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"Myth No. 4: Trade and open markets create "a race to the bottom." That's how Jon Stewart decries globalization on his show, saying, "Globalization allowed corporations to scour the planet for the cheapest labor and loosest regulations!" ---- That problem child, "globalization", would be fine and dandy when governments are barred from entry, economy and state kept strictly apart . Individuals (and companies) deal and trade with others, wherever and whenever they see opportunities and at their own risk. As it is, the large corporates operate "hand-in-glove" with their Gvt which in turn makes deals with foreign gvts. That is then, corporate-globalization, backed, and given entree by, the power of states. Corporatocracy plus statism. (which gives spurious credibilty to socialists who claim capitalism = imperialism ("/neocolonialism") As good a place for this essay by Jeffrey Tucker https://brownstone.org/articles/how-did-american-capitalism-mutate-into-american-corporatism/

I suppose the article does an adequate job of addressing the standard political complaints about jobs in relation to imports (though I don’t accept the claim that “Manufacturing output in the U.S. is near its all-time high. We make more than Japan, Germany, India, and South Korea combined” on the simple grounds that this is a factual claim which deserves actual numbers and sources rather than an unsupported assertion – but facts apparently get in the way of reasoning). One issue which does indeed figure into Objectivist reasoning on this topic is the question, what is the proper response to initiation of force? Governmental force can be justified as a response to the initiation of force, therefore if the government of China initiates force against its citizens to compel labor or to subsidize manufacturing (etc.), it is not immoral for the US to retaliate by restricting the aggressors from profiting from their violations of rights. We have no duty to retaliate when the force is not directed against us, but it is morally allowed. Not all international trade is voluntary, a proper analysis of the issue has to include whether or not some nation operates on free market principles, or does it use slave labor and government subsidy to allow their goods to better compete against goods traded under free market principles? Of course, there are no nations operating under free market principles – our goods are at a disadvantage because of price inflation resulting from government regulation including minimum wage laws. Our own government puts American goods at a disadvantage because it initiates force in order to create a supposed social benefit. Even though all goods are tainted with the stain of force, we cannot therefore forbid all trade (hopefully this is not a controversial proposition). On the opposite side of the continuum, is it ever proper to limit trade in goods created by initiation of force? A kind of case that should be obvious is that it is proper to restrict trafficking in stolen goods, e.g. I cannot break into a warehouse, take goods, then sell them at a discount. But what about the case where the vendor did not himself steal the goods, instead, the government confiscated the goods and gave them to a vendor, who then sold them at a discount? At the level of theory, all we can say is that initiation of force is improper. At the level of practical law, it is far from clear what degree of initiation of force can be ignored, when it comes to the governments (proper) function of protecting rights. A simple principle that could be applied is that it is proper for the US government to protect the rights of US citizens, and only US citizens. I am referring to the sketchy realm of the morally optional, when it comes to government action.

Calling "sanction" occasions of failing to recognize evil and take actions to oppose it is incorrect English, a smearing out of the term sanction.

This is incorrect and a very dangerous idea many have taken away from reading Rand. (A related incorrect take-away, which Rand later, correctly, denounced and clarified, is the idea that evil is impotent.) Evil is not always dependent on a sanction, and when it is, sanction from most anyone will do. Sanction from the (forum-shopped) witch doctor is common. Navalny did not sanction the evil of Putin, and he was brutalized and murdered by Putin all the same. Realistically, sanction from the victim is generally not a worthy sanction to the evil doer. To the evil doer, the sanction of the victim is generally as irrelevant as the sanction, were such possible, of a rat or insect. (Aside: Stalin fooled people into the "sanction" of not realizing that he was the reason they were forced onto a train to Siberia. They wrote him letters thinking that if he knew what was happening he would intervene.) Ayn Rand introduced the idea of the sanction of the victim and the dependence of evil on it in a situation in which evil was an ongoing parasitism on the victim. I'd leave validity of the idea to that sort of situation, nothing broader. One bad idea some readers take away from Atlas Shrugged is that they and their philosophical comrades are the Atlases holding up the world as in the book (kind of an iffy metaphor of the book, really, because of our modern conception of gravity) and that everyone else is significantly a parasite on them. No, our philosophical circle is not in that role. There are other real people who are in that role in this the real world.

Some time back, I tweeted a Value for Value post by Peter Schwartz which explains how our culture's dominant ethical code, altruism, justifies supporting Hamas over Israel, despite the demands of justice to do exactly the opposite. Schwartz says in part:Certainly, a growing anti-Semitism is at work. But the more fundamental explanation is the one provided by a schoolteacher in Atlanta, as reported in the Nov. 5 NY Times ("Across the Echo Chamber, a Quiet Conversation About War and Race"). She posted the following message on Facebook, defending her unequivocal backing of the Palestinians against Israel: "The actual history of this situation is NOT COMPLICATED. I will ALWAYS stand beside those with less power. Less wealth, less access and resources and choices. Regardless of the extreme acts of a few militants who were done watching their people slowly die." She is stating the essence of a moral code that is accepted by virtually everyone today: the code of altruism. According to that code, need is the ultimate standard of morality. If others are in need, nothing else matters -- you have a duty to satisfy their needs.Now that Iran, a nation nearly ten times more populous than Israel, has more directly waged war against Israel, it would be interesting to quiz the above schoolteacher about which side she is on. I would not expect her allegiance to have shifted, despite the fact that Israel had enough help repelling that attack that it is a fair question whether it could have done so alone. Absent the ability to ask directly, we can get the answer by consulting a recent Brendan O'Neill article article at Sp!ked. It is titled "How Woke Leftists Became Cheerleaders for Iran," and I think the below is crucial to understanding why we're seeing mass "demonstrations" by people claiming to be in favor of this warmongering regime's "right" to "self-defense:"The left would say, Don't believe your lying eyes or mind about this evil man. (Image via Wikimedia Commons, license.)The Western left's blaming of Israel for everything, and its implicit absolution of Iran, is grimly revealing. These people seem to view Israel as the only true actor in the Middle East, and everyone else as mere respondents to Israel's actions. Israel is the author of the Middle East's fate, while the rest of them -- Hamas, the Houthis, even Iran -- are mere bit-part players with the misfortune to be caught up in Israel's vast and terrifying web. This is identitarianism, not anti-imperialism. A new generation of radicals educated into the regressive ideology that says 'white' people are powerful and 'brown' people are oppressed can only understand the Middle East in these terms, too. The end result is that they demonise Israel and infantilise Iran. The Jewish State comes to be seen as uniquely malevolent while Iran is treated as a kind of wide-eyed child who cannot help but lash out at its 'Zionist' oppressor. Israel is damned as a criminal state, while Iran's crimes against humanity are downplayed, even memory-holed. This is where wokeness leads, then: to sympathy for one of the most backward and repressive states on Earth on the deranged basis that its criminal strikes against Israel represent a blow against the arrogant West itself... [bold added]The whole idea that all of Israel is Caucasian or that the Islamic world is entirely brown-skinned is nearly as ridiculous as assuming that race determines character or as using white as code for oppressor and brown for needy or oppressed. If anyone needs disabusing of the notion that the left stands for racial equality or individual rights, what we're seeing unfold -- the use of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories to excuse racially slurring Israelis as white (which is a racial slur coming from the left these days) en route to enabling their extermination -- should concern anyone with a grain of rationality or a sense of justice. By casting the alleged neediness of Palestine and Iran -- and Israel's well-earned strength -- as racial attributes, the left has excused making the mindless siding with terrorists in the name of altruism permanent. They're coming for the Jews now, and they will come for the rest of West as soon as is convenient. We're all "colonialists" now, according to the left, anyway. -- CAVLink to Original

These Hours of Radiant Existence* This is the philosophy I created, my life work. This presentation is only the length of a monograph, not a book. There are here no scholarly citations and references or thick setting of my philosophy in the history of philosophy, unlike my usual compositions. It is just straight reading of the philosophy I developed and hold for true. I thank Walter my wonderful for doing all he could throughout our interval these last decades to support my study and writing of philosophy. The ten short chapters in this monograph are: I. Existence II. Other III. Divisions of Existence IV. Entities V. Passage VI. Situation VII. Character VIII. Science and Mathematics IX. Logic X. Mortal Life and Value ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I expect to return shortly to completing my compositions in progress here at Objectivism Online, including: Necessity and Form in Truth / On The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts, / Kelley's Kant / Dewey and Peikoff on Kant's Responsibility / Honesty / Sacrifice

It goes way beyond ‘interesting’, it enters the territory of morally imperative. There is a plain contradiction in Oliver’s position. The media (NYT) bears a responsibility for turning this personal discussion into a propaganda event, it then has carries that responsibility to defend the oppressed in the present case. (*Crickets*). Of course, that presumes that the purpose of the media is to objectively report facts rather than advocate a particular ideology. Occasionally, a rational commentator will notice one of these contradictions and will write about it, as Schwartz did. What should be said is that the NYT has a responsibility to put this very question to Oliver – unsympathetically, in the same manner that they address others whom they deem to be politically incorrect. Attention needs to be put on the media for its reporting bias. However, to be effective such attention would need to be itself objective. This then reminds me of a recent Gus blog where Gus interjects a comment that “Trump’s Supreme Court appointments eventually overturned Roe vs. Wade”, which is misleading (he appointed only 3 of the majority justices, and that statement carries the false and unsupported implication that this was Trump’s reason for those appointments). It’s fine to pick on Trump, but let’s see some actual facts, not just mystical divination about the mental state of voters and guilt-by-association reasoning. Now, hitting rather close to home, there has been a chorus of crickets over the fact that the Trump faction in the House at least temporarily limited some of the right-trampling power of the FISA courts. This action was taken with the full approval of Trump, and yet where is the laudatory commentary? So yeah, we can understand this in terms of a hierarchy of values. Truth is a value; but Trump is a greater disvalue; ignoring a relevant truth is less evil than making an false assertion or implication. Some media elevate the ‘Trump is evil’ axiom to the point that they will make literally-false statements, but that is not so common because of defamation law (though certain media are statutorily immunized against such actions). A safer bet is to rely on false implications (which can still be a cause of legal action, just easier to summarily dismiss). When silence is available, that is a completely un-actionable method of promulgating the viewpoint that Trump is evil. To be clear, Trump is evil, my point is that the philosopher’s job is focus on the logical infrastructure of political discourse, and to point out these contradictions. We cannot in all honesty demand adherence to logic if we also repudiate logic. The laughing-face emoticon is an exemplar of an intellectually dishonest tool, which should be obliterated from this forum.

Over the weekend and from its own territory, Iran launched a barrage of hundreds of drones and missiles at Israel, using Israel's attack on its "embassy" in Syria as an excuse. I recommend Yaron Brook's real-time reporting and commentary (embedded here). I was out running errands when I began listening. Any time I checked, I found him to be well ahead of other outlets both in terms of timeliness and quality of information. The whole thing was barely a blip in mainstream media, and even sites like the Drudge Report were somewhat late. At one point, Brook noted the issue with the most military significance at present: Iran doesn't have the nuclear capability it has been trying to develop. This attack could have been far worse, and harder to deal with if that had not been the case. And after this weekend there is no doubt that this scenario must be averted, in the minimal form of the destruction of Iran's nuclear weapons facilities. Ideally, the West also does whatever it can to topple the murderous, theocratic regime behind the attack and decades of terrorism and proxy conflicts. See also "End States That Sponsor Terrorism," by Leonard Peikoff. As became apparent during the podcast, the need to end Iran's nuclear capability is a point many in Israel seem to grasp, as the following, quote of former Israeli PM Naftali Bennett, tweeted by Open Source Intel would indicate:Some points regarding the overnight Iranian missile attack on Israel:Contrary to what pundits are saying, this wasn't designed merely as "bells and whistles" with no damage. When you shoot 350 flying objects timed to hit Israel at the same moment, when you use three fundamentally different weapon types -- cruise missiles, ballistic missiles and UAVs, you're looking to penetrate Israel's defenses and kill Israelis.The US administration is telling us: "This is a victory, you've already won by thwarting the missiles. No need for any further action." No, it's NOT a victory. Yes, it's a remarkable success of Israel's air defense systems, but it's not a victory. When a bully tries to hit you 350 times and only succeeds seven time, you've NOT won. You don't win wars just by intercepting your enemy's hits, nor do you deter it. Your enemy will just try harder with more and better weapons and methods next time. How DO you deter? By exacting a deeply painful price.It's incorrect to say "nobody got hurt". There's a 7 year-old Israeli-Arab girl called Amina Elhasuny fighting for her life. That's who coward Khamenei hit. The Islamic Republic of Iran made a big mistake. For the past 30 years it's been wreaking havoc on the region -- through its proxies. A terror-octopus whose head is Tehran, and its tentacles are in Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Gaza. How convenient. The Mullahs send others to conduct horrendous terror attacks, and die for them. Other people's blood. Israel's strategic mistake for the past 30 years was to play along this strategy. We always fought the Octopus' arms, but hardly exacted a price from its Iranian head. This should change now: Hezbollah or Hamas shoots a rocket at Israel? Tehran pays a price. The enemy is the Iranian REGIME, not the wonderful Iranian people. The Iranian regime reminds me of the Soviet regime in 1985: corrupt to the core, old, incompetent, despised by its own people, and destined to collapse. The sooner the better. The West can accelerate the regime's inevitable collapse with a set of soft and clever actions, short of military force. Remember, USSR collapsed without any need for a direct American attack. Let's do this. Israel is fighting everybody's war. In Gaza, Lebanon and Tehran. We're considered "the small satan" by radical Islam. America is the big one. I'll be clear: if these crazy fanatic Islamic terrorists get away with murder by hiding among civilians, this method will be adopted by terrorists worldwide. We're not asking anyone to fight for us. We'll do the job. But we do expect our allies to have our back, especially when it's tough -- and now it's tough. Be on the right side and help us defeat these horrible and savage regimes.That army of useful idiots -- the ninnies who are worrying about "escalation" -- are ignoring what happened on October 7 and over this weekend: Iran has already escalated unprovoked twice, and is going to escalate again, anyway. Its threats of doing worse if Israel retaliates are superflous and should be ignored, because these theocrats plan atrocities, genocide, and tyranny regardless of what we do. This is war. We should fight it on our own terms. This attack on Israel is a proxy attack on the West by dogs that smell fear. Let's snuff out these animals while they are still weak. -- CAVLink to Original

Everybody gets the blues once in a while. A few moments from Ayn Rand's life, as recounted by Nathaniel Branden in Judgment Day: My Years with Ayn Rand (1989): By the fall of 1958, it was apparent that Ayn was sinking into a deep and tenacious depression. Not the sales of her novel or the torrent of fan mail or any of the interesting people we were meeting seemed to cheer her for more than a few hours or evoke in her any desire to write again. The thought of another project—any other project—exhausted her. Every day, she sat long hours at her desk playing solitaire, the game becoming a metaphor for her sense of her position in the world. She did not read. She left her correspondence largely unanswered. Her body ached with numerous tension pains. She had written a novel about a man who stops the motor of the world; now it was as if her motor had stopped. She saw herself as trapped in a swamp of mediocrity, malice, and cowardice. She had found admirers but no champions. . . I thought she was experiencing a delayed letdown after thirteen years of high emotional intensity while writing Atlas full-time. Ordinary living could hardly compete. In many of our discussions, from the summer of 1958 and for the next two years, she would begin to cry while describing her perception of the world and her own place in it, and she confided that she cried almost every day. This struck me as shockingly out of character, and I realized that I had underestimated the depth of Ayn’s struggle, with which I felt enormous and painful empathy. We had long conversations on the telephone every day. I visited her two or three evenings a week, sometimes alone, sometimes with Barbara, so we could discuss how we might better interpret the events that were such blows to Ayn’s ambition, energy, and enthusiasm. These sessions typically lasted until five or six in the morning. Her suffering was devastating to watch. [...] Ayn’s depression persisted relentlessly. “I’m ashamed of myself for crying so much,” Ayn said one evening. “The Collective would be shocked if they knew. You don’t tell them, do you?” I told her I did not. “Galt would handle all this differently. Somehow, he would be more untouched by it. More realistic. But I don’t know how or in what way. I would hate for him to see me like this. I would feel unworthy, as if I had let him down.” I was used to hearing her discuss Galt as if he were a real person; all of us did that. I said, “I look at it differently. If I were knocked down and hurt badly by something that had happened to me, so that I was crying a lot or devastated or whatever, I think I would say, ‘All right, look at me. I’m in a bad way. So what? In a little while, I’ll pick myself up again. Meanwhile, this is reality. Why pretend it isn’t?’ ” She chuckled unhappily. “You’re quoting my own philosophy back to me. Only, for once, I can’t seem to apply it.” (ch. 11) Her view of depression, if accurately told, was interesting: When I tried to tell her of some new research that suggested that certain kinds of depression had a biological basis, she answered angrily, “I can tell you what causes depression. I can tell you about rational depression, and I can tell you about irrational depression. The second is mostly self-pity, and in neither case does biology enter into it.” I asked her how she could make a scientific statement with such certainty, given that she had never studied the field. She shrugged bitterly and snapped, “Because I know how to think.” (ch. 15) I suppose she would have scoffed at Schopenhauer's claim:

No, one cannot, but can one, over time, become the other? Many (most?) Objectivists were formerly Christians (and Jews). Are there any Christians who were formerly Objectivists? Not all Christians are the same, each varying in their rationality and in their potentiality for becoming Objectivists. The more deeply rooted their Christianity, the less their potential. Unlike the Rand-friendly "new Christian intellectuals" referenced in the originating post, most Christians who encounter Ayn Rand's work malign and reject her value. The popular speaker and author Jordan Peterson is an example of the latter. A Jungian psychologist and pragmatist Christian, Jordan Peterson, posing as an individualist, says he "acts as if God exists" and who writes in his book, 12 Rules for Life: “the inevitable suffering that life entails can rapidly make a mockery of the idea that happiness is the proper pursuit of the individual. . . . [Life] has more to do with develop­ing character in the face of suffering than with happiness.” He also has said in his YouTube videos that, “Happiness is for stupid people at amusement parks.” For Peterson, Jesus is the “transcendent” exemplar of morality, who should be emulated in a life of suffering and sacrifice. Consistent with all this is his asserting, in more YouTube videos, that he does not “regard Ayn Rand as a great mind…not sufficiently sophisticated”, although he “enjoyed” reading her “superficial” novel, Atlas Shrugged. His participation on a discussion panel with speakers from the Ayn Rand Institute made no difference in his continual dismissal of Ayn Rand and Objectivism. Contrast this with the aforementioned Rand-friendly Christians who aspire to become rational egoists in reverence to their "Galt-like" God. Are these egoistic Christians more or less dangerous than those like Peterson?

Ayn Rand once gave some really good advice that went something like this: "The most important thing you can do to help the poor is to avoid becoming poor yourself." I add: The most important thing you can do to stop destructive evil in the world is to not be destructive of yourself, such as by telling lies, using non-prescribed psychoactive narcotics (even if legal), possibly causing damage to your mind such as paranoia and delusions of Galt-level accomplishments made by yourself, mysteriously unheralded, in physics and engineering. From all you have described to us on your personal front and pleaded for us to accept, it looks most likely that if you "will be completely out of all resources", it will be at root due to your own compromised mind and behavior, whether you yourself caused that damage or it happened by the course of nature. If you die "within the next two weeks" it will not be because of evil of someone else. I hope you will still be alive in two weeks and not so out of resources that you no longer can communicate in this medium if you wish. A sister of mine committed suicide a few years ago (a wife, mother, and grandmother), and from what I know of her physical miseries for which she could get no further help, it was a well-and-long-considered sensible suicide. I don't think she did it just so her loved ones would be pained. I do not know your health potentials, but that is surely the arena in which you need help and protection, assuming you are not just BS-ing the site in a show of fake feelings and mental states (which I doubt). I hope you are not in such a boxed-in and painful health situation as my sister evidently was. Be suspicious of any inclination you have towards suicide. Nature is going to end each life soon enough. A year ago, a nephew of mine died of alcoholism. It destroyed his organs. He was 52. It had started as a young man, when he had been in the Navy. He knew he was an addict, but refused to let the appropriate professionals try to help him. I hope you are not on a destructive course along those lines, with some sort of long addiction. If so, please get medical help, and realize you can not make the return to health by yourself. I experienced paranoia myself for a couple of days. I was in a safe place, a hospital I'd come to for what turned out to be symptoms from a bladder blockage. All my regular medicines I take each day to stay alive could not get released from my body and caused malfunctions in my brain. The neurological condition is known as Metabolic Encephalopathy. When I later saw my neurologist, he could predict all the various mental malfunctions that had ensued. I mention the paranoia part because I know first-hand that while you are in it, you do not know you are in it. You just keep putting every bit in every episode of life into a vast plot against yourself and things you treasure. But if there is for you periodic waning of it, get yourself some help, protecting yourself from yourself. Don't be ashamed of mental derailments. The appropriate model of human perfection is not a perfect crystal, but perfect health, which can be lost and possibly regained. Resilience and recoveries are virtues. I was in a mental hospital myself as a young man, due to my suicidal responses to my existential situation. I began to read The Fountainhead there, and my doctor encouraged me to finish it, which I did. And I lived another six decades (so far, so good) without such problems again, and I achieved difficult things in love and work and in personal projects that, though difficult, were more modest than and more suited to my abilities than stellar physics breakthroughs. (I loved physics and, with engineering education also, I have been able to put what I learned to good use in philosophical reflections.) And I have been happy. Here's hoping. –S

A Greek Sham The fire of the gods stolen by Prometheus was actually stolen by the story maker from man and given to the gods, omitting credit to man of having learned to start, control, and use fires without outside help.

Ayn Rand's noble romanticism, as she says in her Introduction to The Fountainhead, reclaims the emotions of reverence for the sacred back from traditional theistic religions' monopoly on them. Is this Objectivist romance for real ideals what attracts some Christians/theists to Ayn Rand's work, despite their Christianity/theism? Christianity's "transcendent reality" is God, and human earthly affairs are mundane. Galt's triumphs are "transcendent" in that they are heroic realizations of his highest ideals, the exalted becoming of his rational productive being. To be inspired by this noble, uplifting romance of Galt, is to "breathe in" and be energized by that "spirit".

The important questions are, where do you get your abstractions from, and how do you know they are correct? The Christian answer is that you get them from God (sometimes indirectly) and that you know they are correct by means of faith. The Objectivist answer is that you get them by reasoning from reality, and that you have to check them against reality. These are very different. It is one thing to reach, for example, egoism, from facts and reasoning, and it's another to reach it from God and faith. If a Christian's faith causes him to happen to wander into an Objectivist idea, what could make it "stick?" Bible verses? He could wander out of those ideas again just as easily. It's just a question of what seems to be coming from God at any given time. So it becomes completely ungrounded (or grounded, ultimately, only in their faith, only in their feelings). Some Christians can smuggle in bits of reason and reality (they have to, to survive), but enough of that causes God to wither away. The Objectivist perspective would seem to say, "rightfully so!" but that scares many Christians. -- There is also a skeptical pair of answers, that you make up abstractions arbitrarily, and there's no way of ever knowing if they're correct. Christians and skeptics are usually good at finding the holes in each other's theories, but Christians usually evade the holes in their own theories. Skeptics will claim that all theories have holes, including their own, so they claim the holes as proof that their theory is correct. Objectivism is the first philosophy that reality can't poke any holes in, although Aristotle's main ideas came close to that and helped make Objectivism possible. Skeptics say such a philosophy is impossible; Christians may say it's a sin, because it leaves out God, but then they want God to be necessary, so then they say Objectivism is impossible, too. Instead of asking "what could make an Objectivist idea stick in a Christian's mind," you could ask the flip-side, "what could make a Christian drop an Objectivist idea?" Reality can't poke holes in Objectivist ideas even if you hold the Objectivist ideas for the wrong reasons. But if you don't know why an idea is correct, there are still consequences, such as when the idea ends up contradicting another idea. How do you resolve the conflict if you rely on faith instead of facts? Facts may show that one idea is true and the other false, but if you hold ideas based on faith, ideas that might be clearly different in light of the facts end up being on an "equal footing" with each other. With no reference to reality, you could pick either. Usually people decide based on still other ideas, which themselves may not be correct. For example, some theologians say that, if there's a conflict between reality and God, side with God. What would a Christian do with his Objectivist ideas, then?

Do Christians really think that self-interest is immoral? That literally makes no sense whatsoever. They couldn't even live beyond a week thinking something so blatantly irrational/immoral. If they actually "believed" such a irrational thing they would all hold their breath, not eat, not drink water, do absolutely not and just die.

Correct, Monart. This got to be a longer road than I had in mind at the beginning, but that is giving it full due weight. And I'm going to get to each promised component.

Boydstun, I think in the spirit of your personally being “not purely egoist”, you might consider it important to sketch, if only in broad strokes, the bones or main structure of your ethics (which you deem are on a solid footing) in a sort of “introduction” which you might be able to expand upon if the finitude of life’s span permits, but which nonetheless represents the unwavering unshakeable base you have already formed, and upon which any remaining more detailed formulations and expositions are to be made. I propose a sort of ITBE (Introduction to Boystun’s Ethics) even if only in essay form, but possibly of any length or of any title, again in the spirit of how crucial the philosophy of ethics is and your being “not purely egoist”.

The Original Sham was that mortality was not naturally inherent in life. According to this sham, death as a general phenomenon among humans needed an explanation outside the nature of life, the explanation on offer being that there had been an artificial devising of a systematic preclusion of endless life, making all humans mortal. “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and care for it. He told the man ‘You may eat from every tree in the garden, but not form the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; for on the day that you eat from it, you will certainly die’. . . . “God answered ’Who told you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree which I forbade you? , , , , “To the woman he said: ‘I will increase your labour and your groaning, and in labour you shall bear children. You shall be eager for your husband, and he shall be your master’. “And to the man he said: ‘Because you . . . have eaten fruit from the tree which I forbade you, accursed shall be the ground on your account. With labour you shall win your food from it all the days of your life. It will grow thorns and thistles for you, none but wild plants for you to eat. You shall gain your bread by the sweat of your brow until you return to the ground; for from it you were taken. Dust you are, to dust you shall return.’ “The Lord God said, ‘The man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; what if he now reaches out his hand and takes fruit from the tree of life also, eats it and lives forever? So the Lord God drove him out of the garden of Eden to till the ground from which he had been taken.” So there I was, a child in the 1950’s tilling the ground, where we would raise all the fruits and vegetables our family would need for a year. It was hot as promised, and there were sand burrs, goat heads, and thistle, and thorns on the dewberry vines for getting your hands all scratched up. We canned; we stored—in the basement of the house we built—jars of green beans, lima beans, black-eyed peas, stewed tomatoes, (pared, sliced, cooked) apples with a cinnamon stick, peaches, apricots, cherries, pickles, pickled crab apples, strawberry preserves, and apple butter; along with honey from my beehives, wine we made, potatoes and sweet potatoes, onions, and pork we had butchered on the farm of relatives and which we sugar-cured in our basement. Someone had invented freezers, and we stored food also in there. Including bread made by our stepmother. Wheat was grown on farms of wider family, but at that stage of economic development, we bought the flour in a grocery store. Unlike the family of Adam and Eve, we were smarter and more fortunate than the Lord God had hoped, and we did not have to eat none but wild plants. We did pick wild sand plums that grew along roads such as Rt. 66, but they were wonderful, boiled for dessert or made into jelly. There are many puzzles arising from the text I have quoted from the New English Bible. Theologians of the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religions have thought about them for hundreds of years. I’m sure they have many interesting things to say about this story known as The Fall and the attendant doctrines of Original Sin and mortality, heritable from Adam and Eve on down to me picking off potato bugs. I have too many researches going on at this time to dig into the writings of those great theologians. It is another, shorter study I’ve wanted to do for years that I’ll finally do in this thread. That is a comparison of what Ayn Rand and Friedrich Nietzsche had to say about the doctrine of Original Sin, which became a setup for the Christian story of salvation from death and terrors of death. (To be continued.)

Yeah it's likely they don't have remorse. However dogs have, and i view them as less intelligent than cats?

Brian Greene explicitly aligns with determinism. Kaku is indeed a defender of free will; I mistook him for someone else. Solvreven, I think the easiest way to get an opinion might be to provide your own short summary of Sapolski's view. I'm not familiar with his claims, so I searched on Reddit for a brief overview of his argument. I found one with lots of votes, so I'll extract the essential premise from it: "[O]ur bodies are subconsciously (unintentionally without our own input) acting on a series of electric waves in the brain and chemicals and hormones." (Source) I take the above to mean the following (which I'll write as if it were an argument): a) Everything that happens in my first-person perspective has a "twin" in the real world. Love and affection? Dopamine secretions. Anxiety? Cortisol. And so on. b) Dopamine and cortisol are physical things. c) Physical things act lawfully. If you drop a ball, it falls. If you touch an electric fence, you get electrocuted. d) Therefore, dopamine and cortisol act lawfully. e) Corollary: the mental "twins" of dopamine and cortisol (love and stress) also act lawfully. I will now give you my opinion on this. Physical things act lawfully. If a recording device observes reality for a quintillion years, it will only ever record physical things acting in a perfectly lawful manner. Now, let's put physical things aside for a moment. We still have one more thing to investigate: subjective first-person experience. For clarity, examples of first-person experience include: controlling how fast I'm walking on the street; deciding whether to get McDonald's tomorrow; and so on. Since our recording device can only observe one thing, namely physical objects, it is incapable (by design) to observe first-person subjective experience. It is cut off from some information, it works with incomplete data. However, human beings are privileged. They are not limited to observing their limbs, skin, toenails, organs. They have access to what is hidden from the recording device: subjective first-person experience. In addition to seeing everything that the device sees, they also know what it feels like to love, to jump, to look at a Raphael painting. We can now add the finishing touch: what you see introspectively is perfectly real. You really are controlling how fast you're walking, you really are deciding whether to get McDonald's. But science will deny this, and indeed, must deny this. Why so? Science, as it is today, does not consider introspection to be a form of faithfully perceiving something that exists. On the contrary: according to science, only the so-called outer senses (seeing, smelling, hearing, touching, tasting) record that which exists, while introspection is something that must be stripped away from science, to prevent poisoning the data with subjective elements. So for now, we must take refuge in philosophy. From a philosophical perspective, one possible solution to our problem can be simply stated as follows: the will is something eminently real. Of course, the will's existence cannot be inferred from physical objects. From the recorder's point of view, plants and animals just move in a determinate way, according to electrical and hormonal causes. However, from an animal's point of view, it acts exactly as it wants to act. With these results in hand, we can now look at what Objectivism claims, or rather, what Objectivists claim (since Rand wrote very little on free will). Some Objectivists think that "free will" is a pleonasm: where there's will, there's agency; conversely, where there's agency, there's will. This must be put to the test. Quoting my own example: Immediately, a new possibility shows itself to us, and it can be stated as follows: choice does not entail freedom. It just entails choice, period. Choice is choice, and nothing else. Human beings choose to focus, to live, to eat. This really does happen, it is no illusion. However, all choices can be traced to a sufficient explanation. It's up to philosophy to explain this harmony. I have already suggested compatibilism as a framework worth looking into.

I was fascinated by those sophomoronic experiments which were prevalent on Youtube about 10 years ago, supposedly discounting the freedom of will. Something involving the wired-up test subject reacting to lights on a screen and pressing a button, thus 'showing' that the relevant part of his brain responded a split second before he made his physical selection--i.e. his brain 'informed' him which button to press. i.e. no free will: His act was "determined". What? As if the brain will not in every instance show activity prior to and during activities. As if the brain is pre-programmed deterministically to "cause" one's actions in any and all encounters outside the lab environment. I recall the young host of the show was thrilled by these superficial findings. He concluded (consistently) that no free will means nothing you do can be held against you legally or morally by others, equally that you do not need to take yourself to task for some failing. A great relief for the amoral. More, the personal choices of undertaking effortful thinking and character building can be dispensed with. Then the individual mind will be under attack. The result, individualism will succumb to collectivism-tribalism-racism (major determining antecedent - "ancestral" - factors used often to claim power through past 'victimhood') and self-esteem and pride must suffer since one also cannot be responsible for one's accomplishments. If no-free-will has arrived in the broader mainstream the world is heading for trouble, I thought. Sure enough - what we are seeing today. One can count on human nature to take the easy options. Free will demands far too much awareness and thinking work. While valuable in their own area, the neuroscientists (I refer to the popular Sam Harris, notably, who also, I gather, consistently eliminated "the mind" together with free will) have something to be responsible for bringing about this age of pronounced determinism/skepticism. (But who would expect proponents of determinism to take "responsibility" for anything they do? They had no other choice. Or was it due to your free will, Sam?).

And to be more specific I have spent a lifetime becoming the ideal man, I'm not going to hide from lunatics and criminals but have them all brought to justice and insure that this can never happen to another individual in at least the United States again at first and then the entire world. Evil only has power via the sanction one gives it, and I will offer it no sanction and will defeat it and those involved in this mass Evil, not hide from lunatic criminals.

I think the essential in most religions could be characterized as a faith in a transcendental aspect of reality. A faith in the possibility of overcoming the seeming paradoxes in the gross physical environment of life on earth. The life and death of Christ, the perceptual aspects of a human being and the strive to offer an explanation or meaning for how non material aspects , ie 'love' or 'will' , can or do affect one's 'lived experience'. Why be 'good', what are the results of 'being good' , whence the good ?

Without reifying the abstracted "self", and acknowledging the current unknowns about the evolutionary or neurological emergence of self-consciousness, one can observe extrospectively the emergence of the self in a child's growth from infancy to adolescence and beyond. And, one can also observe introspectively, the "emergence" or growth of one's own, continually maturing, increasingly distinctive self, as one engages productively with the world in a noble, purposeful way.

I find reading compositions more exact and facilitating of serious thought than videos. I've not got Robert Sapolsky's Determined: A Life of Science without Free Will (2023). I may get it to add to the following of mine: Free Will – Philosophers and Neuroscientists in Conversation, Maoz and Sinnott-Armstrong, editors (2022) Naturally Free Action by Oisín Deery (2021) Free Agents – How Evolution Gave Us Free Will by Kevin Mitchell (2023) A Metaphysics for Freedom(* & on to next page) by Helen Steward (2012) Laws, Mind, and Free Will by Steven Horst (2011) Deep Control by John Fischer (2013) Causes, Laws, and Free Will – Why Determinism Doesn't Matter by Kadri Vihvelin (2013) Why Free Will Is Real by Christian List (2019) ~Also, to the free will side~ "Volitional Synapses" –Part 1 –Part 2 –Part 3 "Ascent to Volitional Consciousness" –Abstract –Article

I used "emergent" because I was reponding to Monart who had used "emergent." It seems sensible enough to sometimes use that rather than "caused," as when saying that the fluid state of matter emerged from a collection of certain molecules in a certain situation of temperature and pressure. Saying that "air is caused by the molecules composing it" is weird. And "air and its lack of resistance to shearing stress is caused by the molecules composing air and their collisions with each other" is also a weird way of talking. Shearing stresses are not something applicable to a molecule so far as I know. It is something that emerges at a macro level such as in our bones (hopefully with good resistance to shearing stresses) or in a breath of air. Additionally, causal relations in the story of how I came about are immediate and dynamical in my individual ontogeny in which evolution has provided the engineering-type structures in which such organized developmental processes can proceed. (Not only the background evolutionarily yielded structure is required, of course, but also a continuing sameness [within tolerances] of the environment in which the type of organism can survive.) So for thinking about causation and emergences of processes in the individual organism, it seems most important to be focused on individual development, not preceding evolution, while keeping evolution as important background of the present dynamics arena in which this is causing that and/or this is emerging from that. For the determinism worth having in a debate over free will vs. determinism, the determinism has to be a pre-determinism. To which the question "how far back is such and such in the present predetermined?" is sensible, and answers get more ridiculous the farther back the predeterminism is asserted, due to the circumstance that in the real physical, natural world there are a myriad of independent causal streams intersecting each other, continually resetting "initial" conditions and boundary conditions. All of that applies as well to emergences as it does to causation so far as I can see. Also, in stating Rand's mildly circular definition of the Law of Causality (that is, What is the Law of Causality, in applying identity to action?) using the phrase "caused and determined" in her definition (in "The Metaphysical versus the Man-Made"), one should, I suggest, not take the "determined" to mean necessarily determinism, but a broader concept determinate. More like: "caused and delivered as determinate." That way both the results of the mind-independent course of nature and the results of free will engineering things can be brought under a Law of Causality.

You will likely continue seeing even more, since this is the default, or "mainstream" position among popular scientists like Michio Kaku, Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Sabine Hossenfelder. Names like these will quickly pop up when you search for "free will" on YouTube. The meaning that Objectivism attaches to free will is quite fine and useful, namely: that you will not perform at your best in any endeavor unless you monitor yourself: "Will this sentence I'm writing get the meaning across without ambiguity?"; "Did I pick an over-complicated solution to a simple problem?" and so on. This type of self-monitoring is what Rand calls "focus," and it's not automatic. Doing it is up to you. Now, here's the thing. The ability to make choices, even the choice to focus or not, is not what most (philosopher) determinists typically deny. They make a much more reasonable claim: that all choices have a sufficient explanation. I will illustrate what I mean with a very general example. Let's say that you make a mistake. Did you do it on purpose? Of course not. Had you known in advance that you were about to make a mistake, you would have acted fast enough to avert the mistake. Now, onto the next question: what caused that mistake to happen? A sufficient reason will quickly come up: "I didn't know something like that could happen!". And what was the reason for that? "I had never encountered such a situation before, either in real life or in my education. But now I have, and will probably make use of the lesson in the future". And what is the reason for that? "Because I don't like problems." This can continue indefinitely. If one's definition of determinism aligns with this example, then it becomes clear that arguments like "I can make choices," or "I can focus" mean absolutely nothing. They do, however, point to the possibility of a compatibilist view (the belief that free will and determinism are mutually compatible). If you haven't done so already, check up Schopenhauer's prize essay, On the Freedom of the Will. It will put any modern arguments for determinism into perspective.

Rand's sets the self in her first presentation of her mature philosophy thusly: "Existence exists—and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists" (emphases added). This talk of one possessing consciousness is just in the vernacular that the reader can readily get the meaning of sticking simply with common usage. Before this passage in the speech, Rand has been talking already of men living by the mind and of sacrifice and self-esteem. Additionally, this whole speech is set against the immediately preceding scene in which the young government man Tony dies in the arms of Rearden, and they have spoken of the absoluteness of that bullet wound and Rand has illustrated the absoluteness of life and death of a person, mind and body. Self can be an emergent property looking across animal phyla. Encephalization of a nervous system, such as in a snail, need not entail existence of a self, even though the organism has a (fixed) behavioral value hierarchy. Damasio has found neurological quarters and interconnections for different levels of the human self (The Feeling of What Happens). Much is known about the development of the human brain in ontogeny, and experts might tell us when self-consciousness is added to primary consciousness. However, none of those emergences are about emergence of consciousness or consciouness-related self from neurological process, and I don't know if emergence would be the right relationship between neurological processes we possess and those selves. To your first option, we could say that self used to include all those things would be very handwaving, but that it is true enough, and Rand assents, that human self is the whole mind-body organism. I don't think your following OR, taken as exclusive would be right. I leave open for now, at my stage of information, whether the relation of consciousness and consciousness-related self stand to their underlying neural process in a relation of emergence, and if they do so stand, I don't see that as in conflict with your first option. Rand's talk of consciousness is never a sort of reified abstraction, but part of some animal biology.

A comparison of Reality as "Existence Exists" and God as "Being qua Being" may help in understanding how some Christians (and theists in general) would become Objectivsts and how they could recover from their previous Christianity. I estimate that many if not most Objectivists are recovering Christians/theists. Tara Smith and Ben Bayer, of the Ayn Rand Institute, have stated that they, too, are/were recovering Catholics. (I, myself, haven't been a Christian or theist, but was born in a Daoist-Buddhist culture.) Another helpful examination is the esthetic comparison between John Galt and Jesus Christ. (I've read your excerpts of "Existence, We" and am curious but will have to wait until I have access to it. Thanks.)

If Venezuela's Chavista regime held actual elections, they would probably lose the next one, according to a recent Wall Street Journal profile of Corina Yoris, the 80-year old grandmother whose 10-party coalition carefully vetted her and applied for her to run as their standard-bearer against Nicolás Maduro, the leftist dictator of Venezuela. This they did after their previous candidate, Maria Corina Machado, was blocked from running:Though respondents to a poll by the American company ClearPath Strategies haven't heard of Yoris, the results clearly showed that Venezuelans want change -- reflecting previous polls by other companies. In the past decade, the economy contracted 80% as oil output fell precipitously, and inflation at one point hit 2 million percent. The poll showed that an opposition candidate backed by Machado would win 49% to 27% for Maduro. Even a candidate who doesn't have her support would squeak out victory over Maduro, 35% to 27%, the poll shows. And though Maduro's regime has jailed political activists -- including seven of Machado's campaign workers -- the poll shows that 76% of opposition and undecided voters want a chance to cast a ballot. [bold added]The candidate, unlike the two incoherent old men running for President in the United States, is someone I might support. For one thing, she advocates free markets:Yoris is opposed to socialism and communism; she says that the free market regulates prices, that communism was responsible for the death of millions and that the ideology resulted with Venezuela becoming divided.For another, she is in full possession of her mental faculties, unlike her American counterparts, and uses them more effectively than most people do at half her age:Image by Voice of America, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.Asked what she, as president, would do for Venezuela she recalled the democratic years when the country, though flawed in many ways, appealed to immigrants escaping Latin American dictatorships and hardship in southern Europe. "I want to give Venezuela what Venezuela has given me," she said. "I could study in this country. I could educate my children in this country. I could do all manner of things in this country." While not a politician, Yoris said she has taught classes on logic and such esoteric disciplines as the philosophy of argumentation, where she has delved into the concepts of Chaïm Perelman, a Belgian who was one of the 20th Century's most renowned argumentation theorists, and British philosopher Stephen Toulmin. Two years ago, she was named by civil-society groups to serve on an opposition-led commission, which was responsible for organizing the primary elections last year that Machado won by a wide margin. ... "I'm totally for Madrid, and people laugh a lot about this," said Yoris, who during a recent match tweeted out: "This is a scandal! The referee ends the game and takes a goal away from Real Madrid." And though she fires off messages about blackouts and the work of Albert Camus, she also takes photos of the fog-covered hills, flowers and fruit stands overflowing with Venezuela's bounty. She explained that her desire is to show beauty. "It's a message of joy because we've been submitted to a very ugly dark cloud," she said. "So I try to send out a message of optimism, and I take photographs of my surroundings." [bold added]Oh, and she is also much more benevolent than the two bitter old men we have here. Sadly for Venezuela, the Maduro regime, scared of this kind, elderly lady and the optimistic, sunny view of the world she represents, has, predictably, blocked her election bid, like the cowards that they are. -- CAVLink to Original

I’m perplexed with the notion that self describes subjective experience a part from any description of mental products or operations of cognition, ie the ontological basis of the ‘first person’ perspective of experience. As per Rand , and Stephen , consciousness is the act of perceiving that which exists. Would an irreducible subjectiveness be non perceivable and render it without identity and therefore non existent?

This article offers a different frame of interpretation of what was ‘captured’. It seems a better view of the image is to see at as capturing the interactions between light’s ’energy’ and target particles , the light isn’t ‘seen’ or imaged as exhibiting dual aspects as much as what is depicted in the image is the history of the reactions between particles and light as akin to an interference pattern. https://www.insidescience.org/blog/2015/03/13/no-you-cannot-catch-individual-photon-acting-simultaneously-pure-particle-and-wave

Thanks. I'll accept your recommendations.

The local university library has a copy of the Norton 2021 book, so I'll do a reading of it. I'll also read your "Induction on Identity" paper. Thanks.

I suppose Hindus are better salesmen then , lol.

The mind-independent universe is mass-energy, not philosopher-armchair substance. Knowledge of mass-energy and evidence for its amount in the whole universe being conserved back to and including the Initial Singularity is a glorious fruitful quest of science alone. Whether there are extensionless points in spacetime is, in the armchairs of philosophers, as stuck in the mud as all the centuries they wasted over the question of whether matter was atomic or continuous. Science got the answers and subtleties of that and delivered a solid stage for bringing the world into our service. Elementary particle physics has it that leptons, in their particle mode, are extensionless particles, perfect points of mass. The old sayings of philosophers that extension is more fundamental than weight is sensibly (on account of modern science) left back in those moldy old armchairs. Additional Note

Is that to mean Rand and Augustine agree that embracing God is a negation of the self or the mind? both? or are they one and the same? I've long thought that mind and self were the same, but lately I'm perplexed with the notion that self contains the mind as an aspect. That the more fundamental self is consciousness as such. The underlying awareness of the functioning of the mind and its contents are objects to the self.

Augustine had it that to embrace God is to turn away from oneself. Rand had it that to suspend one’s critical rationality in any question, including the existence of God, is a sacrifice of one’s mind, which is one’s self, and I agree. I think the standpoint of the author Mr. Brunton is like one of those exercise platforms with a hemisphere as its underside. His standpoint is unstable and a frame of cognitive dissonance. At least he is an independent thinker. Thanks for the notice. That egoism of God on display in the Isaiah passage seems overly concerned with social image. More importantly: Is the kind of love traditionally attributed to God, traditionally called agape, is it, when shorn of a Christian sacrificial cast, is such purely outgoing love egoistic? As a matter of fact, it is (though not in the sense of being for benefit firstly to oneself). It was stolen from man and placed in God, just as in truth the making and control of fire was stolen from man and credited to the gods in the setup for the myth of Prometheus. Nonsacrificial agape is our fundamental love, the human-level experience and instantiation of outward striving, the joy in agency and dance, an essential of life itself in the human. Such agape in oneself is because one is a living self. I'm speaking of mortal life, which is to say, real life.

(OK. A sour-cream coffee cake, very fine.) A child can discern the rotary motion of a top. Later she gets conceptual grasp of angular velocity, torque and so forth. An account of this advance in knowledge is tackled in David Harriman's The Logical Leap – Induction in Physics. Does that account solve The Problem of Induction ? How far was it a well-defined problem? Was solution of that problem what Rand had in mind in calling for a validation of induction in FNI? I imagine it was, as she would know of Hume’s making shallow of induction and causation and the hero worship Hume received by Philosophy of Science instructors (approximately Logical Empiricists) in the 1960’s (such as my instructor). Does Harriman’s book contain a solution to that problem? I rather imagine it does; I’d have to look at it freshly and closely as well as at the problem. But with the link to SEP on that problem, you might do yourself well in a close look at Harriman with that problem in view. I rather imagine Harriman had a good hold on that because of his portrayal of our modern sure inference to the existence and character of atoms. I told that story also in my “Induction on Identity.” We ended up in somewhat different years on when that thesis could no longer be at all doubted, rationally speaking. Harriman was a bit more liberal on that than I. Can’t recall just now if Harriman gave William Whewell credit for the process of the “concilliance of inductions” that played out in that case after Whewell’s time. Kant had an answer to Hume’s critique of causality. It would be good to know with exactly whose picture of causality Hume had been arguing against and was that prior picture also wrong from the vista of an Objectivist non-Humean system. Kant pulled the premise-rug out from under Hume by exposing that Hume et al. were empty-handed on what was human experience for which Hume could find no necessary connection from episode to episode. Kant’s own hand on what was human experience such that there were necessary connections between its episodes was fantastical. Classic modern philosophers Locke to Kant on this are getting a good replacement today with all the philosophers of perception, direct realist and representational realist who master and incorporate the pertinent science, neurological and psychological. I’ll be taking care of Kant in the sequel of this paper, with a modern realist replacement, my own, which was aided by Rand’s system. You asked about yet-to-come extension of Rand’s measurement structure for concepts. I did take a first step on that 20 years ago in my paper Universals and Measurement. I don’t know how far I might get back to developing that further in connection with science within my projects in view for however farther I live. (I have no indications on specific future failures of health, but I’m 75, so reasonably, the final grade I give myself in advance is “incomplete.”) Within chapter 7 of Harriman’s book, he discusses “Physics as Inherently Mathematical”. He has nothing original to say; and no mention of the many contemporaries of ours imminently qualified who have contributed to further understanding on that circumstance first really solidly seen in Newton (gravity, not optics), and rocketed by Maxwell; and he seemed to not actually know what it was from Galileo that was actually crucial for Newton’s advance; and he seemed ignorant of the middle man Descartes between Galileo and Newton concerning the law of inertia and, additionally, how it was that rotational motion came to be seen as a form of acceleration in the first place*; and he did nothing by way of showing a way (if there is one) that Rand’s measurement-omission analysis of concepts is usefully related to uses of mathematics in modern physics. There are other aspects in Rand’s epistemological ideas that are shown to be at work in the practice of physics, but these aspects are not unique to Rand. If one is a beginner, this book can introduce some history and techniques of physics. Additional literature on those is vast, and some leads to it are in the endnotes of The Logical Leap. I don’t recall if Harriman discussed abduction teamed with induction in science methods, but that is part of the full picture.

The books by John D. Norton on induction look excellent: The Material Theory of Induction (2021) and The Large-Scale Structure of Inductive Inference* (forthcoming, 2024) look to be illuminating. They would not be expressly hooked to Rand's metaphysics or theory of concepts. Upon studying these Norton books, concord and discord with Rand's theoretical philosophy is something most any participant here could do for themselves. A case for basing induction on Rand's Law of Identity is made in my Induction on Identity in the early 1990's (one way to access the text of the paper is to click on bolded text in the Abstract linked here). (I received a complimentary personal note on that paper from Jude Dougherty who was at that time head of the phi department at the Catholic University of America and was editor of the professional journal The Review of Metaphysics.) For deductive logic, the principle of noncontradiction looms large. It is a powerful tool. (Hilbert used only PNC in making the mathematical proof that was his Ph.D. thesis, for example.) Leibniz, Kant, and others of their eras recognized, as did Rand 1957, that PNC is a normative principle of cognition based on the Law of Identity. In some deductive inferences, we rely directly on identity: "All animals are mortal, you and I are animals, therefore we are mortal." One sense in which one might try to validate induction would be to try to prove that if PNC is securely based on Identity, then so is induction based on identity. I think that the history of trying to link induction very closely to deduction has been widely deemed unsuccessful, and perhaps that route suggested in the previous sentence would fall prey to those criticisms. Another sense in which one might try to "validate" induction would be to try to elicit it's correctness for cognition as a corollary from Rand's general metaphysics (taken for true), in the way that OPAR elicits "corollaries" (not deductive theorems) from the most elementary theses and concepts of Rand's general metaphysics. I approve, notwithstanding the usual charge of circularity one receives for any attempts to discursively defend inference principles, deductive or inductive. Another way to validate induction might be to point to vegetative "induction" in the activities of organic neural networks in bringing about sensory perception. Having validated the deliverances of the senses, one then might argue for goodness of consciously engaging in induction for tracking reality (but, again a circularity (benign?) because the first validation had to enlist some induction). Rand suggested in ITOE that induction was intimate with abstraction in her (or other, really) account of concepts. This would be abstractive induction, which I mentioned even in the Abstract of my "Induction on Identity" linked above. That genre of induction was the topic of Peikoff's paper "Aristotle's 'Intuitive Induction'" (1985 The New Scholasticism 59(2):185–99), which was a bit taken from his Ph.D. dissertation. ‘Intuitive Induction’ and ‘Abstractive Induction’ are two traditional names for the same genre of induction. Harriman’s book is nice in his illustrations from the history of physics on the methods we often call induction. That is the standard and very helpful way in contemporary philosophy of science. Scroll down in the pdf link for Norton to his Table of Contents, Part II. I was thrilled in Harriman’s book when I came to text I recognized as taken from old Harvard case studies by Duane Roller, the volume on electric charge, which I had read in my History of Science course in undergraduate around 1970. Roller had joined our faculty at University of Oklahoma. (I’m sorry, but I need to break off just now. I’ll try later tonight to come back and finish what else I wanted to reply for you, Monart. For the present, my husband is calling me away, hoping that I’ll get our dessert made for this evening’s meal.)

"Atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby." -- Penn Jillette *** Lately, articles about the increasing percentage of Americans who aren't "religious" -- like this and this -- have been popping up. Please consider the italicized quote above any time you encounter one of these. Why? Because (1) In today's increasingly tribalistic, anti-individualist Zeitgeist, it would appear that the first impulse is to lump together any group of people to which one can apply a label. (2) So many people lack intellectual rigor that many labels are next to meaningless, anyway. The first piece, about "nonreligious" people includes some whose stated beliefs include all the hallmarks of religion; they just aren't enrolled in a church:Although he doesn't believe in organized religion, he believes in God and basic ethical precepts. "People should be treated equally as long as they treat other people equally. That's my spirituality if you want to call it that."Indeed, somewhere, buried in the piece, is the closest thing it comes to offering its own definition of "nonreligious:" They. Really. Don't. Like. Organized. Religion. Given how "the nones' diversity splinters them into myriad subgroups," don't expect to be able to learn anything meaningful from the rest of the piece. Even the second article, about "atheists" talks about people I'd say are actually religious:Image by François Barraud, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.Atheists also have different interpretations of what it means to not believe. While nearly all self-described atheists don't believe in the God described in the Judeo-Christian Bible, 23% do believe in God or some other higher power or spiritual force in the universe, according to a Pew Research Center report published in January. [bold added]With that much latitude in the term, it is ridiculous to wonder -- as the article starts out doing -- why more atheists are reluctant to volunteer that fact about themselves. The negative stereotypes and bigotry on the part of many religious people don't help, but if a term has been emptied of all meaning, why bandy it about? I am an atheist, and would describe myself as circumspect, but not shy about it. I reject nearly everything about religion, especially professing to believe things absent evidence, and equating morality to a set of supernatural orders that have nothing to do with reason or life on earth. These two things are direct threats to a life proper to a rational animal. If I have a realistic chance of making my world a better place by challenging these evil practices, I will do so. (This is the not shy part.) If doing so will change nothing, except expose me or loved ones to harm by bigots or actual thugs, I will not. (This is the circumspect part.) Self-sacrifice is against my moral code. But simply saying I'm an atheist, or I'm not religious at all is only the start of a conversation. Religion is not the only alternative out there for moral guidance or reflection. Not adhering to religion is not the only aspect of my thinking and my personality. Stating that I am an atheist is thus something that I would hope would at least provoke thought in another, and perhaps require a conversation on my part. The person hearing that from me, or the occasion calling for me to say this, has to be worth it. I find the widespread need to "come out" as something that is so common today both sad and puzzling. Our culture causes most people to feel alienated because it is increasingly blind to or disdainful of the individual. Many people yearn for some measure of visibility, and aren't getting it. But past a certain point, it is puzzling that many people have such a weak sense of themselves that they will compromise on almost anything to "belong." I'm not sure what to say about that, except, perhaps to advise that one should well understand one's reasons for disclosing one's beliefs, or not. Fashion is probably the worst reason to do either. -- CAVLink to Original

I am indeed, but linguists aren't word-mavens. Nevertheless since these are not expressions used by My People, I don’t really understand how Other People use them. Which is why it is useful to ask a person who uses one of these expressions what they intended, especially the details. The issue that I was addressing is not just about blogs, which I don’t like in the first place. It is more generally about the withdrawal of Objectivism from public fora, and the shuttering of Objectivist fora. Maybe fear and the increase of viewpoint-intolerance in society does explain it. Perhaps I should be more fearful, but at least so far, I find OO to be a useful venue for reasoned discussion.

Part 3 – Quine, Objectivism, Resonant Existence – Α’ How did Newton (1687) show that the force that causes unsupported objects to fall here on the surface of the earth is the same force that causes earth to orbit the sun? Not as the schoolman Theodoric of Freiberg (d. c.1310), nor as Descartes (1637), scientifically comprehended the formation of rainbows in the sky. Theirs was physical science contributing to understanding in their problem area. But no, Newton’s effective method for showing expanse of gravitation beyond the earth, his most important problem area, was by bringing geometry and limit-process thought into the service of quantitative representation of force exerted by the sun on its orbiting planets and exact forms of orbits that would result from the various strengths of various candidate central forces specified by their various mathematical forms (Brackenridge 1995 and Harper 2011). Newton’s method on this problem laid the foundation for all subsequent methods of theoretical physics. Newton’s achievement will be the kickoff caught by Kant which, together with Kant’s reception of the old gold of Euclidean geometry, will set in motion a locomotive of thought on to the analytic-synthetic sharp distinction I shall trace and dismantle in §B. Rand refused the conceptions of science and its relation to philosophy put forth by the early moderns, the rationalists and the empiricists. She maintained that science under the rationalists’ picture of reason and its relation of mind to the world had “indiscriminate contents of one’s consciousness as the irreducible primary and absolute, to which reality has to conform” (1961, 28). She understood rationalists as maintaining that “man obtains his knowledge of the world by deducing it exclusively from concepts, which come from inside his head and are not derived from the perception of physical facts” (1961, 30; see Descartes’s fourth Meditation). That is not how Descartes discovered how the rainbow comes about nor how he thought reason should proceed in such an inquiry (Garber 2001, 94–110; Dika 2023). We should notice that Rand did not recommend as remedy for rationalism and its alleged purport for physical science a reintroduction of such things as Aristotle-inspired substantial forms in natural philosophy down from Aquinas and Suarez, against which Descartes had rebelled and had replaced with mechanism (Garber 1992; Garber 2001; Garber and Roux 2013). From the time of Plato and Aristotle through Descartes and Leibniz, philosophy of nature and physical science were not sharply distinguished as we think of them today. Edward Grant concludes that without the high development of natural philosophy attained between 1200 and 1600, the scientific revolution would not have come about (2007, 329). William A. Wallace (1923–2015) argued that Thomist Aristotelianism in logic and natural philosophy was the best frame fitting the natural world and the advance of modern science. He embedded the scientific advance of Theodoric on theory of the rainbow into Aristotle’s four causes, stressing the continuity between Aristotelian science by qualitative natures and Theodoric’s quantitative methods and conferring absolute certainty of the scientific results by their rendition into Aristotelian demonstrative form of science. From Rand’s outlook on the relationship of philosophy and physical science, such would be a smothering and hand-maid casting of science by overblown (and faulty) metaphysics (ITOE 273). On the side of consonance with Wallace, however, Rand’s view, in which the import of metaphysics to physics is modest, would not entail a whole dismissiveness up front of Wallace’s 1992 (Chps. 4–6) intellectual archeology of Galileo’s methodological connections, logical and historical, with the Aristotelian epistemological template for science. Rand’s epistemology and metaphysics, to be sure, are in considerable opposition to that template, by her departures from Aristotle on essence, form, causation, universals, and definition. Galileo’s philosophical framework was not Rand’s more modern one, but he famously freed himself of much encumbrance from Aristotelian natural philosophy and got some new and true science crucial for Newton. I have noted the radical opposition between, on the one hand, conception of science under Rand’s general metaphysics and epistemology and, on the other hand, what she thought to be the rationalist method for science (see also Rand 1970). One difference between Descartes’ actual method from standard scientific method today, with which latter, Rand’s theoretical philosophy is aligned: for Descartes, observations and experiments serve only to illustrate and reinforce implications of scientific theory bound up with natural philosophy, and first-philosophy, which has already settled that the scientific theory is true. An observation at odds with the rationalist scientific theory would be suspected of error by the rationalist inquirer of those days. Results from the laboratory were not tests against which the theory stands or falls. Rand saw the classical modern empiricists as “those who claimed that man obtains his knowledge from experience, which was held to mean: by direct perception of immediate facts, with no recourse to concepts” (1961, 30). She saw them as clinging to reality by abandoning their mind. She thought her own theory of concepts filled the large gaps in the rationalist and empiricist theories of knowledge (1970, 89–90), by her tie of concepts (and reason, I might add) to concrete particulars. I hope some day to uncover whether what is distinctive to her theory of concepts—its cast in terms of magnitude structure among particulars subsumed under a concept—solidifies the tie Rand thought she had attained and its rescue of knowledge, ordinary and scientific, from rationalism and empiricism, classical and modern (Logical Empiricism). Rand maintained that failures of modern philosophy to mount an adequate defense of rational knowledge, including science, against Cartesian and Humean skepticism needed (i) a correct theory of universals and concepts, (ii) a defense of the validity of the deliverances of the senses, and (iii) a validation of inductive inference.[1] The first as provided by Rand can correct rationalist and empiricist failures in adequately accounting for modern scientific knowledge provided someone yet-to-come can develop further the measurement structure in empirical concepts and show how Rand’s theory of concepts in its true distinctiveness can be extended to mathematical knowledge. Knapp 2014 advertised the latter, but failed to deliver. The second was accomplished in Kelley 1986. The third was attempted within Harriman 2010, which advertised, but failed delivery in the same way as Knapp 2014. Both the Harriman book and the Knapp one did not make central, deep connection between the nature of modern science and what is Rand’s truly distinctive aspect of concepts in general: its structuring of concepts by measurement ommisions along concepts’ dimensions capturing concretes and their world-given relations. Still, these books are profitable reads as among contemporary realist casts of modern science and mathematics. These two informative Objectivist books, of course, are written in an era in which science and mathematics have become sharply distinct from philosophy and in which much more science and mathematics has been established than at the time of Theodoric, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton. To those Objectivist works should be joined the Objectivist-neighbor realism of Franklin 2014 and Dougherty 2013 from the Aquinas-Aristotelian framework.[2] In the next installment (§B), we’ll travel the road: Kant, Neo-Kantianism, and Logical Empiricism to Carnap v. Quine on the analytic-synthetic distinction to Peikoff’s tackle of ASD and to my own. (To be continued.) Notes [1] To succeed in accounting for mathematical knowledge, Rand’s theoretical philosophy actually needs a renovation in her general ontology, specifically, a renovation (not possible since Rand is deceased and her philosophy is handily taken as in stasis—identifiably what philosophy she made, just that, as-is) that lands as my own layout of the divisions of Existence (2021). Within my layout, pure mathematics is study of the formalities of situation, some such forms belong to concretes given in perception, and the fundamental contrast of the concrete is not the abstract, but the forms belonging to concretes. [2] Some additional contemporary work on the relations of metaphysics to science and on realism in science: Maudlin 2007; Chakravarttty 2007; Mumford and Tugby 2013; Morganti 2013; Ross, Ladyman, and Kincaid 2013. References Boydstun, S. 2021. Existence, We. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. 21(1):65–104. Brackenridge, J.B. 1995. The Key to Newton’s Dynamics – The Kepler Problem and the Principia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chakravartty, A. 2007. A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism. New York: Cambridge University Press. Descartes, R. 1637. The World and Other Writings, Appendix 2. S. Gaukroger, translator. 1998. New York: Cambridge University Press. Dougherty, J.P. The Nature of Scientific Explanation. Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press. Franklin, J. 2014. An Aristotelian Realist Philosophy of Mathematics – Mathematics as the Science of Quantity and Structure. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Garber, D. 1992. Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——. 2001. Descartes Embodied. New York: Cambridge University Press. Garber, D. and S. Roux, editors, 2013. The Mechanization of Natural Philosophy. Dordrecht: Springer. Grant, E. 2007. A History of Natural Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Harper, W.L. 2011. Isaac Newton’s Scientific Method. New York: Oxford University Press. Harriman, D. 2010. The Logical Leap – Induction in Physics. New York: New American Library. Knapp, R.E. 2014. Mathematics Is about the World. Lexington, KY. Kelley, D. 1986. The Evidence of the Senses. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Maudlin, T. 2007. The Metaphysics within Physics. New York: Oxford University Press. Morganti, M. 2013. Combining Science and Metaphysics – Contemporary Physics, Conceptual Revision and Common Sense. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mumford, S. and M. Tugby, editors, 2013. Metaphysics and Science. New York: Oxford University Press. Newton, I. 1687 (1713, 1725). Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and System of the World. 3rd edition. A. Motte (1729) and F. Cajori (1934), translators. Berkeley: University of California Press. Peikoff, L. 1967. The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy. In Rand 1990. Rand, A. 1961. For the New Intellectual. Title essay. New York: Signet. ——. 1970. Kand versus Sullivan. In Rand 1982. ——. 1982. Philosophy: Who Neds It. New York: Signet. ——. 1990 [1966–67]. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (ITOE). Expanded 2nd edition. New York: Meridian. Ross, D.J., J. Ladyman, and H. Kincaid, editors, 2013. Scientific Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wallace, W.A. 1959. The Scientific Methodology of Theodoric of Freiberg. Fribourg: Fribourg University Press. ——. 1992. Galileo’s Logic of Discovery and Proof. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

#3, The gentle push, is a technique Peter Keating used in order to get rid of a rival. He even lined up a client for his rival.

A few more are sitting up and taking notice of a glaring anomaly, the 'numbers' given are those accepted without question from - a Jihadi terror group and its supporters, from whom the disingenuous claim of 'genocide' originates, the 'numbers' fuelling the lie - picked up and promoted with glee by sundry Judeophobes. Too late this Newsweek piece, the slander was popularly embedded in the first days after Oct7, in advance of the first Gazan casualties. But I notice a level of panic setting in, Hamasophile writers and Tubers and mass activists are not getting their way as expected in saving the remnants of their adulated hero-killers with "humanitarian ceasefire" demands - this time the IDF shows it will not cave to global sentiment and is committed to going all the way. (The huger threat is the Hezbollah Army's coordinated attack in the North, holding back, waiting to see what happens there, and why Israel must wrap up the Gaza war quickly). This is "existential" self-preservation for Israel (for any who are concerned). https://www.msn.com/en-za/news/world/a-more-accurate-accounting-of-the-war-in-gaza-opinion/ar-BB1ka9IG?rc=1&ocid=socialshare&cvid=fa1e2985647b4284842206f5d0432e0e&ei=11

What follows is Zelenskyy is currently president for life, or for as long as martial law is not rescinded. So elections do not matter at this time in the Ukraine, if they ever did, really. I inferred from Stephen's post that he was criticizing the 'undemocratic' nature of dictatorships. By citing official statistics from regimes that charade about elections. I suspect too , that he is throwing shade at what he thinks Trump supporters believe about our recent and present cycle(s). Surely he must realize that Biden is a titular President, his own AG finds him incompetent to stand trial.

How is Zelenskkyyii polling in this cycle ?

Over at Hot Air, Jazz Shaw discusses the decision by Democrat strategist Hal Malchow to go abroad in order to end his own life on his own terms, before he loses his mind to Alzheimer's Disease. Before this story broke, I was unaware that even in American states that have legalized physician-assisted suicide, the laws apply only to people with a fatal condition who will die in a few months. Malchow, after seeing his mother deteriorate with the disease, got himself tested for its genetic markers and discovered that he would eventually succumb to the same fate:Legal Status of Euthanasia Worldwide. (Image by Michael Jester, via Wikimedia Commons, license.)Malchow returned to the vow he had made half a life earlier about what he would do when Alzheimer's arrived: "I knew that if it happened, I was not going to let all this play out to the end." He had seen how responsibility for his mother had fallen on those around her, and he believed it would be unfair to his wife, Anne Marsh, who already suffered from multiple sclerosis. Several American states, including New Mexico, permit physician-assisted suicide under so-called death-with-dignity laws, but all require a candidate to have a fatal condition with only months left to live. Malchow did not qualify and had no interest in living until he did. "What's the point? You know, why sit around the house and watch a little piece of your brain disappear every day?" he says. "And the ordeal for the caretaker is terrible." [bold added]Malchow had to travel to Switzerland to do something that should be a matter of making one's intent legally clear, settling one's affairs, and going to a hospital. This should serve as a wake-up call to anyone who would want the option to end life on one's own terms in the event of a catastrophic illness that involves a lengthy period of deterioration. Legal protection of the right to seek out assistance in suicide faces two major obstacles, one a legitimate concern and one not. Malchow's story mentions one along the way:Last September, Malchow contacted Dignitas, a nonprofit advocacy group that facilitates assisted death, to begin making arrangements. He had to submit a two-page autobiography -- a task, he imagined, to ensure he'd deliberated on his options and was not acting impulsively -- alongside medical records that a Swiss psychiatrist reviewed to grant a "provisional green light" to proceed with planning. [bold added]Because the law exists to protect the individual's rights, it should be non-trivial to exercise this right, because of the possibility of a momentary lapse of sound judgement or pressure from, say, relatives hoping for an early inheritance. These are legitimate concerns, and it appears -- contrary to theocratic smears -- that jurisdictions that recognize this right have accounted for them. And speaking of theocratic smears, Jazz Shaw brings up the other, illegitimate obstacle:Some will argue that this decision is in defiance of God's will and that he will pay a price for it. Perhaps you are correct, but that's a chance that Hal is willing to take and none of us truly knows for sure. Others may wish to turn away because the story is too painful to contemplate. But it's one that we will all face sooner or later unless we are suddenly and unexpectedly swept away from this mortal coil in an accident or otherwise. [bold added]They may argue, but the argument is based on an arbitrary premise that has no place as a basis for law. Or, as I said last year:It think it is clear why the "rights are a gift from God" crowd opposes physician-assisted suicide: It is because they imagine that it displeases a being (that they imagine out of whole cloth), and their whole conception of morality begins and ends at a list of commands having everything to do with "pleasing" this being -- and nothing to do with reason, with living on this earth, or with happiness.If the law permits euthanasia, and the state is barred from ordering executions, then anyone worried about offending an imaginary being can choose to continue suffering. I find it interesting that the same religion that condemns suicide was fine with "Kill them. The Lord knows those that are his own," back when it held power. Those who claim that death and suffering are God's will bring exactly those things to those who will not fight against them. They did it on a grand scale in the Middle Ages, and they do it now, every time someone who would want a dignified end to an inhuman future is denied that end by a superstitious taboo enshrined as law. -- CAVLink to Original

They are many, we are few -- so? They control us through the welfare state. So? We can refute and resist them. We know truly and can speak clearly of this: Self-Defense in a Welfare State You the welfare statist government say you are here to “help” and “serve” us with “welfare” by taxing, licensing, and regulating us. We the individualists are here to repudiate you the welfare statist government and your electors. . . . . . To reject and remove from you the power to violate our rights and so restrict you to your proper role of just protecting individual rights. We do not need or want your false help. We choose to truly help and live for and by own selves. We are self-sufficient, self-respecting, autonomous individuals. We own and support our lives by thinking and working for our own purpose and profit. We defend our rights to our property, liberty, and the pursuit of our happiness. We reject your welfare statist tyranny and refute the self-sacrifice and self-immolation of the altruism that spawned you. We recognize and uphold the supremacy of reason and reality, not the faith or force of the rights-violating State. We trade and associate with each other freely, without coercion, for mutual benefit with mutual consent. We don’t violate anyone’s rights and won’t accept any violation of ours. If we help each other in times of misfortune, we do so voluntarily, based on value not force. We value each other as individual free agents, as fellow humane, reasoning beings, living productive and proud lives. We seek each other’s benevolent company and appreciate each other’s unique, singular sovereignty. And we stand together against any tyranny with the full moral, rational certainty of our individual rights. So, we neither want nor need your welfare statism, your taxing and regulating our conversation and commerce. While we may comply when we are forced by law, we will not be martyrs or willing victims. We will resist, protest, and seek restitution where provided by law. You tax, license, and regulate, but you must also grant subsidies, relief, insurance, pensions, exemptions, deductions, and all such “welfare services and entitlements” so as to maintain the pretext for your statist tyranny. Where we could and care to, we will make claims on such “welfare” as a form of restitution, in self-defense, but without either agreeing or supporting your welfare statism. We will not vote for any member of any of your welfare parties of any color. We will vote only for legislators who stand for individual rights, and for the ethics of reason and reality that’s its foundation. These individualist politicians will oppose and seek to repeal all welfare statist laws and reform the constitution to affirm explicitly, definitively, the supremacy of individual rights, and to remove the government’s power to violate them, in anyone’s name, not the State, Society, or God. Meanwhile, we will continue to live and let live, to make the best of what’s possible to us, even in this welfare statist tyranny. There are and have been other worst states of tyranny than here now in the US-Canadian America, where it's still, overall, the freest in the world. But being the freest is not yet being all free. There's still a long way to go, but it will be soon enough. The legacy of Aristotelian Enlightenment is still a strong source of philosophy against any tyranny, especially when fortified by the rational individualist philosophy in our own times formulated by Ayn Rand. That the Ayn Rand Institute teaching her ideas of Objectivism continues to grow, 35 years after her death, and that her books continue to be bestsellers, is a positive cultural barometer of the progress of a rational, romantic civilization. More and more, there are politicians who acknowledge Ayn Rand’s positive influence on them. As we live on in the frontiers of freedom, we will avoid, as best we can, your welfare statist interference and distraction from our pursuit of our noble purpose, which, ultimately, is our own happiness. We will keep strengthening our understanding of the philosophy of reality, reason, rights, and romance – seeking continuous self-realization and self-betterment. There’s always a better way, as we’ll teach our children, a better and benevolent way through self-knowledge, self-sufficiency, and self-defense. Our children of liberty are the mothers and fathers of freedom’s future. With truth, courage, and love, we cheer them on. You, Welfare State, your days are numbered!

Some handy helpful background: Original Sin –from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Kant famously wrote: "out of such crooked wood as the human being is made, nothing entirely straight can be fabricated" (Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim, 1784, translation by Allen Wood). The context of this quote is an acknowledgement that formation and exercise of a political constitution for a society, is in human hands and minds, which means no constitution and its exercise can be perfect. The conclusion, I say, is fair enough truth, but the antecedent thought that humans are made of crooked timber—human nature is corrupt—seems very likely nothing original with Kant; rather, a common view, come down from the likes of Augustine and put about from Christian pulpits of Kant's era (and ours). Grace, Predestination, and Original Sin –from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Catholic Encyclopedia – ORIGINAL SIN