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Could you clarify the question a bit? Are you asking whether it is currently legal to not save a dying person, whether it should be legal, or whether it's moral? Or something else?

I agree with the essence above two posts: based on the very brief overview you've given, whatever issue your dad has with your mom's boyfriend is more important to him than seeing your sister graduate. That speaks volumes about how much he actually values his daughter.

No, you couldn't. Jazz has definite, concrete referents. As with any genre, there are "borderline cases" that blur the line between jazz and other types of music, but if the existence of such cases made jazz a floating abstraction, then all genres in any form of art would be floating abstractions. How does improvisation contradict the principle that skill improves with practice? This is like arguing that improvisational comedy shows are inferior to scripted comedy since the performance "surely could be improved through rehearsal." That kind of argument misses the point entirely; the improvisation is an aesthetic choice without which you would have an entirely different work of art. Also, why are long solos a problem for jazz? You might not like them, and that's certainly understandable, but that doesn't mean they damage the aesthetics of the music.

"Romantic Realism" is the term Ayn Rand used to describe her own work. She used "Romantic" to describe art affirming the power of volition - i.e. of human efficacy. She considered herself a Romantic in this sense, and also a Realist because all her fiction is set in a real world context. I agree, it's incredibly odd. Even if we grant the very dubious claim that jazz emerged historically from racism, that in no way proves its aesthetic inferiority. But the content of that PDF is irrelevant to the question of whether aesthetics is a field open to rational discourse. You can read the gist of what Ayn Rand had to say about music here. To my knowledge, she didn't write about jazz. As I said, genres of music are optional values, so attempting to prove, for example, that someone who prefers jazz to classical music is in some way deficient is a doomed effort.

Like all forms of music, jazz is an optional value which may or may not appeal to a particular Objectivist. I think I remember reading somewhere that Leonard Peikoff enjoys some form of jazz, though I don't recall the details. Why do you think this? Lyndon Larouche is a rather strange person. Living on a college campus, I've run into his cronies multiple times - usually while they're yelling inanities at passing students and generally being obnoxious. His ideas have no connection to Objectivism, other than being antithetical to it.

Yes. Justice is basically rational judgment applied to men's characters. Like all human values, they should be objective, i.e. based in reality. Otherwise, it can't really qualify as rational judgment. Yes, but I think justice logically precedes legal concepts like rights and property. Justice is a character trait one cultivates in oneself before it is an element of society. Justice is connected to reality, but again I think that rights are after justice in the logical hierarchy. Justice is an ethical concept first and a political concept second. Legal justice has to occur within the courts, according to objective law. Otherwise it's arbitrary, and therefore subjective. Here's a good explanation of connection of the concept "justice" to reality. It's from Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology: EDIT: Sorry about that, khaight, I didn't see your reply. What are the odds that we'd both cite the same quote?

Wow, this guy has the philosophy of... well, pretty much every Final Fantasy villain ever. First, I wouldn't say the person in the video he was responding to is a "moral nihilist" - as you said, he's a utilitarian who seemed to be advocating "the greatest good for the greatest number." In any case, Rand didn't write much about nihilism because there's not much to write about - it's not even a belief, it's the negation of belief. In a sense, the whole of her philosophy is her response to nihilism; by giving answers to the major questions about existence, knowledge, human nature, and choice, she shows that there are meaningful solutions to these problems. As for the claims made in the video, where do I start? It's difficult to count the number of terrible premises he's arguing from. To me, the four most egregious ones are: 1. Ethics is about minimizing the suffering of the collective. 2. Real happiness doesn't come with "a price," i.e. proper happiness is automatic. 3. Life is the story of the "haves" exploiting the "have-nots." 4. The fact that life is finite makes achieving values impossible. Of course, Objectivism rejects all of these claims: 1. Ethics is a code of values to guide man's choices, with the goal of furthering his life. While to a rational man, the flourishing of other people is a value and the suffering of other people is a dis-value, neither is his fundamental concern. The existence of suffering does not eliminate the possibility of a happy, moral life (our friend would contest this, of course - see (2)). It's not hard to see, then, why the Objectivist ethics regards a man who would destroy all life in response to suffering as pure evil. 2. Because life is a process, it requires effort. Thus, there can be no such thing as "happiness without a price tag." It's also not true that pleasure is solely the result of staving off suffering. I think everybody knows athletes who are already in excellent health who still enjoy working out, or an older man who hasn't retired because he loves his job too much. 3. The world is not a pie over which people fight for fixed slices. One man's gain is not another's loss. This is the principle that makes benevolent interaction between human beings possible. This is covered extensively in "The 'Conflicts of Men's Interests" in The Virtue of Selfishness, so if you want an extensive rebuttal to this point I would read that, if you haven't already. 4. While the observation that everyone and everything we value will be no more someday is depressing, it doesn't negate the achievement of values over the course of one's life. Again, life is a process, not an end result. We seek productive work, hobbies, and the company of friends for the time we will spend enjoying them, not because we expect them to be eternal. Making this argument is like saying that you can never enjoy a movie, because it will be over in two hours. The most disturbing thing about this video to me is how many up-votes it has. People are scary sometimes...

You claimed that the lack of evidence in favor of a statement is sufficient to judge the statement as false. That's incorrect, and the OPAR quote above doesn't support your claim. Here's the full paragraph containing your quote: Peikoff isn't saying that a proposition is false by virtue of being arbitrary. He's saying that in some cases, one can make an arbitrary proposition meaningful by bringing one's own knowledge and context to the table. He goes on to say that "Even when it is possible, however, this kind of integration is never obligatory." And just two paragraphs up from the quote you gave is this sentence: The point is that while "There is a God" is provably false given an understanding of the term "God" as it is commonly used in the culture and its relationship to reality, an atheist need not undergo the process of judging the statement as false to rationally reject it.

There is a third alternative - if a statement doesn't qualify as an actual claim, then one can reject it without the concept of belief even being applicable. Saying "God exists" is as cognitively meaningful as saying "Mork bleegle marno foo." The response to the latter statement isn't "That's incorrect," it's "Unless you can make that cognitively meaningful, I'm ignoring it" (or, more likely, "Right... I'm going to go stand over here now."). In fact, since believing that the statement "God exists" is false is equivalent to believing that the statement "God doesn't exist" is true, anyone who responds to an arbitrary claim merely by asserting its falsity, without establishing some sort of cognitive context or doing any justification of their own, is just as guilty of making arbitrary claims.

Reason doesn't allow assumptions without evidence. Objectivism holds that belief in an arbitrary hypothesis is irrational; you can't simply say "I'll believe X until someone or something shows me not-X." Leonard Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand contains a good discussion of why arbitrary claims are invalid; see here.

No, Rand is not positing a deterministic relationship between an artist's work and his culture. While an artist may be inspired by a culture's values and seek to concretize them, that doesn't mean he is a mere mouthpiece of dominant philosophic trends. Artists choose to recreate those aspects of reality they consider important - which may or may not agree with the dominant views. Having said that, Rand does see artistic trends as a sort of "cultural barometer." Since art consist of value judgments, analyzing popular themes and stylistic choices in art can be a good indicator of where a society stands, philosophically. But this is a "statistical" analysis - it indicates a culture's values, not those of any particular artist.

While the Westboro Baptist Church is vile and disgusting, in this instance the Supreme Court is correct - they are protected by the right to free speech. As ARC pointed out on their blog a while back, the obvious solution is more private property. The jerks would have nowhere to protest.

Based on what you quoted, I would point out that saying "one should never break the law" is not the same thing as saying "as a political party, we work inside the law and cannot advocate its violation." The latter is certainly a reasonable policy for an organization that publicly promotes a set of principles.

Well, I know David Kelley was a philosophical consultant for the movie. As to the other invitations, I don't know, but I was invited to a screening for being listed as the head of UCLA's (ARI-sanctioned) Objectivist club, so I would be really surprised if no ARI intellectuals were invited. Incidentally, I quite enjoyed the movie. I'll definitely see it again when it hits theaters.

It can be used in that sense - e.g. "I'm ignorant of the chemical composition of asteroids," but when "ignorant" is used to describe a vice, it usually implies a failure to think clearly as the result of a lack of knowledge.

Since omniscience is impossible, "not knowing everything" isn't a particularly useful definition of ignorance. Generally, we call someone ignorant when his lack of knowledge becomes an obstacle to his ability to reason about a subject. For example, a non-physicist isn't necessarily ignorant for not knowing about relativity. He becomes ignorant when he tries to draw conclusions from his poor understanding of it.

Well, I would say that gang activity is immoral not because gangsters risk their lives or freedom (soldiers do the same thing), but because they are rights violators. I'm not sure what you mean by "the non-snitching nature of others." Do you mean that criminals count on their crimes not being reported by other criminals?

"The universe is God" usually means one of two things: The universe is a supernatural being with the properties usually associated with an anthropomorphic deity. We simply choose to identify the name "God" with the universe. (1) is subject to the usual Objectivist arguments against theism. (2) does nothing but cause confusion between two unrelated ideas. The universe is the universe, not God. The only conceivable reason to call the universe "God" is to be able to associate what is usually meant by "God" with the universe, in which case we're back at (1).

Without getting into the etymology of the term "free will," it is sometimes appropriate to use phrases that are technically redundant when the goal is to emphasize a particular trait or to contrast a word's actual meaning with the way it is commonly used, e.g. "laissez-faire capitalism."

The actual distance between Earth and the Crab Nebula aside, there's more to whether a fact of reality enhances man's survival than mere proximity. The existence of distant astronomical bodies prompts further questions: What is it made of? What natural processes led to its formation? Does its nature support or contradict any proposed laws of physics? How does it interact with other bodies? We understand the physical universe through principles that apply regardless of location, and studying astronomy expands and clarifies these principles, and it equips us with new ones. The larger our toolkit of principles, the greater our capacity to survive on Earth. From page 151 of Ayn Rand Answers: By its very nature, knowledge has survival value. You are still using "robot or trans-human" as though they were interchangeable. This is incorrect: the existence of the robot is automatic; the existence of the trans-human is not. Why would the robot value knowledge, when it doesn't need to understand reality to continue existing? Why would it value love, when nothing can act for or against it? Why would it value friendship, when it has no other values to share with its would-be friends? It's meaningless to talk about the robot's pleasure-pain mechanism when nothing can hurt it or benefit it - what would it find pleasurable or painful? Nor can the robot have an "active mind," since this implies a consciousness that must sustain itself. That life implies eventual death is irrelevant to the Objectivist ethics (although it might still be true as a matter of biology); what matters is that, in order to live, one must actively pursue the things life requires, and without them, one dies. Automatic life is a contradiction in terms.

Ayn Rand's immortal robot is literally immortal - it cannot be destroyed by anything. This is impossible for living organisms, of course, but as you pointed out, its purpose is as a thought experiment illustrating the connection between life and values. In your "trans-human" example, the trans-human still must act to maintain his life - he still needs food, water, shelter, clothing, and money, and still needs to practice all the virtues necessary to obtain these and all his other values, including spiritual ones like knowledge, friendship, and love. His "immortality" is not automatic either - he would need to seek out the medical treatments that counter aging and disease. For the robot, no such action is required. It can't destroy itself or improve itself, so it can value nothing. The trans-human is not "contrary to Ayn Rand," because he is not immortal in the sense she was using the term. All values are necessarily "survival values." Values are the things that living organisms seek out in the maintenance of their own lives. Spiritual values like art and friendship are needs of human consciousness, and a healthy consciousness is essential to man's survival. Happiness doesn't arise in a vacuum, it's the result of successful living, i.e. of surviving, so there's no way to meaningfully detach "life of happiness and life of frustration" from "life and death."

Yes - I've read all her fiction and nonfiction published during her lifetime, with the exception of We the Living.

Hi everyone, My name is Robert; I'm a fourth year college student studying math. I've been interested in Objectivism since high school when my English teacher assigned Anthem for summer reading. Just thought I'd post a quick hello here.