StrictlyLogical

You know, all rights come from an understanding of what the right society is for an individual to live and flourish in, and is grounded in an ethics we all know as selfish (but not irrational selfishness). Generally the idea of living in peace necessary for flourishing with individuals who are restrained from initiation of force (including fraud) gives rise to the concept of individual rights. There are a lot of reason which you know of which support Rand's theory of individual rights, how politics springs from an ethics, a morality of rational selfishness. Imagine all the reasons for having individual rights in a society, and do not forget we are human beings not meaningless machinations. We are all individuals but we are not all independent and fully rational. We all were children once, dependents starting as pre-rational, who at some time later become independent and rational... and we all to some degree have the potential (if we are lucky enough to live long enough), slip back into a state of physical or mental dependence.. and possibly post-rationality... once more. And the vast majority of us love and value family, old or young. I do not think the society which rests on all those reasons for individual rights, would be able to remain the right kind of society for flourishing, if the society removed rights for all dependents, or all children or adults, all members of society, who are not fully independent and rational. At the very least a right to life is necessary, a right also to bodily integrity, being free from irreparable harm is also a requirement. These rights are not extended to those "others" in a society as something superfluous to the proper society, they are necessary to it. Try to imagine the kind of society which protected rights for only those who were fully rational and independent, and all the kinds of predation and killing and human suffering which could result... yes, emotional psychological harm is real, but it is not the only harm, not the only aspect inimical to flourishing one would get in such a society. I think there is a balance to be struck for the kinds of rights to be protected for dependents, a balance which recognizes that they are dependents, and cannot be fully responsible in all ways... possibly being a danger to others or themselves... but who at a minimum should have rights to life, bodily integrity, generally free from unnecessary initiation of force etc. Rights and responsibilities would be rationally considered given the context of the individual. The second amendment, for example, would not enable a 4 year old, or a completely addled old man with severe dementia, to remain in possession of a loaded gun.

All individual rights are protected under a proper government, you are still exploring what rights a child has, and why. This is explored more in another of your posts which I reply to below.

Yes, indeed this is the sort of thing I agree with. Case law governing what constitutes propriety is usually enough until real concerns about immediate safety issues are raised... a proper system does not invoke preventative justice (based on speculation or statistics), but it has mechanisms for dealing with real threats of imminent harm, and irreparable damage and the like... and it would apply should someone find out the child is being sold for money or a pedophile is attempting to adopt...

I understand your equation of possession with ownership, and your idealization of property with that which you take possession of and value, but they are quite different concepts. True property over a thing MEANS you have the absolute right to do with it as you wish (without harming others, or violating anyone else's right etc.) this MUST include the absolute right to do anything to or with it, to sell, rent, modify, etc. and/or destroy the thing. A proper government could NOT prevent you from doing anything to your property including destroying it... because THAT is what DEFINES property which is yours. A mere possession, or an ill-gotten thing owned by someone else, or anything subject to anyone else's rights, therefore cannot be your property. This essential aspect of what property IS means no one else has any claim on it, and you do. Now, of course you can own "bundles of rights" IN a thing, rights under a contract can be enforced.. rental agreements, rights of ways, licenses, etc and in that sense you can "have property" in things... but the things themselves (which you have SOME but not all rights in) are not your property. In this sense, in the sense of what is at the heart of what differentiates property over a thing from any other type of mere possession, or merely having some rights in, is what makes it impossible for a person of any age to BE property in a proper society.

I did not mean a logical base... I meant a base or starting place for discussion. Responsibility with regard to an "IT" is of a different kind (not just a different magnitude) from responsibility in respect of a "who". That's why I raised a few silly questions about property and killing. I agree, we are dealing with a responsibility (to a "who") and I like your example of dining and dashing, the responsibility (or not) to the people running the restaurant. I also agree with the responsibility starting with "claiming the table". Yes, it is a concrete example, but we are capable of abstraction here ... claiming the table is a positive act implying entering to a relationship with the restaurant owner as against all others. It gives rise to expectations which are reasonable in the context and which conveniently allow everyone to dispense with "proclamations" of intent and agreement. Diner: I am sitting here because I intend to order and pay for food provided by the owner and expect to have possession of it for the duration of the meal. Others: I understand that you and the owner are exercising a dining-meal providing custom, and I will not try to sit at your table or eat your food, or take your seat if you go to the washroom, i.e. the table is yours because you have claimed it temporarily as part of the exchange... Owner: I see you sitting there to the exclusion of others who might buy a meal from me and I expect you will order a meal and pay me... Of course this would be silly. No one has to say anything because in the culture your positive actions speak to others your intent, which is tied up with unspoken agreements and expectations etc. Stay outside the restaurant if you do not wish to send to signals of intent to trade for food... As regards a "who" which is not an "it", your actions of caring for him/her and not giving him/her up for adoption, (in today's society there are plenty of people looking to adopt) is a "claim" (not of anything like a table...) that you are literally "taking responsibility" for the child. The continual choice of not volunteering the child up to the care and custody of others tells the child and the others that "you got this" and you ARE intending and trying to provide for the child. At some point a child (not being property) could choose to go with someone else if that responsibility were not being met... while at the same time if it were being met, others would best take the kid (if a misbehaving) back home to be properly schooled...etc. How does one repudiate the unwritten expectation in the restaurant if by accident they sat down in one? Leave ... before eating of course. As for the child, if one does not want to be responsible, literally does not want to provide for a child, (which lack of want goes along with a lack of love) one has only to give it up for someone else to do so. Leaving the specifics of university education aside.

Let's start from the base first: Morally, can you own a child as property? Can you dispose of it (kill it) as you wish? If you lose it (misplace it or it runs away) do you have a moral claim on it?

"If a mother buys food for her hungry child rather than a hat for herself, it is not a sacrifice: she values the child higher than the hat; but it is a sacrifice to the kind of mother whose higher value is the hat, who would prefer her child to starve and feeds him only from a sense of duty." Ayn Rand I suggest we read between the lines and remember what kinds of values Ms. Rand deemed to be valid, and just how human Ms. Rand actually was.

It depends on what colleges are available, how much real knowledge they teach, how much Marxist indoctrination they push etc. It may be worth the money to self learn, hire persons with knowledge, private tutors, mentors etc. Good parents do everything in their power to launch their children as high and as far as they wish to go, sometimes that is something more spiritual than economic, like a small business, or career in art... it depends greatly on the context of the child's wants and needs and realistic dreams, and the means of the parents, good people work this out and do their best. Rationalizing falling short of this is usually confined to people who really would rather have the "hat" than feed the child...[paraphrasing] but really that was one of THE wisest things Rand ever said in her writings.

Arguendo "wanting" to have or keep raising children MEANS being prepared for, and earnestly and genuinely loving and caring for another person who starts out deeply dependent. Whether it fits any philosophical standard, humans DO literally need love to grow into a sane and moral adult.. it is not a psychological luxury, it is a deep human necessity. Perhaps it is only moral to "have" and/or be the guardian of anyone, if and only if you actually WANT to be one, with everything that entails, and ALL that it means. Summary: Have a kid you don't want and/or cannot care for? Just f#@&ing give it up for adoption as soon/early as you know, so someone else can do so. Our world would be a MUCH better place, and so many people SO much better off, if everyone followed this.

It means you cant kill the child, nor can you own it like property. The child is an end in himself or herself.

This is all premised on the idea that there are others who would and could have taken care of the child to a sort of minimal "healthy childhood" standard. If the caregiver maintained that he/she was capable of and was providing that minimum, while preventing others from providing that minimum, to the child... that caregiver better have actually provided that minimum, or should have given the child up to someone else who would have done so.

Love has nothing to do with it. The voluntary action of putting oneself in the role of protector and provider (rather than letting that fall to someone else) does give rise to expectations, both from the child and from other people who otherwise would take care of the child. It is a positive act which is traded in essence with everyone else's compliance... "Let me take care of this child, and do not interfere with me doing so, I will ensure the child is raised into a healthy independent adult." The rights of a child are different from an adult, a right to life yes, but not the right to act free from any intervention if the action is potentially harmful to the child. The rights of children and other dependents then ARE different from the rights of independent adults. Note also, a child can be in someone's possession, and taken care of but cannot be "owned" they are not property, and as animated creatures they have agency... if a child runs away, why should someone else "give" her back to you? You cannot go to court to claim her on the basis that you own her, you have no right to her as property. When you force a child to do something against their wishes what gives you the right (as a non-owner) to do so, i.e. on what grounds could you argue others should not/cannot prevent you from doing so? Clearly, your argument would be "This thing (which I do not own as chattel), I am forcing to do something which makes it temporarily suffer by crying etc. BECAUSE it is in its own long term interest, please do not intervene" Summary: A child is. You have not the right to kill it (it has a right to life) or to irreparably harm it. You also have no right to keep it against all others (it is not your property) except by their agreement... and in the right kind of society that agreement is in place when you are the voluntarily proclaimed caregiver of that child and are doing that which you have promised to do.

Doug, perhaps a little thought experiment could lead you in the right direction. Imagine in a proper (Objectivist) society, there were recognized private causes of action for abuse or negligent behavior or neglect that dependent people could raise against their caretakers. The relationship of dependency gives rise to duties and responsibilities which are voluntarily taken on by virtue of the person's holding themselves out to be and continuing to be in that position of caretaking. Now, children cannot bring suit on behalf of themselves, but when they become an adult they are able (in this society) to bring claims against their parents for wrongs which they could not have brought forward and/or could not have been held responsible for bringing forward as a child. What sorts of things would a judge decide are wrongs for which justice would require restitution? Which sorts of things would perhaps not be considered wrong at all? It stands to reason then that for those facts patterns and cases where some recompense would be required if discovered afterward (brought forth by person upon reaching adulthood - age of majority), some sort of intervention, persuasion, information, ... and in extreme cases (irreparable harm) force... would be in order if discovered while the person is still a child. An adult who thinks the outdoors and any social contact is "bad" and keeps their child indoors and away from all people, is likely causing irreparable psychological harm (or effectively irreparable), and intervention would likely be necessary. All extreme cases of physical, emotional, and intellectual neglect will likely fall into the same category. An adult who otherwise educates their child enough about "this" world, so as to enable them to function as a self-responsible independent adult when the time comes, should be adjudged as not being negligent, no matter what political, religious, or philosophical views they teach. There of course would be difficult cases in the areas in between... is there "enough" care being given... and perhaps in those instances, being able to sue for an amount required to pay for further education, extra health or medical attention, or therapy would be a good way to see how much the neglect really has kept the person back. Developments in the law and the legal theories surrounding this as well as scientific psychological advances would be useful in navigating this difficult area. One thing for sure the standards would have to be realistic... with a clear and sober effort to avoid perfectionism... no person is perfect, no parent is perfect, and no one comes out of childhood perfect either.

I think the thing which sets Objectivism apart is its amenability to non-deterministic causation/action flowing from absolute identity. Things behave according to their nature, lawfully, but not all things do so strictly in a deterministically Leibnizian manner. Free-will is not the ability of a person to choose against his or her own nature/identity in some arbitrary way, but the freedom to choose from a number of possible choices perfectly consistent with the person's nature/identity. Free will is non-deterministic but not completely arbitrary.

Objectivism holds a few things as fundamental (these are not all axioms): Existence is Identity - Implies everything is what it is, and nothing else. That includes what a person is, at a particular time. Of course things can and do change over time. The concept of existence also encompasses everything, so nothing is supernatural in any sense. Things simply are and are natural. Free Will - means a person could have chosen otherwise and hence things could have been different. I am not very familiar with the theory of Agency but it smells of a dualistic mind-body dichotomy or worse supernaturalism which Objectivism rejects. Agents being causes which are not events, takes a specific part of natural existence and divorces it, in essence creating the supernatural, a dimension of souls. All existence would be shorn in two. In place of physical indeterminism one has foisted a sort of subjective indeterminism. The effort to side step events of the natural world by introduction of agents, would be untenable to Objectivism, since all of existence is identity, all things including agents in their own dimension would be subject to acting in accordance with their nature, and that nature would in effect need to be causal as a corollary of identity... instead of looking at protons and electrons and scratching our heads about how minds work, we would be inventing Agent-atoms and Agent-schemata and what-nots to describe how and why agents behave as they do... and even more complicated inventing heretofore unknown mechanisms for causality to flow from events in the real world to the agent-choices of the souls-world and vice versa. Soon we would be forced to look at both worlds as simply part of one existence and all of it subject to identity and causation. Furthermore we would be no better off trying to hand wave away the supernatural Epicurean Swerves of choice etc. in the soul-world... i.e. we are no closer to understanding the underlying arrangements and processes which constitute and bring about Free-Will in the soul world than we are in our world, and an invocation of arbitrary subjectivism is not an explanation, certainly not one in keeping with identity and causation.

Disappointing to see a half thought out or at least not thoroughly researched piece here from Gus. He is ignoring wholesale the complexities here, including to name but a few: So called "rights" of corporations (literally creatures of the State) cannot be equated with individual rights. This is very complex but although people have a right to organize themselves and coordinate their action, they cannot make an abstract thing itself have rights, right remain with people. Ayn Rand clearly described what makes Value necessary is what makes Value possible... the alternative of life or death... gives rise to ethics and rights. Gus states landowners have the right to do anything which does not violate the rights of others... with that in mind and the warnings of Disney's lawyers, he does not see how a the existence of a literally centrally-planned utopia of a city, could possibly conflict with individual rights of actual residents. Does he imagine a city where everyone contracts out of their rights to property and freedoms simply because they live there? Common law restrictions on how tenants and landlords deal with one another in accordance with principles dictate neither have free reign. What of the children and further generations of people of this so called city... they have not signed any contract... can a city arbitrarily have an expulsion plan for people who will not sign some contract? Could the city tax people, what about setting up a social credit system? Could the people agree to arbitrary law, compulsory edicts that are part of the "management plan" for the day the week or the decade? How far could the central planners go? Of course the lawyers were right, in a country which at least pays lip service to such a thing as the US Constitution one cannot have some Centrally-Planned Utopian Territory where the central planners always get their way regardless of what that plan is. No taxation without representation... residents of a territory have rights more fundamental than some arbitrary tenancy contract. Disney was right to say no to "residents" on his property, and for good reason... they would have rights, he would rather not have to deal with.

It’s not about Left versus Right anymore. The remnants of a Principled Democracy leaning to and fro are on the brink and all people who on either principled sides of the isle are threatened. We now have principles as such versus corruption, Republican Democracy versus Tyrannical Oligarchy. I dare say Trump should choose a Democrat as his running mate… but one who is principled and still fights for humanity and the ideals of the west. But perhaps this task is not for Trump and maybe it is decades away… all those principled dems and reps need to abandon the legacy parties …. there is a vast common middle ground and common values most Americans would rally behind… the new principled peoples party would directly reclaim freedom from those powers who aspire to reincarnate themselves as King George…. we need a new set of founding fathers and yes mothers… and one day perhaps we’ll see America slowly becoming more free rather than less.

This bears repeating.

Traditional Statists and authoritarians on the left and right have played a game and worked with each other for a very long time, and they continue to do so. Trump represents a new kind of right which expressly (possibly honestly..) aims to dismantle the deep state and corruption, promising more individual freedom and rights (as those on the Right understand them). He certainly is supported by that new kind of Right. It WOULD be great, if a new kind of Left (not too far now...) arose which also expressly aims to dismantle the deep state and corruption, promising more individual freedom and rights (as those on the Left understand them). The left which used to stand for an enlightened empowerment of the disenfranchised and the common man in face of perceived corruption by greedy capitalists... needs to step up (as they like to say so often). What we need is a united front against authoritarianism, the deep state, and corruption, Left, Right, religious and non-religious... we need humans for humanity.

If true, your situation is very sad, and your mental state quite frankly tragic. On the other hand you sound like someone in high school who has decided to troll this site after having been briefly exposed to Rand. In either case I will address the post in case someone may find it useful. This is conjecture. One cannot predict the future with certainty especially when individual free will is involved. Although statistics do not paint a rosy picture, there are outliers who by whatever chance circumstance or act of sheer will or combination thereof are able to pull themselves out from the jaws of oblivion. This is why Hope and Faith in oneself is paramount when all appears bleak. God help you. Such a want is monstrous when unwarranted. He has not murdered and tortured millions… clearly you only believe you wish this because you do not believe he can change… I hope you don’t wish such a thing but instead which he will turn his life around. As for whether your wish is justified by your so called reasons … I will address each in turn. Need is no justification for such an evil want. You cannot “need” in particular the property of anyone else. You have fabricated an evil way out of your health predicament without due consideration to the multitude of good and mentally healthy venues: charity and hard work to name but two. As for valuing money more than a human being this is a highly superficial and evil “accounting”. Your humanity, dignity, independence, and respect for life are far more valuable to your spirit than any amount of money. That you flirt with selling your soul is tragic. You present contradictory narratives. If you can completely avoid him, he does not “place” you anywhere. You can choose to steer clear and avoid his bringing you down. In which case avoiding exposure to him would not cause a higher cost of living… the mental cost and the loss in productivity in exposure by far have the greater effect on your ability to generate wealth and care for yourself. He is not your keeper and you should not elevate him to that status. Again his life being over is factually wrong at this point and as to the future, pure speculation. You couch your terms quite incorrectly. When you plant a substance with intent and knowledge it will be consumed, you are committing murder. Whether he thinks it is another drug left by his buddies or a vitamin pill or a mint he spilled the day before is irrelevant. As for your use of the term “choice” once again this is in error, he did not choose to ingest the poison you planted he would be choosing to consume something else and unfortunately would be in error. What you are proposing is murder by poison. and apparently you hope to be successful. Your paragraph about “cons” is quite funny but would be alarming if I were to believe anything in the OP Uncomfortable living with murder? Dont know how your family will react if they find out you are a murderer? Your plan might not work… and you could get caught for attempted murder or for committing murder. Is there a death penalty in your State? Committing murder is just not good for you… and the reasons are legion. it is not by any stretch conducive to flourishing… this is the biggest con and the main reason why it is immoral for you to do so.

The big issue with corporations is that bad actors get into power, boards of directors CEOs etc. and pursue causes which lose money or dilute shareholder value. So called woke corporations chasing ESG are directly stealing from public shareholders through weird voting proxy procedures… enabling those with pull to populate the boards, officers, and benefit themselves and their causes at the price of the shareholders and if it comes to it the taxpayers.

There is no general "duty" to do business with anyone in a proper society. The duty a CEO owes to the shareholders is to make a profit, and if they, in discharging to the best of their abilities that duty decide that Alice and Bob are financial risks they should not deal with Alice and Bob. Libel is very specific and generally requires a publication of falsehoods. One of the defences to libel is that what is claimed is true. IF Alice and Bob represent economic risks the corporation is not willing to take (i.e. the CEO has reasons not to deal with them) then the facts constituting those risks do not in any way create libel. Documentation within a corporation should never knowingly be false, as that would be a breach of the duty or loyalty owed the corporation by its officers and employees. An internal memo may not qualify as a publication, although it might depend upon the circumstances.

Indeed individuals directing or managing the corporation should never be shielded from responsibility … after all they are the decision makers directly responsible for the corporation’s actions.

Shareholder rights via ownership should be paramount. The obligation of the company is to make a profit for the shareholder… not to waste resources on anyone else or for any other cause.

Combing this for some semblance of substance... do I take it you are in support of central banking, the existence of the FED as well as fiat money... that these should exist in a proper Republic? and are you suggesting that Jon build his own... .. .. Republic?