Greg Salmieri
speaker
1,054 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2013
last heard Jan 2021
Greg Salmieri’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Elucidations · Episode 73: Greg Salmieri discusses Ayn Rand's moral philosophy · 15 Jul 2015
podcast
Although she titles her book, The Virtue of Selfish, and she's big on pushing it because it captures something that's importantly different between her and the cultural mainstream.
She says in the introduction to that same book that whether one should be an egoist or an altruist, act for oneself or other, is a kind of secondary question in ethics.
The deeper question is
Why do we need ethics in the first place?
Why do we need morality in the first place?
What gives rise to moral concepts?
So put another way, why is it that there's a need to act one way rather than another?
Why not just act willy-nilly on the spur of the moment?
Which spur of the moment, of course, as as Hume and others have pointed out to us, needn't be egoistic.
We could have a altruistic inclination to help someone else in a moment, right?
So why is it that one needs ethics in the first place?
How do we get into the business of talking about value concepts?
What facts give rise to them?
And this is, you know, now we're into the subject of meta ethics.
That's at least the contemporary philosophical jargon for it, the area of ethics that thinks not about what you should do directly, but about the nature of the concepts, thoughts, underlying principles.
that make it the case that we have a discourse or thoughts or theories about what to do and what it is that we're aiming at with coming up with such theories.
So compressing a longer story, she thinks that the whole concept of valuing, a value is something that someone acts to gain or keep.
It's an end, a goal of action, that this whole concept only arises and is only intelligible in the case of living organisms.
And it's not only because only living organisms can act, although I think it's true that only they can act in the relevant sense of act, but it's that to have the idea of a value or a goal as opposed to just an outcome of an action, you have to have the sense of the outcome being directed towards the organism, the of the the thing that's doing the acting, seeking the goal.
of it making some difference to the actor whether or not he or it gets the goal.
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