Invictus2017

"Justice" is not a floating abstraction, any more than "should" is. Among other things, there is no moral requirement (and thus no political requirement) that every injustice be fixed. But the treatment of "justice" as a floating abstraction does allow the absurdity of imagining that justice can be done by stealing from one person that which he has earned to give to another person that which he has not earned on the ground that the second person's parents were deprived of what was rightfully theirs by someone who is long dead.

More or less. Note that precisely the same harm could have happened from an undetected sinkhole. When you claim unowned land, it's on you to check it out before putting it to use.

I forgot to add: civil forfeiture, wherein the government steals your property on the ground that it might have been involved in a crime -- prior to any proof that the crime even happened.

Your right to self defense kicks in at the instant someone forms the intention to use force against you. However, you may only act in self-defense once you have sufficient evidence that the intention exists. You might make your inference from a persons actions, from his words, or even his body language. But it must be a rational inference, not "I hate his words and I take them as a threat" or some such excuse.

Can you elaborate? No need to; I had already said everything relevant to your example.

"one-party rule" There are two parties in name, but they're differentiable only by exactly which rights they want to violate wholesale. The "one party" is the political class, which rules for its own benefit. "executions without trial or with a mock trial, for political offenses" Drone strikes, done to American citizens, without any attempt at arrest or trial. Murder done by cops for such "crimes" as "driving while Black". Executions done "to uphold the law" when there is real evidence of the prisoner's innocence. (Read Herrera v. Collins and be chilled.) "the nationalization or expropriation of private property" Kelo, anyone? Pretty much the entire medical profession, under Obamacare? "and censorship" That thing sometimes called FOSTA, sometimes called SESTA. Campaign finance laws. "A country guilty of these outrages forfeits any moral prerogatives, any claim to national rights or sovereignty, and becomes an outlaw." America is not a conventional dictatorship, but only because its ruling class realizes that it can gain more power and treasure by allowing a measure of "freedom". But it is not real freedom -- it can be abrogated almost at will by the government -- and its presence does not save America from the charge of tyranny.

What rights of the descendants were violated? What force was used against them? Answer that, and you can answer your own question. But it is an error to start with an ungrounded "should" question.

Read some of Branden's work before discussing self-esteem. It'll save much wasted effort.

Only a physical action can be force. Thus, no matter how strongly I may express my negative views of a person, or what that person feels about my expression, there is no force unless I have initiated (engaged my volition to cause) a physical action that constitutes force. And yet, isn't any ethics based on that? No. In fact, most ethics are not based on that. Even in Christianity where, for example, it is assumed that what people deserve is everlasting Hell.

I read it a looong time ago and forgot about it, but I just reread it. I agree with essentially all of it. Anyway, there she discusses a third "official" context, that of living in a welfare state. But today, we really need to talk about living under tyranny, because that's what we now have.

No.

I suspect that there's a whole thread on pretty much any subject that might come up.

Where can I find the definition? I don't think this is explicitly defined, but see "contextually absolute". Probably the best way to describe it is to consider physics. In physics, you have (simplifying a lot) the realm of the small, where you apply Quantum Mechanics, the realm of the large, where you apply General Relativity, and the everyday realm, where you apply Newtonian mechanics. Each is a separate context, and propositions that are true in one are generally not true in another. A given proposition of physics is "contextual" because it applies in a particular context, and "universal", because it is always true within that context. In the Objectivist Ethics, there are only two "official" contexts, the ideal ethical context, and the emergency context. Others are possible. For example, there are situations where it is impracticable to live independently (like the present situation), which is inconsistent with some of the facts Rand relies on. In such a situation, it is necessary to rethink certain parts of the ethics, and the result would be a different context, with different (contextually) universal propositions. (E.g., in the Objectivist Ethics, the answer to, "should you accept government-provided services such as roads", is an unqualified "no". But in the real world, where you can't practicably choose to avoid improper government services, there is no simple answer. There needs to be, but unfortunately isn't, an Objectivist Ethics context for dealing with the real world.) "Poking your eyes out with a toothbrush is immoral" is not a proposition derivable from the Objectivist Ethics; there are outlandish situations where you might have to do so in order to save your life. But you could say, properly, "in the ordinary course of living, poking your eyes out with a toothbrush is immoral". This would follow from the Objectivist Ethics, but would not be a part of it. (Why not? Ethics must generally limit itself to principles of broad applicability, and this is not such a principle.)

The person who claims an entitlement to government education is claiming an entitlement to other people's money. He is or wants to be a thief. And the question of which thief should successfully steal a college education is not one of any moral significance. Only if you start with the premise that the college applicant is not entitled to a placement can you have a real discussion -- but it ends right there, with the acknowledgement that there is no entitlement. No person "deserves" a place in a public college. Period. And so no person can be improperly denied a place in a public college. Also period. Remember: Emotions are not tools of cognition. No matter how much one feels some person deserves an education, that does not entitle him to an education on the public dime. The wrong, to repeat myself, has nothing to do with affirmative action, no matter how long or loudly progressives and government agents scream that affirmative action is the reason for what they do. Remember: Ideas do not act. People do. Ask not what excuse people use for their evil, ask what their evil is. The evil here is denying a deserving person (I'm going back to my cop example) a job for an improper reason, and bringing up affirmative action is, at best, a red herring.

I should have said that not-yet-existing people do not have property rights, so you can't steal from them. The theft, if any, is from the present owners of the property.

DeToqueville's "Democracy in America", Chapter VI, " What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear":

If affirmative action is done for some private reason by some private entity, there is no morally cognizable harm -- the immigrant does not have a right to that which is not offered willingly, whether or not the refusal to offer is rational. Affirmative action in, for example, acceptance to a public university, also involves no morally cognizable harm, since no one has a right to government provided education. But we can talk about the harm done by affirmative action in, for example, the hiring of police, because police are a necessary part of government. I will assume this example for the rest of this message. So, if an immigrant who would otherwise be hired as a cop is refused the job merely because of affirmative action, is he harmed? Yes indeed. But he is not being harmed by affirmative action, nor is he paying any alleged debt to former slaves or their descendants. Instead, he is being harmed by the irrationality of government agents who are using affirmative action as an excuse for their criminal behavior. The harm to the immigrant is precisely the harm that would have arisen had the government agents instead engaged in nepotism or, especially, racism (since affirmative action is a species of racism) or any other irrational means of making hiring decisions. The appropriate word is whatever you'd use when someone refuses to give you something you are entitled to.

The Objectivist Ethics will not tell you how to brush your teeth, as it deals with contextual universals. But when you specialize those principles to the particular of your own life, they will direct even the most minute aspects of it. So, you will find no ethical principle telling you how to brush your teeth. But you will find one that tells you to discover what the purpose is of brushing your teeth, another to tell you to discover which method of tooth brushing will best serve that purpose, and yet another to tell you to use that method, among other relevant ethical propositions.. So, yes, morality does apply to how you brush your teeth.

It is impossible to quantify the restitution owed by those who merely benefit from a dictatorship, so there is nothing to be done about such people. Instead, one must look to specific rights violations, with identifiable victims, by particular people. When such can be identified, one acts as one would with any other criminal. Not-yet-existing people do not have rights; they cannot be stolen from. The evil of our national debt is that it is predicated on the premise that it will be repaid through taxation. Of course, living grandchildren are victims of that evil, but so is everyone else who is subject to taxation. One violates rights only when one has the intention to use force. Something you have no meaningful choice about, e.g., using the roads, does not involve intention to use force, and so does not violate rights. Using government services that would exist regardless, assuming that the service is not in itself evil, does not violate rights. The restitution theory of accepting government services (including medicare checks) suffers from the unquantifiability of much of the harm done by government. But, for sure, accepting money of less value than what you've lost in taxation and other determinate forms of government theft cannot be evil. But, for example, what about the person who is forbidden by law from his preferred career and must choose a possibly less satisfying or less lucrative career? Could such a person justify not choosing the alternate career and accept welfare? That might be self-harming (which would make it evil), but would it violate others' rights? I doubt it. In a system such as ours, where almost everyone is simultaneously criminal and victim, I suspect that the very idea of trying to make decisions based on rights theory is flawed. I think, in the final analysis, so long as you do not choose an action that demonstrably requires additional rights violations, rights are not a relevant consideration when deciding what to do. So, by all means, take that welfare check, if it allows you to live the best life you can, and don't worry about whose rights are violated by the government's acquisition of the money. One way or another, you'll end up paying for welfare, whether or not you benefit from it.

Actually, those are two different things. "True" and "false" are applicable only where there is some connection to reality. A floating abstraction, not being connected to reality, can be neither true nor false. But your general point is correct: When talking to most people, merely pointing out that they're employing a floating abstraction is useless. There's a difference between erroneous reasoning and no reasoning at all. A fallacy is an improper method of reasoning. A floating abstraction involves no reasoning at all.

Well, sorta. Consider an infant, operating without benefit of words. His brain forms associations, which he tests by what we as adults would call experimentation, but which is play to the child. The mere association would be a floating abstraction, but the repeated testing is a primitive form of reasoning that suffices to remove the resulting concept from the category of "floating abstraction". Anyway, I was listing examples of what sorts of methods of acquiring a concept would make it a floating abstraction. Purely undirected (which is what I meant by "random") associations would be floating abstractions. Other kinds of associations might or might not render the resulting concept a floating abstraction. Adopting a concept without considering the concept's roots in reality renders the concept a floating abstraction. Because rocks are rather concrete, it would be hard to acquire the concept "mineral" as a floating abstraction, but I suppose it's possible. The issue of floating abstractions generally arises with concepts further from the concrete, where it is easy to collect the words and imagine that one has actually said something. Agreed. There are all sorts of reasoning (or unreasoning errors), and we can only talk about them sensibly if they're in determinate categories. "Floating abstraction" is one such category, and we shouldn't try to subsume kinds other errors into that category.

There are, in essence, two ways for a concept to be created within a person's mind. The first is by that person reasoning (in the very broadest sense) from his own perceptions to the concept. The second is acquiring the concept without reasoning, as by adopting it from others or by the random associations of his brain. The former is not a floating abstraction, even if the resulting concept is invalid. The latter is a floating abstraction, even if it is otherwise valid. Why does it matter whether a concept is a floating abstraction, if it doesn't relate to the concept's validity? An error in validating a legitimate concept can be discovered by examining your reasoning. You can't do that with a floating abstraction, since you didn't get it by reasoning. More formally: A statement that you have under consideration is true if it corresponds to reality. But how do you show the correspondence? You examine how you reasoned from perception to the statement. If the reasoning is valid, you have that correspondence. If it isn't, you don't. But if you didn't do any reasoning whatsoever, if the statement is merely a collection of words in your mind, not derived from perception by reasoning, you have no chain between perception and statement which can be examined to prove (or disprove) correspondence. It would be an error for you to assert that the statement is true or that it is false, not simply because you don't know one way or the other, but because -- until you do the necessary reasoning -- you cannot know one way or the other. Such unvalidatable statements are called "arbitrary". If you follow a similar line of reasoning, but as applied to concepts, you will end up describing concepts whose validity you cannot know. These are "floating abstractions".

As a general rule, stories need conflict; there must be something that the protagonist wants to do and something that keeps him from doing it. Dystopias provide a more fertile ground for conflict than utopias. It's just that simple. Also, when the theme of a story involves society, it's almost always necessary to show a malfunctioning society in which to express thematic conflict. E.g., it would have been hard for Rand to have done what she did in Atlas had she set her story in something like Galt's Gulch. Similarly, Atwood's story (I haven't seen the dramatizations) needs its dystopia in order to most effectively make her points. I note that Atwood was hardly the first to see the possibility of a Christian dictatorships in America. E.g., Heinlein did it in 1940, in "If This Goes On".

I read that and....I couldn't answer it, not without a whole bunch of expletives. I gave it a few days, and I still have to answer rudely: What rock are you living under? The exclusionary rule has been subjected to a variety of restrictions in the past few decades, not least of which is that the cops routinely lie in order to hide their misconduct. Cops rarely suffer if those lies are uncovered. Ditto the Miranda rule. The third party doctrine has gutted Fourth Amendment protections. Habeas corpus has been rendered largely ineffective by statute and by the courts' indifference to convicts' rights. The right to counsel, the right that one must have if one is properly invoke the rest of one's rights in a prosecution, has been eviscerated by procedural restrictions and by the lack of and low quality of public defenders. The Speedy Trial clause won't get you a speedy trial, not unless you think a year is "speedy", and the mandated dismissal rarely happens even then. There are defendants who have been held without trial -- or lawyers -- for years. The right to a public trial --- the public's right to that public trial -- has been largely nullified by the near universal coercing of defendants to plead guilty. The grand jury is no longer anything like a protection from government abuses of power, instead serving largely as a rubber stamp for prosecutors' decisions to charge. Prosecutors routinely charge crimes that don't fit the facts, withhold Brady evidence, and lie to opposing counsel and the courts, and when they're caught, they almost never suffer consequence. The government can take your property and give it to another private entity, with no more than a declaration that it will serve some public use, and pay you only what the government deems appropriate. Government can take your property, claiming a connection to a crime -- without any evidence that the crime happened -- and you have to prove the negative in order to get your property back. Oh, and you have to pay for the privilege. Police routinely illegally stop, search, assault, rape, and murder, and rarely suffer any real consequence. Police still confiscate the phones of those who record their misconduct, also without real consequence. Malpracticing defense attorneys can be sued, but only in the rare case that their victims' convictions are overturned. Persons arbitrarily declared sex offenders suffer tight restrictions on where they may live, work, and go to school --- and these restrictions can be changed at any time, in defiance of the Ex Post Facto clause. The supremes have declared that this is not punitive, even when it has the effect of preventing people from working or having a home. Prisoners are supposed to retain their constitutional rights, but the supremes have declared that these rights can be abrogated at what amounts to the whim of their jailors. Even when the courts have determine that prisoners' rights are being violated, they bascially just sit back and wait for the violators to stop violating -- sometimes for decades. I can go on for quite a while longer, citing examples of the lack of procedural protections for people. I haven't, for example, even touched on the immigration courts where, for example, children -- not teens, children, are required to defend their requests for asylum without aid of lawyers. So, no, our procedural protections have not been improving. By any informed measure, they have been steadily degraded, and are now laughable.

An entity causes its actions; which actions depend on the nature of the entity and the circumstances surrounding it. Those circumstances may change, in which case the entity may act differently than it did before the change. When that happens, one can say that the change is a "cause" and the difference in action an "effect" and thereby speak of cause and effect. This way of speaking must be used carefully, because it leads to the, among other things, the confusion displayed above. However, using that language, it should be clear that there is no requirement that an effect occur at the same time as its cause or at some later time; when an effect occurs will depend on the nature of the entity acting.