Evangelical Capitalist

There was another thread on exactly the same question, in its essentials, just last week. I'll summarize my answer here. There are a number of reasons why honesty, under normal circumstances, is self-interested. (By normal, I mean apart from the "inquisitive murderer" or similar scenarios where honesty leads to the betrayal of a value rather than its preservation.) One such reason is that anything unearned is never a rational value. Another is that "getting away with it" typically requires faking reality, unless you live in a society with no regard for property rights, as your "legal loophole" example implies, in which case rational existence isn't possible. Even if you legally get away with it, anyone who knows about it will judge you accordingly and will keep their dealings with you to a minimum. The alternative, again, is faking reality in their minds and, in the long run, in your own. Another reason is that Objectivism is not pragmatism: we hold to principles, not range-of-the-moment impulses. (I’ll repeat my recommendation of Dr. Peikoff’s lecture, “Why Act on Principle?”) In principle, honesty is an extension of rationality, which is the primary virtue required for life.

I don't think anyone has really addressed the main point here: namely, why is it self-interested not to initiate force in the above scenario? Why is it self-interested to uphold one's principles? As has been pointed out, in an Objectivist society there most certainly would be the threat of repercussion from the government. Since the man is presumably not omniscient, he cannot know in advance whether he'll "get away with it." (Note your opponent's assumption that if the man can get away with it, then it would be in his self-interest, i.e. the moral and the practical are opposites.) Clearly, if he can't get away with it, then no one would argue that his action was self-interested. But in order to get away with it, he has to create and maintain a false reality in the minds of everyone he deals with. He is forced to depend on their ignorance. He has to live in fear of their discovery of reality. Inevitably, to maintain such an illusion indefinitely, he must himself evade the underlying reality. The surest way to maintain an illusion in the minds of others is to believe it one's self. Since Objectivism holds that a genuinely self-interested person must live only with a full recognition of reality, an evader cannot be said to be acting in his own self-interest. Another reason that the initiation of force is never a self-interested act is that nothing which is unearned can ever be of value. For more on this, I'll just second the reccommendations above, partiularly "The Objectivist Ethics" and "The Conflicts of Men's Interests," both from The Virtue of Selfishness. As for never sacrificing one's principles, there are epistemological reasons for this. Dr. Peikoff's lecture, "Why act on Principle?" which is available at aynrand.org (free registration required), is an excellent discussion of the reasons for this.

I've skimmed this thread, and while its possible I've missed something, I'm having difficulty making heads or tails of the nature of jrs's objection to concept stealing as a logical fallacy. From what I can gather, there are two points, at least, on which he objects: 1) A stolen concept is necessarily the result of an antecedent fallacy in someone's argument/chain of logic. 2) A stolen concept doesn't prove that the conclusion thus arrived at is false. Regarding number 2, no logical fallacy accomplishes this. Any fallacy merely proves that the form of the argument is invalid, that the conclusion does not necessarily follow from the premises. An invalid argument can arrive at a correct conclusion. a. Birds can fly. b. Pigs are not birds. c. Therefore, pigs cannot fly. This is an invalid argument. It contains a fallacy, though I'm not sufficiently versed in the art of formal logic to name it; perhaps someone else can help me out. Nevertheless, its conclusion is true. Using your example: The person making the argument is free, even after acknowledging the fallacy, to maintain his conclusion on different grounds, but he cannot cling to his invalid argument. In the "All property is theft" example, even if one ackowledges that the concept of theft is reliant upon the validity of the concept of property, one can still attempt to deny the validity of property on other grounds. Which leads me to address #1: You may or may not be correct in that a stolen concept must be the result of another, previous fallacy. Regardless, any argument which leads to a stolen concept must be invalid. (Again, this doesn't automatically prove the conclusion wrong.) The statement, "All property is theft," (which is not an argument at all, but merely an assertion), must be the result of an invalid argument, if it is backed by any argument at all. The reason we know this is because the statement uses the derivitive concept "theft" to deny the validity of its antecedant concept, "property". That is the stolen concept. The stolen concept is the pattern by which we identify that the statement is invalid, and that any argument behind it must be invalid. The stolen concept is the fallacy we identify. P.S. I'm thinking of forming a group: Leos Against Astrology. Anyone wanna join?

How many times do I have to say this? No one is waiving their right to life. I agree entirely with that. I'm arguing that the attempt to waive such right, which is implicit in the agreement of the combatants to a match, such as is under discussion here, is invalid. Here's my argument: 1) The question, "Should a deathmatch, to which both participants have consented, be illegal?" comes down to the question, "Does such a match violate anyone's rights?" Agreed so far? 2) The agreement is, in part, an attempt by each combatant to say, "Don't hold this person legally responsible for my death if he wins this match," in exchange for similar license in return. This is an attempt by each to waive his right to life. How else would you characterize it? 3) This agreement is held, by those in this discussion supporting the legality of such a match, as the instrument by which either combatant is absolved of violating the other's rights. Every such arguement amounts to, "They each agreed, of their own free will, to enter this combat, and so no one's rights have been violated." No one, I presume, would be supporting this without the consent of both parties. 4) For reasons already discussed, the attempt to waive one's right to life is invalid. The only way to lose that right is to violate the rights of others. The only way you can argue that no one's rights are violated is is if both lose their rights. But this begs the question of how those rights were lost: by violating rights. 5) By the above, someone's rights must be violated. The act of violating rights is what laws are intended to punish. As such, I see no reason why this shouldn't be made illegal. The notion that either combatant is merely "risking" their life is context dropping. Why are they risking their life? In order to commit murder. The entire point of this match is that someone will die. It's not a chance or a risk that someone will die. It's a certainty. At the end, one will be dead, and the other will be responsible for that death. To add one more element to the discussion, what about dueling as a form of conflict resolution? Should that be legal if accepted by both parties? I see little difference. I dislike the nanny state as much as anyone else. That is not what is under discussion here. It about whether this violates anyone's rights, and I don't see any legitimate argument that it doesn't.

I believe that was the point I was attempting to make. Such a waiver could not be considered valid. Consider the situation after the fact: the victor has been arrested, and you're the prosecutor, attempting to decide whether murder charges should be filed. He claims that he did not violate the other man's rights, because he's got this agreement that both men signed beforehand. But since we agree that the right to life cannot be waived, that agreement could not be considered a valid defense. The only other conceivable defense would be that the act was committed in self-defense, but that doesn't hold much water either. It would have been self-defense never to have entered into such an agreement in the first place. If you want to use the "initiation of force" principle, force was initiated by a volitional act of both parties. As such, neither can claim self-defense. The comparison of this situation to assisted suicide is completely specious. In the case of assisted suicide, the person who dies wants to die. In this case, neither combatant wants to die; they want to kill the other.

Whoever winds up dead has certainly been coerced, and had his right to life violated. The question is whether the contract signed by the individuals should be regarded as valid. The contract is essentially a waiver, for the duration of the fight, of each participant's right to his own life. But since the right to enter into a contract is dependent on the right to life, such a contract would be a literal implementation of a "stolen concept," and as such, invalid. All that is needed to make this kind of fight illegal are laws against murder, because that's all this would be.

You're absolutely correct. Existence is identity ("Identity" being Rand's term for "essence" or "whatness"). To exist is to exist as something. An entity cannot exist as nothing in particular. Since the Objectivist theory of concepts holds that the meaning of a concept lies in the set of entities which it subsumes, it is impossible to separate the concept of existence from any particular existents, as you correctly point out. (I would suggest reading ITOE for more on this, except that I haven't read it myself. I have read Dr. Peikoff's essay, "The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy," which covers, at least implicitly, much of the Objectivist theory of concepts. So I can recommend that.) This does not mean, however, that we cannot know that something exists prior to learning what it is. In fact, we must know that something is, before we can discover what it is. Our knowledge of any particular entity, or of existence, does not come in a single, blinding flash of intuition. Learning and discovery are not automatic processes; they are volitional. Since Objectivists hold to the primacy of existence, and not of conciousness, we do not confuse the operation of our consciousness with the nature of the reality which our conscioiusness perceives. That we are aware of an entity's existence prior to our discovery of the particulars of its identity, does not mean that existence precedes identity.

I was raised in a nominally Christian household. My mother got us up to go to church and Sunday school as often as she could manage. My father is, as my mother once described him, a "closet-case atheist." We usually said grace at the dinner table. Religion was part of our lives, but not a way of life. More lip service than practice, really. I was never made to sit and memorize Bible verses. Nor was I exposed to the afore-mentioned epistemological corruption of things like, "Who made the sea?" I remember thinking, when I was about 10 or 12 years old, that faith was a pretty flimsy basis on which to accept the existence of God. (I may have held that view earlier, but this is the earliest time I remember identifying the thought explicitly.) This thought was followed hard upon by the thought that I must be morally defective if I couldn’t believe in God on faith alone. I spent the next 15 years, give or take, swinging wildly back and forth between belief, and non-belief. I accepted the notion that God was necessary to have any moral values at all, and a total lack of values was not something I was prepared to accept. So being unable and unwilling to accept God on the basis of faith alone, I searched for a reason to believe. I tried, as drewfactor put it, to defend faith with reason. I won’t go into the details of that search, except to say that it was long, frequently without clear direction, and of course, ultimately fruitless. When I believed most strongly, it never lasted very long; when I didn’t believe, I had that lingering sense of moral inadequacy. Then in the summer of 2003, I discovered Objectivism. I had heard of Objectivism in college, but never bothered to check into what it was all about. I had decided that Ayn Rand’s novels would be a good reading project for a while and had just finished We the Living and Anthem and was about to begin The Fountainhead. My real exposure to the philosophy as such was the introductory lecture by Gary Hull through the ARI website. Of course it took me a few months to really begin integrating the information, during which time I also finished The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. I remember very distinctly finally get my mind around the Objectivist argument for atheism (or rather the epistemological principles which lead to atheism, since an "argument for atheism" is really superfluous) and the foundations of ethics, independent of any form of mysticism or need for faith. It was as if a huge burden had been lifted. I didn’t have to believe, or pretend to believe as more often was the case, and I didn’t have to feel guilty about it. I now find that period of my life mostly just embarrassing. The ideas I held, and the arguments I engaged in, now seem absurd. I can’t say I don’t understand how anyone can hold those ideas; most people rarely examine their own beliefs and premises in a critical manner, but I expect better of myself.

I'm not sure in which forum this should go, but this seems as good as any. Cox and Forkum: Pain and Suffering I don't know what I can add to this. It's all right there. Altruism is anti-life. All I can think of is some idiot Catholic (no offense intended to any Catholics that happen to be reading this) saying, "Yes, that's absolutely right! We shouldn't want to be well." I seem to recall the Pope complaining a few years ago about a "Culture of Death." Now the problem is too much concern for health, i.e. for life. Life, apparently is only for those who don't yet have it, embryos and fetuses (feti?) and whatever. The living are too preoccupied with it. Here's the worst part of the article that Cox and Forkum reference: "Precisely in the handicap, in the disease, in the pain, in old age, in dying and death one can, instead, perceive the truth of life in a clearer way... The pope's message is 'suffering is part of life and has meaning.'" There you have it: malevolent universe, worship of death, of pain, of suffering, worship of evil for being evil, hatred of the good for being the good. It's not easy to put that much evil in two sentences. How anyone can listen to this and not run from the Church in abject terror, I don't know. (Proof that we have no instinct for self-preservation.) Everytime I see something like this, I'm reminded of Rand's critics who accuse her of setting up altruism as a straw-man, as being something it's not. I'm reminded of the fact that she was absolutely right about all of it, and that those critics don't have a leg to stand on.

I'm certainly glad to see that this actually got published somewhere. I'm honestly surprised that a mainstream newspaper would have printed what most would certainly consider a controvercial, even heretical (which, of course, it is), view of the 10 Commandments. From a moral standpoint, they usually get a free pass. The only question for most people is whether their public display constitutes an "establishment" of religion. I'm a little puzzled by the "Special to The Courier-Journal" under Binswanger's byline. This is an ARI Op-Ed released recently. (Here's the link.) Possibly they're the only paper in the country to have printed it.

Just what threat, specifically, is posed when a kid writes about zombies? This sounds like some politicians overreacted to Columbine, and passed an absurd law in the name of "doing something." They set what amounts to an arbitrary standard of determining what constitutes a threat, rather than make the police actually work (and think!) in order to find and stop genuine threats. But hey, we're all "doing something," and that makes it okay, right? (Forigve my sarcasm.)

Is it considerd cheating to look at the source code? Because that's how Bill Gates really would have solved it. Took me maybe 2 minutes.

A few weeks ago, maybe a month, Time magazine had a special report on happiness and what makes people happy. In reading the various articles, it became clear, though never stated, that the best correlation to happiness was what I would describe as the strength of one's values. Since most non-religious people are also largely amoral (Objectivists excluded, of course), and conversely those with strong values tend to get them from their religion, I don't find it surprising that the academic research has shown a correlation between religiosity and happiness, and by extension between altruism and happiness. An interesting topic might be to discover the extent to which these two, religiosity and altuism, have been mistakenly used as surrogates for strength of values. There was also an article in the magazine that pointed out that those with colltivistic value systems (the article was discussing religion specifically, but it could apply to other systems as well), might be more inclined to say that they're happy, because they feel that any hint of dissatisfaction would reflect poorly on the group, which of course they regard as more important than their own personal happiness.

I found this rather horrific article at DhimmiWatch.com, about calls for the incorporation of shari'a law into the Canadian legal system. What struck me about this was the implication of "frredom of religion" as pertaining, fundamentally, to the community as opposed to the individual, and the kind of conclusions that flow, plausibly, from such a premise. It's easy sometimes to read Ayn Rand discuss this kind of phenomenon and think, "Well, she's just exaggerating." But when you read something like this, it becomes pretty clear. It provides an outstanding example of the fact that she was absolutely right about the results of collectivizing rights: that they become the rights of some at the expense of others, or worse, the right to violate the rights of others. It also drives home why the libertarian approach to rights, i.e. without any basis in moral principles, is intellectually bankrupt. To combat something this vicious requires a thorough knowledge and defense of the nature of rights, something sorely lacking in today's political discourse, and which the libertarians certainly don't bring to the table. Lastly, and in that same vein, it points how how desperately we need Ayn Rand's work.

I'm guessing there's going to be a lot of New Jersians going out-of-state for their plastic surgery. Anyone remember the luxury tax that put the domestic yacht-building industry out-of-business? Same thing. If I were a plastic surgeon in New Jersey, I'd be getting licensed in Pennsylvania, New York, Delaware or Maryland, 'cause that's where the business will go.

"Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country." - George S. Patton, 1944 "This above all,--to thine own self be true; And it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man." - William Shakespeare, Hamlet, I.iii.78-80 ...and also from the Bard: "What a peice of work is man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!" - Hamlet, II.ii.309-314

I don't think Objectivism fits within that definition, or any other dictionary definition for that matter. While the second half, concerning the basis of knowledge in "observed objects and events" accurately describes Objectivism, the first half is subject to some interpretation, namely the phrase "all reality". Objectivism certainly considers free will to be real but not external to the mind. After perusing some other dictionary definitions, one other variation came up: "a philosophical belief that moral truths or external objects exist independently of the individual mind or perception." (MSN Encarta, AskOxford.com) This most certainly does not describe Objectivism, since "moral truths" pertain only to choices, which is a function of the mind. Of course, this does not mean that moral truths cannot be validated by reference to an objective standard. It's dangerous to rely too greatly on dictionary definitions when discussing anything related to Ayn Rand.

I like those better.

How about this: 1) The John Galt Line 2) The Motor 3) Atlantis These are the main foci of each section of the book, respectively, are they not?

Someone is: Jihad Watch

When I first read the opening paragraph of this story, I thought they were joking. After reading the rest, I'm not so sure. New Dietary Guidelines Issued Was it Ayn Rand, or am I thinking of someone else, who wrote about the left's "worship fo the primitive?" For a little comic relief, here's Cox & Forkum's take on the story: Caveman Diet

I'm still rooting for the Colts!

I've seen it twice, mostly because I like Sergio Leone's westerns. I thought it was awful. I'm a fan of The Godfather (haven't seen Goodfellas or Casino), but this one just didn't do it for me. The plot was pointless and plodding. None of the characters were likable. The main character (DeNiro) seemed to be just "along for the ride," going wherever and doing whatever his friends and his carnal urges demanded. The ending was implausible to say the least. Maybe someone could explain this movie to me, and give me a newfound appreciation for it. (I'm already aware of the "dream" hypothesis.)

Sowell makes a good argument against gay marriage, but it is, in fact, an argument against all marriage, at least insofar as it is a political institution. His justification for applying the restrictions of marriage to heterosexual couples consists of, "Society asserts its stake in the decisions made by restricting the couples' options." Yet, what "society's stake" is, I do not know, nor does he explain. Looks like a hidden collectivist premise to me. I think he's right on the money when he says that what the gay activists really want is not some kind of rights, hitherto allegedly denied them, but a stamp of social approval. More collectivist premises. Since approval is an evaluation, and therefore an individual act of choice, it is not the government's to hand out.

I've seen this book, on coffee tables and in bookstores, all too frequently. Churches around here, and elsewhere I expect, have held "40 Days of Purpose" programs and such, based on Warren's book. Like you, I read the sample pages on Amazon and came to the same conclusion: this book is evil. Next time I see someone claiming, "Altruism doesn't mean all the nasty things Ayn Rand said it does," I need direct them no further than this book. It's pure self-abnegation.