DavidOdden

I think your question is too abstract and wide-ranging, and would benefit from narrowing its scope, and filling in some details. Let us take the first of your activities: driving a car. Rather than assume infallibility in all other domains, can you be infallible w.r.t. driving a car? Pick a different domain if you want, but don’t start with the premise that infallibility is metaphysically possible in some unspecified domain. Now, state precisely what it means to “fail” w.r.t. driving. I don’t mean “give an example of a failure in driving”, I mean give a description of all things that would be a failure. One possibility is framed in terms of emotional reaction – “actions which cause you to be unhappy”. You can then be infallible, as long as you can control your emotions and can completely detach reason from action. Under the hedonist theory of fallibility, it is not a failure if you drive off a cliff, as long as you are happy doing so. There are very many relevant contexts for an objective view of success or failure, for example, it might be considered a failure to drive for hours and end up where you started, but it might be a success if you have the goal of viewing spectacular autumnal foliage. It might also be considered a failure if a way of driving results in commission of a traffic infraction but saves you 2 hours of time on the road. If so, you will have learned that it is more important to you to not commit a traffic infraction that it is to carry out your plan in a shorter time period. Rather than presuming infallibility in all choices then injecting an abstract possibility of failure, I would start by trying to construct a plausible case for infallibility. Error can arise from failures of logic, and also from lack of relevant knowledge. To be “generally infallible”, you have to be “generally rational” and also “generally omniscient”. I posit that you cannot infallibly know whether an action in a specific context is a traffic infraction (or crime) since these are not objectively defined (in a fashion that any person would know what an infraction is).

That’s a tough question. The government should only use force to protect an individual from violation of rights, i.e. the initiation of force. Failure to provide a decent upbringing is not the initiation of force, so there is no moral basis for government intervention under the pretext that the child’s rights are being violated. Children are also not the property of their parents, to be disposed of as the parent sees fit, so we can dispose of the pretext of “parental education rights”. As an outsider, I should not be forcefully prevented from giving an education to the child, as long as I do not physically force the child to endure that education. That solves the problem in case the parents can’t be bothered to educate their child, and don’t actively block my efforts. What if the parent refuses to allow the child to receive an education, would it be proper for the government to enforce the parent’s wishes? Example 1: the parents want to teach that there is no God but Allah (etc), and I want to teach that there is no God, period. The parents want to give the child a misintegrated education on this point, I want to give the child an integrated education. Example 2: the parents say nothing one way or the other about religion, I want to teach that there is no God – the parents want the child to remain ignorant of the issue. Example 3: the parents want to teach that there is no God, some third party (not me!) wants to teach that that there is no God but Allah. Can the parents then use government force to prevent that person from promulgating a religion at the child? Can I use government force to prevent a parent from promulgating a religion at a child? Were we dealing with an adult, the solution would be simple: the individual in question must decide how to survive as a rational being, he has to make his own choices. We cannot assume that a 6 year old child has adult rationality. The current governmental regime (not just the Biden administration, the whole western legal system over the past century) mostly presumes that the parents best know what is in the interest of the child, though that is a defeasible presumption. One way in which that presumption is overridden is when the government declares that parents cannot leave a child completely uneducated. But the actual implementation of the mandate to educate is about 150º off-course. If the government has the power to require parents to provide a proper education, then the government has the power to dictate what constitutes a proper education, and what thoughts / viewpoints / facts are acceptable. Since a government censor is the greatest threat to human existence, I have to conclude that government mandated education does not actually protect the rights of a child. A proper government also cannot enforce ignorance by preventing non-parental education of a child.

By “obligation”, I presume you are referring to a moral obligation, one that rationally follows from your choice to create a human being. Some people end up creating a child by accident, or are tricked into it, and I’m not talking about those cases – I mean a conscious deliberate choice. Just to be explicit, I also assume when you say “our” children, I assume you mean your own children, not “society’s children”. What do I owe my child, what do you owe your child, what does he owe his child. Creating a person should not be done on a whim, one should have a clear understanding of why you are doing so, and not just buying a puppy. A puppy will never become a rational being, a child might. An infant will not actually develop into a rational being without some kind of guidance. It’s irrational to think that children are born with Galt’s Speech planted in their brains whereby they can magically discover how to become fully rational. This is what a parent has an obligation to do: to provide such guidance. It is probably a joint effort between the parents and the parent’s agents, so that mom and dad don’t have to actually devise lessons in reading and writing. Your question seems to be focused on specific technical content. The list of specific technical things that a child should learn is huge: reading, writing, rhetoric, literature, history, philosophy, physics, biology, economics, fishing, hunting, home economics (i.e. “how to wash your clothes; how to cook a meal”). Personally, I think one should try to explain the basic logic of numeric exponentiation, if you can. You don’t teach long lists of facts, you teach very small sets of facts in the course of teaching methods of reasoning. In other words, all you have to teach is the tools of reason, but you do have to go beyond just saying “A is A”.

You are right that simply having a hierarchy of values does not tell you how you should act: that also requires knowedge of the relevant facts, which is where probability fits in. First, you have to know facts in order to build the correct hierarchy. Then, in any subsequent choice, you also have to take further knowledge to reach a conclusion, meaning that you have to know if it is probable or merely possible that some future outcome will be realized. In the 1980 knowledge context, the possibility that Reagan would bring about a national ban on abortion, or even an ad hoc overturning of Roe v. Wade, was very remote. Consequently, the abortion threat does not prefer Carter over Reagan

I’m not gonna accuse you of ignoring anything, but I will point out that there are a number of true things that you didn’t say. I don’t have an opinion as to whether you should have also said those things, a decision that hinges on what you (and Gus’s) central point is. The “rights of corporations” is, in fact, exactly “a subset of the rights of individuals”. For example, you have the right to own property, and so does a corporation. You have the right to enter into a contract, and so does a corporation. You have a right to criticize or sue the government, and so does a corporation. The subset thing comes from fact that individuals have the right to vote and to refuse to incriminate themselves, but a corporation does not. The conceptual problem lies not with expressions like “Disney’s rights”, but with the associated thinking that a corporation is literally capable of entering into a contract, litigating, hiring and firing, and expressing an opinion. While it is valid to criticize Donald Trump or Warren Buffett for their bad acts, it is invalid to criticize Disney (not the deceased namesake), because Disney is incapable of acting and chosing. You can hire a lawyer, Disney cannot, because hiring can only be carried out by a volitional consciousness, so it makes no sense to talk of “Disney’s lawyers”. It seems to me that we have only two viable choices. One, the worst IMO, is to instead say things like “the lawyer hired by Fred Ferggleschnapps to protect his business interests”, and “Sally Slimansky allowed some individual to rent property in which she had a financial interest”. It is usually not even pssible to construct a meaningful, true sentence if you rigorously avoid the metaphor that corporations can “act”. The alternative, which is what we do all the time, is to embrace the metaphor, not just for corporations but for all “collective actions”, where the government announces, the Senate votes, the court rules, the community protests, the family decides. Another example of a creation of the state is “common law restrictions on how tenants and landlords deal with one another in accordance with principles”. Under the common law, there is no requirement that a person have a written contract with a signature (note that when the common law was created, most individuals could not read or write). “Individual rights” is an anomalous concept under the common law, which is in essence the dictates of the sovereign. The king owned all of the land, but under the principles of feudalism that existed under the common law, he could grant an individual a right to use the land, by making the person a vassal. Under common law and feudalism, the baron of Disney has unrestricted right to tax the serfs living on his land: your recourse is to go away and find a better baron, if you can, or to discover land not claimed by any sovereign. I have no idea what Gus is thinking, but I don’t have to imagine a city where everyone contracts out of their rights to property and freedoms simply because they live there, I experience it every day of my life, and so do you. You are required to comply with the laws dictated by your various local governments – city, county (parish, borough), school district, fire district, water district and so on. These are “municipal corporations”. As I imagine you know, they can all tax you. You don’t have to sign anything, because agreement with a government entity is irrelevant. Agreement only matters between individuals and corporations that are not municipal corporations (e.g. Amazon, Microsoft, Boeing). Municipal corporations are provided for by and are subordinate to the statutes and constitutions of the individual states. States are provided for by and are subordinate to the statutes and constitution of the United States. If state law enables a municipal corporation to levy taxes, then you can have a city or county tax; or a school district assessment; or a fire district assessment. There is a common feature of municipal corporations, that the individuals who make (usually, approve) the rules are elected by geographically-defined voters. When the majority of voters expressing an opinion at the polls approve of a voting majority of progressive tax-and-spend ideologues, your right will be sharply curtailed. Here then are some the pertinent question regarding Disney. First, what is the nature of the contract between Disney and the Florida sub-government that the Florida legislature just voided? Second, what was the nature of the municipal corporation that has legal power in this area – to what extent were there provisions for popular voting of that local government? Third, what will replace this governmental vacuum? Does the Florida legislature have the right to unilaterally abrogate contracts? I would say no, but it does have the power.

Only indirectly, as a reaction to the horrors of AI “reasoning”. Of course I am using “can” in the standard Objectivist way, as “possible, based on evidence”, not “imaginable, where anything is possible” and one can “imagine” A and Not A being simultaneously true. I have wasted some time trying to understand the “epistemology” of ChatGPT, and conclude that its greatest weakness is that there is little if anything that passes for a relationship between evidence, and evaluation of evidence. I was puzzled about how something so fundamental could be missed, but then I realized that this is because the system doesn’t have anything like a conceptual system that constitutes its knowledge of the universe, it has a vast repository of sensory impressions – a gruel of “information”. But furthermore: it cannot actually observe the universe, it can only store raw experiences that a volitional consciousness of the genus homo hands it. If you ask about the basis for one of its statements (ordinary statements of observable fact, not high-level abstractions), it just gives templatic answers about “a wide variety of sources and experts”. It does react to a user rejecting one of its statements, apologizing for any confusion, embracing the contradiction, then saying that usually A and Not A are not both true. It is perfectly happy to just make up facts. Sometimes it says that there are many possible answers, it depends on context, then if you give it some context it will make up an answer. Human reasoning is centered around conceptual and propositional abstractions that subsume observations, where the notion of “prediction” is central to evaluation of knowledge. Competing theories are central to human knowledge, so when we encounter a fact that can be handled by one theory but not another, we have gained knowledge that affects our evaluation of the competing systems. These AIs do not seem to evaluate knowledge, or even data. Instead, they filter responses based on something – it seems to be centered around "the current conversation".

Here is a puzzle about social media. The quoted Newsweek article says “If a stranger were to read this book to a fourth grader on the street, he might be arrested and prosecuted”, etc. If this is true, and if this is a consequence of the new law (noting that the following text starts “Under the Parental Rights in Education bill…”), then this is a horrifying consequence of the law (though it would be unconstitutional and would have already been struck down, had it been true). The Newsweek article does quote the related provision of the law, which is that it applies to school districts and not to the guy on the street. The puzzle is, why would the author invent such a bizarre statement in the first place? Is this supposed to be a quote from a purportedly rabid opponent of the law? The internet tells me that the Newsweek author made it up himself. I think the practice of telling lies about the lies is getting out of hand.

Okay, I see what you’re thinking. There are probably no (known, rational) benefits to anyone coming from a spill of crude. I think “disaster” is not the right adjective, but it would be “bad” rather than “good”. Of course the fact that there is a possible bad outcome is not a valid argument for not exploiting that resource. There is a whacko argument that “Spill response and cleanup creates business and employment opportunities for affected communities, regions, and cleanup service providers”, an argument supposedly offered by Kinder Morgan, Inc. to the Canadian Government. But Bastiat addressed the Broken Window fallacy almost 200 years ago. A more credible argument was that oil spills result in fishery closures, also hunting closures, which is a benefit to fish and ducks, but still the net effect ends up being negative.

Not being or ever having been an ecologist and with only a dim recollection of the “subtext” of ecologists’ rhetoric in the 70’s, all I can suggest is that she is referring to a hidden contradiction in the ecologists’ ideology, that one can have one’s cake and eat it too. “Quality of life”, for them, refers to an idyllic world free of the signs of man’s existence. Of course they would not admit that they want to see man deleted from the universe, but they clearly opposed many signs of man’s existence qua man. I would be okay for man to exist in small bands of stone-age hunter-gatherers, but agriculture starts to disturb the “natural order”, meaning “the way things would be if man did not exist”. Preserving “quality of life”, maintaining the man-free wild nature of the planet, becomes an absolute principle for the ecologist. I do personally enjoy a hike in the mountains and love to watch eagles harvesting crows, so I consider that idyllic wild state to be aesthetically positive – in appropriate doses, usually not more than a week, and with a comfy chair at the campsite. Living as a dirt farmer in Cambodia would be the most horrifying loss in actual quality of life, but that is what the ecologists are pushing for. “Quality of life” as an expression doesn’t actually mean quality of life, just as “justice” no longer means justice. I guess I’d have to see your reasoning behind the conclusion that an oil spill in Alaska is a disaster for all species involved.

It needn’t be the most important, it simply needs to be “relatively important”. We have to identify an alternative. I can only conjecture as to an answer, but my first-pass guess relates to “living death” versus “Carter economics”, and, to quote a comment from Binswanger @ OCON 2016 about Hillary Clinton and the prospects for increased taxes – “What else is new?”. Reagan and Trump both appeared to offer something new and horrible, though the potential threat of a conservative abortion-opponent in 1980 did not materialize. There is a general principle to be derived here, that a candidate who threatens with a novel approach to rights-violation is more dangerous, and more in need of opposition, than a candidate who presents the same old program of rights-violation. Without an actual argument showing why one should not vote for Reagan, we’d just be swinging at air trying to invent a line of logic and then discern two moral principles that yield different conclusions, where the proper hierarchy has “don’t vote for Reagan” as the moral conclusion. Reagan at least seemed more opposed to abortion (though he did sign the California law legalizing abortion). Carter’s economics and foreign policies were definitely worse compared to Reagan’s. Rand must have concluded that “living death” is a substantially worse (and realistic) outcome. I don’t disagree with that conclusion, except perhaps the question of likelihood. A related extremely valid concern is the threat of the religious right seizing political power, that is to say, the institution of a rigid doctrine of force and faith over a society of reason.

There is a really long list of things that should be different in the world, and it is easy to evaluate a fact and see if it contradicts some rational moral principle. The problem is that tossing all moral knowledge into a single stew pot only ends up give you a knowledge of what should not. While we can presumably agree that the government should not tax, the government should not prohibit the expression of a political viewpoint, and children should not watch pornography, these are not unranked judgments (unless you adhere an absolutist stewpot theory of knowledge). How should we rank these three conclusions, and of course, from what does that ranking flow? All three are bad from the perspective of “man’s existence qua man”, but can we divide these concrete judgments and say that two are more important and one is less important? Objectivism does actually speak of a hierarchy of values, the question that I ask is, what is the stance of Objectivism or of Objectivists on hierarchical knowledge in general, which would include ranking of moral principles. In the context of the Florida discussion, the various parties all have some moral flaw, doing something that they should not do. There should not be taxes, but there are!. Given that taxes are a fact, what then should we conclude about the use of those revenues for a “public purpose”? Of course, the immediate Objectivist answer is that that confiscated wealth should be immediately returned to their proper owners, but that ain’t gonna happen!. Since it is a fact that the government will redistribute wealth in some fashion, what is the morally least repugnant redistribution scheme? And, of course, what hierarchy of moral knowledge leads to that conclusion? In light of the unquestionably immoral character of taxation, also the immoral character of pornography, there can be such a thing as a “moral relative absolutist” – identify some point in a hierarchy of values, and deem that immorality greater than that point is not to be tolerated. That would sort the moral conclusions so that taxation and governmental viewpoint suppression are not to be tolerated, and pornography is bad but permissible. In fact, since moral knowledge is not some kind of mystical Platonic form that exists independent of human cognition, we can even apply inductive methods to elementary observations of existence, such as that taxation is really bad and speech-suppression is really bad, and that pornography is not good, to induce principles and to discover the hierarchy of values that causes these specific facts. So the question that I pose is, what is the hierarchy of values that leads to these conclusions? Given such a hierarchy of values, is there an identifiable point in the hierarchy where Objectivists should simply refuse to engage in discussion? Clear case, albeit not actually relevant to any contemporary political issue: a debate over which method of execution by torture should be used to suppress political opposition. Less clear case: which is worse, sales tax or income tax?

There are 4 basic choices: murder, assisting suicide, eviction, and leaving. You don’t propose murder as a solution (good choice), but do entertain the possibility of assisting suicide. You say that there would be no deception about what the substance is, and it would be his choice to consume it, but you do also intend to deceive him, by leaving the drugs in such a way that he would assume that one of his drug buddies left it there – why not honestly give it to him and say “Here is some fentanyl, I hope you take it and die”? That would be actually honest. Another less honest approach would be to lace some food with the drug and encourage him to eat the food, omitting a relevant detail. In both scenarios, you cause death, but it was his choice to eat it. I expect that your first reaction to this alternative is “But that’s murder!”, which is true, but so is your alternative plan, at least in a number of states. Of course we know that laws are typically messed up and not objective so maybe this is a morally-permissible act that is wrongly prohibited. Since this is an investigation of morality, I don’t actually know whether you could consider poisoning to be a morally permissible means of solving a problem (as opposed to bludgeoning, which I assume is off the table). If you would also preclude poisoning, then why, morally speaking? The only thing that I could come up with is the taint of dishonesty, and it seems to me this concern should also rule out the plan to surreptitiously leave poison in the hopes that he will kill himself with it. Without endorsing that plan, I cannot see how any other poisoning plan isn’t morally defective from the perspective of the virtue of honesty. If you agree that your original plan is dishonest, therefore immoral, it seems to me that you either have to shift to one of the two eviction plans, or to excuse immorality based on some exception to morality that needs to be discussed in more detail.

I’m not persuaded that any culture needs to reconsider the concept of corporations, but rational discussion is always a good thing. The standard left-wing “argument” against corporations is that it encourages people to operate businesses at a profit and not for the benefit of the workers (what laborers receive is not called “profit”). I find it to be pointless to discuss the merits of corporations with communists. The only argument of merit against corporations that I have ever heard is exactly based on the problem of shielding individuals from the legal consequences of their actions. Hence the second quote is essential to this question. One problem with the claim is that it isn’t exactly true, indeed there is a name for it when you go after evil corporate miscreants – piercing the corporate veil. But don’t go there yet, the first question should be ‘what should happen if a business markets a product “known” to cause harm?’ (I said business, not corporation). Under the current regime, the business gets sued, and if found liable damages may be awarded. I should point out that under an Objectivist regime, a company will not be held liable for marketing a product that can be argued to have some detectable relation to “harm”. A company that sells cyanide capsules as cyanide capsules should not be held liable, even though the company should know of the potential for harm. Caveat emptor! When they sell cyanide as ibuprofen, that’s where true liability arises. Cyanide as ibuprofen is exactly the kind of case where the corporate veil will be pierced, and where criminal prosecution will arise. The question is, which persons should be held personally liable? Some candidates are “the CEO”, “the board of directors”, “the manager in charge of product development”, “the employees of the company” and “everybody with a direct or indirect interest in the company” (such as a bank which makes loans to the business, or your grandmother whose retirement plan invested in the company). In the case of criminal prosecution, the law already has an answer, because you don’t prosecute people for bad outcomes, you prosecute them for evil actions – knowingly violating the rights of another. Whether or not the CEO, board of directors, or guy on the assembly line is held criminally responsible, and sent to jail, depends on that person’s knowledge state and the nature of their actions. One does not gain immunity from prosecution from the fact that you work for a corporation. Unlike criminal law, civil liability for damages is not centered around a person’s mental state, and to the extent that mental state enters into the equation, it is often very subjective – was the person negligent in their actions? There is a venerable but questionable legal doctrine, respondeat superior, which says that an employee is not to be held responsible for their actions in the course of the job, responsibility shifts to the boss. Why in the world should an employee be sheltered from responsibility for their actions? The two main reasons are philosophically repugnant: that with great power comes create responsibility, and that inferiors in a business context are mindless drones, lacking free will. Rather than determining liability based on analysis in terms of power relations, liability should be based on individual knowledge and actions – one’s choices. Corporate structure is pretty much orthogonal to these notions of responsibility, except when it comes to determining whose pockets to pick in awarding damages. The corporate veil means that a plaintiff can only go after the assets of the corporation, and not the assets of the individuals who make up the corporation. Therefore, if Dow Corporation negligently harms a half million people, claims against the corporation are limited to the corporation but not the managers, supervisors, line-employees or shareholders who directly or indirectly bought an interest in the company. If the corporate entity is not recognized as a separate legal entity, your grandmother qua part-owner of the company would be held personally responsible for those actions. I conclude that whatever problem exists, it’s not about corporations, it’s about “responsibility”. Who should be held responsible for what choices? Why should an employee be relieved of responsibility, and why should a CEO be assigned all of the liability?

All 34 charges are counts of New York Penal Code §175.10, Falsifying business records in the first degree, which is defined as: A person is guilty of falsifying business records in the first degree when he commits the crime of falsifying business records in the second degree, and when his intent to defraud includes an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof The criminal complaint is here: it is a series of check numbers, ledger entries, invoices etc. The lesser included crime of second degree falsification is just making or causing a false entry in the business records of an enterprise, without the fraud of other crime aspect.

IMO it is best to focus on an area that you understand reasonably well, but not well enough, that is, go for depth rather than breadth. But before pursuing that advice, you should also aim to say what fact of your existence Objectivism seems to solve, or whether your inerest is more ineffably “I like her writing style”. I came into Objectivism as an account of “rights” that is superior to religion- and tradition-based conservativism and stipulation-based libertarianism (the idea that initiation of force is an intrinsic bad, and that is leads to a contradiction without any clue what the contradiction is). I’m resisting the temptation to say “do everything right now!”. You cannot reasonably hope to grasp a foundational question by intensively studying an area that you know nothing about. When you focus no an area that you alread understand to some extent, you are bound to run into a foundational issue, which when better resolved will have a great impact on your life. I read what Rand had to say about “principles” a million times but it was still just words. Once I read ITOE (which didn’t exist when I got started), the theory of concepts changed everything for me. Galt’s speech suddenly made sense, all of that stuff about principles and “chosing” actions made sense. ITOE provided a fundamental tool that led to me having a better grasp not only of Objectivism, but the nature of the universe. But, as they say, YMMV.

Let me paraphrase Kyary’s claim, changing “movie” into “novel” – “The only way to 'reproduce' a book is to rent out the same studio, get the same typewriter and paper, supporting cups of coffee and whatever discussion surrounded the production of the movie, send it to the same publisher in the same envelope and so on”. Clearly (hopefully there is no disagreement), something has gone wrong in the fundamental identification. Another way to reproduce a movie (i.e. there is more than one way to preproduce a work) is to take the existing physical object (let’s be modern! an mp4 file on a fancy movie-editing computer), and drag-and-drop it onto multiple thumb drives. Let’s forget AS the movie, focus on AS the novel. Ayn Rand initially wrote said novel, and submitted it to a publisher who, after some paperwork where she gave them permission to reproduce and distribute copies in exchange for money (her means of survival), proceeded to line up rows of type, fired up the printing presses, and so on, selling the physical results. Sure there’s a movie based on the book, let’s not lose sight of the basic property right that is copyright. The difference between reproducing and distributing is that when you distribute, you must first reproduce, unless you distribute the sole manuscript copy submitted by Rand. In ordinary English, “distribute” presupposes multiple copies – it presupposes reproduction. There is a valid latent objection regarding the idea / expression divide in this thread. To first reiterate the Objectivist claim: it’s the concrete expression that is to be protected by law as property, not the idea. To then reiterate what copyright law says, it’s the concrete expression that is protected as property, not the idea. However, the courts have not been particularly useful (consistent) in their rulings, in articulating what the distinction is between ideas and expression. And Congress has been even worse in expressing the relevant distinction. Copyright law says that only the creator of a work has the right to copy or distribute a work, or to authorize others to do so (also, that this right is distinguished after a certain period of time). It seems to me that step 1 is affirming or denying that principle. Detail questions about “copying ideas” and trivial changes in the copying process are pointless, if the fundamental proprety principle itself is is dispute.

Maybe this is the root of the problem, in these discussions. Because copyright and patent infringement is widely talked about in social media as “theft” or “piracy”, people quite reasonably identify an important difference between theft and infringement – deprivation. A common retort is “but you are depriving them of their livelihood!”. I think instead the attention should be in what the fundamental claim of patent and copyright law is, it is a claim that a particular expression can be property. When a person trespasses on my tangible property, there is no theft (permanent deprivation). The discussion should look at the similarity between trespass to land or chattels, and trespass of intellectual property. I think the parallelism (identified by Rand) between claiming and maintaining a claim to lands and goods qua property that were not previously owned because the person recognizes their value applies equally to the concrete expression of an idea, and that’s where the discussion should be focused. The automatic output of a computer program is not protected by copyright law, only the creative – non-mechanical – creation of a human is protected by copyright. That’s a legal point, not a philosophical – I’d say that the law has it right. You don’t even need an AI, you just need to know what the vocabulary of music is (♯, ♪, A etc) and the most elementary system of rules about meaningful sequences of those letters, and you can easily generate all possible “pieces of music”, up to length n (the set is unbounded).

I am not surprised at the claim, since NPR is sort of famous for making assertions of fact without evidence, but perhaps that have some document that they think supports the belief. Perhaps these sources will help in doing better historical research. This article traces the history of college athletics in the US. As the author notes, college athletics was on the rise well before the Morrill Act was passed. At the time (1840 and onwards), American students were accused (by the British) of being inferior to their British counterparts in manly qualities. Increased attention to athletics was a natural outcome of the growing Muscular Christianity movement. College sports first sprung from the east coast traditional universities, and incidentally was primarily centered around crew, not football, the former requiring water, not land. Once agricultural colleges were well-enough established, they predictably followed suit and like everybody else developed athletic programs. We can turn to the Morrill Act itself to see why the government passed this law. It was specifically to create agricultural colleges, and then in order to secure passage of the bill after a previous veto, it was expanded to include engineering and military tactics (and was signed into law by Lincoln in 1862). This significantly changed the profile of American university education from a focus on classical studies, eventually leading to what we have now. If the allegation is true – “we’ve got all this land, what do we do with it?” – we would expect there to be a significant correlation between being a land grant university and having an athletic program. These are the land-grand universities. The hard part, IMO, is distinguishing “developed athletics because of all the land” from “developed athletics because of all of the interest”. The University of Washington is a sports powerhouse, but it is not a land-grant university. Washington State University is a lesser powerhouse, and it is a land-grant university. I think the idea of universities trying to “fill the spaces” lacks merit, in that there is no need whatsoever for those spaces to be filled. The act was intended to serve as a source of revenue for states to create university systems, and is not just the giving of federal lands so that you’ll have a place to build a university.

Objectivism does not countenance signing yourself into slavery, it does support the concept of a contract. When I hire a painter to paint my house, that contract entails that the painter must do specific work: paint my house. A contract can also specify, for reasons tangentially relating to trade secrets, that a person cannot harvest the firm’s clients and start a competing business for a period of a year. The only reason why the firm hired you in the first place is that you promised to abide by this contract clause, so if you don’t like it, work for someone else. Or, you and your buddies can get together and agree to refuse any such contracts, which might lead to a labor shortage and thus some change in the contract. A contract that prohibits a person from “using their own writing style” in future employment is plainly unenforceable. The subject matter of trade secrets in law is better defined that a unilateral declaration “we consider this to be a trade secret”. An employer can only lay claim to actual work product created in the course of employment, or limit employee use of kinds of knowledge previously owned and protected by the firm, as stated in the contract and subject to short time limits. Your accusation that people are routinely forced to sign over patents needs to be concretized. I suspect that you’re referring to the fact that a firm will typically contractually require its employees to assign their patents to the firms. Therefore the scientist who, working as an employee for a drug firm using the firm’s resources discovers a cure for Alzheimer’s cannot seize the resulting patent and claim it as his own. The scientist has to abide by whatever IP-sharing agreement is in the contract. If you have a specific real case that illustrates your concern, please direct us to the details.

I think we do have to talk about obligation, not just permission. There are two kinds of obligation to be concerned with. The first one relates to the values of the would-be invaders – us, I suppose. Do our values obliges us to undertake actions, in order to remain honest to those values? The second relates to the specific commitment implied by an invasion or other military act. When we initiate an act for a (valid) reason, does that imply a commitment to carrying through in reaching that goal? Respect for rights is a value, should a nation act to gain and keep that value? Should the US have aided the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, likewise should the US have aided South Korea in resisting the invasion from China / North Korea? Should the US have aided South Vietnam in its attempt to repel the communist invasion from the north? And then, once we have decided that we should aid Hungary in its struggle for freedom, is this a whimsical decision, or have we thought out the consequences of taking action and do we accept responsibility for the actions that we take? I reach different conclusions in these particular cases, but they center around the question of commitment to success. My opinion is that the US should have aided the Hungarian Revolution, and that we were right to defend South Korea. It was a betrayal of our core values to turn our backs on Hungary. The best argument that could be made in favor of the US choice in 1956 would be that the alternative could have been too costly (perhaps the thinking At The Top was that the Soviet Union would retaliate with nuclear weapons). I also conclude that the war in Vietnam was a futile act of self-sacrifice not reflecting a commitment to protection and preservation of individual rights – it was an effort to demonstrate to the Soviet Union the ends to which we were willing to go to oppose their influence (and w.r.t. the conduct of the war, to demonstrate that we were willing to pointlessly wrassle with a tar baby). For analogous reasons, I would hold that military action in Afghanistan is pointless. Despite my affection for South Sudan, there is no point in the US getting actively involve in a race war. “Nuke Tehran” has been a popular slogan in some Objectivist circles, but I disagree with the premise. Sure, we may technically “have the right”, but is it a rational thing to do? What will be gained – or sacrificed? It could be appropriate if the mullah regime were on the brink of launching nukes at us, but they aren’t. Were we to launch a large-scale boots-on-the-ground plus bombing invasion with the intent get rid of the current government, would that get us to our goal? If not, do we have a moral obligation (being true to our own values) to refrain from ill-conceived slap-dash actions like assassinating Raisi in the hope that somehow this will free Iran?

That is exactly the point. To paraphrase the point that Binswanger made in that clip a few minute earlier, colonialism isn’t a term that we can use. It has become completely corrupted. We may struggle to rehabilitate words like “capitalism” and “selfish”, and occasionally people try to rehabilitate “greedy” (hat tip to David V), but I don’t see that imperialism or colonialism is a term that clearly identifies a good concept that needs to be salvaged. We should instead focus on countering conceptual corruption over terms like “justice; equal; right”. Colonialism is particularly useless as an identification since it generally picks out exactly one thing: the establishment of government by France, Belgium and England in Africa, and the subsequent withdrawal of Europe from those territories. Those European governments created nations where there were none, which is in contrast to Asia where an existing nation found itself without a government. We should remove Belgium from the discussion, since their conduct was utterly without merit and I defy anyone to find evidence that Rand approved of the Belgian’s conduct in Africa. What came to be known as “colonies” started out as trade interests, which naturally requires the rule of law and therefore a government. There were certainly many local kingdoms such as the numerous Igbo kingdoms, the Oyo Empire, the Egba Empire, the Bornu Empire and so on, but these empires rise and fall with each invasion from a competing empire or death of a despot. Actually, what first impelled the transition from merely protecting trade interests to direct control in 1862 in what is now Nigeria was Britains war against slavery. It is true that they used their military power to put an end to slavery, thus establishing their first “colonial” presence. The philosophical question that should be under discussion is this: what should a civilized rights-respecting government do with respect to a land lacking a civilized rights-respecting government (so, no government, or only a considerable less rights-respecting form of government). Would it be proper for the contemporary US to send troops to Crapistan in order to build a nation more like the US? Proposed candidates are Iran, North Korea, Somalia, South Sudan, Cuba, Belarus and Afghanistan. I don’t think the answer is the same in all of these cases. We can then translate that reasoning into an answer to the (hypothetical) question “Should the US invade the Moghal Empire and build a rights-respecting rational nation?”.

It is true that all of the copyrights for Sherlock Holmes have expired, therefore those works are 'in the public domain'. It is not the case that the estate cannot garner further revenue – that depends on the terms of the license granted to a publisher. If e.g. Random House obtained a license to publish some work of Doyle’s in exchange for some per-copy royalty, that obligation still exists unless there is an explicit clause terminating the obligation to pay. You’d really have to read the agreement to see what it says. I read my agreements, and there is no clause to the effect that “We don’t have to pay for sales once copyright expires”. “Entering the public domain” is, pretty much defined as “copyright has expired”. People may declare that a work is “in the public domain”, but US copyright law does not define the concept “public domain”, and it’s just a common way of talking about expired copyright.

I don’t understand how the government uses copyright to censor anything. By law, the federal government cannot prohibit copying its works. Other levels of government are usually required to make available public records, so for example they cannot suppress dissent by forbidding discussion of a particular law (anyhow, that right is covered by the First Amendment, which trumps copyright law). A state or municipal government could, for example, publish a book and under copyright law could forbid you from copying that work, but I don’t see how that constitutes censorship. That’s a point that needs to be explained. It is not censorship when a publisher exercises its property right to a work that it owns. Censorship is an act done by the government Your implication that copyright expiry is not “readily available” anymore is simply untrue – copyright always expires at a legally-defined time. Maybe you are claiming that the duration of copyright is too long. The 75 years vs. 50 years vs. 25 years question is a difficult one, but “arbitrary” numbers are necessary in a society with objective laws. The determination that a person can be held liable for contracts at age 18 is an “arbitrary” number, perhaps the number should be 19 or 17. If you want to argue that a 4 year old should be held liable for their contracts, perhaps that would be an topic worth discussing separately. And fyi, “fair use” is rampantly available. The main problem with fair use is that it is not clearly defined – what counts as “fair” is highly arbitrary. Physical copies can disappear at the whim of certain people (“owners”) just as much as electronic copies can. There are tons of physical products that I can’t get anymore because there doesn’t seem to be sufficient market to warrant maintaining the machinery. That’s life. Far from suppressing the acquisition of desirable stuff, the expansion of electronic means of promulgation has made it much easier to get free stuff. Print books are rather expensive, and electronic books are dirt cheap, or could be. These days, it is not difficult to self-publish and freely distribute a book that you write. An author has to make a choice – do they want to make money from the work and do they want it to be widely and systematically disseminated, or are they satisfied with free, informally-distributed samizdat? If you’re not happy with your particular publisher, there are plenty of competing publishers, so I don’t see how publisher control is relevant to the question of whether I have a property right to the book that I write. I just don’t see any argument here that government officials have in any way corrupted concepts of intellectual property rights. Your objections seem to be based on commercialization – Disney not making their movies available all the time and using the law (statutory law and the law of supply and demand) as a way of generating value; contract law and the fact that you can’t sell trade secrets when you agree to not sell trade secrets.

I can’t give you any examples of any large-scale social phenomenon that is characterised purely by reason. OCON really does not constitute large-scale. An example of primarily reason-based colonization, of the US, is being carried out right now by people from Asia, Africa and Latin America. You may not want to classify that as colonization, though I can point you to a number of African, Asian and Latin colonies in my town (the term “community” is of course more politically correct). If we turn the clock back to the late 1500’s and 1600’s, why exactly did Europeans come to America? It was not to wage war against Indians. It is true that some of them had a rational desire to engage in irrational religious conduct that was forbidden in the old country, so the choice to emigrate was influences by something other than strict reason, but as I said, the moral code developed by Rand was not available to them, so like all activities for the preceding innumerable millennia, there was a significant taint of irrationality involved in the mix. The problem is not the colonising, it is the orthogonal tendency of men to “go bad”. If we subtract the irrational component of Islamic jihad which played a major role in African history, the (indigenous) development and spread of civilizations in Africa is predominantly “colonization gone right” – moving into new areas, bringing new technologies and trade. Clearly they were still well behind their colleagues in Europe. There is also a similar colonization from Taiwan starting about 3,000 years ago, extending to Polynesia, Southeast Asia and all the way to Africa.

A funny thing about “colonialism” is that when you contemplate human history, it is difficult to distinguish colonization from other forms of human movements. Many people mistakenly think that the various American Indian tribes came into territory never before occupied by humans, and have been living there since. That’s true at some remote point in history, but does not represent the reality that we know. In the Pacific Northwest, Salishan people moved into territory occupied by Athabascan tribes, and displaced / absorbed them almost without trace, and the Athabascan people had earlier displaced various other people like the Tsimshian and Chinook (using modern names of survivors). People don’t talk about that as colonization, actually we don’t talk about it at all. There are many similar examples throughout the world: the Bantu colonization of Africa, the Arab colonization of the Middle East and Northern Africa. It is generally held that “Europeans” colonized the New World, the English colonized much of South Asia and parts of Africa, the French and Belgians colonized most of Africa, the Russians colonized Siberia and the Caucasus. People do not typically talk of the Goths, Mongols and Third Reich as colonization, they talk of “invasion”. What sets colonization apart from invasion is the underlying method: reason versus force. What gives colonization a bad rep is the later replacement of reason by force. India as a colony under direct rule of the British Parliament was the final step in the transition from trade (which has existed for millennia) to force. The intermediate step is the fact that trade was not being being conducted in a civilized nation following the rule of law, when legitimate trade interests of the East India Company were infringed from various sides due to the decline of the Moghal Empire, and the chaos that ensued. Is colonization a good thing or a bad thing? The question makes as much sense as asking if it is a good thing for a nation to expand it territory. The idea that everybody has a proper place that they should remain in – “we have no business in ___” is just wrong. It’s easy to apologize for an evil by pointing out that at least they made the trains run on time; it’s also easy to condemn any good because somebody on the good side engages in evil. I find efforts to transport highly developed modern knowledge and moral codes back centuries ago and morally evaluate people before there was any rational moral code to be, well, evil. It is right to trade values with other people, it is wrong to use force to get people to act. It is pointless to try to micro-divide moral codes so that we can forgive suppression of political dissent in case we build 400 miles of paved roads.