NationStates Jolt Archive

Linus and Lucy
You seem to be an ardent capitalist. All successful businessmen and women in the country have a social responsibility to help the poor. Andrew Carnegie, one of the smartest and wealthiest businessmen in the history of the U.S., strongly believed in this. We have have a moral and ethical responsibility to help the poor. I'm not talking about lowlifes, drug addicts, or anyone who ended up poor through their own action.

Furthermore, your statements about governments role in business are incorrect. The US government, and every government can raise the minimum wage whenever they want. There is nothing unethical about it. By voting for the current government, YOU allow them to do what they will. Also, the minimum wage was already raised over the summer. It will be at $7.25/hr by summer 2009.

Also, It is the role of the government to protect the individual from monopolies. By breaking up monopolies the government actually helps business, by creating competition. This in turn strengthens the economy, and encourages innovation within the industry as companies try to get the competitive edge against their competition.

The government interferes in business when it must. When it will benefit the economy, and therefore business and people.

Also, the minimum wage was increased this summer. By summer 2009 it will be $7.25/hr.

By the way, Ayn Rand is only one philosopher. Thousands will tell you differently.

:claps:

Best first post I've ever seen.

Oh and LL, I have given up on you. I give you a C+ for effort.

The only protection they have is that the rational have nothing to gain from hurting them. But Atlas Shrugged is about the refusal to help, and plenty of people die as a result of John Galt and company asserting their independence, simply because the life of the non-producers depends on the work of the producers.

This is, of course, my interpretation. Ayn Rand may have seen this very differently - but what does shine through is that everything is earned: respect, love, friendship, wealth, happiness, life. Don't earn it, and you have no right to any of these.

I don't see why the rational, ironically objectivists in this case, would not have something to gain from hurting the irrational. How would it be any different, ethically, if John Galt had released a 100% lethal virus on the irrational in Atlas Shrugged? John Galt would have gotten rid of the nonproducers and would receive a lot of prime real estate in the bargain.

Ironically enough the difference between producers and nonproducers sounds very socialistic , Reminds me of capital and labor.

By what criteria should governments judge whether one has earned one's rights?

A is A
Both P and ~P cannot be true at the same time and in the same sense.

From the simple premise A is A we come to the logical conclusion that Ayn Rand was an idiot, objectivism is false, and Linus and Lucy is either insane, intellectually dishonest, or stupid. Lets be charitible and say stupid.

I don't see why the rational, ironically objectivists in this case, would not have something to gain from hurting the irrational. How would it be any different, ethically, if John Galt had released a 100% lethal virus on the irrational in Atlas Shrugged? John Galt would have gotten rid of the nonproducers and would receive a lot of prime real estate in the bargain.

Ironically enough the difference between producers and nonproducers sounds very socialistic , Reminds me of capital and labor.

By what criteria should governments judge whether one has earned one's rights?

Rand had the dichotomy of producers and nonproducers reversed in Atlas Shrugged anyway. The entrepreneur is called the producer, and the worker who does the producing is Orwellianly renamed the nonproducer.

In reality, without bosses, the workers would find a way to survive. Galt and the other "enlightened few" would have to do their own work, since they'd have no one to work for them. :p

It's spelled "conceited".

And yes, I am a snob--as I should be, because I'm better than him.

Why?

Because unlike him, I choose to be intellectualy honest.
Because unlike him, I choose to spend my time educating myself.
Because unlike him, I am right.

WOW!! You really are full of yourself. "He who recognizes he knows nothing is the wisest on earth".


I most certainly did. That both he and you are either too dense, too ignorant, too lazy, or too dishonest to recognize it is your failing, not mine.

Now you are just flaming.

You're trying to compartmentalize the various aspects and provide them with a linear relationship. Human behavior doesn't work that way. It's an interlinked system on a two way road.
Ahh, yes, the best way to shut down any argument about rights: you're not actually you, you're a product of society - so society should decide who you are and what you're allowed to do.

Ideal argument, especially if you're at the top of that society. You can justify whatever the hell you want that way.

Problem is: to my argument it doesn't matter what society says or teaches you. My argument is tied to people's choice to use reason in order to improve their existence and achieve happiness. What exactly gives them happiness is only important in so far that it should allow others the use of their own minds as well, so force, lying etc is out of the question. So if you want to make up more rights on top of the basic ones I'm proposing, you're welcome to do that - provided they don't conflict with the basic ones that are independent of the society, if that society is to survive for longer than its victims.

Now that's just silly. Instincts are inherent to every being. And that very much includes the need for feed, shelter, etc, etc. Without instincts, the majority of marooned desert island dwellers would flop on the ground and expire. Or for that matter, anywhere.
Yes, but your instinct that tells you that you should have some food doesn't actually provide you that food (except if you're really lucky and it's just some tasty seaweed sitting in front of you, ready to eat).

The decision to eat food is not volitional. What you do to get it is.

A whole lot of those comforts aren't exactly required for survival. They're add ons.
I still wouldn't want to miss them.

And thought isn't influenced by instinct at all?
No, not at all.

My given stance and your two sentences create a logical conflict.
I call it life, you call it long-term survival. We both agree that simply being kept alive with nothing more is not it. Where's the conflict?

Wal-Mart, at $9.99 by your reasoning apparently.
Well, remove Wal-Mart from the world and see where all those people who work there, shop there and earn their living from its supply chain end up.

Contentment is a state of mind. It isn't provided. It's arrived at.
Arrived at through what. You don't get contentment out of nothing - very, very few people can get themselves to the level of a hermit monk. And if everyone did, mankind would be doomed.

Everyone else generally needs both material and psychological goodies. The former could temporarily be provided by others through forcing them. The latter cannot, a significant part of it is a reward for one's actions and one's own appreciation of them.

His definition of rights and yours do not coincide.
Yes, they do. The important word is "proper". This little excerpt comes after dozens of pages of a monologue, part of which describes what proper existence for a human being is.

You ask whether having a taco is good or evil?
That depends. If I have a choice between taco and pancakes, then no, it's just a matter of your preference on the day. Unless I'm allergic to pancakes.

If the choice is between taco and starvation, then there is a choice between life and non-life, which is a choice between good and evil.

And if I decided I want a taco, then there is a choice between praying to the gods for one or going out and growing, hunting, gathering or working for the things I need to make one. The latter is life, the former non-life.

And if I were to take a liberal equal rights activist and put him/her in the same room as a Roman slave trader circa 120 BC, there wouldn't be a conflict of concepts of right and wrong?
There certainly would. But the argument I made is sound, with only one assumption to start with: that humans are beings of volitional consciousness.

Unlike more modern slave-traders, Romans may well have considered slaves human beings, just not citizens, and somehow convinced themselves that non-citizens don't have rights.

But his claim to that is based entirely on what he's been taught as a kid. In a straight argument, you should be able to convince him - provided he's ready to use his brain and actually act according to an argument that he can't refute.

Linus and Lucy
You seem to be an ardent capitalist. All successful businessmen and women in the country have a social responsibility to help the poor.
No, they don't. As the eminent 20th-century Russian-American philosopher Ayn Rand philosopher Ayn Rand, no individual has any obligation except to serve his own rational self-interest.

Andrew Carnegie, one of the smartest and wealthiest businessmen in the history of the U.S., strongly believed in this.
He was wrong.

We have have a moral and ethical responsibility to help the poor.
No, we don't.

Furthermore, your statements about governments role in business are incorrect.
Actually, they're quite correct. You just fail to distinguish between what's right and what the government actually does or can get away with.

The US government, and every government can raise the minimum wage whenever they want.
Not legitimately.

Just because they can get away with it doesn't make it right.

There is nothing unethical about it.
Sure there is. It's a violation of sacred freedom of contract.

By voting for the current government, YOU allow them to do what they will.
That just makes no sense at all.

Also, the minimum wage was already raised over the summer. It will be at $7.25/hr by summer 2009.
Did I say otherwise?

Also, It is the role of the government to protect the individual from monopolies.
No, it isn't.

By breaking up monopolies the government actually helps business, by creating competition.
It's not government's job to help business. It's government's job to stay the hell out of the way.

This in turn strengthens the economy,
Also not the proper role of government.

and encourages innovation within the industry
Same

By the way, Ayn Rand is only one philosopher. Thousands will tell you differently.

Did I ever claim otherwise?

She just happens to be the only one who was right. The rest were wrong.

Ayn Rand, Ayn Rand, She (it counts)

I keep my promises.

:stabs with metaphorical soldering iron:

-snip-
I just read this yesterday (it's from Atlas Shrugged), and thought I'd share it with you, regarding your style of debate:
"By the rules of my code, one owes a rational statement to those whom it does concern and who're making an effort to know. Those who're making an effort to fail to understand me are not a concern of mine."

So I think that some posters here deserve better answers from you than the one-liners you pull. Otherwise one would have to ask what you're looking for here, if you don't think they deserve answers (one's that actually help them understand your argument).

That means that the rich must be getting richer then. Yeah!:p

A is A
Both P and ~P cannot be true at the same time and in the same sense.

Which under no circumstance makes a right inherent. It's a societal construct which has all the physical weight and bearing of the Invisible Pink Unicorn.

And your crypto-fascistic babble about principles of the universe, "A is A" and others being "anti-intelectual buffoon" has shown that you are conceded snob of the highest order.

He asked for proof, and you didn't give it. Put up or shut up.

I think the fact that he tosses around insults, one liners, and gibberish in equal measure shows that he is pretty much your garden variety troll.

I think the fact that he tosses around insults, one liners, and gibberish in equal measure shows that he is pretty much your garden variety troll.

Well that's a duh. I mean he did brush off my post about natural law.

Which under no circumstance makes a right inherent. It's a societal construct which has all the physical weight and bearing of the Invisible Pink Unicorn.

Do not mock her holiness! May your socks be raptured from you laundry for your impiety!

Here - allow me to express my position on such matters

http://www.javys.com/hario/violin_pic/glass_violin.jpg

Your position is a hot Asian girl? :confused:

The government shouldn't give tax money to the poor, i.e., welfare. That's my money. I earned it. Not them. They didn't earn it. It equates to theft, really.

I wish that the goverment did not have to do this to make up for the lack of help given by individuals. It's a tough issue because individuals cannot be forced to directly help the less fortunate. But, because of the lack of help, the government forces them indirectly by giving their tax dollars to the less fortunate. If people gave more freely of their money this would not be necessary and there would be less ill will on either side. I wish there was a way to convince people to be less greedy and help those who truly deserve it, but no one seems to have figured that out yet.

Ahh, yes, the best way to shut down any argument about rights: you're not actually you, you're a product of society - so society should decide who you are and what you're allowed to do.

Huh? Are we even on the same topic anymore? The concept of an individual and at higher complexities, societies, forming rights is linked directly to inborn drives for survival which incidentally, includes stability. I don't know how you got to this point.


Yes, but your instinct that tells you that you should have some food doesn't actually provide you that food (except if you're really lucky and it's just some tasty seaweed sitting in front of you, ready to eat).

But that instinct is integral to the entire damn thing. Think of it as the id. Basic desire. Ego and Superego come into play after. How and why. But without that basic desire, neither of them would be used.


The decision to eat food is not volitional. What you do to get it is.


I'm still trying to work out how your coconut and moral choice fits into this.


I still wouldn't want to miss them.


And what of it? It would not detract from my original point no?


No, not at all.


So when that house fire comes burning towards you, instinct has no play on your decision to remove yourself from the danger at all?

You're really putting humanity on a much higher pedestal than it actually is.


I call it life, you call it long-term survival. We both agree that simply being kept alive with nothing more is not it. Where's the conflict?


Kept alive? One could theoretically be kept alive with severed limbs, bound and fed through nasal tubes.

But that doesn't exactly mean survival. Oh no. The will to live, bound to survival instincts, is there. Your definition of life just adds so much more extraneous material.


Well, remove Wal-Mart from the world and see where all those people who work there, shop there and earn their living from its supply chain end up.


Contentment is a state of mind. Nobody can sell it.


Arrived at through what. You don't get contentment out of nothing - very, very few people can get themselves to the level of a hermit monk. And if everyone did, mankind would be doomed.

The idea of contentment through achievement is a logical paradox that cannot work in any practical concept. If contentment is gained through achievement/acquisition, then obviously that contentment is a short lived emotional state of fulfillment which will then require further acquisition/achievement for yet another fix of fulfillment.

It's like a drug.

But that's not contentment though.


Everyone else generally needs both material and psychological goodies.

Define goodies. Basic needs or beyond basic needs?


Yes, they do. The important word is "proper". This little excerpt comes after dozens of pages of a monologue, part of which describes what proper existence for a human being is.

Yes, I noticed that bit of wiggle room the term provided. But you didn't provide said monologue which would have matched your definitions.


That depends. If I have a choice between taco and pancakes, then no, it's just a matter of your preference on the day. Unless I'm allergic to pancakes.


Which was the context of the question. But you said choice, with no definitions of what kind, thereby indicating all choice, is a moral choice.


If the choice is between taco and starvation, then there is a choice between life and non-life, which is a choice between good and evil.

And if I decided I want a taco, then there is a choice between praying to the gods for one or going out and growing, hunting, gathering or working for the things I need to make one. The latter is life, the former non-life.


Realizing logical steps towards achieving a goal is hardly what would fall under common definitions of "good and evil."

For that matter. Define good and evil.


But his claim to that is based entirely on what he's been taught as a kid.


I'm quite certain the first few slaveholders were never taught as children on what constituted a slave.


In a straight argument, you should be able to convince him - provided he's ready to use his brain and actually act according to an argument that he can't refute.

Oh? And what sort of argument would you use hmm? Is it perchance, the sort of "my culture is superior to yours" argument that is used every so often?

To convince, you must answer the questions of why. Keep in mind that merely placing arbitrary values of worth on aspects that have no meaning to the slave owner's culture is pure arrogance, with little merit as an actual argument.

I don't see why the rational, ironically objectivists in this case, would not have something to gain from hurting the irrational. How would it be any different, ethically, if John Galt had released a 100% lethal virus on the irrational in Atlas Shrugged? John Galt would have gotten rid of the nonproducers and would receive a lot of prime real estate in the bargain.
1) Because he wouldn't have earned it. You don't earn something by taking from others.

2) Because there is only one group of people who one could call objectively, irredeemably evil, and that's the people who have the capacity for thought, who use it, but who come to the conclusion that the principles of reason are applicable to the world but not other people - that it is right to use violence on people because you can't be bothered treating them as rational (the Dr. Stadler character). Anyone else has the choice between producer and nonproducer and can easily redeem himself.

And as an aside, if rationality is one's standard, it implies that there is in fact an objectively true right answer to any question. Any disagreement between rational people is not something that can be settled with violence, lying or anything like that. Both will do what they think is right, and reality will be the final arbiter. And the guy who was wrong (because he made a mistake in his reasoning or lacked information) has the chance to correct his mistake and learn. A guy who is forced to accept someone else's command never gets that chance.

By what criteria should governments judge whether one has earned one's rights?
Government shouldn't judge that at all. There is no need to hurt the irrational, since material reality will do it. So all government has to do is settle disputes by objective law and defend the principle that it is wrong to initiate the use of force on anyone.

Rand had the dichotomy of producers and nonproducers reversed in Atlas Shrugged anyway. The entrepreneur is called the producer, and the worker who does the producing is Orwellianly renamed the nonproducer.
You've never read it, have you. There's a bunch of worker characters who are part of the good guys, not by virtue of their entrepreneurship, but by virtue of their using their rational mind as their tool to survive. Entrepreneurship is simply the ultimate material expression of that principle.

In reality, without bosses, the workers would find a way to survive. Galt and the other "enlightened few" would have to do their own work, since they'd have no one to work for them. :p
Which is precisely what they're doing. They go to a hidden valley and build their own little town, becoming farmers, shop-owners, miners and so on, and working for each other. And those who are new (and therefore lack money), or haven't yet found something they can build up themselves work as employees for those who have.

Huh? Are we even on the same topic anymore? The concept of an individual and at higher complexities, societies, forming rights is linked directly to inborn drives for survival which incidentally, includes stability. I don't know how you got to this point.
By implying that some leader that emerges in a society thinks of, creates and enforces rights, and that being all there is to it, you're implying that rights are in fact that person's individual achievement and that therefore there's nothing whatsoever wrong with him (or his chosen successors) changing them or completely annihilating them. There is no interlinking relationship between the guy with the gun and the guy with his hands above his head. Either my right comes from me by right of my existence, or it comes from the guy with the gun and exists only as a promise (without guarantees) that he won't pull the trigger.

Worse, you suggested that people are, at least in part, a product of their society. That part is the part to which they are choosing not to use their faculty for life, because they accept what others tell them without thinking.

But that instinct is integral to the entire damn thing. Think of it as the id. Basic desire. Ego and Superego come into play after. How and why. But without that basic desire, neither of them would be used.
Obviously. But an amoeba acting merely on instinct would have a very decent life. A dog might still have a pretty good life. A chimp would probably look rather retarded.

A human would die within about a week tops on that desert island. Hence why humans are different from animals with no capability to think.

I'm still trying to work out how your coconut and moral choice fits into this.
Because if my standard of good and evil is whether or not it allows me to further my happy life/long-term survival, then doing something that is detrimental to that standard has got to be evil, and the alternative good.

And what of it? It would not detract from my original point no?
No, it's just a reminder that those add-ons were provided by people because they had the ability and were alone to achieve.

So when that house fire comes burning towards you, instinct has no play on your decision to remove yourself from the danger at all?
It probably would have. In that case it gives the incentive to think. The instinct might say fire = bad. If I actually see it coming, that translates into a desire to get away from it. And then I start thinking rationally and making choices that let me translate my desire into reality. If I fail to do the latter, I can have all the instincts I want, there's a good chance I'll still burn.

You're really putting humanity on a much higher pedestal than it actually is.
The last thing a moral person should be doing is declaring themselves (or others) to be unfit to live a moral life. And besides, I don't think it's a particularly high pedestal at all, particularly since all of us can step on it by choice with little effort.

But that doesn't exactly mean survival. Oh no. The will to live, bound to survival instincts, is there. Your definition of life just adds so much more extraneous material.
Why? We both concluded that mere survival is not it.

You propose that one needs contentment as well. I would say that merely being content is probably only sustainable by continuously adding new stuff that makes them happy, otherwise you'd end up with the perfectly content people of Brave New World or The Island (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_%282005_film%29).

So I propose that to be content, one has to be happy, and have a certain regard for oneself. So how does one get happiness and self-esteem? Through setting goals and achieving them.

Contentment is a state of mind. Nobody can sell it.
So where does this state of mind come from?

But that's not contentment though.
So if you were content, and nothing ever changed from then on, your material environment is fixed and there were no challenges to overcome, you wouldn't get bored? And therefore be no longer content?

Define goodies. Basic needs or beyond basic needs?
More than what you have right now. I'm not sure the difference between needs and wants is all that it's made out to be.

Yes, I noticed that bit of wiggle room the term provided. But you didn't provide said monologue which would have matched your definitions.
It's 93 pages or something. :p

I can recommend you pick up Atlas Shrugged from somewhere and read it yourself, it's not as bad a book as people say it is, and it clearly has some valuable ideas in it.

Which was the context of the question. But you said choice, with no definitions of what kind, thereby indicating all choice, is a moral choice.
Well, I said in the beginning that my standard was life, and I went on to define what I mean by it. So any choice between something that furthers a standard one accepts to be good, and another which one accepts to be evil, is necessarily a moral choice.

If eating pancakes made me really unhappy, I might also consider the choice to eat them anyways evil and therefore make any choice, even between preferences, a moral one because it serves a moral purpose.

For that matter. Define good and evil.
I think I did above. My definition of life = survival + happiness through achievement is my moral and good goal. Any action that leads me towards this goal is a good action, any that does not is evil.

It doesn't define what sort of achievement, it just says that you need to work towards your goals and reach them to be happy and therefore reach the ultimate, absolute and common goal.

The only limitation to your possibilities is the one that one can't condone infringing on other people's ability and effort to reach that goal. It's a limitation, but mainly a practical one, not one that I have to write tomes to justify philosophically.

I'm quite certain the first few slaveholders were never taught as children on what constituted a slave.
Sure they were. They were around slaves, they were told the rules of citizenship, war and debt. It builds an image of what a slave is and whether or not it is condoned to capture, own or sell them.

Hell, maybe they were taught at school. Sounds like a reasonable thing for a young Roman to learn.

Oh? And what sort of argument would you use hmm? Is it perchance, the sort of "my culture is superior to yours" argument that is used every so often?
I don't think I made any reference to my culture whatsoever so far. I've gone to great lengths to make sure nothing I said was conditional on one's culture, and only talk about universal standards.

To convince, you must answer the questions of why. Keep in mind that merely placing arbitrary values of worth on aspects that have no meaning to the slave owner's culture is pure arrogance, with little merit as an actual argument.
I'd go about it much the same as I have with you. The only difficulty is in convincing him that his ability to force a slave to do his bidding is not the same as a right to do so - and moreso in convincing him that non-citizens and prisoner's of war are in fact full human beings to the extent that they make use of the faculties that allow them human life. He's been taught that this is not the case (not through reason, but through tradition), and it would take time, effort and cooperation to break through that.

Still, once you strip away the entirely subjective, unquestioned and unargued standards of a culture, my argument should apply to anyone, not because it sounds good but because it makes logical sense and if others make an effort they can follow it in their own minds.

my standard of good and evil is whether or not it allows me to further my happy life/long-term survival
Very well. Now consider a situation in which you could further your happy life/long-term survival by enslaving another human being, with no chance whatsoever that this slave will ever be able to rise up against you or otherwise undermine your efforts in such a way as to negate the material advantage of having a slave in the first place.

In such a situation, why should you, as a rational self-interested individual, refuse to own a slave?

Yay! One step closer to being able to afford a manservant.

edit: Why do people cut out vegetables, fruits and nuts first. These can be some of the cheapest things. If you want to cut costs, cut the meat out first and go vegetarian.

Agreed. Buying fruits and vegetables along with meat and preparing the food yourself is by far cheaper than buying prepackaged food or other food that is processed. In addition, it is healthier.

By implying that some leader that emerges in a society thinks of, creates and enforces rights, and that being all there is to it


History is rife with such examples, but that's hardly what I meant.

The leader arises from a societal need for someone to provide direction. That leader, under the societal framework, is supposed to provide what the society desires in terms of leadership, and that's enforcing of preconceived rights.

Of course the societal framework tends to fall apart under Machiavellians, but that's besides the intention of the society.


Worse, you suggested that people are, at least in part, a product of their society


How did you take what I say, and come out with the exact opposite?

Society is the product of people, and as it develops, society itself affects people. But society will always come from the people, not the other way around.


Obviously. But an amoeba acting merely on instinct would have a very decent life. A dog might still have a pretty good life. A chimp would probably look rather retarded.

A human would die within about a week tops on that desert island. Hence why humans are different from animals with no capability to think.

In what sense? How are humans that different? We may do things differently, but at the very core of it, we're the same. Human's aren't some kind of otherworldly creature that don't have the same drives or social interactions as other animals at the base of it. We just complicate it.


Because if my standard of good and evil is whether or not it allows me to further my happy life/long-term survival, then doing something that is detrimental to that standard has got to be evil, and the alternative good.


Thereby generosity is evil?


No, it's just a reminder that those add-ons were provided by people because they had the ability and were alone to achieve.

Then that was a pointless waste of time. As for alone to achieve, that's a bunch of crock. The history of inventions and discoveries are littered with cases of others who did the same, but were not quick enough to announce it.


It probably would have. In that case it gives the incentive to think. The instinct might say fire = bad. If I actually see it coming, that translates into a desire to get away from it. And then I start thinking rationally and making choices that let me translate my desire into reality. If I fail to do the latter, I can have all the instincts I want, there's a good chance I'll still burn.


So there we go. Admittance that instinct influences thought by you who claimed it didn't. Without instinct, no thought, no action and shortly thereafter, death.


The last thing a moral person should be doing is declaring themselves (or others) to be unfit to live a moral life.

I've never implied that. You want to live a life by your morals, go ahead. But that doesn't mean your morals make you somehow superior to your origins.


Why? We both concluded that mere survival is not it.


The same reason why those in extended confinement without hope have a tendency to die. Extreme deteriorations of mental states can cause the body either to destroy itself or just shut down. It's not a well explained science, but has been noted to occur among humans at least.


You propose that one needs contentment as well. I would say that merely being content is probably only sustainable by continuously adding new stuff that makes them happy, otherwise you'd end up with the perfectly content people of Brave New World or The Island (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_%282005_film%29).

So I propose that to be content, one has to be happy, and have a certain regard for oneself. So how does one get happiness and self-esteem? Through setting goals and achieving them.

You equate happiness to material gain and goals achievement? Then obviously that's not contentment at all.


So where does this state of mind come from?


From your mind. Dur.


So if you were content, and nothing ever changed from then on, your material environment is fixed and there were no challenges to overcome, you wouldn't get bored? And therefore be no longer content?

What do you think contentment means?


More than what you have right now. I'm not sure the difference between needs and wants is all that it's made out to be.


Really? As much as some would call it blasphemy, you do not need NSG. But here you are.


It's 93 pages or something. :p


Then obviously this person is overly wordy and loves hearing their own voice. 93 pages is a little long for an opinion.


Well, I said in the beginning that my standard was life, and I went on to define what I mean by it. So any choice between something that furthers a standard one accepts to be good, and another which one accepts to be evil, is necessarily a moral choice.

If eating pancakes made me really unhappy, I might also consider the choice to eat them anyways evil and therefore make any choice, even between preferences, a moral one because it serves a moral purpose.


But if pancakes were all you had, then obviously you have a conflict. You cannot eat the pancakes because it's evil (the pancakes are out to get you! :p), but you cannot survive without eating them, making not eating them evil.

And then Schroedinger comes along and solves the problem by making them possibles pancakes. Until quantum cat eats it.


The only limitation to your possibilities is the one that one can't condone infringing on other people's ability and effort to reach that goal. It's a limitation, but mainly a practical one, not one that I have to write tomes to justify philosophically.


Why not? By what standards does one say "I will survive by any means, but not at the expense of others" and when the survival of one is explicitly dependent of the destruction of another. Don't say that doesn't happen. The very act of living itself requires energy, nutrients and raw materials that come from recently living objects. Not just animals, but plant matter as well.

And if we're going to limit it to just humans, then what of the one who kills in self defense?

By introducing caveats in a statement of absolutes you weaken your argument.


Sure they were. They were around slaves, they were told the rules of citizenship, war and debt. It builds an image of what a slave is and whether or not it is condoned to capture, own or sell them.

Not at the time of the first slave and the first slaveholder. Because they didn't exist prior to that.


I don't think I made any reference to my culture whatsoever so far. I've gone to great lengths to make sure nothing I said was conditional on one's culture, and only talk about universal standards.

Society then. The concept of rights is tied to society after all.


I'd go about it much the same as I have with you. The only difficulty is in convincing him that his ability to force a slave to do his bidding is not the same as a right to do so -


And what would that difference be? There have been numerous versions of slavery in history, with varying reasons for it from "because I could" to it being an integral part of their society wherein the slaves were part of that society as well.


and moreso in convincing him that non-citizens and prisoner's of war are in fact full human beings to the extent that they make use of the faculties that allow them human life. He's been taught that this is not the case (not through reason, but through tradition), and it would take time, effort and cooperation to break through that.

Considering what Romans used to use slaves for besides manual labor, the argument that they did not acknowledge that slaves had the same faculties insofar as mental and physical capabilities went (disabilities notwithstanding), negates your argument.


Still, once you strip away the entirely subjective, unquestioned and unargued standards of a culture, my argument should apply to anyone, not because it sounds good but because it makes logical sense and if others make an effort they can follow it in their own minds.

Logical sense in what manner? You haven't really given an argument against it in defined terms.

In such a situation, why should you, as a rational self-interested individual, refuse to own a slave?
Yes.

That is because material wealth is not the goal, it is the symptom. It is the product of work, directed by your mind.

Furthermore, as I will mention below, allowing people to own slaves means that your standard is no longer universal, and from a system in which people have to deal with each others as traders, providing value for value, it becomes a system in which they can deal with each other as perpetrators, and the one with the biggest gun wins.

The leader arises from a societal need for someone to provide direction. That leader, under the societal framework, is supposed to provide what the society desires in terms of leadership, and that's enforcing of preconceived rights.
So how do these rights come about then? I've never taken a vote on them, nor have I seen public discussion that leaders were concerned with. So they don't come from me or my opinions. So who does come up with them?

Of course the societal framework tends to fall apart under Machiavellians, but that's besides the intention of the society.
But sorta important, isn't it?

Society is the product of people, and as it develops, society itself affects people. But society will always come from the people, not the other way around.
So that's settled then. Of course, that means that everyone can and probably will have a different idea of what rights are admissable and which aren't. The question then is: who picks?

In what sense? How are humans that different? We may do things differently, but at the very core of it, we're the same. Human's aren't some kind of otherworldly creature that don't have the same drives or social interactions as other animals at the base of it. We just complicate it.
You try surviving on your instincts. You can't - that's all there is to it. The fact that we "do things differently" means that we are in fact different.

Thereby generosity is evil?
Unless you take pleasure in it.

Then that was a pointless waste of time. As for alone to achieve, that's a bunch of crock. The history of inventions and discoveries are littered with cases of others who did the same, but were not quick enough to announce it.
Or rather: not quick enough to get it to the consumer.

So there we go. Admittance that instinct influences thought by you who claimed it didn't. Without instinct, no thought, no action and shortly thereafter, death.
Did I say my instincts were evil? The only question I have to ask you is: I don't have a choice about my instincts, so I don't have to pick between a good or an evil course of action - so how is there a moral choice? If a lion eats a zebra out of instinct, is that good or evil?

I've never implied that. You want to live a life by your morals, go ahead. But that doesn't mean your morals make you somehow superior to your origins.
My origins are irrelevant, that's the point. I can be the lowest gutter bum out there and be a moral being, and I can be the smartest scientist or richest man in the world and fail to be.

And I do hope you're not using "your origins" as a proxy for something else. It would be rather sad if anyone were to stoop to the level of justifying one's own view of morality by saying "you're no better than me, therefore I'm good".

It's not a well explained science, but has been noted to occur among humans at least.
This drifts very far from the point.

You equate happiness to material gain and goals achievement? Then obviously that's not contentment at all.
Then what is? Achieving goals you set yourself doesn't make you happy?

From your mind. Dur.
That implies a reason. My mind, that is the conscious part of my brain capable of rational thought, doesn't just do things, it requires some stimulus. So if you say my rational mind provides contentment, then what is the reason for it?

What do you think contentment means?
I don't know, I didn't bring it up. A lack of unhappiness, maybe? Some sort of zero, like that's something we should be striving towards?

Really? As much as some would call it blasphemy, you do not need NSG. But here you are.
And who are you to tell? If I didn't have it, I might go insane and shoot myself.

And besides, in the stone ages a person just needed a piece of half-rotten meat to get over the day, and maybe a cave.

In the middle ages, people needed bread and religious enlightenment.

Today people need health insurance, housing and welfare money so they can buy a TV.

It seems the bar for what need constitutes moves along with economic progress.

Then obviously this person is overly wordy and loves hearing their own voice. 93 pages is a little long for an opinion.
It's not an opinion, it's an argument for a philosophy. 93 pages is pretty short considering.

But if pancakes were all you had, then obviously you have a conflict. You cannot eat the pancakes because it's evil (the pancakes are out to get you! :p), but you cannot survive without eating them, making not eating them evil.
In which case I choose the latter of two evils. No cats involved.

Why not? By what standards does one say "I will survive by any means, but not at the expense of others" and when the survival of one is explicitly dependent of the destruction of another. Don't say that doesn't happen. The very act of living itself requires energy, nutrients and raw materials that come from recently living objects. Not just animals, but plant matter as well.
There is no case in human-to-human interaction in which someone would be served better by hurting them than trading with them.

The only way that would be possible is if you refused to be human, refused to think and therefore to produce and had no value whatsoever to provide. And even in that case all you're doing is feasting on a carcass and dying a little bit later - unless someone bigger comes along and eats you, because you've now declared cannibalism acceptable.

And if we're going to limit it to just humans, then what of the one who kills in self defense?
You don't initiate the use of force. You're free to defend yourself against it.

By introducing caveats in a statement of absolutes you weaken your argument.
The goal is absolute. There is only one practical method to achieve it. That method is moral.

Since allowing some to intitiate the use of force against others obviously limits the ability of the victims to achieve, we've got a bit of a problem. If we allowed it, we'd get a situation in which the strong feed on the weak (or more likely: the many feed on the few) which can only last so long. Furthermore, no matter how they justify it to themselves, most people will never feel good about doing it (right now they're being protected by being oblivious to the facts, since they have government do it for them).

The choice is easy, regardless of what criterion you use.

Not at the time of the first slave and the first slaveholder. Because they didn't exist prior to that.
For him it was a matter of "do what I say or I hurt you". He was ruthless enough to do it and don't care.

I'm not sure I have to bother explaining to him, but if I did nothing would change. The argument would be the same - the question is whether he's willing to think and adjust his behaviour accordingly.

It might be a better idea though to talk to the slave. He's more likely to have issues.

Society then. The concept of rights is tied to society after all.
So, was my argument based on any particular society?

And what would that difference be?
I've been trying to explain for a while now. I'm not going to repeat it all. Nor am I going to presume your argument to be true and operate from there.

Considering what Romans used to use slaves for besides manual labor, the argument that they did not acknowledge that slaves had the same faculties insofar as mental and physical capabilities went (disabilities notwithstanding), negates your argument.
I believe both the Greeks and the Romans used slaves as teachers for their kids.

Logical sense in what manner? You haven't really given an argument against it in defined terms.
Which terms do you want?

So how do these rights come about then? I've never taken a vote on them, nor have I seen public discussion that leaders were concerned with. So they don't come from me or my opinions. So who does come up with them?

Society. Or more exactly, the collection of individuals who formed the proto-society. Did you just forget what I said? Society itself grows. Once it reaches a critical mass, society itself becomes semi-divorced from the individual grouping while still being sustained by the people.


But sorta important, isn't it?


Machiavellians are like in affect, similar to viruses. But rather than a self destructive virus that destroys the host, it generally co-opts the host and alters it to suit its needs. Societies generally aren't formed with those in mind.


So that's settled then. Of course, that means that everyone can and probably will have a different idea of what rights are admissable and which aren't. The question then is: who picks?

Everybody picks. The problem is getting it enforced by society as a whole.


You try surviving on your instincts. You can't - that's all there is to it. The fact that we "do things differently" means that we are in fact different.


Dammit, were you even listening? Instincts are an integral part of it. You can't function without them but they aren't the whole. Acting like they're extraneous is like saying your liver is extraneous.

And monkeys get food in a different manner than lions. They still need to eat though, just like us. They've got instincts, but that doesn't mean that's all there is to it. Otherwise they wouldn't be social animals or capable of learning.


Unless you take pleasure in it.


Why? It's still evil according to you.


Or rather: not quick enough to get it to the consumer.


Which makes it any less poignant how?


Did I say my instincts were evil? The only question I have to ask you is: I don't have a choice about my instincts, so I don't have to pick between a good or an evil course of action - so how is there a moral choice? If a lion eats a zebra out of instinct, is that good or evil?

You said instincts did not influence thoughts.


My origins are irrelevant, that's the point. I can be the lowest gutter bum out there and be a moral being, and I can be the smartest scientist or richest man in the world and fail to be.

And I do hope you're not using "your origins" as a proxy for something else. It would be rather sad if anyone were to stoop to the level of justifying one's own view of morality by saying "you're no better than me, therefore I'm good".


I'm talking about species origins. Actually, no, not even that. Planetary indigenous life evolution. You're part of the animal kingdom. Which means the same shared drives overall.


Then what is? Achieving goals you set yourself doesn't make you happy?


Contentment is about being content with what you have and are. Not what you're going to do and have just done.


That implies a reason. My mind, that is the conscious part of my brain capable of rational thought, doesn't just do things, it requires some stimulus. So if you say my rational mind provides contentment, then what is the reason for it?


Are you asking me to read your mind now?


I don't know, I didn't bring it up. A lack of unhappiness, maybe? Some sort of zero, like that's something we should be striving towards?


Nope. That's not contentment at all.


And who are you to tell? If I didn't have it, I might go insane and shoot myself.

Then obviously you wanted it so bad you couldn't give it up without injuring yourself. Just like a drug. :p


And besides, in the stone ages a person just needed a piece of half-rotten meat to get over the day, and maybe a cave.

In the middle ages, people needed bread and religious enlightenment.

Today people need health insurance, housing and welfare money so they can buy a TV.

It seems the bar for what need constitutes moves along with economic progress.


Nah, it's just that resource availability increased. Wants went up with it.

Ugchcuk in 50,000 B.C. probably didn't need to do those cave paintings, but he still did.


It's not an opinion, it's an argument for a philosophy. 93 pages is pretty short considering.


Reading a summarized version, (wiki, I was lazy) it looks like a flawed philosophy with some rather arbitrary ideas of reality.


In which case I choose the latter of two evils. No cats involved.


So you quietly do away with the evil of one?


There is no case in human-to-human interaction in which someone would be served better by hurting them than trading with them.


"I'll trade you my life if you don't kill me"?


The only way that would be possible is if you refused to be human, refused to think and therefore to produce and had no value whatsoever to provide. And even in that case all you're doing is feasting on a carcass and dying a little bit later - unless someone bigger comes along and eats you, because you've now declared cannibalism acceptable.

Huh????


You don't initiate the use of force. You're free to defend yourself against it.

The goal is absolute. There is only one practical method to achieve it. That method is moral.

You've given an absolute. Then you state caveats. And then go back to absolutes.

Make up your mind!


Since allowing some to intitiate the use of force against others obviously limits the ability of the victims to achieve, we've got a bit of a problem.

The same problem with your absolutes.


If we allowed it, we'd get a situation in which the strong feed on the weak (or more likely: the many feed on the few)

Predators are almost always outnumbered by prey. Be it human or animal. There is ever only one dictator over a group.


which can only last so long. Furthermore, no matter how they justify it to themselves, most people will never feel good about doing it (right now they're being protected by being oblivious to the facts, since they have government do it for them).

Doing what?


For him it was a matter of "do what I say or I hurt you". He was ruthless enough to do it and don't care.

I'm not sure I have to bother explaining to him, but if I did nothing would change. The argument would be the same - the question is whether he's willing to think and adjust his behaviour accordingly.

It might be a better idea though to talk to the slave. He's more likely to have issues.

Oh sure, treat the symptom, not the cause.


So, was my argument based on any particular society?


Unless you're living on a desert island by yourself, the implication is the society you belong to.


I've been trying to explain for a while now. I'm not going to repeat it all. Nor am I going to presume your argument to be true and operate from there.

So I see.


I believe both the Greeks and the Romans used slaves as teachers for their kids.

Right, so obviously the Greeks and Romans didn't treat slaves the way you described.


Which terms do you want?

At this point, I'd probably say pistols at 10 paces, but since that's unlikely, I'm just going to have to end this fruitless debate with the pancake monster.

Have at thee!
http://img222.imageshack.us/img222/7125/pancakevc7.th.jpg (http://img222.imageshack.us/my.php?image=pancakevc7.jpg)

Your position is a hot Asian girl? :confused:

She's holding up a violin Kuehneltland. Its the violin that signifies his opinion.

Yes, the poor are getting poorer & the rich are getting richer. They're eliminating the middle class. Without a healthy middle class, the nation is in serious trouble. Think about it.

You've never read it, have you. There's a bunch of worker characters who are part of the good guys, not by virtue of their entrepreneurship, but by virtue of their using their rational mind as their tool to survive. Entrepreneurship is simply the ultimate material expression of that principle.

I'm just drawing off of what I've heard from my friends who have read it. I actually did try to read it, but I couldn't stomach going any further. To put this in persepctive, I actually read most of Marx's Das Kapital. Just uggh!

Which is precisely what they're doing. They go to a hidden valley and build their own little town, becoming farmers, shop-owners, miners and so on, and working for each other. And those who are new (and therefore lack money), or haven't yet found something they can build up themselves work as employees for those who have.

How kibbutznik of them.

If this isn't a question of metaphysics, then what area of philosophy does it fall under? Epistemology? Ethics? Aesthetics? Politics?

NO, the question of the fundamental existence of rights is indeed a matter of metaphysics.

Begging the question. You have yet to prove that rights are metaphysical.

You also have yet to prove that logic is metaphysical, that your perverse political views can be deduced from 'if A then not ~A" and that the 'Is-Ought' gap can be bridged. I can't say I'm optimistic.

Sorry, Linus and Lucy keeps saying that individual rights are somehow objective. Has s/he expanded upon this (other than to say 'read ayn rand'?) I mean if they're objective, where can we observe them?

1) Because he wouldn't have earned it. You don't earn something by taking from others.

He's not taking anything from people who have earned their rights.

2) Because there is only one group of people who one could call objectively, irredeemably evil, and that's the people who have the capacity for thought, who use it, but who come to the conclusion that the principles of reason are applicable to the world but not other people - that it is right to use violence on people because you can't be bothered treating them as rational (the Dr. Stadler character). Anyone else has the choice between producer and nonproducer and can easily redeem himself.


Peope who choose to be nonproducers, Rand's definition, are choosing to be irrational, Rand's definition. Since they choose to be irrational they choose not to earn their rights. Thus they have no rights. Thus Galt has every right to committ genocide on their asses if he wishes.

And as an aside, if rationality is one's standard, it implies that there is in fact an objectively true right answer to any question. Any disagreement between rational people is not something that can be settled with violence, lying or anything like that. Both will do what they think is right, and reality will be the final arbiter. And the guy who was wrong (because he made a mistake in his reasoning or lacked information) has the chance to correct his mistake and learn. A guy who is forced to accept someone else's command never gets that chance.

Using what I know of Rand's teachings two truly rational peope can not have disagreements

Government shouldn't judge that at all. There is no need to hurt the irrational, since material reality will do it. So all government has to do is settle disputes by objective law and defend the principle that it is wrong to initiate the use of force on anyone.

People who aren't earning their rights don't have them. If objective law can be proven then I don't see why government can't use objective criteria on whether one has earned one's rights. If someone hasn't earned his rights I don't why its necessarily not in my interests to eliminate him. It provides incentive for people to earn their rights and eliminates bothersome pests.

Peope who choose to be nonproducers, Rand's definition, are choosing to be irrational, Rand's definition.
It's more the other way around, but no matter.

Since they choose to be irrational they choose not to earn their rights. Thus they have no rights. Thus Galt has every right to committ genocide on their asses if he wishes.
Except then he would cease to be a producer. Objectivism is a philosophy about the self, it's about the actions you choose to take, and their effects on you.

Interpersonal relationships are trading relationships, meaning each respects the sovereignty of the other. That does imply no killing, stealing and so on, but they are the outcome, not the presumption of the objectivist line of thought.

Using what I know of Rand's teachings two truly rational peope can not have disagreements
They can if they make a mistake in their reasoning, or if they don't have all their facts straight.

It's just that in such a case no one can get anything out of forcing or lying to the other.

If someone hasn't earned his rights I don't why its necessarily not in my interests to eliminate him. It provides incentive for people to earn their rights and eliminates bothersome pests.
The incentive is that they will be happy and that they don't starve. They need nothing more, and it's not my job to provide it.

And they aren't bothersome because they have no power to do anything to me, unlike in the modern world.

The rule is: you ignore irrational people until they try to hurt you. Then you resist in whatever manner is feasible - you try and punish a thief, you try and foil the guy trying to kill you, you withdraw your consent from the government that regards you as a means to an end.

I'm just drawing off of what I've heard from my friends who have read it. I actually did try to read it, but I couldn't stomach going any further. To put this in persepctive, I actually read most of Marx's Das Kapital. Just uggh!
And the beautiful thing about that post is that you don't have to justify the ignorance that resulted from failing to read the book - and you can have a quick swipe at the author, just for the fun of it. It's getting boring, people keep using it as an excuse not to engage the argument put forward by her.

How kibbutznik of them.
How do you think anarcho-capitalism would work? Just like anarcho-anything it necessarily requires fairly small communities without major disagreements about how to coexist.

In the book, their rule is that no man exists for the sake of another.


Once it reaches a critical mass, society itself becomes semi-divorced from the individual grouping while still being sustained by the people.
Semi-divorced? Can you step down from the theory for a second and tell me exactly how I can observe this right here, right now?

Machiavellians are like in affect, similar to viruses. But rather than a self destructive virus that destroys the host, it generally co-opts the host and alters it to suit its needs. Societies generally aren't formed with those in mind.
Yet they seem to be a constant, always present and never defeated. Are we too stupid to learn, and do it differently?

Everybody picks. The problem is getting it enforced by society as a whole.
You're skirting around the question. Everyone has their idea of what rights should be, yet somehow some set of rights end up getting enforced. So someone decides - how is their decision valid, justified or alterable? How does it reflect "society's wishes" rather than those of the individual making the choice.

Dammit, were you even listening? Instincts are an integral part of it. You can't function without them but they aren't the whole. Acting like they're extraneous is like saying your liver is extraneous.
But all they do is provide an initial impulse to do something. They don't tell you what to do, and they don't tell you how to do it.

On the other hand, there are about a billion things I do every day which are not motivated by my instincts, because I'm not in a situation in which they apply. My instincts are tools to deal with the primitive environment in which human's developed. I'm scared of a big fire, or of a height. I want food in order to make sure I don't starve. I have no instinct to do well in an exam, to drive to work or to write an objectivist argument on NSG.

And monkeys get food in a different manner than lions. They still need to eat though, just like us. They've got instincts, but that doesn't mean that's all there is to it. Otherwise they wouldn't be social animals or capable of learning.
Yes. Hence my point that apes having human rights may not be that stupid idea.

Why? It's still evil according to you.
I must have done a bad job of explaining.

1) The goal is life = survival + achievement = happiness.
2) The choice of achievement is made up of the little part you need to survive and the big part you need to put your wishes and dreams into reality.
3) The tool to achieve is your mind.
4) Fail to use your mind to achieve your dreams, and you fail to use it to live, which is evil.

Helping another may well be your wish, you may well get a lot of pleasure out of the fact that your actions have allowed another to do X. In such a case, acting against your interest and not helping that person you want to support would in fact be evil.

You said instincts did not influence thoughts.
I should have said "the process of thinking is not influenced by instincts". Instinct may in some cases provide the initial impulse that makes you think, it does not affect the outcome of your thought process.

In the coconut example, instinct told me "eat". I may also have some instinctual idea of what sorts of smells and tastes I should avoid. That's where it ends. The process of identifying a coconut, getting it down from the tree and breaking it open with the rock is an outcome of my thinking about how to solve the problem which in this case has been presented to me by my instincts.

I'm talking about species origins. Actually, no, not even that. Planetary indigenous life evolution. You're part of the animal kingdom. Which means the same shared drives overall.
Yes, I share basic drives to reproduce and to not die before I haven't used every chance at reproducing.

A rubber ball and a coconut also share the same basic characteristics. They're both made up of atoms, they are both round, they may even be the same size and behave similarly when dropped onto the beach.

But try and eat a rubber ball, and you'll notice that the two are objectively not the same thing, and cannot be treated the same way if you want to live.

Contentment is about being content with what you have and are. Not what you're going to do and have just done.
So basically you've come up with this word, have not defined it yet insist it is different from my concept of happiness. And now you're saying that who I am and what I have is not integrally the same thing as what I did in the past and what I plan to do in the future?

Are you asking me to read your mind now?
You can hazard a guess. I would suggest that there are pretty much no guesses you can make that would allow you to gain any sort of lasting contentment out of hurting others.

Then obviously you wanted it so bad you couldn't give it up without injuring yourself. Just like a drug. :p
So, does an addict need the drug? Or does he just want it? Or is the line rather blurry and depends entirely on what the politician of the day want to squeeze out of those who are condemned to be responsible for the needs of others?

Nah, it's just that resource availability increased. Wants went up with it.
So needs are just basics required for survival. And when we're saying "to each according to his needs" what we really mean is some sort of intravenous nutrient solution, just enough warmth to make sure body temperature doesn't get into the dangerous range...well, that's probably it.

Doesn't sound like a communist utopia, so it seems that your definition of needs doesn't entirely match with what people commonly understand by the word.

Ugchcuk in 50,000 B.C. probably didn't need to do those cave paintings, but he still did.
And more importantly, he considered them absolutely vital for his survival (summoning animal spirits for the hunt etc) and would have been rather indignated if you told him he couldn't draw them.

Reading a summarized version, (wiki, I was lazy) it looks like a flawed philosophy with some rather arbitrary ideas of reality.
You wouldn't be the first one to say so. What I've never seen is an actual refutation. The best one I've seen is based on the is-ought problem, but even without engaging it I'm not sure it matters. If the "is" implies wanting a happy life, then an "ought" that contradicts it seems like a rather stupid idea. It would just lead people to have to choose between happiness and being moral, and that being moral is being unhappy. Hardly the sort of morality I want to be following.

So you quietly do away with the evil of one?
No, you're still gonna hate pancakes. It's just that you can rank choices according to how evil you are, and pick the least evil one. Picking anything else would be ridiculous.

"I'll trade you my life if you don't kill me"?
A negation of a threat is not a value. My life is not yours to give or yours to take. You choose to offer me a zero, and a zero is what I'd offer you in return.

Or, if you preferred it, you want to trade in threats and violence, so I'll give like for like.

Huh????
Say you want something I have. Your choice is to provide me with value, and we trade, and we're both happy.

The alternative is that you have no value to offer (in other words you are literally useless), which implies you're not using your mind, which implies you choose to abdicate from your humanity. And in that case you can hurt me and take my stuff until it runs out, at which point you'll do what you would have done anyways: starve to death.

You've given an absolute. Then you state caveats. And then go back to absolutes.

Make up your mind!
There are no caveats. Explain what you think I'm saying.

Predators are almost always outnumbered by prey. Be it human or animal. There is ever only one dictator over a group.
The Jews were outnumbered by the Nazis. Exxon was outnumbered by the Venezuelans.

Doing what?
Tax collection, for example. If you asked someone from the street to go and collect 50% of that guy's income, gave him a gun and said: "if he doesn't want to give you the money, threaten him, if he resists, throw him in jail, if he resists arrest, shoot him" - would they feel comfortable with it?

Probably not. Yet it happens every year, and people are protected from the realisation that it does by a faceless bureaucracy shrouded in veil of so-called legitimacy.

Oh sure, treat the symptom, not the cause.
You've gotta treat both, otherwise you cure the cancer but the stomach still doesn't work and the patient dies.

But this is if the slave owner doesn't want to listen to a rational argument. In that case, no concept of morality is going to change his actions.

Unless you're living on a desert island by yourself, the implication is the society you belong to.
So despite not having mentioned my culture, my society, anything but individuals and their interests - phrased in so general terms that they apply to every person ever born - by virtue of having been born into modern western society my argument doesn't apply to anyone else?

That's a bit of an ad hominem, don't you reckon?

Right, so obviously the Greeks and Romans didn't treat slaves the way you described.
No, therefore they were morally wrong.

At this point, I'd probably say pistols at 10 paces, but since that's unlikely, I'm just going to have to end this fruitless debate with the pancake monster.
I don't think I'm done just yet. I must have made some mistake explaining myself, because you're still misunderstanding me.

Sorry, Linus and Lucy keeps saying that individual rights are somehow objective. Has s/he expanded upon this (other than to say 'read ayn rand'?) I mean if they're objective, where can we observe them?
Mainly by people being unhappy and dying if they're violated.

Except then he would cease to be a producer. Objectivism is a philosophy about the self, it's about the actions you choose to take, and their effects on you.

Interpersonal relationships are trading relationships, meaning each respects the sovereignty of the other. That does imply no killing, stealing and so on, but they are the outcome, not the presumption of the objectivist line of thought.


Why would/should objectivists respect the sovereignty of irrational people, at least in a situation where they could get away with no negative consequences? Irrational people aren't earning their rights to personal sovereignty. Trading relationships, where one respects the other's sovereignty, take place between rational people

They can if they make a mistake in their reasoning, or if they don't have all their facts straight.

So ultimately two objectivists can't disagree. With any momentary disagreements they will check their premises and go through their philosophical arguments to look for any consistencies so they ultimately come to the one true answer.

It's just that in such a case no one can get anything out of forcing or lying to the other


I don't see how this is so. Lets say that two objectivists are arguing over intellectual property rights. Objectivist A says that his work can be copyrighted and thus the Objectivist B owes him royalties when B copied his work. B says that information can't be commodified. They check their premises and low and behold they have different premises. A believes private property is put in place so that people receive all or at least most of the fruits of their labor. B thinks private property was put into place because many goods are rivalrous. Any good that is nonrivalrous can not be property.

Since they have different premises, and thus have slightly different definitions of initiation of force, I don't see how the matter could be settled without force of some kind.

The incentive is that they will be happy and that they don't starve. They need nothing more, and it's not my job to provide it.

I'm not saying its your job. I'm saying it could be someone's entertainment

And they aren't bothersome because they have no power to do anything to me, unlike in the modern world.

They are bothersome. Have you ever been asked for change by the homeless? They offend the eye, the nose and the ear.

The rule is: you ignore irrational people until they try to hurt you. Then you resist in whatever manner is feasible - you try and punish a thief, you try and foil the guy trying to kill you, you withdraw your consent from the government that regards you as a means to an end.

I don't see how that follows. Check your premises.

Suppose that I am in a hurry to get somewhere. I am walking to work, and if I am late, my boss gets mad at me. Furthermore, I like to get to work on time, because I have a lot of work that I want to get done. It is in my interests to get to work on time, but I am running a little bit late this morning. I presume no Objectivist will object to this so far - i.e., surely it will be granted that it is in my interests to get to work on time. Otherwise, there would be no reason for setting my alarm clock or walking quickly.

Now as I walk down the street, there are a lot of people in my way, slowing me down. I just happen to have in my pocket a hand-held disintegrator ray, though. The gun will quickly disintegrate any person I aim it at. It is believed that victims of disintegration suffer brief but horrible agony while being disintegrated, but after that, no trace of them is left. I hold back on disintegrating the people in my path, though, because some of them might be potential clients for my business. But then I see this homeless guy ahead, just wandering down the street. He is not threatening me, and I could go around him, but that would take a second or two longer, and I'm in a hurry. So I pull out the gun and disintegrate him, and then continue on my way.

Assume that I live in a society in which homeless people are so little respected that my action is both legal and socially acceptable. Homeless people are regularly beaten up, set on fire, etc., with impunity. Passers-by even regard it as an amusing entertainment. So I will not be punished for my action. Assume further that I dislike homeless people and don't like to see them on the street. So I do not feel bad about seeing the homeless guy disintegrated. In fact, it amuses me. Nor will my conscience bother me, because I am an ethical egoist, and so I believe that my action was morally virtuous. Therefore, after destroying the homeless guy, I should feel proud, not guilty.

The question is: Was my action morally right? If egoism is true, it was. I saved some time and mildly entertained myself, just as if I had disintegrated a pile of trash that was lying on the sidewalk getting in everyone's way. The other people in my society, who are themselves also egoists, will thank me for performing this public service, just as they would thank me for removing any other kind of useless clutter from the street. On the egoistic view, a person who does not serve my interests either directly or indirectly is just that - a piece of useless clutter, getting in my way.

For she [Rand] further holds that objective reality is readily accessible by solitary individuals using words and logic alone. This proposition -- rejected by nearly all modern scientists -- is essentially a restatement of the Platonic worldview, a fundamental axiom of which is that the universe is made up of ideal essences or 'values' (the term Rand preferred) that can be discovered, dispassionately examined, and _objectively_ analyzed by those few bold minds who are able to finally free themselves from hoary assumptions of the past. Once freed, any truly rational individual must, by simply applying verbal reasoning, independently reach the same set of fundamental conclusions about life, justice and the universe. (Naturally, any mind that fails to do so must, by definition, not yet be free.)

Semi-divorced? Can you step down from the theory for a second and tell me exactly how I can observe this right here, right now?

Easy. Society is about conformity and stability. But the individual is more often than not, about change. In your words, achievement seeking. However, pressure exerted by society is often at odds with that achievement since the preset limits of what can be achieved cannot reasonably cover all forms of desired achievement.


Yet they seem to be a constant, always present and never defeated. Are we too stupid to learn, and do it differently?

You don't see humanity having complete immunity to all manners of deadly diseases do you? Machiavellians evolve too you know. There's no such thing as a perfect, unexploitable system.

Come to think of it, your reasoning (assuming you support it) is a case example of that.


You're skirting around the question. Everyone has their idea of what rights should be, yet somehow some set of rights end up getting enforced. So someone decides - how is their decision valid, justified or alterable? How does it reflect "society's wishes" rather than those of the individual making the choice.

To take it in the big picture, the initial set of rights are those that the proto-society deem the barest minimum to ensuring stability. Right determination by majority. After that, when society gets more complex, it starts getting extra stuff tacked on by one form of power politics or another.


But all they do is provide an initial impulse to do something. They don't tell you what to do, and they don't tell you how to do it.

On the other hand, there are about a billion things I do every day which are not motivated by my instincts, because I'm not in a situation in which they apply. My instincts are tools to deal with the primitive environment in which human's developed. I'm scared of a big fire, or of a height. I want food in order to make sure I don't starve. I have no instinct to do well in an exam, to drive to work or to write an objectivist argument on NSG.

Your exam, work and argument examples are higher level functions of the basic requirements. Food, shelter, social interaction (very important for preserving mental health). Without those basic instinctual requirements, you'd have no motivation to do any of what you've described.

Instincts are the ignition key. Seemingly simple, but they're needed to start a complex process.


Yes. Hence my point that apes having human rights may not be that stupid idea.

The term here is human rights. You want ape rights, maybe you'd have a better argument.


1) The goal is life = survival + achievement = happiness.
2) The choice of achievement is made up of the little part you need to survive and the big part you need to put your wishes and dreams into reality.
3) The tool to achieve is your mind.
4) Fail to use your mind to achieve your dreams, and you fail to use it to live, which is evil.

Helping another may well be your wish, you may well get a lot of pleasure out of the fact that your actions have allowed another to do X. In such a case, acting against your interest and not helping that person you want to support would in fact be evil.

Uh huh. So by this understanding, why on earth are you going by the idea that apes would get human rights. Does it give you pleasure? Why do anything for anyone or anything unless it can directly benefit you right?


I should have said "the process of thinking is not influenced by instincts". Instinct may in some cases provide the initial impulse that makes you think, it does not affect the outcome of your thought process.


No instinct to start it, no thought.

How about we try something a little different hmm? Let's say you're about to do something with a degree of risk like, oh, I don't know, maybe juggling flaming batons. The instinctual part of your mind tells you that handling fast moving fire is dangerous, and that translate to a conscious realization of danger. You can either choose not to, acknowledging the risk, and the instinctual promptings, or you can ignore it.


Yes, I share basic drives to reproduce and to not die before I haven't used every chance at reproducing.

A rubber ball and a coconut also share the same basic characteristics. They're both made up of atoms, they are both round, they may even be the same size and behave similarly when dropped onto the beach.

But try and eat a rubber ball, and you'll notice that the two are objectively not the same thing, and cannot be treated the same way if you want to live.


And how many animals actually eat rubber balls?


So basically you've come up with this word, have not defined it yet insist it is different from my concept of happiness. And now you're saying that who I am and what I have is not integrally the same thing as what I did in the past and what I plan to do in the future?


I'm flattered that you think I came up with the word contentment, but no. The definition of contentment is quite clear I would imagine.


You can hazard a guess. I would suggest that there are pretty much no guesses you can make that would allow you to gain any sort of lasting contentment out of hurting others.

In your mind or mine?


So, does an addict need the drug? Or does he just want it? Or is the line rather blurry and depends entirely on what the politician of the day want to squeeze out of those who are condemned to be responsible for the needs of others?

Does an addict need a drug? Not really. What he's going through is withdrawal symptoms. They do not cause any recorded long term harm assuming successful rehabilitation.

What you're doing is simply translating wants into need. "I want something, so I must need it."

You're cutting out the why's of any reasoning process and going with "If I want it, I am justified in taking it."


So needs are just basics required for survival. And when we're saying "to each according to his needs" what we really mean is some sort of intravenous nutrient solution, just enough warmth to make sure body temperature doesn't get into the dangerous range...well, that's probably it.

Where'd you get that idea? Basic needs are just that. Basic. Food, shelter, water. The basics. Nowhere are you going to be able to fit a 40 inch plasma TV as a basic.


Doesn't sound like a communist utopia, so it seems that your definition of needs doesn't entirely match with what people commonly understand by the word.

Did I ever mention a communist utopia anywhere? Stop projecting your ideas on me.


And more importantly, he considered them absolutely vital for his survival (summoning animal spirits for the hunt etc) and would have been rather indignated if you told him he couldn't draw them.


Why, did you talk to Ugchuck?


You wouldn't be the first one to say so. What I've never seen is an actual refutation. The best one I've seen is based on the is-ought problem, but even without engaging it I'm not sure it matters. If the "is" implies wanting a happy life, then an "ought" that contradicts it seems like a rather stupid idea. It would just lead people to have to choose between happiness and being moral, and that being moral is being unhappy. Hardly the sort of morality I want to be following.


So what if your happiness is causing other people unhappiness hmm? I guess Vlad the Impaler was a moral guy by his standards.


No, you're still gonna hate pancakes. It's just that you can rank choices according to how evil you are, and pick the least evil one. Picking anything else would be ridiculous.

So in either scenario, your morality flies out the window.


A negation of a threat is not a value. My life is not yours to give or yours to take. You choose to offer me a zero, and a zero is what I'd offer you in return.

uh huh.


Say you want something I have. Your choice is to provide me with value, and we trade, and we're both happy.

The alternative is that you have no value to offer (in other words you are literally useless), which implies you're not using your mind, which implies you choose to abdicate from your humanity. And in that case you can hurt me and take my stuff until it runs out, at which point you'll do what you would have done anyways: starve to death.


You're making a bunch of false assumptions. In that the alternative person must automatically have nothing of value at all.

Ever thought of it the other way? The person has value, but offers you none of it.

Yet by that reasoning, that person has abdicated their humanity for not offering you a trade?


There are no caveats. Explain what you think I'm saying.


1: Anything that increases my happiness is good and justifiable.

2: I cannot do anything that prevents the happiness of others.

The two cannot function as absolutes.


The Jews were outnumbered by the Nazis. Exxon was outnumbered by the Venezuelans.

Pfft. And humans outnumber most animals.

Your examples are full of fail. The Nazis doing the actual extermination were numerically inferior to the total number of Jews exterminated. The Venezuelan government was the one that nationalized Exxon's assets, and not even the entire government.

Let me try one of your arguments. Some Americans owned slaves. So all Americans are slaveholders.

You want to go down that road?


Tax collection, for example. If you asked someone from the street to go and collect 50% of that guy's income, gave him a gun and said: "if he doesn't want to give you the money, threaten him, if he resists, throw him in jail, if he resists arrest, shoot him" - would they feel comfortable with it?

As Nuremberg trial defendants have gone on record saying. "I was doing my job."

Or how about certain US Marines at My Lai? "They were the enemy."

You obviously have discounted a great deal of human psychology in your attempt to craft this argument.


Probably not. Yet it happens every year, and people are protected from the realisation that it does by a faceless bureaucracy shrouded in veil of so-called legitimacy.

So-called legitimacy? You mean like your so-called morality?


You've gotta treat both, otherwise you cure the cancer but the stomach still doesn't work and the patient dies.

You're only treating the symptom. You fail as a doctor. But that's an unfair accusation since I don't think you trained as one.


But this is if the slave owner doesn't want to listen to a rational argument. In that case, no concept of morality is going to change his actions.

Your morality. Keep that in mind. It's YOUR morality. Not his.


So despite not having mentioned my culture, my society, anything but individuals and their interests - phrased in so general terms that they apply to every person ever born - by virtue of having been born into modern western society my argument doesn't apply to anyone else?

That's a bit of an ad hominem, don't you reckon?

I don't know. I've given an example of two entirely different time frames, cultures, societies and moral structures. You don't think that it might be a wee bit different in trying to apply one sort of mindset to another?

Of course not. Here we are. Neu Leonstein with his one size fits all morality structure. Philosophers everywhere are in awe at his genius.

Not.

You are still approaching from an aspect of "My way is superior to every other way".

The arrogance.


No, therefore they were morally wrong.


And you would be wrong by their moral codes. You've got no argument that would fit in their perspective yet be able to convince them.


I don't think I'm done just yet. I must have made some mistake explaining myself, because you're still misunderstanding me.


Yes. We are. And no, I haven't.

This debate is over. I've seen it go this way a dozen times before, and it never ends well.

She's holding up a violin Kuehneltland. Its the violin that signifies his opinion.

Ah, my mistake. :(

To put this in persepctive, I actually read most of Marx's Das Kapital. Just uggh!

Yes, it's mind-numbingly boring. So is Wealth of Nations, tbh.

Why would/should objectivists respect the sovereignty of irrational people, at least in a situation where they could get away with no negative consequences? Irrational people aren't earning their rights to personal sovereignty. Trading relationships, where one respects the other's sovereignty, take place between rational people
Because there is no reason to engage with irrational people. They have no value to provide. The only reason you can even come up with this scenario is because we've so far lived in a world where the incapable have been subsidised to the point of actually being able to participate in a market economy.

Trading relationships can only occur between rational, thinking people. A relationship between a thinker and a "feeler" can only take one of two forms: forcing or begging. Neither is going to be initiated by the side that has 100% of the value.

So ultimately two objectivists can't disagree. With any momentary disagreements they will check their premises and go through their philosophical arguments to look for any consistencies so they ultimately come to the one true answer.
Yes, though sometimes some experimentation is necessary to increase the stock of knowledge, or to update our premises, if you want. If we had grown up in outer space and you argued an apple would fall down and I argue it would fall up, neither of us has access to the sort of facts which would have to be added to a rational thought process in order to arrive at the right answer.

So we might fly to some planet and try it out. Then we both learn something and can operate from there.

I don't see how this is so. Lets say that two objectivists are arguing over intellectual property rights. Objectivist A says that his work can be copyrighted and thus the Objectivist B owes him royalties when B copied his work. B says that information can't be commodified. They check their premises and low and behold they have different premises. A believes private property is put in place so that people receive all or at least most of the fruits of their labor. B thinks private property was put into place because many goods are rivalrous. Any good that is nonrivalrous can not be property.
I'd rather not turn this into a discussion on IP rights, suffice to say that I'm not sure either is being consistent in their arguments following from their premises, and that IP protection in an objectivist world would be through trade secrets and contract clauses.

Secondly, if B is an objectivist, he wouldn't reject A's premise. In fact, neither would think that private property is something to be put in place, both would argue that private property logically follows from the nature of human life.

So really you have an argument between A, who is an objectivist in the sense that he or she has completed the line of thought from start to finish, and B, who hasn't. Which is not to say that B isn't a rational human being, he or she just holds some contradictory opinions - and that is something that the two can sort out in an open discussion.

I'm not saying its your job. I'm saying it could be someone's entertainment
That would be a pretty fucked up person, so he might find himself kicked out of an objectivist economy fairly soon (as in, no one wants anything to do with him).

This might be the time to mention another part of the philosophy: that there is no such thing as mindless pleasure. You can experience plain physical pleasure and nothing else, but it won't last very long, you'll get used to it and it doesn't offer any sort of fulfillment.

So real pleasure requires some valuation of your mind, according to your highest standard possible: your life. You don't love someone because he or she is hot, you love them because they represent the things you value the most and by trading your love with them, you are adding an achievement of your own to your list - and that's where the pleasure comes from.

So can you build a reason for why a rational person should get enjoyment out of murdering others when there is nothing else to be gained? Murdering or destroying anything, for that matter?

They are bothersome. Have you ever been asked for change by the homeless? They offend the eye, the nose and the ear.
Not every homeless person is an irrational person. In Atlas Shrugged there is a homeless bum who is one of the good guys (and the hero invites him into her rail car to have dinner with her), so objectivism obviously provides for the possibility of hard luck setting you back.

It's just that if you value your life, and a rational human has to, you won't let it keep you down.

So simply the fact that someone offends the eye, nose or ear is hardly enough to hurt them. That's one problem with the first quote of yours. The rest is that basically he doesn't make an argument for whether it would be wrong to disintegrate the bum, he just trusts that people will conclude that themselves, no argument necessary. I for one, am not so sure that someone who chooses not to live but only to exist as a drain on other's ability to do so, and gets in my way really deserves not to be disintegrated at that point in time. If I was in the business of handing out favours, I might even be giving him one.

The second is even less of an argument. I'm not sure it is one at all. The only thing that looks like a rejection of Rand's writing is "all the major scientists disagree with her" - but the point of objectivism is precisely that this is irrelevant. Reality is objective, not subject to a majority vote. Not even if that majority holds science degrees. Oh, and I disagree with the word "few". She's pretty explicit that everyone has the capability of doing so (severely mentally disabled people excepted, perhaps). John Galt didn't make a speech before the entire world to tell them they're all useless.

This debate is over. I've seen it go this way a dozen times before, and it never ends well.
You have made a conscious effort to misinterpret, misunderstand and ignore what I've been saying.

Look, the presumption of doing these debate threads on NSG is that people test their ideas by attempting to convince others of them. That implies a certain honesty on the part of both parties to give real consideration to what is being said, think about it and engage it in a meaningful way. Objectivism appeals to me, because I am beginning to actually properly understand it. It didn't require any leaps of faith or any assumptions beyond those I can observe in myself, unlike any complete system of morality or philosophy I have encountered and because it doesn't just avoid the question, like any sort of relativistic or society-based approach. I am putting this fact out there to see how well it stands up to the scrutiny of people that are critical of it.

So far, I get pretty much nothing from most people, with one or two exceptions. You haven't exactly been helpful.

You have made a conscious effort to misinterpret, misunderstand and ignore what I've been saying.

Say's the one who took my statements on what were the actual resource costs of living to indicate acceptance of cannibalism. Are you actually, honestly, looking at what I'm saying and interpreting them as they are? Can you look me in the metaphorical eye and honestly say that you are? That you're not projecting some kind of alternate meaning on my words?

Because there is no reason to engage with irrational people. They have no value to provide. The only reason you can even come up with this scenario is because we've so far lived in a world where the incapable have been subsidised to the point of actually being able to participate in a market economy.

You engage with lots of people you have no reason to engage with because you aren't retreating from civilization.

Trading relationships can only occur between rational, thinking people. A relationship between a thinker and a "feeler" can only take one of two forms: forcing or begging. Neither is going to be initiated by the side that has 100% of the value.

So basically you're disagreeing with what I said nonobjectivists are irrational. How is someone who disagrees with objectivism, checks their philosophical system, premises and all, and finds no contradiction being irrational. How can one choose between self consistent a priori systems?

Yes, though sometimes some experimentation is necessary to increase the stock of knowledge, or to update our premises, if you want. If we had grown up in outer space and you argued an apple would fall down and I argue it would fall up, neither of us has access to the sort of facts which would have to be added to a rational thought process in order to arrive at the right answer

So we might fly to some planet and try it out. Then we both learn something and can operate from there.

How can experimentation help an objectivist? If reality is objective and readily accessible through reason I don't see how empricism is as useful. What if empiricism contradicts a core premise?

I'd rather not turn this into a discussion on IP rights, suffice to say that I'm not sure either is being consistent in their arguments following from their premises, and that IP protection in an objectivist world would be through trade secrets and contract clauses.

I was using IP rights as a possible point of friction between objectivists.

Secondly, if B is an objectivist, he wouldn't reject A's premise. In fact, neither would think that private property is something to be put in place, both would argue that private property logically follows from the nature of human life.

So really you have an argument between A, who is an objectivist in the sense that he or she has completed the line of thought from start to finish, and B, who hasn't. Which is not to say that B isn't a rational human being, he or she just holds some contradictory opinions - and that is something that the two can sort out in an open discussion.

You said that in an objectivist world IP would take place by a combination of trade secrets so obviously B, who said that ideas couldn't be automatically copyrighted or patented, was in the right. Perhaps I should have put it that B agreed with A but only for rivalrous goods. If A makes a spear to hunt animals he is not hurt when B also makes to a spear hunt animals

That would be a pretty fucked up person, so he might find himself kicked out of an objectivist economy fairly soon (as in, no one wants anything to do with him).

This might be the time to mention another part of the philosophy: that there is no such thing as mindless pleasure. You can experience plain physical pleasure and nothing else, but it won't last very long, you'll get used to it and it doesn't offer any sort of fulfillment.

So real pleasure requires some valuation of your mind, according to your highest standard possible: your life. You don't love someone because he or she is hot, you love them because they represent the things you value the most and by trading your love with them, you are adding an achievement of your own to your list - and that's where the pleasure comes from.

So can you build a reason for why a rational person should get enjoyment out of murdering others when there is nothing else to be gained? Murdering or destroying anything, for that matter?

You are saying he doesn't gain anything out of it. I'm saying he does. He gets the pleasure of destroying the opposite of what he values just like he does from killing rats, cockroaches, and mosquitoes. By destroying this "anti-life" he is reaffirming his own life and values.


Not every homeless person is an irrational person. In Atlas Shrugged there is a homeless bum who is one of the good guys (and the hero invites him into her rail car to have dinner with her), so objectivism obviously provides for the possibility of hard luck setting you back.

It's just that if you value your life, and a rational human has to, you won't let it keep you down.

I thought you didn't believe in luck. If the good guy was homeless it must have been through his own negligence that led to his homeless seeing as everyone else was able to escape this.

In any case I meant the homeless who are homeless because they are lazy or crazy.

So simply the fact that someone offends the eye, nose or ear is hardly enough to hurt them. That's one problem with the first quote of yours. The rest is that basically he doesn't make an argument for whether it would be wrong to disintegrate the bum, he just trusts that people will conclude that themselves, no argument necessary. I for one, am not so sure that someone who chooses not to live but only to exist as a drain on other's ability to do so, and gets in my way really deserves not to be disintegrated at that point in time. If I was in the business of handing out favours, I might even be giving him one.

Huemer's argument is that egoism is not compatible individual rights and the idea that individuals are ends in themselves. For his full argument go here. (http://home.sprynet.com/~owl1/rand.htm#5.3.3)

The second is even less of an argument. I'm not sure it is one at all. The only thing that looks like a rejection of Rand's writing is "all the major scientists disagree with her" - but the point of objectivism is precisely that this is irrelevant. Reality is objective, not subject to a majority vote. Not even if that majority holds science degrees. Oh, and I disagree with the word "few". She's pretty explicit that everyone has the capability of doing so (severely mentally disabled people excepted, perhaps). John Galt didn't make a speech before the entire world to tell them they're all useless.

Brin's argument is that objective reality is not readily accessible from reason and logic alone. Basically scientists and inventors of technology use empriricism to see what objective reality is, not rationalism, with good results.

Brin said Rand said objective reality was readily accessible to individuals, but since few people are objectivists, and none were before Rand, obviously few people take advantage of it.

Mainly by people being unhappy and dying if they're violated.

Sorry, was that sarcasm?

You engage with lots of people you have no reason to engage with because you aren't retreating from civilization.
What definition of civilisation are we using here?

So basically you're disagreeing with what I said nonobjectivists are irrational. How is someone who disagrees with objectivism, checks their philosophical system, premises and all, and finds no contradiction being irrational. How can one choose between self consistent a priori systems?
Because they also have to be related to the real world. That's the biggest contradiction of all: if your system doesn't cover or denies the need for people to work and achieve in order to survive and be happy, it contradicts what you know about the world.

How can experimentation help an objectivist? If reality is objective and readily accessible through reason I don't see how empricism is as useful. What if empiricism contradicts a core premise?
Reason doesn't operate in a vaccuum. It's just the ability to understand, categorise, relate, combine and just generally perceive yourself and reality. Reason is a method, it requires inputs to produce outputs. You're not going to arrive at the conclusion that apples exist if you never seen, heard of or been given reason to suspect an apple existing.

You said that in an objectivist world IP would take place by a combination of trade secrets so obviously B, who said that ideas couldn't be automatically copyrighted or patented, was in the right. Perhaps I should have put it that B agreed with A but only for rivalrous goods. If A makes a spear to hunt animals he is not hurt when B also makes to a spear hunt animals
I guess it's time for another quote:
When you work in a modern factory, you are paid, not only for your labour, but for all the productive genius which has made that factory possible: for the work of the industrialist who built it, for the work of the investor who saved the money to risk on the untried and the new, for the work of the engineer who designed the machines of which you are pushing the levers, for the inventor who created the product which you spend your time making, for the work of the scientist who discovered the laws that went into the making of that product, for the philosopher who taught men how to think and whom you spend your time denouncing.

The machine, the frozen form of living intelligence, is the power that expands your life by raising the productivity of your time. If you worked as a blacksmith in the mystics' middle ages, the whole of your earning capacity would consist of an iron bar produced by your hands in days and days of effort. How many tons of rail do you produce per day if you work for Hank Rearden? Would you dare to claim that the size of your paycheck was created solely by your physical labour and that those rails were produced by your muscles? The standard of living of that blacksmith is all your muscles are worth; the rest is a gift from Hank Rearden.

Every man is free to rise as far as he's able or willing, but it's only the degree to which he thinks that determines the degree to which he'll rise. Physical labour as such can extend no further than the range of the moment. The man who does no more than physical labour consumes the material value-equivalent of his own contribution to the process of production and leaves no further value, neither for himself nor for others. But the man who produces an idea in any field of rational endeavour - the man who discovers new knowledge - is the permanent benefactor of humanity. Material products can't be shared, they belong to some ultimate consumer; it's only the value of an idea that can be shared with unlimited numbers of men, making all sharers richer at no one's sacrifice or loss, raising the productive capacity of whatever labour they perform. It is the value of his own time that the strong of the intellect transfers to the weak, letting them work on the jobs he discovered, while devoting his time to further discoveries. This is mutual trade to mutual advantage; the interests of the mind are one, no matter what the degree of intelligence, among those men who desire to work and don't seek or expect the unearned.

In proportion to the material energy he spent, the man who creates a new invention receives but a small percentage of his value in terms of material payment, no matter what fortune he makes, no matter what millions he earns. But the man who works as a janitor in the factory producing that invention receives an enormous payment in proportion to the mental effort his job requires of him. And the same is true of all men between, on all levels of ambition and ability. The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains. Such is the "competition" between the strong and the weak of the intellect. Such is the pattern of "exploitation" for which you have damned the strong.

So there we go, that's the little pep-talk on intellectual property. It belongs to the person who produces it, you pay for it, you get more than he ever could. Stealing an idea is just as wrong as stealing any other product of the mind, but if you can replicate it, go ahead - it just points that you also have enormous ability (ie no patents or copyrights). Question is why you wouldn't use that ability to think of something yourself, which would surely be a greater achievement (and pay better in money terms).

By destroying this "anti-life" he is reaffirming his own life and values.
And precisely that is what isn't possible. You don't reaffirm anything by destroying anything. You create in honour of your life and values. Whiping out zeros doesn't add anything to anything.

I thought you didn't believe in luck. If the good guy was homeless it must have been through his own negligence that led to his homeless seeing as everyone else was able to escape this.
If someone stays homeless, yes. But someone can become homeless because bad random events happen.

When I say "I don't believe in luck" I say that I see no reason for the expected value for the probability of any random event deviating from the mean for any person. No one's luck is skewed, no one has an inherently better chance at gaining something if both go to the same effort.

In the book, the reason was that the company he worked for went bankrupt when the heirs of its creator took over and turned it into a Soviet. The link in my signature is part of his recounting those events.

In any case I meant the homeless who are homeless because they are lazy or crazy.
You would have to find that out by talking to them and getting to know them. And if it then turns out, go ahead.

Right at the end of the book, Dagny shoots a guard who had dropped his weapon and his keys because he stood in front of the door and didn't want to decide whether to believe her saying she was approved to go inside or his orders not to let anyone inside. She counts to five, he says "who am I to decide?", she shoots him without remorse or hesitation.

Huemer's argument is that egoism is not compatible individual rights and the idea that individuals are ends in themselves. For his full argument go here. (http://home.sprynet.com/~owl1/rand.htm#5.3.3)
See, now there is something worthwhile for me to think about.

A few thoughts at the moment:
- Re. 5.3.3: Saying "what if stealing something makes me happy" is like saying "what if gravity worked the other way". It's making up things that are factually untrue for the sake of opposing an argument based on facts.
- Re. 5.3.4: I've got pretty much nothing. Xenophobialand called me a "political solipsist" the other day...now there is a task: reconciling that with objectivism. :D
- Re. 5.3.5: I don't see the issue. A conflict of interest arises in the short term and is settled by reality (that is, the choice of the customer). In the long term, if this is a repeat performance, the other store keeper is clearly better at his job than I could be. And just like Stockton in Galt's Gulch said Hank Rearden would bankrupt him and he'd gladly take a job with him after that has happened, so the only conflict here is if you were actually jealous of another's skill and achievement, which an objectivist wouldn't be.
- Re. 5.3.6: "Happiness" is an absolute goal. It is the same for everyone. Everyone can strive for happiness in a different way. My happiness and your happiness are not different things, so there is no infinite number of absolute goals. There is just one absolute goal and an infinite way to get there.

Brin's argument is that objective reality is not readily accessible from reason and logic alone. Basically scientists and inventors of technology use empriricism to see what objective reality is, not rationalism, with good results.
And neither me nor Rand would disagree. Or rather, we'd suggest that gathering empirical data is a step in the rationalist process. We can observe the apple falling all day, unless we get our brains in gear we can't conclude anything - especially if we wanted to ever apply the concept of gravity to improve our lives.

Brin said Rand said objective reality was readily accessible to individuals, but since few people are objectivists, and none were before Rand, obviously few people take advantage of it.
Meh, that's a bit of a non-argument. If it were true, it wouldn't tell us anything about whether or not objectivism is true or not.

And Rand reckoned Aristotle was a long way towards objectivism already.

Sorry, was that sarcasm?
Nope. It's the direct result of rights, as derived in an objectivist thought process, being violated.

If human beings, in order to live, have self-esteem and be happy, require certain rights, then a violation of these rights deprives them of the possibility of living, gaining self-esteem and achieving happiness.

Objective rights doesn't mean they are physically inviolable, or that you can actually see or touch them. It means that they arise directly from the things that you can see and touch.

Nope. It's the direct result of rights, as derived in an objectivist thought process, being violated.

If human beings, in order to live, have self-esteem and be happy, require certain rights, then a violation of these rights deprives them of the possibility of living, gaining self-esteem and achieving happiness.

Objective rights doesn't mean they are physically inviolable, or that you can actually see or touch them. It means that they arise directly from the things that you can see and touch.

That's an utterly bizzare form of argument. There's a massive jump from "it makes you unhappy" to "therefore you must have a right to be protected from this"

That's an utterly bizzare form of argument. There's a massive jump from "it makes you unhappy" to "therefore you must have a right to be protected from this"
If you want to consider it such, fine. But keep in mind what the alternative is.

If you want to consider it such, fine. But keep in mind what the alternative is.

Rational thought?

Rational thought?
Lol, I like you.

No, the alternative is a code of morality that makes you unhappy. A code where it is moral to be unhappy and immoral to be happy. A code where your enjoyment of and on this world is considered evil, and whenever you're not miserable you're eaten by guilt.

Lol, I like you.

No, the alternative is a code of morality that makes you unhappy. A code where it is moral to be unhappy and immoral to be happy. A code where your enjoyment of and on this world is considered evil, and whenever you're not miserable you're eaten by guilt.

I'm not sure if there's not an option between the two where we can try and be happy and look out for eachother.

The thing is, it's a tough world and money and 'success' often achieve little. Ayn Rand promotes bitterness and selfishness in a world which has enough of both. Most people aren't satisfied and I think it's incredibly counter productive to assume we should be. Take what happiness you can, but be aware that if you're deep enough to be philosophically curious (and you are if you are interested in Ayn Rand) then you've unfortunately missed your chance at being fufilled by cribs-styled success of material possessions. I've earnt good money, got a house with a pool, I've been to parties with famous actors and none of that made me happy despite Ayn Rand's assurances that it would. It was cold comfort to me while people close to me died.

What has made me happy is my wife, my charity work and Woody Allen films.

That's a wife (most people get married), charity work (which is essentially as boring as any office job you care to name) and a couple of hopelessly pessimistic films. The devil isn't in the details, our very humanity is expressed through them. Ayn Rand is a guide for the disenfranchised and it's great to be pissed off with the world around you because it's flawed and it's mean and only by realising this can you be protected from it but the solution isn't to turn inward and think that you are the be all and end all. The solution is to turn outwards, make yourself vunerable and if you get hurt so be it, you'll come stronger in the end.

What gets you throught the darkest hours? It's not going to be a jaguar, it might be the thought that one day you'll have a jaguar, but it's not going to be a jaguar. I think when we hurt is when we are most open to our humanity and that's when we find comfort in poetry, in books, in ideas. But when we're up, that's our chance to be the most expressive of our humanity and that's when we've got to have faith that ultimately there's something bigger than our own concerns and only when we're comfortable with that idea can we truly have a shot at being happy. And only then can we be human beings we are comfortable as. Our heroes shouldn't be businessmen, they should be poets and musicians and protestors.

I've realised I've veered a little off course to say the least but what I'll say to your final thought about "eaten by guilt" - ignorance isn't bliss, it can't be. Not for thinking people - and you're a thinking person. Denying that we are guilty doesn't absolve our guilt. You don't have to be miserable, you don't need to be guilty, you just need to recognise your own shortcomings and become comfortable as somebody who isn't always in control, who doesn't always shape his own destiny but as somebody that can do - and will do - something positive even if it's just providing a lover or a confidant or a friend to one person. That's living.

What definition of civilisation are we using here?

As in you're choosing not to pull a John Galt and cutting off everyone else. Everyone else, their relations to each other, and the system of these relations as a whole is civilization.

Because they also have to be related to the real world. That's the biggest contradiction of all: if your system doesn't cover or denies the need for people to work and achieve in order to survive and be happy, it contradicts what you know about the world.

You haven't provided any evidence to back up your assertions. Why would my system deny the above? Why would the above, about people needing to work to survive and be happy, necessarily

I guess it's time for another quote:
When you work in a modern factory, you are paid, not only for your labour, but for all the productive genius which has made that factory possible: for the work of the industrialist who built it, for the work of the investor who saved the money to risk on the untried and the new, for the work of the engineer who designed the machines of which you are pushing the levers, for the inventor who created the product which you spend your time making, for the work of the scientist who discovered the laws that went into the making of that product, for the philosopher who taught men how to think and whom you spend your time denouncing.

The machine, the frozen form of living intelligence, is the power that expands your life by raising the productivity of your time. If you worked as a blacksmith in the mystics' middle ages, the whole of your earning capacity would consist of an iron bar produced by your hands in days and days of effort. How many tons of rail do you produce per day if you work for Hank Rearden? Would you dare to claim that the size of your paycheck was created solely by your physical labour and that those rails were produced by your muscles? The standard of living of that blacksmith is all your muscles are worth; the rest is a gift from Hank Rearden.

Every man is free to rise as far as he's able or willing, but it's only the degree to which he thinks that determines the degree to which he'll rise. Physical labour as such can extend no further than the range of the moment. The man who does no more than physical labour consumes the material value-equivalent of his own contribution to the process of production and leaves no further value, neither for himself nor for others. But the man who produces an idea in any field of rational endeavour - the man who discovers new knowledge - is the permanent benefactor of humanity. Material products can't be shared, they belong to some ultimate consumer; it's only the value of an idea that can be shared with unlimited numbers of men, making all sharers richer at no one's sacrifice or loss, raising the productive capacity of whatever labour they perform. It is the value of his own time that the strong of the intellect transfers to the weak, letting them work on the jobs he discovered, while devoting his time to further discoveries. This is mutual trade to mutual advantage; the interests of the mind are one, no matter what the degree of intelligence, among those men who desire to work and don't seek or expect the unearned.

In proportion to the material energy he spent, the man who creates a new invention receives but a small percentage of his value in terms of material payment, no matter what fortune he makes, no matter what millions he earns. But the man who works as a janitor in the factory producing that invention receives an enormous payment in proportion to the mental effort his job requires of him. And the same is true of all men between, on all levels of ambition and ability. The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains. Such is the "competition" between the strong and the weak of the intellect. Such is the pattern of "exploitation" for which you have damned the strong.

So there we go, that's the little pep-talk on intellectual property. It belongs to the person who produces it, you pay for it, you get more than he ever could. Stealing an idea is just as wrong as stealing any other product of the mind, but if you can replicate it, go ahead - it just points that you also have enormous ability (ie no patents or copyrights). Question is why you wouldn't use that ability to think of something yourself, which would surely be a greater achievement (and pay better in money terms).

If the above is the case then Rand is guilty of stealing. I'm guessing she read other books, had conversations with others, hell she stole her ideas of a government run economy from the Soviets. All these products of the minds of others that she eventually took as inputs and her mind outputted(is this a word) as her novels

And precisely that is what isn't possible. You don't reaffirm anything by destroying anything. You create in honour of your life and values. Whiping out zeros doesn't add anything to anything.

Proof?


If someone stays homeless, yes. But someone can become homeless because bad random events happen.

Why would bad random events necessarily stop?



When I say "I don't believe in luck" I say that I see no reason for the expected value for the probability of any random event deviating from the mean for any person. No one's luck is skewed, no one has an inherently better chance at gaining something if both go to the same effort.

I never held the above to be true.. Yet I believe in luck because I believe in probablities not certainties, for many things.

In the book, the reason was that the company he worked for went bankrupt when the heirs of its creator took over and turned it into a Soviet. The link in my signature is part of his recounting those events.

And in the real world he could have been layed off for a number a reasons that have nothing to do with his person compentency, or lack thereof.

Right at the end of the book, Dagny shoots a guard who had dropped his weapon and his keys because he stood in front of the door and didn't want to decide whether to believe her saying she was approved to go inside or his orders not to let anyone inside. She counts to five, he says "who am I to decide?", she shoots him without remorse or hesitation.

How does this follow? You haven't provided enough of a context to see why this is quote is relevent.

- Re. 5.3.3: Saying "what if stealing something makes me happy" is like saying "what if gravity worked the other way". It's making up things that are factually untrue for the sake of opposing an argument based on facts.

So?

Meh, that's a bit of a non-argument. If it were true, it wouldn't tell us anything about whether or not objectivism is true or not.

I think he saw a contradiction between "readily accessible" and few who actually "access" it.

And Rand reckoned Aristotle was a long way towards objectivism already.

I'm guessing Aristotle would have considered Rand a failed Aristotlian. ;)

I will never give money to a food pantry. Taxes pay for food stamps and I pay too much in taxes already. There are so many needy charities for the environment and wildlife. Last time I checked homo sapiens is in no danger of becoming endangered but lots of other species are so why should we help people?

Said it once and will say it again. Most Libertarians are the self-serving assholes in zombie films that'll hang the other survivors out to dry if it gives them safety and comfort to do so.
Damn straight.

As in you're choosing not to pull a John Galt and cutting off everyone else. Everyone else, their relations to each other, and the system of these relations as a whole is civilization.
Yeah, but physically my interactions are not with a civilisation, but with people. I can choose only to interact with rational, producing people (in fact, I would, because anyone else wouldn't have anything to trade).

Furthermore, those who don't produce don't contribute anything to society. They don't have any meaningful value to offer, so they don't get to trade with those who do. They're left standing in the rain.

Right now they get to take part because of force of arms. Without a government that would do that for them, they might still try that with each other in a sort of parallel society, but that'd collapse fairly soon.

You haven't provided any evidence to back up your assertions. Why would my system deny the above? Why would the above, about people needing to work to survive and be happy, necessarily [be true?]
Because that's human nature. People who don't work starve, unless they survive off the work of others. And people who don't achieve anything aren't happy. I don't think you can seriously debate against that.

So two rational people would observe it, and extrapolate a morality and a set of rights that arises from these facts, with the goal of making happiness possible for themselves and any others who choose to follow it. Since they necessarily have the same starting point, two rational people who don't make mistakes in their thinking would have to come up with the same solution.

If the above is the case then Rand is guilty of stealing. I'm guessing she read other books, had conversations with others, hell she stole her ideas of a government run economy from the Soviets. All these products of the minds of others that she eventually took as inputs and her mind outputted(is this a word) as her novels
But other authors put their works out there for others to read and to influence their thinking. That's their achievement. A novel isn't a trade secret.

And describing what happened in the USSR is hardly violating their trademarks.

Proof?
You create by shaping your material environment such that it benefits you more. But humans aren't part of the material environment, they're humans. We already said that since humans have volitional consciousness and can choose to start thinking at any time, actively whiping out non-thinkers is going to produce mistakes.

People lose their right to live in the moment that material reality presents them with starvation and they still choose not to do anything about it. Before that moment, others just don't have an obligation to help them (and that goes for rational and non-rational people alike). I can respect the property right of a being of volitional consciousness which right now is not using its brain - it's just that without thought it won't have much property to own.

Why would bad random events necessarily stop?
They wouldn't. It's just that when they do, your work starts cancelling them out.

How does this follow? You haven't provided enough of a context to see why this is quote is relevent.
It's just an example of the right to life of someone who chooses not to think in the face of death. In this case Dagny with the gun poses the question, and all he has to do to avoid being shot is to decide.

So?
So it's not a valid way of attacking a "philosophy for living on earth".

I think he saw a contradiction between "readily accessible" and few who actually "access" it.
I think Peikoff wrote an objectivist look at history, and Rand mentions it a few times as well.

It's basically that mystics of the spirit and mystics of the muscle (meaning basically religious nuts and socialist nuts) hijacked governments and the minds of those who were ruled, and because it was useful to them, they denied the possibility to arrive at truth through rational thought. That way their subjects wouldn't become bothersome.

Those who disagreed were left with two options: do a John Galt and live as simple manual labourers all their lives despite their potential to be much, much more, or try and change the world and be killed for it.

I'm not sure if there's not an option between the two where we can try and be happy and look out for eachother.
An option between me not having an obligation to help others against my will, and me having that obligation?

My happiness is the only real goal I can have. I can reach it in many ways, but any goal contrary to that would be ridiculous.

I'm not against helping others, I do it all the time. When people ask me nicely, when I sympathise with their plight, when I can get something out of it. It's when people translate that into me being the sucker with a duty to help that I get just a little bit worried. Because if I have a duty to work for the ends of others with no compensation except not being hurt by others, then that pretty much fits the definition of slavery to a 't'.

Ayn Rand is a guide for the disenfranchised and it's great to be pissed off with the world around you because it's flawed and it's mean and only by realising this can you be protected from it but the solution isn't to turn inward and think that you are the be all and end all. The solution is to turn outwards, make yourself vunerable and if you get hurt so be it, you'll come stronger in the end.
How can I come out stronger? This isn't like some childhood disease, where I shrug it off and am immune afterwards. This is people who want to suck my capacity for success out of me because they just can't be bothered to do it themselves. I give in once, I have two of them at my door the next time around. I don't want to be averaged out!

What gets you throught the darkest hours? It's not going to be a jaguar, it might be the thought that one day you'll have a jaguar, but it's not going to be a jaguar.
I know it. Right now, it's the thought (not of a Jag, mind you, but of a Porsche ;)) that gets me through.

Once I have it, who knows what comes next? But I will know what it took to get that Porsche and its value will not be whatever dollars it cost, its value will be all the events of my life that led up to me being able to call it mine, and deservedly so. That's the thing: my stuff isn't just stuff. Because of that "my" in there it becomes so much more, and that is what people who don't think property rights exist or that welfare payments can solve anything just cannot understand.

Our heroes shouldn't be businessmen, they should be poets and musicians and protestors.
But businessmen enable poets, musicians and even protestors to exist. Poets express themselves in poetry, musicians in music, protestors in angry signs and yelling obscenities. Businessmen express themselves in the products they create and allow us to buy, and as far as I am concerned that makes them just as heroic as any of those other guys, if not more.

I've realised I've veered a little off course to say the least but what I'll say to your final thought about "eaten by guilt" - ignorance isn't bliss, it can't be. Not for thinking people - and you're a thinking person.
Guilt has become a weapon for people who hate me for my skills, my achievements and the fact that I'm not resigning to "contentment". I feel guilty for lots of things I do, but being guilty implies that I did something wrong: I never did anything to any of those starving kids in Africa. I never even had the capacity to do anything to them. How can I have been evil if there never was a choice involved?

Here's a guilty (;)) little secret of mine: Once I made it and I've got my collection of sports cars and my mansion at some Italian lake, I'll most likely stop working and use my resources and capacities to help people in the Third World. Not by donating, not by "social programs", but by going to these villages, picking people who seem willing and able and sponsoring their rise to greatness. That in turn will help those around them.

And I won't be doing it because I have a duty to them, but because I will enjoy it. And there's nothing wrong with that.

...you just need to recognise your own shortcomings and become comfortable as somebody who isn't always in control, who doesn't always shape his own destiny but as somebody that can do - and will do - something positive even if it's just providing a lover or a confidant or a friend to one person. That's living.
Maybe one day I'll be that disillusioned, but I can't resign myself to that just yet. Saying that I am no longer in control, that I lack the capacity to create the life I want, is to give up on everything I am. I am so sick of all these people, who clog up the streets with their SUVs getting their kids to some suburban school, who sit in shopping centres all day spending their petty incomes on meaningless crap without knowing why they're doing it, who watch Current Affairs TV to try and feel anything, even if it's just anger about immigrants. I can't become them.

Call it what you want, but I'm not a teenager any more. I know that academically, mentally and as far as motivation is concerned, I can do it. The only thing that could hold me back is myself - and the last thing I need is to allow the weakness of doubt and resignation in there.

Yeah, but physically my interactions are not with a civilisation, but with people. I can choose only to interact with rational, producing people (in fact, I would, because anyone else wouldn't have anything to trade).

You have to interact with people you don't choose to ineract with. I'm guessing you have or will have to interact with government officials.

Furthermore, those who don't produce don't contribute anything to society. They don't have any meaningful value to offer, so they don't get to trade with those who do. They're left standing in the rain.

I thought you didn't believe in society. In any case nonproducers like children, the infirm, and the lazy/crazy homelesss are usually not left to die.

Because that's human nature. People who don't work starve, unless they survive off the work of others. And people who don't achieve anything aren't happy. I don't think you can seriously debate against that.

So two rational people would observe it, and extrapolate a morality and a set of rights that arises from these facts, with the goal of making happiness possible for themselves and any others who choose to follow it. Since they necessarily have the same starting point, two rational people who don't make mistakes in their thinking would have to come up with the same solution.

First, in deriving morality from human nature one committs the naturalistic fallacy. Second, you're not describing human nature. You're desribing the situation humans are in, incompletely at that. Human nature includes repirical altruism and even egalitarian tedencies: Homo Reciprocans (http://bostonreview.net/BR23.6/bowles.html). Of course this is set against the tribalism that resides in human nature: Tribalism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribalism#Tribalism_and_evolution)


But other authors put their works out there for others to read and to influence their thinking. That's their achievement. A novel isn't a trade secret.

And describing what happened in the USSR is hardly violating their trademarks.

I guess I mistook "stealing ideas" for "stealing ideas" instead of "stealing trade secrets".

You create by shaping your material environment such that it benefits you more. But humans aren't part of the material environment, they're humans. We already said that since humans have volitional consciousness and can choose to start thinking at any time, actively whiping out non-thinkers is going to produce mistakes.

Humans are part of reality. Reality is the material environment. If human aren't part oth the material environment you are either saying that humans don't exist or some form of material/nonmaterial dualism exists. Since humans are part of the environment one is perfectly able, ethically, to mold them

People lose their right to live in the moment that material reality presents them with starvation and they still choose not to do anything about it. Before that moment, others just don't have an obligation to help them (and that goes for rational and non-rational people alike). I can respect the property right of a being of volitional consciousness which right now is not using its brain - it's just that without thought it won't have much property to own.

Since you haven't shown the intrinsic right of the invidual I don't see why an egoist would aknowledge them when its not in their interest.

So it's not a valid way of attacking a "philosophy for living on earth".

I don't see why not. Its using fiction to elucidate one's philosophical argument, like Rand did with her novels.

I think Peikoff wrote an objectivist look at history, and Rand mentions it a few times as well.

It's basically that mystics of the spirit and mystics of the muscle (meaning basically religious nuts and socialist nuts) hijacked governments and the minds of those who were ruled, and because it was useful to them, they denied the possibility to arrive at truth through rational thought. That way their subjects wouldn't become bothersome.

Those who disagreed were left with two options: do a John Galt and live as simple manual labourers all their lives despite their potential to be much, much more, or try and change the world and be killed for it.

Its ironic how religious nuts and socialist nuts would say the same thing about an objectivists society, those objectivist nuts, and be in the same basic situation.

Here's a guilty (;)) little secret of mine: Once I made it and I've got my collection of sports cars and my mansion at some Italian lake, I'll most likely stop working and use my resources and capacities to help people in the Third World. Not by donating, not by "social programs", but by going to these villages, picking people who seem willing and able and sponsoring their rise to greatness. That in turn will help those around them.

And I won't be doing it because I have a duty to them, but because I will enjoy it. And there's nothing wrong with that.

You sound like an altruist by nature. Cheers.