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I, too, am disappointed in the guilty verdict. Providing the epistemic justification requires being able identify and guide others through judicial landscape presented. Thanks for providing the summation. It was nice having it in one place, unfolding as you presented it.

Stephen, quoting from your post in RoR: "In 1984 I wrote an essay titled "The Moral Value of Liberty" which was published in Nomos. I need to quote something I wrote therein: Just as the self cannot be the subject it is without having been subject to external objects, so the self cannot be the value it is without external objects of value to it. And just as the self cannot be the subject it is without also being the self-reflective object it is, so the self cannot be the value it is without being of that value to itself. (V2N1 20) This is an expression of what I think of as conveyance of the primacy of existence into human values in a radical way. This is primacy of existence running more deeply in human values than in any egoistic theory of ethics. The idea that external things need to be valuable to oneself in order for oneself to be valuable to oneself is not entirely foreign to Rand's writings on ethics. She has an essay called "Selfishness without a Self" that touches on this. She drafts her Howard Roark as oriented to external things and constructions he values; he is only secondarily oriented to himself as valuer of those things. Ethical egoism is the view that all moral values and virtues can be based purely on consideration of the agent's self-interest. I have watched attempts to set ethics purely on self-interest from Protagoras and Socrates to Plato and Aristotle to Spinoza and Rand and Mack to my colleague Irfan Khawaja. I don't buy them. They all fail. They fudge sooner or later. There is truth and value in these attempts, and I will keep on watching their latest editions". -- I wonder at your high level thinking in the statement, but whether this 'meta-ethical egoism' (for want of a better term ) can and must always reduce to Rand's ethical egoism? If one wanted to, one couldn't escape moral self-interest, I sense. Putting doubts aside, yours is a radical line of thought. For me, first I had to understand things clearly as they are "out there", before I could place value (or otherwise) in them -- and before I could find objective value in myself. Valuing and rational selfishness wasn't automatic or 'given' and took me longest to appreciate. (Couldn't one achieve self-value existing in a Gulag all one's life, knowing only the bad?; conversely, we may see a free person who had all the advantages of perceiving valuable "external things" quite often fail to know self-value).