Grames

Good for him, and you. Bad things can happen to adopted children and biological children, but when they happen to biological children the parents are to blame and no one else. When the government approves an adoption and it turns out badly the government is partly responsible. Naturally, that bothers responsible people with an interest in what their government has done. So more laws and regulations are put in place to mitigate the problem. One can argue specifics about which laws and regulations would work best but the motivation to do something is not wrong.

Section 10: Powers Denied to the States No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.

I am sympathetic. There are also clauses forbidding the use of any money but gold and silver that have never been repealed or altered by amendment.

Stephen, abortion (pro or con) is way down the list of more important issues to consider. I'm not even anti-abortion so would not support any candidate that was a single-issue lunatic. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania was where Kermit Gosnell ran his abortion charnel house, for which he has been given three life sentences with no parole. I am not threatened by the prospect of some state level regulation of abortion but also see no prospect for a full abortion ban here. If one did pass it would not last long before the political pendulum swung back the other way. Neither side of the issue has the numbers and political power to have it all their way once and for all. Prohibition of the morning-after pill – No. Prohibition of same-sex marriage – No. But I could see forbidding adoption of children into same-sex marriage households as reasonable.

Yeah, that would be me. Except my motives were not mystical. Adherence to some judicial methodology is better than arbitrariness. What was granted by judicial fiat can be taken away by judicial fiat. Individual rights that are properly secured against the federal government and the states are to be spelled out in plain language in constitutional amendments.

If you read the draft opinion you will see that the court's reversal on Roe and Casey is based on the legal grounds that those decisions were unsupported by law, precedent, or practice and that what legal history was covered in Roe was irrelevant or simply wrong. The Supreme Court's assertion of judicial power to attempt to settle the abortion controversy by decree was unconstitutional because the Court has no such authority. Mystical metaphysics has nothing to do with it. No metaphysical hypotheses of any kind is offered.

The root all evil .... French journalist made a Ukraine documentary in 2016. 53 minutes long, so set aside time for it

How The United States Overthrew Ukraine's Democratic Government [Russia Ukraine War Explained] Both Russia and the United States are corrupt kleptocratic empires.

2046, thank you for the example. Phlogiston is exactly the kind of theory that was created by early scientists trying to apply rationality, and discarded by later scientists also trying to be rational but with more knowledge. The degree of correspondence or lack of correspondence of this theory to reality had little to do with honesty or dishonesty. "Seeking correspondence in the appropriate way" means, in my understanding, applying reason to the best of one's ability but is not a guarantee of being correct. From the reverse perspective, being wrong is not proof of irrationality or dishonesty or inappropriateness.

2046, is there an inappropriate way to seek correspondence with reality? What is referent of that idea? I continue to hold that distinguishing between the objects of the virtuous actions is helpful.

2046, honesty being "one's relationship to facts" is broad enough to encompass simply not being wrong about one's conclusions. But one can hold a wrong conclusion for any number of reasons that do not involve honesty or dishonesty or evasion. Being uninformed, making a hasty generalization, making a value judgement on how to spend one's time, methodological errors in calculating - all of those are cured by the commitment to being rational over time which includes rejecting contradictions as one becomes aware of them and always expanding one's knowledge. Honesty does not prevent error or remedy it. The object of actions of honesty or dishonesty is other minds, and presentations or misrepresentations of facts are means to that end. The objects of the virtuous actions of honesty are other minds, and it is on that basis (the object of the action) that distinguishes honesty from rationality. The object of actions of rationality is existence/reality. For our convenient reference the appropriate Rand quote on honesty is copied below: Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have no value, that neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by fraud—that an attempt to gain a value by deceiving the mind of others is an act of raising your victims to a position higher than reality, where you become a pawn of their blindness, a slave of their non-thinking and their evasions, while their intelligence, their rationality, their perceptiveness become the enemies you have to dread and flee—that you do not care to live as a dependent, least of all a dependent on the stupidity of others, or as a fool whose source of values is the fools he succeeds in fooling—that honesty is not a social duty, not a sacrifice for the sake of others, but the most profoundly selfish virtue man can practice: his refusal to sacrifice the reality of his own existence to the deluded consciousness of others. Galt’s Speech, For the New Intellectual, 129

Continuing to work things out, lets consider virtues. From the Lexicon": “Value” is that which one acts to gain and keep, “virtue” is the action by which one gains and keeps it. Galt’s Speech, For the New Intellectual, 121 and then further: My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists—and in a single choice: to live. The rest proceeds from these. To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason—Purpose—Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knowledge—Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve—Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living. These three values imply and require all of man’s virtues, and all his virtues pertain to the relation of existence and consciousness: rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride. Galt’s Speech, For the New Intellectual, 128 The virtues most directly founded in ethics and not requiring others as objects of the virtuous action are rationality, productiveness, and pride. The other virtues are essentially political virtues. Independence is not a virtue unless there is possibility of being dependent, which requires some other person. Honesty is not a virtue unless there is a possibility of deception, which requires some other person to be deceived. Justice is not a virtue unless there is possibility of being unjust to some other person. Once one has learned dishonesty or unjustness they can be turned on oneself, but they must be first learned from others. Comments? edit: I forgot integrity. Upon further consideration it seems redundant. It seems to be a meta-virtue, a reminder to be virtuous.

I agree. Rand gives a good starting point for an objective definition. This presumes a definition for institution. A government is an institution that holds the exclusive power to enforce certain rules of social conduct in a given geographical area. “The Nature of Government,” The Virtue of Selfishness, 107

Non-human actors are encompassed by the term "actors", so it doesn't have to be a human interaction. The coordination of that action is significant, so there are principles and rules involved but not necessarily agreement as much political action is informal and to some degree involuntary such as in one's assigned place in a social pecking order. Social hierarchies are found in most social species. Some political principles of social hierarchies can inferred by studying non-human social species, such as in The Politics of Chimpanzees by Frans de Waal. Politics is a branch of philosophy but 'society' is the single word used as a noun to refer to several individuals as a political unit. Society is defined as "an organization or club formed for a particular purpose or activity" but also has a usage referring to the whole "aggregate of people living together in a more or less ordered community." "Political entity" and "society" are synonyms or nearly so, but "society" has the advantage of being a word and not a noun phrase.

Is lying and learning to lie an inherently political action, requiring the presence of another person and mind? I think so now. Would a hypothetic child that somehow had language and the ability to think but never had the opportunity to learn about lying to others or be lied to by others have any comprehension of or use for the virtue of honesty? I think not.

Proper definitions are important for clear thinking. For politics as philosophy the genus we already knew as human action, a.k.a. ethics. What I seek to add is an objective differentia. The definition I propose makes clear that politics is much broader than government or power relations, and has interesting consequences for some of the Objectivist virtues as Stephen Boydstun points out. There is also the original post at the head of the thread posing the problem in terms of objectivity.

Here's my take on it. The big open ended question of ethics is "What should one do?" Rand starts her talk/essay Philosophy: Who Needs It with a science fiction scenario of an astronaut crash landed on an unknown planet and show how the astronaut needs and in fact acts out some philosophy whatever he does or doesn't do. She affirms elsewhere that one needs ethics stranded alone on a desert island. Ethics is about "what should one do?". To make progress toward a rational answer Rand creates some conceptual handles on the problem. The question is about action, and action has objects and actors. Only living things need to act. Living things need to act to gain certain things to continue to live and act further. She defines value as "that which one acts to gain or keep", with the "one" encompassing any single living organism not just people. The objective basis of ethics is values. Ethics is a necessity for people because of their conceptual faculty and volition, but not for plants or animals. Ethical philosophy is essentially which values are chosen, what standard is used to choose them, and how they are ordered and organized. Politics isn't any different from ethics in its objects, by which I mean politics is still about values. Values are still that which one acts to gain or keep, never a collective. Politics differs from ethics in its method: more than one individual is acting toward the same value. Values are still necessarily selfish/egoistic even when working with others to achieve them. The ethical standard of value, selection of values, hierarchy of values, in fact the entire code of values stays the same and doesn't change for politics. There is no separate political code of values just a political means of obtaining them. All human action comes within the scope of ethics because all action will have some result gained or kept. Only action taken with others is within the scope of politics. Politics is a subset of ethics in this way, and is also conceptually dependent upon ethics via the reuse of the concept of value. "Acting with others" is sufficiently value-free to qualify as an objective basis to defining the scope of politics. It encompasses everything from robbery, murder and slavery (the other need not be voluntarily cooperating, this is about your values not the other guy's) to family, trading, and voting. This definition can apply to animals when they act together because the definition is about acting not philosophizing. Economics is "acting with others for material values". Trading, robbery and slavery are within economics as well as politics and ethics. The basic political unit is coordinated action by two or more actors.

Some systems are weaker than others. That doesn't make it not a system.

Anarchy is the name for a society without any formal government, but is certainly a type of political system so long as the people participating are consciously and deliberately deciding that they do not want to be governed by the people around them. Perhaps you expect that a something described as a system has some degree of formality?

There is a possibility omitted here and unconsidered: epistemological sanction. Biological sanction is equivalent to determinism, values are assigned to animals by nature. Man is an animal too and starts off acting like one as an infant but grows into a wider consciousness. Man needs to choose his own values, and must learn how to value, and at some point choose whether or not to continue to value (to live or die). That valuing is so wrapped up into his consciousness makes Rand's ethics epistemological.

Comte is one of those dead white men no one has ever heard of but we are all enslaved by their philosophies. Comte chronologically comes in between Kant and Marx, and may be somewhat of a conduit linking the two systems. I'm speculating, I read a minimum of that kind of scholarly "who influenced whom?" history.

Thanks Stephen. The Chimpanzee book, and other of de Waals' works look fascinating (even beyond my interest in the topic of this thread). The Haas book looks to be too "in the weeds" specific as a kind of meta-history for my purposes. Might there be any amateur philosophers comparable to Roy Childs publishing their own speculative essays on politics that you might remember from those days?

Good points to keep in mind. 1. Rand's definition of value is about the actions of "one" and does not reify a collective into existence. A good example to follow. Politics is something that "one" engages in, even if it by definition requires some other "one". 2. Point taken but should be moot, in that a sufficiently low level conceptualization of what politics is would (I hope) capture the behavior of animals without free will. 3. Yes, but. Rand needed an objective definition of value to unlock the field of ethics for her reasoning. I contend a counterpart is needed for a philosophy of politics.

I agree because it (the choice of family as basic political unit) already seems to be making a value judgement that reproduction is the most important or organizing principle in political activity. Reproduction should be encompassed by the theory but it isn't quite fundamental enough in my still evolving opinion.

That's actually easy, although most professors would feel ambushed by such a question. Measurement is the objective basis of physics. Measurement itself can be unpacked into a large topic and has epistemology and objectivity embedded within it as premises, with objectivity being a normative standard in itself. The objective basis of objectivity is not quite axiomatic (or perhaps it is, offhand I don't recall) but it must be closely coupled with the axiomatic concepts of Existence, Identity and Consciousness.