I have subscribed to your publication, The Objective Standard, for the last four years. However, I will not renew my subscription on account of your recent denigration of Leonard Peikoff. Below I describe what I consider to be the more relevant facts which led me to this action. However, out of respect for this forum’s policies, I have edited out most of my analysis and all of my evaluations of those facts, which I suspect would get me punished or banned if I included them. If you, or anyone else, wants to see my full argument, you can contact me through my personal website.
1. Does Peikoff provide evidence to support his conclusion?
In your article, Justice for John P. McCaskey, you claim that:
I believe this is your main objection: that Peikoff fails to provide any evidence for his moral condemnation of McCaskey. However, in the email to Arline Mann, Peikoff emphasizes the point that while serving as a member of the ARI board of directors, McCaskey was simultaneously denouncing an ARI-sponsored book that is not only based on ideas formulated by the founder of ARI, but also approved of by him. This is a piece of evidence that Peikoff provides before his moral condemnation in the next paragraph, and immediately before his conclusion that either he goes or McCaskey goes. Yet it is the only substantive part of the email which you do not quote or mention in your article.
2. Should we assume that Peikoff has no evidence?
After claiming that Peikoff provides no evidence, you then write this:
If I understand correctly, here you assume to be true that which you admit cannot be known--because it only exists in Peikoff’s mind. Put another way, Peikoff has not revealed his evidence publicly, and he ignores your private emails, so therefore you are correct in concluding that no such evidence exists. And since, on this view, Peikoff is morally condemning McCaskey without possessing a shred of evidence, he must therefore be acting nonobjectively and unjustly. This is the assumption-based evaluation you make of the man who “fueled [your] intellectual development more than anyone except Ayn Rand.”
3. What does “good reason” mean?
You repeatedly use the phrase "good reason" as perhaps a synonym for evidence. I note that you only use this phrase when referring specifically to Peikoff's alleged non-evidence regarding his moral judgment of McCaskey. At other times in the article, mostly while making general statements, you prefer the word evidence.
For example, you make this general statement about arbitrary claims:
And then in the very next sentence, you make a similarly formulated statement, only it is applied specifically to Peikoff:
It appears that the word evidence suddenly becomes “good reason” when you denigrate Peikoff. Perhaps this is done only for stylistic purposes. But if that is the case, then it seems very strange that “good reason” is reserved solely for Peikoff and appears in none of the general statements.
MisterSwig got a reaction from West in An Open Letter To Craig Biddle