Ari Armstrong's Web Log (Main) | Archives | Terms of Use
Self in Society Roundup 53
Ayn Rand, the trans movement, Biddle and the Objectivist Ethics, Marx, the free market, and more.
Copyright © 2024 by Ari Armstrong
September 10, 2024
ARI on the Trans Movement
Onkar Ghate and Mike Mazza of the Ayn Rand Institute discuss the transgender movement, as distinct from transgender people. Ghate starts off by saying the trans movement is religious or quasi-religious because its self-proclaimed leaders claim to speak for all transgender people. But he doesn't offer specific examples, so I worry he's painting a straw man. Mazza more plausibly claims that the insistence that "trans women are women," full stop and without qualification, counts as a religious-like view. (I have discussed the sense in which a transgender woman is a woman.)
Deep into the conversation (starting at the 44:20 minute marker), Mazza makes his main claim, to the effect that the transgender movement is essential nihilistic. He says, "This is basically a movement about destroying something," whether "the sex binary" or "women and femininity." Ghate favorably references J. K. Rowling's allegation that the transgender movement entails an "attempt here to erase women" (Ghate's words). But what does that even mean? How does one person living as a transgender woman "erase" another woman? If we're going to talk about shared bathroom or sports, the obvious solution is to work around gender, as by coming up with competition categories not based on gender.
I think Ghate and Mazza are on somewhat firmer ground when they worry about the impacts of early hormone treatments and surgeries. They acknowledge it's an empirical matter. They are more willing to trust the Cass Report than I think is warranted. Still, it's nice to see a position skeptical of some of the claims of the transgender movement that is neither religious nor trans-exclusionary.
Biddle on the Objectivist Ethics
Craig Biddle starts and ends his analysis of metaethics this way: "You can pursue values only if you are alive, and you need to pursue them only if you want to live. This observable fact about life, I argued, makes the requirements of human life the standard of moral value."
Biddle commits a basic error. True: You must be alive to pursue values. True: Many of the values we pursue pertain to keeping ourselves alive. But Biddle's unwarranted conclusion is that all of our (proper) values therefore aim at keeping us alive. (See also my book.)
Then Biddle complains about Alex O'Connor's thought experiment about a person living forever (which is akin to Ayn Rand's thought experiment about an immortal robot). In fact, Biddle points out, we do not and cannot live forever.
But then Biddle concedes the point of O'Connor's thought experiment: In fact, not all of morality is about keeping ourselves alive. Biddle says:
I'll answer the question this way: If human beings could be immortal—so there's no way they could die—and yet they still have feelings and desires and can experience pain and joy, I think ethics would still exist—but in a very different way than it does now. "Right" and "wrong" would not be about keeping you alive; it would be about making life the very best it could be. . . . If you were to take away the life-or-death element, I guess you would just be able to enjoy things forever. . . . It would become about maximizing flourishing.
But then the obvious implication is that right now, when we are in fact mortal, morality is not only about keeping ourselves alive. There's more to it than that. That's the point of O'Connor's thought experiment, and it is the point that Biddle concedes despite himself.
Quick Takes
The Visionaries: Four people associated with the Ayn Rand Institute, Ben Bayer, Jason Rheins, Greg Salmieri, and Shoshana Milgram, discuss Wolfram Eilenberger's book The Visionaries, about Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, and Ayn Rand. Team ARI convinced me that I don't need to read the book, but I found the discussion interesting. (It seems like Milgram has been writing a biography of Rand forever, and I hope I get to read it someday!)
The Marxist Movement: Another item from the Ayn Rand Institute to which I've recently listened is Nikos Sotirakopoulos's discussion of aspects of Marxist ideas. "Marxism was appealing despite the mountains of corpses" it produced, says Sotirakopoulos. Marxism was so successful, he says, because it presented itself as a moral movement, an intellectually robust movement, and a "cool" movement supported by artists.
More on Marx: Aaron Ross Powell interviewed Ian Bennett, who is a Marxist. Bennett starts off by talking about the Frankfurt School and how it developed Marxist ideas. Bennett also discusses "critical theory." This is not a good place to start if you want to understand Marx, but I it offers a sense of what a modern Marxist sounds like. Powell offers good push-back on various points. (See also the previous discussion with Powell and Bennett introducing Marx.)
The Jewish Rand: Chris Sciabarra has a long discussion of Alexandra Popoff's book, Ayn Rand: Writing a Gospel of Success, part of Yale's "Jewish Lives" series. No doubt Rand's Jewishness influenced her work in some (minor) ways. However, I worry that Popoff overreaches in trying to make the connections. Consider this odd line: "In Roark’s buildings, '[c]reativity substitutes for the Christian promise of eternal life.'" Eh? Elan Journo and Harry Binswanger are highly dismissive of Popoff's thesis (and they recommend Rand's talk "Global Balkanization"). Incidentally, Sciabarra mentions Aaron Weinacht's book (strangely) arguing that Rand is a Russian nihilist (noting that "nihilism" in this context doesn't mean quite what we Americans expect these days); I found the Wiki discussion of Russian nihilism to be informative.
Childless Cat Lady: As Robert Tracinski reminds us, Rand was one of these.
Caplan on Strategy: Bryan Caplan argues that activists often can be more successful at the state level. I agree, which is why I've been so involved in state-level activism. To an extent, I agree with his general strategy: "Push pro-freedom policies with conservative appeal using conservative rhetoric"; "Push pro-freedom policies with progressive appeal using progressive rhetoric." But there are two potential problems with this. First, you don't have to choose. I've been pretty successful at writing both for conservatives and for progressives (even though I am neither of those things). And a problem with "libertarians" (or liberty advocates) allying themselves too closely with Republicans is that they easily can be tempted to promote anti-liberty measures or to promote superficially good measures for bad reasons. For example, Corey DeAngelis, whom Caplan sites as his model, has allied the school-choice movement (I worry) with evangelicals who are bigoted against LGBTQ people. Long term, that's harmful to the school-choice movement.
Ubiquitous Coercion: Matt Zwolinski rebuts the claim, "There's no such thing as a free market, because all markets involve coercion, just like regulated markets or socialist economies do." The position ignores the legitimacy of certain uses of "defensive" force. A "free market" does not mean a market free from all force; it means a market free from rights-violating forms of force. As Zwolinski puts the point, "Surely there are important differences between the degree and kind of coercion involved" in different political systems. Here is the substantive issue that Zwolinski gets into elsewhere: It will not do to take the current property-rights scheme as an unquestioned given, if the current recognition of property rights depends on substantial past injustices. For example, white settlers, with the active help of the U.S. government, just stole Native lands throughout much of the U.S.
Bunk History: Recently I took my car into the tire shop, and the TV there was playing the History Channel. So . . . there was a program on about history, right? Ha! The program was spinning the tale that aliens somehow directed human evolution. One factoid that supposedly supports this theory is that giants once walked the lands that are now West Virginia. Of course it took me five seconds to find an article debunking the wilder claims about giants.
Kremlin Cash: See Cathy Young's article. I used to respect Dave Rubin. Not anymore. (A tidbit: Some years ago the Ayn Rand Institute paid Rubin to record videos with ARI-affiliated scholars.)
Government Pressure: Government ought not pressure social media companies, or any companies, to remove, silence, or suppress speech. Of course there is no problem with government agents publicly speaking out about problems they see.
IVF: Sushma Subramanian: "The Alabama Supreme Court ruled that embryos created through IVF are children and cannot be destroyed without 'incurring the wrath of a holy God.'" Incidentally, Tim Walz has said his family used IVF, but in fact they used intrauterine insemination (IUI). Regardless, how people conceive properly is none of the government's damn business.
Selfish Gene: Philip Ball rejects the notion that "we can essentially reduce everything in biology to what the genes are doing." He points out that genes themselves are not even alive; they are part of living cells and organisms.
Number of Atheists: Will Gervais estimates that way more people are atheists than surveys suggest, maybe 30 percent of Americans. The problem is that many people tend not to be very self-revealing on surveys about such matters.