Grames

I would agree that each did not "act the way he was supposed to", but the guy with the $10 also got away with a petty theft. Theft is a violation of a right even if it cannot be proven, so that case is not just like the cheating boyfriend. A boyfriend who lies to his girlfriend is a jerk but not a rights violator because her loss was damage to the relationship, but there can be no right to a relationship.

The world is filled with facts. There are too many things to know, and not enough time to learn them. But the facts of reality are not all isolated factoids, they are related to each other. Some cause others. Learning those facts, those principles, that explain the most other facts gives your mind a huge amount of leverage to cope with reality, to understand it and even manipulate it.

LewRockwell.com? What's crossover about that?

And a generalization is a proposition that ascribes a characteristic to every member of an unlimited class however positioned in space and time. These propositions are of the type that describe causal connections between a entity's nature and the way it acts. For example, all generalizations describing the behavior of falling bodies and the orbits of planets can be explained by the principle of the law of gravity.

You are totally mistaken. Rand published an book of essays on aesthetics called "The Romantic Manifesto" . Being a novelist herself, she thought literature was the most ambitious form of art but this is not to be taken as demeaning the visual arts.

Because people have the wrong idea of what is morality and where it comes from. People accept wrong moral theories because they don't know how to think properly. People don't know how to think properly because no one teaches them.

I would conclude: Susan Dwyer is not an Objectivist Susan Dwyer wanted enough students to enroll to prevent her course being dropped by the school. Susan Dwyer is actually ambitious enough to expect her students to write clearly and comprehensively about emotionally charged issues (close enough to objectivity to impress me) I fail to be outraged.

Rand here is just being very careful about not reifying abstractions and not being cornered into a materialist reductionism. The primary sense in which entities exist is as material things which we become aware of by sensation and perception. Mental entities are not like those entities because they do not exist out in the world, but inside your head. They do not seem to take up space or have mass, and you can have contradictory ideas in your head and even ideas which contradict reality. Mental entities don't seem to obey all the same rules as regular entities, or not in the same way. She did agree that a thought "qua existent it is a concrete integration, a specific mental entity in a particular mind" which is conceding your point if the mind is in the brain. Where else could it be? But qua concept location is not even applicable. Certainly the data recorded on a cd is on the cd. But where is the music? The combination of cd and a player produces sound, but like a parrot repeating a memorized phrase the sound has no intrinsic meaning. Music comes from the full context of cd and player and listener. It is wrong to say the music is just on the cd, just in the player or just in the listener; it is all of these. But how can an entity have multiple locations? It can't qua existent, but qua concept this is not a problem. Saying "qua existent" is speaking metaphysically. Saying "qua concept" is speaking epistemologically. There is a danger of committing the fallacy of equivocation by improperly switching between the contexts. For example, the fact that metaphysically a thought is a particular state of a particular brain does not justify materialist reductionism. Materialist reductionism would deny there is such a thing as consciousness at all. After all, the brain is only composed of atoms, molecules and neurons and none of those have consciousness. The fallacy of composition arises when one infers that something is true of the whole from the fact that it is true of some part of the whole (or even of every proper part). The argument that if the brain consists only of neurons, molecules and atoms none of which have consciousness, then the brain as a whole cannot have consciousness is an instance of the fallacy of composition. (Because of the context switching from the parts to the whole, this is a type of equivocation.)

I do not accuse Kevin Delaney of being a collectivist, but I did not want to engage in out of context quoting. Nevertheless, the concept of the inalienability of individual rights has wider application than the context of government action. This is because individual rights are derived from the metaphysical nature of man, which applies to every man in every context with the exception of a metaphysical emergency. In the context of a metaphysical emergency the aspects of man that are fundamental to his survival are changed. A temporary change in the evaluation of the metaphysical nature of man renders all derivative ideas moot, including normal ethics and moral rights. Inalienability is an application of the concepts of the hierarchy of knowledge and the fallacy of the stolen concept in that no derivative economic or political idea can change a man's rights but a logically prior metaphysical change can. But emergencies can differ in their scope. Emergencies always have a finite scope; there are going to be people uneffected by the emergency. The social context relating people in an emergency to people not in an emergency does not change (this is the major point made by Rand's essay "The Ethics of Emergencies"). The modification (or disappearance) of ethics and rights is only applicable to people stuck in an emergency together, that is people "on the same lifeboat" relating to each other. Relations "off the lifeboat" are unchanged. Nor do you have the right to "expand the lifeboat" by roping other people into your emergency. Consider this epistemological aside: If one's private emergency has no outward signs and people don't know an emergency exists unless one tells them, then according to Kevin Delaney's emergency ethics they have lost their claim to have rights and don't even know it. This is absurd. If you are not certain that you have rights, you don't have them. Working backward from loss your saying "this must be altruistic thinking because I caused the loss of a greater value by respecting other's rights, a lesser value" is wrong. The emergency situation caused your loss. It is irrational to assume responsibility for the metaphysical. Sacrifice is trading a greater value for a lesser, or no value. There is no sacrifice involved here because there is no trading with the metaphysical.

Yes.

Technically sensation is antecedent to axioms, but sensation is not cognition so cannot be the called the starting point of cognition.

The axioms are all about the material of sensory perception. Axioms are not proven they are demonstrated, their validity is shown by appealing to the evidence of your senses. No other form of argument can possibly work, and no other is needed.

Right! Correct. "not acting the way he's supposed to" in regard to a contract can be be described as doing any of the following things to the contract: abrogate, breach, break, contravene, infringe, transgress, violate. Does a girlfriend have a contract or not? According to The American Heritage® Dictionary "contract" means If we accept this definition, then any agreement could be construed as a contract. A BF-GF relationship having an implicit agreement to fidelity is a contract. So what are the GF's contractual rights due to her because of the BF's unilateral violation of the terms of the contract? There never were any terms, just agreement, so she has no contractual rights. The contract existed, but it was empty, a null contract. Another name for a contract with no terms would be a nonbinding contract. Is it wrong for him violate a nonbinding contracts? Yes, he demonstrates his lack of integrity and honesty and generally diminishes his reputation. But that is all it does, it harms him not her. His agreement to be faithful did not give her ownership, control, or possession of any aspect of his person. She lost a value when her boyfriend was unfaithful but it was never her value. The value in question, fidelity, is the result of an internal act of volition that must be renewed moment by moment just like any other virtue. It cannot be externally compelled, stockpiled or even given away.

You are still equivocating. I will no longer go along with calling violations of formal, informal, implied or implicit contracts as violations of 'rights'. Contracts are not rights. The right to have a contract enforced is not the same as the contract itself.

You have done well. If I write ambiguously leading you to take the wrong path then it is up to me to followup with a correction. I have none to make so far. I agree fidelity is existential and can be a value, but no one can ever have a right to it. There can no such thing as a moral right to a value that someone else has to provide. Constructed contractual rights are not rights in the same meaning that individual moral rights have in the Lexicon and to use the term right interchangeably in the two senses is to commit the fallacy of equivocation. First, individual rights are moral principles deriving from the metaphysical nature of man while contractual rights derive from a man-made contract. Second, individual rights only refer to action while contractual rights can specify items of property. Thirdly, violations of individual rights are always criminal matters while violations of contractual rights are always civil matters. Fourthly, individual moral rights have logical precedence over contractual rights, meaning they are inalienable and cannot be contracted away, and are always victorious in any supposed conflict. I am not a lawyer, but intention is not required to establish responsibility in general so there are other charges and civil actions that could be brought if murder does not apply. Even if she does not go to court, the absence of objective evidence is our clue that she has no basis for claiming her rights were violated. I will not agree. If she wants the effect then she should enact the cause. If she wants to be able to say, "My rights have been violated", then she should get married. Your monetary example does not apply to the case of infidelity to a girlfriend because the presence of a contract makes objective the mutual obligations and rights. Abrogation of the contract by one party can be disputed in a civil court. Defiance of the civil court's finding is a criminal matter and leads to retaliatory force against the contract flouter on the basis of a violation of the moral right to property. Being unfaithful is a specific action protected under the general right to liberty. Infidelity is an abrogation of the marriage contract, but note that there is no way infidelity can be a criminal matter. Only defiance of the divorce settlement can be a criminal violation of the moral right to property. The right to be unfaithful is inalienable in the presence of an actual contract forbidding it, so it certainly remains an inalienable right in the absence of a contract. What the girlfriend wants is irrelevant. The fact that she has no recourse is yet another clue that she has no basis for claiming her rights were violated.

What is an irrational alienation? She has to actually be insane, not just wrong.

In what comes below I have changed the order of the quotes so I could make the point about objectivity before using it in a later paragraph. What existential values are at stake? Contracting an STD is material harm, and is a violation of rights on that basis alone. Her other expectations are not rights. It's about objectivity. Written contracts make objective what are otherwise subjective intentions and expectations. Objectivity is the reason for the material harm standard, so a written contract is a suitable substitute for an actual harm. No, rights are inalienable and cannot be promised away, or even contracted away. A man can promise to be faithful, but he still has the right to be unfaithful. His right to be unfaithful is truly inalienable. If a particular girlfriend has been cheated on she literally has no recourse at all. She could decide to end the relationship, but she always had that inalienable right she now merely has a new reason to exercise it. (The same goes for any half-measure.) Because of the absence of any objective harm (material harm or abrogation of a marriage contract) she has no rights that have been violated. Exception by means of physical force, real rights are truly inalienable. Because we know there is no conflict between rights, any asserted right that conflicts with a real right is false. Now, the question arises how can someone have the 'right' to do something that is not 'right'. All rights derive from the right to life, and the corollary right to act. If one wants to live, then one must take the rational and objectively correct actions to keep and further one's life. But there is an epistemological problem here: who knows enough to decide what is a rational and objectively correct action? There is no such entity as an omniscient and perfectly rational final authority. Everyone is their own judge of what is best for their own life, and that judgement is finite and fallible. The freedom to think has a corollary freedom to act, with one exception. Every man is alone inside his own mind but he shares the world with others; therefore one's freedom to act ends where another's right to life begins. The freedom to do wrong derives from a general freedom to act, which derives from the total freedom to think.

Inalienability

So you are saying some acts are immoral because they involve an initiation of force, yet they fall outside the law. Yes, that is a feature not bug. Law should be objective (lowercase 'o'), which means there needs to be material signs, traces, and clues resulting from the unlawful act which can be used as evidence of harm. Hurt feelings don't leave tangible evidence and so are (or should be) outside the scope of the law. The private act of doing drugs is a purported 'victimless crime', but some immoral acts are social and so do have victims. Yet immoral acts are not illegal unless there is material harm. Drug laws are opposed because they violate individual rights, girlfriend protection laws are opposed because material harm cannot be demonstrated. The reasons are different but the results are the same: both are legal. I think this is what CF thinks is a problem, but it's not.

LOL Awesome counter-example. This is what the thread is about, not mere property damage. Restitution for property damage can be negotiated after the fact, restitution for murder is not possible. Technically this would be a type of manslaughter not murder but there would definitely by charging and judging.

They are independent but can and should be linked by the girlfriend's rational actions. Terminating the relationship is the only moral and legal way the girlfriend can informally 'enforce' the presumed fidelity agreement in the absence of cause for any formal legal action. She can do this because it is not force. If she chooses not to enforce the agreement that nullifies the agreement. Enforceability is not a trivial distinction. In fact, enforceability might be the conceptual common denominator of law. A law which is unenforceable is a contradiction. Very curious of you to interpret actions which are not illegal as 'approved by law'. The law does not forbid using cocaine so that encourages cocaine use and suggests it is a moral thing? The law is a finite set of rules but the scope of all human action is practically infinite in comparison. The law cannot be said to have an opinion on every act upon which it is silent. The law is not a moral code or even a subset of a moral code. Law is not derived deductively from ethics. There is much practical, inductively derived wisdom in law which has no basis in ethics. For example, there is no ethical basis for driving on the left or right side of the road but there is an ethical basis for getting everyone to drive on the same side of the road. Much law is procedural and has no basis other than the benefits (sometimes merely supposed benefits) of uniformity and regularity. So there are moral, legal and rightful acts? I do not see why rightful is a useful concept. Taking cocaine and lieing to your girlfriend are both wrongful acts, not rightful. You should have the freedom (right) to do both. The social distinction between taking cocaine and lieing is in no way essential.

I don't know whether to agree with you or not because I have no idea what you mean by 'promise'. There is an exchange of values and mutual valuing going on, much subject to revision as a couple get to know each other. When it is time to commit to a promise of fidelity, I suggest getting married because that is what marriage is and what it is for. Short of marriage the relationship can end at any time for any reason due to a good faith revised evaluation of the value of the other person, or even due to meeting someone else. That is what dating is for, time to gain certainty in evaluating the significant other. This evaluation is always in your full context, including comparison with all the other people you know. What does 'binding' mean? Bound by whom or what? The only alternatives I can see are being bound by your own sense of right and wrong (morality) and being bound by law. Clearly Laura can't do any binding. She is not your moral code nor is she the law. The only way to make sense of your statement "all promises are by their nature binding" is as morally significant. So all promises are morally binding, but only some are also legally binding. Violating an implicit contract is not a form of force. Lieing is what this thread is really about. Is lieing a form of initiation of force? Only if material goods are exchanged. Intangible spiritual values can't be literally stolen. If you think you are in love, you are in love. When you don't love anymore, then you aren't. The only thing 'lost' is time. Good luck getting a court to appraise the monetary value of the time devoted to your love life, or that the SO's discovery of a purported better value than you was not in good faith.

Indeed. If some contracts are binding and some are not, some are written and explicit and some are not, then what the hell is a contract anyway?

Mass ostracisation is not a serious problem unless it is a serious injustice. Of course racism is a serious injustice. Having white skin is metaphysically given to you (or not); there is nothing that can be done about that. Wearing a red ribbon or not is a voluntary act, and can be a basis for discrimination (no shirt no shoes no service!). It probably wouldn't be rational, but not every irrational act can be illegal. No constititution or legal tradition is going protect a country whose citizens are mostly irrational.

Implicit Contract Implied Contract(see also implied-in-fact contract) BF-GF is an implicit contract (nonbinding), but you carry on your argument as if it were an implied contract (binding). You lose.