Some people think Rand is just the cat’s meow. I must confess, I just don’t see it. It seems to be to just an ideology of the individual. But you present a well thought out point of view.

One parting shot in response to your last comment: I don’t know you, but I do care for you. I engaged in the conversation not simply for my own sake but also for yours. And I don’t think I am deceiving myself or being fake when I say that.

Happy Thanksgiving!

First, completely missing from this description (notably points 4, 5 and 6) is any mention of choice. Do you believe in determinism? If you do, then I am afraid I wasted my time. Until you confirm that, let me assume that you do not believe in determinism.
Let me address your points one by one
1) Desires for knowledge, community, intimacy, friendship etc are learned desires, not natural ones. The desire to be free from pain is natural because man’s body is “programmed” that way. There is no choice about it. It can be resisted but cannot be erased. The other desires can be erased.
2) You are right that culture plays a major role in shaping man’s thoughts, but the key word is ‘shaping’ (not ‘determining’). I wrote a post some time back that analyzes this role. The crucial point is that man always retains the ability to examine, evaluate, accept, reformulate or reject any of the ideas that he has “picked up”, provided he chooses to do so. Reflection begins with an inheritance but doesn’t end there. This ability of man is the engine of change and progress, both scientific and cultural. It is by rejecting the authority of religion that (some) men became secular, by the rejection of god that they (some) became atheists, by the examination of nature that they became scientists, by the reformulation of existing ideas that they evolved their theories. Culture shapes the thoughts of children. Some of these children grow up into men and then shape culture. Everything that is learned from other men (via culture) can and should be questioned and validated, most importantly one’s principles. That is why we do philosophy.
3) Certainly man doesn’t enter a community as a fully formed individual. He is in a community the moment he is born and its culture shapes his initial thoughts. But that does not change the fact that there is no such thing as group-thinking. Every decision a man makes is ultimately his own choice. We communicate with individuals, we argue with individuals, we cooperate with individuals. To convince a group of men, you have to convince every single individual. We do not control other people’s thoughts or even access them. That requires communication. And communication is only possible if both parties actively process it in their minds. If one of us succeeds in convincing the other (or even if not), it will be because both of us have made the voluntary and independent choice of engaging in a debate – trying to understand the other person’s argument, and framing a counter argument, purely an individual effort on both our parts. ‘Knowledge’ and ‘understanding’ are words that only make sense in an individual context. 2 + 2 = 4 is not knowledge for me, if I do not know the symbols. a + a = 2 * a does not give me an understanding of algebra, until I validate it by induction.
4) Yes, man is indeed dependent on others – for food and education as a child. Adult man (living in a post savage society) is also dependent on others for trade. But in itself, this fact only provides motivation for discovering what the appropriate interaction between men should be. In itself, it does not provide a standard for evaluating the importance of other people’s values. It just shows that other people’s values are important. One has to look at other aspects of man’s nature to understand how important they are and what their relationship is to his own values.
5) Some of man’s desires are certainly chosen and any learned desire can be unlearned with effort. This is essentially a matter of determinism versus choice.
6) Since some desires are chosen and any learned desire can be unlearnt, happiness is a function of choices, nature and culture. The only things man can control are his own choices, and proper principles for making choices is what morality is all about.

So what do I consider to be the nature of man?
1) Man is conscious.
2) Man is capable of choice.
3) Man has the capacity of understanding his surroundings and himself by thinking (using reason and logic) and retaining his thoughts in the form of concepts and principles.
4) Man’s mind works as an independent entity. It cannot be forced. Force can only destroy it.
5) Man is mortal and therefore his life is his ultimate value. No values are possible if he is not alive.
6) Man has a built in pleasure-pain mechanism that makes certain physical stimuli naturally desirable or undesirable.
7) Man’s psychology is such that the satisfaction of his desires gives him happiness.
8) Man requires a certain period of time (around 15 years) to develop his mind and body fully.

I remember this article from Social Ethics last year and how it challenged EVERYONE in the class. Singer’s basic presumptions are, to me, simply too fool-proof to attack his argument. I wanted so very much to be able to dismiss his conclusion (especially since it seems to be such a radical conclusion to two very simple starting points) but I simply couldn’t. Unless someone (Perhaps K. M?) pokes a hole in Singer’s logic, we’re all (99.99% of people?!) going to be revealed for the bastards we truly are.

The administration at USU needs to step-in and tell Kleiner to stop presenting this article on Thanksgiving weekend, my turkey was curiously less-tasty last year. You’re a sick, sick man!

I think you understate how many natural desires you have. As it happens, you agree with Singer when you say that your only natural desire is to avoid pain (psychological hedonism). I disagree with you and Singer here. I think we also have, for instance, a natural desire for knowledge, for community, for intimacy, for friendship, etc. These natural desires can be frustrated, we can choose to habituate them or not.

I happen to think you cannot do much ethics until you have done some metaphysics of man (philosophical anthropology). This is why I kept appealing to the nature of man. We need to sort out what our natural desires our, what is good for our nature, etc. You seem to take yourself (as most moderns do) to be a radical individual. But I think an adequate philosophical anthropology will show us that man is more ‘inter-dividual’ than individual. It is not the case that first we are individuals and then we enter communities (through social contracts or some other principle of modern political liberalism). Rather, I think we are first members of communities, we are with others before we are with ourselves, so to speak.

Regarding Levinas – of course people don’t make these demands overtly (usually). And this is not because they are ashamed or think asking others for help is beneath human dignity. One would think that community (asking others for help) is beneath human dignity only if they first thought that what it is to be human is to be a self-sufficient island unto themselves.
The point about the face is that, once we get behind the modern myth of radical individualism and the isolated and self-sufficient ego, we see that before we have even thought we are already being-for-others. Because of individualistic ideologies, we tend to cover the ‘face of the other’ over. But when you have kids, you will see the face in the young and dependent infant.
But here is the trick – you (and I and everyone else) are just as dependent as that infant. Try, please try, to live for 1 week without depending on anyone else for anything. (Heat your own home with wood you chop. Eat food you have grown yourself. Make your own clothes. Etc etc)

But our dependence is even deeper than that. Everything you think is shaped by your cultural inheritance. So I am also not convinced that someone cannot ‘force a desire’ on you. Again, I think you drastically overstate our individuality, you take us to be radically distinct individuals. To the contrary, I think we are all first and foremost members of communities and cultures. All of your desires are learned (I almost completely reject the category of ‘spontaneous’ or ‘free’ desire). Where did your desires come from? From you parents, your culture, advertisements, etc. Parents actively shape those desires in their children. You did not invent yourself or make yourself from scratch. Once you are old enough to even be reflective, you always already have a personality, a collection of beliefs about the good and true and beautiful. There is no Cartesian starting point, no presupposition-less beginning for reflection. Reflection always begins with an inheritance.
So I agree that you desire happiness for its own sake. But what that happiness consists of is not randomly chosen by you. It is a function of your nature and your culture – your inheritance.

You are an psychological egoist of sorts – you think that the sole motivation for human action is self-love. This includes buying completely into the modern concept of the individual and some sort of social contract as the basis for community. You sound a lot like Ayn Rand. Now, like all psychological egoists, you avoid the charge of being merely selfish by redefining self-interest to include the interests of others.

My objection to psychological egoism is first and foremost ‘metaphysical’. The philosophical anthropology is wrong. Reasons for thinking this: (a) We sometimes act in ways that we know will not promote our own happiness (jealousy, envy, love). In other words, I am not sure about your definition of value as an ‘object of desire’. Can’t some desires be disordered? In other words, the satisfaction of some desires might actually be bad for you, some objects of desires would not then be ‘values’. (b) Just because we might get some pleasure from satisfied desires does not demonstrate that this was the reason why we acted. Aristotle, for instance, argues that we become happy when we aim at something other than happiness. Happiness is a welcome side effect of moral action, not the immediate end.

To the psychological egoist, I would ask these questions
i) What is it that makes you so special, that your interests are to be pursued solely (caring for others only when it is in your ultimate best interest)? Does the sun rise and set over you and no one else?
ii) Can you make any sense of gift-giving? Can you make any sense of love? Mustn’t you, on your view, reduce those things to mere contractual exchanges aimed at self-aggrandizement? In so doing, aren’t you precisely not giving gifts, not really loving? Isn’t love at least this – the state of affairs where one chooses the good of the other, even if it has nothing to do with their own good (and may actually be contrary to it)? In other words, the egoist cannot really say ‘for better or for worse’.
You might bite the bullet here and admit that you cannot love in this sense, and you will likely accuse me of creating elaborate cover-ups. I have little response to that, for the egoist there is always a hidden self-interest lurking somewhere. It is hard to argue against that position, since they insist on something that is in the end really counter to our moral intuition (and even our own sense of ourselves when we report doing altruistic things), just for the sake of sticking to an ideology. In the end, I end up thinking it rather sad.

By the way, I don’t think all adults really are capable of moral thought. You seem smart enough, but smarts do not guarantee moral clarity, and age does not guarantee an advance over childishness (marked principally by thinking only ‘me me me’). I am not calling you childish – I don’t know you at all. I’m just saying that some adults, particularly small-souled childish adults whose chant is always ME ME ME, might need a ‘spanking’.

Your comments indicate that you define ‘moral’ as caring for others. You give three reasons for why this is so. Let me take them one by one.
1) Caring for others is a basic part of human happiness.
I am happy when I achieve my desires. Being free, I control and choose my desires. Other than a desire to be free from pain, I have no natural desires. And even the desire to be free of pain can be resisted, and sometimes is resisted to satisfy other desires. Thus caring for others is not a natural desire, but a chosen one. The question is why should I choose that and hold it above a desire to make money, a desire to study physics, a desire to make friends, a desire to have good food etc? Again this is not a rhetorical question. I am looking for a real answer. And the answer should also enable me to rank those other desires.
2) The suffering of others matters to me because the ‘face of the other’ places a demand on me that says ‘feed me, care for me, do not kill me’
Frankly, very few people I have met actually make such demands, nor do I make such demands on others. You might say that the demands are not made openly, but they are there implicitly. Why are they not made openly? Is it not because people generally feel ashamed in asking for help for their own problems? Is it not because the capacity of not requiring help is a crucial part of one’s self esteem? Is it not because pleas for food and care are beneath human dignity? And even if a tiny minority does make such demands, that does not answer the question, “Why should the demand be accepted?”
3) Not all moral positions deserve argument, some deserve a spanking. That might do for a child not yet capable of thought. It will not do for an adult and I am not a child. You can choose to redefine words and have ‘moral’ mean ‘caring for others’ (that is certainly not the dictionary meaning of the word). That would be valid if it were self-evident, but my arguments in 1. and 2. above should make it clear that it is not self-evident.

Let me now stop asking questions and present where ‘caring for others’ fits into my value hierarchy and why. A value is an object of desire. Something that i do not desire is not a value to me. Since desires belong to individuals, and since no one can force a desire on me, it is only my desires that determine what I hold to be my values. The satisfaction of my desires gives me happiness and that is something that is an end in itself, in the sense that I do not seek happiness to serve some larger goal. I seek it for its own sake. But I cannot choose desires at random and expect to achieve them. Some desires might be harmful for my health or my life, or may simply be impossible to attain. It is irrational to choose such desires. This gives me a standard to evaluate and rank desires, the standard of life and reality. I can ask questions like “Is this desire possible to attain?”, “Is this desire harmful to my life in the long term (or even in the short term)?” The answers to such questions give me an objective way to evaluate, compare and choose between desires. How does this relate to “caring for others”? First I realize that other humans, by virtue of being human, are also free and capable of being rational. That they share the same necessities of life with me and are capable of obtaining them by their efforts. That just like me, they are better at some kinds of work and worse at others. That I can trade with them. That their pursuit of values is not a hindrance to my pursuit of mine but a potential value (through trade). That living in a society of men who trade with each other makes my pursuit of values much easier. That such a society requires certain social, legal and political structures and most importantly, a proper definition of rights. This is what I mean by “caring for others (strangers)” – respecting the fact that others have rights just as I do, choosing not to initiate force against them, regarding them as potential values. I also choose friends by evaluating their character and their values and hold them as actual (not potential) values. This is also what I mean by “caring for others (friends)”.

To summarize, my life and happiness is my ultimate value, reality (circumstances) and the requirements of my life are the standard by which I choose my desires (and values), rational thought is the process by which I do so, character and rationality are the criteria I use to judge others and decide whether to care for them or to regard them as a threat. Caring for others is merely a conditional consequence of my moral code, not its defining characteristic and certainly not the equivalent of morality.

Now it seems clear that you mean something more than what I indicated when you talk of “caring for others”. What more and why?

Singer is an egalitarian, that is why he thinks all men deserve equal moral consideration. Frankly, I don’t think that is a bad principle. It is hard to see how giving more moral consideration to person A over and against person B would be anything other than ultimately arbitrary or dangerously tribal.

I take it you have now come to agree that there is an objective standard for pleasure/happiness and pain/sorrow. Your question is now ‘what does the stranger’s starving mean to me?’ When you say that the value cannot be separated from the valuer, I take it you are saying that reason only moves us to care about their own welfare, and that one need not care about the welfare of others? Is that what you are saying? If so, then you are asking, ‘why be moral?’ Why should I care to maximize value for anyone other than myself?
I think the short answer is that you need not, there is no necessity in it. People are free to be selfish and immoral assholes if they want, right? Why ought you care for the other? How about this: all men have a natural desire for the good (to be ‘happy’). Moral action and participation in the moral community (care for others) is a basic part of human flourishing (happiness). This is a vulgar form of Aristotle’s argument (I must make it vulgar to respond to the selfish challenge), but essentially the claim would be this: you want to be happy, but being moral (caring for others) is a basic part of the happy life. You cannot be really happy unless you are really moral.

But I am inclined to think that account is unnecessary, and unnecessarily ‘abstract’. The response to you that I would really want to make would be a ‘pre-theoretical’ and phenomenological point. I have in mind Levinas and Buber. Why should the sufferings of others matter to you? They simply do, and this is obvious when you look at the ‘face’ of the other. The ‘face’ of the other itself places a demand on you. This demand is ‘older than’ moral philosophy. Before moral philosophers try to sort out duty and obligation and interest, the face of the other always already says ‘feed me, care for me, do not kill me.’
One is free to refuse that call, but refusing the call entails a grave devaluation of the dignity of the human person, and I am inclined to think it tells a ‘bad lie’ about man (that he is a radical individual rather than being an inter-dividual).

Quick aside: I recall some years ago I was making a similar argument – why should I care about anyone else’s value, it seems I should only care for my own. My professor replied to me (close paraphrase): ‘Not all moral positions deserve argument. Those that think they should simply care for themselves and not a wit for others don’t need moral arguments, they need a spanking.’ I think he is right. Recall that Aristotle thinks you can only do moral philosophy if you already have properly habituated moral beliefs. One does not engage in moral philosophy with children, and the view that I need not care for anyone other than myself is, frankly childish.

I have a feeling, though, that I am still missing your point. I hope I have not been attacking a mere straw man here. If so, let me put a question to you. Do you think that the starving of others does not mean anything to you? Why do you think it does not matter to you what happens to others?