Dante
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Posts posted by Dante
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Maybe that's the question, what level of proficiency with science sets an ethical minimum? What breadth, and what depth?
The thing to keep in mind here is that for Objectivism, an ethical system is supposed to be helpful to the individual, a guide to living one's life to the fullest and best extent possible. There is no universal ethical minimum of science knowledge needed for this; requirements are context-dependent. The requirements for an understanding of biology and human anatomy are obviously much higher for a doctor than for a layman; it would be irresponsible for a doctor to practice without a solid and in-depth understanding of such subjects. However, even for a layman, would it be beneficial to one's life to attain a basic understanding of, say, how disease transmission works? Absolutely.
The bottom line would be, if you have reason to believe that you will benefit significantly from attaining some level of knowledge in a particular scientific area, even given the time and effort it takes to attain, then you should go for it. However, there's no reason to think that everyone should attain a solid understanding of (for example) the scientific theories of evolution or global climate change, or else they're immoral. It depends on the relationship between that knowledge and one's individual life. Plenty of people have little to no reason to spend the time it takes to learn any particular scientific theory.
Heh, now that I look, basically what DonAthos said
- emorris1000 and 2046
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Show me where I defined life in that way please.
Okie dokie.
"Since the act of stealing your big screen television does not kill you, the act is not a violation of your right to live." -
Can one not validly make the *induction* that capitalist economies produce more material prosperity than statist economies, by looking at the wealth levels of free and unfree countries?
Why or why not would that induction be unreliable?
That information alone is not nearly enough to make a valid induction about causal factors. There are a huge number of factors that need to be considered when attempting to account for GDP (and also significant problems with using GDP as a measure of material prosperity). You would need to account for other possible factors influencing GDP before you could consider making the statement that economic freedom has caused much of the material prosperity in relatively free countries.
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The two approaches are not mutually exclusive. The amount of economic knowledge that can be gained from simply reasoning from human action is quite limited, and those principles are quantitatively undefinable. To answer any meaningful question about a past economic occurrence requires empirical data. Because of the nature of economic data, arguing for causality in an economic context often requires advanced econometric techniques to isolate and estimate the quantitative effect of one variable on another. In short, empirics and econometrics are vitally important for economic knowledge. You might consider principles of economic behavior deduced from human action to be the skeleton of economics if you like, but a full body of economic knowledge requires much more than simply a skeleton.
It is simply incorrect to hold up a deterministic interpretation of Friedman's positivism as the only alternative to economic reasoning from human action. Empirical work can tell us a lot about how people tend to behave in economic matters without claiming perfect prediction as the theoretical goal.
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...According to the above incorrect argument, one must make the following incorrect conclusion:
"if it is man's right, then it is man's right TO LIFE." This is the same as saying...
"if it is man's right, then it is man's right TO LIVE."
By describing what a man's right is, you are also decribing what a man's right is not because the contrapositve (your exact statement as a negative) is:
"If it is NOT man's right to live, then it is NOT man's right."...and here is the danger of your incorrect conclusion: from the above equivical contrapositive, one must then make this incorrect conclusions:
"If an act does not violate your right to live, then that act is not a violation of a right at all."
"Since the act of stealing your big screen television does not kill you, the act is not a violation of your right to live."...
Your jump from the concept of "the right to life" as discussed in Rand's essays and Trebor's post to the impoverished "right to live" (which you seem to define as the right to not be killed immediately) is invalid. These are not the same things in this context. As Rand argued in her work on the foundations of ethics, life is fundamentally a process, not simply a state, and a self-sustaining process at that. This fuller conception of life is what leads to the corollaries of liberty and property, as both are required by man to engage in the self-sustaining actions which maintain one's life. This equivocation and failure to understand the conception of life operating here is what leads to all of your subsequent errors of reasoning. Perhaps you should hold off on the condescending lectures on logic for now.
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Because this forums website is not the book, Atlas Shrugged. You'd need to add about 1000 pages of text to your title area in order to accomplish that.
Without a carefully constructed context, and a cogent qualification, the only way to interpret a symbol is its normal usage. Most people don't look at a dollar sign and think, "that's a symbol of a perfectly, idealistically free version of the USA". On the contrary, it's usually a symbol that means, "a unit of currency minted by the United States government" or merely, "US money (in its present state)".
Well that's just ridiculous. The usage of the dollar sign in an Objectivist context anywhere outside the pages of AS requires a separate and similarly lengthy exposition? Was it inappropriate to put a 6-foot dollar sign at Rand's funeral without reading 1000 pages of text to accompany it? The context established in AS concerning the dollar sign was relied upon there, as here, such that no separate explanation is required, which is not an unreasonable thing to do.
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The interview, linked.
... Here being the site logo. What makes you think its usage here is different than Rand's usage of it as a symbol of free trade and a free mind? I doubt Rand mentioned ObjectivismOnline in her 1964 interview.
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In AS, the meaning is used to signify (a free version of) the USA, not a government-controlled currency.
What exactly makes you think its meaning is different here?
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For police I may give 100$ a month to protect against an accute theif coming and stealing my money, my car, my house, or god forbid my life, there is only an equivalence with the theft of money, and even there what I have purchased is a stability in the loss of money, which is a service.
For the military I may give 1000$ a month to ensure that my land itself is safe, or that the business I have spent years building isn't conquered and dismantled, something that the accute property theif could not take, but that a foreign military could.
It is simply a service with an economy of scale that is justified through a mutual self-interest. A lot of people (Rand included) made the mistake of thinking that public spending was inherently bad, but ignored the possibility of such a thing as truly mutual SELF interest. No altruism there. We're all just going to Sam's club together.
Ah, I see. And when you decide that $100 is too high a price to pay for a stability in the loss of money, you can just stop paying and go your own way, like Sam's club, right?
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expletive
I consider the use of purposefully meaningless words to be anti-objective.
That's clearly two different uses of 'expletive.' Profane words are not meaningless; if they were, what could possibly be profane about them?
Profanity has a time and a place, like all language.
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Thanks for the tip James. My avatar is no longer squished.
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The problems with allowing the government to unilaterally determine interest rates and the money supply go far beyond chronic inflation. The roots of the problem are the general issues associated with central planning of any variety. The interest rate is, at root, a price, the price of intertemporal trading. Allowing the government to dictate this price suffers from the same problems as all price-fixing: the severe lack of information on the part of the central planners, market distortions, inefficiencies, etc. Advocating a commodity standard and a free market in money is simply a result of the more general stance of supporting utilization of the market mechanism to organize economic activity, rather than central planners.
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You can still get to chat by clicking on the "Objectivism Online" tab to the left of the "Forums" tab, and the link to chat is on the right. Hopefully the link will be put back up on the forum pages as well shortly.
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Ultimately, September 11th should be a day of rage against all of religion and the Judeo-Christian ethic. Contrary to what practically everyone today thinks and says, these two are not forces for good. 9/11 was their handiwork!
People who love "god" ultimately hate man -- and they destroy him. People who practice religious-type self-sacrifice ultimately sacrifice their fellow man too -- and in droves.
Religion and "god" are 100% false and 100% evil -- and everybody knows it. But the worst religion by far is that of Islam. That's what 9/11 should be about: remembering the spectacularly loathsome evil of the genocidal Muslims -- and then fervently swearing a holy oath that in future the good guys of this earth will successfully avoid it, neutralize it, and defeat it.
Sooner rather than later, the jihad-based philosophy of Islam needs to be brutally crushed. And every jihadi on earth needs to be summarily annihilated.
It takes a heck of a lot more than religious faith to do what the jihadis did on September 11th ten years ago; it takes a conscious hatred of man and willingness to do evil. Religious faith is certainly a destructive cultural and philosophical force, but to say that religious people are evil in the same way as the 9/11 terrorists is simply absurd. It is simply not the case that "Religion and "god" are 100% false and 100% evil -- and everybody knows it." In fact, religious people would not accept this statement, and to accuse them of consciously perpetuating evil simply because they are religious is ludicrous.
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About "Tabula Rasa" it is not a concept so strictly defined as you think, as example see this brief article in Wikipedia
Here the somewhat broader definition also mention "...aspects of one's personality, social and emotional behaviour, and intelligence..."
The point of contention here is what Ayn Rand was referring to when she used the term 'tabula rasa.' Thus, it doesn't help at all to show how other people use the term. Rand made her claim concerning tabula rasa very clear: people are not born with any conceptual knowledge. To saddle her with some other claim just because other people use the same term to refer to different things is equivocation.
I disagree. As a philosophy Objectivism comes to life only inside each individual, so each one of us must integrate it into the structure of our own conscious "building" and not the other way aroundThe point here is that if we have been successful in identifying true moral principles, then they apply whenever their context obtains. They are absolute within that context, like scientific principles. If you find yourself defying one, you know that you're harming your own life in the long run. 'Adapting yourself to Objectivism' in this case means taking those moral principles seriously and attempting to use them to better your own life, rather than pretending they aren't true when you don't feel like following them. Of course, applying these principles to concretes often involves a lot of individual context, so it is also true that concrete applications of principles are highly individualized.
You are right about the difference between the two types of Altruism BUT I believe the philosophical Altruism grown thanks to the biological oneThe LA Times article I cited speaks about inherited traits used by religions as "building blocks" of their business, one of these traits is the biological Altruism which served as foundation for the religious Altruism which in turn gave birth to the philosophical one since Philosophy was more or less born from Religion. These three types of Altruism reinforce each other in a vicious circle in modern society
I disagree. Biological altruism, to the extent it is true, is a fact about human nature. It cannot be wished away by any philosophy, including Objectivism, and no philosophy should seek to. It must be taken as given when constructing a moral system. Philosophical altruism, on the other hand, is a man-made position on the fundamental nature of morality, one that should be rejected in the strongest terms. Objectivism is a fact-based philosophy, and biological altruism is a fact. There is no conflict there. Philosophical altruism, on the other hand, is in direct conflict with Objectivist moral philosophy. Any 'reinforcement' that occurs between different usages of the term altruism is only due to confusion about the issues and unclear thinking.
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What Brian said. You completely misunderstand Rand's conception of tabula rasa as well as her view of the scope of our control over our emotions. In addition, you also completely misunderstand the content of 'altruism' that Rand opposed. Altruism in the biological literature refers to a sense of empathy or concern for the well-being of others of our species. This is a completely different usage of the word than philosophical altruism, which originated with Comte and consists of self-denial of values. It is this second sense of altruism that was virulently opposed by Rand. And as for conclusion C, if you have grave concerns about society collapsing, just build an underground bunker somewhere out in the woods like everyone else who worries about that.
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Of course. Why didn't I think of that (slap's head): the price of gold is being secretly manipulated by the US government! That explains why it's gone up by 500% in 10 years when the price of everything else has stayed relatively stable! It's all part of their evil plan to do (um, something).
... I suggest you re-read the post you responded to. 'State issued currency' in the paragraph you reply to obviously does not refer to gold. It refers to dollars, the supply of which is purposefully 'manipulated' by the Federal Reserve in an attempt to engage in economic planning. This is not a claim about some nefarious government conspiracy, but a simple statement about what the Federal Reserve does on a daily basis, which is to influence the money supply.
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Bad link.
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...It is the objectivist, who claims that rational self interest is the correct state of man. However I am argiung that rational selflessness is a part of that concept and thus must also be a correct state of man. One cannot speak of selfish without indavertently referring to selflessness. Half of the argument promoting rational selfishness is an argument denouncing selflessness. Objecivism is an anti/pro philisophy. It is just as equally concerned with selflessness as it is with selfishness, therefore selflessness is half of your philosophy. Withouth your false dichotomy, you would not have a philosophy at all, therefore your whole state of being an objectivist depends on the very existence of that which you denounce. Objectivism is the act of distinguishing between, therefore you are inadvertently emphazing both, though you claim to be against one. "AGAINST" is a tricky concept to use as a foundation because come to rely on that which you are against. Selflessness is irnonically a part of you, more than it is a par of any other philosophy. Funny how that works.
And it is the liberal, who claims that freedom is the correct state of man. However I am argiung that slavery is a part of that concept and thus must also be a correct state of man. One cannot speak of freedom without indavertently referring to slavery. Half of the argument promoting freedom is an argument denouncing slavery. Liberalism is an anti/pro philisophy. It is just as equally concerned with slavery as it is with freedom, therefore slavery is half of the philosophy. Withouth the false dichotomy, the liberal would not have a philosophy at all, therefore their whole state of being an liberal depends on the very existence of that which they denounce. Liberalism is the act of distinguishing between, therefore they are inadvertently emphazing both, though they claim to be against one. "AGAINST" is a tricky concept to use as a foundation because come to rely on that which they are against. Slavery is irnonically a part of them, more than it is a par of any other philosophy. Funny how that doesn't make sense at all.
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The thing is, Jesus followed this up with sacrificing himself for our sins.
And the Apostle Paul did take that extra step in his 1st letter to the Corinthians: "Let no one seek his own good, but the good of his neighbor."
Sounds like wishful thinking. Good thing she thought better of it by the time she wrote AS.
In this letter, she is not 'wishing away' the altruistic element in Christianity; she acknowledges it quite straightforwardly and argues that it is at odds with the sacredness of one's own soul, which "introduces a basic contradiction into Christian philosophy, which has never been resolved." I think this take on Christianity is spot-on; all of the Christians I have ever spoken to believe that their moral code of sacrifice is also the path to personal happiness, fulfillment, and salvation. In short, they believe that altruism is the path to personal gain. Since this is not true in actuality, it introduces contradictory elements into their moral code. She does argue in the letter that the egoistic aspect of Christianity is more fundamental than the altruistic aspect, which I think could be argued either way. It certainly reflects a more benevolent view of Christianity on Rand's part to hold that for them, egoism is more fundamental than altruism.
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But philosophically, those who do not compromise at all can not be considered a rational benefit in the the collective interest toward strengthening civilization because those who do not compromise place all their desires above all else. They are not content to have some, or many of their desires met, they want all or nothing....and thus these people do not contribute to the progression of their species. They do not see themselves as a part of it, yet, still they dwell inside of it and do not concern themselves with whole that they effect. They just stubbornly defy those who wish not to take, but to give and take, but those who do not wish to give are actually the ones taking because they use civilization, yet they never allow civilization to use them. This is not and even trade and thus they are not an asset, but a liability, ironically expecting the same altruism that they claim to despise. There is nothing more ironic than hearing a man ask "why should I pay taxes," as he drives down a public free-way in large truck, spewing black exhaust.
You seem to think this has some relevance to Objectivism. It doesn't. I highly recommend that you go to Rand's primary works and attempt to understand her on her own terms so as not to post irrelevant diatribes when attempting to criticize her ideas.
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Of course there are individuals who are different, but judging by Rand's writing, I'm sure she thought that it was most beneficial for sexual relationships to be between a sexually agressive man and a passive woman.
And? It doesn't so much matter what she thought, as what she could prove (or at least support), and I'm not so sure she did on this point.
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...I admit to some growing frustration, because I feel as though there are specific issues that I'd like to try to resolve (and what's more, I now believe that they are resolvable), but I have rarely felt engaged by others on those specific issues, which I've gone to some length to try to define. I sometimes suspect that people would rather argue about specific personalities and histories, rather than ideas. But no matter. We're talking about ideas now -- aren't we? -- and that's really all that I ask.
Speaking for myself, it's not that I wouldn't rather be discussing ideas than people, it's simply that I think you've made a compelling and thorough case, and reading through it all a few times I have found no point of contention from which to generate a discussion. The only contribution that did jump out at me was the opportunity to correct a characterization of the different sides of the debate, even though I understand that's secondary to your main objective.
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I love really anything by Salman Rushdie. He's just an incredible storyteller; I can't help but be completely immersed in any world that he creates. My favorite is probably Midnight's Children, but everything I've read by him has been fantastic.
Objective penalty
in Law
Posted
What physical object possibly fits this bill? Food is definitely necessary to survive, but you taking my sandwich today won't kill me today, tomorrow, or in 50 years. What single item's theft would possibly result in the person's death in the future? This is not a viable requirement, and it isn't necessary either, because...
Having, on principle, the right to dispose of the fruits of one's labor is absolutely required by man to engage in the self-sustaining actions which maintains one's life. If these actions result in the ownership of a T.V., then the theft of that T.V. is a denial of the principle of property rights and is detrimental to the victim's well-being. The principle of property rights is vitally connected to one's right to life.