http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/common_good.html
The more I research this movement the more destructive this movement appears to me. In my last post I talked about how Ayn Rand's philosophy of "Objectivism" was amoral bordering on immoral. The reasons I gave were from her list of principles, which denied the notion that humans owe any obligation to other human beings other than to not do them direct harm. To her each of us is to be as Cain was to Able; "each man is an end to himself...existing for his own sake" -- and not for the sake of anybody else. Normally when examining a more nuanced discourse I'd have to qualify her words at this point and say "she meant this in such a such a sense, within such and such limits." I can do that with most religious and philosophical teachers. Often they used such absolute language in an ironic fashion, to get attention. But if Ayn Rand meant these things ironically, it doesn't come across in her language. And when one follows her reasoning you see she reinforces this point consistently. No her thinking is consistant: When she admonishes disciples to hold her ideas "with total consistency" she is perfectly consistent. It never occurs to her that that word "total" is the real basis of all totalitarian systems, which are always based on "ideology."
To quote Hannah Arendt:
"An Ideology is quite literally what its name indicate: it is the logic of an idea It subject matter is history, to which the "idea" is applied; the result of this application is not a body of statements about something that is; but the unfolding of a process which is in constant change. The ideology treats the course of events as though it followed the same "law" as the logical exposition of its "idea." Ideologies pretend to know the mysteries of the whole historical process -- the secrets of the past, the intricacies of the present, the uncertainties of the future-- because of the logic inherent in their respective ideas."
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/arendthtml/essayb1.html(source Page 469 in the Chapter "Ideology and Terror" in The Origins of Totalitarianism" by Hannah Arendt)
Like all ideologies, "Objectivism" as taught by Ayn Rand has a total answer for all the questions of life, and this total answer not only justifies selfishness and self interest, it tries to make it Moral and right; and she denies all paths that advocate to the contrary. If one believes her arguments her system of thought becomes a "total"...."philosophical system to guide the course of"[ones] "life." I take her at her word. I'm following her admonishment; Philosophy must be debated. And I'm following in the footsteps of Thom Paine when he critiqued Edmund Burke. Not that I'm as smart as any of them, but somebody has to do it.
However, the problem is that she claims proofs that aren't as obvious when examined as she makes them out to be. I have put "volumes of thought" into trying to make sense of the objectivist system, and I agree with her that philosophy demands logical reasoning. However her point about the importance of making a stand is premature. While theoretical philosophy needs only internal consistency (To answer the question do the conclusions flow from the premises), practical philosophy fairly demands that a person be able to summarize a concept in understandable terms. To be able to stand on one foot and say "The first rule of Medicine is "Do no harm", "now go study." It is wrong to say that "philosophy cannot be discussed while standing on one foot", that is too trite an answer. Yes, to thoroughly explicate systems of philosophy one has to sit at the feet of masters and ask them questions, but no any good philosophy worth its salt can be summarized. And it should be able to withstand those questions. Not only must the logic be sound, but the premises have to be even more sound. Philosophy has to stand on its premises, and those premises better be consistent.
And philosophy fairly demands that one be able to look at the subject from all sides. That doesn't mean one has to agree with all sides. It means that to establish valid principles those have to be either reasonable a-priori and something that seems obvious to the student, or those principles have to derive from deductive and inductive reasoning from some valid source. One has to be able to deconstruct, reconstruct, and figure out where premises are faulty and systems go wrong of the various alternatives in order to come up with the best alternatives for the subject. One cannot simply dismiss, say democracy, as "totalitarianism" without a better argument than that the Athenians killed Socrates. That is a cheap argument justifying a cheap conclusion. Yet somehow in the absence of criticism it stands to this day and is repeated by many otherwise intelligent people as if it were gospel truth.
On the other hand the purpose of all this criticism is not to end up on "both sides of every fence," but to inject clarity into the eventual arguments and find resolution of the underlying concepts. Ayn Rand was a lady who rebelled at the disorder in the "liberal" discourse of her day. She sought a total philosophical system. Strangely, to me, her philosophy is totalitarian. She presents a total solution that builds a box around ideology and says that because A is true, B must not be true. This might have made sense if A and B were opposite propositions, or mutually exclusive notions. But they aren't.
And this becomes the basis for her attack on the core concept of a "common good."
"The tribal notion of “the common good” has served as the moral justification of most social systems—and of all tyrannies—in history. The degree of a society’s enslavement or freedom corresponded to the degree to which that tribal slogan was invoked or ignored."
First, while Democratic thinkers of the enlightenment traced the notion of the common good back to the original state of Mankind's existence, which certainly was tribal. The concept of "common good" is too sophisticated a notion to be dismissed as "tribal" simply because it has been, can be, and therefore will be, misused by tyrannies. Another of her fallacies is that she consistantly rejects concepts because they've been misused in the past. She is arbitrary in this argument. Fascists used similar arguments to dismiss concepts they didn't like as myths. They also elevated lies as "new" myths when they were convenient for their cause. That fascists could use media such as newspaper, film, or radio broadcasts as a means to power doesn't invalidate newspapers, film or radio as mediums of sharing information. That Auschwitz used IBM Hollerith cards (maintained by IBM technicians) to track people destined for the gas chambers doesn't invalidate the importance of computers. It may be a critique of the corporate culture of 1930's IBM, but it is in no way a critique of media, computers, or even of modern methods of production. Her arguments are equally cheap here.
On the other hand, there are notions that do deserve to be trashed. For example, the notion of the inevitability of the strong ruling the weak was a foundation of fascism. Now that notion degraded the notion of "common good" to a ploy used to rule the masses. Do we discard Darwinism and elevate "common good?" or Do we discard words like "freedom" because Hitler put "Work Makes Free" on the entrance to Auschwitz? This is absurd.
"“The common good” (or “the public interest”) is an undefined and undefinable concept"....
Now this continues an argument from Schumpeter that there is no such thing as the common good. Maybe this reflects a central European bias, but to me this makes no sense. I can can find pretty good definitions all over the place. This one comes from answers.com: "The good which is common to—that is, shared by—a number of persons; or, the good of a collectivity which cannot be disaggregated." In either case the term in English belongs to a family of terms with both a common history and a common meaning, all related to the concept of a commons. A commons is an entity whose ownership/rule cannot be effectively and justly disaggregated. A common good as a specific thing is a thing that is so important to human existence that to divide it and give ownership of it to a single individual would be a crime and fit the very definition of tyranny.
Certainly it can be proved by negative proof. That is the opposite of a common good is a good, or basket of goods that belong to one person. Say we are talking about food. Imagine one person owns all the food in the world. Like Joseph working for Pharoah buying up grain in Egypt and then selling it during a famine. Everyone else becomes a slave to that person. Obviously food as an aggregate is a "common good." However, food in the particular has to be acquired through exchange. It might start out as one person's property but soon gets sold down a chain of custody until a wheat field is divided up into cakes, cereal breakfast, and animal fodder, which eventually becomes steaks. Some things are held as common goods because the people of a jurisdiction decide collectively to make them available in a collective manner. Such as when someone creates a free market and invites all merchants to sell their goods. The market is a commons. The individual stalls are "disaggregated" properties. The streets and byways are commons, the vendors sit on little properties, which they usually have to rent from some landlord.
"there is no such entity as “the tribe” or “the public”; the tribe (or the public or society) is only a number of individual men."
This kind of absurd reasoning could be applied to the cells in our body. "There is no Ayn Rand" there is only a set of bones that used to belong to a collective of cells and structures that were arbitrarly labeled a woman named Ayn Rand." Do you see the absurdity? The common good is a concept that applies as a function of humans creating communities. When someone creates a company, the stockholders, CEO and board act for the common good. How they define the common good depends on whether they are thinking of themselves, the benefit of the board, the benefit of the stockholders, or of the company as a whole. The borders may shift with individual concept, but they are very real. If a CEO loses his job, the justification is usually that he didn't act in the interest of the shareholders. The shareholders is a "commons" of all the people who own voting shares in the company. These are legally definable terms. They apply to self defined groups of people. People get together for a common purpose, if only to fleece the public around them, or to sell copies of "Atlas Shrugged." When they do so they form a commons and act for the common good of that commons.
Where the concept gets slippery is when one starts talking about the aggregate of the whole. If it is difficult for Objectivists to be objective about their membership in abstract commons such as a company or a club, it gets even harder for them to come together to support such gigantic commons as the United States; which is the commons of the citizens of the United States (and sometimes includes non-citizens as well). When one goes from specific to abstract specifics lose their specificity. The commons "the United States" is harder to define than the commons of a big corporation. That definition may be a legal one, but it is extremely important. If a good is not worthy of belonging to a commons than it can be disaggregated. If it is worthy of belonging to a commons such as a company, then it may well actually be a commons that ought to belong to a larger entity. This is a legal issue and an issue of justice. Justice in a sense is the definition and adjudication of boundaries. Defining and then dividing up properties that are really difficult to disaggregate is what governing is about.
"Nothing can be good for the tribe as such; “good” and “value” pertain only to a living organism—to an individual living organism—not to a disembodied aggregate of relationships."
Really, we see the principle of the commons at work in organisms and social animals all the time. When the Spartans who defended the pass at Thermoplie died in order to buy the Athenians and Spartans time to mount a defense of their cities. Individually their death was a waste of good genetic material and human life. Yet for the "tribe" -- for the Athenians and Spartans, that death was immensely important. In a sense humanity is like a living organism in that no matter how much we fight and struggle to serve only ourselves and live forever, it ain't going to happen. We end up becoming food for the worms anyway. Like Ayn Rand says herself "Reality exists as an objective absolute—facts are facts, independent of man’s feelings, wishes, hopes or fears." And reality is, we are part of collectives, part of tribes, part of nations. Ayn Rand could have gone to Nazi Germany and presented herself as a good Nazi, not a Jew, and Hitler still would have gassed her. We don't get to define our membership in bodies, and morally we owe who we are to our family membership, to our relations, and to our "tribal" affiliations. The common good doesn't apply to a "disembodied aggregate of relationships" it applies to ongoing enterprises of family, corporate and communal affiliations. To deny this is as absurd as for a single cell to deny that it is part of a living body, and as cancerous.
For that reason, to assert that:
"“The common good” is a meaningless concept, unless taken literally,..
...is an absurd assertion. On the contrary the common good only takes it meaning as people take abstract principle and apply it specifically in terms of concrete associations of people and concrete means and ends. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution both invoke the common good of the Nation as their rationale for their principles of association. The "General Welfare" is only the common good of the people as a whole. The "common defense" of the nation is necessary to the survival and health not only of the individuals of the country, but the abstract future generations of that nation. The common good is an abstraction from the literal good of the collective of the people. But it is a meaningful abstraction because the whole is more than the sum of the parts. Nations have attributes associated with them that may or may not apply to their individual members. Collectives have missions that give their members meaning and lead them to do great things. It's not just the objective of making money that guides an athlete or drives an inventor. It is this very abstract notion of the "common good" that is only degraded if it is taken literally only to be debased.
"[If taken literally]...in which case its only possible meaning is: the sum of the good of all the individual men involved. But in that case, the concept is meaningless as a moral criterion: it leaves open the question of what is the good of individual men and how does one determine it?"
Ayn Rand debases her own argument by debasing the example. If the common good is more than the sum of the individual good, then her whole argument falls apart. Yet, how often do we see good deeds, good actions, multiplied instead of being merely additive? One of the depressing facts of modern life was when a mathematician, Vilfredo discovered just how the possession of wealth in itself multiplies the odds of aggrandizing more wealth. This is both a negative and a positive reality. We are all more than the sum of our cells and cell mass. We are at the very least the multiple of our thoughts words and deeds. To debase the concept of commons by reducing its definition to a mere sum, and then to remove the concept of the common good from the good of individuals, is to reduce the very thing from life that gives most of us our sense of meaning.
"It is not, however, in its literal meaning that that concept is generally used. It is accepted precisely for its elastic, undefinable, mystical character which serves, not as a moral guide, but as an escape from morality. Since the good is not applicable to the disembodied, it becomes a moral blank check for those who attempt to embody it."
I love this word play that somehow the "common good" is an "escape from morality". Again, yes, the concept of the common good is generally and frequently misused. Ayn Rand is misusing it here. It's not just tyrants and demagogues, who misuse the term, it is also other miscreants and con artists. Appeals to the common good are not an "escape from morality," they are merely a means by which con artists try to convince people that their own aims are somehow in the common good. Mussolini appealed to Italians sense that they were a people with a continuity of identity back to the Roman Empire. Okay, so far, but then he used that sense of identity to justify repression, attempts to create colonies, and wars. Does Ayn Rand really think it was in Itally's "common good" to invade Ethiopia? Again the misuse of a term is not invalidation of the term. This attempt at reductio ad absurdum worked for her however, because people like Mussolini, Hitler and Lenin, were fresh on her mind when she was writing.
"When “the common good” of a society is regarded as something apart from and superior to the individual good of its members, it means that the good of some men takes precedence over the good of others, with those others consigned to the status of sacrificial animals.
I always think of the common good as the derivative of the Sum of the good of an entity from past to infinite future taken at a moment or interval of time. So to me this statement strikes me as particularly absurd. When my relatives fight for their country in some foreign land, or other relatives demonstrate against them fighting, both of them are thinking of unborn future generations, of the children they are raising at home, and of their families and futures. It's not always a matter of some people taking precedence over others. Where it becomes that is in the bait and switch with which demagogues and tyrants use the term common good to justify policies that aim to improve their own good. However, denying the concept of "common good" doesn't stop demagogues and tyrants from pursuing their factional common good. The fact is that the "common good" usually is a better deal than the good a single individual can get on their own effort. It's not additive, it often is multiplicative. And the line in most prayers about heroes is often true; "That there sacrifice wasn't in vain."
Ayn Rand fails to understand that the elitist philosophy she's proposing is at this stage no longer amoral but immoral.
It is tacitly assumed, in such cases, that “the common good” means “the good of the majority” as against the minority or the individual.
Here is where zero sum thinking destroys the integrity of her argument. If the common good doesn't mean the good of the majority, then it is being used to benefit a minority or an individual. In that situation the common good is not the common good anymore. The threshold for "common good" is something that benefits the majority, but the objective of "common good" is the good of everyone. This is definitional. The only "tacit assumption" here is hers. For most of us we see the "common good" as for the good of everybody, including those who may fight kicking and screaming against efforts that in the end will benefit them too. It's not "common good" if it only benefits the majority. A common thing is not a thing that can be disaggregated. Like a country, even if it is owned by a King or a Queen, it remains a commonwealth and the people in that commonwealth have rights to property, freedom, and life. This argument of hers doesn't hold up to simple logic. If the common good doesn't apply to "the good of the majority" then it won't apply to the good of the minority or the good of the individual. On the other hand, if there is no "common good" then the good of the individual can take precedence over the good of the majority, and the good of the minority over the individual and the majority. If the only choices are between the interests of individuals and every political decision is a zero sum game, -- there is no common good. Then every political decision is a battle in which only self interest provides a guide. That guide cannot endure as a moral virtue. On the contrary, without the concept of a common good, it is "every man for himself" and each family "to their own tents." There cannot be rational and humane government without the concept of the common good, and the fact that the term and concept are abused does not invalidate the concept.
Observe the significant fact that that assumption is tacit: even the most collectivized mentalities seem to sense the impossibility of justifying it morally.
There is a simple reason for that, any system of philosophy that denies obvious realities of human needs, creates a system of fiction that degrades both moral concept and common sense. When the appeal to the common good becomes a lie that doesn't deny the concept of common good, it just debases it and degrades it. It is just a giving into the dark-side of the force of human enterprise.
But “the good of the majority,” too, is only a pretense and a delusion: since, in fact, the violation of an individual’s rights means the abrogation of all rights, it delivers the helpless majority into the power of any gang that proclaims itself to be “the voice of society” and proceeds to rule by means of physical force, until deposed by another gang employing the same means."
Unfortunately the converse is true. Both the denial of and the debasement of the concept of the "common good" becomes a way for factions to manipulate majorities and eventually impose the will of the minority on the majority. If the common good is a non existent thing, or an arbitrary proposition, then the will of the majority soon becomes what the majority faction (or an ever decreasing elemental) decides it is. Abuse is justified by "ends" that will never arrive. Abuse leads to conflict which leads to looting. This in turn leads to the transfer of wealth and power that decreases the total wealth available to society but increases the percentage available to the looters and destroyers. That is what happened with Leninism implicitly and has happened in various forms where-ever factionalism replaced the notion that there is a greater good and that the collective as a whole can be bettered through collective action. Ever smaller circles of liars fed in the name of idealized ends and fear of "barbarians at the gates." This consumed first the more idealistic among them, and later anyone who looked like they might someday become a threat, until fear replaced idealism as a motivation for conversation. At this point nobody really believed what they were saying. The lack of integrity of communism thus escalated itself until the only reality was people feathering their own nests while mouthing platitudes. Communism eventually imploded from the hollowness and debasement of its own basic principles. The ends never justify the means used to attain them, because means are integral to improvement of a system. Unless those means can justify themselves without harm to those employing them or who are affected by them they act at odds with the ends they are meant to promote. To summarize; games that turn into Zero Sum end up destroying the sum. This is demonstrated by historical example. Ayn Rand's denial of the concept of the commons, of the common good, simply justifies turning politics into a zero sum game.
"If one begins by defining the good of individual men, one will accept as proper only a society in which that good is achieved and achievable.
Is this really true? Does the good of the individual provide the sum of the duties and obligations, benefits and joys, that an individual enjoys? Think about it in ones own life. Do we get married solely for our own benefit? Do we have children solely for that reaon? No, we find joy and happiness from donating/giving to others our time and sharing our goods with others. Man does not live by bread alone. On the contrary the place to begin to define the good of society is with the family: Tribes are an extension of family, Nations of Tribes. We only need to assert rights to property if there are other people around. Our duties and obligations all flow from our desire to both please ourselves and please others. If we start with the individual needs, even there there comes eventually the need for community, for love, for sex, for approval. The common good is derived from the reality that the sum of our efforts is more than us as individuals. Families are more than current generations. Our boundaries and properties are not only lateral (on all sides of us) but also temporal. We dream of a world that is better for our children, a world where the common good we strive for now will be realized. Our individual integrity is similar to the common good. The integrity of a society is the extent to which it actualizes the concept of the common good. The extent to which the "sum is greater than the parts" of that society.
Ayn Rand is profoundly and disturbingly wrong. "No man is an Island, A rock in the mare." John Dunne was right, not her. She was so taken aback by the lies of the Soviet Union that she invented her own lies in her generalization of the degraded ideas of communism to liberal democracies and common society.
But if one begins by accepting “the common good” as an axiom and regarding individual good as its possible but not necessary consequence (not necessary in any particular case), one ends up with such a gruesome absurdity as Soviet Russia, a country professedly dedicated to “the common good,” where, with the exception of a minuscule clique of rulers, the entire population has existed in subhuman misery for over two generations."
So, because the Soviets degraded the concept, Objectivists would dispense with it entirely?
Posted by cholte at December 22, 2009 07:22 PM