Oh my, dear r9etb, but it seems to me that like minds travel in the same gutter! So to speak. For soon after I wrote my last, I started thinking about Ayn Rand's Objectivist doctrine. Then I find you are thinking about it, too!
What has always troubled me about Objectivism is that it can say so many truthful things about human individuals; yet it somehow misses, or by-passes the larger point: the relations naturally obtaining between the individual and society.
My thinking about this question is largely informed by Plato's insights into the basic structure of reality. To put it into a nutshell, Man (the Microcosm) is the Cosmos "writ small." (I.e., the total recapitulation of the universe on smaller scale.) But human societies are Man "writ large." (I.e., no human society can be better than the "basic (or average?) human stock" of which it is composed. No positive law can remedy defects of this kind.)
The Greeks recognized as well as the later Christians did that man is inherently a social animal. To speak of him as an isolated little universe of "individual rights" — as the Objectivists seem to do — is to mischaracterize human nature from the get-go.
All I can say is "Thank God for Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem!" For if we didn't have it, we'd have to live in a "black-or-white" universe — a "yes" or "no" universe; a "'true" vs. "false" universe. In short, a universe eminently suitable for digitizing into machine applications, but which cannot even begin to capture the full range and diversity of human moral and intellectual experience....
Gödel showed that Aristotle's "two-valued" system of logic is insufficient to account for the reality experienced by human beings. We do not live in a clockwork, mechanistic universe in which there is any such thing as "certainty." Contemporary physics tells us that. Rather the idea of undecidability (or incompleteness) denotes the refutation of the idea of certainty, which can only be obtained under "black-or-white" conditions under observation at a particular discrete moment in time.
Which then in many cases is blown up into "universal generalizations."
But human existence is more than "discrete moments in time." Certainly human nature is not. Or so it seems to me....
Thank you ever so much for writing, r9etb! It's good to hear from you.
What has always troubled me about Objectivism is that it can say so many truthful things about human individuals; yet it somehow misses, or by-passes the larger point: the relations naturally obtaining between the individual and society.
IMO, the reason for this difficulty probably arises from Rand's personal motivations for defining Objectivism, which I have to attribute to Rand's atheism. I really believe that she started with an visceral (and thus irrational) animus against the idea of God; and was thereafter engaged in attempting to deal with the appalling moral consequences of God's disappearance.
She says some truthful things about human individuals, but I believe those truths are borrowed from Judeo-Christian principles. As I've put it elsewhere, I think she wanted the last 6 Commandments without having to deal with the problems of the first 4 -- and she wanted them to be as objectively true without God, as they are with Him.
Rand wasn't stupid ... she understood the implications of stating that a moral principle is objectively true. For one thing, it would have to take the form of a law of nature, somewhat like gravity. As such, it could not really apply to relationships in a direct sense; it had to apply to individuals as individuals.
Relationships between people necessarily become secondary under such a system, and that shows in Rand's fictional writing. There is no "love," for example, except insofar as the parties are in accord as to their individual attainment of Rand's enlightened state. Real love is, of course, far more complex than that.
My favorite example of this disconnect is found elsewhere, in Rand's famous statement that "Man—every man—is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others." There's a lot of truth in that, so long as you don't take it too far. But as an "objective" truth it does not survive contact with something as obvious and natural as parenthood!
Now ... what does that say about the topic of this thread? Well, I think it goes back to what you started off saying: there are always presuppositions, whether it's about the nature of "objective" moral principles, or about the origin of life.
The first task in any debate of this nature, is to uncover the concealed presuppositions that underlie both sides. It's amazing what happens when one starts picking away at that... For example, I used to be quite a Rand fan, until I started looking at her presuppositions -- to my very great surprise, it eventually led to me becoming a Christian!
I would venture to state that none of us is free of concealed presuppositions, many of which have little to do with the specific topic at hand. Much of our argumentation is built around them, and I think we often don't understand why certain lines of thought perturb us so much. I've learned (however imperfectly) that such reactions are generally worth investigating. I've found that to be true, both in my personal life and also in my technical/professional life. It's true in science, as well.
When it comes to the topic of intelligent intervention in the development of biological origins, I think a great deal of the heat on both sides of the debate actually arises from a set of concealed presuppositions about God. Thus we are subjected to much silliness from those on the Creationist side, who appear to fear that evolution and God are mutually exclusive; and we have on the other side a set of materialist assumptions that often seems to have roots in atheism, rather than science (e.g., Mr. Dawkins' works).