seidlmatic2000

I think it's a very good foundation! My wife and I were talking about the origin of rights just this past Sunday, and I had some of the same thoughts. I was trying to say why, for millions of years, life existed according to the law of the jungle (no rights), and then why rational beings needed to believe in rights in order to live as rational beings. I think you answer that very well. I had one other addition. Whenever someone violates the rights of another, they negate their own rights. They revert to accepting the "law of the jungle," and therefore can have their life, liberty, or property seized in return (under objective law). The sacrifice a person makes by violating the rights of others is the negation of his own rights. Negating your own rights is never worth it, unless maybe you're starving. But that could be another topic for discussion.

A brilliant refutation of central planning.

Now that Kermit Gosnell is in the news, I though he would be relevant to this topic. We can all probably agree that the instances when he killed live, moving, breathing, crying newborns were murder. But I think it's still wrong to abort a fetus for at least some months prior to that as well, especially if they can survive outside. There cannot be reproductive rights without responsibilities. To make my position as clear as possible, the abortion issue has been my biggest hurdle to accepting objectivism completely, but I accept about 95% of the rest. I appreciate Rand's admission that there is moral ambiguity after the first 3 months. I realize I'll get no agreement on being against abortion from conception here, but isn't that the fullest extension of a right to life? "One may argue about the later stages of a pregnancy, but the essential issue concerns only the first three months."

Yes, I think it definitely has been. By whom is the more important question in my opinion. Yaron Brook has said that the collateral damage caused by US action in Iraq is actually the fault of Saddam Hussein, and that our action there is self-defense. I don't agree fully with that, and I think there can be disagreement within objectivism on this question. Innocent people should not be killed in war. But it's unreasonable to expect even the most morally righteous army to act in such a way that not a single child is killed, especially in battles where the enemy literally hides behind children. The only thing our army can do is try to avoid killing them while pursuing enemy targets unless letting the target escape would result in even more death. I hate to sit in gray areas like this, but in this case I don't agree with either extreme, that killing kids in war is either completely ok, or completely not ok. War doesn't fit nicely into objectivism because it is the most irrational, destructive thing humanity is capable of. Rational people like objectivists don't resort to violence as a general rule, certainly not in initiation. In any war, at least one side is not rational. But for the hypothetically perfectly rational, peace-loving side to bend over backwards to the irrational side, that capitulation is not rational because it would mean letting the irrational, brutish, violent side win. The right way to view such a war is to say that all the destruction is the fault of the irrational side, and to say that the "rational" side can do anything to win. But then this gets into trickier questions such as whether any perfectly rational country has ever existed, or whether one can exist, who really initiated the war, or how to divide blame for a war based on which side was more irrational than the other, and that's definitely beyond my level. One of my grandparents had some close calls with death as a kid in Nazi Germany during the war, and many of his friends and relatives died. Was it the fault of the Nazis or the British or the Americans? I think all shared some fault. Ayn Rand probably would not have endorsed US entry into WWII, based on a number of comments she made. Her philosophy was not developed until long after the war so she didn't express any opinion while it was going on.

Murdering someone is wrong because it violates that person's right to life (obviously). But if we believe in rights, then we must respect the rights of others, or they are not bound to respect ours. To murder someone else, you sacrifice your own right to life in the process. I would say that is why murder is wrong, it is wrong because the murderer sacrifices his own right to life, (and liberty and property). It is not really selfish to murder, but self-destructive. I was at a talk Yaron Brook gave a few months ago, and he said Bernie Madoff wasn't really living the virtue of selfishness because he sacrificed his own right to liberty and property when he defrauded people. He sacrificed his own integrity. It isn't properly selfish to sacrifice yourself like that, "selling your soul for a nickel," like Ayn Rand would say.

usdebtclock.org has all the numbers. Medicare and Medicaid together cost $800 billion, Social Security 770 billion, the entire military is 670 billion, and various other welfare is another 350 billion just at the federal level. To put it in perspective, the government spends $3.5 trillion per year and only takes in 2.4 trillion, a difference of over a trillion dollars. It's like making $24k a year and spending 35k a year. The root cause of this is the moral and philosophical problem growing worse in our country since Woodrow Wilson, a statist, collectivist philosophy.

I don't think it's immoral to share such photos because you're not claiming ownership, you're not selling them, and because the people who originated the photo would probably want it to become widespread and popular anyway, even in the case of newspaper pictures. Many of those are available online for free anyway. If it was not originally free, then there might be a problem, but 99% of the time you're fine. The whole idea of worrying about this hadn't occurred to me before, but it's fun to think about!