of a team of philosophers who holdthat ethical egoism is paradoxical, implying that to dowhat is in ones best interests can be both wrong and rightin ethical terms. Although a successful pursuit of self-interest may be viewed as a moral victory, it could also bedubbed immoral if it prevents another person from exe-cuting what is in

his

best interests. Again, however, theethical egoists have responded by assuming the guise ofthe Commissioner of Boxing. His philosophy precludesempathy for the interests of others, so forestalling themis perfectly acceptable. Regardless of whether we thinkthis is a correct view, adds Rachels, it is, at the veryleast, a

consistent

view, and so this attempt to convict theegoist of self-contradiction fails.

[24]

Finally, it has been averred that ethical egoism is no bet-ter thanbigotryin that, likeracism, it divides people into two types themselves and others and discriminatesagainst one type on the basis of some arbitrary disparity.This, to Rachelss mind, is probably the best objectionto ethical egoism, for it provides the soundest reason why

Read more:

Ethical Egoism | Psychological Egoism

The global sports industry is estimated to carry a $1.5 trillion value. With that big of a presence in the business, it makes sense that Mendoza College of Business chose its Ethics Week theme for this year to be Sports and the Common Good.

Sports and the Common Good just seemed like a natural [pick for a theme], especially at a university like Notre Dame [with] a college of business like Mendoza, Brian Levey, one of the organizers for the event, said in an email. Educating the mind, body and spirit is at the heart of the Holy Cross mission.

Levey said Notre Dames emphasis on this complete education is evidenced not only in varsity sports, but also in activities such as Bengal Bouts, which starts this week, and Bookstore Basketball.

Now in its 20thyear, Mendoza College of Business Ethics Week was first started by accounting professor Ken Milani. Inspired by the work of John Houck, a Notre Dame management professor who died in 1996, Ethics Week has included themes such as sustainability, financial institutions, governing for the greater good (politics and public service) and ethics through a global lens.

Over the history of the event, the organizers have tried various approaches and activities with Ethics Week, including a brown bag lunch speaker series and an ethics case competition.

Recently, changes in the timing and formatting of the events, as well as an increased online presence through a Facebook page and Twitter account, have helped attendance spike to about 500 participants in 2014 and 2015.

Speakers from past Ethics Weeks have ranged from Fr. Jenkins to the chief ethics officer of the United Nations. This years agenda feature an equally diverse group, with backgrounds spanning sports psychology to wealth management.

Levey hopes incorporating sportswith this years Ethics Week will help students consider ethics on a different level.

By examining sports from a deeper perspective, we can explore business ethics issues in a relatable manner. Winning, losing, fair play, cheating, equality, discrimination, altruism, egoism sports has it all, he said. Just check the headlines; youll see a sports ethics issue, and, in turn, a business ethics issue almost every day.

Thursday offers a movie night that features the baseball movie The Natural, starring Robert Redford. The first 75 movie attendees who also stay for the panel after the movie will be treated to free pizza.

Its critically acclaimed its a sports movie, its a love story, its a tale of redemption and it presents the audience with an ethical dilemma, Levey said.

View original post here:

Lecture series explores ethics in sports industry - Observer Online

The 2017 edition of Notre Dame Ethics Week will put a new spin on a popular topic sports.

The annual conference, held Feb. 14-17 at the University of Notre Dames Mendoza College of Business, will explore Sports and the Common Good through a series of panel discussions, speakers and even the showing of a classic baseball movie.

Sports is big business, said Brian Levey, Mendoza teaching professor and one of the Ethics Week organizers. Estimates peg the global sports market at $1.5 trillion. And by examining sports from a deeper perspective, we can explore business ethics issues in a relatable manner. Winning, losing, fair play, cheating, equality, discrimination, altruism, egoism -- sports has it all.

Ethics Week events, which are free and open to the public, take place in the Giovanini Commons located in the lower level of Mendoza College of Business unless otherwise noted in the following schedule:

Tuesday, Feb. 14, 4:30-5:30 p.m.: Panel discussion: Life Lessons from Sports: Performance & Purpose, featuring Christopher Adkins, executive director of the Notre Dame Deloitte Center for Ethical Leadership; and Amber Lattner, founder, Lattner Performance Group

Wednesday, Feb. 15, 12:20-1:30 p.m.: Panel discussion: Building Global Bridges through Sports, featuring Guiorgie Gia Kvaratskhelia, head fencing coach, University of Notre Dame; Notre Dame student-athletes Jonah Shainberg (fencing) and Sandra Yu (soccer); and Mario Berkeley, Mendoza teaching assistant (moderator)

Thursday, Feb. 16, 5:30-7:45 p.m.: Movie night: The Natural, showing in Mendozas Jordan Auditorium, immediately followed by Panel & Pizza

Thursday, Feb. 16, 7:45-8:30 p.m.: Panel & Pizza: Discussion of the novel, The Natural: Messiah in Uniform, by Bernard Malamud, featuring Michael Cozzillio, Widener University Commonwealth Law School; and Ed Edmonds, Notre Dame Law School. Note: Free pizza will be provided to the first 75 movie attendees who also attend the panel discussion

Friday, Feb. 17, 12-1 p.m.: "Prolanthrophy: The Business of Helping Athletes Give Back, featuring J. Jonathan Hayes, principal director, Pro Sports, Pegasus Partners Ltd.

Notre Dame Ethics Week takes place annually in February, and brings in experts from a diverse array of industries to explore current ethics issues. The event is sponsored by the Mendoza College of Business and the Notre Dame Deloitte Center for Ethical Leadership.

Now in its 20th year, Notre Dame Ethics Week was established to encourage the discussion of ethical matters in undergraduate and graduate business classes atNotreDame and to secure a foundation for future discussions inside and outside the classroom. The event continues the legacy of JohnHouck, aNotreDame management professor who authored numerous works on business ethics, including Is the Good Corporation Dead?Houckdied in 1996.

For more information aboutNotreDame Ethics Week, contact Brian Levey at(574) 631-3560orblevey@nd.edu.

Excerpt from:

More than a game: ND Ethics Week examines sports and the common good - ND Newswire

Driving the Day

Listen to Playbook in 90 Seconds http://bit.ly/2kQMYba Subscribe on iTunes http://apple.co/2eX6Eay Visit the online home of Playbook http://politi.co/2f51Jnf

JUST A THOUGHT: Earlier this week, President Donald Trump mocked Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) for crying about the plight of immigrants, saying he was faking, and wondering aloud from the White House who his acting coach was. Yesterday, he followed that up by calling him Fake Tears Chuck Schumer to his 23 million Twitter followers. Now hes asking Schumer to expedite the consideration and support Neil Gorsuch, his nominee for the Supreme Court. Do you think thats how this works, Mr. President?

Story Continued Below

Good Wednesday morning and welcome to February. Yes, we expect Gorsuch to get confirmed. But Democrats are saying they want him to get 60 votes, daring Republicans to push him through on a majority vote. Gorsuch passed the Senate unanimously 2006 when President George W. Bush nominated him, but that matters little when talking about todays political dynamics. Eight Democrats would need to join with Republicans to break the expected Democratic filibuster.

AT LEAST SEVEN Democratic senators have signaled an openness to having a committee vote on Trump's Supreme Court nominee. Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (Ill.), Richard Blumenthal (Conn.), Chris Coons (Del.), Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.), Joe Manchin (W.Va.), Claire McCaskill (Mo.) and Jon Tester (Mont.).

**SUBSCRIBE to Playbook: http://politi.co/1M75UbX

THE REVIEWS TRUMP CARES ABOUT -- NYT -- 5 of 6 stories about Trump and ANOTHER six-column banner headline -- TRUMPS COURT PICK SETS UP POLITICAL CLASH. He probably likes this one, referring to Gorsuch, A Nominee Who Echoes Scalias Style, but probably doesnt care for this one, referring to Anthony Scaramucci, a hedge-fund manager turned adviser, A Trump Aide, a Chinese Firm And A Fear of Tangled Interests. http://nyti.ms/2jVIVII WaPo -- the entire front page is about Trump, and another banner headline -- Supreme Court nominee is Gorsuch Its still Justice Kennedys court Originalist pick seen as willing to compromise http://bit.ly/2kpN1tU N.Y. Post: BURN IT DOWN!: Dems go full blast to undermine Trump http://nyp.st/2jusKUo

THE BACKSTORY -- GREAT DETAILS -- How Trump got to yes on Gorsuch, by Shane Goldmacher, Eliana Johnson and Josh Gerstein: Behind the scenes, [Donald] Trump settled on [Neil] Gorsuch after only a single in-person interview in Trump Tower. Gorsuch was ushered into the building through a back door on Jan. 14 so he wouldnt be seen by the press gathered in the lobby. Trump personally interviewed four Supreme Court finalists, three at his home in New York before he moved to the White House, according to two people involved in the search. ... Only one other person was in the room during Trumps full interviews with the finalists: White House Counsel Don McGahn, the two officials said. And Trump only met with each of the finalists once before deciding, although he did later speak with some by phone. Trumps top lieutenants -- Vice President Mike Pence, McGahn, chief of staff Reince Priebus, and chief strategist Stephen Bannon -- also had their own interviews with the four finalists, along with several other candidates in New York. http://politi.co/2jul6t1 Video of Trump announcing Gorsuch http://bit.ly/2kqcgfx

THE ANALYSIS -- NYTs ADAM LIPTAK: In Judge Neil Gorsuch, an Echo of Scalia in Philosophy and Style: Judge Gorsuch ... is an originalist, meaning he tries to interpret the Constitution consistently with the understanding of those who drafted and adopted it. This approach leads him to generally but not uniformly conservative results. While he has not written extensively on several issues of importance to many conservatives, including gun control and gay rights, Judge Gorsuch has taken strong stands in favor of religious freedom, earning him admiration from the right. Judge Gorsuch has not hesitated to take stands that critics say have a partisan edge. He has criticized liberals for turning to the courts rather than legislatures to achieve their policy goals, and has called for limiting the power of federal regulators. http://nyti.ms/2kfP9lg

-- WAPOS ROBERT BARNES: Trump makes his pick, but its still Anthony Kennedys Supreme Court: Kennedy, 80 and celebrating his 29th year on the court this month, will remain the pivotal member of the court no matter how the warfare between Republicans and Democrats plays out. On almost every big social issue, neither the courts liberal, Democratic-appointed justices nor Kennedys fellow Republican-appointed conservative colleagues can prevail without him. That is why an undercurrent of Trumps first choice for the court was whether it would soothe Kennedy, making him feel secure enough to retire and let this president choose the person who would succeed him.

Who better, then, to put Kennedy at ease than one of his former clerks? Kennedy trekked to Denver to swear in his protege Neil Gorsuch on the appeals court 10 years ago. If Gorsuch is confirmed to the Supreme Court, it would be the first time that a justice has served with a former clerk. http://wapo.st/2jC6nYb

-- NEAL K. KATYAL in the NYT, Why Liberals Should Back Neil Gorsuch: I was an acting solicitor general for President Barack Obama; Judge Gorsuch has strong conservative bona fides and was appointed to the 10th Circuit by President George W. Bush. But I have seen him up close and in action, both in court and on the Federal Appellate Rules Committee (where both of us serve); he brings a sense of fairness and decency to the job, and a temperament that suits the nations highest court. http://nyti.ms/2jTXieo

-- A 2002 op-ed in UPI by Gorsuch excoriated the Senate for delaying hearings to appoint John Roberts and Merrick Garland to the U.S. Court of Appeals http://bit.ly/2kqVRXO

-- @ShaneGoldmacher: Gorsuchs classmate at Harvard Law: A certain gentleman named Barack Obama

WHO WILL HELP GORSUCH -- Ayotte to lead White House team shepherding Supreme Court nominee, by WaPos Phil Rucker and Ashley Parker: [Kelly] Ayotte will serve as the nominees so-called sherpa, personally introducing the pick to senators and escorting him or her to meetings and the confirmation hearing. The lead staffer on the nominees team will be Makan Delrahim, currently the director of nominations for the White House legislative affairs office. Delrahim will serve as the quarterback, in the words of the White House official, overseeing strategy and outreach with the Senate.

Delrahim will work closely with Mary Elizabeth Taylor, a former aide to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), where she ran the Senate cloakroom and developed personal relationships with Republican senators. Also involved will be Rick Dearborn, a deputy White House chief of staff and a former chief of staff to Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), and Marc Short, the White Houses director of legislative affairs. The communications strategy will be overseen by Ron Bonjean, a longtime Republican strategist who has served as chief of staff to the Senate Republican Conference and as the chief spokesman for former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.). http://wapo.st/2jUiEbb

-- BUZZ: The White House considered several other potential sherpas before settling on Ayotte. Kyle Simmons, former chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, was among those who had been discussed. Typically, SCOTUS sherpas are veteran staffers like former Reagan chief of staff Ken Duberstein, who managed multiple Supreme Court and cabinet nominee picks.

** A message from the Coalition for Affordable Prescription Drugs: Federal programs, state governments, employers, unions and others partner with PBMs to address rising prescription drug costs, keep patients healthy, and deliver value for the health system. Visit http://www.affordableprescriptiondrugs.org for more. **

TEAM OF RIVALS -- White House tries to course correct after messy travel restriction rollout, by CNNs Dana Bash: According to sources familiar with internal White House conversations, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus will now take more control of the systems dealing with basic functions, like executive orders. The way one source described it: Priebus already technically had the authority, but clearly the staff needed a reminder not to color outside their lines. Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner, two other senior advisers, still have considerable power and influence with Trump. Administration officials say no role has been diminished or expanded but rather existing roles clarified. It is unclear how that will fit in with Priebus exerting more control over White House operations. Additionally, White House Counselor Kellyanne Conway is expected to take more control of the communications strategy. http://cnn.it/2kQb6XX

SCARAMUCCI UNDER FIRE -- NYT A1, Trump Aides Deal With Chinese Firm Raises Fear of Tangled Interests, by Sharon LaFraniere, Michael Forsythe and Alexandra Stevenson: A secretive Chinese company with deep ties to the countrys Communist Party has become one of the biggest foreign investors in the United States over the past year, snapping up American firms in a string of multibillion-dollar deals. But it is one of its smaller deals that is apparently stalling the White House career of a top adviser to President Trump. Anthony Scaramucci, a flamboyant former campaign fund-raiser for Mr. Trump whom the president has appointed as the White House liaison to the business community, has been in limbo for more than a week since he agreed to sell his investment firm to a subsidiary of the Chinese conglomerate, HNA Group.

Mr. Scaramucci is on the job but has yet to be sworn in, partly because of concerns about the Jan. 17 deal, according to two administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to publicly discuss personnel matters. It is the second known transaction between a politically connected Chinese company and an incoming White House official. And it is evidence of the unusual confluence of interests between superrich members of the new Trump administration who need to unwind complex financial portfolios to comply with government rules and international firms eager to buy American assets. http://nyti.ms/2kfNfBd

-- Scaramucci fights to stay in the White House, by Tara Palmeri: Reince Priebus and Anthony Scaramucci were sucked into a bizarre episode of infighting Tuesday as the White House chief of staff tried to push Scaramucci out of a promised role as an adviser to President Donald Trump, only to later backtrack. http://politi.co/2kpXm93

PETRAEUS WARNING -- ONLY IN PLAYBOOK -- Former CIA Director, retired Gen. David Petraeus plans to warn the House Armed Services Committee this morning that U.S. global alliances are at risk, according to an advance copy of his testimony from someone close to Petraeus. In assessing the threats, Petraeus plans to tell the committee: Americans should not take the current international order for granted. It did not will itself into existence. We created it. Likewise, it is not naturally self-sustaining. We have sustained it. If we stop doing so, it will fray and, eventually, collapse. This is precisely what some of our adversaries seek to encourage. President Putin, for instance, understands that, while conventional aggression may occasionally enable Russia to grab a bit of land on its periphery, the real center of gravity is the political will of major democratic powers to defend Euro-Atlantic institutions like NATO and the EU.

NEW POLITICO/MORNING CONSULT POLL -- Poll: 1-in-4 voters believe Trump's vote-fraud claims, by Jake Sherman: One in four voters believe President Donald Trump's unsupported claim that millions of votes were illegally cast in the 2016 election, but more people believe that Trump benefited from any electoral malfeasance instead of Hillary Clinton. A new POLITICO/Morning Consult survey showed that 25 percent of registered voters say they agree with Trump that millions of people improperly cast ballots last November. But if the election was subject to voter fraud, 35 percent say its more likely any improper votes benefited Trump, and 30 percent say they benefited Clinton.

Trumps approval rating is ticking upward toward 50 percent: 49 percent of voters approve of how Trump is handling his job, and 41 percent disapprove. That is more positive than other polls; a 51-percent majority disapproves of Trump in the latest Gallup tracking poll. Even Trump's favorable rating -- 49 percent favorable to 44 percent unfavorable is a significant departure from other polls, which show Trump viewed more unfavorably. http://politi.co/2juUSGA

OTHER POLL HIGHLIGHTS

-- SEAN SPICER IS WELL KNOWN. 60% say they have seen, read or heard a lot or some of Spicer. He has a 24% favorable rating, 32% unfavorable, 16% have no opinion and 28% dont know him.

-- AS NETANYAHU READIES FOR TRIP TO THE U.S., AMERICANS SAY DONT MOVE THE EMBASSY TO JERUSALEM. Across the board, our new poll shows that Americans dont want the U.S. to move its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. When told of the history of the issue, 41% say to leave the embassy in Tel Aviv and 33% say move the embassy to Jerusalem.

THE JUICE --

-- EU ANXIETY -- POSTCARD FROM BRUSSELS: From our POLITICO Europe Playbook colleague Ryan Heath in Brussels: "European Commission Vice President Maro efovi just stood up in the EU press room and said that the College of European Commissioners discussed at their weekly Cabinet meeting that it and the EU have to choose between the 'inequality, national egoism' displayed by the Trump administration or 'openness, social equality and solidarity' that the defines the EU. Sefcovic said there was 'growing anxiety' about the transatlantic relationship and urged the Trump team to cool it because: 'The U.S. never had a better ally than Europe.'"

-- BIDEN LAUNCHES FOUNDATION: The Biden Foundation is launching to build on Vice President and Dr. Bidens lifelong commitment to protecting and advancing rights and opportunities of all people, according to a release off embargo at 5 a.m. The board of the foundation: Former Sen. Ted Kaufman, a longtime Biden adviser; Valerie Biden Owens, the VPs sister; Mark Gitenstein, a former Biden aide who later was ambassador to Romania; Mark Angelson, a long time Biden adviser; and Jeff Peck of Peck Madigan and Jones. Peck also worked for Biden on the Hill. Louisa Terrell, Sen. Cory Bookers former chief of staff, a former Facebook lobbyist and FCC aide, will be executive director of the foundation.

-- KEY MCCARTHY AIDE TO THE WHITE HOUSE: Ben Howard, who ran the House floor for House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), has gone to work for President Donald Trumps legislative affairs office. This is not only big for Howard, but also for McCarthy, whose stature continues to grow in Trump World. I cant begin to express my gratitude for all Ben has done not only for me and my team, but the entire Republican Conference, McCarthy emails. Over the years Ive relied on Ben for both his wisdom and his wit. Hes been an integral part of my senior staff, but President Trump and his team will be well served by Ben as we work to enact the American peoples legislative priorities.

-- SPOTTED: Eric Trump in first class and Don Trump Jr. in coach flying from DCA to LaGuardia on the 10 p.m. American shuttle after the Supreme Court announcement House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte, who is under heat for several of his aides agreeing to sign non-disclosures with the Trump team, chatting with Steve Bannon at the White House Supreme Court announcement Tuesday night NFIB President and CEO Juanita Duggan at the White House for the SCOTUS announcement.

HAPPENING TODAY -- PBS NewsHour anchor Judy Woodruff will interview Vice President Mike Pence Wednesday morning in his first sitdown since inauguration. It will air Wednesday night. Trump is attending an African American History Month listening session. In the afternoon, he is participating in a legislative affairs strategy session.

PHOTO DU JOUR: President Donald Trump walks through the Cross Hall to the East Room of the White House to nominate Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court on Jan. 31. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

THE RESISTANCE -- GET WITH THE PROGRAM, OR NOT -- State Dept. Dissent Cable on Trumps Ban Draws 1,000 Signatures, by NYTs Jeffrey Gettleman on A1: It started out in Washington. Then it went to Jakarta. Then across Africa. One version even showed up on Facebook. Within hours, a State Department dissent cable, asserting that President Trumps executive order to temporarily bar citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries would not make the nation safer, traveled like a chain letter -- or a viral video. The cable wended its way through dozens of American embassies around the world, quickly emerging as one of the broadest protests by American officials against their presidents policies. And it is not over yet. By 4 p.m. on Tuesday, the letter had attracted around 1,000 signatures, State Department officials said, far more than any dissent cable in recent years. It was being delivered to management, and department officials said more diplomats wanted to add their names to it. The State Department has 7,600 Foreign Service officers and 11,000 civil servants. http://nyti.ms/2jutOr1

-- Resistance from within: Federal workers push back against Trump, by WaPos Juliet Eilperin, Lisa Rein, and Marc Fisher: Less than two weeks into Trumps administration, federal workers are in regular consultation with recently departed Obama-era political appointees about what they can do to push back against the new presidents initiatives. Some federal employees have set up social media accounts to anonymously leak word of changes that Trump appointees are trying to make. ... At a church in Columbia Heights last weekend, dozens of federal workers attended a support group for civil servants seeking a forum to discuss their opposition to the Trump administration. And 180 federal employees have signed up for a workshop next weekend, where experts will offer advice on workers rights and how they can express civil disobedience. http://wapo.st/2jVGN3H

COMING ATTRACTIONS -- Trump administration circulates more draft immigration restrictions, focusing on protecting U.S. jobs, by WaPos Abigail Hauslohner and Janell Ross: The Trump administration is considering a plan to weed out would-be immigrants who are likely to require public assistance, as well as to deport --- when possible -- immigrants already living in the United States who depend on taxpayer help, according to a draft executive order obtained by The Washington Post. A second draft order under consideration calls for a substantial shake-up in the system through which the United States administers immigrant and nonimmigrant visas, with the aim of tightly controlling who enters the country and who can enter the workforce, and reducing the social services burden on U.S. taxpayers. http://wapo.st/2jup5FU

BRIAN FALLON in POLITICO, Why Trumps Firing of Sally Yates Should Worry You: [F]or Yates, if this weeks events did mark the conclusion of her career at Justice, she can at least depart knowing she was true to herself and to the finest traditions of the institution until the very end. But theres always the chance her leave from Justice is only temporary. It seems quite likely she will be at the top of any list for attorney general in a future administrationonly next time, on a full-time basis. http://politi.co/2kqJOK5

WHAT THE HILL IS READING -- Staffers secret work on immigration order rattles the Capitol, by Rachael Bade: News that House Judiciary Committee staffers secretly collaborated on Donald Trumps controversial immigration order reverberated through the Capitol on Tuesday: Democrats denounced the arrangement, the GOP panel stonewalled, and an outside ethics group requested an investigation. And the man most on the hot seat over the unusual arrangement, House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte, was in full-on cleanup mode. At a private GOP conference meeting, Goodlatte (R-Va.) tried to calm fellow Republicans who were incensed to learn that some of his aides helped craft Trump's immigration directive without telling him or GOP leaders or about it. Democrats, meanwhile, almost immediately began raising ethical concerns about nondisclosure agreements signed by the Judiciary aides and questioned whether such work infringes on separation of powers. http://politi.co/2jUjRiQ

-- WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW: Several government employees signed a non-disclosure agreement to secretly work on an executive order on immigration for the Trump team. And Goodlattes staff -- whose salaries are funded by taxpayer money -- refuses to answer if the chairman approved of this, and why it was allowed.

SHOW ME THE MONEY -- Trump raised $15 million in December, by Ken Vogel: President Donald Trumps reelection efforts are off to a strong start financially, according to Tuesday evening campaign finance reports showing that Trumps three committees brought in a combined $15 million last month and finished the year with $16 million in the bank. The committees Trumps campaign and two joint fundraising vehicles created by the campaign and various Republican Party committees - disbursed nearly $32 million from Nov. 29 through Dec. 31. http://politi.co/2kPZTH2

--TEXT FROM TRUMP President Trump took office only 10 days ago and the media has waged a nasty fight every day. Fight back. Donate by the 11:59p deadline: http://www.bit.ly/2jSqMsN

** A message from the Coalition for Affordable Prescription Drugs: Federal programs, state governments, employers, unions and others partner with PBMs to address rising prescription drug costs, keep patients healthy, and deliver value for the health system. Visit http://www.affordableprescriptiondrugs.org for more. **

THE CABINET -- Treasury secretary nominees foreign money links bring new scrutiny, by CNNs Phil Mattingly: In a private interview with committee staff, aides said, Mnuchin acknowledged that his responses to the committee had not, as he had stated, been true, accurate and complete. He twice was forced to revise his initial disclosure questionnaire. He stated his role in the entities was inadvertently missed during the disclosure process. http://cnn.it/2kQrcEh

WHAT PELOSI TOLD TAPPER -- CNNs town hall with the House minority leader -- TAPPER: You still think you can work with [Trump]? PELOSI: Well, I certainly hope so. Hes the president of the United States. And by the way, I told him at the meeting, so Ill tell you, I said, Mr. President, we have -- I worked, when I had the majority, I was the speaker, I had the gavel, and President George W. Bush was president, we worked with him even though we disagreed on the war in Iraq. What could be worse than that? And privatizing Social Security, we disagreed on those. But we passed some of the most progressive legislation to help poor children, the biggest energy bill in the history of our country. He wanted nuclear; we wanted renewables. We had a big bill. The list goes on. Drugs for HIV-AIDS, all of those kinds of things. So we disagree on certain issues. We respect that hes the president of the United States. We want to work together. But where we will draw the line is if he wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

-- FOR YOUR RADAR: Pelosi and Iowa Republican Sen. Joni Ernst will speak at the 132nd Gridiron Club and Foundation dinner on March 4.

MOVING ON -- Strobe Talbott stepping down from Brookings, by Michael Crowley: Talbott, a former TIME magazine journalist who became deputy secretary of state under Bill Clinton, has led Brookings for 15 years. He will resign in October. ... He served at the State Department from 1993 to 2001, including seven years as Deputy Secretary of State. http://politi.co/2kfHLGD Release http://politi.co/2kUx0IN

SCHOCK UPDATE -- @kenvogel: Ex-Rep. @AaronSchocks campaign cmte paid a $10k compliance penalty to the @USTreasury, & $16k+ in legal fees. http://bit.ly/2kQ9c9X

VALLEY TALK -- Googles Eric Schmidt: Trump Administration Will Do Evil Things, by BuzzFeeds William Alden and Nitasha Tiku: Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Googles parent company, told an audience of Google employees on Thursday that the Trump administration is going to do these evil things as theyve done in the immigration area and perhaps some others. Schmidts remarks were made during the companys weekly meeting at its headquarters in Mountain View, California, on January 26. http://bzfd.it/2kfQLeU

MEMO FROM CARRIE BUDOFF BROWN AND JOHN HARRIS -- Please join me in offering thanks and congratulations to our colleague, Roger Simon, who is retiring from the business after 42 years of writing columns 10 of which were for POLITICO. Roger was the first person in this newsroom hired after John Harris joined Matt Wuerker and Ken Vogel from the Capitol Leader gang in late 2006. In this peevish age, in which combatants seem never to relinquish the self-righteous pose, and the language of politics often is infused with contempt, Roger uses his gift for language for a different cause. He respects politics and its practitioners, even when he is being searingly critical. He is shrewd in assessing character and motive and views politics and the work of government less through an ideological prism than human one. These are real people, often quite powerful, making decisions that affect other real people, often quite powerless.

-- ROGERS LAST COLUMN: A majority of one walks away from his keyboard: This is the end, my friends. It is time to say goodbye. I realize this is the worst possible time for a political columnist to retire, but what I didnt realize is that any of you cared. Robert Feder, a famous media writer from Chicago, found out about my retirement a few days ago and I have been flooded with farewells ever since. I have also been flooded -- really, you can read them -- with messages on Facebook and Twitter asking me not to retire. Not now. Not, Im told, when America needs you. I know, I know: It is preposterous. It is laughable. But not to some.

For some, I have been the friend they have never met for more than 40 years. For all those years, my job took me all over the world. My wife and I had precious little time for extended vacations. She stayed behind working at newspapers for 35 years and then running her own editing business. Now she wants to see the world. And Id like to go with her while I still can. http://politi.co/2jCde3I

MEDIAWATCH -- White House ices out CNN, by Hadas Gold: The White House has refused to send its spokespeople or surrogates onto CNN shows, effectively icing out the network from on-air administration voices. Were sending surrogates to places where we think it makes sense to promote our agenda, said a White House official, acknowledging that CNN is not such a place, but adding that the ban is not permanent. A CNN reporter, speaking on background, was more blunt: The White House is trying to punish the network and force down its ratings. Theyre trying cull CNN from the herd, the reporter said. Administration officials are still answering questions from CNN reporters. But administration officials including White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer and senior counselor Kellyanne Conway haven't appeared on the network's programming in recent weeks. http://politi.co/2jVAPje

--Upset in WSJ newsroom over editors directive to avoid majority Muslim in immigration ban coverage, by Joe Pompeo: [Gerry] Baker conveyed the message in an internal email Monday night, responding to a breaking news story about Trumps firing of Acting Attorney General Sally Q. Yates for refusing to defend the executive order temporarily barring citizens of Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Libya and Somalia from entering the country. Can we stop saying seven majority Muslim countries? Its very loaded, Baker wrote in an email to editors obtained by POLITICO. ... Would be less loaded to say seven countries the US has designated as being states that pose significant or elevated risks of terrorism. http://politi.co/2jC3gzg

--Fox News Tops Cable News Ratings for 15 Straight Years With January Win, by The Wraps Brian Flood: http://bit.ly/2jC70kA

KATY TUR PROFILE -- Taunted by Trump, Little Katy stood her ground. And became a star because of it, by WaPos Paul Farhi: Trumps attacks on [Megyn] Kelly may have had a higher profile, but few reporters took as much flak from the future president as Tur. Turs reaction to the tumult was like that during her first confrontations in New Hampshire and in Trump Tower. She stood her ground. She didnt fire back. She continued reporting. Now she smiles at the memory, as composed as a sonnet. Generally, I find the hotter the temperature, the cooler I am, she says. Its times of relative calm and ease that I start to wind myself up. http://wapo.st/2kOGlWA

SPOTTED -- Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump eating at RPM Italian Monday night. They also took a jog Saturday with their security detail on the trails on Rock Creek Parkway.

OUT AND ABOUT -- Democratic campaign hands gathered last night to celebrate former Howard Dean campaign manager and longtime political strategist, Rick Ridder, and his new book at the Hawk n Dove. Ridders book Looking for Votes in All the Wrong Places: Tales and Rules from the Campaign Trail draws from his decades leading campaigns and the party featured friends old and new. $16.99 on Amazon http://amzn.to/2jCacg1 SPOTTED mingling in the crowd: Stephanie Schriock and Jess OConnell from EMILYs List, Colorado Reps. Diana DeGette and Ed Perlmutter, Mark Putnam, the DSCCs Lauren Passalacqua, Andrew Piatt, Danny Kazin, Jay Marlin, Rich Pelletier, Mark Blumenthal, Glen Totten, and Amy Pritchard. Also spotted: Ricks proud daughter and DCCC alum Jenn Ridder.

WELCOME TO THE WORLD -- Doug Calidas, legislative counsel for Sen. Joe Manchin III and Wharton and Duke Law alum, and Katie Calidas, a designer for an advertising agency and Parsons alum, on Sunday at 12:05 a.m. welcomed William Kristopher Calidas, 7 pounds, 11 ounces, 21 inches. Mother and baby are doing great and came home from the hospital Monday. Pic http://bit.ly/2jBYYYW

TRANSITIONS -- Victoria Glynn, former deputy press secretary at the Veterans Affairs Department, has joined Rep. Henry Cuellars (D-Texas) office as communications director. My Brothers Keeper Alliance (MBK Alliance) has elected former Obama administration official Broderick D. Johnson as chairman of the board of directors effective yesterday. http://politi.co/2jUDozP

NSC DEPARTURE LOUNGE -- Adam Strickler departs the NSC today after nine years of service to four National Security Advisers, most recently Ambassador Susan Rice. He plans to take some time off with Lauren and Toby. (h/t Suitestaff44)

BIRTHDAYS OF THE DAY: Jake Siewert, head of corporate comms at Goldman Sachs, father of four, and Bill Clinton alumnus, celebrating with a pancake breakfast at my kids school, a full days work, and dinner with my wife near our apartment -- read his Playbook Plus Q&A: http://politi.co/2kQnzuV ABC News Ali Dukakis, celebrating with friends and co-workers likely at Edgar -- Q&A: http://politi.co/2kUk1qP ... BuzzFeed White House correspondent Adrian Carrasquillo, celebrating with operatives, reporters, BuzzFeed colleagues and friends on Friday at Hawthorne -- Q&A: http://politi.co/2kpVEoi

BIRTHDAYS: CAAs Michael Kives ... Liz Breckenridge of Sen. Caseys office and is the pride of Chesterfield, Mo. Hudson Lee (Carol Lees son) is 4 ... Fred Barnes is 74 ... Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) is 73 ... Jamie Radice, head of comms and public policy at Shift Technologies, and a McAuliffe and HRC 2008 campaign alum ... Christine Halloran ... Marc Elias of Perkins Coie (h/ts Jon Haber) Mara Sloan Mat Lapinski, Jeff Kimbell protg and EVP of Crossroads Strategies (h/t Krueger) ... Matt Moon, EVP at Delve DC and a Rick Scott and RNC alum ... Politicos Andrew Friedman (h/t wife Taylor) ... Ashley Hicks, manager of corporate alliances at USO and a Politico alum ... Joseph Jones, pride of Des Moines and beloved friend of ACYPL ... Miguel Ayala, SBA and Hillary campaign alum, is 38 ... L.A. Dodgers President and CEO Stan Kasten, the pride of Lakewood, N.J., is 65 ... David Thomas of Mehlman Vogel Castagnetti Alexa Kissinger, Obama White House and 12 alum, now 2L at Harvard Law School (h/t Gareth Rhodes) ... Dan Arbell, 25-year veteran of the Israeli foreign service, now a scholar-in-residence at AU ... Tara Brown, Mid-Atlantic regional director for AIPAC (h/ts Jewish Insider) ... Jordyn Phelps, ABC News superstar White House producer (h/ts Jonathan Karl and Arlette Saenz) ... ABC News Erin Dooley (h/t Arlette) ...

... Tara McGowan, digital director at Priorities USA Willa Prescott, the pride of Omaha and Rep. Tom OHallerans scheduler and director of operations (h/t Zac Andrews) ... Bloomberg News U.S. economy reporter Michelle Jamrisko -- her Twitter bio: I like to tell my stories with pictures and numbers (h/t Ben Chang) ... Meet the Press producer Natalie Cucchiara, celebrating half of the day at 30 Rock and half of the day in D.C. (h/t Olivia Petersen) ... Locust Street Group founding partner David Barnhart (h/t Ben Jenkins) ... Andrew Oberlander ... Emmett McGroarty, education director at American Principles Project ... CBS News Alana Anyse ... Ubers Alex Luzi ... David Redl, counsel for the Senate Energy and Commerce Committee ... Susan Coll, director of events and programs at Politics & Prose ... Catherine Kim, executive editor at NBC News digital ... Maria Reppas ... Dan Chmielewski ... Josh Nelson, deputy political director of CREDO Mobile ... Alex Otwell of Cvent ... Karl Bach ... Bill Sweeney, former deputy DNC chair and now president and CEO at International Foundation for Electoral Systems ... Carrie Goux Luke Peterson ... Kelly Collins ... Zachary Tumin, deputy commissioner of strategic initiatives at NYPD ... Emily Laird ... Jordan Lillie Michael Frias Karl Bach, Human Rights Campaign alum Princess Stephanie of Monaco is 52 ... Lisa Marie Presley is 49 ... Pauly Shore is 49 ... Harry Styles (One Direction) is 23 (h/ts AP)

** A message from the Coalition for Affordable Prescription Drugs: PBMs use their purchasing power, sophisticated analytics and clinical expertise to help government programs, employers and unions get the most effective drug at the lowest cost possible. In fact, a 2016 study found that for every $100 in prescription drug expenditures, costs would be $45 higher without PBMs negotiating directly with drug manufacturers. With drug costs on the rise, it's good to know there are private-market solutions to lower them. Check out http://www.affordableprescriptiondrugs.org for more. **

SUBSCRIBE to the Playbook family: POLITICO Playbook http://politi.co/1M75UbX ... New York Playbook http://politi.co/1ON8bqW Florida Playbook http://politi.co/1OypFe9 ... New Jersey Playbook http://politi.co/1HLKltF ... Massachusetts Playbook http://politi.co/1Nhtq5v Illinois Playbook http://politi.co/1N7u5sb ... California Playbook http://politi.co/2bLvcPl ... Brussels Playbook http://politi.co/1FZeLcw ... All our political and policy tipsheets http://politi.co/1M75UbX

CLARIFICATION: This version of Playbook has been updated to better clarify the stance of seven Democratic senators toward Neil Gorsuch.

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THE BACKSTORY: How Trump got to yes on Gorusch -- PLAYBOOK EXCLUSIVE: PETRAEUS warns US ... - Politico

James Rachels

Ethical Egoism

Ethical egoism is the idea that people have moral obligations only to themselves and that they ought to pursue their own ends exclusively. An ethical egoist would say that one has no duty to help others in need unless doing so happens to coincide with one's own needs. Because ethical egoism prescribes actions, it is distinct from psychological egoism (discussed in the previous selection by Joel Feinberg), which is a descriptive claim about the nature of people's motivations.

Rachels provides several arguments both for and against ethical egoism. The first argument for ethical egoism is that we actually harm other people by looking out for their interests. For example, we may misinterpret their interests and bungle attempts at help, or we may intrude on other people's lives in ways that they dislike, or we may degrade others by offering them handouts. But this justification of egoism is premised upon the value of the general welfare precisely the thing that ethical egoism denies is important. Rather than claiming that only one's own interests matter, this argument states that paying attention to one's own interests is the most effective means to furthering the interests of everyone. It is thus an empirical claim about the best way to benefit people generally, not a normative claim about whose interests ought to count. A second argument for ethical egoism is that altruistic ethics (i.e., those that require one to help others even without benefit to oneself) requires one to sacrifice oneself for the benefit of others, and that were one to follow altruistic ethics one would have nothing to give one's projects, goals, and relationships. But those things are precisely what make life valuable; thus, altruistic ethics denies the importance of the very things that are valuable. Rachels dismisses this argument quickly because it is a false dichotomy; having obligations to others does not entail that one give up all of one's projects.

The final (and most powerful) argument for ethical egoism is that egoism is what underlies our common-sense morality. For example, the reason there are proscriptions against lying and stealing and obligations to help the needy is that we all benefit from those rules. There are two problems with this argument. First, it only provides general rules; thus, even though it might generally behoove us to tell the truth (in order to gain people's trust), it does not proscribe lying when it is in fact advantageous to do so. Second, just because acting for the good of others is to one's advantage, it does not follow that that is the only reason doing so is good.

Ultimately Rachels finds ethical egoism implausible; he concludes this on the basis of an argument concerning morally relevant differences. There is a general moral principle that requires us to treat likes alike, which Rachels articulates as follows:

We can justify treating people differently only if we can show that there is some factual difference between them that is relevant to justifying the

difference in treatment.

For example, the reason why racism is wrong is that racists seek to treat people differently despite there being no morally difference between races. In fact, racist stereotypes (e.g., that black people are lazy or that Jewish people are greedy) are often used to provide morally relevant reasons to treat people differently on the basis of race. Ethical egoism runs afoul of this principle, for it demands that one assign oneself greater moral importance than every other person, despite there being no factual difference that justifies assigning oneself greater importance. Thus, Rachels concludes that ethical egoism is mistaken.

See the article here:

Ethical Egoism - Education

Consequentialism is the class of normative ethical theories holding that the consequences of one's conduct are the ultimate basis for any judgment about the rightness or wrongness of that conduct. Thus, from a consequentialist standpoint, a morally right act (or omission from acting) is one that will produce a good outcome, or consequence. In an extreme form, the idea of consequentialism is commonly encapsulated in the saying, "the end justifies the means",[1] meaning that if a goal is morally important enough, any method of achieving it is acceptable.[2]

Consequentialism is usually contrasted with deontological ethics (or deontology), in that deontology, in which rules and moral duty are central, derives the rightness or wrongness of one's conduct from the character of the behaviour itself rather than the outcomes of the conduct. It is also contrasted with virtue ethics, which focuses on the character of the agent rather than on the nature or consequences of the act (or omission) itself, and pragmatic ethics which treats morality like science: advancing socially over the course of many lifetimes, such that any moral criterion is subject to revision. Consequentialist theories differ in how they define moral goods.

Some argue that consequentialist and deontological theories are not necessarily mutually exclusive. For example, T. M. Scanlon advances the idea that human rights, which are commonly considered a "deontological" concept, can only be justified with reference to the consequences of having those rights.[3] Similarly, Robert Nozick argues for a theory that is mostly consequentialist, but incorporates inviolable "side-constraints" which restrict the sort of actions agents are permitted to do.[3]

It is the business of the benevolent man to seek to promote what is beneficial to the world and to eliminate what is harmful, and to provide a model for the world. What benefits he will carry out; what does not benefit men he will leave alone.[5]

Mozi, Mozi (5th century BC) Part I

Mohist consequentialism, also known as state consequentialism,[6] is an ethical theory which evaluates the moral worth of an action based on how much it contributes to the welfare of a state.[6] According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Mohist consequentialism, dating back to the 5th century BCE, is the "world's earliest form of consequentialism, a remarkably sophisticated version based on a plurality of intrinsic goods taken as constitutive of human welfare."[7] Unlike utilitarianism, which views utility as the sole moral good, "the basic goods in Mohist consequentialist thinking are... order, material wealth, and increase in population".[8] During Mozi's era, war and famines were common, and population growth was seen as a moral necessity for a harmonious society. The "material wealth" of Mohist consequentialism refers to basic needs like shelter and clothing, and the "order" of Mohist consequentialism refers to Mozi's stance against warfare and violence, which he viewed as pointless and a threat to social stability.[9]Stanford sinologist David Shepherd Nivison, in the The Cambridge History of Ancient China, writes that the moral goods of Mohism "are interrelated: more basic wealth, then more reproduction; more people, then more production and wealth... if people have plenty, they would be good, filial, kind, and so on unproblematically."[8] The Mohists believed that morality is based on "promoting the benefit of all under heaven and eliminating harm to all under heaven." In contrast to Jeremy Bentham's views, state consequentialism is not utilitarian because it is not hedonistic or individualistic. The importance of outcomes that are good for the community outweigh the importance of individual pleasure and pain.[4] The term state consequentialism has also been applied to the political philosophy of the Confucian philosopher Xunzi.[10]

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think...

Jeremy Bentham, The Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789) Ch I, p 1

In summary, Jeremy Bentham states that people are driven by their interests and their fears, but their interests take precedence over their fears, and their interests are carried out in accordance with how people view the consequences that might be involved with their interests. "Happiness" on this account is defined as the maximization of pleasure and the minimization of pain. Historically, hedonistic utilitarianism is the paradigmatic example of a consequentialist moral theory. This form of utilitarianism holds that what matters is the aggregate happiness; the happiness of everyone and not the happiness of any particular person. John Stuart Mill, in his exposition of hedonistic utilitarianism, proposed a hierarchy of pleasures, meaning that the pursuit of certain kinds of pleasure is more highly valued than the pursuit of other pleasures.[11] However, some contemporary utilitarians, such as Peter Singer, are concerned with maximizing the satisfaction of preferences, hence "preference utilitarianism". Other contemporary forms of utilitarianism mirror the forms of consequentialism outlined below.

Ethical egoism can be understood as a consequentialist theory according to which the consequences for the individual agent are taken to matter more than any other result. Thus, egoism will prescribe actions that may be beneficial, detrimental, or neutral to the welfare of others. Some, like Henry Sidgwick, argue that a certain degree of egoism promotes the general welfare of society for two reasons: because individuals know how to please themselves best, and because if everyone were an austere altruist then general welfare would inevitably decrease.[12]

Ethical altruism can be seen as a consequentialist ethic which prescribes that an individual take actions that have the best consequences for everyone except for himself.[13] This was advocated by Auguste Comte, who coined the term "altruism," and whose ethics can be summed up in the phrase "Live for others".[14]

In general, consequentialist theories focus on actions. However, this need not be the case. Rule consequentialism is a theory that is sometimes seen as an attempt to reconcile deontology and consequentialismand in some cases, this is stated as a criticism of rule consequentialism.[15] Like deontology, rule consequentialism holds that moral behavior involves following certain rules. However, rule consequentialism chooses rules based on the consequences that the selection of those rules have. Rule consequentialism exists in the forms of rule utilitarianism and rule egoism.

Various theorists are split as to whether the rules are the only determinant of moral behavior or not. For example, Robert Nozick holds that a certain set of minimal rules, which he calls "side-constraints", are necessary to ensure appropriate actions.[3] There are also differences as to how absolute these moral rules are. Thus, while Nozick's side-constraints are absolute restrictions on behavior, Amartya Sen proposes a theory that recognizes the importance of certain rules, but these rules are not absolute.[3] That is, they may be violated if strict adherence to the rule would lead to much more undesirable consequences.

One of the most common objections to rule-consequentialism is that it is incoherent, because it is based on the consequentialist principle that what we should be concerned with is maximizing the good, but then it tells us not to act to maximize the good, but to follow rules (even in cases where we know that breaking the rule could produce better results).

Brad Hooker avoided this objection by not basing his form of rule-consequentialism on the ideal of maximizing the good. He writes:

the best argument for rule-consequentialism is not that it derives from an overarching commitment to maximise the good. The best argument for rule-consequentialism is that it does a better job than its rivals of matching and tying together our moral convictions, as well as offering us help with our moral disagreements and uncertainties[16]

Derek Parfit described Brad Hooker's book on rule-consequentialism Ideal Code, Real World as the "best statement and defence, so far, of one of the most important moral theories."[17]

The two-level approach involves engaging in critical reasoning and considering all the possible ramifications of one's actions before making an ethical decision, but reverting to generally reliable moral rules when one is not in a position to stand back and examine the dilemma as a whole. In practice, this equates to adhering to rule consequentialism when one can only reason on an intuitive level, and to act consequentialism when in a position to stand back and reason on a more critical level.[citation needed]

This position can be described as a reconciliation between act consequentialism in which the morality of an action is determined by that action's effects and rule consequentialism in which moral behavior is derived from following rules that lead to positive outcomes.[citation needed]

The two-level approach to consequentialism is most often associated with R. M. Hare and Peter Singer.[citation needed]

Another consequentialist version is motive consequentialism which looks at whether the state of affairs that results from the motive to choose an action is better or at least as good as each of the alternative state of affairs that would have resulted from alternative actions. This version gives relevance to the motive of an act and links it to its consequences. An act can therefore not be wrong if the decision to act was based on a right motive. A possible inference is, that one can not be blamed for mistaken judgements if the motivation was to do good.[18]

Most consequentialist theories focus on promoting some sort of good consequences. However, Negative utilitarianism lays out a consequentialist theory that focuses solely on minimizing bad consequences.

One major difference between these two approaches is the agent's responsibility. Positive consequentialism demands that we bring about good states of affairs, whereas negative consequentialism requires that we avoid bad ones. Stronger versions of negative consequentialism will require active intervention to prevent bad and ameliorate existing harm. In weaker versions, simple forbearance from acts tending to harm others is sufficient.

Often "negative" consequentialist theories assert that reducing suffering is more important than increasing pleasure. Karl Popper, for example, claimed "from the moral point of view, pain cannot be outweighed by pleasure...". (While Popper is not a consequentialist per se, this is taken as a classic statement of negative utilitarianism.) When considering a theory of justice, negative consequentialists may use a statewide or global-reaching principle: the reduction of suffering (for the disadvantaged) is more valuable than increased pleasure (for the affluent or luxurious).

Teleological ethics (Greek telos, "end"; logos, "science") is an ethical theory that holds that the ends or consequences of an act determine whether an act is good or evil. Teleological theories are often discussed in opposition to deontological ethical theories, which hold that acts themselves are inherently good or evil, regardless of the consequences of acts.[citation needed]

Teleological theories differ on the nature of the end that actions ought to promote. Eudaemonist theories (Greek eudaimonia, "happiness") hold that the goal of ethics consists in some function or activity appropriate to man as a human being, and thus tend to emphasize the cultivation of virtue or excellence in the agent as the end of all action. These could be the classical virtuescourage, temperance, justice, and wisdomthat promoted the Greek ideal of man as the "rational animal", or the theological virtuesfaith, hope, and lovethat distinguished the Christian ideal of man as a being created in the image of God.[citation needed]

Utilitarian-type theories hold that the end consists in an experience or feeling produced by the action. Hedonism, for example, teaches that this feeling is pleasureeither one's own, as in egoism (the 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes), or everyone's, as in universalistic hedonism, or utilitarianism (the 19th-century English philosophers Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidgwick), with its formula of the "greatest pleasure of the greatest number."[citation needed]

Other utilitarian-type views include the claims that the end of action is survival and growth, as in evolutionary ethics (the 19th-century English philosopher Herbert Spencer); the experience of power, as in despotism; satisfaction and adjustment, as in pragmatism (20th-century American philosophers Ralph Barton Perry and John Dewey); and freedom, as in existentialism (the 20th-century French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre).[citation needed]

The chief problem for eudaemonist theories is to show that leading a life of virtue will also be attended by happinessby the winning of the goods regarded as the chief end of action. That Job should suffer and Socrates and Jesus die while the wicked prosper, then seems unjust. Eudaemonists generally reply that the universe is moral and that, in Socrates' words, "No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death," or, in Jesus' words, "But he who endures to the end will be saved." (Matt 10:22).

Utilitarian theories, on the other hand, must answer the charge that ends do not justify the means. The problem arises in these theories because they tend to separate the achieved ends from the action by which these ends were produced. One implication of utilitarianism is that one's intention in performing an act may include all of its foreseen consequences. The goodness of the intention then reflects the balance of the good and evil of these consequences, with no limits imposed upon it by the nature of the act itselfeven if it be, say, the breaking of a promise or the execution of an innocent man. Utilitarianism, in answering this charge, must show either that what is apparently immoral is not really so or that, if it really is so, then closer examination of the consequences will bring this fact to light. Ideal utilitarianism (G.E. Moore and Hastings Rashdall) tries to meet the difficulty by advocating a plurality of ends and including among them the attainment of virtue itself, which, as John Stuart Mill affirmed, "may be felt a good in itself, and desired as such with as great intensity as any other good."[citation needed]

Since pure consequentialism holds that an action is to be judged solely by its result, most consequentialist theories hold that a deliberate action is no different from a deliberate decision not to act. This contrasts with the "acts and omissions doctrine", which is upheld by some medical ethicists and some religions: it asserts there is a significant moral distinction between acts and deliberate non-actions which lead to the same outcome. This contrast is brought out in issues such as voluntary euthanasia.

One important characteristic of many normative moral theories such as consequentialism is the ability to produce practical moral judgements. At the very least, any moral theory needs to define the standpoint from which the goodness of the consequences are to be determined. What is primarily at stake here is the responsibility of the agent.[citation needed]

One common tactic among consequentialists, particularly those committed to an altruistic (selfless) account of consequentialism, is to employ an ideal, neutral observer from which moral judgements can be made. John Rawls, a critic of utilitarianism, argues that utilitarianism, in common with other forms of consequentialism, relies on the perspective of such an ideal observer.[3] The particular characteristics of this ideal observer can vary from an omniscient observer, who would grasp all the consequences of any action, to an ideally informed observer, who knows as much as could reasonably be expected, but not necessarily all the circumstances or all the possible consequences. Consequentialist theories that adopt this paradigm hold that right action is the action that will bring about the best consequences from this ideal observer's perspective.[citation needed]

In practice, it is very difficult, and at times arguably impossible, to adopt the point of view of an ideal observer. Individual moral agents do not know everything about their particular situations, and thus do not know all the possible consequences of their potential actions. For this reason, some theorists have argued that consequentialist theories can only require agents to choose the best action in line with what they know about the situation.[19] However, if this approach is navely adopted, then moral agents who, for example, recklessly fail to reflect on their situation, and act in a way that brings about terrible results, could be said to be acting in a morally justifiable way. Acting in a situation without first informing oneself of the circumstances of the situation can lead to even the most well-intended actions yielding miserable consequences. As a result, it could be argued that there is a moral imperative for an agent to inform himself as much as possible about a situation before judging the appropriate course of action. This imperative, of course, is derived from consequential thinking: a better-informed agent is able to bring about better consequences.[citation needed]

Moral action always has consequences for certain people or things. Varieties of consequentialism can be differentiated by the beneficiary of the good consequences. That is, one might ask "Consequences for whom?"

A fundamental distinction can be drawn between theories which require that agents act for ends perhaps disconnected from their own interests and drives, and theories which permit that agents act for ends in which they have some personal interest or motivation. These are called "agent-neutral" and "agent-focused" theories respectively.

Agent-neutral consequentialism ignores the specific value a state of affairs has for any particular agent. Thus, in an agent-neutral theory, an actor's personal goals do not count any more than anyone else's goals in evaluating what action the actor should take. Agent-focused consequentialism, on the other hand, focuses on the particular needs of the moral agent. Thus, in an agent-focused account, such as one that Peter Railton outlines, the agent might be concerned with the general welfare, but the agent is more concerned with the immediate welfare of herself and her friends and family.[3]

These two approaches could be reconciled by acknowledging the tension between an agent's interests as an individual and as a member of various groups, and seeking to somehow optimize among all of these interests.[citation needed] For example, it may be meaningful to speak of an action as being good for someone as an individual, but bad for them as a citizen of their town.

Many consequentialist theories may seem primarily concerned with human beings and their relationships with other human beings. However, some philosophers argue that we should not limit our ethical consideration to the interests of human beings alone. Jeremy Bentham, who is regarded as the founder of utilitarianism, argues that animals can experience pleasure and pain, thus demanding that 'non-human animals' should be a serious object of moral concern.[20] More recently, Peter Singer has argued that it is unreasonable that we do not give equal consideration to the interests of animals as to those of human beings when we choose the way we are to treat them.[21] Such equal consideration does not necessarily imply identical treatment of humans and non-humans, any more than it necessarily implies identical treatment of all humans.

One way to divide various consequentialisms is by the types of consequences that are taken to matter most, that is, which consequences count as good states of affairs. According to utilitarianism, a good action is one that results in an increase in pleasure, and the best action is one that results in the most pleasure for the greatest number. Closely related is eudaimonic consequentialism, according to which a full, flourishing life, which may or may not be the same as enjoying a great deal of pleasure, is the ultimate aim. Similarly, one might adopt an aesthetic consequentialism, in which the ultimate aim is to produce beauty. However, one might fix on non-psychological goods as the relevant effect. Thus, one might pursue an increase in material equality or political liberty instead of something like the more ephemeral "pleasure". Other theories adopt a package of several goods, all to be promoted equally.

Consequentialism can also be contrasted with aretaic moral theories such as virtue ethics. Whereas consequentialist theories posit that consequences of action should be the primary focus of our thinking about ethics, virtue ethics insists that it is the character rather than the consequences of actions that should be the focal point. Some virtue ethicists hold that consequentialist theories totally disregard the development and importance of moral character. For example, Philippa Foot argues that consequences in themselves have no ethical content, unless it has been provided by a virtue such as benevolence.[3]

However, consequentialism and virtue ethics need not be entirely antagonistic. Philosopher Iain King has developed an approach which reconciles the two schools.[22] Other consequentialists consider effects on the character of people involved in an action when assessing consequence. Similarly, a consequentialist theory may aim at the maximization of a particular virtue or set of virtues. Finally, following Foot's lead, one might adopt a sort of consequentialism that argues that virtuous activity ultimately produces the best consequences.[citation needed][clarification needed]

The ultimate end is a concept in the moral philosophy of Max Weber, in which individuals act in a faithful, rather than rational, manner.[citation needed]

We must be clear about the fact that all ethically oriented conduct may be guided by one of two fundamentally differing and irreconcilably opposed maxims: conduct can be oriented to an "ethic of ultimate ends" or to an "ethic of responsibility." This is not to say that an ethic of ultimate ends is identical with irresponsibility, or that an ethic of responsibility is identical with unprincipled opportunism. Naturally, nobody says that. However, there is an abysmal contrast between conduct that follows the maxim of an ethic of ultimate endsthat, is in religious terms, "the Christian does rightly and leaves the results with the Lord"and conduct that follows the maxim of an ethic of responsibility, in which case one has to give an account of the foreseeable results of one's action.

Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation, 1918

The term "consequentialism" was coined by[citation needed]G. E. M. Anscombe in her essay "Modern Moral Philosophy" in 1958, to describe what she saw as the central error of certain moral theories, such as those propounded by Mill and Sidgwick.[23]

The phrase and concept of "The end justifies the means" are at least as old as the first century BC. Ovid wrote in his Heroides that Exitus acta probat "The result justifies the deed".

G. E. M. Anscombe objects to consequentialism on the grounds that it does not provide ethical guidance in what one ought to do because there is no distinction between consequences that are foreseen and those that are intended.[23][full citation needed]

Bernard Williams has argued that consequentialism is alienating because it requires moral agents to put too much distance between themselves and their own projects and commitments. Williams argues that consequentialism requires moral agents to take a strictly impersonal view of all actions, since it is only the consequences, and not who produces them, that are said to matter. Williams argues that this demands too much of moral agentssince (he claims) consequentialism demands that they be willing to sacrifice any and all personal projects and commitments in any given circumstance in order to pursue the most beneficent course of action possible. He argues further that consequentialism fails to make sense of intuitions that it can matter whether or not someone is personally the author of a particular consequence. For example, that participating in a crime can matter, even if the crime would have been committed anyway, or would even have been worse, without the agent's participation.[24]

Some consequentialistsmost notably Peter Railtonhave attempted to develop a form of consequentialism that acknowledges and avoids the objections raised by Williams. Railton argues that Williams's criticisms can be avoided by adopting a form of consequentialism in which moral decisions are to be determined by the sort of life that they express. On his account, the agent should choose the sort of life that will, on the whole, produce the best overall effects.[3]

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Consequentialism - Wikipedia