Bobby66

But could you uphold that your view if you some day turned blind and deaf by desease or if you were born this way? You couldn't create the means for your existance and would or should die then, as you are saying.

Well, maybe you're right, maybe I should read some of Rand's philosophy first. But are you sure Peikhoff's book is the right one to start with? How about a book from Rand herself? How about "Philosophy - Who Needs It?"? Wouldn't that be better? Or should I be reading "Atlas Shrugged" at the same time? [Removed excessive quoting. - GC]

Ingenious! It not only points out the immorality, but does so by illuminating the fact that others are being made slaves by the government, principally just as in slavery. Any advocate of socialism that condemns slavery will be provoced by this and forced to reflect.

That's right, but adding that all people are selfish in nature, i.e. they value their own life each, one could also continue arguing that not all people need the constitution of rights as long as they know they are protected by a group large enough to defend them against enemies. But that would lead to a hobbesian world picture. What about the human drive for rightousness and selfjustification, the desire for "freedom of guilt" (with being guilty = having destroyed his means of survival)? Would that be an alternative?

Go vote, that's my advice. It should be in your own rational self interests to have them violated as less as possible. The initiation of force has already occured by putting evil parties on display for election. You have the right to defend your life. I think that's what the Objectivists would say.

Let me get something straight: When I say "reason", I mean logical and factual thinking alone. This doesn't include any feeling of "good" or "bad". Only the ability that e.g. enables you to solve a mathematical task at school. By the quality of experience, i.e. the quality of the sensation I feel. This can be pleasant in many ways or painful. And without emotional response it would all be boring, wouldn't it? This makes the emotion the main thing, the essence of the enjoyment. What would everything be without the emotional sensation? Uninteresting. Talking about identification prior to emotional response, I can't remember to have had things like "clear cut face", "blonde hair", "brunette hair", "silky skin", "tiny lips" or anything else directly in my brain before feeling attracted by a beautiful girl, all though all these things more or less have often been neccessary for the sensation to occur. It is the image as a whole that causes the sensation, without being aware of anything in abstraction in my brain. There you are, "by means of a sensation".

Local elections are also about to happen in the German state of North Rhein Westphalia (NRW) on May 22nd. The situations can very well be compared to the one source described about Croatia: High taxes, wasteful subsidies into hard coal extraction in stead of lowering the taxes and letting the people decide for themselves what to spend their money on. And all this mainly because the Social Democrats (SPD, the party that also forms our current government) are in charge of NRW. But as actual figures point out, the SPD is about to loose that election in favour of a Christian Democrat / Liberal Democrat (FDP / CDU) coalition, and with that, the last and longest enduring (39 years) socialist stronghold in Germany will collapse, since all other states have already thrown off the SPD in their local elections. This will clear the way for the final removal of our national government in next year's national elections. But, similarly to the situation in Croatia, an FDP/CDU lead NRW will be just the lesser evil. The only party (the FDP, Liberal Democrats) that wants to eliminate all subsidies on hard coal extraction is just a small party and won't have the final say in the coalition with the CDU, who only wants to cut that subsidies in half. And above all, due to our constitutional "social market economy", we'll never have a government that fully respects human rights.

I realize the lack of legality for utalitarianism as a political system. My quotations are not meant to determine what political system we are supposed to be living in, but to point out human motivations for their actions and their subjective thinking. But what do you mean by reason being king? King of what? Surely not of your motivation. What do you think tells you what you value? Reason tells you what is true and false, but "interesting" or "worth pursuing" is a voice that is expressed by the emotion. Reason is a means to happiness, i.e. pleasant emotions, but not happiness itself. I surely wouldn't be trying to be succesful at something without the outlook for pleasant sensations as fun, self-esteem etc. in the future.

Right.

My position on this is rather a positive hedonist one, but to understand that you must apply the meaning derived from my wikipedia excerpt, not "selflessness". This, and not only selflessness, is the meaning applied in many circles that consider themselves "pro altruist". I think it's chiefly this semantical confusion that causes unneccessary quarrels between people. Of course there are people that think you should suffer for the sake of suffering, which we would surely both view as complete nonsense.

Does this question refer to both of my sentences or only the first? In case it's the first sentence: You answered the question yourself. The difference is that my view is a view, that is to say a judgement on how far politics can be morally allowed to interfere with private life, not an idea, not a guide for live. The latter is a private issue, where I can at most give advise.

How come? If their main objective is "liberty", their answer should be just the same, since the liberty of a person ends where the liberty of another one begins. How could they claim to be respecting "liberty" if they actually didn't wanna make the effords to grant it? Such kinda "liberty" would be just a wishy-washy conception, which may be the main reason for its survival on the political landscape.

They would have to obey the laws based on reason objectively and make the final official judgement on whether any right has been broken or not. Again, they would have to obey reasonable laws based on objectivist principles.

That sounds logical to me. So that means, within a country, if someone meets you on the streets and threatens to kill you the next day, you do have a right to kill him first, or don't you? Because if you don't, that is to say, if it requires a judgement by a governmental representative, then the same rule must be applied internationally, the U.S. government being like the representative of a society in the world. The U.S. would have obey a world government, the U.N., or am I wrong?

But libertarianism isn't a philosophy, is it? It's jst a political attitude. So in the field of politics, libertarians draw the same conclusions as objectivists because the libertarian principle (liberty) implies everything an objectivist can expect from a government, though libertarianism may have no philosophical basis, so it differs in private issues, right?