The 'Conflicts' of Men's Interests by Ayn Rand Questions and Possible Answers

--- In opar@yahoogroups.com
There was some good discussion of this essay yesterday. Here were the answers that I came up with to the questions I made. (I didn't come up with answers for all of them.) Further thoughts after group discussion are included in brackets:

1) What is the theme of this essay?

An explanation of why there are no conflicts of interest among
rational men in a free society. (First page, first para.)


2) What is given as a common counter-example of the Objectivist assertion that there are no conflicts of interest among rational men?

The example of two people applying for the same job, where only one will be hired. (First page, second para)

3) What are the four interrelated considerations which are involved in a rational man's view of his interests, but which are ignored or evaded by the presentation of the counter-example of two people competing for the same job?

"Reality", "Context", "Responsibility", and "Effort" (first page, third paragraph)

4) What, in this context, does Ayn Rand mean by "Reality", as it relates to the issue of there being no conflict of interest among rational men? Give an example of an irrational desire, and explain why this is not what Rand means by being in one's self-interest.

a) The term "interests" is a wide abstraction that includes issues of man's values, desires, his goals, and their actual achievement in reality. "Desires" are not tools of cognition, and they are not a valid standard of value. The fact that man desires something does not constitute a proof that the object of his desire is good for him or in his actual self-interest. A man may desire something that contradicts reality.

b)


5) What does Ayn Rand mean by "Context"?

Context means considering an idea in relation to one's other ideas, and, ultimately, in relation to the facts of reality.


6) What is "Context-Dropping"? Give two examples of it.

a) "Context-Dropping" is one of the chief psychological tools of evasion. In regard to one's desires, there are two major ways of context dropping: the issues of range and means.

b) Two Examples of "Context Dropping":
i) "…comparing the virtues of rinsing a dish from the faucet versus dipping it into a pan of rinse water which fairly quickly is no longer pure. When my children were growing up, I often said to them that the aim in washing dishes is not to get the dishes clean but rather to dilute the dirt to an acceptable degree." (pg 226, "The
Ultimate Resource II", by Julian L. Simon ISBN 0-691-00381-5, Chapter 15)

Simon takes the concept of "clean", which *in this context* is washing the dishes with water and soap to make them sufficiently clean to eat off of without risk of disease, and drops it, to imply that the dishes aren't "really clean", but in this context, that is what "clean" means. [We noted in group discussion that Simon is probably dropping context as to "range" in this quote.]

ii) Debate on Floor of Texas State Senate on 4/9/03 regarding SB 83 (Moment of Silence Statute) (See Croft v. Perry, Northern Distric of Texas) On transcript, page 6, Lines 2-5: "Senator Hinojosa: Why –Why are we mandating the schools to do that?
Senator Wentworth: Well, we're not yet. We haven't passed the bill…"

Senator Wentworth drops context because he knows full well (or should know full well) that Senator Hinojosa means why would the proposed bill (SB 83) mandate schools to require a moment of silence. He appears to be dropping context in this case as a sort of debating tactic to give himself more time to think of a response to what he knows Senator Hinojosa's question to be.

7) Are all "Context-Droppers" engaged in "evasion"? What is "evasion" according to Rand? (You may need to go to other writings by Ayn Rand to answer this question, such as "Galt's Speech" in Atlas Shrugged; or The Ayn Rand Lexicon, ed. Harry Binswanger, see entry on "Evasion".)

a) [The consensus answer during group discussion seemed to be yes.]

b) (Evasion) "Thinking is man's only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one's consciousness, the refusal to think –not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment –on the unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you do not pronounce the verdict "It is."…" (Galt's Speech, Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand; see also, The Ayn Rand Lexicon, ed. By Harry Binswanger, "Evasion")

8) What does Ayn Rand mean by "Responsibility", as it relates to her assertion that "there are no conflicts of interest among rational men"? Why does Ayn Rand seem to believe that a person who does not take responsibility for achieving his own goals will tend to adopt the attitude of not being concerned with the interests and lives of others? ("In dropping the responsibility for one's own interests and life, one drops the responsibility of ever having to consider the interests and lives of others –of those who are, somehow, to provide the satisfaction of one's desires." ("The `Conflicts' of Men's Interests" by Ayn Rand, pg 54, _The Virtue of Selfishness_, Signet, ISBN 0-451-16393-1).)


9) What does Ayn Rand mean by "Effort", as it relates to her assertion that "there are no conflicts of interest among rational men"?
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10) Why does Ayn Rand think that there are no conflicts among rational men only if one lives in a free society? What aspects of an unfree society would make such conflicts inevitable in her view?