khaight

A proper constitution lays out the purpose and function of the government. This both limits and enables -- it prevents the government from violating individual rights, and it enables the government to protect individual rights from violations by other individuals (and other governments, but that should go without saying). Certainly a pure majoritarian democracy means a lack of support for rights, because such a system allows the government to do anything that is validated by the support of 50% + 1 of the population. Such a government has no principled limit on its authority. For the last several decades the term "democracy" has been used as a package deal to combine majoritarianism with selected elements of a free society, such as freedom of speech, gender equality, religious toleration and the like. The effect of this has been to conflate majority rule with freedom, with disasterous results. Democracy, per se, is really a side issue. The fundamental in politics is the principle of individual rights. Everything else revolves around that. Voting has value only insofar as it contributes to the stability, legitimacy and effectiveness of a rights-protecting government.

I think Arrow's theorem demonstrates that there is no way to 'winnow' a multiple candidate field down to just two without violating at least one seemingly desirable characteristic of an ideal voting system. The real key, as has been noted by multiple people in this thread, is a constitutional restriction on the powers of government. That reduces the stakes of voting to the point where 'good enough' is good enough. Robert Tracinski has made an interesting point about one benefit of requiring some kind of voting -- elections require politicians to make a case in support of themselves and their policies to the public. In other words, voting imposes a structural requirement for debate, which provides at least an opportunity for widespread rational discussion of issues. Without voting, politicians have no need to try to convince the public of the merits of their policies, which means they have no need to argue for them. In this sense, political systems that incorporate some kind of voting requirement have a place for reason (or at least the possibility of reason) built into them in a way that non-voting systems do not. They implicitly acknowledge the importance of persuading the governed that they ought to support the government.

I don't think Objectivism has a specific position on voting as an element in the government of a free society. Objectivism defends the view that the only proper function of government is to protect individual rights; the question of how exactly government should be structured to achieve that end is left to political science. I'm personally dubious that unanimous voting would actually serve to protect individual rights, as it would allow would-be criminals to cripple attempts at effective law enforcement. Majority voting on *everything* is clearly hostile to individual rights, but a government that is constitutionally limited to protecting rights could use majority voting as a way to select which of a number of legitimate options should be used to achieve that end.

I've always been amused by the logical contrapositive of Clarke's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced." (Bonus exercise: spot the logical fallacy and win no prize.)

I have a copy. I've tried to read it but couldn't get past the first 60-70 pages. The style is rambling. The author is apparently from the 'non-judgmental' camp of semi-Randians; he seems to consider the Branden's accounts of Rand's life reliable and takes a number of IMHO unjustified potshots at Leonard Peikoff. I'll probably take another whack at it someday, but not soon. That said, since I haven't yet read the whole book I can't provide an opinion on its overall merit. There may well be valuable nuggets of insight to be had in later chapters.

Some are, some aren't. If the broader question is whether it is moral to hold a government job, the answer is that it depends on the exact nature of the job and your reasons for holding it. Some jobs, e.g. policeman, are part of the legitimate function of government. Others, like public university college professor, aren't part of government's legitimate function but are still legitimate job roles -- i.e. there would be university professors in a free society, just not working for the government. Still others are inherently illegitimate -- like business regulator and tax collector. "Benefit" in what sense? Objectivism holds that the only proper function of government is the protection of individual rights. You don't benefit the million by violating their rights. Well, God doesn't have an identity because there is no such thing as God. Existence is identity, ergo non-existence is non-identity. Certainly the fact that those who allege God's existence can't provide a non-contradictory description of his alleged nature is one of the many reasons for concluding that there is no such thing. 'Identity' is a metaphysical concept; it is the nature of a thing that exists. 'Concept' is epistemological; it refers to a mental integration, an identification of a kind of relationship between the identities of various existents.

Zip is entirely correct. Countries don't have rights -- individuals have rights. Normally, it is the task of a government to protect the rights of its citizens. So your question really reduces to two other questions: does the government of the other country act on the basic principle of protecting the rights of its citizens, and does the extraction operation violate any of its citizens' rights? I think the former question is more fundamental -- if the other government respects the principle of rights, why would it refuse to extradite a known murderer? And if the other government doesn't respect the principle of rights, then it has no basis for complaint against the actions of the government that does.

It depends on context. What would be the costs of such an invasion? Certainly being forcibly retrieved and tried doesn't violate the rights of the criminal. A real-world example of a similar scenario is the Israeli extraction of Adolf Eichmann from Argentina. The Israeli government captured him in a covert operation and moved him to Jerusalem, where he was eventually tried for war crimes and executed.

And is anybody saying that commercials like these are sufficient to win the battle for the culture? No. Don't move the goal posts. The claim to which I object is specifically that the positive values mentioned in these commericals are "wasted" because the company whose product is being advertised does not live up to them. These commercials are essentially neutral with regard to integration. What they do is present a single good value -- selfishness -- in a positive light. They help to 'detoxify' the idea of selfishness in the culture, and in doing so they provide hooks which people like us can use. If somebody points out that the company doesn't live up to the ideas, that's an opportunity to point out how much better off they'd be if they did.

I don't think that most people who are exposed to the commercials are going to analyze them on that level. We're not talking about a speech that advocates a complex, integrated series of ideas -- we're talking about commercial taglines.

I don't think an Objectivist could be happily married to a person who wasn't fundamentally rational and value-oriented. Irrationality, mysticism and altruism are too psychologically pervasive -- they touch everything, and couldn't be compartmentalized. But not everybody who is rational and value-oriented is an Objectivist.

Are they? They're out there, on the airwaves, being presented in a positive light as an element of mainstream culture. We're trying to erode a mountain here, and every drop of water helps.

Peikoff's website is, oddly enough, http://www.peikoff.com/.

Yes. Specifically, the philosophical principles of Objectivism. If you understand the principles, accept them, and act on them, then you're an Objectivist. Yes, one can disagree with Rand and still be an Objectivist -- as long as one doesn't disagree with her philosophical principles. Her views on psychology, for example, are not a part of Objectivism. One must also draw a distinction between a principle and the application of that principle to concrete situations. One could agree with the philosophical principle of individual rights, for example, while differing on the question of how best to move the United States back towards respecting that principle in its political policy. Those are the two key things to understand: what is and is not part of philosophy, and what is and is not a principle. I will say this: your reluctance to call yourself an Objectivist while there are still areas of the philosophy which you either know you don't grasp or know you don't agree with speaks well of your basic intellectual honesty. There's nothing wrong with saying "I agree with Ayn Rand on many points, but disagree with her on others, and here's why." Some of the best Objectivists I know -- Paul Hsieh, for one -- spent many years in the 'sympathetic non-Objectivist' camp while they chewed over the ideas.

Not a book, and perhaps a bit expensive, but I highly recommend Scott Powell's "A First History for Adults". It's an excellent, integrated overview of American history. (The subsequent courses on European, Middle Eastern and Ancient history are also very good.)

Interesting questions. I don't think they've been treated in depth in the Objectivist literature, so I wouldn't take anything anyone (including me) says here as the "Objectivist" position. These strike me more as questions in the philosophy of law than in philosophy proper. A few random thoughts. First, on the Objectivist understanding of rights, all rights are protections of the individual's freedom of action in a social context. This would include property rights. This implies that the normal way of speaking -- that one has a right to an object -- is really a shortcut. Property rights are rights to engage in certain kinds of action -- to live in a house, to drive a car, to vote in a shareholder meeting, to drill for oil on a piece of land, to publish a novel. This way of thinking of property rights can be clarifying when it comes to issues of so-called 'intellectual property'. Many people try to ground property rights in scarcity: you and I can't use the same toothbrush, so we need some way to determine which one of us gets it. These people then get into difficulty when the inherent scarcity of physical objects no longer applies, as in the case of informational constructs like music and software. Understanding that property rights are rights to action diminishes the significance of the physical/informational divide and opens a path to a unified theory of property rights that applies to both. I don't think I agree that a man can only possess property in the quantity that is usable by him. The question is who decides whether something is 'usable' or not? If a person decides himself that something he owns is no longer of use to him he will sell it, give it away or abandon it. But what would be the effect if I could decide that you had no use for something you owned, and then take it away from you? Your property rights would no longer be absolute -- you would retain ownership only by my permission. The problem doesn't go away if you say that 'society' decides how much property is 'usable' by a man. 'Ownership' would still be by permission, not by right. Not all objects 'become yours' when you work on them. It depends on the terms under which you are working. I'm a software engineer by profession. The 'object' I work on is a complex system of information, owned by my employer and the vast majority of which I did not write. This software object is the aggregate product of many individuals trading their labor to my employer in exchange for salaries, stock shares and the like. The nub of truth in Locke's view, I think, is that value is created. People look out at the world and, by thinking, identify ways in which what they see can be made more conducive to human survival and flourishing. They act on those identifications, which creates value. That value would not have existed had the thought and effort required to identify and embody it not been exerted by the creator. This is the base on which the creator's ownership rights rest. This kind of ownership doesn't violate the rights of other people because the kinds of action they are not permitted to take were not possible to them before the value was created. If I write a novel, for example, my ownership of it means that somebody else with a printing press cannot print copies of it without my consent. But before I wrote the novel, he still couldn't have used his printing press to print copies of it -- the novel didn't exist. He has lost nothing as a result of my ownership of the value I brought into existence. I would not consider states of consciousness (memories, experiences) to be property because there isn't any way for others to interfere with the actions one can take with respect to them. What, at root, can I do with a memory other than remember it? And how can anybody else prevent me from doing so?

My initial reaction to this data dump is skepticism -- it feeds into too many stereotypes, too well, and the critical data is unverified. Confirmation bias is seductive. This clearly warrants further and careful investigation, but I wouldn't accept it uncritically as true on the basis of what we know at this point. That said, if it is true it's a bombshell and reveals a truly sickening corruption of scientific integrity in pursuit of political goals.

I was thinking of 'evasion' and 'irrationality' as basically synonymous in the context of specifying 'sins'. The cardinal Objectivist virtue is rationality, which we understand as the consistent volitional exercise of the mind to identify the facts of reality, and action consistent with the facts so identified. The corresponding sin would be the volitional refusal to use one's mind to identify facts and act accordingly. Put in those terms, "evasion" might actually be a better term than "irrationality" for getting across the point, which is what one should not do if one wishes to have a happy, successful life.

If 'sins' are the opposite of virtues, we can identify the 'Objectivist sins' by reading them off from the virtues. The standard litany of Objectivist virtues is rationality, independence, justice, honesty, integrity, productiveness and pride. From that, the 'sins' would be irrationality, second-handedness, injustice, dishonesty, hypocrisy, parasitism and humility.

I actually think the original Austrian theory of value propounded by Carl Menger is very close to Rand's model of objective value. Consider Menger's definition of a good, from his Principles of Economics: Compare that with Rand's description of the objective theory of the good from Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal: I think the overlap here is obvious. The good is an evaluation ('human knowledge of the causal connection') of the facts of reality ('such properties as render the thing') relative to man ('a human need'). Rand and Menger are clearly identifying the same basic phenomenon in reality using slightly different terminology. Unfortunately, at the time Menger was writing, the term 'objective value theory' was already attached to the labor theory of value -- which is actually intrinsicist. Menger's theory thus got saddled with the label "subjective" because it held that value depends in part on human consciousness, which it does. Later Austrians have often put more emphasis on the subjectivist element, but there is certainly a basis for saying that Austrian value theory is 'objective' in the sense in which Objectivists use the term.

It is worth noting that a properly delimited government, which protects the individual rights of its citizens instead of violating them, is good. You can always tell a libertarian by the claim that government is evil. The minarchist says it's a necessary evil, and the anarchist says that it's evil and therefore unnecessary. They're both wrong.

Now, I am listening to my dryer in the laundry room.

I wouldn't say 'affirming' so much as 'implicitly relying upon'. For example, if one denies the primacy of existence, one is saying that it is contradicted by the facts. But what are facts? Aspects of reality, i.e. things that exist.

See, that's the thing. I don't think we're fighting, and the reasons we aren't are largely encapsulated in the fact that the 'war' has the wrong name. Words stand for concepts, and concepts are how we understand the world. Giving the war the wrong name means we're conceptualizing it incorrectly. Flawed thinking leads to flawed action. If we call it the "War on Terror", that has implications. It identifies the wrong enemy, which leads to wrong strategic goals, which leads to wrong military actions. We pick the wrong targets, we use the wrong rules of engagement, we pick the wrong allies. This is not a recipe for victory -- indeed, it makes victory impossible by obfuscating our understanding of what it would consist of. Has a clear set of victory conditions in the "War on Terror" been specified by any of its architects or advocates? If so, I haven't heard of it. Fighting the wrong war is worse than not fighting at all. I agree that Obama is carrying on Bush's policies, but I don't think there's anything admirable in that. Leonard Peikoff once described Bush's actions post-9/11 as "taking a gun with one bullet and firing it into the ground." Obama is waving the empty gun around, even though our enemies can see that it has no magazine and nothing in the chamber. Bush misidentified the enemy and fought an appeasing, altruistic pseudo-war against irrelevant targets. Obama has kept the altruism and appeasement while waffling on the pseudo-war. I really wonder what you find to admire in Obama's foreign policy? His constant delays on settling on a policy in Afghanistan? His appeasement of the Iranian theocracy? His insults of Israel, our only real ally in the Middle East? His support for the attempted left-wing coup in Honduras? His sell-out of Poland and Czechoslovakia to the Russians? I suggest you read some of the essays that went into Winning the Unwinnable War. The book's subtitle is "America's Self-Crippled Response to Islamic Totalitarianism", and the thing doing the crippling is altruism. A couple of them are available for free on the Objective Standard website: "Just War Theory" vs. American Self-Defense The "Forward Strategy" For Failure They do a fairly good job of explaining the ways in which altruistic premises have impacted our war policy, and the disasters that have resulted. (I also have to question the idea that the Afghanistan and Iraqi campaigns have in any way protected our economic interests in the Middle East -- as well as the notion that 'economic interests' should in any way serve as a major justification for a war. The goal of war is to destroy an enemy who threatens your existence. Our government's policy has eschewed that goal. No amount of oil pumped from Iraqi oilfields can erase that fact.) You might also want to read John David Lewis' article "No Substitute for Victory": The Defeat of Islamic Totalitarianism. Dr. Lewis has a book coming out in March, Nothing Less Than Victory: Decisive Wars And The Lessons Of History, which I'm sure will also be worth reading if you are interested in questions of war, peace and victory. I've also heard a number of good things about Angelo Codevilla. He's not an Objectivist, but I gather he's written a number of incisive critiques of our government's recent war policy, and stuff on the theory of war more generally. I've got a number of his books in my to-read stack. War: Ends And Means; No Victory, No Peace; and Advice To War Presidents are the most on-point. The second, in particular, is a collection of essays focusing specifically on the "War on Terror". Did we? We clearly didn't defend ourselves from 9/11 itself, because it happened. A proper defense after the fact would have destroyed the capability and will of the enemy so that they no longer posed a threat. I don't see that that happened. The Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan. The Iranian theocracy is not only still in power, they are closer than ever to becoming a nuclear power. The Islamists have more power in Turkey and in Pakistan than they did before our 'self-defense' started. Our enemies are not destroyed. They are increasingly emboldened, growing in power and in number. There is a war being waged against us. Because of our moral and intellectual defaults, we are unwilling to act effectively to defend ourselves, and because of that we are losing.

At the moment, I am listening to a manager and a software engineer discussing something outside my cubicle at work. :-)