Doug Morris

Invalid. COVID-19 kills a lot of people that would otherwise have gone on living. Official counts are a much better indicator than your method. Excess deaths are counted by comparing total deaths from year to year. If a disproportionate number of deaths are of old people, that does not change the total number of deaths. And some younger people die too. But they do slow it down and reduce the risk.

OK, unnecessary risk is not enough by itself. We need to consider the degree of risk, the degree of directness of the risk, and the nature of the countermeasures. Your examples seem to be less direct creators of risk than the risk in breathing out air that may well contain dangerous viruses. We need to carefully protect parental rights. But a sufficiently egregious case of bad parenting might justify someone suing for custody of the children. We would have to consider the degree of fire risk and the availability of other ways of cooking. Any restrictions should be based on actual aggressive actions, not on fear.

What taboo? Are there any laws against it? Have any scientists been persecuted for investigating free will?

This also applies to verbal definition. Axiomatic concepts like consciousness must be defined ostensively. For a fuller explanation, I recommend Ayn Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, especially the section on axiomatic concepts.

People have free will. Each individual has the power to choose good or evil. Unfortunately, some choose evil, at least some of the time. The things you mention in point 1 of your O.P. can influence this choice, but do not determine it. It ultimately comes down to the individual's choice. Thanks to Christianity, and more recently to Kant, bad ideas have dominated Western civilization. This makes it harder for people to make good choices and easier for them to make bad ones, both directly and because of the resulting conditions.

Recognizing consciousness in oneself is implicit in every act of cognition. Thus any attempt to deny or question it is self-contradictory. We summarize this by saying consciousness is axiomatic. Thus recognizing consciousness in oneself precedes any proof or explanation of anything. This is implicit at first, but should eventually become explicit. Inferring consciousness in others is different. So is scientific study aimed at understanding how consciousness is possible and how it works.

The shorter a summary you boil something down into, the more you leave out that might be better explained. It is possible to boil Objectivism down into one word. In English, this makes it an imperative sentence. An imperative sentence may be addressed to oneself, but should be explained to others rather than presented as an order. This one-word sentence sounds like it was stolen from IBM. It relegates important things to the level of omitted details.

No. But there is a right to restrict reckless, drunk, or unqualified driving for the protection of all non-hermits.

Anyone can and should be 100% ethical all the time, even if few are. It is vitally necessary to have an ideal for inspiration and guidance.

Anybody who holds such a belief is blatantly irrational. I don't know how many there are. There seem to be some people who make the opposite error, believing that the leading, successful, entrepreneurial businessman (and most are men) can do no right. Certainly the altruist morality has poisoned many people's minds against businesspersons.

If a hemophiliac is injured in a car crash and dies from the injuries, but a non-hemophiliac would probably have survived, then the hemophiliac has died of injuries from a car crash and should be included in traffic death statistics. The hemophilia was a contributing factor, but the car crash was the primary and immediate cause of death. If A has a serious case of mononucleosis but is expected to fully recover, and B shoots A through the spleen, and A dies from the combination but might well have survived the gunshot wound if there were no mononucleosis, then A has died of a gunshot wound and should be included in gun death statistics. Also, B is guilty of murder. The mononucleosis was a contributing factor, but the gunshot was the primary and immediate cause of death. How many people die where COVID-19 is the only thing contributing to the death is irrelevant to how deadly COVID-19 is.

The New Deal was not the best way to fight Communism. It was not best morally and it was not best economically.

One problem with both slogans is that they treat being dead and being Red as the only alternatives. It was obvious even then that they were not.

This does not make it right. During World War II, the U.S. Gov't did put terrible restrictions on the liberty of people of Japanese origin or ancestry. Are you going to defend that too?

It is legitimate to dig into these questions. It is not legitimate to blow them off.

Why not apply this to COVID-19? There are multiple ways to reduce the spread. They are not mutually exclusive.

Operating a motor vehicle is not physical force. Doing so recklessly is, even if the driver means no harm. What about reducing the spread?

No. I am saying that infection is physical harm and that creating an unnecessary risk of physical harm can rise to the level of an initiation of physical force.

All significant risks should be considered. The risk of death caused by economic damage is much more relevant to lockdowns than to vaccine mandates or mask mandates. We should not treat all people as being at risk because some are, and I have never advocated doing so. Even if only one person is put at risk, that can still be an initiation of physical force against that person. Any vaccine mandate should allow medical exceptions.

Behaviors can't be "conditioned". Hormones enter into our emotions. We can and should use reason to decide what to think and do.

It is also misleading to say behaviors are conditioned.

Our pleasure-pain mechanism is built in, but it does not control our actions or tell us exactly what to do. It is misleading to call it "instinct".

Emotions.

You're welcome.

This refers to competition for mates, not to competition for food or to anything that could be considered economic. Among human beings who make proper use of their faculty of reason, which male gets to mate with which female is decided by the voluntary choice of the female, not by a physical fight. This refers to how well organisms are adapted to their environment, not to a literal fight. (Font enlargement added.)