Sirius1

No, it does not reference that. What is to be done about the encirclement problem in property law (easement) is a deduction that comes way later than the concept of a right.

A right is a normative abstraction describing how one should act toward others and how others should act toward oneself. A normative abstraction pertaining to human action is also known as a moral principle. Moral principle is the genus of the definition of right given by Ayn Rand:



That a man's right to his own life is fundamental is important here because what is fundamental is the essential defining characteristic of the concept by the rule of fundamentality. Any and all construing of the limits of property rights are subordinate to the right to life, which can be considered as forming the context for those specific rights.


The actions required by man the rational animal crucially include interacting with others: above all learning from them, and also listening to and speaking to them, and trading with them for material values, and generally contracting with them. "Man is not a lone wolf and he is not a social animal. He is a contractual animal." -Ayn Rand There cannot be a right to so greatly interfere with the necessary actions of life man qua man even if subsistence survival were possible on the isolated plot.

Not 2 months ago there was a thread on this identical topic. See Trapped Man Problem

Two years ago Craig Biddle wrote in defense of Immigration and Individual Rights. Poster 2046 referenced it in the thread Ayn Rand & "Open Borders". Since freedom of movement is a similar feature between the immigration question and the trapped man problem there is a parallel argument to made in both cases.

I quote the most relevant portion of Biddle's case (footnotes and links omitted from the original):

Claiming a right to trap a man on his property violates rights by making it impossible generally for the trapped man to act on his judgement, and so is an assault on his life and initiation of force.

The overarching purpose of PTK is to recruit high-GPA students to low-prestige schools.

If you can get the forum listed here and here as a safe haven for students wanting to start their own campus club, it could be an excellent growth opportunity. The Local Forums could be expanded to accommodate them, and moderation could be delegated as needed.

I'd take it a good deal further and say that if a company could be shown to be causing a neighbor direct physical harm they should be responsible for any and all costs associated with returning the individual to their original state or compensating them directly when that is not possible. In fact, that is was our legal system does. Of course, you need to actually prove your case against an individual entity. So this is only accomplished in a specific and objective way.

What you seem more interested in, though, is to avoid the impossible task of tracing actual harm and lump all businesses into one category and label it "damaging to our health." This would affect software companies with 15 employees and virtually no "carbon(or any other) footprint" and large car factories with thousands of employees bunches of smokestacks responsible for this same harm. Doing so, vaguely holding all businesses and wealth producing individuals responsible for every harm that occurs to anyone is capricious and myopic in nature.

This could be fair, but first you would need to add up all of the values they produce and subtract the cost from them. So for example, the car factory where you purchase your car might be able to be shown to produce enough poisonous fumes to take 5 years off of your average lifespan. So if that was determined to be 100 years based on your healthy lifestyle and long lived grandparents then they would be responsible for compensating you, at least financially for 5% of your life...or roughly $165k in the US plus some reasonably determined amount for the emotional cost of that lost year. But then we would need to factor in your gains from being able to drive a car rather than walk to places which would amount to around 14 years of your life or around $462k. Also we would need to add in the lessened cost of all of the material items you consumed due to the mechanization of jobs over your whole life so, maybe $974k for that. Also some reasonably determined amount for the emotional value gained by having access to so many products and services that would be unavailable without those dirty factories. We can just say that those cancel out, for the sake of argument. So...$1.436 million - $165,000 comes out to $1,271,000 that you would owe to them. You know, if you wanted to be fair.

As a side note, this myopic-ness is one of the most frustrating things that I routinely come across in interacting with leftists. Opportunity cost is impossible to measure and always massive. So taking 50% out of everyone's pay has a cost that will end in being orders of magnitude higher than those actual dollars because there is no telling what businesses may have gotten started, what ideas could have been pursued, or what technologies invented had that money stayed in the capable, productive hands of them that created it.

What does objectivism hold as the rational way for the opposite sex to pursue romantic interest? In general, is it the most rational for men to pursue women, or is this irrelevant? I find that usually in our culture, men do not think of women as members of the opposite sex, but as buddies with different plumbing. It is very unsatisfying as a woman, I like to be pursued, and be appreciated through my feminine qualities, not as a buddy with benefits. It is very frustrating to have to change my own natural behavior to have a conversation with a timid man who I am interested in.

Does modern feminism dehumanize men and rob them of their sexual self confidence? This is what I've always thought. There is an implicit hatred in society for traditional masculinity, and most young men learn to de emphasize their behavior because of this. Acknowledginng the strengths that one sex tends to have which is complemented by the other, is not in any way sexist.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/09/03/earlyshow/saturday/main20101324.shtml

This is just so bad on so many levels. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but I am.




OP

If you are offering only unsubstantiated opinions, then how are you different from the psychiatrists that you describe, that offer medication without proof for their assertions?

If I were going to take time out of my busy day to multi quote for a person who simply doesn't pay attention carefully to what I'm saying, I would have already done it. No one is forcing you to read it, so either read it or don't.

You say that I need to provide evidence for my CLAIMS? I did not claim anything that isn't already obvious, such as that the existance of mental illnesses have not been proven yet. I suppose you would have to disagree with Rand on that one. My opinions do not have to have evidence, because they are just my opinions and I would never state an opinion of mine (or of anyone else's for that matter) like it was a fact. If you want to investigate my thoughts on a particular subject, YOU NEED TO DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH. There is no law against making claims without evidence anyway. I can tell you I have not said anything out of thin air that I didn't have some kind of specific, factual reason for saying. You ask me how I can be an objectivist and make claims without evidence but how can you possibly be an objectivist and believe that insanity is proven to be a sickness in the body?

A good example of careless diagnosing of patients is in a documentary called "The Medicated Child." You can look it up on youtube. There are some examples of it in there, but not all are particularely careless. IMO, the psychiatric method of diagnosing a person is in itself devoid of rationality for many reasons, but mostly because it closes people up. If you don't understand the causes for something, you can't possibly know whether what you are doing to a person is helpful or hurtful. For example, if a supposed "schizophrenic" hears voices in their head that tell them negative things about themselves and they were actually just hearing their own thoughts, telling them they are schizophrenic and that they can't help it might actually reinforce the problem.

The main concern here is whether any evidence can be offered that Rand actually designated Peikoff as her intellectual heir, as he claims. Backing up one's claims is (or should be) routine for any academic or intellectual, and in general the same would be asked of Objectivist experts in a formal academic discussion setting. I therefore fail to understand why this attitude by forum-goers would keep any experts away.

Now, if all he means by intellectual heir is what softwareNerd takes from it, an intellectual who follows in the tradition of Rand and builds on her work, then the claim is backed up by the books, articles, and lectures that he has produced. However, this would not seem to give him an exclusivity on this title in any way, and in fact I could think of several others who would also qualify based on the work they have produced.

But that's not obvious at all. Try to think about it from a character-centric perspective. The most important resource to sustaining and furthering your own life is your own character. Over the long term, and over the vast majority of situations, production is by far the superior road to success and accomplishment, not dependence. In short, if you're the type of person who instinctively takes responsibility for achieving your own values, you're going to have a much better and more fulfilling life. When you're faced with a desire, it is much better for you for your first thought and inclination to be "What do I need to do to earn that?" rather than "How could I get that without working for it?" If every time you try to engage in productive work, you have to fight through your own laziness and desire to get something for nothing, your own capacity to achieve success and values is greatly diminished. So how does one get a productive, independent character which inclines one towards taking responsibility for achieving desired values? Quite simply, by consistently being productive and independent, and taking responsibility for achieving one's own desires. Any actions which break this trend are also instilling bad habits into the actor. In short, the means by which ill-begotten gains (like a big score) are attained make it so that those 'gains' are actually bad for the actor in the long term. The bigger the score, the bigger the dent in your most valuable resource. This is why principled living is required, rather than just guiding one's life from moment to moment.

What? Isn't the pleasure-pain mechanism the guardian of one's life, dude?

Not sure of that; Wikipedia at least defines it as "a focus on the needs or desires of oneself" without mention of other people. But if I argue about dictionary definitions anymore I'm going to get banned.



I guess the closest term you could come to that is Pareto efficiency, where at least one person is better off and no one else worse off. Don't know if it's in most dictionaries though.



Well since you're still feeding the troll I would go with the Wikipedia definition of self interest, since, although it is from Wikipedia, I believe it is one of the more commonly understood definitions of the word and people will usually have a good idea of what I mean when I use it.

If so I'm just going off of the information provided in this thread. Let's break out an actual dictionary. Going off of:



http://thesaurus.com/browse/self-indulgence

Main Entry: selfishness
Part of Speech: noun
Definition: self-regard
Synonyms: greed, self-centeredness, self-indulgence, self-worship, stinginess

Main Entry: enjoyment
Part of Speech: noun
Definition: delight in something
Synonyms: amusement, delectation, diversion, enjoying, entertainment, fruition, fun, gladness, gratification, gusto, happiness, hedonism, indulgence, joy, loving, luxury, pleasure, recreation, rejoicing, relaxation, relish, satisfaction, savor, self-indulgence, sensuality, thrill, triumph, zest
Antonyms: displeasure, dissatisfaction, misery, sorrow, unhappiness, woe

So just from a brief purview of a crappy online thesaurus it can be seen that selfishness and hedonism are closely related terms if not synonyms. Whether or not psychological egoism or any other theory dealing with self interest is "correct" is irrelevant to my point; the common definition of the word self interest as used in these theories equates self interest with pleasure to some degree or another.

I'm getting conflicting answers to my questions in this thread, though, so I should just drop it rather than try to see which one of you is the true voice of Ayn Rand. Sorry if I sounded like a dork there, but I don't see it so much as an issue of me understanding Ayn Rand so much as people in this thread saying words making words out to mean something other than their usual definitions. Now go ahead and give my post 100 down votes like a youtube video of Justin Bieber.

You know, Mustang... It's been said a dozen times by now.

Go read Ayn Rand.

I'll add:

You are either a deliberate troll or an unintentional one.

The fact that you're a hedonist doesn't prevent you from thinking long-term either. Deciding to endure painful surgery for more use out of your joints afterwards isn't at all incompatible with hedonism, just as long as whatever use you get out of the joint is worth it. Being a hedonist in no way requires you to be a drug addict either, in fact even a hedonist would probably not want to be one.

I really wish you guys would pick a word besides "self interest" if you're talking about something that differs from the accepted definition of the term in important ways. It gets pretty confusing when someone asks you very basic questions about your philosophy and your response is to tell them to read a 2000 page book about how you don't mean what you sound like you mean. Not ones for finding beauty in conciseness are you all? Disclaimer: The previous paragraph was a troll.

This was explained well in the Prudent Predator thread. I'll echo what others have already suggested and tell you again that you should go back and read it.

As far as a real world example is concerned, the looming debt crises in Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, the US and other countries are the direct result of grandma's system of morality. Social welfare systems like those in the US and Western Europe are fundamentally altruistic in nature. When one pressure group is able to extract wealth from another group at the point of a gun, that system can only function for so long. Eventually the producers tire of being fleeced, they shrug and the system collapses. Of course this may take years to come to a head and grandma might be able to cheat reality for a while and live off of the unearned wealth of others, but eventually that will end. Unfortunately, the end will probably be very bad for everyone and the damage caused by grandma and her system of morality will cause a lot of people to be hurt. I suppose that grandma might even be lucky enough to live like a parasite and die before the day of reckoning comes, but she will have left one hell of a mess for her grandson to sort out.

Yeah. Well that's what's so interesting about this forum.

I have another question. What is the Objectivist take on government led disaster relief efforts? Say the response to Hurricane Katrina or the recent tornadoes in the south. Or even the cleanup and evacuation efforts of the Soviet government after Chernobyl. Would a proper Objectivist state have something along the lines of FEMA or would disaster victims pretty much be left to fend for themselves or rely on private charity?

An additional question: Can you point out a historical example of a society that more or less followed Objectivist principles pretty closely?

Finally: What do you think would happen if the world suddenly "turned Objectivist", that is if all the people in the world realized the Objectivist position was right? Sudden technological and industrial renaissance or something along those lines?

Okay, well let's establish one thing first: employers don't put their employees at risk just for the heck of it. Even if your hypothetical employer is a heartless bastard who literally cares nothing for the welfare of his employees, it's well established that riskier jobs pay higher wages, other things equal; in general, employers have to pay their employees a premium for taking on risk. So let's say there's a very low-cost change that an employer can make to his factory that significantly reduces risk. Do we need to regulate him to get him to do it? Obviously not; there's a number of reasons that an employer would do that voluntarily, from the risk wage premium to employee moral. Employers in the absence of regulation are already looking to reduce risk; however, they're also balancing that against the cost of reducing risk.

So what will change when safety regulations are passed? Obviously these regulations will target the more expensive changes that employers wouldn't do without the regulation, so employers complying with the regulations will undergo significant costs. Often when these sorts of things are passed, many small businesses in the industry simply go out of business (in fact, it's well documented that large corporations often use these types of regulations to eliminate competition, but let's pretend for the moment that regulators are only interested in the task of making workplaces safer, and their regulations can't be influenced in this way). Obviously the employees there aren't better off; they could have accomplished the same level of safety by simply not going to work in the first place. Larger firms have to incur significant costs, which usually means laying off workers and temporarily cutting back production. So what have the regulations done? They've made some workers safer at the cost of the jobs of other workers.

Of course, regulations are rarely ever eliminated, only built upon, which means an ever-increasing amount of red-tape and extra cost for employers, which comes at the expense of both employers and employees. So we've gone from a situation where employees were consciously deciding to accept risky jobs and being compensated accordingly, and employers were gradually making the workplace safer in a cost-effective manner, to a situation where neither party has control of what happens; an outside bureaucracy does.

In short, the image of regulations costlessly solving problems in the market is an immense oversimplification that inevitably ignores the unintended consequences of said regulation. Market actors have incentives to balance benefits against costs; bureaucracies have no such incentives, and we've all seen what happens when the people in charge of an industry don't have to pay the costs.

Okay. Thank you for taking the time to explain your point. I think I understand now. (Though I need to think about it more.)

Edit to add: I retract my assertion, with apology to Mr. Rand, that Rand Paul is a hypocrite on the basis of his exchange with Ms. Hogan. I was wrong. I believe that he believes that abortion is murder, and I think that his challenge to Ms. Hogan was appropriate.

"You are saying that a person using free will can become committed to a cycle of addiction (biological or psychological) against their will."

I am a determinist...so I am not saying anything about a person using free will...

I am saying that people doing potentially destructive things are more prone to if they think they can will their way out of danger. As far as the physics thing, i was going with your analogy and what i thought you meant by it. I didnt make it up, i said "If i understand you correct" . As for the definition of determinism i thought that was an obvious thing. If you werent aware of what it meant, i am not sure why you felt a need to post. The definition is as follows.

"Determinism is the view that every event, including human cognition, behavior, decision, and action, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences. Determinists believe the universe is fully governed by causal laws resulting in only one possible state at any point in time"

Its nothing mystical, as I see it, it is just common sense.

ALSO, read my first post and you will realize that nobody has even addressed the issue at hand. Look at the title of the thread. "This isnt a free will/determinism debate."

Stick to the topic or dont post here. There are plenty of free will/determinism debate threads. This is not one of them.

We certainly are governed strictly by the laws of cause and effect, and there are no loopholes in causality. However, accepting this view does not immediately lead to the acceptance of determinism, as is often supposed. The non sequitur is often accepted because many people have an incorrect conception of causality. For many people, determinism is part of the definition of causality; this viewpoint might be termed 'billiard-ball' causality, where all instances of causality are assumed to be instances of objects interacting deterministically like billiard balls. However, Objectivism supports a more general conceptualization of causality, which does not smuggle in determinism. Causality, properly conceptualized, is simply the statement that, "A thing acts in accordance with its nature." This formulation leaves open the question of whether or not that nature is deterministic or (as in the case of human consciousness) some ability of self-determination is part of that nature.

Now, I would not dispute the fact that the particles which make up the human brain and form the physical basis for human consciousness act deterministically, but it does not follow from this that the system as a whole acts that way (see fallacy of composition). In fact, to claim that determinism is true is to engage in a contradiction. The existence of knowledge itself presupposes that volition exists; knowledge depends on our ability to volitionally weigh evidence and separate truth from falsehoods. To claim something as true which undercuts the basis for truth is clearly contradictory. For some further threads on determinism, see 1 2 3 4.

The rest of your point, however, is well taken (replacing 'acting deterministically' with 'acting causally'). If we pretend that our free will can do more than it actually can, then we will be helpless to face many personal issues. Our minds have a certain, definite nature, and our will is limited in scope. We need to understand this nature and these limits in order to act effectively (this is just another example of "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed"). The example of kicking an addiction is a good one, where understanding how the human mind works will contribute greatly to one's success. Psychological issues in general depend on a good understanding of the nature of human consciousness. This thread on procrastination and how to beat it using an understanding of human consciousness also comes to mind.

From opposite sides of the planet come really bad news and a ray of hope. Getting the bad news out of the way, yet another report of superbugs on the loose came, this time from India, the other day:

A gene that makes [bacteria] highly resistant to almost all known antibiotics has been found in bacteria in water supplies in New Delhi used by local people for drinking, washing and cooking, scientists said on Thursday. As a story on the rise of antibiotic resistant bacteria pointed out some time ago, the loss of this defense against infectious bacteria would be a disaster for modern medicine.


Dr Livermore, whose grandmother died for lack of infection-killing drugs in 1945, is director of the antibiotic resistance monitoring and reference laboratory of the Health Protection Agency. Last year, the HPA put out an alert to medical professionals about NDM 1, urging them to report all suspect cases. Livermore is far from sanguine about the future.

"A lot of modern medicine would become impossible if we lost our ability to treat infections," he says. He is talking about transplant surgery, for instance, where patients' immune systems have to be suppressed to stop them rejecting a new organ, leaving them prey to infections, and the use of immuno-suppressant cancer drugs.

But it is not just an issue in advanced medicine. Antibiotics are vital to abdominal surgery. "You safeguard the patient from bacteria leaking into the body cavity," he says. "If you lose the ability to treat these infections, far more people would die of peritonitis." Appendix operations would carry the same risk as they did before Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928. Fortunately, nanotechnology may be well on the way to providing an answer, by overcoming some of the limitations found in a couple of classes of molecules that were being investigated for their antibiotic properties:


[C]harged peptides like magainin can be difficult to work with. Charged polymers have proven to be preferable to peptides because their manufacture is easier and cheaper to scale up, and because they are less haemolytic -- they are better at killing bacteria than they are at killing red blood cells. But the fact that they are not biodegradable poses a problem when it comes to their use in humans.

[Fredrik] Nederberg et al. made charged polymers out of cyclic carbonates, which are nontoxic and biodegradable. Their degradation produces alcohol and carbon dioxide, and they degrade slowly, so they have prolonged antimicrobial functions inside the body and long shelf-lives outside of it. Because of their amphiphilic nature -- they have a positively charged region, which is hydrophilic, but also a hydrophobic region -- these nanoparticles spontaneously form small spheres in water, so they can hide their hydrophobic parts inside.

The enhanced charge of the spheres allows them to more efficiently bind to the bacterial cell wall than other antimicrobial polymers that act as single molecules. The nanostructures were effective against Gram-positive bacteria, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), and the fungus Cryptococcus neoformans, and had an efficiency comparable to that of conventional antimicrobials at their best, all while leaving red blood cells alone. [link to journal abstract added] Test results with mice sound promising.

We're not necessarily out of the woods. I understand that drug development can be tricky, and human tests could always reveal some unforeseen problem. But setting aside those pitfalls and interference from the FDA, we may well see catastrophe averted.

-- CAV

Cross-posted from Metablog

JayR assuming the incident with the 14 year old boy did in fact occur I would not be surprised in the least. That is not an excuse or any sort of equivocation it is just a fact of war. Saying "war is hell" is really easy but understanding what that means is another thing all together.

Ever talk to a Vet, I mean get right down into their most vivid and disturbing memories? About how they would get hungry on the battlefield because of the smell of burning human flesh, or about how some of them went through firefights with huge hard on’s in spite of (because of actually) their fear? Ever talk about how when a human body has been very close to the site of a large explosion when the bones have been pulverized by the shock wave that picking up your friend is like picking up a flesh coloured bag of jello with bits and chunks of other stuff inside of it?

The brutal fact is that war is barbarity in its purest form.

One commander I know, the first kill that his troops made in Afghanistan was dragged kilometres back to their strongpoint so that everyone in the company could see a real live dead body. Call it cruel, call it abusing the dead but he swore he's do it again because from that act he was able to gauge how his men would react when the time came for them to be on the trigger. He also discovered which of them he could task with picking up the body parts of children after an IED attack and which, if he tasked them, would probably not be of use to anyone for some time later.

I’m the one who isn’t making any excuses. You want these men, when confronted with what is to most civilized human beings the most terrifying and disturbing events and actions to behave like you do sitting in front of your playstation playing Call Of Duty. Well that just isn’t going to happen.

We are not about to start nailing babies to telephone poles like the Serbs and Muslims in Bosnia were fond of doing. We western soldiers are for the most part the most professional soldiers in history. We do our best, but there are times when manipulating some dead scumbags jawbone to make him say “Allah sucks big hairy donkey dicks” is the best thing for you, your sanity and the sanity of the troops around you, Geneva convention, regulations and everyday run of the mill civility be damned.

Do not overlook the fact that there are enemies of the United States that would be glad to see this information be made as public as possible, whether it happens to be true or false. If you are the DoD, of course you are going to suppress it. Suppression is not an admission (or confirmation) of guilt, it's simply the right thing to do in either case (for morale, public support, etc.). DoD's job is to wage war and win.


Edit: If you are inclined to disagree with me, or vote me down, I think you should read about Information Warfare. There are many places to start, but if you want to jump into the thick of things, read John Stockwell.

Do not overlook the fact that there are enemies of the United States that would be glad to see this information be made as public as possible, whether it happens to be true or false. If you are the DoD, of course you are going to suppress it. Suppression is not an admission (or confirmation) of guilt, it's simply the right thing to do in either case (for morale, public support, etc.). DoD's job is to wage war and win.


Edit: If you are inclined to disagree with me, or vote me down, I think you should read about Information Warfare. There are many places to start, but if you want to jump into the thick of things, read John Stockwell.