Following my March 12, 2008 talk at the University of Virginia, “Atlas Shrugged and Ayn Rand’s Morality of Egoism,” an attendee named Alexander Cohen posted a pack of half-truths and outright lies about me on his blog. Anyone familiar with my work, or with the philosophy I advocate, will recognize that Cohen’s claims are false; but, for the sake of those who are unfamiliar with my work and positions, I want to set the record straight. Here is the full text of Cohen’s post (in block-quote format) interspersed with my comments and corrections:
Craig Biddle visits Grounds
I’ve had the honor of being told I’m not an Objectivist by no less than Yaron Brook, but now Craig Biddle, also of ARI, has gone one better: I’m dishonest.
Cohen is dishonest, as he amply demonstrated first in our post-talk discussion and again in his blog post about it.
Ironically, both times were at meals associated with guest talks hosted by clubs of which I was a leader.
Cohen, a lawyer and a PhD candidate in philosophy, never informed me that he was a “leader” of the UVA club that hosted my talk—and I have confirmed that he is indeed not a leader of the club.
His evidence? A philosophical argument in which I pushed him to defend his points and, when he raised David Kelley’s name in order to use it as an expression of disapproval, I refused to sanction his insult.
Nonsense. After attending my talk, Cohen, a self-proclaimed “scholar” on Ayn Rand’s theory of rights, followed me and a few students to a restaurant, where he made several attempts to engage me in debate. After multiple unsuccessful attempts to support such absurd claims as the notion that, according to Objectivism, rights are not moral principles but only political principles, Cohen latched on to a point I had made about charity during the Q&A of my talk. I had explained that a person—given a certain degree of wealth and a certain hierarchy of values—could egoistically give charity to innocently helpless strangers, such as mentally retarded children. Cohen disputed that this could be done “merely” in accordance with the virtues identified by Ayn Rand—because, he insisted, one would get nothing in return for such charity. I explained that one most certainly could get something in return for it: the personal satisfaction that one had made the lives of innocently helpless people easier and happier. I explained that such charity—providing that it does not involve a sacrifice, and providing that one gets some spiritual value from it—can be egoistic. Legitimate values, I explained, can come in many different forms; the only requirement is that they are life-serving and non-sacrificial with respect to one’s value hierarchy.
Cohen would have none of it. He insisted that my claim that one can selfishly give charity to strangers was illogical; he maintained that a fully rational, egoistic hierarchy of values could not include giving charity to mentally retarded children. I told him that if he couldn’t see that one can receive legitimate spiritual value from such an act, that was his problem, and I couldn’t help him. But Cohen continued vociferously to deny the possibility of such a value hierarchy, and he insisted that such charity could only be an act of “benevolence”—which, he wanted to argue, is a virtue.
With that clue, I asked Cohen if he was coming from the perspective of David Kelley, and he affirmed that he was. Continuing to give him the benefit of the doubt, I proceeded to explain briefly why benevolence cannot be a virtue and is not necessary to defend the possibility of egoistically giving charity to innocent helpless strangers.
I explained that benevolence cannot be a virtue because there are no facts that give rise to a general truth that “one should always be nice to people.” I explained that a so-called principle of benevolence would contradict the actual principle of justice—the general truth that one must judge people according to the available and relevant facts and treat them accordingly, as they deserve to be treated. Some people are rotten; some are evil—such people don’t deserve kindness.
But, Cohen persisted, what about the retarded kids who don’t deserve your charity?
I replied that the issue in that case is not their desert but one’s own hierarchy of values. Among other things, I explained that the principle that evidence is the standard of knowledge means that people should be considered morally innocent and treated accordingly unless there is some evidence that they are morally guilty. I explained that this basic principle of logic—in conjunction with a certain degree of wealth and a certain hierarchy of values—makes such egoistic charity possible. If a morally innocent person is suffering from circumstances he could not have avoided, and if my value hierarchy and financial situation are such that I will gain spiritual satisfaction by assisting him, then it is perfectly selfish for me to assist him.
Unmoved by my explanations, Cohen continued to protest, and I repeated that if he couldn’t see the possibility of an egoistic justification for such acts of charity, then I couldn’t help him. But he wouldn’t let it rest. He continued to ask how an egoist embracing only Rand’s seven virtues could give such charity—as if I hadn’t already answered that.
It was becoming increasingly clear that Cohen was not interested in getting to the truth of the matter. He was interested only in upholding the fantasy that “benevolence is a virtue” and the notion that this so-called “virtue” must be embraced to justify such charity. It was becoming increasingly clear that evidence and logic mean nothing to Cohen.
Biddle argued that the negative side of a right is defended adequately by affirming the positive and then “inverting” it.
(This claim pertains to a part of the discussion that Cohen and I had had prior to the part concerning charity and benevolence, so I have no idea why he has placed it at this point in his screed; but, then, I’m not vouching for his organizational acumen.)
I did not say that “the negative side of a right is defended adequately by affirming the positive and then ‘inverting’ it.” I said that the positive and negative forms of a principle are essentially the same principle—and that one can and occasionally must obvert (not “invert”) a principle from positive form to negative form (or vice versa) in order to grasp its full meaning and proper application.
He analogized this to deriving the principle that A cannot be ~A from the principle that A is A. I do not see that the analogy holds,
It is not an analogy; it is an application of the exact same principle—the principle of obversion, which, simply stated, is the idea that the form of a principle can be changed from positive to negative (or vice versa) while retaining its substance and validity. Just as the law of identity (A thing is what it is) obverts to the law of non-contradiction (A thing cannot be what it is not), and just as the law of causality can be stated either in positive form (A thing must act in accordance with its nature) or negative form (A thing cannot act in contradiction to its nature), so the moral principle regarding man’s need of freedom can be stated in the positive (A person morally must be free to act on his judgment) or obverted to the negative (A person morally must not be forced to act against his judgment). But Cohen wouldn’t have any of this, either.
and I am fairly confident that if I take the time to work it through I will be able to show why. A law of deductive logic cannot get us from “I need others to abstain from doing certain things to me” to “I must never do those things to others.”*
The use of deductive logic is just one aspect of applying a principle; other aspects include: recognizing the nature of a principle (which Cohen evidently refuses to do), holding and not dropping the relevant context (which Cohen evidently is unwilling to do), and so on.
The former is justified by my needs, and the latter must be as well.
The latter is justified by one’s needs: One can’t have one’s principle of individual rights and eat it too. But one cannot see this if one refuses to think in principles.
(My view is that rights are binding as political principles: that we cannot justify an absolute moral prohibition on rights-violation, only a legal prohibition; that it is not always the case that if I initiate force I harm myself, but that it is always the case that I need a government that will prosecute the initiation of force. Moreover, I hold that the violence in Rand’s fiction is consonant with my view, but not with the view that rights are prohibitions directly binding on the individual.)
Cohen has a right to maintain his wrong view—so long as he doesn’t violate anyone’s rights. But beware: He does not think he has any moral responsibility to respect your rights, and I suggest taking him at his word here.
Biddle’s other defense of rights as morally binding principles rested on universalizability: He holds that a principle must be universalizable, and that affirming the positive side of rights without the negative means affirming a contradiction.
Finally, Cohen states a truth: I did say that.
This, so far as I can tell, incorporates Kantianism into Objectivism: It says I must not do something merely because I can’t will that everyone else do the same thing--in this case, that I mustn’t initiate force merely because I could not will that everyone else initiate force.
Just because Kant employed the word “universalizablity” in his irrational ethics doesn’t mean that the concept of “universalizability” is irrational or Kantian. Universalizability is an objective characteristic of all valid moral principles (which is one reason why neither benevolence nor tolerance can be a virtue). A person morally must not initiate force against others because to do so is to violate the moral principle that initiating force is anti-life. Cohen’s refusal to recognize this has no bearing on the truth of the matter; it does, however, say a lot about him.
But such a morality would be a morality of limited self-interest, where the limits come, not from the facts of reality, but from an a priori concept of what principles are--a concept that is, in essence, a weakened version of Kant’s categorical imperative. (It is weakened in that it affirms only negative, not positive, duties, and thus demands only that we limit self-interest according to duty, not that we chuck self-interest and act only on duty.)
So far as I can tell, and as always I invite counterarguments, Biddle’s defense of rights as prohibitions directly applicable to the individual is both philosophically wrong (i.e. not true) and historically wrong (contrary to Rand’s view). But Biddle said that if I didn’t grasp that he was right, he wouldn’t be able to help me.
I stand by my clearly sensible claim.
He said a few other things too the defense of which I do not see. He said he’d pay more for meat from animals that were humanely treated,
I did not say “humanely treated”; I said that I would pay a little more for meat if I knew that the animal from which it came was killed painlessly vs. being killed painfully—and my point was simply that inflicting unnecessary pain on animals is irrational. Cohen apparently disagrees.
and that he’d shun those who derive entertainment from sports that involve animal suffering.
I said intentional animal suffering—and I would.
He said it was good to donate money to those who cannot do any good, so long as one derives subjective pleasure from it.
I said no such thing.
Perhaps the two most surprising things: He sharply criticized me for referring to the seven virtues enumerated in Galt’s Speech and The Objectivist Ethics as “canonical.”
In the context of his rant, Cohen meant by “canonical” that to limit Ayn Rand’s philosophy to principles she actually specified and advocated is to be Church-like. That Cohen found my objection to that “surprising” is rather telling.
And he insisted that no one was ever “excommunicated” and that it was a vicious slander on the part of Kelley, Bidinotto et al. to say otherwise.
It certainly is a vicious slander to claim that anyone was “excommunicated” from the Objectivist movement (whatever that means). I asked Cohen to give me an example of someone being “excommunicated” along with some evidence to support it. He said: “How about ‘Fact and Value’”? To which I replied: “Can you be more specific?” To which he replied: “I can’t recall the details right now.”
A little while later, he said that if I had read the statements from both sides at the time of the schism and chosen TAS, I was dishonest and not worth talking to. I told him that he ought to back up the charge of dishonesty before the Honor Committee. He said I wasn’t worth his time; I called him coward; he dismissed me from the table.
I did not call Cohen dishonest for having “chosen TAS” (such a mistake could have been made innocently); I called him dishonest for failing repeatedly to grasp relatively simple points I made with perfect clarity throughout the course of the evening. A person can maintain an incorrect position in the face of evidence to the contrary for only so long before he is justly deemed dishonest. My error, if I made one, was in not recognizing Cohen’s dishonesty earlier; in retrospect, the evidence was sufficient an hour prior to my declaration.
It seems to me it would be counterproductive at this point to demand that no further ARI people come to U.Va. However, I suspect it may be unnecessary.
I have no idea what Cohen is trying to say there.
*Clarification: I do not deny the value of deductive logic in ethics. I deny that this particular logical deduction is valid.
I have no comment on that alleged clarification.
As I said earlier, I had never heard of Cohen before this encounter; and, as you can imagine, I hope never to be bothered by him again. If he responds to this response, I will not reply. I will let Cohen’s character, made clear by this exchange, stand as sufficient grounds for doubting whatever nonsense or lies he spews about me (or others) in the future.
—Craig Biddle, March 2008
Copyright ©2008 Craig Biddle