Part 27 (2/2)
[”Altruism as Appeas.e.m.e.nt,” TO, Jan. 1966, 5.) Moral cowardice is the necessary consequence of discarding morality as inconsequential. It is the common symptom of all intellectual appeasers. The image of the brute is the symbol of an appeaser's belief in the supremacy of evil, which means-not in conscious terms, but in terms of his quaking, cringing, blinding panic-that when his mind judges a thing to be evil, his emotions proclaim its power, and the more evil, the more powerful.
[Ibid., 4.]
See also APPEAs.e.m.e.nT; COMPROMISE; COURAGE and CONFIDENCE; EVIL; MORAL JUDGMENT; MORALITY.
Moral Judgment. One must never fail to p.r.o.nounce moral judgment.
Nothing can corrupt and disintegrate a culture or a man's character as thoroughly as does the precept of moral agnosticism, the idea that one must never pa.s.s moral judgment on others, that one must be morally tolerant of anything, that the good consists of never distinguis.h.i.+ng good from evil.
It is obvious who profits and who loses by such a precept. It is not justice or equal treatment that you grant to men when you abstain equally from praising men's virtues and from condemning men's vices. When your impartial att.i.tude declares, in effect, that neither the good nor the evil may expect anything from you-whom do you betray and whom do you encourage?
But to p.r.o.nounce moral judgment is an enormous responsibility. To be a judge, one must possess an unimpeachable character: one need not be omniscient or infallible, and it is not an issue of errors of knowledge; one needs an unbreached integrity, that is, the absence of any indulgence in conscious, willful evil. Just as a judge in a court of law may err, when the evidence is inconclusive, but may not evade the evidence available, nor accept bribes, nor allow any personal feeling, emotion, desire or fear to obstruct his mind's judgment of the facts of reality-so every rational person must maintain an equally strict and solemn integrity in the courtroom within his own mind, where the responsibility is more awesome than in a public tribunal, because he, the judge, is the only one to know when he has been impeached.
[”How Does One Lead a Rational Life in an Irrational Society?” VOS, 89; pb 71.]
If people did not indulge in such abject evasions as the claim that some contemptible liar ”means well”-that a mooching b.u.m ”can't help it”-that a juvenile delinquent ”needs love”-that a criminal ”doesn't know any better”-that a power-seeking politician is moved by patriotic concern for ”the public good”-that communists are merely ”agrarian reformers”-the history of the past few decades, or centuries, would have been different.
[Ibid., 93; pb 73.]
The precept: ”Judge not, that ye be not judged” ... is an abdication of moral responsibility: it is .a moral blank check one gives to others in exchange for a moral blank check one expects for oneself.
There is no escape from the fact that men have to make choices; so long as men have to make choices, there is no escape from moral values; so long as moral values are at stake, no moral neutrality is possible. To abstain from condemning a torturer, is to become an accessory to the torture and murder of his victims.
The moral principle to adopt in this issue, is: ”Judge, and be prepared to be judged.”
The opposite of moral neutrality is not a blind, arbitrary, self-righteous condemnation of any idea, action or person that does not fit one's mood, one's memorized slogans or one's snap judgment of the moment. Indiscriminate tolerance and indiscriminate condemnation are not two opposites: they are two variants of the same evasion. To declare that ”everybody is white” or ”everybody is black” or ”everybody is neither white nor black, but gray,” is not a moral judgment, but an escape from the responsibility of moral judgment.
To judge means: to evaluate a given concrete by reference to an abstract principle or standard. It is not an easy task; it is not a task that can be performed automatically by one's feelings, ”instincts” or hunches. It is a task that requires the most precise, the most exacting, the most ruthlessly objective and rational process of thought. It is fairly easy to grasp abstract moral principles; it can be very difficult to apply them to a given situation, particularly when it involves the moral character of another person. When one p.r.o.nounces moral judgment, whether in praise or in blame, one must be prepared to answer ”Why?” and to prove one's case-to oneself and to any rational inquirer.
[Ibid., 91; pb 72.]
The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world. Reality is an absolute, existence is an absolute, a speck of dust is an absolute and so is a human life....
There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist.
[GS, FNI, 216; pb 173.]
Morality is the province of philosophical judgment, not ot psychological diagnosis. Moral judgment must be objective, i.e., based on perceivable, demonstrable facts. A man's moral character must be judged on the basis of his actions, his statements and his conscious convictions-not on the basis of inferences (usually, spurious) about his subconscious.
A man is not to be condemned or excused on the grounds of the state of his subconscious. His psychological problems are his private concern which is not to be paraded in public and not to be made a burden on innocent victims or a hunting ground for poaching psychologizers. Morality demands that one treat and judge men as responsible adults.
This means that one grants a man the respect of a.s.suming that he is conscious of what he says and does, and one judges his statements and actions philosophically, i.e., as what they are-not psychologically, i.e., as leads or clues to some secret, hidden, unconscious meaning. One neither speaks nor listens to people in code.
[”The Psychology of 'Psychologizing,' ”TO, March 1971, 5.]
It is not man's subconscious, but his conscious mind that is subject to his direct control-and to moral judgment. It is a specific individual's conscious mind that one judges (on the basis of objective evidence) in order to judge his moral character.
... The alternative is not: rash, indiscriminate moralizing or cowardly, evasive moral neutrality-i.e., condemnation without knowledge or the refusal to know, in order not to condemn. These are two interchangeable variants of the same motive: escape from the responsibility of cognition and of moral judgment.
[Ibid., 6.]
See also ABSOLUTES; CHARACTER; COMPROMISE; ERRORS of KNOWLEDGE vs. BREACHES of MORALITY; EVASION; EVIL; JUSTICE; MORALITY; MORAL COWARDICE; ”PSYCHOLOGIZING”; RATIONALITY; STANDARD of VALUE; VIRTUE.
Moral.Practical Dichotomy. Your impracticable creed ... [inculcates a] lethal tenet: the belief that the moral and the practical are opposites. Since childhood, you have been running from the terror of a choice you have never dared fully to identify: If the practical, whatever you must practice to exist, whatever works, succeeds, achieves your purpose, whatever brings you food and joy, whatever profits you, is evil- and if the good, the moral, is the impractical, whatever fails, destroys, frustrates, whatever injures you and brings you loss or pain-then your choice is to be moral or to live.
The sole result of that murderous doctrine was to remove morality from life. You grew up to believe that moral laws bear no relation to the job of living, except as an impediment and threat, that man's existence is an amoral jungle where anything goes and anything works. And in that fog of switching definitions which descends upon a frozen mind, you have forgotten that the evils d.a.m.ned by your creed were the virtues required for living, and you have come to believe that actual evils are the practical means of existence. Forgetting that the impractical ”good” was self-sacrifice, you believe that self-esteem is impractical; forgetting that the practical ”evil” was production, you believe that robbery is practical.
Swinging like a helpless branch in the wind of an uncharted moral wilderness, you dare not fully to be evil or fully to live. When you are honest, you feel the resentment of a sucker; when you cheat, you feel terror and shame. When you are happy, your joy is diluted by guilt; when you suffer, your pain is augmented by the feeling that pain is your natural state. You pity the men you admire, you believe they are doomed to fail; you envy the men you hate, you believe they are the masters of existence. You feel disarmed when you come up against a scoundrel: you believe that evil is bound to win, since the moral is the impotent, the impractical.
Morality, to you, is a phantom scarecrow made of duty, of boredom, of punishment, of pain, a cross-breed between the first schoolteacher of your past and the tax collector of your present, a scarecrow standing in a barren field, waving a stick to chase away your pleasures-and pleasure, to you, is a liquor-soggy brain, a mindless s.l.u.t, the stupor of a moron who stakes his cash on some animal's race, since pleasure cannot be moral.
If you identify your actual belief, you will find a triple d.a.m.nation-of yourself, of life, of virtue-in the grotesque conclusion you have reached: you believe that morality is a necessary evil.
[GS, FNI, 214; pb 171.]
See also ALTRUISM; ”DUTY”; EVIL; GOOD, the; MORALITY; ORIGINAL SIN; PLEASURE and PAIN; RATIONALITY; SACRIFICE; SELFISHNESS; STANDARD of VALUE.
Morality. What is morality, or ethics? It is a code of values to guide man's choices and actions-the choices and actions that determine the purpose and the course of his life. Ethics, as a science, deals with discovering and defining such a code.
The first question that has to be answered, as a precondition of any attempt to define, to judge or to accept any specific system of ethics, is: Why does man need a code of values?
Let me stress this. The first question is not: What particular code of values should man accept? The first question is: Does man need values at all-and why?
[”The Objectivist Ethics,” VOS, 2; pb 13.]
Ethics is an objective, metaphysical necessity of man's survival....
I quote from Galt's speech: ”Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice-and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man-by choice; he has to hold his life as a vatue-by choice; he has to learn to sustain it -by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues-by choice. A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.”
The standard of value of the Objectivist ethics-the standard by which one judges what is good or evit-is man's life, or: that which is required for man's survival qua man.
Since reason is man's basic means of survival, that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; that which negates, opposes or destroys it is the evil.
Since everything man needs has to be discovered by his own mind and produced by his own effort, the two essentials of the method of survival proper to a rational being are: thinking and productive work.
[Ibid., 16; pb 23.]
Man must choose his actions, values and goals by the standard of that which is proper to man-in order to achieve, maintain, fulfill and enjoy that ultimate value, that end in itself, which is his own life.
[Ibid., 19; pb 25.]
Life or death is man's only fundamental alternative. To live is his basic act of choice. If he chooses to live, a rational ethics will tell him what principles of action are required to implement his choice. If he does not choose to live, nature will take its course.
[”Causality Versus Duty,” PWNI, 118; pb 99.]
The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.
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