William O

I don't agree with this account of the Objectivist ethics. It is a good piece of advice, epistemologically, but I don't think it is the basis for the distinction between morality and immorality, because you can unintentionally form invalid concepts. For example, many people who believe in God are basically honest, even though God is an invalid concept. I continue to find invalid and unexamined assumptions in my thinking on occasion, even years after learning of Objectivism.
I'm not saying this is irrelevant to morality, it's just a really demanding standard to set. Almost everyone has some invalid concepts at work in their thinking.

Sometimes belief in God is dishonest, but not always. Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, Rand's favorite philosophers, both believed in God. Ayn Rand herself believed in God when she was young, as did Leonard Peikoff, who is the most prominent Objectivist philosopher alive today.
When we reject belief in God, I think we are the beneficiaries of advancements in science and philosophy from over the past few hundred years that not everyone has fully grasped the ramifications of yet. It's not necessarily immoral if you can't see the flaw in the cosmological argument without help from the great philosophers of the past, any more than it's immoral to miss an error in a fallacious mathematical proof.
Basically, your position amounts to the claim that every invalid concept is an inherently dishonest idea (to use Leonard Peikoff's term). That's just not true.
But you are equating a logical mistake, forming an invalid concept, with deliberate dishonesty. They are not the same.
They are irrational in the sense that they are using an invalid concept, and that there is a breach between their reasoning and the facts. That doesn't mean they are irrational in the sense of being immoral or dishonest - although, in some cases, they are.

I don't agree with this account of the Objectivist ethics. It is a good piece of advice, epistemologically, but I don't think it is the basis for the distinction between morality and immorality, because you can unintentionally form invalid concepts. For example, many people who believe in God are basically honest, even though God is an invalid concept. I continue to find invalid and unexamined assumptions in my thinking on occasion, even years after learning of Objectivism.
I'm not saying this is irrelevant to morality, it's just a really demanding standard to set. Almost everyone has some invalid concepts at work in their thinking.

I don't agree with this account of the Objectivist ethics. It is a good piece of advice, epistemologically, but I don't think it is the basis for the distinction between morality and immorality, because you can unintentionally form invalid concepts. For example, many people who believe in God are basically honest, even though God is an invalid concept. I continue to find invalid and unexamined assumptions in my thinking on occasion, even years after learning of Objectivism.
I'm not saying this is irrelevant to morality, it's just a really demanding standard to set. Almost everyone has some invalid concepts at work in their thinking.

I think it's easier to say that suicide is always wrong when you are not in terrible pain. This is one of my issues with Stoicism - the Stoic implicitly argues "I can practice virtue now, so I could practice virtue under any circumstances, even in terrible pain." In practice, this is not the case, because there is no mind body dichotomy. When the body is subjected to terrible pain over a long period of time, the mind is unable to continue to function rationally and gradually becomes more and more detached from reality.

I think the main thing is just getting the word out about Objectivism to a wider audience. I understand wanting some means other than persuasion to deal with an irrational opponent, but if we are talking about having an impact on the culture, we are talking about mass communication, not about individual rational or irrational people. People have a variety of beliefs and values, so any communication that is heard by a large enough number of people will get some people interested.
For illustration, suppose you had a pro-Objectivist message that was heard by ten million people. Even if only one in a hundred people got interested in Objectivism due to the message, that's 100,000 people, which is equal to the entire current population of Objectivists by Yaron Brook's estimate. That would definitely have an impact on the culture.
So, I don't think we need "radical action," we just need to keep stating our case clearly to the widest possible audience.

I'm surprised a campaigning presidential candidate would say that. Do you have a source?
I've seen a video where Cruz responded to a similar question, and he didn't say outright that an atheist shouldn't vote for him in that particular video. However, he did dodge the question and use it as an opportunity to pander to his Christian voter base about how atheists should hope their president has Christian values. Is that what you're referring to?

Dustin said:
That is not a matter of rhetoric but philosophic principle. What you are saying is that Oist are minorities on that issue and should recognize the mob cant be wrong. You don't persuade others to change their premises by pointing out they are an intransigent minority.

I suspect there are as many interpretations of Kant as there are Kant interpreters.

The thing is, "ask and listen" doesn't work so well when a person isn't already really inclined towards Objectivism. It's passive, it won't attract new people to ideas, it isn't passionate. It's good for addressing disagreements or concerns, and your response can be passionate, but it won't convince somebody to explore it. When I first got into Objectivism, it was because the statements I heard by Rand or mentions of her clearly showed a radical view on life. Rand's books are passionate.
A problem comes in if people don't see how radical Rand is. A lot of people seem to think she holds ideas we see every day, like those of an angsty teenager, or Trump-style manipulation in some business people, or sham politicians like Cruz who speak of Atlas Shrugged but act like her ethics didn't matter. People start to think these are the people Rand would praise. Then they don't seek out more information because it sounds so typical. This is a good example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8m8cQI4DgM
Another problem comes in when I think most of Objectivism as we may see with ARI is that while some thinkers are good for curating her ideas, but they aren't good at rhetoric. Peikoff used to be good I think, but I can't name anyone else, and today I think he's pretty bad at it. Yaron Brook speaks, but I find him boring, and for better or worse, not good at speaking itself even if his ideas are fine. I appreciate ARI for at least curating Rand and Objectivism, but it probably won't help with presentation.
I'm interested in ideas about rhetoric too. It's one thing to think of good arguments, it's another to make them exciting or interesting.

This is an old discussion, but I have a relevant comment.
I subscribe to the Harry Binswanger Letter, which includes both a forum and a regular email sent out by Dr. Binswanger containing the best posts from the forum. The main difference I have noticed between this forum and HBL is that, on HBL, everyone is required by the rules to start with the assumption that the person they are talking to disagrees with them based on an honest mistake. People who are rude lose their posting privileges pretty quickly.
If you compare that with the finger pointing evident even in this thread, it should be pretty easy to see why a major Objectivist would prefer to post there rather than here in their limited time, in addition to the other reasons people have pointed out.

I've always associated this type of thinking as moral relativism or cultural relativism, but at least looking at these terms they don't seem to quite fit (though related).
So you have someone that is a cultural relativist. They don't view any culture as particularly right or wrong, better or worse, than any other. But when they look at different cultures, they see obvious differences. Some cultures do better than others. Some result in higher standards of living and others are poorer. This also applies to countries. Some countries are wealthier and some are poorer.
And this is where the fun happens. There is a balancing act. Since no culture is better than any other, I assume they expect similar outcomes. Since there are obvious differences between cultures, there is some sort of injustice. The culture doing good is brought down and the culture doing bad is often given the benefit of the doubt on its transgressions.
An example of this: In the Israel - Palestinian conflict, Israel is often described as committing genocide and the Palestinians are provoked into aggression. Israel is guilty of every evil and the Palestinians are misunderstood, victims that really aren't doing anything harmful.
Is there a term that describes this?

I thought it's called multiculturalism. Although I don't think that most people really understand what that officially means.
Usually, when we think of culture, we think of everything but abstract ideas. We think of concrete customs, aesthetics, ethnicity and the like. The look and feel of it.
For example, if you think of Italian culture, you think of Pizza, you think of Pasta, you think of Opera Music, you think of predominantly European men and women with dark hair, you think of typical old Italian Roman-style houses with thick roofing tiles surrounded by Mediterranean cypresses, you think of Italian language, and on and on.
I think that's why most people are just completely flabbergasted and offended when you tell them that some cultures are superior to others. You can easily come across as a racist, because we usually think of and identify a culture on the perceptual level I described. So to most people, you appear to be saying, e.g., that British Eggs and Bacon should be considered something objectively "better" than Pizza. Or that English should be objectively "better" than Italian. Hence they just brush you off as stupid.
For the same reason, it is often said by most people that Americans have "no culture", "no cultural identity", just a hodgepodge of elements borrowed from "real cultures", and otherwise just "commercial stuff" from Coca Cola to Nike in a landscape dominated by public advertising and super malls.
Its mostly intellectuals who really identify a culture on the abstract philosophical level of individualism versus collectivism, science versus faith, capitalism versus socialism etc.
It took me a while, too, to get what certain people really mean, when they talk about the "culture" of a country.
So I think its most important to get the terms straight before starting a discussion with people about culture. You could otherwise easily be talking at cross-purposes with people. So you might misidentify their thinking, just as they might do yours.

Ayn Rand included a long list of recommended further reading at the end of Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. It would probably be a good move to buy that book if you haven't already, then use the recommended sources to go further into the specific issues that interest you. Notable economists included in her list include Henry Hazlitt and Ludwig von Mises.

Ayn Rand included a long list of recommended further reading at the end of Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. It would probably be a good move to buy that book if you haven't already, then use the recommended sources to go further into the specific issues that interest you. Notable economists included in her list include Henry Hazlitt and Ludwig von Mises.

While it may seem obvious to say it's wrong to say that a person believes all the implications of their ideas, a fallacy is something that still pops up and will go unnoticed unless you make the fallacy clear. You're right, Don, about looking at actual claims. But the fallacy pops up at that level especially. What does a person's evidence actually imply?
A lot of the time, these are not examples of a refusal to see. It's a matter of your standards of evidence for a topic, which are hopefully proper standards. But that an idea is a tangent is similar to saying their evidence is not evidence. In discussion, the point is not "is it evidence or not?" but "what does this evidence mean?" The first is bound to run into the fallacy, as in you assume their ideas must follow your standard, that certain beliefs -need- to follow without regard for evidence people hold. The second is best, as you allow for their evidence to be evaluated, not wiped away as utterly irrelevant. Focusing on a tangent is totally fine, it's usually a way to see what sort of evidence people hold. "Tangent" is another way to say "not obviously related". If we want to avoid the fallacy, it's important to exchange evidence.
I really like how you brought up AI, William. With a few simple rules and pre-determined facts, we know what an AI -has- to think, or else it is broken. It will take time for some conclusions, but it will always get there. Similarly, you can say people will always "get there" or else they're failing to think. But you can't easily say it for people at all, because you need to know their evidence. An AI like that is straightforward, but we can't even apply logical omniscience there. The AI doesn't hold new concrete facts about the world, yet its evidence changes, as in when it learns 4 and 5, it knows more facts. The point is, evidence people hold is key, not just a discussion of how A does or doesn't imply B.
 

On a related note, I'm currently taking a class in artificial intelligence, and one of the major problems in building a working AI is getting the computer to figure out all of the implications of the knowledge in its knowledge base. (There's no fundamental distinction between an AI and any other algorithm, by the way, it's just a subjective distinction based on how well the algorithm emulates human intelligence.)
An AI's knowledge base consists of (1) facts about the world and (2) rules about how the world works. For example, an AI might know the following:
Bob is hot. Bob is rich. Bob's favorite ice cream flavor is mint If a person is hot and rich, they will buy ice cream. If a person buys ice cream, they will buy their favorite flavor of ice cream Here, our facts about the world are 1, 2, and 3, and our rules about how the world works are 4 and 5. There are two main ways an AI might try to draw the conclusion that Bob will buy mint ice cream from these premises: forward chaining and backward chaining.
In forward chaining, the AI starts with the given facts and tries to apply various combinations of rules to the facts until it finds a rule where the predicates in the antecedent match the predicates in the facts. Here, the AI would start with 1-3, then try to match the predicates in 4 and 5 to those facts until it starts making progress. The process in this case would be to match 1 and 2 to 4, then deduce a new fact ("Bob will buy ice cream") which it can then match to rule 5 together with fact 3. This would allow it to discover a new conclusion, namely that Bob will buy mint ice cream.
In backward chaining, the AI starts with a query representing the conclusion to be derived and works backward through the knowledge base until it finds a derivation of that conclusion from the given facts and rules. That is, it would start with "Bob will buy mint ice cream" and try to match the predicates in that term to the predicates in the consequent of one of the rules. So it would first notice that the antecedent of rule 5 together with fact 3 would allow it to prove the conclusion it wants, then start looking for a way to prove the antecedent of rule 5, then succeed in doing so by going back through the antecedent of rule 4 to facts 1 and 2.
This is pretty different from how humans reason, since we can't represent our knowledge as a simple list of clearly defined rules and facts like this, nor do we have the ability to search for implications as quickly and efficiently as a computer.

You're talking in non-essentials. Rights can only apply to humans since morality is only needed for humans to survive. Humans have to think to make choices in life to survive; animals act on instinct.
So you cannot talk in terms of animals "deserving" to exist.
Furthermore, it would be impractical to protect them and for no one to eat them; the ramifications would be enormous. E.g. we would be overrun with them, disease would spread, etc.

I intend to participate. I have a BA in philosophy and I am near the end of a BS in computer science.

It's about creativity. Plumbing sounds pretty boring to some people. Leaky pipes - who would care, right? But imagine you are a plumber. You understand pipes. You understand how to connect pieces of metal that looks trivial to other people, but is probably as complex as how your Internet network is wired at your work. Even if you work at simple houses, your plans don't need to end there. It is sensible to get into urban planning later maybe. Who knows. Maybe your skills translate to skills as a writer on the side. Maybe you honestly like working with your hands, and plumbing is a stable job you really enjoy.

No one should labor under the delusion that Marxism, religion, capitalism, or even Objectivism promises to deliver humankind to Utopia. Objectivism defines the natural rights of people, standards of morality, and within that standard of morality, the right to trade a value for a value. I hope one day, our society will embrace the Objectivist ideals of capitalism and rational self-interest, although I am quite certain many will cling to religion and various forms of altruistic practices. As the topic of this threat probes the possibility of such a society, that hypothetical society will be occupied by a minority of irrational and imperfect people, StrictlyLogic suggested. (The more irrational, the smaller the minority, I hope.) Either way, laws would reflect those ethics of free-market economics, and markets would set the price of all goods and services. As softwareNerd pointed out, new technologies may increase the efficiency of many jobs, and likely they will reduce the hazard and discomfort of what are now low-tech operations. If those services are the "dirty jobs," (and as New Buddha very rightly pointed out, plumbing and other careers in the trades, should not be regarded as "menial") the market will set the wages for such tasks. Some people are perfectly content to clean out drains and sewer pipes, pump out septic tanks, remove road kills, and remove the ugliness of natural and human activities, as long as they are paid accordingly. Morticians, are example, have the sort of job I would not envy, but it requires skills, as well as certain other traits I do not possess, and it pays well. And as long as the pay is right, you can be sure someone will be willing to do it.

I would not use the term "we" here.  Each person consents or does not consent individually.  Many people, including myself, simply do not consent to be "ruled" by government in accordance with the systems of today, which includes taxation.  Unlike a historical slave of the southern states 150 years ago, there is no where to run to in today's world, but like the slave of the south, deciding the risks of attempting to escape are too great, deciding to remain does not mean consent to being enslaved.
No.  Custom here matters no more than it would if all the territories of the globe were ruled by tyrants or communists.  A decision not to take up arms in revolution does not and would not mean consent.  Like many others with the correct philosophy, the hope is that improper, oppressive, rights-violating government will one day, through peaceful change, cease to be.
I would not say that they are both being defrauded.  They are both making a number of grave mistakes, errors, and possibly evasions.
 
No.  Assessment of the risks of any other course of action other than attempting to use persuasion to change the system lead Objectivists to decide to stay notwithstanding the injustice of modern democracy.  No Objectivist "truly consents" to being ruled by an improper government, i.e. one which does anything other than protect individual rights.  Of course non-Objectivists are free to so "truly consent".
 
We ARE saying "NO".  AR, LP, ARI, a number of academics... loudly and clearly.  Some are hearing.  Change is slow.
 
Physical action against one's will, by definition action without a person's consent, (lack of that consent is part of the essence of the initiation of force), cannot be at the same time consented to.
In the ring fighters agree to something but still disagree to something else.  As a fighter I agree to your attempt to knock me out, using the strength and speed appropriate to that, but I do not agree to your attempt to kill me, or crush my head or snap my neck, not the strength speed and techniques appropriate for that result.  Here the agreement is to "box". 

I agree that the people who vote for welfare often -- perhaps typically -- don't do it for themselves, but because they think it is the right thing to do. Many of them probably also give to charities and causes. However, when they vote for it, there are two things going on, not just one. As you say, they're thinking they should be helping people who have fallen on hard times. But, second, they also think they should force their neighbor to pay too. I don't know if people parse it out that way, but I think this is what it boils down to if you were to analyse it: they are not satisfied with doing charity along with the vast majority of others like them who are also for charity (all those pro-welfare voters). No, they want to do it via a government that can send tax-agents to collect. Their neighbors who would vote against welfare are forced to pay the tax agent. 
It is a fashionable bromide to scoff at politicians and to blame government for all sorts of ills. However, the real wielder of force in modern western democracies is the voter who imposes his will on his neighbors. At an abstract, philosophical level, is such a person any different from a 16th century protestant zealot forcing a papist to come to the "right" church and to worship in the "right" way... by supporting a government that imposed such rules?  Both are cheering when force is used to impose their view of morality on their neighbor.

The argument you are referring to is an application of the philosophy of pragmatism. Pragmatism has been the dominant philosophy in the United States since the Civil War, so people often appeal to it without even realizing that they are taking a philosophical point of view.
Pragmatism as developed by William James says that there are no absolute principles. We believe in the absolutes we do on the basis of our passional nature, which is irrational and inclines us to choose the premises that we do without our realizing it. This is pragmatism's explanation for why there have been so many different philosophies.
This is why people feel like they can use the term "works" without explaining it, although they may never have heard of William James. The term "works" comes from our passional nature, which there is no point in elaborating further. This is also why they feel like they can defend their views on health care without applying an objective benchmark.
A particular person who uses this argument might not realizing that he is appealing to pragmatism, so you might be able to persuade him to change his mind by pointing out that he needs a more principled approach. However, if someone is a committed pragmatist, it is very difficult to argue with him successfully, because they are so concrete bound.

I'm not so sure I'd agree that German immigrants were trying to escape collectivism; from my reading it, and a little bit of family history, the motivation was little more an simple economics. American employers paid more for the same labor. However, I found your answer very interesting, largely because of the inclusion of students and other members of the academic body of America. The trend toward collective action was always a part of the American Revolution, if one considers war a collective action. In the early 1800s, reform movements of all sorts sprang up. Collectivism, as it emerged from European society, was imposed by the state, such as the national reforms imposed by the German government under Bismark. These reforms were acceptable to most Germans, and yet many believed they could do better emigrating to the US. And they did. But many also brought with them their view of class-struggle, the core of the socialist argument. Doubtful they could quote Hegel or Marx on academic matters, such as the material dialectic or anything on that intellectual level, (as Reidy pointed out.) But vast numbers of immigrants, German or any other national origin, viewed themselves as members of the bottom tier of American society regardless of the gradual improvements in their standard of living. Many native middle-classed Americans sympathized with the plight of the newcomers, as matter of Christian charity. As pointed out in the above post, the intellectual movement toward socialism was the work of universities and members of the media. Journalists, such as Lincoln Steffens, Ray Stannard Baker, and Ida Tarbell, supported demand for government action. Much of the propaganda aimed at laborers was printed in bilingual format, second language being German. As a matter of family history, we have a well-preserved letter from one relative, one immigrant from Germany to another, dating back the 1920s, which includes comments about the injustice of the workers suffering for the benefit of the rich. And yet, he was making enough money to send a little back to family members who help him establish himself here in America. Actually, it was a wedding present.
Point being, the influence on popular ideas brought over from the Old Country should not be overlooked. But the main onus of the Progressive Era reforms rests of the intelligentsia of those times. The immigrants and their children were very receptive to these ideas, and cast their votes accordingly.