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Showing content with the highest reputation on 07/16/17 in all areas

  1. By "life for its own sake", I assume you mean just staying alive, as such. If so, I agree. Staying alive is an essential precondition for any philosophy, at least while one is practicing it... even a Nazi/Commie/altruist has to stay alive as a pre-condition, at least up to the point the particular morality suggests death. There've been some thread on this topic: i.e. staying alive versus flourishing. The one thing that is incomplete in your post is that you mention " Pre-rational, visceral, gut-level enjoyment" -- which is okay but incomplete. An epicurean move from day to day, enjoying friends, music and other such fun will not bring the fullness of human happiness. Human beings need to supplement that with a sense of purpose: this is where Rick Warren or anyone who heads to the Peace Corp really understands something true about human happiness.
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  2. Boom. Because it's a drive, an inclination, an instinct. Man has a nature. Man has innate drives. Values are not chosen. Don't be afraid to throw out tabula rasa.
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  3. What makes life worth living is not living life. Life for its own sake is tedious, boring, dutiful, meaningless. What makes life living is the concrete experiences one enjoys within it. The pleasures one derives from things. Satisfying one's desires. Pre-rational, visceral, gut-level enjoyment. Withouth rhyme or reason, you just like it. And then life has value as a means to those experiences. Life is not the end, it's a means to an end. Strikingly opposite to Objectivist thought. In my direct experience that is the case. All the Objectivist virtue and ethics couldn't make me happy or make me want to live. It's when I started listening to my own desires and pleasures, and enjoying things for their own intrinsic pleasure that life started to have value and happiness seemed possible. When you're depressed, the only thing that matters is how you feel. That life is a value has no power to shake them from their depression, because it's not true for them. Life is only a value if your specific life is a value to you for other things. Many Objectivists will shift gears and agree that's what they meant all along but they are doing a bait and switch with the meaning of the term life, and it contradicts the fine print of the ethics.
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  4. "Blessed are the children for they shall inherit the national debt."--Chinese fortune cookie
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  5. One does not have to visualize/imagine a healthcare system that is fairly free-market. Many countries -- e.g. India -- have systems like that. And, "OMG! Surely I don't want Indian healthcare" misses the crucial point. Indian healthcare -- or even Bangladeshi, if you like -- is bad for the same reason everything is lesser there: average wealth. Given that average wealth, the system -- mostly private -- works very well. If Indians had 6 times their per capita income (becoming similar to Britain) it is easy to see their healthcare could be the envy of the world because of its structure. (The U.S. may be worse than U.K. in some ways because almost all of healthcare is government directed in some way, but has a structure of being private.)
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  6. Yep. It's absurd. Throw it out. What makes life worth living has nothing to do with conditional state of existence. The idea that an immortal human would have no reason to act totally ignores the reality of human psychology. If I'm immortal, I can still enjoy the same things, so why wouldn't I? I don't enjoy myself to survive, I enjoy myself to enjoy myself.
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