Moral Views Into Non Existence example essay topic

I'm afraid I find Jimbo's answer less than convincing; and he correctly anticipates that I will charge him with circularity. To begin with, what exactly does it mean to say:" Fundamentally, living entities face a single alternative: existence or non-existence". Is this a disguised value judgment, to the effect that "The most morally significant choice to make is whether to live or to die" (I trust that Jimbo will deny this interpretation, so I move on.) Or is it a descriptive statement to the effect that " You need to be alive to make any choices at all, so the choice to live is a kind of causal root of every other choice " If the second, then it is clearly true, but so what It only shows that every value system is going to have to endorse life as a means; asR on Merrill explains in his The Ideas of Ayn Rand this argument shows that life is an ultimate means. But it hardly shows that life is an end-in-itself, much less the only end-in-itself. Indeed, Rand " 's council to suicide in dire situations (I can't place the quote - could it have been in a speech) indicate that she (perhaps unwittingly) council ed using life as a means to ending pain; and hence the latter goal would appear more fundamental. Now Jimbo moves on to his most substantive argument: to ask "Why ought I choose to live" is an example of the "stolen concept fallacy".

To fill in the non-Rand readers, this fallacy is the fallacy of using a concept and treating it as valid while denying the validity of the concepts upon which it depends. One example that I believe Nathaniel Branden offered was the concept "orphan". It would be incoherent for a person to affirm the existence of orphans but deny that parents had ever existed. Another favorite example would be claims like "We know that we know nothing", which claims knowledge while denying it; or "I don't exist", which identifies yourself as existing while denying it.

I have no problem with thi idea in general. What I object to is its specific use in this situation. A person who says "You ought to kill yourself", is not "stealing any concepts. He is merely using the word "ought" as it is used in standard English. For Jimbo to be right, it would have to be the case that somehow, everyone using the word " ought" is covertly saying that it is necessary for survival. And thesis empirically simply false; to say that "You ought to do X" means nothing more or less than that you ought to do it.

If you doubt this, just try this thought experiment: imagine a Nazi says "You ought to kill as many Jews as possible". Can you honestly say that you don " know what he MEANS No - his meaning is clear, which is why you are able to disagree with it. Perhaps Jimbo will say that ordinary English is philosophically unsound; and that the vast majority of ought-statements are arbitrary claims about nothing. The only meaningful ought-statements are ones which indicate a causal relationship between an action (state of affairs, etc.) and the promotion of an agent's life.

It is of course possible to maintain this; but it is highly implausible. I say "You ought not to murder people". Is my meaning unclear Do you have in mind a distinct proposition Does the distinctness of that proposition depend at all upon whether you believe Jimbo's argument that murder is never in your self-interest Upon reflection, I think you will see that Jimbo is attempting to define alternative moral views into non-existence by denying that they mean anything, when their meaning is quite clear. And at the same time, he is attempting to define his own moral views as true by the simple trick of saying, "Well, X is good because "good" just means X". My alternative view is that good means good, and that's all there is today. The concept good is simple, like "yellow".

Moral philosophers " task is not to define this simple concept, but instead to indicate what classes of things possess it. Asking someone to define "yellow" is pointless; but it is quite sensible to ask them what objects are yellow. The worst route would be to say "Well, "yellow" just means square things", and then say that all of the people who doubt your view are stealing the concept of yellow..