Theory-Practice Dichotomy

The theory-practice dichotomy is the belief that something can be true in theory yet fail in practice — that principles and results belong to separate orders, so that a man must choose between being consistent and being effective. Objectivism rejects it, holding that a theory which does not work is a false theory, and that the phrase names a refusal to revise a conclusion rather than a discovered feature of the world.

What the phrase actually reports

"Good in theory, but it doesn't work in practice" is normally offered as an observation. Objectivism analyses it as a confession, and there are only a few things it can mean.

• The theory is wrong. A generalisation is a claim about what happens. If the predicted result does not occur, the generalisation has been refuted, and calling it true anyway detaches it from the facts that were supposed to support it. See Floating Abstraction.
• The theory is right and was misapplied. Principles are abstractions and do not carry their own instructions for use; identifying which concretes fall under one is a separate act of judgment, and getting it wrong is a mistake in application rather than in the principle. See Context.
• The theory is right and the speaker dislikes what it requires. This is the case Rand was most concerned with, because it is where the phrase does its real work: it lets someone keep a conviction as a decoration while acting against it, and describes the resulting split as a fact about reality instead of a choice.

In none of the three is there a genuine gap. The dichotomy survives, on this account, by never being examined closely enough to collapse into one of them.

The root: mind and body

Objectivism treats this split as one instance of the mind-body dichotomy, the notion that man's consciousness and his physical existence belong to different and opposed realms.

Once thought is placed in a realm apart from the world men act in, the consequences arrive automatically. Concepts become detached from the percepts they were formed from, so the connection between an abstraction and the concretes it governs is broken (see Concept formation and Analytic-synthetic dichotomy). Ideals become admirable in proportion to their unattainability. And "practical" comes to mean the successful handling of concretes without reference to any principle, which is the definition of pragmatism.

The related splits — the is-ought and reason-emotion dichotomies, and the moral-versus-practical dilemma of conventional ethics — are the same fracture appearing in different branches.

The moral and the practical

The version with the widest reach is the belief that a man must choose between doing what is right and doing what works — that morality is a tax on success.

Objectivism denies the alternative at its base. If the standard of value is man's life, then what is moral is what in fact sustains it, and a code that made its adherents worse off would have been mis-derived. Honesty is not a sacrifice of advantage but the recognition that faking reality gains nothing real; Justice is not generosity but accuracy about people; Productiveness is not a duty but the activity by which a human being stays alive. See Value, Virtues and Rationality.

The reason the dilemma seems compelling is that the codes it is usually posed within do demand sacrifice. A morality built on altruism does set the good against the interests of the person practising it, so under that code the conflict is real. Objectivism's claim is that the conflict is a property of that code rather than of morality as such. See Egoism and Sacrifice.

Why principles are the practical option

The dichotomy is often defended on the ground that rules are rigid and reality is complicated, so an unprincipled approach is the flexible one.

The Objectivist reply is that principles exist because man's cognitive capacity is limited and his life is long. Nobody can re-derive his conduct from first principles at every moment, or hold in mind every consequence of every act; a principle is the form in which a wide range of experience is compressed into something usable in the moment it is needed. Discarding principles does not free a person to respond to the situation — it leaves him responding to whatever is most immediately visible, which is the shortest possible range. See Principle and Unit-economy.

Common misunderstandings

• That it means every idea must be immediately applicable. It does not. Abstract research with no foreseeable use is not "impractical" in the sense at issue; what is claimed is that a true generalisation is never contradicted by the facts.
• That Objectivism denies the difficulty of applying principles. It insists on it. Judging what falls under a principle, in a specific context and with incomplete information, is where most real error occurs.
• That it makes the moral automatic. Acting on principle raises the odds over a lifetime; it does not guarantee any particular outcome, since outcomes also depend on facts outside a person's control.
• That "practical" means whatever succeeds in the short term. That is the pragmatist sense the dichotomy generates. Objectivism defines the practical by reference to man's life as a whole. See Pragmatism.

See also

• Principle · Practical · Pragmatism · Context
• Mind-Body Dichotomy · Is-Ought Dichotomy · Reason-Emotion Dichotomy · Analytic-synthetic dichotomy
• Ethics · Virtues · Rationality · Honesty
• Concept formation · Floating Abstraction · Reason · Logic

Discussion

• The Alligator River Story
• How do you argue with moral relativists?
• Why theft is neither ethical nor practical

References

• Rand, Ayn. "The Objectivist Ethics" and "Doesn't Life Require Compromise?", The Virtue of Selfishness. New American Library, 1964.
• Rand, Ayn. "Philosophy: Who Needs It", Philosophy: Who Needs It. Bobbs-Merrill, 1982.
• Rand, Ayn. "For the New Intellectual", For the New Intellectual. Random House, 1961.
• Peikoff, Leonard. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, chapters 5 and 7.

External links

• Moral-Practical Dichotomy at the Ayn Rand Lexicon