Congress and Absolutes

 I answer questions in philosophy and in history in Yahoo's Q&A forum called Yahoo! Answers. Recently, someone asked how "the good" should be defined in terms of "context". Here is my answer:

A good example is in Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged, in which a hero point-blank shoots to death a military soldier--because he can't make the decision to let her have the prisoner (even though the soldier knows she is trusted by the government)--or adhere to the orders he was given to keep the prisoner, who he, the soldier, knows absolutely is being tortured in secret.

   The man being tortured is also one of the heroes and is being rescued. The soldier doesn't even say "Yes" or "No"; he is confused, unfocused, hoping for, you might say, a sign from the heavens about what to do--and the hero had a gun pointed right at him, but he can't make up his mind. So she shoots him dead.
   Yet, Rand was a vocal, ardent, and radical advocate for the sanctity of human life. "Individualism," she wrote, echoing Locke and Jefferson and Madison and others, "regards man—every man—as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being." But, to keep this situation of "what is the good" in context, she also wrote this:

"Rights” are a moral concept—the concept that provides a logical transition from the principles guiding an individual’s actions to the principles guiding his relationship with others—the concept that preserves and protects individual morality in a social context—the link between the moral code of a man and the legal code of a society, between ethics and politics.

   The soldier could not decide which action to take, and while the gun was obviously a coercion, so was his gun, which if he had time he would have pointed at the hero. The soldier was violating the first paragraph, about individual sovereignty, by keeping the prisoner who was being tortured. You might ask, why was he being tortured? Because he was the good guy, and the bad guys (the government in this novel) wanted the tortured hero to work for them. The soldier had to have known this.
   If individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law, then it was moral to kill the soldier who couldn't make a soldierly decision, in order to save the hero who wanted the evil government to be subordinate to moral law--which they were not.
   Now, that is a long example. But it is one that is rarely understood about that novel. And since it was written by an advocate of absolute human rights, it puts "absolute rights" into context--save the hero, or let the villains have their way.
  
   This concept of "absolutism" is something the Tea Party as a whole doesn't comprehend any better than a Progressive, whether a Republican, or a Democrat. There are no absolutists in Congress, save a few who are absolute only on one or two specific issues, but not broadly and fully, and in context of what "absolute Originalist reading of the Constitution" means.
   While there is room for debate even in an Originalist reading, there is no debate that it is a document of negative liberty, not of positive liberty. If there is any member of Congress who you can envision as a hero in an Ayn Rand novel, he or she may be one of those who holds to an absolute idea here and there--but I'll bet s/he couldn't explain why s/he believes it to be an 'absolute'.




© Curtis Edward Clark 2011 Visit the Atheist-AA Google Group http://groups.google.com/group/atheist-aa