Dante

Let's not go too far here. Kevin's advice is bad for most of the reasons given in this thread and others, but absolutely there are special actions that you should take on a date that you wouldn't take for one of your guy friends or just some random stranger.  You  treat your date as special because he or she is special, to you.  She isn't special because she's a woman, she's special for all the reasons that led you to ask her out.  Now how you express that is more open; you could go along with social conventions like holding the door and paying for her meal (assuming you set up the date), or not.  If she finds those sexist, that's fine, the point isn't to follow some rulebook, but just to communicate that she is special to you, not because she's a woman but just because you like who she is.  Treat your date like a 'special case' because she is.  That means going beyond just courtesy stuff that you'd do for a stranger, because she means more to you than a stranger does.  I'm speaking from the male perspective, but this goes for both sides of the date.
 
Now, some of the stuff recommended above can be used to convey to your date that she's special, and others I just don't see.  Picking the table, for instance, seems like a pure dominance move.  In the broader sense, taking the time and the initiative to plan out a date and set it up beforehand is a nice thing to do for your date (man or woman), but picking the table first?  I just don't see that, or the "no touching in public" thing.  Wow.  Now, not ignoring your date during the meal, having a two-sided conversation, and opening the door for her (if she doesn't mind that) all seem like sound advice; not because of some leading man framework, but because of both common courtesy and the fact that you should go beyond common courtesy on a date.

Let's not go too far here. Kevin's advice is bad for most of the reasons given in this thread and others, but absolutely there are special actions that you should take on a date that you wouldn't take for one of your guy friends or just some random stranger.  You  treat your date as special because he or she is special, to you.  She isn't special because she's a woman, she's special for all the reasons that led you to ask her out.  Now how you express that is more open; you could go along with social conventions like holding the door and paying for her meal (assuming you set up the date), or not.  If she finds those sexist, that's fine, the point isn't to follow some rulebook, but just to communicate that she is special to you, not because she's a woman but just because you like who she is.  Treat your date like a 'special case' because she is.  That means going beyond just courtesy stuff that you'd do for a stranger, because she means more to you than a stranger does.  I'm speaking from the male perspective, but this goes for both sides of the date.
 
Now, some of the stuff recommended above can be used to convey to your date that she's special, and others I just don't see.  Picking the table, for instance, seems like a pure dominance move.  In the broader sense, taking the time and the initiative to plan out a date and set it up beforehand is a nice thing to do for your date (man or woman), but picking the table first?  I just don't see that, or the "no touching in public" thing.  Wow.  Now, not ignoring your date during the meal, having a two-sided conversation, and opening the door for her (if she doesn't mind that) all seem like sound advice; not because of some leading man framework, but because of both common courtesy and the fact that you should go beyond common courtesy on a date.

I find it very unlikely that she simply didn't value or like her life that much, and thought this would be a good opportunity to just throw it away for little or no reason.

I find it much more likely that she took her responsibility (her chosen responsibility) as a guardian of these kids very seriously, and was willing to pay the ultimate price to preserve the integrity of that responsibility.

I think, particularly if you have kids whose safety you entrust to others every single day, that calling her a hero isn't a misuse of the term at all.

And?  Islam is not compatible with itself!  Its holy book contradicts itself numerous times, much like the Bible.  In virtue of this, I fail to see why Islamic scholars who accept western values are being more contradictory than your extremists.  They are all picking and choosing verses they like, interpreting away those they don't, in order to glean a consistent worldview out of contradictory source material.  I see no reason to accept the idea that one set of them is 'more serious' about ideas or about their own religion than the other.  And that's certainly not why we would label one group 'extremist.'

So Muslim scholars that devote their lives to arguing for the compatibility of Islam with Western values aren't taking their religion seriously?  Really?
 
'Extremist' Muslims aren't labeled extremist because they're the only ones that take their religion seriously.  They're labeled extremist because they're willing to kill for their interpretation of Islam.

This is a question for all those who share Epstein's view: Out of all the millions of religious interpretations, why is the 'extremist' interpretation the 'correct' and 'consistent' one? The only supporting evidence I've seen for this is a few quotes from the Quran and the Bible taken out of context- with no mention of contradictory statements in the same texts, or contradictory beliefs of extremists.
 
For example, see the excerpt below taken from Voices of Islam (p246), which quotes Muhammad. It clearly states that if a man commits suicide, he will "be punished in the Fire of Hell forever." Woah! Wait a second. Don't suicide bombers believe they'll be rewarded in the afterlife (ie: greeted in heaven by 72 virgins)? Where are they getting that from? Certainly not from Muhammad or the Quran- as you can see, it's written that suicide will land you in hell! So can this extremist belief even be considered a 'religious' one if it's contradicted in the holy book (the word of God) and by the holy prophet? If the answer is no (and I believe it is), then the 'extremist' interpretation is not the 'correct' or 'consistent' one, and should not be regarded as such.

Relevant quote from Ayn Rand on how the two interact politically in America, from her Q&A:

Aleph, I suggest you let the Muslims hash that argument out. Islam cannot be divorced from how it is practiced. So if someone within Islam is trying to reform how it is practiced, to make it benign and non-political, you'd do well to get out of his way if you can't help him.

The justification for a particular state does not come from its democratic nature. Plenty of democratically elected governments have done things which put them firmly in the illegitimate category. It is a fiction that democratic means free.

What makes a government legitimate is whether or not it actually respects fundamental rights. If you have a government that does so, there is no right to 'compete' with it, in the sense of carrying out one's own retaliatory force which is not subject to objective procedure. Such action presents a valid risk to the rights of the citizens of such a government, and it is justified in shutting down said operations.

Picking one concrete difference between men and women and extrapolating one's entire theory of masculinity and femininity from that is not a good example of keeping one's ideas tied to reality.  This requires taking all facts into account, periodically checking and rechecking one's conclusions against these facts again and again.  Without that, floating rationalism is exactly what it is.

The point of the question is this: how do the firms determine which scents are masculine and which are feminine? Do they make decisions in reference to objective principles that we can all understand and apply? If so, what are these principles? Or do they simply go by tradition, conventional wisdom, and marketing trials to see what the public at large responds positively to? If the latter is the case, then there is no objective definition of a feminine vs a masculine scent, at least not one being used in the manufacture of colognes and perfumes.



Okay, great. You accept the options that are marketed to you specifically as a shortcut, and then choose within those options. That's great; I do that with most products too. But there are plenty of times that I think that the paradigm presented to me is wrong, and I choose instead to exercise my independent judgment. One would think that sort of behavior would be applauded here. Of course, that is not always appropriate, specifically when there are objective principles underlying the paradigm which is being rejected. In that case, one's 'independent vision' is in conflict with reality. That seems to be what you are arguing here, but in order to do so you must put this particular paradigm on objective grounds rather than simply those of tradition and appealing to popularity and marketability. Can you?

This thread is a revealing display of the utter lack of intellectual justification for the position that homosexuality is immoral.  It doesn't get more rationalistic than this:
 
 
'I define sex as only between a man and a woman... so how could same-sex couples possibly have sexual desire for one another? I've defined it away!'
 
The best part is pretending to cite evidence by simply referencing 'human biology.'  Quality, in-depth support that.

This is rationalism.
 
You still have not confronted the previous dissections of your arguments, or even acknowledged that they exist.

Consider the question of why Steven Mallory tries to kill Toohey, or why Rearden feels a desire to kill the past teachers of the Wet Nurse. You ask, well why don't they just feel the urge to speak out against these people, rather than kill them; wouldn't that be a more rational and appropriate reaction?

The faulty assumption is that every action or thought by a Rand character 'should' represent a well-reasoned and philosophically consistent Objectivist statement. Without this assumption, these things aren't confusing; Toohey and the teachers were doing something bad, and Rand's characters wanted to punish them and stop them from doing it again.

Or consider Roark's dynamiting of Cortlandt, or Galt's statements about his 'highest moral feeling' being to kill the man who would ask Galt to live for him, or Dominique's statements about hating the rest of the world. It's not hard to understand these as literary devices intended to convey particular points to the reader; it's only when you try to integrate every action and every word of each of these characters, taken literally, into a mature, consistent, reasoned philosophy that you get the troubles you've run into.

The key to all these questions is: it's a novel. It's not a philosophical treatise. It has imagery, metaphor, character progression. Some of these characters are still undergoing character development. Some are facing contexts fundamentally different from contemporary American life. Some are acting on emotion alone. Some are making philosophical points through their actions that are more complex than "this exact thing would also be okay to do in real life."

In the debate, John Mackey charges that following a strict conception of self-interest will lead one to disregard any actions taken for others.  He accepts the dictionary definition of selfishness and argues against living by it, saying that we should take others into account and balance our interests with those of others.   Kelley responds by disputing this conception of selfishness, as he should, and immediately refers to his own work on benevolence and its relation to selfishness.  In so doing, he gives a hypothetical of a neighbor's house burning down, and discusses self-interested reasons to help that person.  Namely, he refers to 'investing in a social practice' that he himself might need some day.   This rebuttal completely misses the central point that Kelley should address head on.  There's a much simpler reason why you might want to help someone in that situation: because you care about that person.  This gets to a central question that Kelley, astoundingly, fails to address.  The question is, what role do other people play in our own selfish values?   Mackey contends that, by and large, the two are non-overlapping spheres; there's acting for self-interest, and then there's acting for others.  Thus, his example of extreme self-interest is a narcissist that never acts for others.  The important distinction for the Objectivist to make is that a narcissist is someone who fails to value other people at all!  Selfishness is all about pursuing your own values, and the question is: can other people be values to us?  When put this way, the answer is obvious; of course they can!  I care deeply about many people in my life.  Their happiness helps to constitute my own; their happiness brings me joy, and their pain brings me sorrow.  This is what ties acting for others into self-interest, far more so than furthering some social code of helping.   We can put some more meat on this issue by considering its application to some real-life questions of how we should treat other people.  This will help to illustrate why selfishness is important even when doing things for others.  Let's consider a couple of (related) hypotheticals.  In the first, I'm considering going to the hospital to pay a visit to someone who's been injured.  In the second, I'm considering spending the night by their bedside in the hospital, to keep them company and reassure them.  How do I decide what to do in either case?   In either scenario, the central question is: what does this person mean to me?  The reference point is me, myself, my life.  It might sound unfamiliar (and maybe callous) to couch the question in these terms, but I encourage the reader to take a second and actually consider this scenario.  I'm sure there are many people in your life to whom you would gladly pay a hospital visit if they were sick, or injured.  Coworkers, acquaintances, distant relatives, any number of people that you know and like well enough so that you'd take the time to visit them and brighten their day if they were hurt or sick.  However, for most of these people, you probably wouldn't put your life on hold and sleep in a folding chair in a hospital room just to keep them company.  You might like them, but you don't like them that much.   But there are some people that you would put everything else aside to be with.  Immediate family, very close friends, certainly significant others.  When people mean a lot to us, we're willing to do a lot for them, as well we should be.  I hope Mackey would agree that this is an appropriate way to act and make choices when we're "balancing our self-interest" against other concerns.  My point is, in order to act this way, we need to look to ourselves, fundamentally.  We do (and should!) treat people differently based, not on some cosmic scale of importance, but on what they mean to us personally.  To rephrase this, we should take actions for them to the extent that doing so is also pursuing our own values.  We should help them when it's selfish, in Rand's sense, to do so.   In the debate, John Mackey states that he's using the dictionary definition of selfishness, and that it's Ayn Rand and David Kelley's job to justify using a different definition.  Well, here is my justification: the integrating principle behind how we should treat other people and how far we should go to help them is inherently a self-oriented principle.  It depends on what they mean to us, their relation to our life and our values.  If you're willing to acknowledge that other people can be values to us, just as our career or our health or other such 'selfish' values can, then self-interest provides an overarching moral framework that integrates our actions towards other people with the pursuit of our own values.  Mackey suggests that we should balance these two things, and perhaps he has some additional ideas as to how to do that, but the truth is this: we should balance acting for others with acting for ourselves the same way that we make decisions between our 'selfish' values, by evaluating their importance to us and paying fidelity to our values.

The fraud and the dynamiting are two separate issues.  On the subject of the fraud, Roark realizes and admits that he was wrong to engage in it and pass off his work as Keating's.  This is part of his character progression; he initially doesn't see the harm in helping Peter, he feels sorry for him, etc.  However, by the end, he has made this realization:
 

 
Roark begins the novel with a mistaken premise and an inadequate understanding of the consequences of helping Keating in this way.  The progression of the novel then illustrates, to Roark and to us, the consequences of this error.  In this respect, it's much like Rearden's initial flawed approach to dealing with family obligation: the events of the novel illustrate to him and to us the error in his thinking.
 
The dynamiting is not a deliberate error Rand is using in this way.  Rather, it is a powerful aesthetic statement about artistic integrity; Roark takes the only action possible to him that will protect the integrity of his work.  The dynamiting and the fraud serve different purposes and are used in different ways in the novel, and must be analyzed differently.

In the debate, John Mackey charges that following a strict conception of self-interest will lead one to disregard any actions taken for others.  He accepts the dictionary definition of selfishness and argues against living by it, saying that we should take others into account and balance our interests with those of others.   Kelley responds by disputing this conception of selfishness, as he should, and immediately refers to his own work on benevolence and its relation to selfishness.  In so doing, he gives a hypothetical of a neighbor's house burning down, and discusses self-interested reasons to help that person.  Namely, he refers to 'investing in a social practice' that he himself might need some day.   This rebuttal completely misses the central point that Kelley should address head on.  There's a much simpler reason why you might want to help someone in that situation: because you care about that person.  This gets to a central question that Kelley, astoundingly, fails to address.  The question is, what role do other people play in our own selfish values?   Mackey contends that, by and large, the two are non-overlapping spheres; there's acting for self-interest, and then there's acting for others.  Thus, his example of extreme self-interest is a narcissist that never acts for others.  The important distinction for the Objectivist to make is that a narcissist is someone who fails to value other people at all!  Selfishness is all about pursuing your own values, and the question is: can other people be values to us?  When put this way, the answer is obvious; of course they can!  I care deeply about many people in my life.  Their happiness helps to constitute my own; their happiness brings me joy, and their pain brings me sorrow.  This is what ties acting for others into self-interest, far more so than furthering some social code of helping.   We can put some more meat on this issue by considering its application to some real-life questions of how we should treat other people.  This will help to illustrate why selfishness is important even when doing things for others.  Let's consider a couple of (related) hypotheticals.  In the first, I'm considering going to the hospital to pay a visit to someone who's been injured.  In the second, I'm considering spending the night by their bedside in the hospital, to keep them company and reassure them.  How do I decide what to do in either case?   In either scenario, the central question is: what does this person mean to me?  The reference point is me, myself, my life.  It might sound unfamiliar (and maybe callous) to couch the question in these terms, but I encourage the reader to take a second and actually consider this scenario.  I'm sure there are many people in your life to whom you would gladly pay a hospital visit if they were sick, or injured.  Coworkers, acquaintances, distant relatives, any number of people that you know and like well enough so that you'd take the time to visit them and brighten their day if they were hurt or sick.  However, for most of these people, you probably wouldn't put your life on hold and sleep in a folding chair in a hospital room just to keep them company.  You might like them, but you don't like them that much.   But there are some people that you would put everything else aside to be with.  Immediate family, very close friends, certainly significant others.  When people mean a lot to us, we're willing to do a lot for them, as well we should be.  I hope Mackey would agree that this is an appropriate way to act and make choices when we're "balancing our self-interest" against other concerns.  My point is, in order to act this way, we need to look to ourselves, fundamentally.  We do (and should!) treat people differently based, not on some cosmic scale of importance, but on what they mean to us personally.  To rephrase this, we should take actions for them to the extent that doing so is also pursuing our own values.  We should help them when it's selfish, in Rand's sense, to do so.   In the debate, John Mackey states that he's using the dictionary definition of selfishness, and that it's Ayn Rand and David Kelley's job to justify using a different definition.  Well, here is my justification: the integrating principle behind how we should treat other people and how far we should go to help them is inherently a self-oriented principle.  It depends on what they mean to us, their relation to our life and our values.  If you're willing to acknowledge that other people can be values to us, just as our career or our health or other such 'selfish' values can, then self-interest provides an overarching moral framework that integrates our actions towards other people with the pursuit of our own values.  Mackey suggests that we should balance these two things, and perhaps he has some additional ideas as to how to do that, but the truth is this: we should balance acting for others with acting for ourselves the same way that we make decisions between our 'selfish' values, by evaluating their importance to us and paying fidelity to our values.

In the debate, John Mackey charges that following a strict conception of self-interest will lead one to disregard any actions taken for others.  He accepts the dictionary definition of selfishness and argues against living by it, saying that we should take others into account and balance our interests with those of others.   Kelley responds by disputing this conception of selfishness, as he should, and immediately refers to his own work on benevolence and its relation to selfishness.  In so doing, he gives a hypothetical of a neighbor's house burning down, and discusses self-interested reasons to help that person.  Namely, he refers to 'investing in a social practice' that he himself might need some day.   This rebuttal completely misses the central point that Kelley should address head on.  There's a much simpler reason why you might want to help someone in that situation: because you care about that person.  This gets to a central question that Kelley, astoundingly, fails to address.  The question is, what role do other people play in our own selfish values?   Mackey contends that, by and large, the two are non-overlapping spheres; there's acting for self-interest, and then there's acting for others.  Thus, his example of extreme self-interest is a narcissist that never acts for others.  The important distinction for the Objectivist to make is that a narcissist is someone who fails to value other people at all!  Selfishness is all about pursuing your own values, and the question is: can other people be values to us?  When put this way, the answer is obvious; of course they can!  I care deeply about many people in my life.  Their happiness helps to constitute my own; their happiness brings me joy, and their pain brings me sorrow.  This is what ties acting for others into self-interest, far more so than furthering some social code of helping.   We can put some more meat on this issue by considering its application to some real-life questions of how we should treat other people.  This will help to illustrate why selfishness is important even when doing things for others.  Let's consider a couple of (related) hypotheticals.  In the first, I'm considering going to the hospital to pay a visit to someone who's been injured.  In the second, I'm considering spending the night by their bedside in the hospital, to keep them company and reassure them.  How do I decide what to do in either case?   In either scenario, the central question is: what does this person mean to me?  The reference point is me, myself, my life.  It might sound unfamiliar (and maybe callous) to couch the question in these terms, but I encourage the reader to take a second and actually consider this scenario.  I'm sure there are many people in your life to whom you would gladly pay a hospital visit if they were sick, or injured.  Coworkers, acquaintances, distant relatives, any number of people that you know and like well enough so that you'd take the time to visit them and brighten their day if they were hurt or sick.  However, for most of these people, you probably wouldn't put your life on hold and sleep in a folding chair in a hospital room just to keep them company.  You might like them, but you don't like them that much.   But there are some people that you would put everything else aside to be with.  Immediate family, very close friends, certainly significant others.  When people mean a lot to us, we're willing to do a lot for them, as well we should be.  I hope Mackey would agree that this is an appropriate way to act and make choices when we're "balancing our self-interest" against other concerns.  My point is, in order to act this way, we need to look to ourselves, fundamentally.  We do (and should!) treat people differently based, not on some cosmic scale of importance, but on what they mean to us personally.  To rephrase this, we should take actions for them to the extent that doing so is also pursuing our own values.  We should help them when it's selfish, in Rand's sense, to do so.   In the debate, John Mackey states that he's using the dictionary definition of selfishness, and that it's Ayn Rand and David Kelley's job to justify using a different definition.  Well, here is my justification: the integrating principle behind how we should treat other people and how far we should go to help them is inherently a self-oriented principle.  It depends on what they mean to us, their relation to our life and our values.  If you're willing to acknowledge that other people can be values to us, just as our career or our health or other such 'selfish' values can, then self-interest provides an overarching moral framework that integrates our actions towards other people with the pursuit of our own values.  Mackey suggests that we should balance these two things, and perhaps he has some additional ideas as to how to do that, but the truth is this: we should balance acting for others with acting for ourselves the same way that we make decisions between our 'selfish' values, by evaluating their importance to us and paying fidelity to our values.

In the debate, John Mackey charges that following a strict conception of self-interest will lead one to disregard any actions taken for others.  He accepts the dictionary definition of selfishness and argues against living by it, saying that we should take others into account and balance our interests with those of others.   Kelley responds by disputing this conception of selfishness, as he should, and immediately refers to his own work on benevolence and its relation to selfishness.  In so doing, he gives a hypothetical of a neighbor's house burning down, and discusses self-interested reasons to help that person.  Namely, he refers to 'investing in a social practice' that he himself might need some day.   This rebuttal completely misses the central point that Kelley should address head on.  There's a much simpler reason why you might want to help someone in that situation: because you care about that person.  This gets to a central question that Kelley, astoundingly, fails to address.  The question is, what role do other people play in our own selfish values?   Mackey contends that, by and large, the two are non-overlapping spheres; there's acting for self-interest, and then there's acting for others.  Thus, his example of extreme self-interest is a narcissist that never acts for others.  The important distinction for the Objectivist to make is that a narcissist is someone who fails to value other people at all!  Selfishness is all about pursuing your own values, and the question is: can other people be values to us?  When put this way, the answer is obvious; of course they can!  I care deeply about many people in my life.  Their happiness helps to constitute my own; their happiness brings me joy, and their pain brings me sorrow.  This is what ties acting for others into self-interest, far more so than furthering some social code of helping.   We can put some more meat on this issue by considering its application to some real-life questions of how we should treat other people.  This will help to illustrate why selfishness is important even when doing things for others.  Let's consider a couple of (related) hypotheticals.  In the first, I'm considering going to the hospital to pay a visit to someone who's been injured.  In the second, I'm considering spending the night by their bedside in the hospital, to keep them company and reassure them.  How do I decide what to do in either case?   In either scenario, the central question is: what does this person mean to me?  The reference point is me, myself, my life.  It might sound unfamiliar (and maybe callous) to couch the question in these terms, but I encourage the reader to take a second and actually consider this scenario.  I'm sure there are many people in your life to whom you would gladly pay a hospital visit if they were sick, or injured.  Coworkers, acquaintances, distant relatives, any number of people that you know and like well enough so that you'd take the time to visit them and brighten their day if they were hurt or sick.  However, for most of these people, you probably wouldn't put your life on hold and sleep in a folding chair in a hospital room just to keep them company.  You might like them, but you don't like them that much.   But there are some people that you would put everything else aside to be with.  Immediate family, very close friends, certainly significant others.  When people mean a lot to us, we're willing to do a lot for them, as well we should be.  I hope Mackey would agree that this is an appropriate way to act and make choices when we're "balancing our self-interest" against other concerns.  My point is, in order to act this way, we need to look to ourselves, fundamentally.  We do (and should!) treat people differently based, not on some cosmic scale of importance, but on what they mean to us personally.  To rephrase this, we should take actions for them to the extent that doing so is also pursuing our own values.  We should help them when it's selfish, in Rand's sense, to do so.   In the debate, John Mackey states that he's using the dictionary definition of selfishness, and that it's Ayn Rand and David Kelley's job to justify using a different definition.  Well, here is my justification: the integrating principle behind how we should treat other people and how far we should go to help them is inherently a self-oriented principle.  It depends on what they mean to us, their relation to our life and our values.  If you're willing to acknowledge that other people can be values to us, just as our career or our health or other such 'selfish' values can, then self-interest provides an overarching moral framework that integrates our actions towards other people with the pursuit of our own values.  Mackey suggests that we should balance these two things, and perhaps he has some additional ideas as to how to do that, but the truth is this: we should balance acting for others with acting for ourselves the same way that we make decisions between our 'selfish' values, by evaluating their importance to us and paying fidelity to our values.

'Postmodernist garbledee-gook'?  Public choice economics simply applies a central economic principle (incentives matter) to the behavior of politicians in government as well as businessmen in a marketplace.  Fundamentally, it is about looking at the incentives that politicians actually face, and evaluating how effective a given government program or institution will actually be at achieving its goals, based on how it is structured.
 
To the OP, public choice does point out some endemic problems that are faced by democratic systems.  This is not the same as saying that the system is broken to the extent that we should just go for anarchy.  In fact, we need to know about these incentive problems in order to design a government structure that minimizes them.  Public choice doesn't speak at all to the purpose of government.  What it does do is tell us the likely outcomes of different structures of government.  In designing a government, we could make it more or less robust to a lot of these incentive problems.  This is precisely what things like separation of powers, checks and balances, term limits, state vs federal authority, etc are intended to address.  Public choice allows us to apply economic reasoning to the question of how an elected official or a bureaucrat might behave within a certain system design, and therefore helps us use economics to address how we should structure a government, given the purpose that we want it to fulfill.
 
In short, it doesn't address the purpose of government, or replace political philosophy in this respect.  What it does is tell us how to best translate a political philosophy into an actual structure of government, e.g. a constitution.

Christianity does not explicitly set its moral code against the interests of its followers, or 'completely oppose living for oneself.' It claims to preach an ethical code which benefits the practitioner. Rand herself did a good job of highlighting the contradiction between the egoistic focus on personal salvation and the altruistic code that is actually advocated: (from Letters of Ayn Rand p.287, written in 1946)



It would be better to say that Christianity sets itself in opposition to the actual moral code that is compatible with living for oneself; it claims to lay out this moral code, but in actuality does not.



On this I can only elaborate on Marc's previous statement (quoted above); the end product isn't a capitalist. It is someone who applies reason to every area of his or her life, and fully accepts and implements a moral code oriented towards self-interest and based on fact. You may share some ethical and political views of hers, but clearly not all.

ObjectivismOnline was created 10 years ago on 03 February 2003. Here is the first post, in which I described my plans for this website.
In 10 years, we've received 270,156 posts from 8,962 members.

Are you going to make a thread about every single action or statement by Rand or one of her characters that you disagree with? This is the tenth such thread of yours that I count in the past month:

http://forum.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=24592

http://forum.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=24603

http://forum.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=24604

http://forum.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=24646

http://forum.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=24687

http://forum.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=24721

http://forum.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=24743

http://forum.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=24744

http://forum.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=24820

Many of these threads consist of you taking some action or statement by a character in a specific situation, and pretending that Rand is advocating that as a general practice or would advocate such a thing in real life. What is the point of this exercise? Rand provided a detailed enough statement of her philosophy and its principles such that it's not hard to figure out that she wouldn't advocate killing teachers, or blowing up buildings, or letting the world burn when you could save it with a simple philosophical speech. She was a novelist. She wrote fictional accounts of fictional people doing and saying fictional things, in order to illustrate through her works the practical consequences of ideas. Why is that difficult to grasp?

Consider the question of why Steven Mallory tries to kill Toohey, or why Rearden feels a desire to kill the past teachers of the Wet Nurse. You ask, well why don't they just feel the urge to speak out against these people, rather than kill them; wouldn't that be a more rational and appropriate reaction?

The faulty assumption is that every action or thought by a Rand character 'should' represent a well-reasoned and philosophically consistent Objectivist statement. Without this assumption, these things aren't confusing; Toohey and the teachers were doing something bad, and Rand's characters wanted to punish them and stop them from doing it again.

Or consider Roark's dynamiting of Cortlandt, or Galt's statements about his 'highest moral feeling' being to kill the man who would ask Galt to live for him, or Dominique's statements about hating the rest of the world. It's not hard to understand these as literary devices intended to convey particular points to the reader; it's only when you try to integrate every action and every word of each of these characters, taken literally, into a mature, consistent, reasoned philosophy that you get the troubles you've run into.

The key to all these questions is: it's a novel. It's not a philosophical treatise. It has imagery, metaphor, character progression. Some of these characters are still undergoing character development. Some are facing contexts fundamentally different from contemporary American life. Some are acting on emotion alone. Some are making philosophical points through their actions that are more complex than "this exact thing would also be okay to do in real life."

He doesn't define the line in practical terms, in terms of specific weapons, but he draws a crystal clear philosophical line between defensive and offensive weapons. The right to self-defense is an individual right that must be recognized by the government. There is no room here for trying to reduce shootings or gun deaths by banning specific weapons that are commonly used in such crimes. You look at the weapon, determine whether it is a viable weapon for self-defense or not, and then you're done. No 'banning this gun would reduce gun violence by X' or 'well, these guns are mostly used in a bad way.' It's either a fundamentally offensive weapon, and banned, or it's not, and you can have one.