Risk Deontology

Can we say the recent event in South Africa, where protesting miners were killed by police in self defense, occurred with moral authority, and if so, from what does that authority derive, or is it derivative at all? Is the event a predictable ontology with a categorical imperative or is it a teleological construction with an Objectivist, risk ontology that is apparent only when the event occurs at a particular time occupying a particular space?

These are not rhetorical questions or curious conundrums. Answering these questions in theory or in practice forms the philosophy of risk, which has real, measurable, technical value that determines the distribution of the reward and delimits the liability of the risk.

According to the Objectivist, morality is derivative value. (It is value with no absolute constancy, having as many values as there are observers, derived from all the probable circumstances they are in to form what is nothing but a random, objective, stochastic oscillation of the risk, forming clearly predictable patterns of probability in the aggregate.) It derives, as Nietzsche maintained, from the execution of power, which is the only thing that gives it constancy, much as Ayn Rand describes it. (In other words, technically, it has no added value. Technical data in the aggregate is devoid of subjective, moral sentiment because it does not really exist--it is not objective reality. The value we subjectively impart to moral sentiment results in unobjective, irrational behavior, which appears in the technicals as a predictable, algorithmic, objective ontology. When we provide welfare for the unemployed, for example, which technically presents as inflation with low productivity, Randians explain, we foolishly believe we are being morally responsible when, objectively, we are making the problem worse by destroying productive incentive. Rather than adding value it is really a loss in zero sum--what conservatives refer to as a moral hazard--because the economy loses the incentive to add supply that economically reduces the probability of the risk without all the confusing, relative ambivalence of political sentiment. The loss produces the violence, for example, that yields the value--the imperative--to kill protesting miners with moral authority. The deontology, according to the Objectivist, ontologically yields the risk to be avoided--that is, the value of the risk is always conserved in zero-sum, economically maintained to technically indicate error. The technicals, not moral sentiments, objectively indicate the right thing to do, demanding an economic solution derived from the individual rather than a collectivist, political solution--like the civil action taken in South Africa--derived from the state.) For a power elite, what is moral is whatever maintains power. So, as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle pointed out, good people, ironically, are stuck with all the risk and bad people take all the reward.

Nietzche and Rand, however, fail to see the irony of good versus evil because the value of the risk is not morally derived from an imaginary world of ideas but derives from the real-world application of the risk. Morality is not integral to the good life but derives from the deontology of the risk--shaping it into whatever you want it to be on demand, not ontologically on command. Fascists, for example, who subscribe to Nietzsche's philosophy and maintain that the masses require a superman, or a super-ego, to direct them into the good life, much as Plato described it, fervently maintain power be legitimately structured on demand. Communists who want to maintain power on command are inimical to the individual freedom required to make demands in the marketplace and keep "the people" peacefully prosperous. As long as the non-elite have the freedom to prosper and advance in socio-economic class, by maintaining our natural inequality, the productivity required to get there on demand ensures the supply needed to actualize the good life that cannot be had without it being ontologically derived from those that have the power to execute it on demand in the marketplace. Once the capacity for leadership has been established to manage the risk, we are free to pursue the good life on demand with the power of self-determination, which is to describe an integral, ethical dimension (a deontology) where it objectively does not exist.

According to the objectivist, we are never where we want to be, and this lack of meaning, of arbitrary purpose always to be determined, is what gives meaning to an otherwise meaningless existence. Just look at the technicals. Everywhere we look is a fractal "sameness" of continuous oscillation. The only real meaning it has is the objective we give it, continuously oscillating between what we are and what we freely want to be.