My point however is that different folks have different reactions to the consequences of any particular set of actions.
And then the objectivists come along and refuse to respect the reactions of anyone who does not share their own.
How is that not reasonable?
Again, let’s explore my own reaction to the question that revolves around the behavior we call abortion: “is aborting a human fetus rational…is it moral?”
My answer is embedded existentially in this:
1] I was raised in the belly of the working class beast. My family/community were very conservative. Abortion was a sin.
2] I was drafted into the Army and while on my “tour of duty” in Vietnam I happened upon politically radical folks who reconfigured my thinking about abortion. And God and lots of other things.
3] after I left the Army, I enrolled in college and became further involved in left wing politics. It was all the rage back then. I became a feminist. I married a feminist. I wholeheartedly embraced a woman’s right to choose.
4] then came the calamity with Mary and John. I loved them both but their engagement was foundering on the rocks that was Mary’s choice to abort their unborn baby.
5] back and forth we all went. I supported Mary but I could understand the points that John was making. I could understand the arguments being made on both sides. John was right from his side and Mary was right from hers.
6] I read William Barrett’s Irrational Man and came upon his conjectures regarding “rival goods”.
7] Then, over time, I abandoned an objectivist frame of mind that revolved around Marxism/feminism. Instead, I became more and more embedded in existentialism. And then as more years passed I became an advocate for moral nihilism.
Which then precipitates [philosophically and otherwise] this frame of mind:
If I am always of the opinion that 1] my own values are rooted in dasein and 2] that there are no objective values “I” can reach, then every time I make one particular moral/political leap, I am admitting that I might have gone in the other direction…or that I might just as well have gone in the other direction. Then “I” begins to fracture and fragment to the point there is nothing able to actually keep it all together. At least not with respect to choosing sides morally and politically.
In other words, I am inhibited from making any “drastic change” in my behavior because I have come to conclude that any change at all is merely embedded in an existential contraption rooted in dasein and conflicting goods.
And then I ask folks like you: How is this not applicable to your own behaviors?
Thus when you level this accusation at me:
That is precisely what I am inclined to think about you. And many other objectivists.
Narcissists [like many sociopaths] are interested only in behaving in a manner that it reinforces their own sense of self-gratification. Sometimes they will agree that there is a right and a wrong behavior, but they just don’t care. Other times they will insist that in the absence of God right and wrong can only be understood from the perspective of any particular mere mortal in any particular context viewing the world around them from the perspective of “what’s in it for me?”
Personally, I do try to live my own life embodying the perspective embedded in the Golden Rule: would I want others to do this to me?
I merely have no illusions but that this is just one more existential contraption rooted by and large in the particular sequence of experiences that have encompassed my life. So far.
Though even here I have no way of demonstrating to others that all reasonable men and women are obligated to think like this. So I am always acknowledging here that I may well be wrong.