Reidy

Thomas Hobbes said all this nearly 400 years ago. What you and he, but not Rand, have failed to do is question what self-interest is. The behavior you describe just isn't what she meant by the term. If you want to appeal the matter up to a higher level and argue that your characterization is more cognitively useful than Rand's or more explanatorily powerful or that it avoids inconsistencies that hers falls into or what have you, I'd have to hear your case. On this level it is simply inaccurate about the plain language or her published writings.

The radio speech goes into more topics than just ethics. On the other hand you ought to read it in the context of the story. The Objectivist Ethics goes into more detail on ethics and how to arrive at ethics ("metaethics" is the technical term for the latter). If you have time, read the entire novel - as you may already have done - and then move on to The Objectivist Ethics.

This is just like old times. Archaeology started out as the province of (usually rich) amateurs well before it was a formal academic field: Pompeii, the Rosetta Stone and Tutankhamen's tomb are some cases in point.

http://www.thegreatcourses.com/ gives online classes taught by academics. They look credible, though I've never taken one of their classes. Their list prices are very high, but they seem always to be advertising big discounts.

You don't say where you live, but many big schools have extension or continuing education classes, usually at night, where you can take rigorous courses. Where I live, Stanford and Berkeley do this; in LA, UCLA. I expect that courses in individual philosophers or the history of philosophy would be heavier on philosophy and lighter on indoctrination.

Consent is willing cooperation. Informed consent is consent by someone who has the information he needs to make the decision in question. Leaving aside my doubts about the phrase "Objectivist system", the laws would require that the patient consent freely and that he he be informed. It would fall under the same genus as informed consent for a spinal tap, but it would be different in species. For example, if there were papers to sign, they'd say "assisted suicide" instead of "spinal tap".

No. I'm not a lawyer or a legislator.

I'm sorry to hear about your condition, and I hope you deal with it as successfully as circumstances allow. That is a job that you. and any professionals you seek out, are in a much better position to do than any of us are. To take up your political question, a right to life - i.e. a right to control one's life - straightforwardly entails a right to kill oneself. Objectivists would thus oppose laws punishing doctors and others who help out. Objectivists would also oppose government programs, such as, I gather, some of the European countries have, to help implement such wishes. I can see a case for requiring informed consent, on the record, though, and for laws spelling out just what this is.

Heavy-handed and unimaginative.

1. I don't see a contradiction here. Strictly speaking a contradiction is a statement and its negation. What's the statement in this case? 2. Rand would never say that a people is at fault. She said repeatedly that choice, thought, virtue, vice and other predicates of conscious activity apply only to individuals.

I don't think this tracks with people's sexual orientation. Some homosexuals, like some heterosexuals, are weird and will show it off to anybody on the lightest pretext, whether anybody is interested or not. Others, gay or straight, are implausibly modest; they won't exercise or they'll change under a towel. Most people, gay or straight, are somewhere in between. They are willing to undress under the standard circumstances and not under any others.

These are examples. I'd hope to see generally-applicable definitions that we could carry from one instance to another.

What does this mean? Musical styles and philosophies would not seem to be the sorts of things that can be compatible or incompatible any more than (to use the stock example) stones and thoughts about Vienna can be. 1. What is the definition of "compatibility" that applies here? Logical compatibility between statements and personal compatibility between people are easy to understand and easy to apply, but I don't think either notion would hold here. 2. What are the criteria of compatibility by which we could give a yes-or-no answer about a given philosophy and a given musical style?

What you seem to mean, then, by a serious Objectivist treatment of Kant and of AR's critique of him, is Peikoff's minions' saying just what you want them to say and being open to the possibility of publicly and overtly disagreeing with her. The first condition is unlikely and the second is flatly impossible.

If by "'major' Objectivists" you mean Peikoff-approved, it's not going to happen. A brief search turned up some leads. Seddon, Walsh, Hicks and Kelley are all credentialed academics and professed students of Rand's writings. I haven't read any of these myself. http://www.amazon.com/Ayn-Rand-Objectivists-History-Philosophy/dp/0761823085 http://www.jstor.org/stable/41560303?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents http://www.reasonpapers.com/pdf/19/rp_19_7.pdf http://www.stephenhicks.org/2011/11/20/was-kant-really-that-skeptical/ http://philpapers.org/rec/WALARA-3

The Ayn Rand Society of the APA devoted its 1992 session to Kant. That might be a case of what you're looking for, an intellectually serious Objectivist treatment of his ideas.

Do you have a citation on this? The only time I've seen her use the phrase was about Branden in the autobiographical afterword to Atlas Shrugged. Since you use quotation marks I'd hope to see exact words.

In my experience people use it to mean certain Objectivists, dogmatic and unwilling to think for themselves. Among them are the ones who liked Maxfield Parrish but threw out their posters when Rand called his work "trash".

Galt's radio speech attributes "A is A" to Aristotle, inaccurately.

If people will pay knowingly and voluntarily for what you're selling, you're productive. Whether or not Rand would write a novel about you is a separate question. I've noticed, as you have, that her novels favor producers of palpable goods and services over pure traders. This looks to me like a literary matter: what they do doesn't lend itself to stories and to visual spectacles the way the activities of industrialists does. Midas Mulligan is an exception, but he made his money, so far as we see, lending to hard-goods producers such as Rearden. Hopton Stoddard, Roark's client, got rich purely by spotting good investments, and she treats him dismissively. Futures traders. arbitrageurs and the like move capital and information from where it is to where it is most wanted. The money they make is a measure of the value of what they're doing. Lenders provide money now in place of money later. Interest is the value people place on this. People with verifiable credit histories are safer to lend to, so lenders are willing to charge them less. People without such records are riskier, so they pay a higher price for credit. If you want to call the lenders they patronize "loan sharks", be my guest. Walter Block's Defending the Undefendible has a reputation as the best source on this question.

Anthem is the traditional starter for middle-schoolers. After that age people usually start with The Fountainhead then move on to Atlas Shrugged and We The Living, with Anthem somewhere along the way.

Welcome to the forum. You've followed an unusual path, as most of us read the novels first.

The link above did not work for me, but http://goldengateobjectivistgroup.blogspot.com/ did. It may be out of date, as all the events were in 2010.

The book is interesting in part for what it tells us of the current state of the party line. It's the first time I've seen an orthodox source credit Barbara Branden, not "a biographer", as Rand's interviewer. She, NB and David Kelley get extensive mentions in the index. Lennox and Hunt have both spoken at TAS events.