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  1. Why? "Rights" is not a floating abstraction. It arises from a consideration of what humans require to live, what this implies about the proper society for humans, and what each individual should do in such a society. One of the essential facts relied on in the derivation of rights is that humans survive by means of the use of their rational faculty. Take away that fact and the derivation falls apart. Thus, unless an organism survives by means of reason, it cannot be said to have rights.
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  2. Fair point. Here's an interesting thing though: my parents retired to the countryside and keep a few laying hens. In my experience, every time my mom "steals" the hen's egg (I'm assuming that's the word you would use, if you think the hen has rights), she just comes back the next day and lays another one. That's an odd attitude towards theft, from a supposedly rational creature, no? More importantly, does your argument above still apply, if the supposed "victim" is never going to deprive me of my means of survival, and will in fact keep me fed much more nutritious and healthy food than what any vegan I've ever come across eats?
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  3. I am skipping over the various implicit or explicit claims about animal cognition, because they are irrelevant unless the claim is that animals are cognitively the same as humans (a sufficiently ludicrous proposition that I doubt the OP intended that). Instead, I will focus on the problem of the concept “animal rights”. I start by summarizing the nature of and justification for the concept of “rights”, plagiarising in presumably obvious ways from The Virtue of Selfishness, but also from Schwartz’s essay “Free minds and free markets”. A code of morality is a system of concepts guiding man in pursuit of his values. A right is a moral concept that links legal and moral codes – rights are the means of subordinating spciety to moral law. Evasiveness is immoral, but it is not a violation of rights. A “right” is a focused moral principle which defines and sanctions a man's freedom of action in a social context. The fundamental right is a man's right to his own life, being free to act on his own judgment, by his own uncoerced choice. A man’s rights impose no obligations on others, except to abstain from violating his rights. Where rights come from is important: they are the conditions required by man's nature to survive qua man. Violation of rights would require a man to exist contrary to his nature. How does man survive? Not by strength, camouflage or instinct, but by his cognitive nature – free will (the necessity of choosing), aided by his conceptual faculty and his ability to discover and follow logic. When man lives in a social context (in a rational society), his rights are recognized via legal prohibitions against certain actions by others: the initiation of force. Force refers to physical actions taken by a volitional being to neutralize the choice of another volitional being. Given this, and since no animal’s nature demands the concept of rights for its survival, the concept of rights is inapplicable to animals. The proffered principle “animals shouldn't be harmed by humans” is not a restatement of the concept of rights, it is a different concept. It may be related in some way to the concept of rights, but it is not rights (just as a cat is not a dog, even though they are related in some ways). To avoid confusion, this concept needs to be clearly identified as a different thing: “animal protection” seems appropriate. If we are to believe in this moral concept, there needs to be a statement of what the concept objectively is. The most prominent question is, whose standard is applied in judging whether an action harms an animal? Does collecting eggs, milk or wool harm the animal? Is it proper to restrain an animal which intends to leap in front of a car? Does owning an animal harm it? Must an animal consent to being petted? Insofar as animals are utterly incapable of articulating their own judgment on these issues, men must decide on the standard – what is ‘in the interest of the interest of the animal’? What things are to be so protected (and what things do not deserve that protection)? Is it only mammals? Mammals and birds? Does it include fish, insects; plants, bacteria, fungi? If not, why not: that is, what is the essential property of these beings that creates this special relationship with man – imposing certain restrictions on moral actions. There is no conflict of man’s rights, but there is a conflict between man’s rights and the special privilege “animal protection”. Because men are able to grasp moral concepts and can act in a principled manner, man is capable of respecting the rights of others. When a man does not respect the rights of others, he cannot claim rights for himself. Animals cannot grasp moral codes and cannot be expected to respect the rights of men; when may a man morally defend himself against a violation of his rights by an animal? If you try to conceptualize moral actions towards animals in terms of “rights”, all you will do is confuse yourself and degrade the concept of “rights”. Let me repeat a point that I made earlier: you have the right to be evasive – and you should not do exercise that right. Every question that I raised above is free of the taint of legal enforcement – I am asking, should I beat my dog, should I kill a rat, should I swat a fly, should I let my dog kill a rabbit, or dig up the neighbor’s yard? These are simple moral questions. I propose that, for anyone who wants to live the vegan life, that they develop and justify answers to these kinds of questions. If there is a case to be made for overriding man’s nature (to act free from compulsion), then surely the seeds of that argument will be found in a fuller articulation of the vegan moral credo.
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  4. From the Guidelines: What kind of post falls under these rules? I've seen fairly rude posts here that weren't moderated.
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  5. Use the report function. Rudeness per se isn't a violation, and it's not clear cut when posts are merely "not nice". But reporting helps. The most egregious ones are removed quickly, though.
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  6. Running naked through the park: Yes you've identified a crucial problem with "public property," that is, property that has no clear owner, there is no way to regulate conflicts regarding its use without resort to arbitrary solutions. Now, Rand describes a free society in which all property is privately owned. But let's make an allowance here for some sort of land as you stipulate. Private property has its foundations in the Lockean homesteading principle, that which is unowned and I mix my labor with becomes my private property. Note that this doesn't mean all property has one single individual owner, that would be the fallacy of composition. There are of course "group owned" properties and corporate entities allow for a legal method to deal with this. Legal doctrine has traditionally allowed for some sort of "commons" area or such associated with small towns or villages. A village is built, and there is a small space in the center reserved as a "town square" that people agree is available for general use. Or consider a fishing village near a lake, in the early days of the community it was hard to get to the lake because of all the brush and debris, but the path was slowly cleared over the years and not by any one single effort, but by the combined effort of walking through the path over time. I think there's also records in England of private roads that were built during the 19th Century and then donated to public use (the builders had businesses alongside.) So there's a public space in each of these, but what is the sense in which it is "public?" Surely it isn't truly "unowned," the village or townsfolk own it. And surely it isn't "government owned," or "owned collectively by the human race" or some such nonsense. It would simply be corporately owned by the actual village and they can set the community standards for their space. Surely I, as an outsider, cannot just come to their square or path and block it off for my own personal use, nor can I start streaking. As to how they go about decision making? They can vote, they can set up a board, they can have meetings, they can take disputes to arbitrators, they can form a homeowners association. They can leave rules real loose, or they can really get down and dirty and decide who the real owners are: Sam, he didn't really clear any brush, and Jones, he was lifting fallen branches every day, Sam gets a single share, but Jones gets a 20% share, whatever. You get the point. On the last point, pollution: certainly you have to provide proof of harm. And certainly our understanding of what is harmful changes over time. That's why issues are solved through tort law, not legislative law. This specific person harmed this specific person. And multiply it many times for class action suit, even for hypothetical massive cases. Objectivists accordingly view these issues like climate change as scientific issues, not political ones. One looks at scientific evidence, in a court of law, and if the plaintiff proves their case, then the court stops the pollution. Environmental crusaders are always looking for problems to solve, instead of becoming lobbyists and trying to buy influence from politicians, their efforts would be better served in a more Randian society as litigators for the aggrieved. But what Rand was truly opposed to was the ones that claim humanity must subordinate itself to instrinsic value of nature, or that civilization's progress must be stopped.
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  7. "How do I live in a country…" …This translates (to me) to mean, how do you manage your frustration with things you think are never going to get better? Universal Health Care is a scam. The people pushing it know its never going to work. The more they push it the worse it gets. Which intern insights delusional people to scream louder for it. The terror of death is what keeps it going. Everyone wants to live forever and they will give their last dime, their home, any legacy they have for their families future, and get themselves in hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical debt. Just to stay alive as a guinea pig for another couple years. This is what they want the government nanny state to pay for. Cry SAFETY!! The ultimate tool of stagnation. No one is safer than the man is a straight jacket in a padded cell. Death is so horrifying for most mystics that they will buy any snake oil that promises eternal life. The safest sounding prescriptions from the oldest biggest churches. All hail big FDarma. It is difficult for a person who doesn’t want “power over another person” to understand, communicate with, or come to an agreement with a person who does want power and does want control over others. They want so much control and power, that they perceive your refusing their power or control as another power/control tactic. “Attention whore control freak” is a label that pops into my head more and more as I contemplate the problems in the world that my mind can’t seem to turn away form. Every mystic who stands in front on the pulpit is desperate to keep their audience attention. Their focus is not on quality, but on quantity. They get people to listen by playing to their weakness and telling them what they want to hear. Every decision in an irrational person’s life seems to be rooted in fear. They are so saturated with fear that telling them they do not have to live a life of fear causes them panic and terror. As though you are taking away their only protection, their only lifeline. The alternative you offer them seems impossible for their atrophied mind to grasp, the amount of mental effort to get themselves to a better place is alien. They can not see the context of the better place, they only see the loss of their traditions, and their feelings of belonging. Are you offering them anything better really? Does your approach reflect how ‘good’ your own system is? It seems so much easier to be a forgiven sheep, than it is to stand up as a man. Calling them evil is making yourself a target. JudaeoChristian values have survived for 5000 years, as countless others have fallen or been absorbed. The Bible is full of the ample examples of physical and psychological warfare they have engaged in. Have you ever read the Bible? Do you even know who your enemy is? They are masters of war, and your cries of despair fuel their fire. Darwin states that it isn’t the strongest or the smartest that survive, but the most adaptable to change. The Judaeo/Christian movement has certainly adapted. How long will your own personal movement last? Are there paths that will help mystics adapt to greater and greater rationality?
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  8. In the objectivist view, conflict over the use of goods is solved by adherence to strict private property rights. The function of government is to organize a body of law based on that principle. 1. Pollution is the export of harmful particles onto someone else's physical body or property. Just as if I came and dumped my garbage on your lawn, if I am exporting harmful air onto your property I can be made to stop via a legal injunction, and sued for the damages. Indeed, historically this was the legal tradition, the problems involving pollution have been caused by the governments failure to live up to this role and to allow certain producers to export pollution in the name of the "public good." 2 and 3. Again, in a free society people will always have conflicting values. Differing opinions regarding the use of scarce resources is part of human nature. I want to do this on some property, you want to do that, who decides? Private property rights involves a kind of meta-ethical space in which people can seek their interests without coming into physical confrontation. In a market economy, individual choices and tastes prevail. Not all members of society will approve of the choices of others. But, by and large, the mass of the consumer choices will determine the way in which resources are used. Ifa library or retail store started allowing dress (or non-dress) far out of line with cultural value systems of the mainstream, consumers will be quick to express dissatisfaction with these management decisions. Same in education services. Some prefer Catholic schools, creationism, others a liberal arts education, or progressive education. Who decides what the schools should do? There is not one monopoly decision. Parents, as consumers, decide with their money, and the owners pay the price of their decision in terms of profit or loss. That is the beauty of the market system, when there is not one single monopoly decision. Let a million different flowers bloom, as the Maoists say.
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  9. This article has a good critique of Harris from an Objectivist point of view. https://www.theobjectivestandard.com/issues/2008-fall/mystical-ethics-new-atheists/
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