intrinsicist

I understand that's what you're going for, but my question here has been: how is that possible? How can a symbol meaningfully stand for an unlimited range of yet-to-be-observed particulars without relying on a real universal, some real property that makes them what they are, with which we can make universal claims about all such instances? It seems like you run into the same problems whether you're talking about things you're "referring to" or things that the symbol "stands for", I'm not seeing what that distinction buys you here. Based on what in reality? You're telling me there's this "something" in reality which makes all instances which have this "something" identical by nature. That's an exact description of a real universal! I would agree that this is clearly what she is implicitly relying on in numerous places in the book (and in many derivative ways throughout Objectivist philosophy), and yet she specifically rejects the reality of these metaphysical universals, these "timeless essentials" which man "recognizes", the "treeness" in tree or "manness" in man, etc. The issue here, both with you and with Rand, is the reliance on the real universals while denying them.

Sure, the concept tree refers to all particular trees that have ever existed or ever will exist. That's not "just a similarity", what you are describing is exactly what is meant by a "metaphysical universal", when all trees share this identical property of "treeness", this common denominator that makes a tree a tree. If such a common denominator exists, if there is such an abstract property of "treeness" that all trees share, then what we are dealing with is a real universal. What you are expressing is exactly the confusion and contradiction present in ITOE. Rand rejects the existence of real universals, of "treeness" in trees, and yet what she tries to capture in her concepts are real abstract properties shared by all particulars, so that the concept may refer to all the particulars of the kind that have ever existed or will ever exist. She rejects real universals, but relies on them implicitly.

So you're telling me that by "universals" you are merely referring to sets of observed particulars. And you're saying that "the facts don't change" and therefore there's no issue - but what do the facts buy you? How do you interpret anything you observe, how do you predict the future, how do you classify anything new, when you can't infer anything in general about reality? The "man" you've classified today might have nothing to do with the next particular you observe. The ball you're observing in one moment tells you nothing about what you might observe in the next moment. Any particular, any moment that you've yet to observe, you can't say anything about it, because your classifications are all retrospective, they only refer to the particulars you've already observed ("we cannot refer to things we don't know of"). The length "epistemic universal" you invented today can't tell you anything about the length you'll observe tomorrow, because you're telling us that you're not inducing any necessary connection, anything general about reality itself, you're just cataloging regularities in your experiences. You are just making retrospective statistical observations - the moment you start talking about length - every property of length in all places and all times - then you're talking about a universal property out in reality, a metaphysical universal, which is exactly what you're rejecting. "I don't understand how we -could- refer to all particulars. That would be further from reality." -- and this is exactly the nominalist opinion on concepts. If all we can refer to are particulars, then concepts (e.g. Man, referring to all men who have ever lived and will ever live), actually distort our view of reality, since it's not really like that. I'm just telling you that calling your epistemic categories "concepts" or "universals" is mistaken. You shouldn't try to claim any of the positive results Ayn Rand tries to claim, like solving the problem of induction, the ability to have conceptual knowledge or certainty about reality, etc. None of this is really consistent with your real view; you are a skeptic about any general statement about reality, a nominalist who believes in categories of convenience, and your epistemic standard (and thus, necessarily, your moral and political standard) is subjective and pragmatic. There are plenty of people who own up to holding exactly this view, like Gordon Stein, or Sam Harris. I'm just asking you to be clear and honest with yourself on exactly where you stand. If on the other hand you are not truly a skeptic about reality, if deep down you really do believe we can know things that are necessary and certain and universal, then we need to start talking about the metaphysics of universals. Either way there's an inconsistency in Ayn Rand's thinking.

Honestly I don't think you've done either of these things. First you got distracted by me naming intrinsicism in particular, then you've pummeled me with questions about the details of intrinsicist metaphysics. But nothing I've actually argued depends on any of that. I've made a specific criticism of Objectivist metaphysics which nobody seems to have yet clearly understood, let alone attempted to counter. The closest thing I've seen is the Harry Binswanger thing you quoted, "To be nothing in particular is to be nothing at all--i.e., not to be." -- but that just seems like an assertion that universals aren't real, I don't see that that's an argument in favor of that assertion. As for "the concretes referred to by a concept have to be identical in some respect, as if all shades of blue were identical, all lengths were identical, etc." - obviously that's a silly straw man, the point is that the abstract attribute of blue or of length is held in common by the particulars, not the exact shade or measure of their lengths. Again, he doesn't seem to understand the Realist position that he's criticizing at all, he seems to be just assuming that only particular concrete objects are real, and therefore concludes that universals must be "nothing". The fact that we can perceive things as similar, that we can isolate the abstract property of length which things have in common, seems to demonstrate that. Obviously I can't go around and show you all men who have ever lived and who ever will live. I can't physically show you an infinite set to prove a universal inductively. That's like asking me to prove that a^2 + b^2 = c^2 by calculating the formula for all natural numbers. Either you presuppose universality in the first place, and thus are capable of arriving at a universal inductively without observing an infinite number of instances, or else you presuppose that universals aren't real in the first place, in which case absurdity follows (in the problem of induction, subjectivism, and all of the other problems I've been arguing). Likewise, Rand's stated position is that universals aren't real, and thus there's no way to arrive at a universal inductively. Rand's argument in ITOE in which she describes how to arrive at certainty about the boiling point of water by referencing knowledge about the behavior of H20 molecules is an infinite regress - because the natural next question is how does one arrive at universal knowledge of the behavior of H20 molecules? When Rand describes acquiring knowledge about the abstract property of length, or certainty about the boiling point of water, or maintaining a non-contradictory definition of man despite a changing context of knowledge, she is implicitly relying on the belief that there are universals (length, water, man), contra her own stated position on the subject.

Eioul, the issue is absolutely whether or not there is anything in reality that holds universally. I'm not following why you're suggesting that's not the issue here. I'm trying to interpret what you are saying in a way that isn't blatantly contradictory - after all, if there's a "universal aspect of things", how could you also say that "the aspect itself isn't the universal"? I'm guessing what you mean by a "universal aspect of things", is some aspect that holds for all particulars in a given set. But the "recognition of invariant facts about sets of particulars" is not a universal unless the "set of particulars" you're referring to, is the universal set of all particulars, as in, "for all X, such and such holds". Saying merely "for this specific set of particulars, such and such holds", is not a universal claim, it's just a claim about some particular group of things. So this is precisely the issue here. Rand denies real universals quite explicitly, as I quoted here. She believes everything in reality is particular, that there is in reality no "manness" in man which applies universally for all men at all times, but rather the concept "man" is merely our way of organizing the particulars we see around us into a mental grouping. So as the set of particulars we have observed changes and the context of our knowledge expands, so too must change our definition of "man". In ITOE, Rand writes that, contra Aristotle's intrinsicist philosophy, Rand specifically rejects the notion that there is a metaphysical essence, i.e. that particulars are instances of real universals, universals which hold at all times and for all of the particulars of that kind. On the contrary, our concepts are only "universal" over the total set of of our observations. But this is not the universal set! This isn't guaranteed by any metaphysical principle to hold at all times and for all instances in reality. Concepts in this view aren't describing something that holds abstractly in reality, they are just describing something that holds abstractly over the particular, delimited set of observations which we've accumulated thus far. So these Objectivist concepts aren't universals. Rand doesn't refer to them as such. She only uses the word "universal" in this sense in a couple of places in the book, and exclusively in the context of specifically pointing out how the Objectivist view differs from the Intrinsicist view in holding that there are no real universals.

No, not in the sense I've been exhaustively explaining here. And the distinction is important, because the only alternative to basing your philosophy on real universals is subjectivism, as I was arguing in the original thread: I'm hoping we come back to my arguments here, I don't have anything to contribute right now regarding your comments on "objective (metaphysical) idealism", as you call it.

I don't know what that is. I've been making a case for universals being metaphysically real, as against Rand's position that they are merely epistemological.

Well if some "other type of universal" existed, then it would be real, wouldn't it? If something exists that implies that it's real. What I'm trying to distinguish is between one conception of what "universals" are, and another very different conception of them. A realist says that universals are features of reality that exist and persist outside the mind, outside of any human mind. There is an intelligible structure to reality whether anyone understands it or not. Our concepts can be right or wrong according to whether they correspond to these universal types, these natural kinds. A nominalist holds that there is no intrinsic intelligibility to reality, intelligibility is something we do in our own minds as a way of organizing our sense data of reality. Reality is like this tabula rasa, materialist blank canvas. "Universals" are categories that we make up, like mental "buckets" to group together particular sensory-perceptual experiences. Whichever buckets you make up might be judged as practical or impractical, according to unit economy or whatever, but there is no "right" answer, there aren't "true" or "false" buckets. There are no true universal types, there aren't natural kinds, out there in nature. The "kinds" are things we make up, these mental buckets. These are not basically both the same type of thing, just one I believe in and one I don't. It's not like we are dealing with real and imaginary breeds of animals, like wolves are real, but werewolves aren't real. Of course I do believe we form concepts in our minds, like creating mental buckets like the nominalist believes, or like Ayn Rand describes the process of concept formation. The point is that I think there are real universals out there, and the ones we come up with in our head can be true universals or they can be false; they can be right or wrong not just in terms of pragmatic standards like unit economy or utility, but in terms of corresponding, or failing to correspond, to the true universals in reality.

I can only respond to this a bit at a time, let's start with this: There are other metaphysical positions which accept the reality of universals besides intrinsicism, but I'm speaking here to an Objectivist audience, and if you are an Objectivist who rejects the aspects of subjectivism and nominalism in Objectivist metaphysics and epistemology, and instead accepts the implicit realist aspects, then I argue what you end up at is intrinsicism. By "real universal", I mean something that exists metaphysically, outside of your head in reality, and not merely epistemologically, as something you've come up with in your own mind. This is not exclusive to intrinsicism, as I said, of course there are other metaphysical views which hold that universals are metaphysically real. But Rand does follow standard nominalism is denying the existence of such things, in favor a view in which "universals" are merely epistemological, made up by man for his use.

I wasn't asserting there that universals exist, I was just making a point about knowledge - "If universals exist then our awareness of them is accurate and knowledge of universals is possible, but if they do not, then our seeming "awareness" of them is really a phantom, and the universality that we imagine is not really "knowledge"."... that is, if there's nothing in reality that holds universally, then any universal proposition cannot actually be true, not in the normal sense of logical truth; such "universal knowledge" is not actually knowledge, it's just a hypothesis, or a useful convention, or something like that.

Knowledge about a fictional world implies the existence of the fictional world (qua fictional world, of course). You could make something up about the fictional story of Harry Potter, for example claiming that Harry is a mathematician, when actually he isn't one, and that wouldn't be knowledge. Whereas some truth about Harry Potter, for example that he is a boy, is knowledge. But I think this is all an aside from the main point, hopefully it's clear to everyone else by "knowledge" I'm talking about correspondence with reality.

Knowledge of universals implies the existence of universals. Even knowledge of similarity implies the existence of a universal (i.e. some feature of reality which is identical at different places or times). So the "problem of universals" does not arise from questions about our awareness or knowledge, it is really prior to that - if universals exist then our awareness of them is accurate and knowledge of universals is possible, but if they do not, then our seeming "awareness" of them is really a phantom, and the universality that we imagine is not really "knowledge". This issue that you're raising - that we seem to be aware of similarity and universality, but are we really, and how? - is related to the problem of universals, but the question of whether universals exist at all is a more basic one, and is the grounds for your answer to the question regarding whether we are actually aware of universality, and whether that awareness is truly knowledge which corresponds to reality. Sorry, but you can't bypass metaphysics and begin in epistemology. Everything in your epistemological philosophy is going to depend upon the metaphysics that you've presupposed.

But that's not any different than what a nominalist would say. A nominalist might say, sure we have these abstract concepts in our minds. But the issue here is whether they correspond to a real universal which has a true definition, or rather on the contrary that there is nothing universal out in reality for it to correspond to; it's a made up definition which cannot in principle be true or false. If there is no universal in reality to check a concept or definition against, then they are just stipulating the definitions of words, and the only issue is whether they are using their words consistently or inconsistently, or whether their concepts are pragmatic or unpragmatic; nobody can possibly tell them that they are wrong. Nobody can tell them that their definition is false, that their conceptual classification is not corresponding to the real, natural kind. After all, their basic metaphysical position is that there are no natural kinds. "When he says he is this or that, then he is this or that" ...

splitprimary quoted this from ITOE: - was this quote not clear? also from ITOE: and You said "You don't have to be an Objectivist to accept the fact that universals exist," which is true, but the point here is that if you do accept the fact that universals exist, then you aren't an Objectivist. You are an intrinsicist. Your thread is about nominalism, too... which is a basic metaphysical and epistemological issue. From the OP: The nominalist doesn't deny that there are concrete particulars out there in reality to which concepts refer. That is exactly their position, that "these names refer merely to an organization of concretes, that this is our way of organizing concretes". What they deny is that there are any real universals to which concepts refer - which is exactly what Rand denies. Hence the result: without a real universal as the standard, true or false are not applicable to definitions. At best what you get is that one way of organizing concretes is more useful than another, and hence one definition may be "better" than another in this sense of being "better" pragmatically. This is what Rand claimed essentially, that certain definitions are better than others according to context or unit economy. In these respects she was following the basic nominalist metaphysics which she endorsed. The issue is that every time she referenced natural kinds as the ground for identifying a concept or judging a definition as true or false, she was in fact stealing from a realist metaphysics which she denied. which is what splitprimary was saying earlier: If one is a nominalist, i.e. denies the existence of natural kinds, as Objectivism does, then definitions cannot be validated as "true" or rejected as "false", and from there open the floodgates to subjectivism and slavery and everything else you have diagnosed in this thread, I think correctly.

This is your self, your identity, your nature. I don't see how that could strike you as "enslavement", as if it were a third party thing being imposed upon you from the outside, when what I'm saying is exactly the opposite of that, I'm advocating you to be free as free as possible from any third party force acting on you from the outside. I am essentially saying you should be as free as possible from anything enslaving you.

Man Pulled Over For Driving Into Oncoming Traffic Assures Officers He Is Just Living His Own Truth http://babylonbee.com/news/man-pulled-driving-oncoming-traffic-assures-officers-just-living-truth/ “I’m just doing me! Who are you to judge the path I’ve chosen?!”

Let me just explain something about is implies ought... what this phrase represents is a rejection of a basic tenet of all modern philosophy: where anything external and physical is objective, but everything pertaining to values, to the normative, is subjective. The external world is hard and definite, it can in principle be identified objectively and finally through rational inspection, and nobody can rationally disagree, because any issue can be settled by reference to reality. But values, tastes, judgements, now they are relative to each person, they are somehow indefinite and indeterminate, an entirely subjective issue where there is no right answer except by reference to your own feelings, which need no further justification. But feelings are not the ultimate ground of justification in moral reasoning in Objectivism, because emotions are not some irreducible primary, but rather emotions follow from your prior thinking. From Virtue of Selfishness: Objectivism rejects this whim-worshipping subjectivism in the realm of values. Like with the external world, moral issues in Objectivism can (and must) be settled rationally, by reference to reality. Specifically, by reference to man's nature. Most fundamentally, it's by reference to the attribute of man's life, and more generally, to man's life qua man - that is to all of the attributes of man's nature. There is an objective way to judge normative matters. A man's choices, actions, values, and goals can be judged by the standard of that which is proper to man - proper to man's life, his rationality, his sex, to every attribute of man's nature. If his choices are consistent with his nature and help him to maintain and fulfill his nature, then they are good. If his choices are contradictory to his nature or fail to live up to that standard, then they are evil. So yes, contradicting the functions of your life, the functions of your sex, the functions of your rational faculty, is evil. And not just contradicting these functions, but failing to use them as well and as fully as you possibly can is immoral, because these are the standard of what is good for you. Choosing to perform worse by that standard than you could is self-sacrifice. Holding a man to that standard is not "enslavement", this is his life, his nature, and so the issue is whether he's living well or living poorly. Man is an end in himself, his life is an end in itself, his attributes are ends in themselves. These are intrinsic values for him. Values and normative judgments about living well or living poorly are ultimately not subjective, but rather they are grounded in these objective attributes of man's nature.

By "sex" I mean the attribute, not the act.

I have another answer more specific to the original question. A machine doesn't have consciousness; it doesn't have that native access to the mental side of metaphysical reality like humans do (nor, as a part of that, the native awareness of value), and nor does it have free will. This gives machines some specific limitations in intelligence, and I wouldn't presume that this theoretical limitation will have no practical significance; I think this will imply some limitations in the abilities of machines. Because machines have no free will, they fundamentally aren't creative, nor can they think. Because they don't have consciousness, they will not understand, nor can they grasp meaning. Since they don't have awareness of meaning or value, they won't be able to create art or have emotions. Since they don't have any truly metaphysically mental existents, they won't perceive, nor have actual knowledge or concepts, and so they can't actually learn. So we will never see any mechanical philosophers, artists, lovers, or citizens. A machine will never have a "sense of life". A machine can never have personhood. And while machines may be able to imitate certain aspects of those identities, they are fundamentally limited in their ability to understand the nature or meaning of reality, the value of art or people, and the nature of morality or law, and so they will be limited in their ability to function, let alone to think creatively, in any of these regards. That being said, machines can carry out the methods of logic, and thus can do something analogous to the inductive and deductive inference that humans can do, and even form something analogous to concepts - with logical definitions, which can both be built up into hierarchies of abstraction as well as reduced to regularities in sensory data, and even have words that serve as symbols. So when it comes to the logical relationships between words, actions, and regularities in sensory data, I think machines have tremendous potential power in terms of doing something analogous to learning the logical, conceptual structure of reality, and in solving complex physical and linguistic problems on a level that we don't find anywhere else in nature except in humans. Now I say machines can do or have things "analogous" to humans in many cases. That's because for example a percept or a concept is a mental existent, it has a different metaphysical status than the sensory data and logical representations that a machine works with. The machine can only work with percepts and concepts in the logical and reductive senses, not in the metaphysical or aesthetic senses. Its learning will be restricted to the physical, reductive meaning of words, and the abstract, logical relationships between words - not the metaphysical or normative meaning of the concepts that the words stand for. A machine cannot generate the "right" answer, or tell you the way things "ought" to be, because it fundamentally doesn't have knowledge of reality or value. Fortunately, for pragmatic purposes, a machine can induce logical relationships in sensory data, it can form logical definitions from its observations, and it can from there deduce abstract logical connections, and ultimately, optimal, practical solutions to physical problems, and intelligible answers to verbal questions. When implemented with the right philosophical approach, and applied to the data of reality and of human natural language, these sort of mechanical algorithms can and will have extremely far-reaching economic, scientific, medical, and military consequences, to name a few.

I agree man is more than merely a living being. That's actually kind of my point here. Man has other attributes of his nature besides life, like sex for example, and he should act consistently with all attributes of his nature, and not contradict any of them.

I understand your position, but that's not what is implies ought means. Because an entity is a living entity, it ought to choose actions which advance its life, not actions which contradict it. That is is implies ought. You are giving a different rule: if it's chosen, then you ought to do it. But if this is a pre-moral decision (i.e. you're not choosing it because you ought to, which obviously would be circular), then on what other basis is the choice made? Wouldn't you agree that your rule is: "if you want it then you ought to do it"?

In case it wasn't clear, that's a position that I'm criticizing, along with the corollary that "self-esteem" is the purpose of sex. You do realize I was describing the proper form of happiness? My whole point is that there is something more substantive than just the emotion, something that underlies it, produces it and justifies it. That is our real moral purpose, not just the emotion. But you're reaction is just - You're telling me the emotional reward is the most important issue, but the proper form of that emotion isn't; if getting your emotional happiness conflicts with your nature, then damn your nature. Well this is exactly what I'm criticizing as subjectivism. That's exactly the position of the man who is after casual sex, for example. It doesn't matter to him how fake and corrupt the act is, he's still getting the emotional result, the feeling of self-esteem, no matter that it's counterfeit, that it's not what he really wants as a man, that it's not actually fulfilling. Aiming at the emotion as your ultimate purpose instead of at your metaphysical nature, and the consistency of your actions with that nature, is the basic mistake. Ayn Rand is saying basically that in the following quote: "It is only by accepting “man’s life” as one’s primary and by pursuing the rational values it requires that one can achieve happiness—not by taking “happiness” as some undefined, irreducible primary and then attempting to live by its guidance. If you achieve that which is the good by a rational standard of value, it will necessarily make you happy; but that which makes you happy, by some undefined emotional standard, is not necessarily the good. To take “whatever makes one happy” as a guide to action means: to be guided by nothing but one’s emotional whims. Emotions are not tools of cognition; to be guided by whims—by desires whose source, nature and meaning one does not know—is to turn oneself into a blind robot, operated by unknowable demons (by one’s stale evasions), a robot knocking its stagnant brains out against the walls of reality which it refuses to see." - Ayn Rand, The Objectivist Ethics That's a pretty good description of the concept of a "black box". In this psychological black box, the only referent is an emotion - an emotion whose "source, nature and meaning one does not know" - free from any objective, metaphysical grounding. Nevermind the countless objective references to the physical and psychological basis of the male vs. female sexual distinction, nevermind the genetically, hormonally, anatomically, and psychologically distinctive male and female forms, nevermind the complementary and unifying physiological and psychological functions that males and females serve, nevermind the nature of the sexual intercourse from which you came into existence in the first place, and for that matter the entire historical existence of homo sapiens sapiens as a sexually reproducing species, and ultimately EVERY organism on Earth that has ever lived in the last billion years as a member of a sexually reproducing species. Nevermind all of that, you have a FEELING! (and in some kind of bizarre irony for the ages, you top it all off by describing these realities of human nature as "barren and sterile".) This is doing exactly what Rand says should never be done, and it's taken so much further that she could have ever imagined. It's not just taking “whatever makes one happy” as a guide to action, but as an entire epistemology, as a metaphysics. Your method isn't to question the origin of your emotions in your prior thinking and value judgments, identifying if your views are consistent with metaphysically given reality and therefore if your feelings make sense, and changing your views and ultimately your feelings if not -- you're instead taking the emotional end-result as the metaphysically given and unchangeable, rationalizing your value judgments from which they originally came in the first place, and then attempting to redefine reality, especially the nature of man, based on your feelings. All suicidal feelings must be following from some wrong belief about themselves or the world. I gave my argument as to why: they are a living being, is implies ought, and that life is therefore the standard of value, and thus suicide, an act which cannot be supportive of life but rather flatly contradicts it, is categorically wrong. You're asserting the opposite, but I'm not seeing any counter-argument here. Which part do you disagree with? That they are living beings? That is implies ought? That life is the standard of value? That suicide flatly contradicts that standard? Whichever option you pick, you're going to be leaving Objectivism for subjectivism.

Again, you're looking to the emotion as the standard and the definition, but this is a superficial, and fundamentally subjectivist, approach. You are saying exactly the same thing as Diana Hsieh, that essentially "you can’t change the mind, but you can in fact alter the body" -- this view of one's own mind as an unreasonable force of emotions, emotions of which you can't make heads or tails, and are forced to take indiscriminately as an irreducible black box, since you've done away with any objective point of reference to ground your feelings in reality. By contrast, there are no "mere feelings" in Objectivism; emotions follow from your prior thinking and value judgments, and so can be corrupted by a mistaken belief. Your position on this can applied to anything - take being alive as your example, someone might have suicidal feelings, does that mean it's proper to declare that "in this case the psychological aspect of living can be broken", and therefore that suicide might actually be a good solution for them since that is in fact how they happen to feel now? Or isn't it worth referencing the metaphysical grounding here, that they are a living being, that is implies ought, and that life is therefore the standard of value, and that their suicidal feelings must be following from some wrong belief about themselves or the world, and that they need therapy to bring them back in line with reality, and that they should not to be helped along this mistaken, self-destructive path?

Talking about self-esteem, the final emotional result, as the purpose of sex is basically a subjectivist way to talk about the issue. All you're talking about is the emotion; you're not saying objectively, substantively what the thing is in itself. The purpose of sex, the purpose of your life, is not just the emotional end-result (self-esteem, or happiness) - not just in whatever form you can best find it. Your purpose is achieving the ideal form of your being; acting with self-consistency and in such a way as to fully express your nature. Your purpose in sex is carrying out the deepest drives of your nature, it's about self-fulfillment/self-actualization, carrying out the core functions of your being to their fullest extent. At the deepest level, the purpose of sex is the completeness of your being, in the unity of marriage, and in procreation. This is the real substance, the real purpose behind the proper form of that emotional end-result. So it's superficial to say that the purpose is the emotion, after all that is the same emotional end-result that any corrupt person seeking casual sex is ultimately after, as Rand describes in Atlas Shrugged. Rand is still a D1 integrator here (using the DIM schema), she's just one step beyond the causal sex addict. They are both looking for the same emotional end-result, and they are both doing it in a corrupt, consequentialist manner, it's just that she is looking a little deeper and longer-range than he is. She fundamentally doesn't care about the self-consistency of the action, let alone the ideal form of being. It doesn't matter to her whether the emotion is corrupt and stolen - at least not completely, that's not the most important issue. The emotional reward is still the most important issue, it still trumps the substance.

There is a fundamental problem with trying to form concepts of any kind without reference to the metaphysical as opposed to the man-made. This is the basic difference in the Objectivist and Aristotelian approach as opposed to nominalism. On the basis of a materialist metaphysics and a nominalist epistemology, all concepts are simply man-made categories of convenience. They don't actually mean anything beyond a handy, stipulated point of reference, with no wider significance or implication. The result is that people can't think on the conceptual level; they can only talk about bundles of properties, and what they may or may not be correlated with. They can't talk anymore about the nature of Man and his identity or his actions, and thereby draw any universal aesthetic, moral, or political conclusions. When you've reached the point of being unable to define man according to his nature, you're are at the point where you've logically disintegrated any universal human justification for individual rights, Objectivist virtues, objective aesthetics - any normative philosophy at all outside of your emotional whims (of which you can't make heads or tails, and are forced to take indiscriminately as an irreducible black box, since you've done away with any objective point of reference to ground your feelings in reality). If that isn't a disturbing enough consequence for you to reconsider, then consider the following. There's nothing objective or Objectivist left remaining. This is instead an Irrationalist, Romantic, Nietzschean philosophy of: Nominalism in epistemology - where "identity" is made up, and metaphysics doesn't matter Nihilism and relativism in ethics - a free-for-all of emotional whims, beyond any objective reference to good and evil The will to power in politics - without any concept of individual rights based in a universal human nature And with that philosophy, we enter the world where "truth", "reason", "good and evil", or "rights", are made up words that ultimately mean whatever it's convenient for them to mean, whatever best serves the will to power of yourself, or of the identity group to which you assign yourself. If you want to see what kind of world this leads you to, look at Marxism and communism, where "truth" is whatever the Party says is the truth, "reason" is whatever argument the Party agrees with, "good and evil" is whatever serves or threatens the good of the Party, and your "rights" are limited to whatever speech or behavior is approved by the Party. This is exactly the world that the establishment Left intends for us: cultural marxism, codified in law, and enforced by the police power of government. This is exactly the kind of world you are heading toward when you evade the necessity of a metaphysical basis for your concepts.