Show me where I have asserted “objective truth” on these threads, general_re. Mostly I devote myself to questioning the assertions of others WRT this thorny problem. Indeed, one wonders whether the formulation “objective truth” can mean anything at all. Perhaps it is an oxymoron.
I’m really glad to learn that John Stewart Mill is an intellectual companion of yours. To put him on the philosophical map, J.S. Mill is usually classified as a British empiricist of 19th century vintage. He’s one of my favorite thinkers. I love him for his insights into liberty, for his reliance on experience and observation as tests of knowledge, for his insistence that logic is “the science which treats of the operations of the human mind in the pursuit of truth.” I also love him for all the awkward situations he gets him self into, as a self-described devotee of Bentham’s Utilitarian School, and faithful adherent of empiricist methodology.
For instance, as much as he considered himself squarely in the Benthamite school, it turns out that Mill thought the utilitarians had not developed anything even near to an adequate theory of human nature. The utilitarians tended to regard human beings as mere “atoms” or units in a more or less malleable mass (given proper education). Human behavior was assumed to be motivated by the search for pleasure (happiness), and the avoidance of pain. Given this, statistics tells us pretty much what sorts of things can happen with human beings. And thus, armed with such utilitarian tools, institutions and even entire cultures can be made amenable to progressive change initiatives.
While still insisting that he was himself a utilitarian, Mill said that this conception of human nature was drastically inadequate. He noted that happiness as a goal could rarely be achieved directly, but usually only as the by-product of striving for and achieving some larger goal, a goal set by a unique private person. Thus human existence by its nature is particular; so to consign it wholesale to the reductive notion of the mass could hardly serve as a premise for serious thought. (This is Mill the empiricist speaking.)
Mill the great British empiricist lays down his credentials in this statement: “The notion that truths external to the mind may be known by intuition or consciousness, independently of observation and experience, is, I am persuaded, in these time the great intellectual support of false doctrines and bad institutions…. There never was such an instrument devised for consecrating all deep-seated prejudices.”
And yet Mill himself went far beyond empiricist methods when he adverted to “intuition or consciousness, independently of observation and experience” in two extraordinarily telling ways. First, he assumed that Nature possesses a stable structure; that is, it is lawful. And second, Nature is lawful because it has been designed. (He invoked a kind of “back-hand proof” in stating that science itself would be impossible, if Nature were not lawful, ordered.)
Would you would agree with me, general_re, that neither of these statements can be the result of direct observation?
Thus we have the case of an empiricist who, while not satisfied by a “proof of the existence of God” of the “First Cause” or “Prime Mover” type, is effectively persuaded by the proof of the existence of God by Design. He thought he could establish that on empirical grounds, if only inferentially.
Mill’s conceptions of Nature and God are fascinating topics in their own right, but beyond the scope of this writing.
Maybe by now you’re wondering what is the purpose of this rant on J. S. Mill? You might say you “resonate” to his ideas or whatever. But my suspicion is he would never say “Who cares?” – as you have rather cavalierly done in your last. He knew full well that there are limits to human knowledge and understanding; he just wasn’t prepared to say where they actually were in fact. (Indeed, how could he -- or you or me?)
He kept probing. He isolated and clarified problems; and where he couldn’t do that, he put up a flag for future thinkers. IMHO, he is an absolutely first-rate modern philosopher, and a man of rare intellectual acumen, insight, and integrity. It is ironic that, as much as Mill derided the idea of a priori knowledge of any kind, he seemed to have had recourse to it on occasion.
There is a spirit of adventure about John Stewart Mill that I love and cherish. He helps us see the limit of experience, to acknowledge that there are real things that direct observation cannot account for. And that science can only do what science can do. Which may or may not exhaust all the possibilities….
Mill kept an open mind. We’d do well to take a page from his book.
Meanwhile, general_re -- what was our disagreement about? Please refresh me.
p.s.: I really don't see how Objectivism fits into this picture at all -- though I gather Objectivists tend to look kindly on J. S. Mill....
I plead guilty - to my knowledge, you have yet to assert such a thing here. Shall we see if I can pull an assertion of such out of you? ;)
Thus we have the case of an empiricist who, while not satisfied by a “proof of the existence of God” of the “First Cause” or “Prime Mover” type, is effectively persuaded by the proof of the existence of God by Design. He thought he could establish that on empirical grounds, if only inferentially.
Oh? How attached to the notion of omnipotence are you? ;)
That much applauded class of authors, the writers on natural theology, have, I venture to think, entirely lost their way, and missed the sole line of argument which could have made their speculations acceptable to any one who can perceive when two propositions contradict one another. They have exhausted the resources of sophistry to make it appear that all the suffering in the world exists to prevent greater---that misery exists, for fear lest there should be misery: a thesis which if ever so well maintained, could only avail to explain and justify the works of limited beings, compelled to labour under conditions independent of their own will; but can have no application to a Creator assumed to be omnipotent, who, if he bends to a supposed necessity, himself makes the necessity which he bends to. If the maker of the world can all that he will, he wills misery, and there is no escape from the conclusion. The more consistent of those who have deemed themselves qualified to ``vindicate the ways of God to man'' have endeavoured to avoid the alternative by hardening their hearts, and denying that misery is an evil. The goodness of God, they say, does not consist in willing the happiness of his creatures, but their virtue; and the universe, if not happy, is a just universe. But waving the objections to this scheme of ethics, it does not at all get rid of the difficulty. If the Creator of mankind willed that they should all be virtuous, his designs are as completely baffled as if he had willed that they should all be happy, and the order of nature is constructed with even less regard to the requirements of justice than to those of benevolence. If the law of all creation were justice and the Creator omnipotent, then, in whatever amount suffering and happiness might be dispensed to the world, each person's share of them would be exactly proportioned to that person's good or evil deeds; no human being would have a worse lot than another, without worse deserts; accident or favouritism would have no part in such a world, but every human life would be the playing out of a drama constructed like a perfect moral tale. No one is able to blind himself to the fact that the world we live in is totally different from this, insomuch that the necessity of redressing the balance has been deemed one of the strongest arguments for another life after death, which amounts to an admission that the order of things in this life is often an example of injustice, not justice. If it be said that God does not take sufficient account of pleasure and pain to make them the reward or punishment of the good or the wicked, but that virtue is itself the greatest good and vice the greatest evil, then these at least ought to be dispensed to all according to what they have done to deserve them; instead of which, every kind of moral depravity is entailed upon multitudes by the fatality of their birth, through the fault of their parents, of society, or of uncontrollable circumstances, certainly through no fault of their own. Not even on the most distorted and contracted theory of good. which ever was framed by religious or philosophical fanaticism, can the government of Nature be made to resemble the work of a being at once good and omnipotent.The only admissible moral theory of Creation is that the Principle of Good cannot at once and altogether subdue the powers of evil, either physical or moral; could not place mankind in a world free from the necessity of an incessant struggle with the maleficent powers, or make them always victorious in that struggle, but could and did make them capable of carrying on the fight with vigour and with progressively increasing success. Of all the religious explanations of the order of nature, this alone is neither contradictory to itself, nor to the facts for which it attempts to account. According to it, man's duty would consist not in simply taking care of his own interests by obeying irresistible power, but in standing forward a not ineffectual auxiliary to a Being of perfect beneficence; a faith which seems much better adapted for nerving him to exertion than a vague and inconsistent reliance on an Author of Good who is supposed to be also the author of evil. And I venture to assert that such has really been, though often unconsciously, the faith of all who have drawn strength and support of any worthy kind from trust in a superintending Providence. There is no subject on which men's practical belief is more incorrectly indicated by the words they use to express it than religion. Many have derived a base confidence from imagining themselves to be favourites of an omnipotent but capricious and despotic Deity. But those who have been in goodness by relying on the sympathizing support of a powerful and good Governor of the world have, I am satisfied, never really believed that Governor to be, in the strict sense of the term, omnipotent. They have always saved his goodness at the expense of his power. They have believed, perhaps, that he could, if he willed, remove all the thorns from their individual path, but not without causing greater harm to some one else, or frustrating some purpose of greater importance to the general well-being. They have believed that he could do any one thing, but not any combination of things; that his government, like human government, was a system of adjustments and compromises; that the world is inevitably imperfect, contrary to his intention. And since the exertion of all his power to make it as little imperfect as possible leaves it no better than it is, they cannot but regard that power, though vastly beyond human estimate, yet as in itself not merely finite, but extremely limited. They are bound, for example, to suppose that the best he could do for his human creatures was to make an immense majority of all who have yet existed, be born (without any fault of their own) Patagonians, or Esquimaux, or something nearly as brutal and degraded, but to give them capacities which by being cultivated for very many centuries in toil and suffering, and after many of the best specimens of the race have sacrificed their lives for the purpose, have at last enabled some chosen portions of the species to grow into something better, capable of being improved in centuries more into something really good, of which hitherto there are only to be found individual instances. It may be possible to believe with Plato that perfect goodness, limited and thwarted in every direction by the intractableness of the material, has done this because it could do no better. But that the same perfectly wise and good Being had absolute power over the material, and made it, by voluntary choice, what it is; to admit this might have been supposed impossible to any one who has the simplest notions of moral good and evil. Nor can any such person, whatever kind of religious phrases he may use, fail to believe, that if Nature and Man are both the works of a Being of perfect goodness, that Being intended Nature as a scheme to be amended, not imitated, by Man.
- J.S. Mill, "Nature", Three Essays on Religion
Meanwhile, general_re -- what was our disagreement about?
I don't think we were disagreeing yet - you asked me a set of questions which I tried to answer...
I gather Objectivists tend to look kindly on J. S. Mill....
Why shouldn't they? It may be that objectivism ultimately reduces to utilitarianism anyway ;)
There are very very few philosophers taught in university classrooms that are even worth reading. The few that are worth reading are mostly ignored (big surprise!). Hume, Kant, Descartes, Mill, Bentham, Marx, Nietszche, Berkeley, Sartre, Hegel, Rousseau, Hobbes, Voltaire, Foucault, Aristotle, etc. are all false philosophies, and only serve to poison the minds of their readers. There are some true elements in the philosophies of these men, but overall, they stink, and all have been debunked. T. Jefferson said after reading Hume that it took him years of reflection and reading to rid his mind of the poison of Hume's philosophy. John Adams ridiculed Hume, and rightly so. There is very little TRUE philosophy taught in public universities. There is so much false philosophy that it only serves to confuse the minds of the unenlightened (by God). They present the cases of these false teachers, then more or less leave you to "pick your poison" as to which one you will believe. Arsenic or strichnine... Before I was saved, I was totally confused by philosophy, but then, after being reborn, I could suddenly see the errors in the thinking of these ungodly men. There is only one true philosophy -the rest are simply lies from the darkened hearts of men.