You ask two questions: a moral one and a literary one.
The moral one depends on the circumstances.
The literary one requires a new thread under aesthetics. To answer THAT QUESTION, I offer the following:
Observe that neither Hank nor Francisco gave their enemies a choice. They simply overpowered the guards and made their way to the rendezvous point.
Dagny, however, gave the guard choice after choice after choice. But the guard defaulted on every single one, including the choice of get out of the way or get killed. But Dagny's job was to secure that specific door, and she always took full responsibility for every job she ever had. So she shot him.
And THAT attitude, ladies and gentlemen, is quintessentially Dagny.
Think about it: a woman becomes the unsung heroine of a railroad empire and kills her enemies while her male counterparts take less violent courses of aciton.
In the 1950s, a time when women were regarded as weak-minded, homemaking pacifists, Dagny would have been shocking and liberating.
Now she's just really, really cool.
And the event? Even more shocking and liberating. It dramatized Dagny's character in connection with the role of independent thought and choice in human survival while simultaneously demolishing the notion that women are the weaker sex.
No Tom...THAT attitude you refer to is fundamentally where objectivism fails. Ayn Rand's entire philosophy falls apart on that one scene. The guard was merely a fool, ignorant and a hinderance to Dagny. But that does not justify his cold blooded killing. A philosophy that justifies killing those who stand in the way of one's own philosophical or ideological position is fundamentally flawed. Taken to its extreme - it is the logic of pure Nazism. Create a scapegoat, devalue them to such a degree that their life is expendable, and you have the underlying counter-logic of the holocaust.
What was it Christ said, "love thine enemies"? I don't remember him saying anything about kill those who get in your way. Ayn Rand's philosophy is in every way anti-Christian. It is not surprising that she is the philosophical darling of the political Right. It is in fact reminiscent of the first law of Satanism. i.e - "Do unto others before they do unto you". This is also the logic of the Bush Administration. How ironic that they were re-elected largely with the support of the Christian fundamentalist twits of our Bible belt who supported the carnage in Iraq. They simply don't see the hypocrisy of supporting the carnage on hand, and espousing Christian values on the other.
Why did Dagny save an enemy's life?
in Ethics
Posted
No Tom...THAT attitude you refer to is fundamentally where objectivism fails. Ayn Rand's entire philosophy falls apart on that one scene. The guard was merely a fool, ignorant and a hinderance to Dagny. But that does not justify his cold blooded killing. A philosophy that justifies killing those who stand in the way of one's own philosophical or ideological position is fundamentally flawed. Taken to its extreme - it is the logic of pure Nazism. Create a scapegoat, devalue them to such a degree that their life is expendable, and you have the underlying counter-logic of the holocaust.
What was it Christ said, "love thine enemies"? I don't remember him saying anything about kill those who get in your way. Ayn Rand's philosophy is in every way anti-Christian. It is not surprising that she is the philosophical darling of the political Right. It is in fact reminiscent of the first law of Satanism. i.e - "Do unto others before they do unto you". This is also the logic of the Bush Administration. How ironic that they were re-elected largely with the support of the Christian fundamentalist twits of our Bible belt who supported the carnage in Iraq. They simply don't see the hypocrisy of supporting the carnage on hand, and espousing Christian values on the other.