Dear Onkar and Yaron,
I want to thank you again for the student scholarship you gave me to attend this summer's Second Renaissance/Lyceum Conference; I hope your investment in me will prove fruitful. I appreciated your cordial response when I told you that I was interning at The Objectivist Center (TOC) this summer, but I was saddened when I received your ultimatum, which stated, "Until and unless you decide to cut off association with [David Kelley's] group, we cannot admit you into other classes in the OAC."
I have spent the last two months considering the issue carefully. I read and re-read the articles you, Onkar, suggested reading: Leonard Peikoff's Fact and Value, Peter Schwartz's On Moral Sanctions and Libertarianism: The Perversion of Liberty, Bennett Karp's Reintroducing the Measurements: An Old Fallacy with a New Name, and Robert Tracinski's Notes On A Question of Sanction.
At first, I found them somewhat persuasive. I did not want to support subjectivism or skepticism, sunder fact and value, or promote the corruption of Objectivism, as these writers say Kelley does. However, I thought that to evaluate the issue independently, I had to examine Kelley's position first-hand, so I read his original article, A Question of Sanction. After thinking about it, I realized that Peikoff, Schwartz, Karp, and Tracinski misrepresent his position.
To understand Kelley's position more clearly, I also read two replies to "Fact and Value"--Kirsti Minsaas's open letter to Harry Binswanger and Robert Bidinotto's "Facts, Values and Moral Sanctions: An Open Letter to Objectivists." Furthermore, I thought that to do Kelley's position justice, I had to read The Contested Legacy of Ayn Rand: Truth and Toleration in Objectivism, Kelley's own book-length reply to "Fact and Value." Only then did I understand precisely what his positions are on judgment, sanction, toleration, the scope of honest error, and the definition of Objectivism, and why they are justified.
And only then did I understand the extent to which Peikoff, Schwartz, Karp, and Tracinski misrepresent these positions.
For example: Peikoff claims that Kelley offers the academic Marxist "as one of his examples of an intellectually honest man" (Fact and Value 4). But Kelley says only that academic Marxists are not necessarily guilty of the same crimes as Lenin or Stalin; he neither says nor implies anything about the academic Marxist's honesty in this essay (A Question of Sanction 2).
Moreover, there are substantive issues on which Kelley and Peikoff disagree, and on which I find Kelley's arguments convincing.
For example: The original cause of the split was the fact that Kelley spoke to a group of libertarians. Kelley did not "sanction" them in any meaningful sense by speaking to them, as Peikoff claims; on the contrary, he explicitly criticized them for trying to defend liberty without a sound philosophical foundation. Peikoff assumes that -- except in exceptionally rare cases -- a person who believes a false idea is irrational and should not be talked to. But Kelley argues effectively that one must know more than the mere fact that someone believes a false idea to conclude that the person arrived at the false idea through evasion, and even if a person is irrational in a particular instance, that does not mean that the person is characteristically irrational. Kelley "tolerated" or "sanctioned" the libertarians only in the sense that he did not, a priori, dismiss them all as irrational or conclude that none of them would be open to persuasion by rational argument. Indeed, Kelley has since persuaded many libertarians that they need a sound philosophical foundation to defend liberty.
These are just two examples of the many problems I found in Fact and Value.
I looked for a public reply to Truth and Toleration by Peikoff, Schwartz, Karp, or Tracinski, but I could find none. In fact, I could find no substantive reply to _Truth_and_Toleration_ by anyone at ARI. If you, Onkar, are going to continue telling people that Kelley carries "out activities that we know are harmful to the spread of Ayn Rand's philosophy," as you wrote in your e-mail to me, I think you should also offer a comprehensive response to Truth and Toleration.
I realize that you must receive great value by associating yourselves with ARI to promote Objectivism. I certainly received value by taking your course from the OAC, Onkar, and by attending the Second Renaissance/Lyceum Conference this summer. However, TOC -- which promotes Objectivism just as ARI does -- also has great value to offer, even though TOC is rarely discussed publicly by the leaders of ARI. David Kelley is one of the most intelligent, rational, honest men I know. TOC has thousands of members -- many of whom left ARI because they shared Kelley's dissatisfaction -- and it has a summer conference of comparable size and quality to the Second Renaissance/Lyceum Conference. Most people I've met through TOC agree with the basic principles of Ayn Rand's philosophy -- including the self-described "libertarians" (who are not necessarily members of the Libertarian Party), most of whom are opposed to anarchism and nihilism and dissociate themselves from that wing of the libertarian movement.
It saddens me to know that you do not want to work towards common goals with me and other rational, honest people who affiliate themselves with TOC. The Objectivist movement is much less powerful than it could be because of this.
I thought your speech, Yaron, at the anti-"living wage" rally I led at Harvard was very effective, and I was flattered that you, Onkar, expressed your confidence in me as a promising scholar when you wrote, "I hope you continue to take courses with us and I hope you end up pursuing an academic career" after I completed your course. I would like to continue trading values and furthering common values with ARI, but I am not willing to betray my philosophical convictions nor sacrifice the values I gain from TOC in order to do so.
I hope you will reconsider your position, and I hope we can work together in the future.
Sincerely,
D. Moskovitz
