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How can man act against his own nature?

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Since the subject here has veered towards ethics, could someone tell me if there's ever been a comprehensive reply written to Robert Nozick's "On the Randian Argument'"? Ive been curious for a while, but didn't think it was worth starting a new thread over.

So while Epicureanism is one of the best of the historical egoistic ethical systems, it still falls prey to this error.  Epicurus did recognize that pleasures couldn't be just momentary, because one pleasure can come in conflict with another, and he gave some useful (and some not-so-useful) advice about how to avoid such conflicts.  But for him, the standard was still always pleasure.

Bear in mind that Epicurus originally wrote in Greek, rather than English. You cant claim that he chose to use the word 'pleasure' rather than 'happyness' and hold this against him, since he didn't. I think that what Epicurus meant by (what is normally translated as) 'pleasure' is different from 'pleasure' as taken in contemporary English, precisely because he recognised the long-term aspects involved.

edit: I don't think I have ever read Epicurus.

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Though ultimately I don't think he really does mean anything different by pleasure than we do, I'm not basing this on terminology. He gives a lot of examples of the sorts of things he has in mind, and his goal amounts to a long and unbroken string of pleasures. The best contrast is Aristotle's concept of eudaimonia, which is much more like what Objectivism advocates.

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  • 12 years later...
On 7/7/2004 at 9:17 AM, Spearmint said:

Since the subject here has veered towards ethics, could someone tell me if there's ever been a comprehensive reply written to Robert Nozick's "On the Randian Argument'"? Ive been curious for a while, but didn't think it was worth starting a new thread over.

A New Find: Harry Binswanger's 1977 Response to Robert Nozick which links to the response: Harry Binswanger's 1977 Letter to Robert Nozick. Harry Binswanger also wrote a wider response Life-Based Teleology and the Foundations of Ethics which appeared in The Monist, January 1992.

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