Self-Interest And Tautologies

The Libertarian take on “self interest” can be annoying:

A colleague of mine still insists — after a good twenty years of our discussing the subject — that people can act altruistically. “Give me one example,” I ask, “just one. We have numerous and varied interests we pursue, and we act only in anticipation of being better off afterwards than if we had not acted,” I tell him. “In other words, all volitional action is self-interest motivated.”

I like Butler Shaffer and a lot of what he writes, but when you start bandying about “all” statements you’re bound to wind up in a logical wasteland.  Your seemingly emphatic statement about this or that becomes, when further considered, meaningless and without content:

A rhetorical tautology can also be defined as a series of statements that comprise an argument, whereby the statements are constructed in such a way that the truth of the proposition is guaranteed or that the truth of the proposition cannot be disputed by defining a dissimilar or synonymous term in terms of another self-referentially. Consequently, the statement conveys no useful information regardless of its length or complexity making it unfalsifiable. It is a way of formulating a description such that it masquerades as an explanation when the real reason for the phenomena cannot be independently derived.

Grant the point:  all volitional action is self interested.  So what?  Then on that score, no act can be distinguished from any other, by definition.  Murder is the same as a self-sacrificial effort to heal the sick.  Yet because these two acts are obviously so profoundly different they can still be distinguished; we’ll just call it something else other than the one being “altruistic” and the other being “self interested”.

Logic is not a silly word game.  The world is a real thing.  You can dogmatically define yourself into a corner and claim victory, but you’re still painted into a corner.  What’s the point?

Ayn Rand had some valuable insights.  But “all volitional action is self interest motivated” is not one of them.

The Inexplicable – Explained, Sort Of

We get all upset around here at the things police sometimes do:  lying, cheating, framing people, wrongfully convicting people.

Lying.

But it’s also fair to get upset at the things police sometimes don’t do.  Take the Canadian case of Robert Pickton.  Please.

This guy is sort of a classic straight from a slasher/horror flick real life creepy monster.  Operates a pig farm in British Columbia.  Yes, a pig farm.

On the side he killed prostitutes.  Many of them, perhaps dozens.  Over years.  Long after some in the various police investigative agencies began to suspect him.  Long after there was ample evidence implicating him, to be had for the asking.  Right under the noses of police, the top brass of which repeatedly looked at what can only be described as the overwhelming proof and….scoffed.