Greg Salmieri

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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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Elucidations · Episode 73: Greg Salmieri discusses Ayn Rand's moral philosophy · 15 Jul 2015 podcast

And some difference some things can matter or be goals or the difference they can make to you is the achievement of some further goal.

But this can't go on indefinitely.

And she thinks the only kind of fundamental alternative that things face that can give rise to action is the alternative between existing and not.

and that it's only living things that act in the face of this alternative.

It's only living things that ultimately have anything at stake.

And so the whole idea of valuing can only come up for a living organism as a valuer, as a seeker of values.

So already if you have that, you have the idea that pursuing a value presupposes an answer of of value to whom?

Whose value is it?

The organism that pursues it.

And I think that the structure of this reasoning makes it the case that the only possible ultimate value for an actor is that actor's own life.

At least in the non-human case.

Because the only phenomenon that can give rise to valuation is action in the face of alternatives, and all other alternatives are parasitic on the alternative of whether one continues to exist or not.

Again, put aside the human case for a moment because we have free will and that's gonna massively complicate things for her.

And that's what she in fact thinks gives rise to ethics.

So it's not that the animal needs to be alive in order to act, that is if he's dead he can't act.

It's that he needs to have his life at stake in order to have goals.

So in the case of animals, she sees each animal species or each plant species as having a life, and its life is a kind of self-sustaining process.

A process that has a kind of logic and order to it, in which its parts are the parts of that process all are coordinated by, you know, physiological or biological automatic processes around the goal of sustaining itself.

itself and maybe to some extent its descendants in carrying on that same process.

What's distinctive about human beings is that the mechanism by which we can coordinate our actions towards our own sustenance or towards any other goal is reason, is thought, rather than some biological urge or automatic genetic coding or anything like that.

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