cellar door

I think the best immediate response to the ultimate question: "Why should I choose to live?" is: "Why would you choose NOT to live?" Think of the countless reasons which could make your life worth choosing over nonexistence: getting your PhD, enjoying a fine Cabernet, making that girl you like laugh, jogging 5 miles, etc. These reasons JUST ARE the responses to "Why should I choose life?" There isn't some further abstract principle doing the final ethical justification: the concrete, inductively grasped facts of what makes life worth enjoying speak for themselves. A philosophical validation of why these activities are worth pursuing requires some work, but from an experiential standpoint, the proof is in the pudding. (For instance, I can feel awesome after writing a poem regardless of knowing WHY I feel that way.) To demand some further principle answering the ultimate question is akin to saying: "I know existence exists. But what proves THAT?" The existence axiom is implicit in perceiving concrete entites. Likewise, the 'axiom' of your life's ultimate worth is implicit in experiencing that which brings you happiness or fulfillment. (Of course, the facts surrounding what activities bring noncontradictory joy and what do not is a complex discussion belonging to another thread.) Perhaps I'm misinterpreting, but I'm concerned with some of the above posts if they're claiming that the Objectivist position on the ultimate choice to live is that the choice is arbitrary. "Arbitrary" means "unsupported by good reasons." If the ultimate choice to live is, in fact, arbitrary, then the nihilist or the typical academic philosopher can get away with asking why one should accept the Objectivist ethics as opposed to something else. But the ultimate choice to live is not arbitary. For healthy individuals in relatively free societies, there are lots of reasons favoring them to seek/enjoy their lives. Given those reasons, what basis - on balance - would give them better reasons to choose death?

Unless I'm mistaken, you seem to be presuming that I must both allow and not allow something at the same time, but that's not the case. When I presently choose to waive my sovereignty it's all over for my future freedom. If I declare that: "As I now sign this contract, I grant others the freedom to do whatever they want to do to me, regardless of my resistance," then I'm _presently_ allowing something that I _presently_ want to allow for all time, regardless of later regrets about my present decision. If I come to realize the obvious idiocy of my contract, whatever I might _later_ want to allow is beside the point since I choose to waive my sovereignty here and now. There is no future issue about what I have the sovereignty to allow -- I freely chose to give up that sovereignty! I exercised my right to set up a scenario in which I do not have future rights. Are you claiming that rights _by definition_ are inalienable? If so, I still don't see how imprescriptible rights are contradictory. EDIT: slight grammatical fixes

I'm probably making this explanation harder than it needs to be, but here goes: In the passage you cite, I take Dr. Peikoff's use of "this" to refer the fact that any _existent_ is finite since every individual entity that constitutes the universe is finite. The universe is simply the sum of entities A+B+C -- and since A is finite, B is finite, C is finite -- the sum is also finite. His use of "this" doesn't imply that the universe is a unique entity unto itself, with its own special set of attributes. There are these chairs, these planets, these electrons, etc....but there is not an entity _in addition to_ all these particulars, called 'the Universe,' that stands apart from them. The universe is an existent but not an entity -- the universe should be thought of merely as the sum of all physical entities. So the sense in which the universe is finite differs from the sense in which any entity that comprises the universe is finite. As a placeholder for naming the collection of every thing that exists, the word 'universe' refers to a sum that is finite in the general sense of being "not infinite," whereas any particular entity is finite in the more particular sense of being limited in size, shape, any other relevant measurement. Maybe we should just stop using the word 'universe' since it seems to raise so many confusions?!

There's a distinction, not often used, between _inalienable_ rights and _imprescriptible_ rights. Inalienable rights are those which nobody _including_ the rights-holder can relinquish. You have those rights whether you want them or not. Imprescriptible rights are those which nobody _except_ the rights-holder can relinquish. On this view, rights are "take it or leave it" claims. It is the moral default that a person has sovereignty over himself -- unless he chooses to give it up. My question is: why should we have to treat rights as inalienable rather than imprescriptible? Rights define a person's sovereignty over himself and his property -- so why can't that sovereignty entail that he has the power to renounce his future sovereignty? Rights are moral principles delineating our sovereignty to decide how others may treat us physically - so why can't a person draft a contract that specifies that he grants another (the 'slavemaster') total discretion to treat him however the master likes? It's not clear to me why a person can't waive his rights in general, but he can waive rights to this or that particular (such as right to THIS car or a right not to be bruised and bloodied.) I know some here will claim that (certain? all?) rights can't be waived, but that presumes that rights are inalienable. Again, why do they have to be inalienable rather than imprescriptible?

Since you seem to post here regularly, I'm sure you've met or heard of Objectivists who like Beethoven more than Rachmaninoff, or who like much of the Beatles' oeuvre, or who don't like Rush, yada yada....I've met some without looking too hard. I interned at an ARI conference a few summers ago. Some fellow interns and I played the Who's "Live at Leeds" while we manned the information booth. We didn't scour past articles to make sure that Miss Rand approved of late '60's British rock, and nobody there condemned our musical selection, regardless of their own opinions. In fact, one of the speakers mentioned that he liked the Who as well. But even if a bunch of Who-hating Objectivists had voiced their displeasure, so what? We love the album and it made the already enjoyable experience that much more fun. What's strange is that you seem to think that Objectivists don't have different artistic favorites. What's even stranger is that none of the above posts (save yours) mention anything implying totalitarianism, Plato, chains, or conformity to religious fundamentalism. I do see in the above posts that some people wonder whether their sense of life has caught up with their acceptance of a philosophy. That's a reasonable question, isn't it? I certainly don't see a "philosopher-king" or Jerry Falwell commanding us to abandon independent judgment. Edited by TomL to remove unnecessary quoting of entire previous post

I agree with you that the concept of 'insanity' is often a loaded and ambiguous term as used in legal and political contexts. But I'm not ready to claim that 'insanity' or 'mental illness' are useless concepts per se - if that's what you were implying. If not, we have no disagreement. There's a clear difference between someone who acts irrationally _by choice_ (e.g., a death-fighter who is capable of understanding the fact that he is risking his life) and, say, a severe schizophrenic who 'acts' non-rationally from paranoid delusions and hallucinations that render useless whatever volitional control (if any) he may have to act purposively in an environment where he can't control his capacity to tell reality from fantasy. The death-fighter is stupid because he hasn't thought through better ways of making money. He is stupid in the humdrum sense of a slacker who doesn't choose to think about his life, get off his butt, and make something of himself. I'm assuming, by contrast, that there is such a thing as a severe schizophrenic who can't live his life independently, since he literally can't tell reality from fantasy. _If_ in fact some extreme schizophrenics lack this much control over their agency, I'd say they are 'insane' in the sense of lacking competency to perceive reality enough to live independently and to consent to risky contracts. In that case, contracts are unenforceable in the same sense that very young children can't make legally binding contracts. OTOH, otherwise competent slackers and fools are just, well, foolish by their own plain unwillingness to think. If they want to enter foolish contractual arrangements, then they are responsible for the risk of very bad consequences. They aren't bedeviled by uncontrollable paranoid schizophrenic delusions that Satan is telling them to slack or to enter into duels. I could go on but will leave it there for now! EDIT: to spell the noun form of 'schizophrenic' correctly

I *%@#ing know that I'm not shelling out $$ to see this *^!%

This will undoubtedly repeat some of the points posted above, but I'd like to give an overview: I'm assuming, arguendo, that any viable contract between two competent persons who agree to engage in a death fight will establish that each person understands that he thereby assumes the risk that he will be the one who ends up dead. Of course he doesn't _intend_ to die - that's why he signs the contract to participate in this match for monetary "profit." He is wagering that he has a chance between 0% and 100% that he will win the match, and thus he is wagering a chance between 0% and 100% that the other guy will win. As for "sanity" we need to get to clear about what this concept means in the context of this thread. I agree that a death match participant under normal political conditions is "insane" in the sense of being stupid or foolish to risk his life for however much money the purse holds. (Sheesh, is his self-esteem so low that he believes that he can't make money in more life-affirming ways?) But I'm also assuming for this discussion that, whatever his own personal issues, he is not "insane" in the sense of being cognitively incapable of understanding reality in general or the foolish risks he takes in particular. All else equal, if he is cognitively competent and his possible death doesn't violate any prior legal obligations he may have -- what right or permission do we have to prevent him from embarking on his stupid enterprise? I press this distinction in the two senses of "sanity" because the latter sense, which is a synonym for foolishness, applies to all kinds of behavior that Objectivism condemns morally but would allow legally: promiscuity, drug abuse, "slacking," etc. I don't see a principled distinction between these types of "insane-qua-foolish" self-destructive behaviors and our foolish death match participants. Hence I don't see how one could make a principled case favoring the illegality of duelling without also opening the door to massive paternalistic prohibition of other foolish behavior.