Dante

This is unnecessarily charitable to the right. Neither side of the aisle is above using the actions of crazed individuals to lay blame at the feet of their political opponents. This shouldn't be forgotten simply because the left are the ones doing it right now.

So throw away the politician's right to be tried against an objective standard?

So you do not respect the individual rights of the politician?

So you too are a mobster.

I'll get my gun.

If you cannot understand the reasoning and have not yet read the non fictional works, and need a fictional reference...

I have little doubt that if O'ism allowed for ANY room for such activity, Rand would have made a point of saying so.

Keep in mind that her only "Criminals" in her works either destroyed/stole their own property, or took property - ONLY property - from Governments. NO MORAL CHARACTER in her works ever used force to harm others persons when those persons were posing no immediate threat to themselves or to some other innocent.

Ragnar Daneschold never hurt anyone AFAIK. Francisco Danconina shot at thugs who were shooting at Readeron workers. Dagny killed a guard who was allowing Galt to be tortured - and only after much warning.

If you engage in violence against politicians when NON violent recourse is still available you are not a policeman, you are not a defender, you are not a ranger.

You are a thug.

No, I'm the "police man", the defender of man's rights, a Ragner.

A politician that does not respect individual rights is not a politician, but a mobster. Kill 'em all.

Once again, you can't use the idea of an illusion in your argument without losing your entire argument.

Let's define terms. In this post I'll cover mind, volition, and causality.


Mind is the human faculty of conceptual consciousness, and consciousness is the faculty of awareness. Many animals but no plants are conscious. Only mankind has a mind. Consciousness is identified by Rand as one of the axiomatic concepts so it is not defined but demonstrated, or as she puts it defined ostensively. The steps of forming a concept are: directing one's attention to find differences and similarities, forming particulars into an integrated unity regarded as a class, selecting a word for that class. Not one of these steps are automatic, each one is an act of will, a will free to not act or to contemplate something else. In Objectivism volition is primarily mental.

The freedom in free will does not and can not mean freedom from causality or identity, or that some magic spark within us can transcend the bounds of time and space. That is simply an invalid criterion because it demands the impossible. What is possible and exists is the fact of choice, a mind can cause itself to contemplate one thing or another. The "free" in free will distinguishes between internal causation and external compulsion, and between conditional and automatic forms of awareness. You won't find exactly that formulation in Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, but there is "volition is an instance of causality" (paraphrasing page 69).

Volition is axiomatic. Quoting fromPeikoff in OPAR



To elaborate a bit, a validation of ideas is necessary and possible only because man's consciousness is fallible, and it is fallible because it is volitional: it can choose poorly.


Causality at the Lexicon. Here is thread for discussing causality further. The summary is: disembodied actions do not exist. Cause and effect should not be understood as actions causing actions, but as entities acting in accordance with their natures. It is the nature of the human conceptual consciousness that it is volitional.

Harris' rationalistic insistence that there is no volition based on his theory of causality is an instance of putting the pet theory before the facts in importance.


What distinction are you relying on between pretending to disregard a proof and actually disregarding it? Disregarding would refer to some act consistent with a presumed falsehood or arbitrariness of some proposition, and if you did that act then you did it. Suppose some aspect of your job required you to know the relation between the sides of a right triangle, and you relied on a lookup table for any two sides to figure the third. If you then learned the proof of the Pythagorean Theorem, but then carried on with your lookup table because "that's the way I've always done it", then that is disregarding a proof. Claiming this would be "pretending to disregard" does not have any meaning; both pretending to disregard and actually disregarding are the same actions.

Also, understanding a proof takes volitional effort. You are cheating if you only start counting up effort after you have learned a proof.

This same logic would result in the conclusion that a smoker should not treat his lung cancer, because "he earned it." The fact is, we all take actions with risks every day, and when those risks actually obtain, we should be perfectly free to deal with the consequences in whatever way we see fit. The fact is, even people who make this "responsibility" argument about abortion wouldn't dream of making it in analogous cases which don't involve sex. The basics of the situation are: you are taking an action which involves the risk of something unpleasant happening, and you are taking medical action to alter the unpleasant situation if it occurs. The same basic structure applies to the smoker who treats his lung cancer, or to the fast food junkie who seeks medical attention when he has a heart attack. Or consider the very closely analogous case of a person catching syphilis or gonorrhea by having sex, and then going to a doctor to cure it. Would you also tell these people to just "deal with it?"

I'd imagine not, and neither would most of the people who make the responsibility argument. However, they are willing to make the argument in the case of abortion because of their additional premises about the immorality of abortion. This argument fundamentally relies on the premise that abortion is already "different" and "immoral" while other methods of dealing with consequences are not. Thus, it cannot be used to provide or support an argument against abortion.

Also, you're attempting to equivocate with the term "evade" to make your argument sound more appealing to Objectivists. Evasion as the core vice means unfocusing your mind and refusing to think about reality or consequences. Your example individual does not evade in this sense when she gets an abortion. She may have done this when she was having sex and not thinking about the consequences, but the act of getting an abortion is one of accepting reality (the reality that she's pregnant) and actually doing something about it. She's only evading in the sense of dodging or avoiding the situation through willful action; she's not evading in the sense of refusing to think about what she's done and what could happen. There is absolutely nothing wrong with evading in the sense that you use the word; in fact, it's a profoundly moral action to recognize the reality of a situation and to take conscious steps to improve that situation for oneself.

As for all that parasite talk, I think you've incorrectly identified that as a core of the pro-abortion side. I feel like it's mostly used to attempt to shock the other side into taking a second look at the way they view a fetus. It is really incidental to the argument itself.

Nietzschean influence in her fiction is one thing, and a philosophical debt to Nietzsche is quite another. She did have some particularly Nietzschean-influenced passages in her first novel, We The Living, that she struck from later editions of the novel. While I probably wouldn't have done that, I can understand an author that, when a character is clearly supposed to be speaking for the author and says things the author no longer agrees with, changes those statements. In any case, if you actually learn something about the philosophies of Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Rand, you can clearly see that in terms of philosophy (not fiction or inspiration) Nietzsche's distinct ideas are quite absent from Rand's mature philosophy. Notice she did not say inspirational debt or literature debt (or just debt), but rather philosophical debt. She spoke very precisely as a point of pride, so I'd take that extra adjective seriously.

In any case, none of this has any bearing whatsoever on the truth of her philosophy. I most definitely believe that she was not a perfect person (even though I may disagree with you on this point), but I do accept her philosophy as true nonetheless. To reject it on grounds of her personal character flaws is known as the ad hominem fallacy in logical reasoning.

Nietzschean influence in her fiction is one thing, and a philosophical debt to Nietzsche is quite another. She did have some particularly Nietzschean-influenced passages in her first novel, We The Living, that she struck from later editions of the novel. While I probably wouldn't have done that, I can understand an author that, when a character is clearly supposed to be speaking for the author and says things the author no longer agrees with, changes those statements. In any case, if you actually learn something about the philosophies of Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Rand, you can clearly see that in terms of philosophy (not fiction or inspiration) Nietzsche's distinct ideas are quite absent from Rand's mature philosophy. Notice she did not say inspirational debt or literature debt (or just debt), but rather philosophical debt. She spoke very precisely as a point of pride, so I'd take that extra adjective seriously.

In any case, none of this has any bearing whatsoever on the truth of her philosophy. I most definitely believe that she was not a perfect person (even though I may disagree with you on this point), but I do accept her philosophy as true nonetheless. To reject it on grounds of her personal character flaws is known as the ad hominem fallacy in logical reasoning.

I say yes, assisted suicide is moral, if and when there is objective evidence of the fact that a rational being wants to end his life and cannot do it himself.
The crux of the matter is to have that objective evidence.

Most prejudices around assisted suicide lie on the belief that the immorality of killing hinges on the mere interruption of the vital functions of other person.
In reality, the immorality of a murder lies on violating the mind of other person, acting against his consent, denying his capacity for reason and choice.
Murder is immoral because we act as if the other person didn't exist qua man. We deny reality and by doing so we deny our own mind. That's what makes murder immoral.

In a proper act of assisted suicide (meaning, one in which there is no doubt of the intentions of the subject and his mental capacity), nobody is faking reality.
Indeed, we are honouring each one's reality of being rational, volitional beings.
"I am injecting this high dose of medication into your veins because I recognize you as the owner of your own life, and by doing this I am honouring that fact."

I disagree strongly with your use of this quote to support the OP's viewpoint. The OP is saying the following: No rights can exist without the ability to translate one's right into reality. Compare this with Rand's statement; that is not what Rand is saying. She is saying that certain rights imply other rights, not that the existence of rights depends on the ability of the rightsholder to translate them into action.

The solution to this problem is the insight that knowledge, by its nature, is contextual. Every piece of knowledge arises from a certain context of perceptual evidence, and can only be applied within that context. For instance, Newton's law of gravitation was formed within a specific context in which he could take measurements, and even though the law cannot be applied to very massive objects or objects moving very fast (as evidence supporting Einstein's general relativity showed) the law is still valid for the types of objects from which it was formed. Einstein's theories did not falsify the work that Newton had done, but rather expanded scientific theories into new contexts.

From this view of knowledge, it is obvious that the standards which you propose to judge knowledge are inappropriate. It is indeed impossible to somehow attain knowledge that will apply with certainty outside the context in which you form it, but this does not mean that knowledge is impossible to man and that we can never be "certain" (properly understood). Rather, you have simply misunderstood the nature of knowledge by asking for an impossibility. For further exposition of the Objectivist view on knowledge and context, see the Lexicon Entry and the work "Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology."

Agnosticism is not the logical approach, and is in fact worse than theism. The mistake is that you are failing to distinguish the arbitrary from the rational. You are demanding "prove a negative." When Ayn Rand says that you can not logically be called upon to do this, she is stating the burden of proof principle. The burden of proof is on he who asserts the positive. That is what is meant, that belief and non-belief are not the same. To "prove a negative" is irrational to demand because you cannot prove or disprove the arbitrary.

Arbitrary means without rational basis or justification. Atheism is not the belief in a non-God, it is the principled refusal to credit an arbitrary idea that has no rational basis and makes no sense (is illogical, i.e. contradicting the basic axioms of metaphysics.) Rand's point here is that theism and atheism are in different epistemological categories. It would be absurd to commit to every idea in the universe, any and every wild claim, until it has been disproved. Instead, reason demands committal to those ideas only with rational support. Belief in an idea cannot be the default position, until canceled by disproof. Belief has to be justified. Otherwise anyone can state anything, such as "what disproof do you have that there isn't a Zeus, Thor, Odin, Ra, magical unicorns, gremlins, goblins, ghosts, or that I am God, etc. etc."

A theist offers the arbitrary and says "prove it isn't so" and the agnostic falls for it. Since the arbitrary is not admissible into rational consideration, the agnostic believes in the possibility of God without reason. At least the theist is more honest (he does not pretend to be rational.) So the choice is ultimately theism or atheism. Agnosticism is just an evasion of the whole issue.

What kind of evidence do you want? Great Depression was created by excessive human supply, it's quite obvious. Free markets ensure fastest economic growth. It's obvious too. Free markets can't exist in democratic society since machines replace majority of electorate and majority would vote to destroy capital to survive.

Free market fascism is only sustainable free market system. Free markets are inherently unstable. It's not bad thing in itself. But business cycles create unemployment which can lead to revolution or destruction of capital by government to create demand for excessive human supply(e.g. Great Depression). If being poor and unemployed was a crime then revolutions/destruction of capital wouldn't happen. First country to adopt free market fascism will experience huge economic growth because bourgeoisie will be able to exponentially accumulate capital and replace obsolete human workers with machines without any government intervention to protect proletariat. In the end such economy will reach 90-95% of world GDP. Everyone else will be mere exporters of natural resources because keynesian/socialist/marxist economies won't be able to compete with free market fascism

What do you see as the justification for having special protections for "official news organizations" that do not apply to, say, a private blog? Why should one be able to release certain documents while another is not?

Your argument assumes that action-as-such inside the universe must have an origin point, even as we both agree that existence per se does not require one. Your claim is that if there is action, then there is an entity which by nature can act of its own accord. Is it fair to rephrase this to say that if there is action, then then there is an entity capable of originating its own action without outside stimuli?

If so, then your argument assumes that the origin of action must be explained. But why is this so? Action is simply entities behaving according to their own natures. In physics terms, we might equate action with entities possessing kinetic energy. But KE is simply one form of energy, and energy is tranformed into KE and from KE into other forms all the time. Why must there have been a point in time where there was no kinetic energy in existence? This seems to be what you're claiming when you argue that if there is action, there must be an entitiy capable of originating it.

My position is simply that existence, energy, and action have always existed and require no origin point. As such, there does not need to be an entity capable of providing this origin point.

Wow. Here are just a few comments.



If you seriously think she advocates this, you should reread The Fountainhead, especially the portion where Roark passes up a huge contract to go work in a granite quarry in order to preserve his integrity.



It should be legal. It's certainly not moral. There's a huge difference.



Rand began her exploration of ethics by examining the nature of life itself. The conclusions she drew from this apply to all living organisms (the agent-centered nature of life-sustaining action as the basis for values). The specific virtues that she advocated are all drawn from facts that apply to all human beings, by virtue of human nature. I'd recommend re-reading that section of Galt's speech; especially where she identifies each virtue as "the recognition of the fact that..." For example, "Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it - that no substitute can do your thinking, as no pinch-hitter can live your life..." Who, exactly, does this not apply to? The virtues are courses of action that are required by certain facts that are true about all human beings; this is why they are general virtues. The application of each of these virtues to each person's life is different, but they are all necessitated by fundamental facts of what it means to be human. This is the basis of her defense of her system as a rational and objective code of morality.

Welcome abroad... I am an avid reading myself. There are tons of books you can read and here are some of my favorites.

1. Harry Potter
2. Power of Now by Eckhart Toller
3. William by Richmal Crompton
4. Perry Mason by Earl Stanley Gardner
5. Autobiography of a Yogi by Yogananda Paramahamsa
6. Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch

I can suggest many more, but not sure if the above list will suit your taste. I read Fountainhead too.

Your relationship with your kid is obviously far broader than anything you say in a single post. So, I was reacting only to the aspects you chose to stress, and the rationale you mentioned for that: i.e. teaching him rationality.
Every now and then, people come on the forum and ask why they ought not to lie in some situations where they can get away with it. Such people are probably not routine liars who are callous about their lying, because those types don't bother asking about it on forums. The point is that the consequences of lying often come a few steps away from the lying and are therefore not obvious. If one wishes to teach a kid reason, then one has to teach him that lying is bad for a reason. Also, it cannot be done in the abstract, but has to be done with concretes. A concrete like "you don't get allowance" or "you get a spanking" is a consequence, but it does not reflect the real-world consequences of lying. So, if that is all a kid gets, one lose the chance to explain the real reasons one ought not lie. One might reinforce "do not lie", but it remains as a dogmatic rule. If it is not tied back to "why", it is not well-suited to a human thinking mind.

For instance, I might remind my son of little Frankie who fibs about all sorts of things. Frankie thinks he's fooling us all, but we're laughing at him behind his back. He's trying to get people to think better of him, and everyone thinks he's pathetic. Then, there are some examples of adults who lied to me and consequences that followed from that: instances where those adults would have received so much more value in life by telling the truth. Finally, there is some example of when I lied and how I felt and what the consequences were. An eight year old will be able to understand this at some level, even if a single iteration won't be enough. However, much more importantly, he will get a meta-message: ethics can be rational and can be designed to ensure long-term value to me. One cannot give a kid such an abstract message directly, but this is what they need to conclude in some wordless way.

Those are the types of things that will reinforce the value of reason and rationality. After that, if you still want to belt or spank, that's something incidental that will not have a long-term consequence either way if done in moderation.

Of course, more important than all these is what your son sees you do in your relationships. If he sees you lie, even to get some type of tiny value, all the lecturing and spanking is going to be dismissed as dishonest. From the fact that you hold lying to be one of the "top sins", I assume you're up-front and honest in your life. Use this to your advantage: tell your son of an instance where you could easily have lied, and why you did not, and more importantly what value you gained by your honesty. Help him internalize the motivation: heroes do not lie, heroes will tell the truth even if they're belted for doing so.

In order to truly understand the Objectivist principle of non-initiation of force, which you have been basing your argument upon, you have to understand how and why Rand formed that principle, and the context under which it is valid. Such an understanding will also reconcile the quotes you have given from Rand with her stated position on accepting public scholarships. To start, Rand's principle of non-initiation of force does not play the same role in her ethics as, say, the non-aggression axiom plays in the ethics of Rothbard, for example. It is not a contextless absolute that applies in all circumstances, which seems to be the way you want to apply it. Your methodology seems to be the following: Find out if the action in question involved initiating force against others. If yes, immoral; if no, moral (or at least not immoral on these grounds). But applying it to a real life situation is often more complicated, and to do that, first we need to understand the context from which it was formed.

For Rand, this principle is derived from the fact that man's characteristic method of gaining value is through production. Because a life of production is possible to man (in principle), there are no inherent conflicts of interest among people who wish to live in this fashion (her principle of the harmony of rational interests). This is the most practical and therefore the moral way to live; any initiation of force represents a deviation from this ideal form of human society and interaction.

This was her basis for arguing that the welfare state is an immoral institution. The welfare state, or institutionalized redistribution, is a systematic deviation from a society founded on individual rights and non-initiation of force. Under the framework of a welfare state, it is quite common to encounter a clash of interests. Under a system of institutionalized redistribution, like the system we have now, it is literally impossible for me to get every value I require through production. The roads I drive on, for example, are built, maintained, and available for me to use regardless of how much I contribute to their maintenance. It is not possible, without a structural change in the government, for me to live solely through production in that sphere of my life. I am faced with two choices: use the roads as much as I need to (sacrificing others to myself) or refuse to use the roads, and heavily inconvenience myself (sacrifice myself to others). This example is meant to illustrate one simple point: forced redistribution pits men against each other. It imposes an artificial, but very real, conflict of interests among men.

This should suffice to illustrate the point that the principle you are invoking cannot be straightforwardly applied in the case of forced redistribution. The principle of non-imitation of force assumes a context where living by production is possible (a context where the harmony of rational interests is achievable). However, as we have seen, the welfare state imposes a different context. It does not leave open the option of living solely by production. In this context, one is forced to choose between giving or receiving sacrifices, and your attempts to apply the non-initiation of force principle to this situation amounts to context-dropping.

To finally answer your questions:



It must be taken from Ms. D.



That is a difficult question, because Ms. C does not have an avenue where she can avoid sacrificing herself and at the same time avoid sacrificing Ms. D. Certainly, it is inappropriate to conclude that either choice by Ms. C is immoral simply by citing the principle of non-initiation of force. Simply citing that principle regardless of context is a tactic which is more at home in Deontological Libertarianism than Objectivism.

The threshold between what is an exercise of the right to think and speak and what is an initiation of force is the presence of an act of initiated force. This is an objective threshold, a clear bright line that is easy to use to discriminate the illegal from what is not. When you group together "revolution or change of the government" you are disregarding a distinction that is the basis of the law. The law must be objective because if it is not the result is totalitarianism and specifically politically correct thought police prosecuting thought crimes.

This position is not even remotely consistent with the conclusion that taxation is theft on the basis that each individual has the power to decide whether or not to support the government. If someone were to advocate a strike on funding the government in order to weaken it as a step toward changing it would you prosecute that? Or would you claim individuals can make their own decisions but cannot coordinate them? If it is legal to withhold funds from the government, then there cannot be a conspiracy to do so.

Your claims about what is the proper scope of individual freedom are contradictory.

A rational society would rightfully outlaw the propagation of speech which is a threat to the Constitutional principles of that society.

An Objectivist society would outlaw political speech espousing socialism, just as it would outlaw political speech espousing the killing and eating of 49% of the population by the majority 51%. Free speech rights are not absolute, for the reason that some speech constitutes the initiation of force against individuals. (Yelling fire, and inciting riots are two easy examples)

yes good point
Whole the universe is surrounded by different gases.It can be understand by the following example
If you put down a footbal or tenis ball on the surface of the water it will float on the surface of the water on the other hand if you put a steel ball on the surface of water it will sink down .
Same is the case with earth and the moon all these are suspended in the universe according to their density and will never fuse or strike with each other.Thats why all the planets are moving and rotating in their orbits from the thousands of years.

there is no gravitational force in this world if there any force exist then it would apply on the basis of their masses and weights.For example put a paper and a steel rod in front of a blower then switch on the blower you wil see the air will throw the paper many meter away from the blower on the other hand the steel rod will move some inches away from the blower.
But in case of gravitaional force the result is reverse it works more effectively for heavier objects rather than light objects.For example if you put down a stone from the top of a building it will comes down on the ground very rapidly on the other hand if want to throw down a ballon it will never comes down on the ground if the gravity exist then the ballon should comes down more rapidly due to its lighter weight as compared to stone but it never happens because there is no force of gravity in this universe.Accuately there are two factors that are controlling the entire process
1 density
2 pressure
Any object that is more dense than air will comes downward and the object less dense than air will go upward.The factor that controls the falling and upgoing speed of the object is the pressure of the air.
There are many examples to support and prove this concept .