Grasp the Nettle

Lots of people
1) do things in computer role-playing games they wouldn’t actually do, for moral reasons (example: murdering a village full of innocents with magical fire)
2) do things in sexual fantasies they wouldn’t actually do, for moral reasons (example: asserting control over another human being through physical violence)
3) imagine things in their daily lives they wouldn’t actually do (example: punching a cashier in the face for being obnoxious)

Some of these might actually be morally problematic, depending on the reason why they seem interesting.

Murdering a village full of innocents in an RPG might make getting money for better armor easier. If done for this utilitarian purpose, it seems fine, as the villagers aren’t actually people.
However, if it is done for the “thrill” of hurting things which seem similar to people, it is bad. It is not bad because it makes you more likely to commit murderous acts, necessarily (a silly inference often made by mainstream TV reporting on video games), but because it encourages a theory that says being a terrifying badass with the capacity to hurt people is a good/fun thing, which has implications for other areas.

Analogous might be dealing with insects. If you kill an insect for the utilitarian reason of its annoyance, there’s not an issue — insects are annoying and have no moral status. However, if you kill it and enjoy it because you enjoy imagining it as a sort of anthropomorphized creature upon whom you are inflicting great suffering … well, that’s pretty fucked up. (Additionally, there’s the possibility of testing out theories that are not strictly utilitarian nor bad that would be ok — like dissection)

Similarly, with sex stuff, there are similar issues raised. People should want to engage in sex with people who are confident, self-assured, assertive, thoughtful, calm, and happy, because that is the natural disposition of a healthy, productive human being. If you want to be a plaything, or have a plaything, there is some theory in your mind which deserves further investigation. These theories are not consequence-free, and can often cause you to act in non-autonomy-respecting or non-assertive ways (depending on which side you fall on) in other areas of your life, or at least make it seem like a good idea to do that. You’re encouraging a theory / developing a habit of mind which associates being dominant or submissive with extreme happiness and pleasure. It’s unsurprising that this might prove problematic.

While people shouldn’t repress their sexual desires (conservative/traditional morality is bad in this sense), neither should they treat all desires as equivalent morally (modern/progressive/liberal morality is bad in this sense). If one has certain desires, like being in a dominant role relative to other human beings, then one should question why this is the case, for the reasons discussed above. Sometimes, engaging in the sex act itself (or in the playing of an RPG in order to test out theories about hurting NPC villagers, as in the above example) can be useful in figuring out what is appealing about something — the reasons why things are appealing are difficult to figure out, and direct emotional experience can be one helpful avenue. But one has to actually subject one’s theories to criticism, and not fall into the pitfall of avoiding criticism due to the irrational fear that one is fundamentally “bad” because one’s values, sexual or otherwise, may have some problems.

The last example is likely the most common. Most have experienced imaginary rage-violence at some perceived slight of social niceness. And again, the overwhelming majority will never actually engage in violence as a result of such fantasy. But what they will do is encourage the theory, which is itself giving rise to the fantasy in the first place and can be further entrenched by emotional reinforcement and repetition, that imaginary rage-induced-violence is a useful coping device for stress. This is fundamentally flawed — one should care less about social slights, and develop better theories for dealing with emotions.

Came across this article a while ago, which claims that women have more orgasms if partners are wealthier according to an analysis they did of a survey.

The link between enjoyment of sex and partner’s wealth was statistically significant even when they took into account other factors such as age, education, happiness, the length of relationship and health. The scientists say the findings could be explained by bias in the study – that women who have frequent orgasms tend to overestimate their partner’s income, or that women with ‘high powered’ partners exaggerate how much they enjoy sex. ‘While we cannot rule out reporting bias, we note that the interviews took place away from the respondents’ home, without their partner present and with the respondents able to input their responses directly into the computer if they so wished,’ Dr Pollet said. It is also possible that women who are highly susceptible to orgasms select partners who are wealthy, he said. He added: ‘The third interpretation is that more desirable mates cause women to experience more orgasms,’ he said. If this is true, a woman’s ‘capacity for orgasm’ could have evolved to help her discriminate between males on the basis of their quality, he added. The link between enjoyment of sex and wealth has also been found in studies in Germany and America. Evolutionary biologists argue that every aspect of sex – from courtship to the quality of orgasms – is influenced by millions of years of evolution. Although many people find the idea that women enjoy sex more with rich partners offensive, some biologists argue that the instinct makes evolutionary sense. Women have to invest so much time and personal risk into each baby, it is crucial that they get the most successful and healthy partner so they can to improve the chances of their own DNA being passed on. A man, in contrast, can father hundreds, or even thousands, of babies in a lifetime and so invests less in each child. That means they do not have to be so choosy about whether their partner is socially successful. The result of this battle of the sexes is that women are more influenced by the social status, intelligence, quick wits and success of a partner than men are, scientists argue. Wealth is usually an obvious indicator of success.

Question: suppose I demonstrate that a woman exists who thinks anyone who “hoards excess wealth” is immoral, and finds sex with them repulsive. Does this refute a theory of biologically-driven sexual attraction which (somehow?) discriminates for wealth, while still being compatible with a theory that explains sexual attraction through memes? If not, why?

Another question: how would the hypothesized “instinct” even work? When one is rich, does one emit a pheromone of some kind?

Several banks are repaying their government bailout money, partially so they don’t have to abide by executive pay limits which they say reduces their competitiveness. The President is telling banks that having benefited from the help of U.S. taxpayers, they have to lend more.

Article in pertinent part:

President Obama told some of the nation’s top bankers Monday that they need to explore “every responsible way” to make more loans.

BARACK OBAMA: “America’s banks received extraordinary assistance from American taxpayers to rebuild their industry. And now that they’re back on their feet, we expect extraordinary commitment from them to help rebuild the economy.”

Earlier, he criticized what he called “fat-cat bankers on Wall Street.”

Major banks have been doing well since the worst of the financial crisis shook Wall Street more than a year ago. Banks including Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo have recently announced plans to repay government rescue money.

First, does the President think he knows more about the optimal rate of lending then the banks? His statement that they need to explore “every responsible way” to make more loans suggests this interpretation. As profit-making enterprises, wouldn’t we assume that they were already doing this, and that the current diminution in lending is merely the most “responsible” reaction to a time of great economic uncertainty? If Obama believes he has a better handle on the responsible rate of lending than the banks, that would be pretty extraordinary arrogance, considering the example of the massive, systematic failure to ascertain the appropriate rate of lending in the housing market by pretty much every market actor in the past few years. Banks, consumers, and investors failed to adequately gauge the risk of home lending for the better part of a decade — obviously, this indicates that accurate risk assessments of lending are an easy problem which the President should be able to do better than everybody! Obama would hardly be the first political leader who thinks he is smarter than and can do better than every market actor combined, of course. It is still disturbing.

On the other hand, perhaps he is not that arrogant, and just sees the banks as an extension of social welfare policy, which should engage in certain lending practices without worrying about whether they are optimally profitable. Discussing banks as having an extraordinary commitment to help rebuild the economy would cut towards this interpretation. Banks have no such commitments — they have a commitment to profit. Perhaps the President thinks accepting the bailout money has imposed a moral obligation on the banks where one did not necessarily exist before, or enhanced the moral weight of a pre-existing obligation. Note to private enterprises: this is precisely the hazard of accepting government assistance. Of course, if the government expected a certain level of lending activity as part of the TARP loan “bargain,” it should have put that in the initial terms, rather than trying to effect a post-hoc bargain via altruistic moral pressure.

Finally, by tying the restrictions on CEO pay to the companies’ outstanding TARP loan obligations, the government made this result pretty inevitable. Once the government establishes that it will back up banks using taxpayer money, it makes those banks a much less risky asset, both by the actual present-moment transfer of wealth and by establishing a bad precedent for the future (in the form of a market expectation that if anything goes really bad, the government will come in and rescue).

As a result of this decrease in risk, the banks will have a much easier time raising capital in the private market. Any restrictions imposed by the terms of the initial government assistance itself, which are conditioned on having outstanding loan obligations to the government, can be gotten around by simply selling what is equity in a now very secure enterprise. This is what they are now doing. To do otherwise would be foolish. To expect otherwise would be to expect banks to act against their interests. To avoid this outcome, the solution is to either draft better regulations (for instance, making the executive compensation limits a permanent or long-lasting condition of accepting the loan initially, which endures even after repayment) or, and this would be my solution, simply stop meddling in the market to begin with. But whether you subscribe to the idea of government regulation or not, it’s clearly not the banks fault that the government can’t see 90 seconds into the future in drafting their market-meddling regulations.

Update 11/28 : A reader made several relevant points.

1. It’s a dangerous game whenever one starts making inferences from unpublished notes. Clear communication of ideas is incredibly difficult even when one is putting in the effort to make something publishable and generally accessible. In private notes, one’s only audience is oneself — as such, one may write in a shorthand manner which may have a very different meaning when read by somebody else.

2. These quotations were selected by the author for being the most damning that could be found, and are pretty ambiguous (as I pointed out in the discussion below). They’re especially ambiguous in light of point one.

3. I failed to challenge sufficiently the framing of the author’s discussion — this whole frame of whether or not Rand discarded the “Nietzscheanism’” of her youth actually reveals some biases and false assumptions of the author.

Arguably (and this is my analysis now, building off the reader’s comment), the point of contention is *whether* Rand’s philosophy is a faux, watery Nietzscheanism (the mask allegedly slipping off in the quotes discussed below) or something altogether different which was created by someone who happened to have a passing interest in Nietzsche. By not challenging the author’s framing, I conceded too much.

Thanks reader!

Original article follows:

This article was brought to my attention…

In her journal circa 1928 Rand quoted the statement, “What is good for me is right,” a credo attributed to a prominent figure of the day, William Edward Hickman. Her response was enthusiastic. “The best and strongest expression of a real man’s psychology I have heard,” she exulted.
At the time, she was planning a novel that was to be titled The Little Street, the projected hero of which was named Danny Renahan. According to Rand scholar Chris Matthew Sciabarra, she deliberately modeled Renahan – intended to be her first sketch of her ideal man – after this same William Edward Hickman. Renahan, she enthuses in another journal entry, “is born with a wonderful, free, light consciousness — [resulting from] the absolute lack of social instinct or herd feeling. He does not understand, because he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people … Other people do not exist for him and he does not understand why they should.” (Journals, pp. 27, 21-22; emphasis hers.)
“A wonderful, free, light consciousness” born of the utter absence of any understanding of “the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people.” Obviously, Ayn Rand was most favorably impressed with Mr. Hickman. He was, at least at that stage of Rand’s life, her kind of man.
So the question is, who exactly was he?
William Edward Hickman was one of the most famous men in America in 1928. But he came by his fame in a way that perhaps should have given pause to Ayn Rand before she decided that he was a “real man” worthy of enshrinement in her pantheon of fictional heroes.
You see, Hickman was a forger, an armed robber, a child kidnapper, and a multiple murderer.

Apparently Rand wrote various positive thing about this guy (see the article for more).

My first reaction was, so what? Rand thought silly things when she was in her Nietzschean phase. She hardly was the first person to wrongfully admire a heinous criminal at some point in their lives (see, e.g., the fascination many people have had with Che Guevara)

The author, to his credit, tries to address this:

No doubt defenders of Ayn Rand, and there are still a few left, would reply that the journal entry in question was written when she was only in her early twenties and still under the spell of Nietzsche, that as her thinking developed she discarded such Nietzschean elements and evolved a more rational outlook, and that the mature Rand should not be judged by the mistakes of her youth. And this might be a perfectly reasonable position to take. Unquestionably Rand’s outlook did change, and her point of view did become at least somewhat less hostile to what the average, normal person would regard as healthy values.
But before we assume that her admiration of Mr. Hickman was merely a quirk of her salad days, let’s consider a few other quotes from Ayn Rand cited in Scott Ryan’s book.
In her early notes for The Fountainhead: “One puts oneself above all and crushes everything in one’s way to get the best for oneself. Fine!” (Journals, p. 78.)

This could just be referring to obstacles, not other humans. “Above all” and “everyTHING” in one’s way don’t point towards a terribly damning conclusion.

Of The Fountainhead’s hero, Howard Roark: He “has learned long ago, with his first consciousness, two things which dominate his entire attitude toward life: his own superiority and the utter worthlessness of the world.” (Journals, p. 93.)

This admittedly sounds bad. The world isn’t worthless, and if Rand thought it was, she was wrong.

In the original version of her first novel We the Living: “What are your masses [of humanity] but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?” (This declaration is made by the heroine Kira, Rand’s stand-in; it is quoted in The Ideas of Ayn Rand by Ronald Merrill, pp. 38 – 39; the passage was altered when the book was reissued years after its original publication.)

I’m not sure who Kira is addressing in this early edition quote, but it sounds like the context could be sarcastic (if she is addressing one of the Communists, say). Rand was against sacrifice, and this sounds like a pretty sacrificial idea.

On the value of human life: Man “is man only so long as he functions in accordance with the nature of a rational being. When he chooses to function otherwise, he is no longer man. There is no proper name for the thing which he then becomes … When a man chooses to act in a sub-human manner, it is no longer proper for him to survive nor to be happy.” (Journals, pp. 253-254, 288.)

Rand is saying that our essential capacity is our capacity to think. If we give up that capacity, and lower ourselves to the level of animals, we won’t survive … I suppose the author of the article thinks that Rand is arguing it would thus be ok for a Randian Hero to come and extirpate such a sub-rational life, but I don’t think the text supports the reading.

In Atlas Shrugged, Dagny takes an interest in her brother’s wife, Cherryl, who Dagny can tell is good, but not quite good enough to be strong against the cruel people in the world. She asks her to stay at her apartment one night after Cherryl comes over in the midst of a moral crisis; but Cherryl returns to Dagny’s brother, and winds up killing herself later out of despair.

That, I think, is what Rand is getting at — if you aren’t rational and awake in life, then either your own hand or some cruel evil person or the universe will get to you; the Randian hero the author imagines to be so malevolent and antisocial might actually try and help you out, but they can’t save you from yourself.

As proof that her Nietzschean thinking persisted long after her admirers think she abandoned it, this journal entry from 1945, two years subsequent to the publication of The Fountainhead: “Perhaps we really are in the process of evolving from apes to Supermen — and the rational faculty is the dominant characteristic of the better species, the Superman.” (Journals, p. 285.)

I would argue that Rand’s interpretation of this statement is true: since she is defining what is evolving as our rational faculty, then of course we’re going to become better at reasoning as we go along and figure things out. Again, where’s the connection between this and the naive Nietzscheanism displayed in the Wild Bill Hickman discussion?

A redditor is sad he got dumped and asks for an analogy that has been made before to be posted:

I know a girl who broke up with a guy and she told him she wanted to “still be friends.” He said, “No thanks.” She wondered why he couldn’t fall back to being just friends after they had a romantic relationship. I came up with the “McDonalds Analogy” to try and explain it in a simple way that would help all women understand this tough question.
Imagine if you went to McDonalds a lot and ordered a Big Mac Combo meal. A Big Mac, Large Fries and a Coke. You really like this meal. One day, you pull up to the drivethrough and order the Big Mac Combo meal and the girl tells you, “I’m sorry – you can have the Big Mac and the Coke, but you can’t get fries with that anymore.” You think about this for a moment, and sure – the Big Mac is the centerpiece of the meal, but McDonalds has some really good fries and you like their fries with your meal. So you say, “I’ve been able to get fries with that before, why can’t I have fries with my Big Mac combo anymore?” The girls says, “Well, I just think it is better if you only have the Big Mac and the Coke from here on out.”
At this point, a lot of guys are going to go to Wendy’s or BK and see if they can get fries with their combo at that drivethrough window. But there are some guys who REALLY like McDonalds Big Macs and they might think, “If I keep coming here and ordering the Big Mac and Coke, maybe she’ll change her mind and give me some fries with that later.” So they will keep on getting the combo without the fries until the deal breaker happens: One day that guy is going to order the Big Mac and Coke and then he’s going to pull up a little bit to pay, and someone else is going to pull up to the drivethrough speaker and order the “Big Mac Combo” and he is going to hear the girl say, “Would you like fries with that?”
That’s why guys don’t like to be friends with a girl who breaks up with them.

This example illustrates well why romance memes suck. The premise is that even though the person very much likes the friendship, he is going to end it because … because the other person finds sex with them uninteresting? How does this make sense?
One way it makes sense is if you see the other person’s sexual rejection of you as some kind of value judgment of your worthiness, which only makes sense if you partially define your worthiness by how sexually attracted some people are to you.
Because of this poor basis for self-esteem, people will often spend great energy trying to do things to make themselves more desirable to other particular people, as a kind of validation of their own purpose and worthiness. This is silly.
If a person who I enjoy playing Super Smash Brothers with decides they are no longer interested in battling me (because their skill level far exceeds mine or whatever), I shouldn’t try and improve my skill so that they will decide to start battling me again in the future; anchoring my self-esteem so closely to someone else’s desire to engage in a particular activity with me is silly. If being good at Smash is something I value, I should work on improving my skills because of that, because of its value to me; it may eventually be the case that, if I improve enough, the other person will want me to battle with them again. But that shouldn’t be the goal.