Immanuel Kant: Ayn Rand’s Intellectual Enemy:
by Edward W. Younkins
[b]For Kant, analytical truths are logical and can be validated independent of experience. These propositions are a priori and non-empirical. On the other hand, he said that synthetic propositions or truths are empirical, a posteriori, and dependent upon experience in order to be validated. Kant contended that analytic propositions provide no information about reality and that synthetic ones are factual but are uncertain, unprovable, and contingent.
According to Rand, there is no basis upon which to differentiate analytic propositions from synthetic ones. Her theory of concepts undermines Kant’s idea of an analytic-synthetic dichotomy. For Rand, concepts express classifications of observed existents according to their relationship to other observed entities. Rand explains that a concept refers to the actual existents which it integrates including all their characteristics currently known and those not yet known. She argued that concepts subsume all of the attributes of the existents to which they refer and not simply the ones included in the definition. Her objective theory of concepts is the tool she used to abrogate Kant’s analytic-synthetic dichotomy.[/b]
Consider the words above. Now consider the words above attached to a discussion of or a debate about the rationality [and thus the morality] of military conscription.
Yes, you know where this is going.
As soon as the words above are not aimed entirely at defining and defending other words – “analytically” “theoretically” “conceptually” “essentially” – and are enscounced instead in defining and defending actual historical interactions relating to the documented use of military conscription, the meaning starts to wobble and the inevitable equivocation [or, for Randians, outright verbal brawls] commense.
Here, for example, is Rand’s own “metaphysical” take on conscription:
[b]Of all the statist violations of individual rights in a mixed economy, the military draft is the worst. It is an abrogation of rights. It negates man’s fundamental right–the right to life–and establishes the fundamental principle of statism: that a man’s life belongs to the state, and the state may claim it by compelling him to sacrifice it in battle. Once that principle is accepted, the rest is only a matter of time.
If the state may force a man to risk death or hideous maiming and crippling, in a war declared at the state’s discretion, for a cause he may neither approve of nor even understand, if his consent is not required to send him into unspeakable martyrdom–then, in principle, all rights are negated in that state, and its government is not man’s protector any longer. What else is there left to protect?[/b]
Now, certainly, this can be defended as a reasonable argument about the draft. And, in many important respects, I share it myself. But the manner in which it is expressed leads one to believe there cannot possibly be an equally reasonable argument made in defense of conscription.
And, more importantly, it makes the crucial assumption that the relationship between the individual and the community, the individual and the state, is an inherent one. In other words, a relationship that can, in fact, be known objectively.
But can it?
Throughout human history, the actual relationship between “I” and “we” has always been complex, convoluted and contradictory; and ever embedded in contingency, chance and change. Think of the role the draft played in the American Civil War; or in defeating the Nazis and fascism; or the manner in which it is perceived by most in the state of Israel. In the course of human history, the relationship between means and ends [as with the one between “I” and “we”] has never one that can be calculated…mathematically?
For example, in Frances Fitzgerald’s book, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam, I was struck by her references to indigenous peoples in that part of the world who did not even have the word “I” in their vocabulary at all. They were enculturated as children to think of themselves soley in the context of “we”—the village, the indigenous tribe they belonged to.
Was this objectively irrational, immoral. Is this something that can be demonstrated philosophically?
In my view, there is no philosophical argument – not analytic, not synthetic, not metaphysical – that can be broached such that the meaning of “conscription” used in a philosophy of ethics is the equivalent of the actual empirical facts accumulateed to demonstrate unequivoally whether a particular state has, in fact, engaged in the act of conscription morally. We can be analytically and synthetically sound in arguing about the existence of conscription because we defined what that word means. But that is not the same thing as concluding an essential, objective moral value can be derived from this.
They are [qualitatively] two very different kind of arguments, in my view.
And as much as Younkins wants to demonstrate how Rand might approach a behavior like military conscription differently from Kant [as a rational moral value], they really approach them the same. Namely, they assume [each in their own way] there is a way to link conceptual arguments to arguments “in reality” such that they are [philosophically] indistinguishable.
What is our moral duty as a citizen here? Can this be calculated?