A friend posts this quotation from Ayn Rand:
Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage—the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry.
Rand’s conclusion is correct. And the reasoning by which she gets to that conclusion is also correct.
So whence the title of this post you might ask.
Good question. The answer is that given her premises as a reductionist materialist, Rand is not permitted logically to make the argument that she has made, because a reductionist materialism, by definition, insists that “a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry.” Indeed, reductionist materialism, again by definition, insists that “internal body chemistry” exhausts the causal possibilities for “intellectual and characterological traits.”
But Barry, doesn’t materialism allow a role for environmental influences in shaping intellectual and characterological traits? Of course it does. But what is being shaped? Not the spirit. Not the soul. Not even consciousness (which must be denied as an illusion). Materialism allows for nothing immaterial. According to materialism, the environment influences internal body chemistry and nothing else, because there is literally nothing else that can be influenced.
“We are our chemicals and nothing else,” Rand must say if she is to be a logically consistent reductionist materialist.
How then, can she logically reject “the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage—the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry”?
How indeed.