Most creatures seem pretty indifferent to the fates of different species. I, for instance, am now finishing off a plate of leftover ribs from some poor hog. As a species with a population of one, Galactus is pretty indifferent to the fate of everyone. I don't think it's a matter of being Objectivist. We're just a serving of babybacks to him.
Objectivists recognize the right (and responsibility) of each person to pursue his own interests, and respect the laws that protect that right.
Galactus does not respect the rights of other individuals. In fact, he eats them.
Laws are the product of reason, and apply to creatures with the power of reason. Galactus (as far as we can tell) has the power of reason. The law applies to him.
If a pig demonstrated the power of reason -- the power to understand law -- then a pig would have the same rights as men. Law is a product, and applies to the domain, of reasonable creatures.
Galactus is bad. Tragic, maybe. Cosmically hapless, perhaps. We may feel sympathy for him, and awe, but he's still bad.
As someone who doesn't eat ANY formerly living beings, I must disagree with the idea that Galactus is bad.
Absorbing the life-force of planets is his ONLY means of survival. He doesn't have the option of vegetarianism, as we do. In a way, he's no different than a tiger or a lion, who eats other animals to survive. There's no maliciousness at all in his actions, just pure instinct & self-preservation. In fact, he's shown himself to "compassionate" in some ways like when he made the deal with Norrin Rad to spare Zenn-La, or with Frankie Raye to spare Earth. The specific planets to eat were irrelevant to him, he's willing to spare an individual world as long as his heralds are capable of finding a suitable replacement.
That's one of the most brilliant things about Stan Lee & his early Marvel collaborators IMO. Not only did they give heroes like Spider-Man flaws in order to make them more down to Earth, they also gave more depth to villains, like Galactus or Magneto, or even Dr. Doom, so that there was a part of you that actually felt like sympathizing with them. This added an extra dimension of characterization to superhero/supervillain battles that had not previously existed.
In Objectivism, it makes no difference whether an evildoer intends to commit evil. In Objectivism, either the act is evil or it is not.
Eating living people is evil, because it kills them. Galactus has no right to kill people, no matter how badly he needs to eat them.
It doesn't matter whether he has any choice.
The only thing that would allow Galactus to kill anyone, ethically, would be to stop violence that person introduced against innocents. Even then, in my opinion, Galactus would be limited to a reasonable use of force.
Galactus may be a tragic figure, and he may be big, and he may wear a cool hat -- but he still isn't allowed to kill people.
I don't see how Objectivism could allow for vampirism. The only justifiable way for Galactus to feed would be to purchase the planets in a free market exchange.
Is it "vampirism" when you eat a hamburger? What if its worse, a hamburger is the ONLY thing that will sustain you. Are you supposed to let yerself die?
Objectivism frays at the edges when faced with supernormal situations ~ all philosophies do. There's a reason that the Question and Mr A inhabited worlds which were far less "super" than mainstream comics.
It's from my understanding that Galactus can ONLY survive by absorbing the "essence" of planets that are capable of sustaining life. That's his food. And when he's done those planets are no longer capable of sustaining life. And since the universal odds are that any planet capable of sustaining life is going to have some living beings on it, as a result of Galactus' actions they will end up dead.
But I really don't see how Galactus could be considered evil because of this. I am a vegatarian, but I swear I'm not one of those animal rights extremists or anything, so please don't take any of the following as an attack on any of you, but I just have to point this out: All of you, I presume, eat meat. Animals (who have never done anything wrong to you) are KILLED, so that y'all can eat them. That is not neccessary for you to survive. You don't HAVE to eat animals. You have other options. Sure, a salad may not taste as good as a steak, but the fact is, you CAN live a long healthy life without ever eating meat. This is an option that Galactus does not have. So are any of YOU evil for eating animals?
Now, I know the argument is that it's different because animals have no capability to reason or understand law or have no measurable intelligence or whatever (have y'all ever been to a circus, or watched "stupid pet tricks" on David Letterman?), but you're using human standards to judge these lesser beings and deciding that, according to you, they have no right to live.
Am I saying humans are no different than animals? No, of course not. Like I said, I'm no extremist. Grant Morrison once wrote that "A child with leukemia has no more intrinsic right to life than a white lab rat, anyone who believes that man's 'intelligence' makes him special has only to look at the way we destroy our environment." I'm not saying that I agree with that philosophy (although he sort of has a point). Personally I don't eat meat just because I think it's gross. I may not think animals are equal to humans, but I do think they're equal to each other. I don't see the difference between eating a cow or eating a dog. Heck, pigs are the filthiest animals on Earth, they'll wallow for hours in their own waste, & then eat it, & yet most people have no problem eating pigs. But you wouldn't dream of eating a cat, despite the fact that cats clean themselves more than most people do.
But I digress.
Judging by the standards of Galactus WE probably don't seem to demonstrate any capacity to reason or any intelligence, at least not by how he would measure such things. How could us, with our flimsy flesh & blood bodies & our little 70 year average lifespans, possiblity relate to this immortal cosmic giant? We would be less than ants to him. So since there's no evil intent in Galactus' actions, how could he be considered evil?
Linda is right; Objectivism applies to the objective world, not to supernatural fantasy. Galactus does not objectively exists -- nothing even vaguely like Galactus has been discovered and, not to be a party poop, probably won't ever be discovered.
Still, JR, if we are examining Galactus in Objectivist terms, I must repeat that [i]intention[/i] has nothing to do with the ethics of an action in Objectivist terminology. An action is good or evil, no in-between, and intention changes nothing.
If we insist Galactus is not ruled by reason, then I suggest we consider him a natural force like a storm or an asteroid or a disease -- ethically neutral. As such, humans are ethically free to quash him or defend against him, as against a forest fire.
Mr.A versus Galactus? I can think of a few science fiction writers -- Heinlein, maybe, or Gordon Dickson -- who might say, "Sucks for Galactus."
The classic definition of evil is to intentionally cause suffering to a sentient being, so intent plays into it. Of course that's not the only time Objectivism disagrees with classic definitions.
My understanding is that nobody DECIDES what is good or evil--that things are inherently good or evil by themselves. The question is how do we KNOW what is good or evil. Clearly, there is no "phone book" where we can look something up and find out it's evil or good.
So, is our knowledge of good and evil then somehow impaired by the fact that we only have five senses and can't possibly know everything? This is one of the parts of the Objectivist school that I sort of have problems with, myself.
That's my problem with Objectivism. There are too many things about the world around us we don't know, so the objective reality that we perceive is only a limited part of the entirety of reality. But we have to work with what we do know until we discover something else.
Exactly. What you're articulating (more simply that I did, ya freakin' bastid!) is the essence of the philosophy of Plato. (Posters who skipped class during freshman Philosophy 101--shame on you!) Basically, (1) there is an objective reality, and (2)we can't really know it fully, but we can make some conclusions about it based on how we perceive it. The famous analogy is Plato's cave (not to be confused with Plato's Retreat, which is for another website): Say that there is activity in front of a lit fire in a cave, but all we can see are the shadows that the actors cast on the wall.
Next week: Challenges to empiricism and Baron Mordo.
Objectivists find truth using whatever method is best. That method is reason.
I'm pretty sure that's the party line, so to speak.
Some information cannot be found using reason. For example, "Does God love what I do?" is a question that cannot be answered through reason. Please note that the question is nonsense. Very often, a question for which reason cannot find a truthful answer turns out, upon examination, to be a nonsense question.
Rand also proposes that paradoxes cannot exist; they are the product of a fault of reason, of an absurdity in the line of questioning.
Truth can be found. Truth is knowable.
I cannot support the following statement with quotes from Rand's text, yet it is an inference I find inevitable: Any information that cannot be found by reason is not "truth." Any question that cannot be answered reveals an absurdity in the line of questioning.
The school of philosophy called logical positivism formed in the early 20th century, taking their cue from Russel, Whitehead and Frege, in an attempt to prove that all human knowledge could be based on objective reason (the methods of mathematical proof): incorrigible basic statements ("There is a blue shape in front of me.") and the laws of logic ("A=A," "If A implies B and A is true, then B is true" and such).
Unfortunately for the logical positivists, the mathematician Kurt Godel proved in his famous "Incompleteness Theorem" (I think we're talking early 1930's) that no matter how many statements one knows or assumes true in any given system of information, there will always be some statement in the system that can neither be proved nor disproved by reason of that system's logic*. One of the profoundest accomplishment in the history of western philosophy, in fact. There's a great book for the layman called "Godel's Proof" by James R. Newman that should still be in print.
Now, there are many non-standard logics, including one approach called intuitionistic mathematics, in which things like contradictions can have truth value ("A does not equal A"), which are quite fascinating, but do not in anyway seem to be acceptable to the Randian Objectivist.
*I should really say "non-trivial system." Which means that you have more than just a single statement, or something sneaky like that. By "non-trivial," mathematicians mean rich enough to contain the positive integers and their arithmetic.
GODEL'S PROOF is a title I've found mentioned in various things I've read -- but I never pursued the book because I never quite knew what it was about. Maybe I'll take a look now! Thanks for hepping me, I am very grateful.
I believe the discoverability of truth through reason is the absolute basis of Objectivism -- perhaps the very definition of it. Myself, I can't quite buy it. That's why I never claim to be an Objectivist. Still, I persist in wondering...
When I described "the discoverability of truth by reason" as the principle from which Objectivism springs, I hoped to help explain Objectivism a little to JR. I hope I got it right by Rand. Really, JR, you're better off reading ATLAS SHRUGGED and FOUNTAINHEAD.
Mark, I have never agree with that principle absolutely, yet I find it a useful perspective to take sometimes while examining a difficult topic. Very often, it does reveal faults in my own chain of reasoning -- as when it reveals the absurdity of superstitious nonsense such as "Am I in love?" or "Where do you go when you die?"
