The Grossman Conjecture - Morality killing compassion again, this time on the libertarian side
Actually written JULY 2, 2023 -
Just above [in my post called: Interview With My Inner Fake Socialist] I expressed my desire to write “An Interview with My Inner Fake Libertarian” to counter-balance my interview with my inner fake socialist. I never got around to writing it.
But I found a short video that hints of what my writing would be like.
As I portrayed Standin J Socialist favoring morality over the actual and verifiable relief of suffering [to spite his attempt to avoid doing so by using bullshit postmodern (anti)epistemology], I think I’ve found a libertarian counterpart to Standin J Socialist.
As an Objectivist, Jennifer Grossman obviously believes socialism fails to relieve any actual suffering, and more importantly, that socialism aggravates suffering (and I obviously agree to some extent). And I think it would be reasonable for libertarians to try linking the relief of suffering to the moral principle of upholding individual rights.
But Grossman deliberately, though hypothetically, cuts that link by supposing that socialism actually works, that it does relieve nearly all suffering. She does this to stress the point that we must uphold individual rights even if they actually aggravated suffering instead. Thus the “Grossman contention” is that “Even if it did work, socialism is evil.” That’s the literal title of the short video.
The extreme implication of the Grossman contention is that even if socialism did relieve nearly all suffering, we must oppose it on moral grounds, because it violates individual rights. In Grossman’s speech, this principle is not explicitly taken to the extremes that I’m here exaggerating. But I suspect if we pressed Grossman enough on the issue, she’d go to these extremes. She would favor morality over the actual relief of suffering – to the ultimate extremes. Grossman is emphasizing a principle, that when applied consistently to even extreme scenarios, means “fuck your happiness, do what we libertarians say is morally right.”
So, the extreme is this: If socialism cures all suffering, we have a moral obligation to reject it and suffer. It seems to me that anyone who holds this view is either callous or outright malevolent. They’d be like the God who has the power to relieve suffering but refuses.
Anyway, like Professor Socialist, Grossman is trying to bypass any concerns over whether her ideology actually relieves suffering by “cutting to the chase”, and making a strictly moral issue out of it.
When I called out Professor Socialist on this, he did two things.
(1) He oscillated between the two contraries:
(A) linking the moral principles of socialism with the actual relief of suffering, and
(B) breaking that link and siding with morality instead.
(2) He tried to resolve the contradiction by retreating into bullshit postmodern anti-epistemology that embraces contradictions.
I suspect I would see Grossman mirror Professor Socialist in number 1 above, but differ in her second approach. I suspect she would try to resolve the contradiction by means of rationalism, the kind of rationalism that Objectivist Leonard Peikoff warns against. For an explanation of Peikoff’s warning, I refer the reader to the writing chunk in this book [blog] called “The Bizarre Experience of Leonard Peikoff’s ‘Life as the Standard of Value’ Lecture”, in chapter 04 “META-ETHICS”.
And here is the web link to the Grossman short video: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/R6SUaqDjKEo
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