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Rounin

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    David Oftedal

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  1. While each person's notion of how to attain happiness may be different (and thus relative to each person), as I understand it, Objectivism's notion of happiness refers more to the fundamental kind of happiness which all people ultimately seek in everything they do, and which it's in man's nature to seek. After rereading the OP, I suspect that moral relativism wasn't the kind of relativism the OP was attempting to refute after all, though, so I think I'll refrain from any further interpretations of Objectivism here.
  2. I sometimes describe myself simply as a "rational egoist". Certainly, it's a somewhat general term, but if a more specific explanation is needed, I can give one anyway.
  3. If the machine could successfully emulate a real and fulfilling life, filled with real challenges and simulated people with complete personalities and desires of their own, one could ask whether the machine itself constituted a separate world in its own right. It would still have to be weighed against the trauma of leaving behind one's current life, though. Even if one could simulate all one's friends and relatives inside the machine, one would still know that they existed on the outside.
  4. My response to relativism would simply be that the pursuit of one's own happiness is fundamental to the nature of man and is what all human beings are engaged in, no matter what moral system they adopt in order to achieve it. So there is at least one moral absolute.
  5. I think this is a perfectly rational belief. We can observe that we have the power of volition and of reason, so any meaningful definition of determinism must obviously take that into account. Determinism doesn't negate the existence of volition and reason, rather it adds that the mechanism underlying those mental faculties is subject to the law of causality. I wrote more about this in a previous thread ).
  6. Retaliatory force against the Iranian government, and initiation of force against the thousands of innocents killed just because of the choice of a nuclear bomb as the mode of attack. It's very convenient to hold all Iranians collectively responsible for the actions of their government, but this is collectivist reasoning. If some innocent Iranians harmed by the attack were to decide to strike back at the US, on what basis would you condemn them? When you legitimise using a type of force that harms a high number of innocents, you're legitimising more than the proper use of force.
  7. 1) Because it'd be a massive initiation of violent force against a large number of innocent people, which would be an immoral act of an order of magnitude almost unheard of. 2) Because it'd legitimise the initiation of violence against innocents by other nations, including against US citizens. 3) Because it'd create an(other) enormous backlash against the US, as did the war on Iraq. 3) Because it isn't necessary to protect the US or its allies. 5) Because it'd increase the chance of nuclear war.
  8. Yes — If you wanted to, you could restate my previous post as saying that determinism doesn't disprove Free Will, because even if our behaviour was completely deterministic and could theoretically be predicted in advance by an omniscient observer, the world is still be experienced by us in a manner that appears to us to be non-deterministic, and we should thus behave accordingly. Whether one looks upon choice as a purely deterministic process involving input and output or as a non-deterministic process involving several possible outcomes has no significance beyond the realm of theory, because even an ardent determinist has to recognise that choices exist and that how one chooses will affect the future.
  9. While this is probably a slight digression from the original topic, I don't believe it's necessary to agree with or understand Rand's views on Free Will to agree with Objectivism's general tenets. In fact, I believe the importance of Free Will is severely overstated in general. Consider the hypothetical case of a man stealing an apple. If we suppose that there's no such thing as Free Will, the man can correctly claim that his stealing the apple was merely the result of an unfortunate chain of causation. However, what does that mean in practice? Very little. When we hold people responsible for the consequences of their actions (such as stealing apples), the actions we're holding them responsible for are always inevitable, since they've already been carried out and are in the past, whether they were inevitable at the time (determinism) or not (Free Will). When we respond to such actions, for instance by punishing the man who stole an apple, the response is meant not to alter the past, but to alter the likelyhood of similar actions being carried out in the future. Whether we actually have a free will or are just acting out a chain of events that's completely pre-determined, our response can still be observed to have an effect upon the future course of the man's life. What about the difference between people who willingly commit crimes, and people who commit crimes due to insanity or other circumstances beyond their control? Under a deterministic worldview, all circumstances could be considered to be beyond our control, but this doesn't change the fact that different types of causes require a different type of response. The people most likely to be dissuaded from criminal behaviour by punishment would still be eligible for punishment, whereas those most likely to respond favourably to psychiatric treatment would be eligible for that kind of response. In short, the practical differences between non-deterministic and deterministic worldviews aren't applicable to actual situations. The idea of the universe as a fully deterministic system is interesting as a thought experiment, but in actual fact it doesn't free anyone from the ownership of and responsibility for his own life.
  10. I think it's helpful to remember that Objectivism is the intellectual property of a small group of people centered around its originator, Ayn Rand. Compare it to the different branches of communism: Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, Trotskyism and so on. While one can certainly disagree with parts of a philosophy and start a new branch, one cannot hold that Mao was wrong about central points of his philosophy and still be a Maoist. Objectivism, too, is proprietary and fixed, and is, with the exception that certain people have been authorised to clarify it, an immutable value.
  11. Wouldn't the simplest first step be to have as many objectivists as possible move to a small, immigration-friendly and freedom-loving nation, akin to what the Free State Project is doing in New Hampshire? The idea of founding a new nation is certainly exciting, but in actual fact there may already be one or more nations out there that would be relatively open to Objectivism already.
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