by Jason Stotts
While out here at the Objectivist conference, I’ve been taking a number of interesting seminars, one of which is “The Elements of Thinking in Principles” by Dr. Craig Biddle. The official course description reads:
Ayn Rand’s cognitive clarity and moral certainty were consequences of her thinking in principles. Thinking in principles is, in essence, a process of identifying relevant fundamentals and applying them properly to a given situation. This course will examine and concretize crucial components of this method, emphasizing the practical, life-or-death implications of each.
We will discuss the nature, importance and interrelationships of: naming one’s primaries, excluding the middle, classifying by essentials, respecting hierarchy, keeping context and dismissing the arbitrary. Using a wide variety of examples, we will see how—when properly understood and applied—these elements unify into the whole that is the hallmark of objectivity: the method of thinking in principles. Attendees will increase their understanding of what is involved in this vital method, which will better equip them to pursue their values, promote their lives and protect their rights. (The course presupposes an intermediate-level understanding of Objectivist epistemology and ethics.)
Now of course I was interested in a course which purported to be able to help me think clearer – who wouldn’t want to increase their cognitive efficacy? So I enrolled, went to class on the first day, and something very surprising happened – the course lived up to its description. Instead of being a waste of time, which had been a fear of mine, the course was actually quite useful and it helped me to clarify a lot of things which I “knew”, but apparently only sketchily.
Take this for example, a thing must be either A or ~A (the tilde means “not” or “non”), so this implies that if A stands for “tables”, then ~A is the class of all non-tables. Every existence which is not a table, falls into the class of ~A and there is no overlap between the groups, they are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive (nothing is outside one of the groups and everything is represented). This makes it very easy to think about moral issues with very little trouble applying this framework to ethical issues. For example, let us start over with a thing must be either A or ~A, and let us represent the class of all actions which are moral. This means that ~A represents the class of all things which is not of the class of all actions which are moral, or ~A represents the class of all actions which are immoral. So, since a thing must be either A (moral) or ~A (immoral), this clearly means that everything is “black and white” and it clearly delineates moral action from immoral action. Now of course we still need Morality to provide us with what exactly the class of moral actions contains, but even before we have that knowledge, we know that no immoral action could be moral and that everything is either black or white.
Think about that for just one second, you have just yourself proved that everything is black and white by following my argument, you now know that there is no moral gray!
This was only one of the first points of the course and for me it wasn’t even the most insightful.