The core libertarian principle explained

I'm using the term 'libertarian' in its specifically political sense, not the (indeterminist) free-will sense, as per the following image:

The basic libertarian principle is often phrased in terms of 'self-ownership' - the principle that one is the rightful owner and therefore has exclusive rights of disposal or control over one's own physical person (body-mind; faculties; abilities; energies; time; life-activities) - and, by further reasoning, exclusive rights of disposal or control over the productive fruits of applying one's personal resources in action (property rights, including the right to start and own/control a business of one's own, or pool capital with others, whatever one freely chooses).

Now, in the header I put the word "explained", and in so doing I'm both giving an essential description of the core libertarian principle as well as a why-account, as in why do people possess an exclusive right of 'self-ownership' and classic, essentially Lockean property rights.

The core libertarian 'self-ownership' principle reformulated is provided in the image above: one person's life is not another's (or others', as in a majority/mob) to dispose of.

I take the libertarian principle to be some kind of undeniable moral truism although its precise specification is a matter of controversy.  Is it consistent with any form of welfare or subsistence rights that Rand explicitly denies?  (And for reasons I will get into shortly I regard Rand as preeminent exponent of the libertarian idea.)  If it is undeniable, then it means that whatever other ethical/moral principles we can all reasonably agree upon after due deliberation, they all must occur within the constraints of libertarian 'self-ownership'.

Now, as to the reformulated wording.  The most directly comparable formulation of "one person's life is not another's to dispose of" or "my life is not yours to dispose of" in the literature is Prof. Hospers' "other men's lives are not yours to dispose of," in his early-1970s article, "What Libertarianism Is."  But it's a safe bet that his primary influence in this regard was his series of conversations and correspondence with Ayn Rand in the early '60s.  And the evidence that it originated with Rand is a passage in Atlas Shrugged (1957) where the hero, John Galt, asks the Head of State (heh heh) Mr. Thompson (heh heh), what he has to offer him, and the panicked (heh heh) and account-overdawn (heh heh) Mr. Thompson says, "I'm offering you your life" or words to that effect, and Galt replies, "It's not yours to offer, Mr. Thompson."  (Of course, anyone who has followed these things knows, Hospers, a widely respected figure in his profession, is recognized in particular for his expertise in aesthetic theory, and he's a big fan of Atlas Shrugged.)

Now, the core libertarian self-plus-property ownership principle is often taken by many scholars and interpreters to imply a rejection of any extensive measures of taxation and governance (a really big, powerful armed forces might be required for a period of time to defeat a mortal foreign enemy?), and especially measures that take property/income/wealth from one citizen and give it to another, or, what's usually called redistributive taxation/spending.  (Self-styled anarchist libertarians or 'anarcho-capitalists' say that you don't need any form of government/taxation to have a stable rule of (libertarian) law, national defense, or other 'public goods' functions usually attributed to a 'minimal state' framework.)

Now, the basic libertarian 'self-ownership' is, I believe, best formulated by Rand and (subsequently) Hospers, but Rand gives an explanatory why-account that Hospers doesn't in his article, although the intuitive appeal of the principle is there aplenty even in his telling.  But it's Rand who really gets to the meat of the why-account, which is the whole theoretical & thematic core of Atlas Shrugged and her entire philosophy: the role of the mind in man's (human) existence and all this entails.

Rand boils down the basic principle in dramatic fashion in the Galt-Thompson scene as much as she does throughout pretty much the whole novel.  The basic opposition comes down to this: Is John Galt's mind properly at Mr. Thompson's disposal rather than (exclusively) his own?  By "mind" Rand means a specifically human, conceptual or intellectual faculty which depends on the volitional  (thereby requiring free or uninhibited thought/action) act of focus, and the ultimate measure of the service to one's life, i.e., ethical or moral perfection, is the degree of one's focusing one's mind as opposed to evading or being otherwise frustrated or negated from within or without (by other actors).  
Put another way: A human is, by nature, a volitional/free conceptual-intellectual being who must make judgments about how to act, and this requires a focused process of thinking and this requires an effort (the basic phenomenon that involves active, free, volitional movement as opposed to a relatively or fully passive or restive state), and it means that one must be able to duly consider the reasons for taking a course of action.  So is it Galt's life to determine by how own free judgment how it is disposed of, or does it belong in part or full to Mr. Thompson/the State?  It's an irreconcilable opposition of basic principles.  Miss Rand is often bashed for putting things like this in such starkly "unrealistically black-and-white" terms, but I don't see any way around it.  It's the basic crux of Nozick's rejection of Rawls' theory (and arguably on grounds Rawls concedes as true when he defends the seperateness of persons against utilitarian appropriation-of-persons-for-collective-benefits).

But the fundamentality or primacy or basic-principle-ness of Rand's role-of-the-mind theme is the why of the libertarian principle.  To state again: the human mind (intellect) must operate freely to act/be what it is, and to be appropriated from outside against the action-directives issued by the exercise of its own free judgments weighing the for/against reasons (etc etc?) is to be treated as a mere instrument or means which falls afoul not just of the libertarian principle as presented here but also a 'Kantian' principle widely considered eminently plausible (the Randian version being stated as: "man is an end in himself and not a means to the ends of others" - which I take to be another alterative formulation of the libertarian principle).

So if Mr. Thompson is to get Galt to willingly cooperate, bother to put forth the effort to act (causally enact an effect, which in human terms is means-ends reasoning), he needs to be shown a reason to do so, and not the muzzle of a gun.  (Oh no, that unbearably black-and-white illustration of the principle, stated for the umpteenth time already in the novel (heh heh - if only the Rand-bashers would just fucking listen for a change, man, they might learn something; Rand's got information, man; not-exactly new shit has come to light (these past 63 years and counting ffs etc. for the umpteenth time)).)

What exactly is a reason for engaging in the effort of an action?  Well, there's a vast literature on that but a lot of it has to do with reconciling the "rational" and the "reasonable," or put another way, between appeals to one's personal preference- or value-set, a so-called egoistic reason-giving or justification for action on the one hand, and what, in arriving at the best principles for governing interpersonal behaviors meet the highest standards of fairness?  (Much of the influence of John Rawls in recent moral-political theory has to do with his understanding of political justice in terms of fairness or what I'm here calling reasonabless.  The idea I'm advancing/advocating here is that the libertarian principle must be able to - and does - satisfy standards of fairness, principles all communicating-in-moral-terms actors can freely and cooperatively agree upon.  Rawls brings in the concept of overlapping consensus to help describe/explain this ideal deliberative-communicative framework.)  The reasonableness-standpoint also suggests something or other about taking a stance of impartiality so that the perspective of all moral deliberators-actors are respected (taken into account).  (Political jab: this is why I loathe today's leftists who constantly caricature their opponents.)  Some sort of principle of human-equality is operative throughout all this ideal, something about equal consideration of all perspectives which means techniques of free, rational, logical persuasion and dialectic.  (Rawls' famous Original Position is a thought-experimenty device for taking the impartial standpoint so that particular circumstances don't affect one's judgments of fairness.)

So, Galt and Rand are saying - or might or ought to say - perhaps not to a slimeball like Mr. Thompson but rather to even an honest interlocutor whom I take Rawls and Nagel (whose 'altruism' or other-person-directed motivation comes from taking an impartial stance) to be, something like the following: "Look, give it your best shot at convincing me to take your so-called impartial stance but it's going to me my own free judgment and not yours that decides, okay?  This constrains you from applying your difference principle and all that stuff in anything other than a voluntary sense, i.e., even then it's not the role of the political to employ physical force in any capacity other than protection from the initiation of force (the introduction of force into human relationships)."

Rand has a lot of very negative things to say about the initiation of physical force.  "Force and mind are opposites" as she would say aplenty.  Then there's the translation of "armed might (of, e.g., the electoral majority)" into "guns and physical force."  Rand ain't fucking around here when she brings up the gun thing, because that's what it comes down to, a tool to threaten you to do things contrary to your own judgment and substitute for that the judgment of others (over how to lead your own life, etc.).  If Rand gets nothing else about her political principles across, it's that all human relationships should be premised on rational persuasion.

Now, there's the introduction of force, and there's the use of force in self-defense in the event that its use is initiated.  So that gives us some idea of when the use of force is ever appropriate.  If one is ever to use force, one should be able to give a damn good reason for doing so.  In the case of self-defense, a life is at stake (we're taking the case of defense against attempted murder here).  Or, we can speak of a portion of one's life (which is one's own to exclusively dispose of, etc.) being defended against less deadly forms of violent assault.  Now, there's also the matter of what are usually termed 'emergency exceptions,' e.g., the shipwreck scenario and breaking into an absent owner's house to obtain food rather than starve - provided compensation is paid to the owner, say.

Some philosophers - James P. Sterba comes to mind - have argued that a combination of reasonableness and libertarianism (or the moral principles that give libertarianism its appeal) leads to subsistence or welfare rights on roughly the 'emergency exception' grounds, although that can probably (surely?) be reformulated in the terms of reasonableness and fairness outlined above.  But there is reasonable disagreement over really (I mean, really, c'mon) how much leeway this gives the government/state to use forcible mechanisms to move resources around on a greater-needs basis.  (Keep in mind that the primary/basic/fundamental/essential productive resource is the human mind/intellect.)  For one thing there is a really large body of economic and political-philosophical literature that speaks of the wisdom of free markets in minimizing human want or suffering across a vast range of goods and services, in raising living standards wherever they're instituted, in making for the development of capital which leads to fewer out-of-resources scenarios, etc.  (Rand famously yet widely-misunderstoodly explains all this in terms of the darn-near-explosive power of the human mind unleashed especially as that has happened in the modern period from the scientific and political Enlightenment and onward, with (in her polemical mode) statist parasites trying to divert all the fruits of that progress to their big-government programs for little or no reason (sic) other than that "the resources are there for the taking [and Rawls tells us that we should go by maximin principles as a justice-as-fairness criterion, so the proper, non-libertarian role for government/force here is to maximally improve the lives of the least advantaged, and that requires about 50% of GDP be government/force-based.]")

(Note, BTW, the implausibility of the Warren/Obama argument that billionaires are created through massive state-created infrastructure - the famously caricatured but still relevant-point-making "You didn't build that" stuff.  So, how do they explain the existence of a billionaire like John D. Rockefeller or an industrialist on the level of a Henry Ford, prior to the rise of post-New Deal big government infrastructure?  Is it the idea that more government-provided infrastructure adds to the per-capta GDP growth rate?  I rather doubt that the data available at ourworldindata.org support such a thesis.  It actually shows a fairly consistent cross-era (pre- and post-New Deal) average growth rate - so doesn't that suggest that all that extra government is just a deadweight-loss superfluity in GDP growth rate terms, thereby recommending a return to a libertarian-ish default government size?

I guess one basic question here, though, is whether the libertarian is conceding as a matter of principle that in the event that misfortune should ever exhaust a person's resources, they have a government/taxpayer-provided safety net, which is in effect conceding that there are welfare or subsistence rights.  Do we get at least this concession on behalf of a "right to well-being" when Gewirth formulates his semi-famous principle of generic consistency (PCG) in terms of rights to freedom and well-being (inasmuch as he's formulating his 'dialectical' moral framework in rights-terms...).  Put differently: is this a principle that even a John Galt could rationally-and-reasonably concede in terms of the value-hierarchy he could rationally endorse, which necesarily includes taking an appropriate stance of impartiality?  What if he's in the shoes of the unfortunate who has exhausted all resource-avenues (somehow)?

I think I'll leave that as an open question for now.  While it is an interesting question whether the kind of subsistence-rights-claim I'm talking about can still be called libertarian in some sense, the more interesting question is whether it's the right position to take.  I happen to think it is, as long as it's properly qualified and constrained.  There is an emergency-exception kind of rationale on the one hand, and then there's the reality of government taxing and spending upwards of 40% of GDP in many advanced economies today on the other hand.  Is there some kind of slippery slope from an emergency-style safety net (what else is "safety net" supposed to connote? it's not supposed to mean a hammock, as many conservatives like to point out) to government taking up half a country's (it's citizens' lives) in GDP?

Okay, to wrap this up: There's a lot of reason to believe that the libertarian principle, widely adopted in all its implications and grounding principles, would be a route to optimal human problem-solving across a vast range of cases (particularly in regard to what I take to be its Randian grounding principles about the free exercise of the human intellect - which adopted/applied universally would meet by definition for an end of history, i.e., a universally or perhaps only near-universally adopted principles of a perfectionistic or 'Aristotelian' approach to human rationality or problem-solving.  I've found the tendency for the most accomplished libertarian theorists (the Aristotelians and Randians) to be barking up that tree quite a bit more than I've been seeing the other libertarians or the non-libertarians doing so.  Communicative rationality, justice-as-fairness, or even the basic libertarian principle itself describe roughly the "form" that human reasoning ought to take on ethical (more specifically, moral or universalistic) grounds - ideas that fall more or less into the Kantian tradition of theorizing.  But the Randian-Aristotelian ground of the libertarian principle is a principle of intellectual perfectionism that applies not only to thinking in terms of mutual deliberative rationality and that cluster of Kantian-ish theories (with reasonabless front and center), but at least as importantly to the issues about how to live one's life and fulfill one's wisely-formed goals, expressed in terms of rationality (preference-satisfaction) and well-being (objective flourishing/actualizing of potentials).  (This is often associated with 'Aristotelian,' teleological, eudaemonist or happiness-oriented, self-actualization (like in David L. Norton's magisterial if not monumental Personal Destinies), perfectionism (the Dougs Den Uyl & Rasmussen; Thomas Hurka), virtue-ethics (a huge field of authors such as Anscombe, Foot, Rand, Veatch, MacIntyre, John M. Cooper, Nussbaum, Annas, and basically a lot of the moral philosophy faculty at places like Arizona and UNC-Chapel Hill.) That is to say, the intellectual perfectionism applies to the content of one's ends over and above applying the proper form of reasoning.  The very interesting question from this point on, explored in places like Gewirth's Self-Fulfillment, is how mutually reinforcing these reasoning-stances are or might be.  We can have Kantian-ish constraints informing us about the reasonableness of ends to adopt as examined from the flourishing-angle - to both reasonably and rationally incorporate such contraints into one's (wisely-formed) preference-set, as it were.  And it seems to me that whatever else intellectual perfectionists ought to be, they ought to be libertarians who also recognize the problem-solving power of human intellect with all this entails.  (And it's hard to see how Rand doesn't earn high philosophical marks on this count, although I would like also to single out Gewirth - a good man, and thorough.)

Big Govt Refucklicans vs. cannabis common sense

[Details to come; I just wanted to get that post title and images in as soon as I could.  Republicans qua Refucklicans selectively entrust (all of a sudden) and empower an insultingly paternalistic and always-increasingly bloated government bureaucracy to generate supposedly desirable outcomes; all of a sudden they rush toward Wickard-style federal overreach; how's that been working out for them? Should be fun lol ^_^ ]

"The Blue States are legalizing it and they're always wrong about everything. Also it's a gateway drug to opioid overdose, or something." -Scumbag GOP

A pretty smart and common sense guy, probably while saganized

A middle finger to "woke" statists

For those who propose that the state "do something" at someone's expense.

Socialism vs. freedom, in a nutshell

In a nutshell?  Socialism in its original sense means the abolition of private property "in the means of production," to be replaced by some form or other of social control of "the means of production."  If you see the modification of the term at the supplied google search link - a necessary modification to reduce the perceived moral and economic ugliness of the idea - the meaning has mutated into "production, distribution and exchange [being] owned or regulated by the community as a whole."  In other words, if there is a considerable amount of regulation of an economy, then it (apparently) now falls within the range of socialist ideas, although I prefer the term "socialism-lite" so as to highlight the morally odious socialist elements of a broadly leftist/"progressive" vision of a just economy.

In her landmark essay, "What is Capitalism?", Rand presents a shortened, nonfiction version of much of the "Galt speech" in Atlas Shrugged.  The theme of Atlas Shrugged?  "The role of the mind in man's existence."  The strength of Rand's case for capitalism stands or falls with her arguments concerning the role of the mind in human existence -- in the case of capitalism, the role of the mind in the process of economic production.  It is this role that socialists of whatever stripe seem to have a very poor grasp on.  Evidence of this poor grasp is how socialists/leftists tend to react to Rand's writings themselves (i.e., quite cluelessly, resting content with caricatures or downright smears), but a wider body of evidence is available: how do socialists treat the subject of entrepreneurial creativity and vision?

Many of the richest people in capitalism-lite societies of today are visionary entrepreneurs, who create value-added using rare and hard-to-replace skills.  At the margins, these value-added skills are rewarded handsomely, which is how (in this age of advanced wealth accumulation) the top-net-worth individual[*] can surpass the next individual on the list to the tune of billions of dollars.  It is this combination of skills and the usual monetary incentives that explains how we now have four "tech" companies well within striking distance of $1 trillion market capitalization each.  (In the true spirit of Making America Great Again, we should be following the lessons from the successes of the MAGA giants, i.e., Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon.)

In the literature of the Austrian economists, entrepreneurship is front and center in explanation of market processes in constant 'disequilibrium' moving toward 'equilibrium' as, e.g., arbitrage opportunities are discovered and exploited.  (Israel Kirzner is one such economist who treated this subject in much detail, applying basic Misesian observations.)  Rand adds the dimension of creativity to the entrepreneurial process.  Creativity is a unique function of human consciousness: in essence it involves taking existing elements and generating some new or original combination of them.  (The following is a tentative characterization of creative action.)  Creativity happens in almost any human endeavor where abstract thought is involved; from there it is a matter of magnitude, and some humans have demonstrated greater aptitude in this process than others.

In other words, what Rand was getting at with Atlas and "What is Capitalism?" is: the primary means of human economic production is the human mind or intellect or reason.  All the other means of production in form of (the productive value of) land, labor, and capital are consequences of this primary.  (We're assuming, of course, a value-added situation beyond that of the primitive humans.)  It is this basic feature of human economic life that socialism of every variety fails to recognize or appreciate.  In consequence, what socialism involves is some measure or degree of control over the human mind.  As Rand put it, via Galt, "When you clamor for public ownership of the means of production, you are clamoring for public ownership of the mind."

As she put it elsewhere, "a free mind and a free market are corollaries."

(I like to play games in my head along the lines of "What's your all-time starting five" and not just when it comes to NBA basketball.  So, like, in the NBA a good lineup of candidates for the starting five would be Russell or Abdul-Jabbar at Center, Lebron James and Larry Bird at the Forward positions, and Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson at the Guard positions.  Now, what are good candidates for an all-time starting five in the realm of "intellectual defenders of the capitalist system."  They would include: Rand, Mises, Hayek, Nozick, Friedman.  Now, if we liken it to another sport, hockey or soccer, we would have a goalie, and I'd have Rand at goalie.  Every argument against capitalism you might come up with would have to get past Rand-the-goalie.  When you get to Rand -- assuming you somehow managed to get past the Mises-Hayek-Nozick lines of defense -- she'll have a response invariably along the lines of "Man is an end in himself."  Or: "Man has a right to exist for his own sake."  Or: "My life isn't yours to dispose of."  The rest is the anti-capitalist going through various rationalizations to either deny these statements or mutate them somehow into a defense of socialism(-lite) along these very same morally-undeniable lines.  "Doesn't the capitalist dispose of the lives of a company's employees?" etc.)

What is to happen with entrepreneurial talent/vision in a socialist framework.  More pointedly: how does one go about providing incentives for entrepreneurial talent to be forthcoming?  Even under a "market socialist" framework (basically, a mutation of socialism from its original meaning - central ownership, planning, control - to something involved "social ownership" but subject to market processes, as a supposed response to the Mises-Hayek criticism of central planning), if what is sought is long-term economic prosperity, certain rare and marginally-very-valuable talents will have to be involved, and the judgment involved has to be exercised freely in accordance with the requirements of the creative intellect.  If what is sought is efficient financing of production projects, you need financial talent and incentives sufficient to bring that talent to market and directed toward its most optimal uses.  How does all this happen without essentially "devolving" into the very tried-and-true capitalist process?

The socialists may not still profess to adhere to a labor theory of value (although getting them to drop that theory may have been like pulling teeth), but their chief focus is on a category they call "the workers" (subordinate employees).  Do entrepreneurs do a lot of value-added intellectual work?  From what I've been able to discern, this seems to be an issue discussed very little in the socialist literature.  If we applied Marxoid phraseology (without reference to at-the-margin value or rarity), entrepreneurial labor could be categorized as multiplied or intensified unskilled or simple labor.  The less-clueless socialists will still want to distinguish between entrepreneurial or organizational talent on the one hand, and the finance-capital end of things on the other.  But what about financial-capital talent?  Is it discussed at length in socialist literature?  (If it is, it must be hidden well from view, with other themes and concerns pushed to the fore.  The main concern/theme driving all of it seems to be: inequality in the process of production.  Talents are, after all, "distributed" unequally.)

The capitalist ethos (espoused by Rand first and foremost) holds that private property rights are essential to human freedom, in terms of the products or consequences of individual value-added creativity.  In the case of the "tech titans" we might have the CEO owning a lot of the company's shares, in effect playing the roles of both entrepreneur/organizer as well as financial capitalist.  Along the lines of Locke and Hegel and Rand and others, property is an extension of self or personhood.  In some sense, the personality of a "tech titan" is heavily invested in the enterprise.  But does anyone really need a billion dollars (discovered via the loathsome leftist Leiter's blog) to properly express their personality?

It'd sure be nice to resurrect Rand in her prime to see how she would handle this kind of question.  She'd pick apart certain assumptions of the question, perhaps use the phrase "context dropping" or "blanking out the cause of the effect."  But I'm not her, I am merely me, and here's what I've got so far:

Say a tech titan reaches a billion dollars net worth.  (This is not like a billion dollars cash in the bank, it might be nearly tied up in stocks that couldn't all be liquidated at present market prices.  It's almost surely not a billion dollars that's going to be blown on hookers and coke, as good as that might be for the bottom line of hookers and coke merchants.)  So if Ocasio-Cortez and the other enlightened progressives have their way, this tech titan won't be able to amass a net worth more than $1 billion, at least not as long as there are human beings somewhere going without health insurance.  (What are we actually supposed to infer about the latter from the former, anyway?  Is one the cause of the other?  That means that our modern economy is accurately characterized as more like a zero-sum situation than a win-win one [tech titans offer comparative advantage, using talents not directly at the disposal of "the workers", . . . ].)

(Without delving into the preposterous, just how would a committee of average-100-IQ "workers" manage to develop a company like Apple?  Again, one only need read Rand for the essentialization of the principle involved here.  It's on the same order of preposterous as imagining a committee of average-100-IQ intellects coming up with the grand-scale integrations of a Karl Marx.  Ohhhhhhhh, so now the role of the mind in man's existence becomes more clear, all of a sudden, to the myopic leftist.  Keep in mind, though, that Marxism proper doesn't place primacy on the human intellect but on "the material productive forces" of which intellectual products - including Marx's theoretical edifice itself - are consequence or superstructure.  In the last resort, of course.  And this is the leading contender for best socialist theorist to date, no less.)

Anyway, let's say I have a billion dollar net worth and any extra amount of wealth over that is confiscated (to pay for children's health insurance or whatever most noble cause).  I could just sit on my ass after that and create no more value-added.  But what good would that do anyone?  No matter, my marginal tax rate is 100% because in the last resort that meets enlightened progressive understandings of fairness, and so I can either sit on my ass or continue to create value for free.  So why should the tax code create preference for leisure time over production?  In one case (sitting on my ass) my life is still exclusively at my disposal, but in the other, doing win-wing comparative-advantage consensual capitalistic acts, the state can dispose of 100% of my marginal proceeds, i.e., my time, energies, effort, talents, mind, person.  (Nozick makes a similar point about a tax-code incentive for leisure over production in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, p. 170.  It's basically a common-sense refutation of the moral premise of punitively high redistributive taxation, just right there.)

What part of "Man is an end in himself, has a right to exist for his own sake, and he has a right to dispose of his own life as he chooses" do the leftists/socialists not fucking understand?

So, in a nutshell: Private property is an expression of man's mind.  Socialism foolishly flouts this moral principle; pure socialism flouts it purely (see: Mao, Great Leap Forward.).  Socialist moral theorizing implies the preposterous.

(If it can be established that "capitalism causes global warming," i.e., desire for economic prosperity causes global warming, and if it can be established that warming-mitigation technology could not outpace the warming itself, then and only then would you have capitalism characterized by a monumental negative externality or non-win-win scenario.  But the socialists were basically making preposterous assertions about capitalism before global-warming became a big issue, putting their credibility in tatters.)

[*] - I'd sexistly say "guy" . . . well, why not just say "guy," since we appear to be at the tail end of a bell curve of a certain kind of intelligence, dominated almost all by men . . . a fact that cannot be sexist.  (Speaking of which, if we're going to rank-order the greatest women philosophers in history on the basis of a full accounting of their strengths and shortcomings, we'd better be sure we've got the right criteria for measurement.  What did Prof. Hospers find so fascinating about Miss Rand in particular, again?  All-time starting five, at least?  And what about . . . All-Time Starting Five Philosophers, period?  What shall the criteria be?  I need to become more of a student of the history of philosophy to know for sure, but I already do know that there can be both a lot of great stuff in Rand and in the rest of the philosophy canon; need they stand over and against one another? ^_^ )

Regarding absolutes

Serious philosophers hold that there are absolutes - perhaps, indeed, that everything (every existent, every fact, every event, every sound mental integration of such things) is an absolute, i.e., not subject to alteration or revision.  The question then arises, what does that mean?  I'll respond first with a concrete instance: It's an absolute that the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776; it is a fact and as such it isn't alterable.  But from what I've seen, many people have difficulties with the concept of absolutes (or absolutism), and so an example such as this might not really hit home in the face of their objection to, or rejection of, the idea that there are absolutes.

Miss Rand dismisses the doubters thusly:

“There are no absolutes,” they chatter, blanking out the fact that they are uttering an absolute.

That sounds like a familiar stock response to skeptics who utter something to the effect that there are no absolutes.  It works, but maybe it doesn't address the non-skeptics, the "ordinary folks out there" who are suspicious of those who speak in terms of absolutes.  What I want to suggest is that  there isn't true confusion (among intellectually serious people) over there being absolutes or not, but rather the issue is what the rejection of something put forward as an absolute means in people's minds.  Are they really rejecting the idea of an absolute, or are they misunderstanding what "absolute" means to the serious philosopher, or are they, perhaps, simply rejecting something proposed as an absolute because either (a) they don't think the that something being proposed as an absolute (often a controversial moral, political, or religious ideal or principle) should be regard as an absolute, or (b) because the absolute being offered is ill-formed?

The case-in-point that brought me to thinking about this appeared in philosopher Edward Feser's blog, under the blog entry titled "The road from libertarianism," which chronicles his move away from ("right-wing" or capitalist) libertarianism to the politically conservative position he holds today.  What stuck in my mind was this paragraph in particular:

That the “ownership” aspect of the thesis is no less indeterminate than the “self” aspect also became more evident to me as I thought more carefully about John Locke, who was a defender of the thesis of self-ownership but also someone who denied that our rights were so absolute that we could have a right to commit suicide or to sell ourselves into slavery.  And after all, in everyday life we can rightly be said to own all sorts of things to which we don’t have absolute property rights.  For example, you might own the land your house sits on without thereby having the right to store nuclear waste on it.  But then, how absolute should we take property rights to be, and why?  That depends on your theory of rights.  And that reinforces the point that the thesis of self-ownership by itselfdoesn’t tell us nearly as much as many libertarians think it does.  Ifthe theory of rights that underlies the thesis entails an absolute right of self-ownership, then our rights over ourselves are exactly what libertarians think they are.  But if the theory that underlies the thesis does not entail such an absolute right -- as it didn’t for Locke -- then we might in some sense own ourselves, but withouttherefore having the right to take heroin, or unilaterally to divorce a spouse, or whatever.  Again, the idea of self-ownership by itselfwon’t tell you either way.  You have to look to the underlying theory of rights to find out -- in which case the thesis of self-ownership isn’t doing a whole lot of work.

The word "absolute" shows up five times in this paragraph, and as a means of dispensing with the idea of "self-ownership" as an absolute right or principle.  Feser's framing of the issue isn't so much about the absoluteness of a purported right of self-ownership, but about having to appeal to some other moral principles to make the principle determinate.  Do we have the right to sell ourselves into slavery?  That question can lead us in one of (at least) two directions: We can ask whether understanding the principle of self-ownership as an absolute leads us to accept the legal propriety of selling oneself into slavery; or, we can ask whether we need to appeal to other moral principles to determine whether a usefully determinate right of self-ownership entails the right to sell oneself into slavery.  Feser treats both of these in perhaps a significantly-related way.  My focus here, though, is on the way in which the term "absolute" is being used.  This need not even concern specifically the right of self-ownership under question, for early in the paragraph he discusses the idea of absolute property rights (over non-bodily resources) in conjunction with whether or not we have the right to store nuclear waste on our property, which raises intuitive concerns not altogether different than those raised by questions about a right to sell oneself into slavery.

That being clarified, let us now ask: Does your having an absolute right with respect to your duly-acquired property entail that you have the right to store nuclear waste there, right in the middle of a neighborhood, say?

This ties in with recent public debate over the Second Amendment individual right to bear arms.  Some people in the debate claim that the individual right to bear arms isn't absolute because we aren't rightfully permitted as individuals to bear nuclear arms.  This claim must be distinguished from a similar-sounding familiar claim, which says that the Second Amendment individual right to bear arms doesn't extend in scope to an individual right to bear nuclear arms - that such a restriction bearing on one's legal rights does not run afoul of the Second Amendment.  If someone makes this latter claim, they may or may not also mean to say that the Second Amendment isn't an absolute.  And that's the crux of the matter.

What I would advocate is the view that the Second Amendment, viewed as an absolute, doesn't extend in scope to an individual right to bear nuclear arms.  This, in short, as an example, illustrates the (absolute!) principle that there are absolutes, when those absolutes are properly formulated.  A not-so-serious "philosopher" might infer that the "when those absolutes..." qualification, by virtue of being a qualification or a condition, rules out the principle understood as an absolute.  In this person's mind, the concept of a conditional or qualified absolute doesn't compute.  The problem is, I think many folks out there suffer from this very problem when considering the subject of absolutes (assuming they ever actually consider them beyond brief dismissals of the very idea).  Now, Feser by all appearances is a serious philosopher but he engages in a not-so-serious approach to discussing absolutes in the way he does as quoted above.  It is pernicious to clear and cogent understanding of what is meant by "absolute," and as pernicious things go, "the least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold." (Aristotle)

So in analogy to the Second Amendment example, I return to Feser's commentary about absolute property rights and storing nuclear waste.  The whole issue concerns not whether the rights in question are absolutes - they are - but what the correctly specified contours and scope of those rights are.  We have an abstract principle of what I and Locke and Jefferson would term natural rights, which has a number of formulations all of which amount more or less to the same idea: that individuals are rightly the sovereigns over their personal domain - over their physical person and their duly acquired property - and that their personal domains must be capable of peacefully coexisting with the personal domains of others.  And what does that mean, in practice?  Here we need to be careful, in our transition from the abstract formulation to the practical implementation, not to erect a pernicious dichotomy between the two.  If in practical implementation, we end up with (say) a prohibition on storing nuclear waste in a neighborhood setting, we don't get to then say, "Oh, that abstract statement isn't so absolute after all," or, more perniciously, "That abstract statement of an absolute isn't helpful for practical application."  After all, storing nuclear waste in a neighborhood setting imposes an unreasonable risk or threat to the personal domains of one's neighbors.

But there is something to be said for not rationalistically dabbling in abstractions without the ability to formulate good, workable, concretely-detailed laws governing people's domain-regarding interactions.

(And to circumvent pernicious "cultural conservative" mischief, we distinguish domain-regarding interactions from interactions regarding all the other areas of life; we are concerned here only with how boundaries ought to be set.  Within those boundaries, people have every natural right to do things the "cultural conservatives" find so horribly objectionable that boundary-invading force needs to be employed - you know, to keep teh gayz from doing gay stuff, for instance.  Let us dismiss without serious consideration the question of whether "natural right of personal domain" doesn't extend to or encompass the right to engage in "victimless crimes."  Calling Lysander Spooner for the knock-down, drag-out, no-brainer argument-stopper on that one...)

So how do we figure out what is domain-respecting and what is domain-disrespecting?  Well, through practice.  That institution known as the common law wasn't deduced from abstractions in a vacuum or in a philosopher's armchair; the laws pertaining to personal domains had to evolve - or, arguably, better yet - be discovered (through trial-and-error) over a long period of time.  This would be a sort of "natural rights/natural law" variant upon a familiar Hayekian theme, stressing said discovery as the "telos" of the legal process while giving neither constructivist rationalism nor slavish adherence to tradition any respect.

(Hayek's formulation of the spontaneously evolved legal order is in terms of being "between instinct and reason," which I think eventually approaches in concept that which we usually refer to as "tradition." Someone of such Randian sensibilities as yours truly cannot accept that formulation; the evolution of common law happens in the correctly-defined "middle ground" between tradition and rationalism, which is a general cognitive malady of which Hayek's diagnosis of constructivist rationalism is a variety, and rationalism is not, ever, in any way, to be confused with reason.  The sense of the term "reason" that Rand endorses (the appropriate aforementioned "middle ground") involves experience, trial-and-error, historical data, and so on, which makes legal evolution not so much "spontaneous" as a process of experience-based reasoning in progressive/perfective discovery of the correct implementation of correct abstract principle (i.e., natural rights).  Indeed, the idea of natural rights itself wasn't always around, and had to be discovered through that very same sort of process.  For the extended Objectivist treatment of the cognitive malady that is rationalism (which is treating reason in effect as a process of deduction with floating abstractions), there is the indispensable Understanding Objectivism.  For an(other) extensive study of the Objectivist opposition to all kinds of false dichotomies, including the theoretical and the practical, there's Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical.)

I make mention of Hayek in large part because that's where Feser's non-Randian, conservative political sensibilities are (keeping in mind that Hayek wrote this).  That might help to explain the pernicious language regarding absolute rights.  (Feser's more primary/fundamental philosophical sensibilities are closer to the Randian track, so that's good.  Being that he is of the theistic persuasion, one would very much expect a high regard for absolutes from him, but that doesn't mean that his paragraph quoted above isn't a slip into perniciousness.)  Hayek's approach to defending (classical) liberalism is a "pragmatic" one, and I'm not clear on whether this version of pragmatism isn't vulnerable to the standard objections to the pernicious sorts of pragmatism that eschew absolutism, or that it isn't at the very core of what Rand found so bad about Hayek qua defender of capitalism upon reading The Road to Serfdom.  It helps to keep in mind that the approach to defending classical liberal (and especially individualist) ideals among American theorists (Jefferson, Thoreau, Spooner, Tucker, Mencken, Rand, Rothbard, Nozick, Mack) tends to have a more extreme or robust flavor than that of the English ones (Hume, Smith, Bentham, Mill . . . hell, Mill ended up a socialist, and have the Brits ever really recovered since?); Hayek's approach coincides much more with the latter, and it's even reflected in his rather dull prose.

(EDIT: This parenthetical become something of a diversion, but it all integrates in the end, of course.  Herbert Spencer, a Brit, was more of a radical, and boy has he paid the price in the form of vicious smears as a "social Darwinist."  And such a familiar-sounding vicious smear, innit? . . . and wouldn't you know it, Sully the Fool strikes again!  Why is it that when I keep integrating, Sully keeps showing up as a useless fool?  Why, I ask, why?  Let me guess, he's probably totally bogged down these days in cabinet-nominee discussions, the sort of thing no serious, long-term-focused intellectuals get bogged down in.  And OMG, wouldn't you know it, I'm right.  That's his most recent posting.  Integration/induction works yet again.  Checkmate, dickweed.   Here, how 'bout you do this (assuming you're keeping up on what's of real importance, i.e., blogs like this one, and this one's just getting warmed up): direct your readers to reddit for all the "useful" articles you post to the Dish, condense every twenty "opinion" postings into one unit apiece instead, use the rest of your time to study philosophy, and you might actually end up a historically-influential public intellectual.  Note that Hitchens won't be remembered all that much in the long run (except perhaps as a well-spoken leading figure of the intellectually-juvenile and hence short-lived New Atheist movement of the very early 21st century), and you're headed right in the same direction.  I just have a sense for these sorts of things - for example, like how P.T. Anderson's non-Oscar-nominated The Master will far outlast many of the films that got Oscar nominations this year.  Clearly PTA has a higher similarity-score with Kubrick qua filmmaker than do Bigelow, Russell, Spielberg, and even Tarantino, and that pretty much tells the story, does it not.  Ayn Rand: now there's someone with lasting influence, for reasons all too obvious to folks like me.  Get a fucking clue, Sully!  Also, for those who don't know: Sully, of Brit origins, is much more in line with the Brits in his reverence for the boring, "reason"-downplaying and overly-conciliatory-sounding Hayek in preference to the robust, reason-celebrating and uncompromising Rand.  It all integrates and makes sense just as I said, dunnit?)

So I think that about does 'er.  Wraps 'er all up.  Was it a meticulously lengthy proving of the obvious, old wine in new bottles, or a genuinely valuable insight unfamiliar to many?  It gets harder and harder for me to tell these days.  And does it even meet my river-of-gold standards of late?  Shouldn't I be, like, abstractly theorizing about the Singularity of singularities - you know, the coming Big Integration, whatever (awesome thing) that turns out to be?  (How do we make it past this problem though?  Urgency, do you feel it?)  Aw heck, I'm rambling again.

Sullivan (and broken culture) again

[For some context, the last blog entry about Sullivan is here.  One could alternately refer to this here blog entry as Exhibit B.]

So, the subject of Justice (sic) Scalia's very recent bout of imbecility regarding gay rights came up on Andrew Sullivan's 'The Dish.'  Here's Sullivan's substantive take on the issue:

So lets challenge Scalia on "legislating morals". The public has every right to legislate morals but not to do so arbitrarily to punish and stigmatize a minority for doing the exact same things that the majority does all the time, i.e., sodomy. If the court has already determined that mass murderers have an inviolable right to marry, how is allowing gay people to marry somehow a sign of moral decline? If the court has already made non-procreative sex constitutionally protected for straight people, how is it that the very same thing, condemned for the very same reasons by Scalia's and my own hierarchy, is obviously immoral when it comes to homosexuals? 

It's that discrepancy that suggests that this argument is not about legislating morals, as Scalia insists. It is about legislating them unequally, and treating a tiny minority differently for no rational reason. This issue has been settled, as Scalia himself declared in his dissent in Lawrence vs Texas. He rightly said there that that decision essentially made gay marriage a constitutional inevitability. He was right. And he should uphold that precedent in these cases, if it comes to that. Or is he going to contradict himself?

Got all that?  Just in case you didn't:

He starts with, "So lets challenge Scalia on "legislating morals"."  Great!  After all, the whole notion of government "legislating morals" is so fucking offensive to genuine-liberal sensibilities that Scalia should be toast.  But wait!  Instead, Sullivan says:

The public has every right to legislate morals but not to do so arbitrarily to punish and stigmatize a minority for doing the exact same things that the majority does all the time, i.e., sodomy.

Is this what Jefferson had in mind when authoring the Declaration of Independence?  Is this what Thomas Paine had in mind when writing The Rights of Man?  Where does a supposed right of the public to do this-and-that come from?  Does "the public" have rights, or is it only individuals that have them?  If the public has rights, can they not be only the rights delegated to it by individuals?  That's the whole idea of civil government in Lockean-liberal terms: the individuals give up to the government rights of enforcement of the Law of Nature, in exchange for a much more effective, just, and stable system of securing and protecting their rights.  This is a goddamned no-brainer if you just read the opening part of the Declaration.

What is the just exchange of rights and responsibilities, benefits and burdens, involved when "the public" decides to punish a victimless crime?  The peaceful people doing their private consensual things give up their freedom to do so in exchange for . . . what?  Jack shit, that's what.

Let's call "legislating morals" that do not serve the end of protecting individual rights what it is: violations of individual rights by a majority that has no fucking business whatsoever interfering with victimless activity.  This whole notion of "legislating morals" is a "conservative" (read: right-wing) fantasy that may have held sway back in the day, but it's neanderthalism at this point in history.

And to be clear even further: "Legislating morals" and "protecting rights" cannot - in a rational system of government based on individual rights - be mashed together such that when government punishes a murderer, it is "legislating morals."  Only imbeciles - Justice (sic!) Scalia, for example - would run them together like that.  (See, once again, Spooner.)  (Here's Spooner again.)  (Lysander Spooner, "Vices are not Crimes.")

Spooner already refuted this bullshit well over a century ago.  Why "the morals-legislating public" isn't intimately familiar with this essay is a very good question.  I'll provide some hints to an answer in just a moment.

(In case you missed it: Spooner.)

(And there's no good argument that homosexual sodomy per se is even a vice!  Double imbecility from Scalia!  You know what is a vice, a deficiency, in an objective, Aristotelian/perfectivist code of ethics?  Willful imbecility on the part of those who should goddamn well know better.  Plato wrote The Republic, after all, with the idea in mind that imbeciles shouldn't be in positions of political power.  Remember the Athenians' "right to legislate morality" by sentencing Socrates to death?  Q.E.D., motherfuckers.)

To continue: What Sullivan turns this into is a case for "legislating morals" but not to do so "arbitrarily" and "unequally."  So it comes down to a Fourteenth Amendment issue, which is the primary basis (under present, corrupted jurisprudence) on which to strike down sodomy laws as unconstitutional.  How exactly does one distinguish between equal protection and equal rights-violation given this framing of things, praytell?  (Anyone else think of this question before I did?  Of course, it came to me at mind at the very first but I just forgot to ask or mention it in first drafit; hadn't yet perfected this subject in my mind till now.  [UP asks: how exactly do you figure out what "now" this is referring to?  Did you think of the question for yourself before, or after, seeing UP ask it above?  If it's "before," you're in a small minority of intellectually-well-informed people who happened upon this blog "early," making you well ahead of the rest of internet users and the "general public" in a very significant sense.  What results this fact will have, sociologically speaking, I guess I have to predict via my understanding of praxeology, memetics, moral theory, and so forth, to come to some overhelmingly amazing conclusion I haven't reached yet?  Whoa. :-D  So, what is "now" in UP's context?  In yours?  In the minds of those you love?  An exercise not just for present readers but for all of us, it appears....] serious and pensive Sagan face.)

Sullivan is correct that Scalia was not such an imbecile as to fail to recognize that striking down laws against sodomy would pave the way for marriage equality.  (He was an imbecile for being concerned about striking down sodomy laws on that basis, hence his morally obscene dissent in Lawrence.)  But all this misses the point, given Spooner.

As I pointed out in my previous blog entry, all of this intellectual and jurisprudential corruption can be circumvented by appeal to the Ninth Amendment, that is, to natural law, or to what Paine termed common sense.  If we want to be "originalists" (as Scalia supposedly is) in our interpretation of the Constitution, which involves reference to the intent of the Framers, then what other intent is there behind the Ninth Amendment than just what Jefferson and Paine referred to as The Rights of Man?  We can prattle on all we like about the intent of the more statist Framers - like those, for instance, who never intended for African-American slaves to have rights - but that doesn't do a fucking thing to negate the meaning and intent of the Ninth Amendment (which could also have been invoked to strike down slavery as unconstitutional, under a rational jurisprudence).

Well, I've gone on at some length already here, and the gist of the matter is plenty clear.  Having once been an avid reader of Sullivan's 'Dish', I'm disgusted by him these days.  I don't know if his brand of so-called conservatism inspired by Hayek and Oakeshott is undermined by the 'British' way of approaching governance post-Locke (see: J.S. Mill and utilitarianism) with which he was bombarded as a youth in the UK, but it isn't what American originalists like Jefferson and Paine - and, later, Spooner, and later still, Rand, Rothbard and Nozick - had in mind.  (There is also the matter of Sullivan's "dialectical" sensibility in trying to carve out some territory of reconciliation between different factions in today's politics, to reach some ostensibly reasonable and practical common ground of overlapping consensus; the primary problem here is the underlying corruption of the whole discourse as such today, which Sullivan does not address at its core [a matter for the discipline of philosophy to address].  A better term for Sullivan's "dialectical" sensibility here is pragmatism, with all the baggage that carries.)  But more disgusting still is what is revealed by this paragraph of Sullivan's article:

But the exchange also brought back something in my own past. Well over a decade ago (I can't remember when), one of the professors I taught students for at Harvard, Michael Sandel, invited me to debate my former dissertation adviser, Harvey C Mansfield, on marriage equality. It was for Sandel's legendarily popular course, "Justice". The fact that Harvey and I both agreed to do it and debated with civility and mutual respect (I revere Harvey as a scholar and as a human being) was, for me, somewhat moving, if also a little personally awkward.

Cutting to the chase: what the fuck is going on at Harvard that someone who teaches for Prof. Sandel doesn't understand the principles of rights underlying the Declaration of Independence?  Moreover, how the fuck does it happen that a former teacher of students at Harvard can so ignorantly blast Ayn Rand in the most extreme of terms?  (For that matter, what the fuck is going on in academia generally that a leading academic "philosophy" blogger does the same thing?)  Is it any surprise that Harvard is turning out so many statists along with so many morally and aesthetically vacuous Wall Street financiers and intellectually vacuous politicians (see: 2012 presidential election)?  Just what the fuck does a credential from Harvard signify, anyway?  Raw smarts can go only so far, after all, and Gates and Zuckerberg didn't need the credential to prove their economic worth.

This former teacher of students for Michael Sandel at Harvard concludes by quoting without comment the following from another author, one Paul Campos:

Scalia’s tactless fulminations are, at bottom, a reminder of why life tenure for Supremes is a bad idea, the badness of which increases in direct proportion to our average life expectancy. Put another way, someone who was in law school at a time when 96 percent of the public disapproved of interracial marriage should be considered too old to sit on the Supreme Court.

How is this asinine and irrelevant opinion worthy of so much as a quotation in the given context?

Something something Jefferson, Franklin and Paine appalled and aghast, etc.  Q.E.F.D.

Scalia vs. principles of liberty

UPDATED below.

I was going to title this blog entry "Scalia vs. liberty," but I suppose he sometimes - incidentally - comes out in favor of liberty.  But the issue here is principle: is Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia a principled advocate of liberty?

No, he is not.

[EDIT: On second thought, the best headline for this entry might very well be "Scalia vs. rights."  Let's each of us chew on that one.]

This item came to my attention today.  Rush Limbaugh is on record for saying for saying, at least a couple times, that if he could switch out his brain with someone else's, it would be Scalia's.  Given Limbaugh's gradual, sad descent into intellectual dementia, I can see why.  One of the "best legal minds of our time" responded to a student's sensible question regarding his comparison between laws banning sodomy and laws banning bestiality and murder:

“If we cannot have moral feelings against or objections to homosexuality, can we have it against anything?” Scalia said in response to the question, according to The Daily Princetonian. “I don’t think it’s necessary, but I think it’s effective.” 

Scalia told Princeton student Duncan Hosie that he is not equating sodomy with bestiality or murder, but drawing parallels between the bans. 

Scalia added dryly, “I’m surprised you weren’t persuaded,”  the student newspaper reported.

Oh, good lord.  Does this even merit comment?

Where does this guy live, under a fucking rock?

This is the second decade of the 21st century, after all, where gay ivy-league college students aren't going to find persuasive some asinine comparison of sodomy laws to bestiality laws, and yet Scalia finds himself "surprised" by their not being so persuaded.  He's got to have been living under a fucking rock.

But, more importantly, here's the article's description of Scalia's legal reasoning (sic) used in the landmark case, Lawrence v. Texas (2003), in which the Supreme Court struck down sodomy laws as unconstitutional:

Scalia had dissented in the case; in his dissent, he makes a couple of comparisons to laws against bestiality and declares, "nowhere does the Court’s opinion declare that homosexual sodomy is a 'fundamental right.'"

I'll go ahead and state it in plain, simple and blunt terms:

There is most definitely a natural right to engage in homosexual sodomy.

This comes from the reality-based observation that (a) people have the right to engage in private consensual activities with one another, and (b) private and consensual homosexual sodomy poses no credible threat to the security and well-being of society's members.  (This is also why people have a natural right to use cannabis responsibly.)  As to where one can find this right - implicitly - in the Constitution, Justice (sic) Scalia cannot fail to be unaware of the libertarian implications of the Ninth Amendment which refers to un-enumerated rights retained by the people, and of the illiberal implications of laws banning sodomy, pornography, birth control, victimless drug use, and so on.

(EDIT: Stupidity - Scalia's, for example - does in fact pose a credible threat to the security and well-being of society's members.  Maybe stupidity, intellectual laziness, ignorance, or plain old kookery should be made illegal?  I wonder why right-wing politicians, pundits and bloggers don't fanatically go after that real threat wherever it lurks (or, hell, is openly broadcast)?  Where's Michele Bachmann when we need her to protect us from this manifestly obvious threat to American Values?  Why the fuck is she spending her time focusing on a non-existent problem such as sharia law emerging in America?  Just because it's the brand of illiberal batshit-crazy theocracy-ism that she doesn't like, doesn't mean that it's anywhere near the threat that someone like, say, Antonin Scalia or his doppelganger John Yoo poses to our liberties.  Is down up in the right-wing mindset?  Good lord!  It's just so absurd, I don't know how people can endure such blatantly irrational idiocy with a straight face.... [Don't worry, proudly-ignorant left-wing socialism-embracers and Rand-haters, you're next up on my Shit List, beginning with the fact that I received not one single fucking answer in the affirmative to the question I posed here.  Just you wait till I'm in full intellectual-rampage mode, 'cause you ain't seen nuttin' yet, you fucking amateurs.])

What Justice (sic) Scalia is, is a "conservative" statist of sorts who only happens sometimes to support freedom.  What he is not, is someone whose occupancy of a Supreme Court seat should be considered a good thing for the country - especially not when he's so homophobic as to be unqualified to adjudicate the marriage-equality issue fairly or justly.  And that issue is, at this point in history, a no-brainer!  (I'll note that since the Prop 8 plaintiff's attorney Theodore Olson wrote his conservative case for gay marriage, no conservative group or publication has managed to produce anything remotely resembling a well-reasoned case against it.  Indisputable fact.  There's a reason why it is an indisputable fact: the overwhelming evidence, logic, and constitutional and natural principles of justice are on the side of marriage-equality.  Duh.)

I will also mention that the "conservative" Scalia sided with the "liberal" majority in Gonzalez v. Raich which upheld the (natural-rights-violating) federal drug laws on the grounds of the ominously-ever-expansive (under twentieth-century, post-Holmes, post-Dewey jurisprudence) Commerce Clause. These laws (wrongly) empower the government to prohibit a citizen from growing pot in his own backyard.  Meanwhile, Justice (sic) Scalia found some way to oppose the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), presumably on the grounds that it would involve an unacceptable expansion of federal power.  What principle drives all of this is some idiosyncratic Scalian jurisprudence that I haven't gotten a grip on, but given how illiberal he is on issues like sodomy and weed, it is a corrupt jurisprudence, no question.

Since I first got interested in politics some decades back, my political sensibilities have always been more or less libertarian, with civil libertarianism on the so-called personal-freedom issues being one of the biggest no-brainers in political philosophy.  Just some good ol' Aristotelian common sense on my part, I suppose.  During this period of time one of the books that readily caught my attention given my areas of study/interest was Peter McWilliams's Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do: The Absurdity Of Consensual Crimes In A Free Society (1993).  I have not actually read this book, because it preaches to this choir.  (Given its unusually high rating by goodreads.com standards - 4.48 out of 5 stars with 285 ratings - perhaps it goes into the "must-read" category regardless.)

The story of McWilliam's own death - caused by corrupt jurisprudence (which stems ultimately from corrupt but influential philosophy) - is fucking insane.  Franklin, Paine and Jefferson would be aghast.

Thanks a lot, Justice (sic!) Scalia.

Asshole.

UPDATE: Lysander Spooner, bitches.

"The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer's Social Statics." -some "progressive" asshole in a black robe

"The Ninth Amendment surely enacts Mr. Lysander Spooner's Natural Law." -The Ultimate Philosopher

(I've just been getting warmed up here these past months, mofos.  BTW, did you happen to catch that one ignorantly-Rand-hating asshole who runs a leading "philosophy" blog, whining recently about hedge-fund managers making a lot more than university professors?  It's like he's never heard of the concept of rarity of talents combined with the relative economic importance of skill sets.  Sure, Derek Jeter could probably teach high school classes, but can any high school teachers play shortstop for the New York Yankees?  Does a philosophy professor have the skill set to run a hedge fund or other demanding business venture?  Arguably a hedge-fund manager could have entered the philosophy profession instead, and do a good job at it (which really isn't all that hard if you absorb Aristotelian sensibilities, as way too many philosophy professors have failed so crashingly to do - as evidenced by the quality of students Higher Ed lets loose on the world nowadays), but who would run the hedge funds, then?  Such questions and answers occur as second nature to business-types but apparently never occur to a lot of university professors, especially those in the Humanities who are supposed to be expanding their cognitive horizons for fuck's sake.  I guess Marx-inspired economic value theory never accustomed them to understanding these things?  I'll just leave this here again.  Nozick > bitter whining asshole left-wing "philosophy" prof.  Say, why did Nozick go from leftist to libertarian?  Something something conversation with Murray Rothbard and individualist anarchism, something something Rothbard and Rand's Atlas Shrugged and Mises's Human Action, something something individualist anarchism and Lysander Spooner, something something footnote three to "A Framework for Utopia," something something "On the Randian Argument," something something "Nozick on the Randian Argument," something something "How to Derive Libertarian Rights," something something eudaemonistic egoism, something something "Flourishing Egoism," something something Personal Destinies, something something Aristotle, something something Allan Gotthelf, something something epistemology workshop, something something noble soul, something something man as heroic being, something something role of the mind in human existence (Marxian value-theory and historical materialism, eh?  Something reeks about all that. Class struggles? Like that going on between the darkly-comically entrenched Theory Class and ordinary human beings, for instance?), something something rationality as the fundamental virtue, something something Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics, something something Leonard Peikoff, something something Understanding Objectivism, something something Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical . . . wait a second, it's like there's some kind of dialectical progression/convergence/integration/ perfection going on here; anyone else notice that besides moi?  If not, why the hell not?  Also, to that whiny left-wing "philosophy"-prof blogger: Go fuck yourself, asshole. [cue Spaceballs-mog finger gesture and smooching noises] Cheers, UP :-p )

A goal: total cannabis legalization by 4/20/2013

[UPDATED below.]

(Stimulated in part by the insanity of this news item.  Something something Mark Twain quotation.)

Completely legalized in all of the United States for all adults 21 and over (unless we want to be wink-wink hypocrites by making it nominally 21 while acknowledging that college kids starting freshman year will do it; do we want to be fucking wink-wink hypocrites or do we want to be reality-observant like Aristotle?).

The only question is how to make this happen.  (The ironic part is that formulating strategy for swift-as-possible legalization would itself be aided by cannabis-induced semantic priming.)

I think there is already a basis for pot legalization in the Ninth Amendment.  What would Jefferson, Franklin, Paine, Locke, Sagan, Marley ("Get up, stand up..."), the Coens, Kanye, Glenn Greenwald and plain old common sense say/do?  If consuming cannabis in the privacy of one's home poses no clear or present danger to the security or well-being of others or self, then prima facie we have a pre-political, nature- or God-given right to do so, which government is instituted to secure.  It's plain, simple, and common sense - something we don't see enough of in the world, unfortunately.  (A compromise measure would leave cannabis prohibition up to the states - a Tenth Amendment thing - but at the very least the wise tactic is to go into negotiations demanding as much as you can reasonably demand.  And I rather like the appeal to Sagan and Marley on natural-rights and common-sense grounds.)

There also needs to be a common-sense plan in place for educating people about the benefits and hazards of cannabis use.  (Available data indicate that it's not a good idea, in terms of cognitive development, for people in their teens to use weed - not frequently or in large amounts, anyhow.)  In fact, such an educational program should be a required condition of cannabis legalization, because we don't want a big fuck-up.  We don't want such legalization to go bad for no good reason, and then get blamed for problems that ensue from irresponsible use or what have you.  The cognitive benefits (when used responsibly) as explained by Sagan need to be brought to the fore of the public's consciousness.  (Something something semantic priming.)  It's fucking Carl Sagan, man!  There's no reason for anything he wrote to languish in obscurity.  (Exhibit B of what's gone the hell wrong with this country.)  The other health benefits are all well and good, but we have a planet to save from possible ecological collapse, and/or a technological singularity to reach ASAFP, and we need all the cognition-boosting resources at our avail to make this happen.

That, and a thorough, age-appropriate education in philosophy for as many citizens as possible, as soon as possible.  (Might not happen by 4/20/2013, but the future is not determined . . .)

That's pretty much the gist of it in a nutshell.

The nice thing is that there's really no refuting any of it.  (Perfectivism rearing its pretty head again....)  Ah, it's neat having truth, beauty and justice on one's side. :-)

Can we as a nation get our shit together on this issue in a little over five months?  If not, why not?

"Weed is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy." -UP, with revision from the original saying

UPDATE: Might as well make same-sex marriage the law of the land by 4/20/2013 while we're at it . . .  Then prostitution other capitalist acts between consenting adults?  What Would Jefferson Do?  (The philosophy-education program would probably be higher priority with him, but hey, we're not limited to just one or the other, thank Rand.)

UPDATE: Wouldn't the fucking politicians just love a large-scale cannabis revolt right around April 15?  "Legalize it and then we'll pay up.  Deal?"  (Hell yeah, that's way more than a fair bargain.  Throw the other rights retained by the people in there as well, while we're at it.)

UPDATE: It had slipped my mind by the time I posted this blog entry, but the original Ninth Amendment idea planted in me quite some time ago is rightly credited to Georgetown law professor Randy Barnett.  My "prima facie natural right" formulation above and Barnett's "presumption of liberty" idea amount to essentially the same thing.  (Ain't integration fun? :-) / You can't refute perfectivism. :-) )

Glenn Greenwald (and Ayn Rand) vs. Evasion

Evasion - i.e., the refusal to think, to see, to know - is, as Ayn Rand pointed out - and which many people (ironically? non-ironically?) evade because of the messenger - the root of all human evils.

Glenn Greenwald documents on a daily basis the devolution of the American justice system going on right before our eyes in the wake of the so-called War on Terror. It's nothing short of fucking disgusting what's going on - as are the evasions that enable it.

Is it any coincidence - any coincidence at all - that the American justice system, and the American political system, were perverted in the face of the so-called War on Drugs? In fact, we might as well assume that the perversions enacted by the so-called War on Drugs were a test by our Political Class to see just how far the American People could be hoodwinked into giving up the principles of freedom in order to Keep Us Safe. Hence, the so-called War on Terror.

I say principles of freedom here, because even if you or your neighbor's rightful freedom wasn't infringed by these ridiculous policies, the principle involved was torn asunder. Hell, let's just make it plain: the principles of freedom have gradually been torn asunder since the days of FDR (to "keep us free from fear," or whatnot). Perhaps before that, going back to who-knows-when. As the ever-prescient Rand pointed out, quite incontrovertibly, there was a contradiction from the very start between the nation's founding political principles and the wider moral-intellectual ethos of its people. As she pointed out, America didn't have a well-recognized moral-philosophical base (i.e., reason and egoism, but primarily reason) for its political ideals.

We're seeing the results of this split. It's quite inevitable, really. And we continue to ignore - i.e., to evade - the inevitable consequences of this split, at our own peril.

Back to the matter of principles: one thing that an anti-intellectual ethos does, is to destroy people's ability to think in terms of principles. So if some far-off stranger has his freedoms trampled upon in the most egregious of anti-American ways, an intellectually-stunted populace will sigh in relief that at least their own freedoms aren't being trampled upon - ignoring the principle of fredom involved. (This is even assuming they value freedom any longer, as distinct from, say, Safety.) Well, the departure from principle has led to the de facto state of lawlessness in which our Political Class now operates. That's what happens when a principle is abandoned.

Anyone who is paying attention - i.e., doesn't evade in one fashion or other - realizes that the current state of things, politically and intellectually, would make Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration, and long-serving president of the American Philosophical Society, fucking vomit. Further, if you pay attention and exercise any capacity for independent thinking in principles, you realize that this problem won't - and can't - go away, not without some significant change in the mindset of the American People. Only the ire and rage of the American People against its lawless Political Class could serve as a check against the perversions of its founding principles (i.e., individual rights). Only the evasions of the American People can keep the problem festering, and keep diminishing America's standing in the world.

So, during the times I'm not posting here, a good blog to read is Greenwald's. He is one of the few still remaining who have the courage to call out the corruption of our political system in the most clear and uncompromising terms.

The problem is, at root, an intellectual one. A philosophy like Rand's is the ultimate solution. The ultimate diagnostic approach is philosophical. But at the least Greenwald is highlighting what our political problem is in the starkest terms, even if he hasn't identified the why. (I've added "pragmatism" as a tag to this post, seeing as how pragmatism - a most unfortunate intellectual phenomenon in America - has proved insidious against its founding principles. Also, I've added "integration," since this all ties together. Oh, I've also added "torture," since that integrates with the rest. Long story short: Pragmatism leads to disintegration, which leads to lawless torture.) Greenwald constantly kicks ass; as far as I can remember, he's always putting the apologists for the Status Quo in their place in any debate that arises. The defenders of the Status Quo have a vested interest in people evading what Greenwald says. So far, these slimeballs have been getting away with it well enough to keep conducting a progressive erosion of all law and decency. If you get the People dumbed-down enough through a long-enough train of evasions, they will accept tyranny, plutocracy, endless war, you name it.

Far as I can tell, Greenwald identifies as "left-liberal" politically, which really has little to do with the effectiveness of his blog, which focuses on constitutional rights and their abuse by politicians of both parties. Further, he's not a philosopher, so that limits his intellectual context and range of awareness. He does share with Ayn Rand at least one feature: marginalization by the Establishment. But, more essentially and crucially, he shares with Ayn Rand a basic intellectual attitude: the refusal to evade facts. It's just mind-boggling how rare such an attitude is today.

Now, back to composing....

P.S. Please take a look at my previous posting and let it sink in, if it hasn't yet.

Ayn Rand: A Mini-Guide

(For both scholars and laypersons.)

Ayn Rand's philosophy, which she called Objectivism, has received widely varied reception, from "It's the key to solving our crises of civilization" all the way to "It's a pseudo-philosophy not worth taking seriously." (Disclosure: My own view is much, much closer to the former than the latter, with some reservations and qualifications.) This guide is meant to convey what a serious scholar (or "student of Objectivism") might come away with after a careful study of Rand's ideas. I will go over Rand's views on philosophy, branch by branch, and indicate what strengths (and, in some instances, weaknesses) a student of philosophy can expect to find therein.

First, Rand summed up her philosophy as follows: "My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute."
(http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/objectivism.html)

Now, to see how this bears on subject matter in philosophy:

Metaphysics

Rand's views here are not much advanced beyond the ancient Greek - namely, and especially, Aristotelian - conception of the world as existing independent of us and ordered according to "natural law." Her axioms of existence, identity and consciousness are fundamental-level identifications implicit within all other statements, and are denied upon pain of contradiction. Her neo-Aristotelian metaphysics might best be identified as a standard statement of "classical realism" - the view of the world essentially contained in "common sense": we come to the world without any power to alter or construct it; it is absolute and unyielding; it exhibits causal regularity to which we have to conform to achieve any kind of cognitive or practical success.

Rand's views on the subject of God are "hard-line" and philosophically controversial. The arguments offered by Rand and others on this are unlikely to convince believers or theologians. They amount in effect to the claim that the universe - which is considered synonymous with "existence" or the totality of all that exists - could not come into or go out of existence, and that traditional talk of God leads to a negation of a rational understanding of the world. In an interview on the Donahue show, Rand made a comment that "There is no such thing as a disorderly universe," the implication being that there is no need to posit God to explain the order in the world. While the universe being orderly of necessity falls out of Rand's classical-realist metaphysics, and its being orderly needn't require an order-er or creator or designer, it's far from clear how this rules out God's existence by Rand's hard-line reasoning.

Rand did not get into the subject of God beyond some basic metaphysical claims; she did not talk about the Problem of Evil, for instance. Neither did she talk about God, much, period: it wasn't a subject of interest to her in itself, apart from the historical-cultural phenomenon of belief in such a deity or higher power. There do appear to be two distinct strands offered, however: the usual "there's no compelling proof" one shared by a whole host of non-believers, on the one hand, and the hard-line metaphysical one in which God's existence implies a contradiction or rejection of the axioms, on the other.

Rand rejects the "materialist" label, where that means being committed to the view that all reality is ultimately material; she associated such a label with "vulgar materialism" which denies an irreducible reality and causal efficacy to conscious processes. It is hard to escape this label, however, if materialism amounts only to the view that existence exists independently of consciousness, per classical or "common sense" realism. Rand is of the view that existence existing independent of consciousness implies that there can't be a God, which is presumably defined such that it is a conscious entity that exists ontologically prior to the world. This seems to miss the claim of theologians that God is at once existing and conscious (just like us), without any claim that God's consciousness is somehow prior to existence. It is unclear from her or her designated spokespersons' extant written arguments how the axioms can be invoked to handle challenges like this one.

In sum, I don't think there's much to be gotten out of Objectivist metaphysics than some pretty standard classical-realist claims and some strange-looking arguments against God's existence and against other things which Rand and others claim violates the axioms. We can already appeal to Aristotelian or other arguments in favor of classical realism and get much the same idea about the world and our relation to it.

Epistemology

To understand Rand's epistemological project, it helps first to get clear on how she conceived that project. Her aim was fundamentally a practical one and a methodological one. The practical aim was to provide a basic guide for ordering our thought processes in a way that makes us most efficacious in living. The methodological aim is the spelling-out of the practical one: defining the methods by which we best order our cognitive processes.

Rand regarded her theory of concepts as her most significant philosophic achievement. She aimed to provide not just a solution to the traditional "problem of universals," but also to provide a fundamental accounting of how we think about anything and everything, from the most abstract to the most particular, to the most theoretical to the most mundane. Our knowledge is held in the form of concepts, and concepts are integrations of percepts (the perceptually-given). If we can provide a systematic accounting for how thought, properly done, is carried out, then we've done all the epistemological work Rand is concerned about.

Rand spent some 20 years, prior to laying out her theory of concepts in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, testing her ideas about the roots of our concepts. Her theory in essence is that human cognition involves measurement (of particulars) and measurement-omission (in forming concepts, i.e., by integrating percepts into mental units). All abstractions are ultimately tied to the perceptual, either in simpler and direct terms (via lower-order concepts, e.g., concepts of color), or in more complex and indirect terms (involving higher-order concepts, e.g., "love" and "justice"). The higher-order abstractions require definition in terms of the lower-order ones.

Chains of reasoning, if they are to be considered sound, depend ultimately on reducibility to particulars. This requires keeping our concepts well-organized within a hierarchy, which establishes the context for any concepts we employ. We should be able to relate, i.e., to integrate any item of knowledge to all other items of knowledge within the hierarchy. Concepts well-formed and well-organized serve a crucial practical need, namely, mental unit-economy and, in turn, mental and practical efficacy. Concepts and definitions are condensations of vast bodies of observation, with the particular measurements as they apply to concrete data omitted from these condensations. Rand treats of "borderline cases" (as, say, between "chair" and "sofa") by stressing the need for a mind to organize its contents by the most efficacious means available; that may or may not require forming new concepts to handle "borderline" cases. The basic determinant for forming a concept or definition of anything is to identify the fundamental similarities among concretes, i.e., the similarities which (existentially or metaphysically) make the greatest number of similarities possible, and which (epistemologically) explains the greatest number of other similarities (These considerations should be guided by Rand's "Razor", which states that concepts should be neither expanded nor reduced beyond necessity.)

The basic cognitive method Rand endorsed and applied here is one of keeping all one's mental contents very well-organized and at least fairly readily reducible to the perceptual. Doing all this is not just a mental exercise but, rather, serves a crucial life need. Her chief aim was to make consciousness as efficacious as possible in dealing with everyday problems. In that regard, Rand did not particularly concern herself with a number of "background" issues in epistemology that have concerned a great deal of other philosophers. If they approach Rand with an eye to these "background" issues, they might not find much to sink their teeth into. An Objectivist, meanwhile, will maintain that any discussion of any issues, "background" or otherwise, requires the use of well-formed and well-applied concepts, and that the relevance of these background issues must be explained in terms of relevance and use for daily life; otherwise, it is idle speculation.

So, to take, for instance, the "problem of necessity" addressed by Hume and Kant, it needs to be explained how this is an issue that should be of concern to us. There is a "pragmatic" attitude involved here: if we already have a well-ordered system of concepts that aids us in our daily lives, then it becomes some other kind of concern (a "theoretical" one) whether the concepts we have reflects an inherent necessity in nature. Even if we don't have a "satisfactory grounding of necessity," i.e., one satisfying to all but skeptics, we still have to get on with the task of living. At the same time, any discussion of the "problem of necessity" should presuppose that we're employing our concepts in such a discussion in well-grounded (i.e., perceptually-grounded) ways.

If all knowledge is grounded in the perceptual, according to Rand, then the label "empiricist" might seem to fit. To be sure, Rand, despite her advocacy of reason, did not identify with the "rationalist" tradition; in fact, she saw in rationalism a tendency to treat ideas or concepts in a way that detaches them from their proper grounding in the perceptual - and thereby to sever philosophy from the needs of life. However, to lump her in with Hume using the "empiricist" label is to ignore the basic difference between them: the task of the cognitive faculty (which Rand called "reason") in Rand's philosophy is to integrate sense data into a non-contradictory whole, even if "only" for practical purposes; Hume, as abstract theorist, was more interested in the "problem of necessity," while he's often seen (fairly or not) as a leading advocate against the idea that we can rationally or objectively integrate percepts. In any event, Rand's perception-based theory of knowledge is more in the spirit of Aristotle than of Hume.

Ethics

Rand is perhaps most famous for her advocacy of ethical egoism, or as she referred to it, a rational selfishness or morality of self-interest. Evident from a careful reading of her arguments, though, is that she is not an advocate of these things as typically or widely understood.

Her basic point about ethics - "a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions - the choices and actions that determine the purpose and the course of his life" - is that it is a guide to living well, or living happily. In her understanding of things, that makes any good code of ethics egoistic by definition: living well or happily just means to be living self-interestedly. Insofar as Rand's "ethical egoism" is damned or rejected by moral theorists, they also damn or reject the ancient conception of ethics as, likewise, being concerned with the task of living well or happily. Objectivist ethics is hardly anything more or other than an updating of Aristotelian eudaemonist ethics.

Rand offers a neo-Aristotelian argument on the foundations of the concept of "value" or "goodness"; she locates value-significance in living phenomena, and a narrower sub-division - the moral - is concerned with the achievement of what is of value through the exercise of choice. She shares with Aristotle the basic conviction that living well as humans means living rationally and intelligently - that rational and intelligent living is our best (perhaps only) guarantee to achieving a stable and enduring happy livelihood. The basic form of right living for both Aristotle and Rand is virtue, the integral commitment to living as reason requires. For Rand, the basic virtue, which explains all the other virtues, is the virtue of rationality. Rationality is the locus of the interaction between her epistemology and her ethics, or between thought and practice. Humans are distinguished by their mode of functioning - most fundamentally, the exercise of reason. If we perfect the use of our cognitive faculties, that is our best and only means to perfecting our lives as a whole.

In the contemporary professional literature, eudaemonism generally is discussed in David L. Norton's Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism (Princeton, 1976), while Rand's eudaemonism more specifically is discussed in Tara Smith's Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist (Cambridge, 2006). Rand's ethics - again, best understood as a version of neo-Aristotelian eudaemonism - is the part of her philosophy which has seen the most coverage and ground gained in the philosophy profession. (Her epistemology, by contrast, has received hardly any treatment, negative or positive.) The egoism she espoused is best understood in connection with the basic summary statement near the beginning of this posting: the idea that achievement of happiness is the moral purpose of one's life, and that we should strive to be "heroic" or great in our lives. Arguably this fits right in with an Aristotelian version of eudaemonism.

The strength of Rand's ethics depends on the strength of eudaemonist ethics as such; eudaemonism has become a force to be reckoned with in contemporary moral theories, and as such moral theorists ignore it and Rand at their peril.

Rand's meta-ethics - her grounding of the concept of "value" in the concept of "life" - has been much the subject of analysis and criticism, and much of that discussion centers on whether Rand (or any other thinker) successfully derives an "ought" from an "is." Rand contours her claims about living things so as not to commit herself to defunct teleological doctrines, but her claims can still be challenged on grounds of whether the functions of living systems are ordered for "the preservation of the organism's own life" (as distinct from or perhaps inclusive of reproduction), or on whether we can get a clear picture of functional organization that gives us the kind of ethical views we usually find plausible. Again, her views here are closely related to Aristotle's, and are also echoed in such neo-Aristotelians as Philippa Foot (Natural Goodness, Oxford, 2001). Her views in these areas seem to be well-reflected in the mainstream literature and the tradition, and as such are more or less right in the thick of things as contemporary meta-ethics is concerned.

Political Philosophy

Rand's politics in essence is an extension of her ethics: she is an individualist, and in an individualist ethos the basic function of government is to secure the conditions - rights - under which people can pursue their happiness through the exercise of their own minds. Her views have predecessors in Locke, Jefferson and Spencer, but her explanation of the relation between ethics and politics is rather original if not right on target. Her basic identification here is that force and mind are opposites. If eudaemonia is necessarily rationally-directed activity, then we require the freedom to exercise our own minds and judgments to achieve it. Further, the propriety of pursuing happiness grounds the right to pursue happiness. Rights - the basic concept in social and political philosophy - are principles "defining and sanctioning a man's freedom of action in a social context." Rights define freedoms rather than specific objects to which we might lay claim. (Property rights, as an extension of moral personhood, specify freedoms as to the disposition of goods, not rights to goods themselves.)

Rand's substantive conclusions about rights are closely echoed in Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Basic Books, 1974), and both Rand and Nozick stand opposed to the contemporary "liberal" mainstream, well-represented by John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (Harvard, 1971). For Rawlsians and other liberals, much hinges on whether a Randian or Nozickian conception of justice reliably serves, in practice, the legitimate interests of "the less well-off." In fact, Rand's theory, especially, would merit universal assent only if it could be addressed to the rational self-interest of all members of society; this is a natural consequence of Rand's universalization of egoistic norms (as opposed to the caricature of pretty much all versions of egoism as exception-making on behalf of a talented few). This might "force" Rand and/or Nozick to resort to "empirical" or social-scientific claims on behalf of their laissez-faire capitalist conception of rights and justice.

There are, however, at least two considerations a Randian can raise in addition to acknowledging whatever is the case social-scientifically: (1) Even if there are good arguments showing that people should adopt certain measures aimed at improving the condition or life-prospects of the "less well-off," it doesn't follow that this should be done via the State, an apparatus of coercion; and (2) There is more to the story than simply justice in a political sense: Rand would share with a number of critics of Rawls (or of contemporary mainstream liberalism) the view that a flourishing society would require a conception of virtue for people to adopt; for Rand, especially, a society the members of which are educated in the ways of virtue would be one where politics is hardly needed at all (except for the most minimal rights-protecting functions), for such a society would likely be very full of people who are already flourishing. (A big question, then, is how we could educate a large segment of society in the ways of virtue, i.e., what sort of program of education we ought and are able to adopt and apply effectively. In any event, this process of education would require time.)

Aesthetics

Rand's aesthetics have been little-explored, including by the current author. Here some basics will have to do: Rand saw art as a means of depicting life "as it might be and ought to be." Art serves a fundamental spiritual need in man, and its products affect the audience on a sense-of-life level, sense of life being "a pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics, an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and of existence." Aesthetics, then, would be concerned with the relation between consciously and rationally-adopted values on the one hand, and the immediate, emotional, and subconscious reaction to works of art or beauty on the other. Further, the spiritual needs of man are as integral to Rand's worldview as they are to any religious one; they are located here in the natural world rather than in relation to a supernatural one.

Other

In connection with both epistemology and "sense of life," Rand and other Objectivists have spoken of the subject of psycho-epistemology, or "the study of man’s cognitive processes from the aspect of the interaction between the conscious mind and the automatic functions of the subconscious." This is an intriguing line of study, for it informs us on how people habitually approach their mental content. Psycho-epistemology is chiefly concerned with method, from the standpoint of how our rationally and consciously-directed processes interact with the immediately and automatically given, such as emotions, subconsciously-given intuition, or even habituated (and therefore automatized) thought processes themselves. Automatization is a big concept here and arguably requires some development; among other things, it ties into how we understand the subconscious as being a repository of automatized content and method. A study of psychology also comes to bear on understanding what is automatized in our thought processes, and how. Rand's aim as epistemologist was to make our consciously-directed thought processes so well-formed and habituated that they work in harmony with the subconscious; ideally, sound thought processes would come more or less automatically after habituation - though always, of course, subject to volitional assessment.

Rand's "style" of doing philosophy as it pertains to polemics directed against other thinkers, leaves something to be desired. Many of her claims reduce other thinkers such as Kant to caricatures, and her approach is one of "good guys vs. villains" instead of one of acknowledging other philosophers as providing incomplete, perhaps confused, perhaps even bad, but nonetheless thoughtful and honestly-reasoned perspectives on the Big Issues. This is one aspect of Rand's approach that can be fairly called a blind spot - indeed, one that is often incomplete, confused, bad, etc., even if thoughtful or reasoned in some way or other. She should not be looked to for information on the history of philosophy, just as few commentators should be looked to for information on Rand's ideas herself; the best thing to do in both cases is to study the relevant literature. (It is fair to say, though, that she had a correct basic grasp of the importance of philosophy as it affects the course of history.) It is fair enough to say that Rand's basic sympathies were with Aristotle, while legitimate differences with Plato, Kant and others would arise from that basic sympathy.

Rand's foremost student, Leonard Peikoff, received her full endorsement in a general letter of recommendation (reproduced in Letters of Ayn Rand, Dutton, 1995), and his lecture courses on Objectivism (e.g. Understanding Objectivism, 1983-4) provide valuable insights into Objectivism especially in terms of methodology as distinct from content. The basic content of her philosophy is set forth in complete form in his Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (Dutton, 1991), which is based on a 1976 course which she endorsed. His later courses presuppose a familiarity with the content, and seek instead to provide a guide to everyday thinking processes (philosophically or non), stressing the central methodological concepts of integration, hierarchy, and context. While the courses are almost prohibitively expensive, and Peikoff adopts at times Rand's tendencies in polemics, a full scholarly study of Objectivism should take these courses into account. The aim with the courses, as with Rand's own writings, is the integration of theory and practice, of philosophy and life.

Conclusion

Rand is certainly worth taking seriously as a thinker, despite misgivings I and others have over certain things. I would not expect scholars to find a whole lot that is both new and compelling about her metaphysics. Her epistemology, if correctly understood in its aims, provides a lot of useful material in terms of thinking methods and practical application to the task of day-to-day living. A very small number of thinkers have even yet approached her epistemological writings in these terms. Her ethics stands or falls with the strength of eudaemonism, which is a very promising mainstream alternative to deontology and consequentialism. Her meta-ethics, dealing with concepts of goodness and value, should at the very least stimulate thoughts in these areas, and may help lead to fully-worked-out treatments by scholars of the concept of goodness in naturalistic or perceptually-based terms. Her politics stresses the fundamental importance of freedom of the individual and the tie between ethics and politics. In sum, her epistemology, ethics and political philosophy are areas of strength in her thinking, and where further scholarly study or detailed working-out is warranted.