tadmjones

One point that needs to be clarified is the hierarchical nature of knowledge: knowledge is a hierarchical system of concepts and propositions. Insofar as we are speaking of human knowledge (not some table-looking computer), this system must be simple (see the various references to “crow”). Second, moral knowledge is a specific kind of knowledge, about good and bad with respect to choices. Part 2.1 is that “rights” is further specialized kind of knowledge, it is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context. The fundamental right is a man’s right to his own life. From this flows the rest of the discussion. If you reject that principle, then we need to understand what you offer in its place. For example, you may instead hold that only males have rights, or men over age 25 have rights, or females under age 65. In a discussion of rights, the fundamental question is whether you accept the fundamental principle that a man has a right to his own life.
I recognize that Rand used more classical language in her writing, when she continually speaks of “man”. She means “person” or in Latin homō. It does not mean “male” and it does not mean “adult”. There can be no doubt that she means “person”, and furthermore a child is a person. A child, indeed a newborn, can be distinguished from a fetus because a child, or any other person, does not live inside a person, but a fetus does live inside a person. This is essential to the abortion question.

It is true that a four-month-old can’t use his freedom to survive, also a person undergoing surgery (who is unconscious) can’t use his freedom to survive, but still these people have rights. So the inability of a four-month-old to survive on his own is irrelevant in the face of the fundamental principle that all men have rights.
I am harping on the hierarchical nature of moral knowledge, because you are dipping down in the direction of those facts that establish the fundamental principle, as though those facts might directly replace the principle itself. This is contrary to the nature of human cognition. It is a mistake to argue that a child has rights, because child rights are self evident from the fundamental moral principle that defines rights. It would be more coherent to reject the principle itself and offer in its place a different principle, for example that only those that survive the Spartan agōgē have rights.

 

DavidOdden: "The classical, objective-reporting view is decidedly on the decline"
I agree. But such an approach had always been greatly compromised.
DavidOdden: "The contemporary activist view is that the journalist should promulgates a progressivist viewpoint (or on rare occasion, an anti-progressivist viewpoint)."
It is the purpose of any polemicist - progressive, reactionary or moderate - to promulgate a point of view. U.S. media on average is much more polemical and slanted than in previous decades. But most outlets are a mixture in a range from fair to somewhat fair to biased and sometimes to profoundly biased. Also, right-wing and conservative views are not rare in the media. Fox, NY Post, Washington Times, Washington Examiner, Boston Herald, Newsmax, The Federalist, American Greatness, Substack and a myriad other outlets. Also some publications such as Newsweek have commentary from both the right and left. And sometimes even liberal media hosts commentary from the right. Moreover, though most of the most powerful outlets are slanted toward a liberal point of view, I wouldn't describe them as predominately progressive. And Real Clear Politics lists its articles virtually always in a back and forth between right and left, so there are equally as many from each.
DavidOdden: "The massive destruction of value mandated by the various governments in an attempt to thwart The Apocalypse was significantly under-reported"
There was a considerable amount of media discussion about the economic, educational, social and psychological costs from the government actions. Also, the loss of liberties was hardly ignored. But as to such things as social and psychological costs, to report them very well would depend on studies that could only come later.
And I don't see that a clear discussion is enhanced by nudging a point of view with tendentious sarcastic rubrics such as 'The Apocalypse'.
DavidOdden: "the magnitude of the death and destruction was vastly over-stated."
What evidence do you offer for that generalization? Meanwhile, both the Trump administration (including Trump himself) and certain media egregiously tried to minimize the treat.
DavidOdden: "the failure of the media to engage the public in basic education about the underlying science"
There was a terrible paucity in from both media and health officials of clear, accurate explanation of the science, even granting that so much was unknown at the time. The worst was Fauci saying that masks were not needed, then saying masks were needed and that a cutup T-shirt would work. And health officials never got it right; even after the studies, they never finally properly informed that N95 or KN95 should be the standard.
DavidOdden: "Insofar as there was always a respectable scientific view that covid was not the end of the world, why were the nay-sayers disregarded"
"End of the world" is strawman exaggeration. It would be a rare media source that claimed that Covid would be the end of the world. In any case, the pandemic was a massive threat (there is still the potential for Covid to mutate so that it is both far deadlier than Delta while also far more transmissible than Omicron). Meanwhile, there were some experts who advocated different approaches to the pandemic, and some of those views were discussed in the media. But there is always this famous question: In a subject requiring expert understanding, if 99 experts say statement P and 1 expert says not-P, does fairness require that the side for not-P be given equal time as the side for P?
DavidOdden: "covid sensationalism"
What are examples you have in mind of such sensationalism?
DavidOdden: "The problem is that The People are suffering, and only proper guidance by The People (via the dictatorship of the proletariat) can alleviate that suffering."
You lose credibility, and again, cloud discussion with things like "dictatorship of the proletariat". The federal, state and local governments are not dictatorships of the proletariat.
DavidOdden: "their cause was also advanced significantly by the fact that the only visible opposition to the progressivist trend was the moron in the White House."
Trump was only vaguely at times opposed to government intervention. For the most part, he favored it, especially in certain profound ways.
DavidOdden: "the dominant trend in the media was to encourage fear, and to promote the progressivist agenda."
Again, I'd like to see examples of any supposed pattern of common media having the purpose of making people afraid as opposed to advocating that people should recognize the threat and take precautions. Indeed, if there was one general theme, it could be summarized as "Recognize the threat, learn about it, take precautions against it, but don't panic." In fact, though I couldn't dig up cites now, a number of times I had to read the cliche of quoting Roosevelt "There only thing we have to fear is fear itself".
As to a "progressivist agenda", (1) The administration itself very much pushed governmental interventions,  profoundly so, (2) Many staunchly conservative politicians both in the federal government and in state governments favored government interventions, profoundly so. (3) I don't know exactly what agenda you mean. Staunch conservatives, liberals, progressives and moderates acted for the purpose of ending Covid or at least avoiding the worst consequences or at least to get the country past the stage where the medical infrastructure and available care were overwhelmed, especially to avoid a course in which even more than 1.2 million Americans died (and nearly 8 million worldwide). Whether or not one agrees with the government interventions, I don't see evidence that the goal was more than to end or ameliorate the pandemic.

Now we should aim to find the fodder for a proper law, since the spectre of legal enforcement of rights has been lurking at the edges. When you directly cause a financial loss to a person which they did not invite, you should accept that cause-effect relation and you should compensate them for their loss. If necessary, the government should require you to compensate for such a demonstrated loss. We don’t say that the loss only occurs when the customer starts to eat, perhaps it occurs when the meal is delivered, or plated, or when it is cooked – but these specifics are not part of the law, which is only about the general principle of loss, and compensation. The government integrates facts with specialized moral principles, a.k.a. laws, to reach a conclusion (“pay up”). The loss suffered by the business might be incurred at the point of requesting a table (making a reservation, for example).
Turning to repudiation of guardianship, your prior actions show that you have accepted the responsibility to be the custodian of the individual’s rights, which obliges you to do certain things. If you want to shirk that responsibility, you can if you do so in an orderly manner as specified by law. The proper concern of the government is whether there is a successor who accepts the responsibility. This need not directly involve the government, it means that if the question arises, you have to prove that there is a successor who accepted that responsibility in your stead. The gravity of being a custodian of rights is significant enough that I believe that an actual legal process should be required, just as real estate sales require legal formalities.

I have to follow in your footsteps. When we built our house I was excited about designing and laying a brick/paver walkway from where the driveway pavement gave way to the front porch 'apron'. I formed the sections and laid under material and tamped the crap out of it , but the job I did only had a two decade 'halflife',lol.
I doubt I'll redo it in brick, just have to figure the elevation change/slope to see how many sections I'll need to pour of cement.

Congratulations on your achievement.

Toxic by Design  (video)
Reasons to think the harmfulness of the vaxx was intentional. Features Michael Yeadon, Meryl Nass, and others.

Life in Russia: 1.5 Years Later, by Setarko, Russia, 27 May 2023
"it's been almost 1.5 years since life in Russia changed dramatically. But today I would like to talk not about the life and prosperity (or decline) of the country, but about the lives of ordinary people in it. There are two points of view. According to the first, people in Russia have lost access to hundreds of services and services, people are leaving the country by the millions, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to survive. According to the other, the country has only benefited from the special military operation that was launched, the people have rallied, import substitution is in full swing, and the next few years will be OUR years. Well, let me, as a really average resident of Russia, try to describe what has really changed in our lives during this time."
 

I suggest that moral responsibility for training and education of children lies firstly with the child's parents, although not as part of a package of responsibility attaching merely to having caused the child's existence. That Objectivist position focussing on causal relationship, down from the era of N. Branden in the 1960's, was off the mark. Moral responsibility for training and educating the child lies firstly with the child's parents, I suggest, because of the moral goodness of responsiveness to persons and the potential person they may become, responsiveness to persons as persons.
That responsiveness is, I say, the core of moral relations among people (and indeed, differently, relations of a self to itself). That is the preciousness that is the moral in a social setting. This position is a cashing out of the concept of moral justice, treating a thing as the kind of thing it is—that moral virtue. What a thing is includes its internal systems, but as well its distinctive external relations, actual and potential. The relations of responsiveness to persons as persons have a specially intense and distinctive character in the relation between the persons who are parent and child (natural parent most strongly, of course, but strong with adoptive parents as well).
Additionally, there is a moral goodness in the benevolent protectiveness—that responsiveness—between any adult and any child. That such responsiveness fosters continuance of the species human as human may well be the underlying biological reason for this responsiveness. But that is not the reason the responsiveness of parent or other adult to the child and responsiveness of the child to them as persons is moral. Rather, the nature of value in the life of individual humans together, which is their best situation in the world, is the source of the moral goodness of such responsiveness to persons as persons. 

Arguendo "wanting" to have or keep raising children MEANS being prepared for, and earnestly and genuinely loving and caring for another person who starts out deeply dependent.  Whether it fits any philosophical standard, humans DO literally need love to grow into a sane and moral adult.. it is not a psychological luxury, it is a deep human necessity.
Perhaps it is only moral to "have" and/or be the guardian of anyone, if and only if you actually WANT to be one, with everything that entails, and ALL that it means.
 
Summary:  Have a kid you don't want and/or cannot care for? Just  f#@&ing give it up for adoption as soon/early as you know, so someone else can do so.  Our world would be a MUCH better place, and so many people SO much better off, if everyone followed this.

By “obligation”, I presume you are referring to a moral obligation, one that rationally follows from your choice to create a human being. Some people end up creating a child by accident, or are tricked into it, and I’m not talking about those cases – I mean a conscious deliberate choice. Just to be explicit, I also assume when you say “our” children, I assume you mean your own children, not “society’s children”. What do I owe my child, what do you owe your child, what does he owe his child.
Creating a person should not be done on a whim, one should have a clear understanding of why you are doing so, and not just buying a puppy. A puppy will never become a rational being, a child might. An infant will not actually develop into a rational being without some kind of guidance. It’s irrational to think that children are born with Galt’s Speech planted in their brains whereby they can magically discover how to become fully rational. This is what a parent has an obligation to do: to provide such guidance. It is probably a joint effort between the parents and the parent’s agents, so that mom and dad don’t have to actually devise lessons in reading and writing.
Your question seems to be focused on specific technical content. The list of specific technical things that a child should learn is huge: reading, writing, rhetoric, literature, history, philosophy, physics, biology, economics, fishing, hunting, home economics (i.e. “how to wash your clothes; how to cook a meal”). Personally, I think one should try to explain the basic logic of numeric exponentiation, if you can. You don’t teach long lists of facts, you teach very small sets of facts in the course of teaching methods of reasoning. In other words, all you have to teach is the tools of reason, but you do have to go beyond just saying “A is A”.

Over the past decade or so it has become much more acceptable to "punish" people because of their opinions -- because they expressed them, or just because they have them.
It has been pointed out that there is a big difference between the government carrying out this "punishment," such as by throwing people in prison, and private individuals (or groups) carrying it out, such as by denying service at a bar or a bank. In the latter case, property owners are merely exercising their right to their own property, and their right to choose who they associate with, and if somebody were to force them to serve people they don't want to, even if this force is only forcing them to do what is in their actual best interest anyway, then, as Leonard Peikoff puts it, the act of forcing it on them makes it wrong.
However, in some cases the motivation behind using your own personal property to do something, and using the government to do it, can be the same, and in the case of "punishing" opinions, the motivation is wrong in both cases, even though initiating force is the only thing that should properly be illegal.
It is proper to address the motivation and expose its incorrectness even if it is not (yet) infringing anyone's rights. By doing so, it may be possible to talk people out of acting on it.
One can say that, for example, nihilism ought to be legal if you don't infringe anyone's rights, but one can also say that it is still wrong.
My point is: the motivation for punishing people's opinions contradicts the motivation for having free speech, which means, a person can't consistently support both. When you see more and more people "punishing" opinions, and supporting the punishment of opinions, you can know that the days are numbered for free speech, even if the government itself has not yet begun to act against it.
The motivation for free speech is confidence in reason (and reality). We can afford to allow people to state falsehoods because we have confidence that reason will expose the falsehoods as such. Free speech also ensures that it's possible for people to speak the truth even when it's controversial, so that the truth can also be exposed.
This confidence is what allows a store owner to let people he disagrees with walk into his store and buy stuff. He knows that their opinion, even if wrong, is not a threat to him; he knows that reality and reason will prevail in time; he can count on the police to be on his side if they initiate force, so he can just smile and sell them their goods.
When people have abandoned reason, when they believe they are the exclusive owners of truths that cannot be reached by means of reason (or "reason alone"), when they decide that "unbridled" reason is a threat to their point of view, when they find that reason (and ultimately reality itself) can be "misleading," they do not feel that confidence, and they seek to suppress contrary opinions.
If they cannot do it through the government, then they can do it through their own private property, but if they don't see the problem doing it with their own property, they will not see the problem with using the government to do it.
So, in that sense, saying "it isn't really censorship if they're using their own private property" is true, but it's not addressing the root of the problem.
The real problem is that people have abandoned reason -- and without reason, the distinction between merely using their own property and using government force to go beyond it will be abandoned, too. It's only a matter of time. (Actually it has already been abandoned. The separation between usage of private property [i.e., economics] and government powers [i.e., state] has never been formally recognized and has been on the way out for decades; however, it cannot be upheld unless reason itself is upheld.)
The notion that "free speech is dangerous," that "free speech corrupts people" and so forth, is coming from both political parties. Because of its widespread popularity, even if you do not see it affecting government policy now, it is going to affect government policy sooner or later, unless it can be exposed as the mistake that it is.
Exposing the mistake -- and defending free speech as such -- requires a defense of reason.

I think at least in the 'chat bot' versions of "AI" it's like having all the 'words' in text as weighted tokens and the prompting computes an algorithm and outputs a 'response', the discernment being the  the running of the algorithm on the data set. I don't imagine it 'sees' or 'knows' the prompts are different from the responses ?
A vaguely remembered anecdote, I think about John von Neumann describing what could be done with accumulating the largest and most detailed data set of the particulars of the atmosphere , an almost perfect digitalized 'copy' of the world's atmosphere and how that would facilitate answering questions of atmospheric science and concluding that the data itself would be useless, as the same questions would remain.
Chat bots that 'speak' without prompting is what to look for , and I don't think that is yet (?)

A recent fine composition from Marc Champagne:
Kantian Humility and Randian Hubris?

I'd like to add another link to a paper (2019) examining the Gibson affordance concept in perception: On the Evolution of a Radical Concept: Affordances According to Gibson and Their Subsequent Use and Development. 

An objective reality must exist in order for there to be truth and falsehood.  To claim "objective reality does not exist" is a statement which is true or false.  Also, it is stated in such a way that proving the statement requires proving a negative which can only be done by inventorying the Universe and determining that every last corner of it is non-objective.  If that could somehow be accomplished, that would immediately create at least that one objectively true fact and the effort refutes itself.

I saw a post by Dr. Michael Hurd on his web page which summarizes the issues with the 2020 election.
The post itself is here: https://drhurd.com/2023/04/26/john-roberts-temporary-lapse-of-understanding-the-constitution/
I'll duplicate the whole thing; it's worth reading.
 

This bears repeating.
 

People everywhere are coming to see that smear as nothing more than an evasion aid for information that upsets one's worldview, information the implications of which one is not comfortable facing.
For example, "covid hospitalizations" and "covid deaths" overcounting has been an easily confirmable fact since the beginning of the Scamdemic. But normie simpletons refused to look at the information and relied instead on their favorite smear.
The truth is that very few people, including self-identifying Objectivists, are willing to think for themselves. Too often people will reject objective evidence they don't like with smears of the messenger and wait until "respectable outlets" (or Mr. Brook) tell them what to think.
 

What on earth is a broad qualifier , while I think children in ninth grade could be intellectually mature enough to handle exposure to descriptions of sexual hedonism  and even perversions as thy occur in culture in a more abstract presentation , I do wonder about those who produce fiction to facilitate the exposure.
 

Philosophy, Engineering - a life, a mind
Interview of me: 
 

The issue is planning an action to hasten the end of a life. The OP thinks their life will be better after the death of the other individual and wants to orchestrate it, their only qualm is whether or not they will be let into Galt's Gulch Heaven.

I say it isn't moral. I wouldn't want to be the type of person who would do such a thing, or to owe my money to having done such a thing.

The moral is what should be done or permissibly may be done given certain sorts of factors marked off as moral considerations. In Rand’s view, and in mine, rational process is what distinctively moral process comes to. What is the nature of rational process?
For the imagined scenario, if it is being asked whether the entertained action would be moral, within the Objectivist ethics, then I’d argue No. It would not be morally permissible on account of the virtues of Pride, Productivity, and Justice.
The last entails treating people as ends in themselves. Even if they are losing their powers for autonomy, homage to autonomous life-making they formerly had or had possible is within what may and should be respected by the rational agent in Rand’s sense of human rationality. Rand’s virtuous human buoys the best possible to humans.  Similarly, if a person said all their life that they wished their body to be cremated upon their death, it is against human rationality to instead bury the body upon their death, assuming cremation was indeed feasible, with the rationalization: “Well, it can’t matter to the deceased.” Respectful behavior for a life and autonomous person that had been or had been a potential in youth is within the ambit of Randian rationality and self-respect.
To focus on the getting of money by lottery, inheritance, or design of tort, is betrayal of the virtue of production and trade in the context of human existence and failure at holding productivity as the central organizing purpose of one’s life. Then too, as Rand had it, the getting of money is not the only rational human pursuit, and the pretension that her ethics entails such foolishness concerning values is a patent distortion of her thought (one she denounced expressly).
The virtue of Pride in the Objectivist system of ethics entails moral ambitiousness. The making of objectively grounded self-esteem has a precondition: “that radiant selfishness of soul which desires the best in all things, in values of matter and spirit.”

I’m not persuaded that any culture needs to reconsider the concept of corporations, but rational discussion is always a good thing. The standard left-wing “argument” against corporations is that it encourages people to operate businesses at a profit and not for the benefit of the workers (what laborers receive is not called “profit”). I find it to be pointless to discuss the merits of corporations with communists. The only argument of merit against corporations that I have ever heard is exactly based on the problem of shielding individuals from the legal consequences of their actions. Hence the second quote is essential to this question.
One problem with the claim is that it isn’t exactly true, indeed there is a name for it when you go after evil corporate miscreants – piercing the corporate veil. But don’t go there yet, the first question should be ‘what should happen if a business markets a product “known” to cause harm?’ (I said business, not corporation). Under the current regime, the business gets sued, and if found liable damages may be awarded. I should point out that under an Objectivist regime, a company will not be held liable for marketing a product that can be argued to have some detectable relation to “harm”. A company that sells cyanide capsules as cyanide capsules should not be held liable, even though the company should know of the potential for harm. Caveat emptor! When they sell cyanide as ibuprofen, that’s where true liability arises.
Cyanide as ibuprofen is exactly the kind of case where the corporate veil will be pierced, and where criminal prosecution will arise. The question is, which persons should be held personally liable? Some candidates are “the CEO”, “the board of directors”, “the manager in charge of product development”, “the employees of the company” and “everybody with a direct or indirect interest in the company” (such as a bank which makes loans to the business, or your grandmother whose retirement plan invested in the company).
In the case of criminal prosecution, the law already has an answer, because you don’t prosecute people for bad outcomes, you prosecute them for evil actions – knowingly violating the rights of another. Whether or not the CEO, board of directors, or guy on the assembly line is held criminally responsible, and sent to jail, depends on that person’s knowledge state and the nature of their actions. One does not gain immunity from prosecution from the fact that you work for a corporation.
Unlike criminal law, civil liability for damages is not centered around a person’s mental state, and to the extent that mental state enters into the equation, it is often very subjective – was the person negligent in their actions? There is a venerable but questionable legal doctrine, respondeat superior, which says that an employee is not to be held responsible for their actions in the course of the job, responsibility shifts to the boss. Why in the world should an employee be sheltered from responsibility for their actions? The two main reasons are philosophically repugnant: that with great power comes create responsibility, and that inferiors in a business context are mindless drones, lacking free will. Rather than determining liability based on analysis in terms of power relations, liability should be based on individual knowledge and actions – one’s choices.
Corporate structure is pretty much orthogonal to these notions of responsibility, except when it comes to determining whose pockets to pick in awarding damages. The corporate veil means that a plaintiff can only go after the assets of the corporation, and not the assets of the individuals who make up the corporation. Therefore, if Dow Corporation negligently harms a half million people, claims against the corporation are limited to the corporation but not the managers, supervisors, line-employees or shareholders who directly or indirectly bought an interest in the company.
If the corporate entity is not recognized as a separate legal entity, your grandmother qua part-owner of the company would be held personally responsible for those actions. I conclude that whatever problem exists, it’s not about corporations, it’s about “responsibility”. Who should be held responsible for what choices? Why should an employee be relieved of responsibility, and why should a CEO be assigned all of the liability?

It was meant as sarcasm , a parody of an argument one might hear from those who refuse to see the level of corruption in practically all of our institutions. Corporations or private entities that cooperate with government, for ‘good or bad’ cease to be private entities. It’s a little fascistic, unless as an argument goes they are cooperating with the regime to investigate and curtail dissent er I mean criminality. 
 
I’m starting to think western culture needs to reconsider the idea of corporations and corporate governance.