DavidOdden

My crow just died. Do you want to simplify this to one manageable point of discussion?

I’m not sure, because I don’t entirely understand your reasoning. You would not play with a deadly weapon because you can only be contextually certain that it is safe, but likewise you should not be in the presence of a deadly weapon for the same reason, and you should not play with a carving knife or a pit bull for the same reason. Never drive. You have abandoned reason in a specific and important way. It is impossible to exist, while being absolutely free of all risk (to life, limb or property, in that order). You therefore refuse to live (an active process, not just the absence of death) because you want to live, a contradiction. This is the epitome of irrationality, or, unawareness. The problem with your model is that you assign an infinite cost to an action when actually the risk is finite, and you don’t consider the associated benefit. Let’s rephrase the scenario a bit. You earn a piece of gold for digging a ditch, and you don’t have to spend it on immediate survival, so you consider options for increasing your wealth – investment. You might put it under your mattress, or you could put it in a low-yield interest-bearing insured account, or a medium-yield uninsured mutual fund, or a wildly risky venture in cold fusion. I vote in favor of the middle two options. It is irrational to be paralyzed by a negligible risk, just as it is irrational to ignore a high risk. I’ve described the extent of my knowledge of investment instruments, which determines I will do. I am only contextually (quasi-)certain that the FDIC will guarantee my savings accounts, but I am contextually quite certain that stuffing money under the mattress is a very irrational economic plan. I accept that you may be contextually ignorant of the mechanics of a given deadly weapon. I think I could inspect a revolver and determine that it is not loaded, and I know enough about physics to know that a demon won’t suddenly cause the revolver to be loaded. I think I am ignorant enough about the workings of an electric car that I would never ever ever consider doing any repairs on one myself. It would be irrational for me to work on an electric car, and it would be irrational for the local Toyota Zero mechanic to refuse to work on one for fear of being electrocuted. If you have a concrete, articulable reason for believing that you could be harmed by some action, then it is necessary to compare risks and benefits. It is standard irrational gun safety hyperbole to declare that you should never … something with a weapon. A semi-automatic pistol is complicated enough that you have, or should have, conceptual knowledge of great danger. Even though a revolver has a more “you can see everything” design, you still may not know how to uncock the hammer (if necessary, and how would you know?), and open the cylinder. It’s irrational to declare a gun to be an absolute threat, but it may be contextually rational to find the gun to be very risky. Then the next question is, can you mitigate the risk (don’t point it at your head! point it at the slaver’s head!), and is your freedom worth some risk? As far as I know, kombucha is a deadly poison, and in my knowledge context, I’m unwilling to gamble with my life by taking a drink. The essence of rationality is integrating what you know with logic. Your fear of guns should not be based on what you don’t know about guns, it should be based on what you do know about guns, which includes awareness of your ignorance important facts. Like the concept "one in the chamber". You are also correct that in this ferkakte scenario that you should expect something devious from the slaver who set up this ethics trap in the first place.

The core practice of “scientism”, as framed by Hayek, is that the methods of Science are appropriate in “their proper sphere”, but are not appropriate when they are the “slavish imitation of the method and language of Science”. This applies most pointedly to the social sciences. The questions that immediately should spring to mind is, what is the nature of scientific methods, and to what are they appropriately applicable? If we know that, we might have some idea when the application of those methods to some other sphere of knowledge is “slavish”. In fact I agree that methods are often applied slavishly, even in the hard sciences. This leads us to our first definition of scientism, as being “the uncritical application of a methodology in pursuit of knowledge, motivated purely because of the unjustified belief ‘that’s how (this) science works’”. I am familiar with various scientific sins in the acoustic analysis of speech, the problem being that numerical methods (signal processing) are often applied inappropriately because “that is how we do it”. Application of the methods of physical sciences to human behavior suffers from a particular defect that might lead one to conclude that human behavior cannot be studied scientifically. We should pause for a moment to consider what the alternative to science is. You might say that rather than drawing any general conclusions, a social scientist should only passively record what happened at a particular time and place (old-school ethnography). The enterprise of acquiring knowledge – science – is not just limited to making concrete observations, it involves reasoning about causation behind the behavior. The problem with many scientific theories of human behavior is that we can’t plug in a number or equation that accounts for the fact that humans chose their actions (well, their chosen actions, you don’t choose for your blood to circulate, it happens automatically). Some people ignore free will in their attempts to scientifically model human behavior; some people eschew the attempt to devise causal models of human behavior. One thing that Objectivists bring to this discussion is our epistemological stance, that the universe is knowable; and, we should check our premises. We operate in terms of well-defined concepts, not floating abstractions – Objectivism is the scientific method applied to everything, even art! Science focuses on what objectively is, not on subjective appearance, and so does Objectivism. Hayek’s objection to “inappropriate scientism” is really an attack on a particular view of science which is incapable of yielding scientific knowledge about human behavior. The anti-cognitive, positivist behaviorist view that held sway over social sciences has been beaten back somewhat, to the point that his objections would need to be reconsidered in the contemporary millieu. Politicized science is really something completely different: it is the rejection of the scientific method in the hard sciences.

We could start with λογική, if you would like. How do you see the Objectivist concept of logic being different from Aristotle's? Concepts are more stable as the things that unify referents (units), because of polysemy. Sometimes, a word subsumes more that one concept.

Good enough, but what are you observing? How do you know that you have observed an instance of “scientism”? Are you observing e.g. “How ‘scientism’ is used in academic publications on philosophy of science”, or “How ‘scientism’ is used on Fox news”? I am inclined to take this as my starting point. This would lead me to click Boydstun's link, or go directly to Hayek 1964. IMO when a person coins a term, we are obliged to stick with the concept that they have identified, rather than change the definition. So we know what Objectivism is and it doesn't change everytime someone feels like changing the term. In other words, what exactly did Hayek mean by scientism? Is that not what you are asking?

“Scientism” is a sufficiently niche term that I don’t see how you can determine “what it actually is from a philosophical standpoint”. You define it as “the conflation of the practice of science with religion and the scientists themselves as clergymen”, Wikipedia says that is “is the opinion that science and the scientific method are the best or only way to render truth about the world and reality”. Clearly, one of you must be wrong. Let me proffer a third definition, that it is the belief that governmental lawmakers are to be chosen on specific technical expertise. How would we decide which definition is correct? Rand discusses the problem of definitions in ITOE, but her discussion is at a much higher level, where there is no dispute over the actual referent of a concept, it is merely a question of the cognitively most-suitable definition. What we’re faced with here is a fundamental dictionary question – what does “scientism actual mean”? So, perhaps you can offer some concrete evidence that you’re using “scientism” in “the standard way”. This will be hard to do, since this is an obscure word of English.

They certainly could have used a decent philosopher to guide them in drafting their statement. Is there anything in the world that is actually indivisible? Despite the etymology, atoms of iron can be ‘divided’ into parts, and I guess in light of this new-fangled physics of the past 60 years, protons can be subdivided. Plus, leptons can be distinguished in terms of charge and mass. Nothing is truly indivisible or undistinguishable. I wonder what it even means to say that liberty is indivisible, but from context we can conclude that they are denying that a person can be “politically free” yet not “economically free”. Insofar as most people nowadays do not approve of economic freedom (specifically, the right to make a profit) even when they approve of religious, expressive, and voting freedoms as well as the freedom to do anything non-economic that you want (let’s call it lifestyle freedom), they are clearly denying that the concept “freedom” or “liberty” can be validly applied to everything except profit-making activities. The more pointed question that should be asked is, what is the utility of reifying adjective plus “freedom” constructions? There can’t be a contradiction in an undefined, meaningless statement. We could strive to assign a specific meaning to “economic” and “political” whereby we can consign a choice to one’s “exercising political freedom” vs. “exercising economic freedom”, eviscerating all conventional meaning from the words “political” and “economic”. So they should have given up on “freedom” or “liberty” as the fundamental concept. But, the alternative concept “rights” has long been hopelessly corrupted to mean “entitlement to receive”. My opinion is that deeper delving into the concept of “rights” with the public is better carried out on a long-term personal basis, moving an actual face-to-face conversation in the direction of a better and more-corrected understanding of the concept of rights. This is probably one reason why there aren't any successful Objectivist politicians.

It should be noted that the Sharon Statement from 1960 (the foundational document of YAF) begins: In this time of moral and political crises, it is the responsibility of the youth of America to affirm certain eternal truths. We, as young conservatives, believe: That foremost among the transcendent values is the individual’s use of his God-given free will, whence derives his right to be free from the restrictions of arbitrary force; whereas the present statement says In order to ensure that America’s best days are ahead, we affirm the following principles: 1. Liberty. Among Americans’ most fundamental rights is the right to be free from the restrictions of arbitrary force: a right that, in turn, derives from the inseparability of free will from what it means to be human. Liberty is indivisible, and political freedom cannot long exist without economic freedom. The similarity is well beyond what might have arisen from like-minded individuals across 63 years expressing common sentiments: the omission of God must have been an essential choice that they made. In the current context of conservatism as even more fundamentally religious as it was 6 decades ago, this is an almost shocking (pleasing) omission.

This all underscores the futility of rankings by ill-defined criteria. I live in an oppressive dictatorship which is very democratic – the fascists are a voting majority in my state, this being a counterexample to Freedom House’s claim that “freedom flourishes in democratic nations where governments are accountable to their people”. I would like to see a well-conducted survey taken from a fixed view and limited view of rights – the Objectivist view – where the majority cannot exercise their “right” to require people to hold a particular religious or social view, or a “right” to wealth equal to that of all others. The main problem with all of these surveys of freedom (or democracy as a proxy for freedom) is that they weight criteria arbitrarily. How should we weigh “economic” rights against “lifestyle” rights? And how should we weigh existing violations of rights against probably future violations of rights. This is clearly an issue with US politics, if you compare a Clinton-style regime with a future religious-right regime. Economic oppression is self-limiting, but religious oppression is not. The underpinning of economy policy is reason, typically polluted with misidentification. The underpinning of religion is the rejection of reason and the embracing of death. The appropriate question, which can be equally posed for the US and India, is whether the threat of a religious regime is palpably high. When it becomes a matter of official policy that “we are a Christian / Hindu nation”, it is too late.

A rational man acts according to his nature, which means that he survives by reason. An irrational man does not live by reason: he may behave randomly, in exact opposition to reason, or according to emotion. We have a moral code which we apply to our choices that says what exactly that entails, therefore I know that it would be immoral for me to blow out my brains right now since life is great (that’s a fact about the current context, not the idea of blowing out one’s brains qua absolute). We can apply that moral code to the evaluation of others, and conclude that Putin is, by nature, immoral (not just once, but as a general fact of his character). I am currently under irrational government compulsion to hand over part of my wealth to the government robbers (multiple governments!). I would not do this if I had a free choice, however, the government threatens me with force if I do not comply. A person’s response to force is by nature outside of the scope of reason – force is the denial of reason. Me paying taxes is not “rational”, it is the best I can come up with in light of reality and my hierarchy of values. You have drawn a dichotomy between moral and immoral, but there is actually a trichotomy. The actions that another takes when under compulsion cannot be morally evaluated. The slave’s choices are outside the scope of moral evaluation, precisely because of the contradiction created by force. A further problem with your scenario, and with many hypothetical moral philosophy scenarios, is that it isn’t epistemologically consistent, instead it flits between the perspective of the individual and an observer. As an observer, we do not know the slave’s hierarchy of values – his actions cannot be morally evaluated. Evaluating the choices of others in such an epistemologically-impoverished circumstances is not reasonable, I might even say irrational, but I won’t. The more interesting question is, what would you do in this circumstance, and why? I pay my taxes because even though I value freedom, I also value my life, and I recognize that knuckling under to the demands of government is necessary in order for me to live my life qua me (as opposed to living off the grid in the Sahara desert, where the weather sucks). I recognize that surviving purely by reason is impossible, but I have discovered that living is still possible. That means that the choice to exist, the primary choice, still remains at the very top of my hierarchy of values. Your scenario adds a strange complication, that the master will free the slave if he engages in a silly symbolic act that he would never otherwise engage in. Equally “applicable” would be the mandate to drink a cup of kombucha in order to gain freedom. At this point, I am starting to think that the slave is not simply “failing to act purely by reason”, I think he is positively insane, in refusing to rectify his enslavement because he has been the victim of force. Change the scenario just a little: a person is subject to improper government compulsion, and he is given the choice of replacing the existing dictatorship with a less-cruel but still not perfectly rational government which still uses improper force. He would ordinarily not choose an irrational government which employs improper force. Since my hierarchy of values is different from that of the slave whose highest value is to not be the victim of force, I have a hard time evaluating this guy. Since one’s hierarchy of values is chosen, I would conjecture that the person is indeed irrational because he bought into a contradictory philosophy which makes “be free from compulsion” be his primary choice. I would try to get the guy to read Galt’s Speech, to see if that might straighten out his crazy hierarchy of values.

When this goes up the food chain, the primary tension will probably be a First Amendment battle between Biden’s right to be a leftist extremist vs. other people’s rights to disseminate false statements. The core issue will be what constitutes coercion. Common sense tells you that if a person tells you “I really could use the money in your wallet. Do you want to continue living?”, your life has just been threatened, but nowhere did the person say “Give me your money or I will kill you” – the threat is implied (you can read between the lines and infer a negative consequence for non-compliance). Common sense is often suspended in court judgments. Section IIIB(1)(a)(i) lays out the legal framework for concluding that the government did coerce, the unrelenting pressure to comply being a significant factor supporting the conclusion that the government was not just “expressing an opinion”. In principle, the government might attempt to justify violation of the First Amendment because it is “necessary” in aid of the government’s (stipulated) compelling interest is preserving public health – a rotten doctrine to be sure, but it is an accepted legal fact. The scientists’ opinions would largely be irrelevant to this argument, except in testifying to something that they would be on very shaky grounds about – that viewpoint suppression is necessary to prevent an apocalypse.

Concretely, as cited and discussed in the court ruling against the government, White House Communications Director, Kate Bedingfield’s announced that “the White House is assessing whether social-media platforms are legally liable for misinformation spread on their platforms, and examining how misinformation fits into the liability protection process by Section 230 of The Communication Decency Act.”

Section 230 grants a special privilege to internet platforms, immunizing them from contributory liability (primarily defamation) for customer content material that they publish, unlike newspapers or broadcast media. The hammer in this instance is the threat to withdraw the privilege unless the platform acts as an agent of the government by removing expressions that don’t meet government approval. Of course, the platforms like the privilege. Plainly, the privilege should not exist, and all individuals should be equally liable for defamation.

The WSJ article mentions in passing, but does not give appropriate analysis to, the contribution of “Section 230”, which is 47 USC 230, in the censorship debate. That piece of law relates to a legal distinction between expression and mere transmission. For example, if you make death threats, you can be prosecuted. If you knowingly tell lies to the effect that Smith is a rapist, you can be sued for defamation. It’s not just the person uttering the word who can get in legal hot water, it is also those who “publish”, for instance the New York Times or the Fort Bend Star. The reason is that the newspapers knowingly and deliberately made the defamatory statements public (private writing of false lies is not legally actionable). A crucial distinction is made under the law between a publisher and a distributor, that the truck driver who delivers the newspapers to the newsstand is not held liable for his role in making the falsehoods public. The role of section 230 is that it declares that an “internet service provider” is not a publisher, therefore unlike any other publisher, an internet publisher has no liability for publication of other people’s defamatory statements (or other torts excluding copyright infringement, though §230 does not immunize against criminal, copyright-infringement, or obscenity cases). Now the question is, is this legal immunity a good thing or a bad thing? On another page, we can debate whether defamation should be legally actionable, the crucial point is that it is actionable, but in a limited fashion where an internet publisher is deemed to not be a publisher, therefore not responsible. The law also immunizes an internet publisher from a breach of contract lawsuit for removing user content, if the publisher finds the content to be objectionable. This means that an ISP does not have to contractually own up to their arbitrary removal powers. Section 230 creates a twisted plate of conceptual spaghetti that is very difficult to untangle. Should there even be a legal cause of action for defamation; should a publisher be allowed to call on a hidden contractual provision; should internet publishers be treated differently from other kinds of publishers? The matter is exacerbated by the fact that the courts do still hold internet publishers liable about half the time. The crux of the variation is whether the company is just an “internet service provider”, or is it an “information content provider”. Normally, if a business exercises editorial control, it is not just a distributor, it is a publisher. But internet publishers enjoy special privileges, that they can exercise control over objectional content without exercising editorial control. Say what? No wonder people get confused about censorship.

The recitation of plaintiff and defendant arguments in the background section is standard practice, and you can’t automatically read endorsement into these words, especially when it comes to a crucial question that both sides agree on, that she is not discriminating against any individual on an illegal basis such as sex or religion, which simplifies the court’s task. It is true that plaintiff in their petition for a writ of certiorari did submit as one of the question to be decided “Whether applying a public-accommodation law to compel an artist to speak or stay silent, contrary to the artist’s sincerely held religious beliefs, violates the Free Speech or Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment”, but the court did not answer the religion fork of the question, they focused on the Free Speech issue. That means that I too as an atheist cannot be compelled to worship or compose sermons, or to compose progressive-statist praise poetry when a customer do asks (as was possible until this ruling). But that would be the case if Free Speech only applied to religious matters. Every petition to the courts uses a huge-bore shotgun in the hope of hitting something, so I am not surprised that they played the religion card.Notice that the Free Exercise Clause is not mentioned even once even in the dissent, a clear indication that religion was not an issue. Plaintiffs also invoke Employment Division v. Smith which was about religious actions (not expressions) which leads to their question 2 of “[w]hether a public-accommodation law that authorizes secular but not religious exemptions is generally applicable under Smith, and if so, whether this Court should overrule Smith”, and again the ruling completely ignores the religious prong, never citing Employment Division (because religion is irrelevant to the question). I’m not inclined to listen to the entire two and a half hour of the argument, which is here, since the party arguments are not proof of anything about the court's reasoning. I doggedly insist that what matters is the legal principle established here, namely the holdings.

I don’t see this in the opinion, but maybe we’re looking in different places. I am focusing on the legal conclusion, the holding, pp 1-6. That is where they state the principle which is now law, and it is about free speech, “the principle that the government may not interfere with ‘an uninhibited marketplace of ideas’”. In Barnette, the court even declared in the holding “That those who refused compliance did so on religious grounds does not control the decision of this question, and it is unnecessary to inquire into the sincerity of their views”, a principle that remains true to this day. No part of the majority opinion rests on the Establishment or Free Exercise clauses, and a connection to religion is not a requirement for their opinion. If you have a candidate in the majority opinion, I’m all ears (or, eyes). Anyhow, the point about Nazis is that we must make choices as to what stances we will publically take, and how energetic that stance will be. Should we actively and loudly defend the rights of Nazis to demonstrate with the same fervor as we would apply to a demonstration against the ideology that they express? Or do we deem their ideology to be so much more vile, compared to actual government suppression of speech, that we can scale back our defense of Nazi speech rights? I generally take a stronger stance against improper government, though an quite aware that today’s individual ideology can become tomorrow’s governmental initiation of force. On the third hand, I can’t run myself ragged on every ideological battle. So I find these to be tough choices to make.

The underlying principle is, I would say, correct. There is an actual business here, not a frivolous business, and the plaintiff sincerely hopes to expand that business. However, the law clearly states that in order for her do so while acting according to her judgment, she will be punished for having violated the law. It is a fundamental principle of law that a person must not be required to violate the law and receive punishment in order to challenge the law in court, for which reason plaintiff has standing. As the court stated, “That required her to show ‘a credible threat’ existed that Colorado would, in fact, seek to compel speech from her that she did not wish to produce. Susan B. Anthony List v. Driehaus, 573 U. S. 149”. I don’t understand your point about Queer, which does not figure into the ruling. The ruling is an entirely good thing, in my opinion, because it makes clear that the First Amendment prohibits compelled speech. Perhaps it is not good enough because it doesn’t also declare that the government cannot compel action either, however there is no constitutional basis for that conclusion. Clearly, we need a constitutional amendment that also protects one’s right to not do, but that will not be happening any time soon. Typically, people believe that the government can do anything that it wants to. That seems to be true, but theoretically there are some limits, as articulated in the US Constitution. But still, the courts have been highly variable in how they interpret those limits. The current SCOTUS is slowly dialing back one set of principles of deference to the government, limiting what the government can so. Their main problem is an unresolvable one arising from the structure of the US: a collection of states, organized into a nation. The states-rights religious crowd is pleased with Dobbs because it recognizes the right of states to choose its laws. The rest of us are displeased because it allows violation of individual rights. The states-rights religious crowd is also pleased with 303 Creative because it recognizes the supremacy of individual rights over the right of states to set its laws. The role of the current court is to enforce a particular view of “rights”. It is not the Objectivist view, it is the view that rights are those things created by the Constitution (or is “historically fundamental”, a major vague loophole). In other words, our view of the concept “rights” has not taken hold, and until it does, we can’t expect others to act in accordance with that view. The tougher question is discerning a specific principle saying “how we should respond”. Should we defend the rights of Nazi and religious bigots to express their viewpoint because of rights, or should we oppose the actions of Nazis and religious bigots because they advocate potentially dangerous viewpoints? As Rand identified, we should, when the opportunity arises, oppose both religion and violation of rights. I don't deny that the religious zealots will see this as a victory for their god, but it is in fact a victory for individual rights.

There is a very important distinction to be made between Objectivism and Ayn Rand’s views. Objectivism is the philosophical system developed by Ayn Rand, but “Ayn Rand’s views” is an extensional bag of everything that she thought. Too often, in my opinion, people think that Objectivism is whatever she said, rather than being an integrated system of non-contradictory concepts and propositions. Some of what she thought is part of the system, and one good way to tell is that she wrote it and published it after thinking it over. For example, Atlas Shrugged, or ITOE. Spontaneous answers in response to a Ford Hall Forum question (the homosexuality canard, best reported here) makes clear that her personal reaction is not part of the philosophical system), same with other personal communications such as her reported (positive) view of tiddlywink music and or her dislike of Mozart or Beethoven, which does not dictate what music an Objectivist should like. Let’s return to the opening statement, that “Rand suggested that the colonisation of North America was fair play because the inhabitants did not recognise individual rights”. Let’s actually investigate what part of her philosophical system suggests something, and what exactly is suggests or better yet actually says. It’s guaranteed that she never said that it was “fair play”, which is an idiom invented long after her death. Instead of looking for scientific errors where she she said more than she knew, let’s look for any elements of her philosophy that would support a loyalty oath as a requirement for being in a rights-respecting nation.

It is in the nature of rights that a man may live his life according to his sole judgment, and he is not required to justify his choices to others. The burden of proof therefore lies on the government to prove that a man’s actions constitute initiation of force. The assumption that failure to recite a loyalty oath or take any other symbolic act is proof of initiation of force is entirely unreasonable. As in, by what logic does such non-action constitute initiation of force? Not only do we not have to accept your two claims, we must reject them. Those who have not fully internalized and accepted the Objectivist ethics still have the legal right to claim the benefits of the Objectivist ethics for themselves, moreover, no claim need be made since a man is free to enter and remain in the country (state, city) to the best of his ability. No man can question this right, any man who attempts to use force against a foreigner for not satisfying his personal criteria for virtue can be properly arrested and punished for initiation of force. Blocking entry of foreigners is not a legitimate function of government, because entering a national territorial jurisdiction is not initiation of force, any more than being in a national territorial jurisdiction is. Your proposal reduces to a perpetual requirement to justify one’s existence to the authorities.

The problem is that you have demonstrated by your words that you do not recognize individual rights, therefore you do not have rights and we can use preemptive physical force against you, because you are a savage. Alternatively, the problem is that you haven’t included a sufficiently objective epistemological basis for deeming someone to be a savage brute. Rather than subjectively declaring it to be self-evident that a certain act is initiation of force (whereby I get to condemn you as an aggressor and you get to condemn foreigners as aggressors), we should determine “what constitutes proof that a person has initiated force?”. A more subtle question is, “what constitutes initiation of force?”. Since the precogs are fallible science fiction, we have to judge based on objective evidence, not direct inspection of a person’s mind. What action has a foreigner, or resident, taken that proves that he has no respect for individual rights?

The essence of Objectivist political ethics is that the function of government is to prevent the initiation of force, meaning that human interactions are based on reason. Every person has the right to pursue his life according to his judgment, as long as he does not initiate force. A corollary of these principles is that holding or expressing a disagreeable position does not constitute the initiation of force. You will notice that although Rand properly vilified leftist and rightist dictatorial views, she also opposed government mind control, indeed it is a central premise of Objectivism that the mind cannot be forced. The proper response to the expression of a vile philosophical idea is not force, it is reason: counter-argument.

Yes. Since voting affects what sort of government we have, we need to be careful about who we allow to vote Although one often hears of a “right to vote”, that’s a concept that I think needs to be fleshed out quite a bit more. If we simply deny that there is any such “right to vote”, then rights do not hinge on taking a loyalty oath, and “citizenship” is conceptually redundant, it simply stands for the idea that some some people can vote, others cannot. In terms of "what are we voting for", I argue that this only refers to the selection of law-making ~ enforcing officials. For example, the senators. It's not at all clear that a popularly-elected "chief executive" is desirable, and it's kind of clear that many elected officials are undesirable. A good case is to be made that changes to the constitution itself should also be subject to a vote of the people as well as the senate. The question of whether the general rule for enacting legislation should be "simple majority" vs. super-majority is not entirely obvious, but insofar as new legislation ought to be extremely rare, there should be more than a "preponderance of support" for new laws. Unanimity would probably be overly burdensome, in case a wingnut accidentally gets elected.

What difference does citizenship make? Perhaps you mean that only citizens can vote, but you would still need to justify that restriction. We sort of have a reasoned age restriction on voting, to prevent the 4-14 year old voting block from outlawing spinach. I just want to see why a loyalty oath is a reasonable requirement for exercising the right to vote; and if there are further consequences of citizenship, we'd need to see why a loyalty oath is reasonable for that purpose.

A person has the right to act according to his own judgment, as long as he respects the rights of others. Therefore, a person can sell knives for a living, even though knives can be used by others to stab the innocent. It is only right that the government prevent the initiation of force. Selling knives is not initiation of force, nor is moving from Nevada to California, nor moving from Canada to the US. The idea that everybody, both migrants and natural born residents (who have come of age), should swear a loyalty oath is squarely at odds with Objectivist ethical principles, and is not even required in fairly oppressive states, except perhaps North Korea and Khmer Rouge Cambodia. It is also quite ineffective: forcing people to lie about their beliefs does nothing to protect a society from initiation of force. It is in fact the initiation of force itself – force will be used to block you from entering or remaining if you do not sign the loyalty oath. My rights, to engage in lawful business relations with people from outside the US (who come here to do that business), have been violated by the government. Those who enact such law themselves are initiating force, and must by law be expelled from the country. The problem with deportation for rights-violators “beyond a certain point” is the vagueness of what that point is. Assuming that we have a system of rational laws limited to only punishing violation of rights, there is a technical-implementation question regarding what is the proper punishment for theft or murder. Incarceration is the obvious punishment to impose, exile is not likely to be effective in a free society, but if we erect an impenetrable barrier around the US and carefully monitor entry into the US… we’re back to where we started.

I disagree with your (apparent) stance on infant consciousness. Newborns have already gained perceptual experience in utero, and will have some experiential knowledge of the ambient language, which is essential to developing full adult rationality. It’s not just that an infant will eventually develop concepts, it’s than they have already started to develop their conceptual consciousness prenatally, which a rabbit never does.