A theme in Ayn Rand’s fiction is that the failure to understand evil is a source of error and unhappiness for good people. Drawing on the Objectivist corpus this talk will explore the nature of evil, including: the ways in which actions, motives, ideas and people can be evil; the respects in which evil is and is not important; and how understanding evil can help us to appreciate the good and to foster the best in ourselves and others. Recorded live as part of The Objectivist Conference on September 01, 2021.
Whether it’s the legality of abortion, the desirability of free speech, the power of social media companies, or the appropriateness of a president’s tweets, we seem to be increasingly divided by issues of value, by what we consider right and wrong,good and evil.
But whichever side we take on these and other controversies, if we’re asked to explain where our very ideas of good and evil and of right and wrong come from, and what exactly they mean, we’re often at a loss.
In the face of such puzzlement, one of the most common responses is to say that God is the source of morality and that if “God is dead, everything is permitted.”
In this webinar, we’ll challenge the idea that morality rests on an authority figure. We’ll discuss how authoritarianism plagues both our religious and secular thinking about ethics. And we’ll sketch an alternative approach to good and evil, one that treats morality as a this-worldly, ordinary, understandable form of knowledge.
Recorded live as part of ARI’s Philosophy of Living on Earth webinar series on July 27, 2019 Sign up up to attend the next webinar live at http://courses.aynrand.org/webinars/register
This talk explores the value of admiration in the realm of sports. At a time when much in the world around us seems distinctly un-admirable, spotlighting athletes’ achievements offers a refreshing antidote. Even those who aren’t sports fans can gain a deeper appreciation of how admiration itself is a value and can contribute to the admirer’s own flourishing. We explore how the sight of an achievement (as Ayn Rand observed) is, indeed, a glorious thing.
This talk was recorded live in Newport Beach, California, at Objectivist Summer Conference 2018.