It isn't difficult to throw down the gauntlet against Ayn Rand's detractors (which includes a sub-group of intellectual swamp-dwellers I refer to as Rand-bashers -- very low-hanging fruit).
The gauntlet-throwing goes something like this: Make your case that Rand shouldn't be taken seriously to the faces of Ayn Rand Society scholars who can competently vet for accuracy the (almost uniformly ignorant but hubris-driven) negative critical characterizations of Rand's ideas. (That Rand detractors uniformly demonstrate by their behavior that they are less concerned with accuracy about Rand than with having an opinion about her, is compelling evidence of dishonesty on their part, all on its own, IMNSHO.)
So I'd issue this triple dog dare to any and all of Rand's detractors: follow J.S. Mill's advice and present your case to the most formidable representatives of the 'Randian' position you can find - those who (using Mill's terminology) present the case for Randian ideas in the most plausible and persuasive form (since Rand isn't around to defend herself ffs). Ayn Rand Society scholars fit that characterization as well as anyone. They have dual expertise - in academic philosophy and in Objectivism. The (blatantly dishonest) claim that Rand isn't taken seriously by "experts in philosophy" actually means the following if it is to be rendered in any way persuasive or plausible: Rand is not taken seriously by expert practitioners in philosophy who are not also experts in Rand's Objectivism. (Should this even come as a surprise, given Mill's very sage advice about having and testing opinions?)
And yet these "expert" critics would fall apart all too easily when thinkers with feet in both camps can all too readily "translate" this or that point in Rand into academia-speak. "Dougs" Den Uyl and Rasmussen do this all the time, like they did in their rebuttal to Nozick's "On the Randian Argument" (which Rand's usually-dishonest detractors cite as the final word on the subject). That's not to mention their "Aristotelianizing" of Rand in their essays in The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand, and in the academy Aristotle is not exactly considered a lightweight. (The Dougs can manage very expertly to draw the parallels between these two thinkers; why can't everyone else?)
So just as soon as any Rand detractor is ready to engage in actual good-faith dialectic with the likes of Ayn Rand Society scholars (and not, like the lowlifes on /r/badphilosophy, picking on arguments made by Objectivists not so academically established, or arguments by the author of this here blog, say [bring it on, I triple dog dare you; all I ask for is intellectual honesty, is that too hard?]) -- only then would I be ready to take these entities seriously.
In Galt's Speech, Galt/Rand state: "Man has a single basic choice: to think or not, and that is the gauge of his virtue. Moral perfection is an unbreached rationality—not the degree of your intelligence, but the full and relentless use of your mind, not the extent of your knowledge, but the acceptance of reason as an absolute."
I've never encountered a Rand detractor who honestly considered the meaning and import of such statements in Rand's writings. Typically a Rand detractor will focus instead on mocking the statement "Existence exists." And a typical Rand detractor will simply concoct out of thin air the notion that for Rand, it's Rand who gets to define what "unbreached rationality" means (i.e., agreement with the philosophy of Ayn Rand -- so Prof. Hospers was failing to use his mind to the fullest when it came to disagreements with Rand? [Rand-detractor blanks out, as always]). But these folks don't, in any remotely credible way, get to ignore the totality of Rand's statements once they start pointing to this or that Rand quote to be a detractor about. Once they're committed to opining about Rand, they have to play by certain rules of intellectual integrity or GTFO. One of those rules is one extremely central and key to Rand's philosophy: context-keeping (a point in Rand's philosophy her detractors know absolutely zilch about, else they wouldn't be detractors - at least on this point - since of course there's no coherent case to be made against context-keeping). These context-keeping rules ethically compel one to consider the full context of Rand's statements, i.e., the full body of her work, and to do so in the utmost good faith and intellectual curiosity.
(And there's even free will here. Even such low-character individuals as Rand-bashers have it within themselves to be great, but it's up to them.)
And so, part of the body of Rand's public writings include an endorsement of Leonard Peikoff's 1976 course on her philosophy. In an open 1981 'Letter of Recommendation' she described Peikoff as eminently qualified to teach her philosophy - and anyone who knows all the surrounding history know that Rand couldn't remotely possibly give such an endorsement lightly. Anyway, if anyone is most curious and good-faithy about what Rand meant by the virtue of rationality, over and above the Galt passage, or whatever else one finds in the Ayn Rand Lexicon, one would - if diligent enough, and it shouldn't be hard - to find it spelled out in much detail in Peikoff's Understanding Objectivism (1983) and elsewhere. In that course, you get not only the Lexicon passages and the generalized statements about key & central concepts of epistemic/cognitive method like context, integration, and hierarchy in the 1976 course (adapted as Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (1991), a standard/reference text that any Rand scholar/commentator worth taking seriously would take seriously, which automatically excludes the likes of Heller and Duggan), but Peikoff goes indepth with many examples of how to respect context and hierarchy.
From the standpoint of "Rand Studies" it doesn't really matter in the slightest that Rand herself didn't provide this detailed content in such courses to fill in what she doesn't say in her writings; her endorsement of Peikoff as teacher of her ideas suffices to make him an indispensable source of Rand scholarship. (With the 1976 course there is no ambiguity about this whatsoever. While Understanding Objectivism did in fact come a year or so after her death, the 1976 course was authorized by Rand herself, and so it is kinda dishonest on its face for Rand's critics not to even acknowledge such material, yes? What else than some form of dishonesty or other - and intellectual laziness, complacency and hubris are forms of dishonesty - would explain this level of ignorance? How is it not willful, culpable ignorance given the 45 year stretch between that course and today no less? But the pattern holds up in the case of the absence of anything remotely resembling a serious critique of the Galt Speech, some 64 years after its publication no less. Surely a relevant error in Galt's speech - a real error, not a strawman that Rand's detractors typically if not always employ - would have pointed out by now? I can't even imagine what that would supposedly be. And when it comes to the quality of Understanding Objectivism even without Rand's being alive to vet it all the way, there are countless longtime students of Objectivism (the folks whose intellectual context the detractors have chosen - have bent over backwards in fact - to be ignorant of) who would nonetheless attest to its value for understanding "how to think like an Objectivist.")
My ultimate philosophical standard-setter is Aristotle, who (despite errors he committed) perfected the art of dialectic and I essentially rank philosophers in merit/importance based on how well they approximate this perfection. And when the editor of the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (also willfully ignored by Rand's detractors) makes a big deal about "dialectic(s) as the art of context-keeping" I get most curious. Don't you, dear reader, get most curious to learn more? I mean, a dialectical sensibility would pretty much require one to get curious. (Prove me wrong.) As a historically contingent matter, as to my own intellectual context, I got into the study of philosophy via Rand - encountering her Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal in my teens while still mainly a student of economics put me on the path to ethics and political philosophy (how have I done so far?) - but I certainly don't consider the be-all and end-all of philosophy (refer back to the first sentence in this paragraph). But I do consider Ayn Rand to be a very helpful litmus test for who really has a clue and about what. The very most intelligent philosophical people that I know of are those who know what to take seriously in Rand and how. (Note, it's not her polemics against the likes of Kant. For that, I'd throw down exactly the same gauntlet to Kant-detractors among Randians (and there are a lot of them...), to support their case that Kant is "the most evil man in mankind's history" (Rand's own words) to the faces of some selected group of Kant scholars who can vet the characterizations for accuracy and context, and best of luck with that. For more effective - and by necessity more detailed and lengthy - polemics, I like how Mises takes down socialism and the Marxoid variant in particular.
(BTW, I have now gone through the whole of the Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx as I said earlier I would do as a condition of making further commentary on Marx/Marxism (as per Mill's advice, etc.). The only essay that is somewhat impressive in there is Ollmann's outline of Marx's dialectical method. And yet one of Ollmann's students - the aforementioned editor of the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies - holds that such method has its roots in Aristotle and that Rand exemplifies it in the development of her philosophy [though not necessarily of her polemics against other thinkers; Hospers had similar opinions which he told Rand directly about and he kind of knew his stuff]. How does a Rand detractor honestly account for this? [I'm not holding my breath.] Now, the Oxford Handbooks series is a first-rate scholarship and research resource, and if the Marx one is as unimpressive overall as I found it to be, I don't see much if any future for Marx studies among honest first-rate scholars and thinkers. The scholars in the Marx Handbook are hardly dialectical over and above their preaching. About the only thing I can see Marxism and not some other system of thought (dialectical or otherwise) having gotten correct which might explain its appeal to socialists is that laborers in capitalist society have historically had it tough - especially those with the least specialized skill sets and hence bargaining position - and that maybe there are ways of making things less miserable for such people. The utter pile of BS comes when it's capitalism specifically that these socialists blame for such conditions, and their avoidance of dialectic with capitalism's leading thinkers (especially Rand and Mises, but there are plenty of others who can identify what's bunk in Marx/Marxism) speaks volumes IMNSHO. That's all I have to say about that for now.)
As for Rand as the litmus test for intellectual honesty: maybe some other thinker(s) could be used as an example (I mean, how often is Aristotle lazily/dishonestly caricatured ffs?), but Rand is a good one: she's controversial, her political ideas are certainly opposed to that of the Academic Mainstream. (Supposedly it's the same with her ethics, but lo and behold, the Dougs were right on this decades ago and those in the academy with a clue are coming to the realization: Rand's egoism is a version of neo-Aristotelian eudaimonist virtue ethics (with of course rationality as spelled out in Rand/Peikoff's body of work being the primary virtue which explains the others - independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, pride). (Question: how does Rand's ethics - dialectically steelmanned of course - play off dialectically with and/or against Gewirth's Self-Fulfillment, itself the product of a comprehensive lifelong exercise in dialectic? And why the heck isn't Gewirth's book itself all the rage?)
And what I find, countless times without exception, is mostly politically-left Rand detractors (although the ones on the Right are hardly better), not just on internet forums but in the academy, being utterly, disgustingly un-dialectical in their treatment of Rand. And I use Rand as a litmus test because I figure if these academic creatures are willing to play as fast and loose with their characterizations of Rand as they do, and given that such ideas correctly grasped are as full of merit as Ayn Rand Society scholars maintain, I know with a certainty that these folks will go the extra mile to crap all over the best thinkers if those thinkers don't conform to their "progressive" ideas an MO.
And what has that "progressive" academic MO become in recent years? Well, the Amy Wax episode serves as an illustrative case. Prof. Wax dared to say that the racial achievement gap might not be completely chalked up to systemic racism but rather that (objectively troubling) phenomena like the rate of single-parent families in the Black community arguably help to explain the achievement gap (and that a rigorous adoption of "bourgeois values" would go a long way to fix that problem). For speaking her mind thus, fellow Ivy League (University of Pennsylvania) students and faculty went apeshit, construing her arguments as 'white supremacist' and other such silliness, not bothering to give her a chance to defend herself against these charges in an honest dialectical fashion (and so they treated their determination of what her views were as the final determination - how is this not blatantly f'ing dishonest?), and signed letters calling in effect for her cancellation (her only protection being tenure, but we can forget about academic freedom without that protection, right?). Nothing remotely resembling an honest inquiry and exchange of ideas occurred at this Ivy League venue. (And when a Black professor, Brown's Glenn Loury, makes similar points that Wax did, guess what the "progressive" response to Loury is. Silence. A dishonest silence resulting from refusal to engage dialectically, and/or a refusal to know the most plausible and persuasive arguments from a given side. But at least Loury doesn't get smeared like Wax did. Guess why. His skin color. And that, too, is blatantly dishonest. Still, somehow these creatures don't consider it racist to ignore a Black scholar's research; I thought that was the essence of a racist behavior according to these creatures?) (Hot take: I think the Left is such an intellectual basket-case now, so dialectically inept and so useless for tracking truth, that its "Woke" narratives about systemic racism are the product of a failure of "progressive" social policy to close the achievement gap. They are doubling down on the dogma and refusal to have dialogue even with the likes of Prof. Loury. It's pathetic.)
(Also: the pattern of blatant dishonesty with Wax/Penn is repeated in how James Damore was canceled/fired by Google. Strawman, refuse dialogue, and cancel forthwith. And somehow even this ridiculous behavior has its defenders/rationalizers! In any case, this behavior within corporations and the ideology motivating has its origins in the Academy. If you challenge the ideology strongly enough, don't expect an honest response; expect being called a racist/sexist, denied lucrative opportunities, or - if you're Black - being ignored outright.)
And outside of exceptions (which prove the rule) like University of Chicago which make explicit a commitment to academic freedom, this kind of anti-Millian, dishonest-smear approach has become the "norm" in academia. And had these folks not been so thoroughly, blatantly dishonest in their approach to Rand, the litmust test case, I might have given these creatures the benefit of the doubt. I've since abandoned such hopes, short of a revolutionary overhaul of what the Academy has become (when it comes to politically-charged matters, at any rate).
So, to sum up, and once again: Rand's detractors don't deserve to be taken seriously in the slightest until they rise to the challenge of taking on Ayn Rand Society scholars, the editor of the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, and other such people that Mill would advise going to in order to actually understand that with which one supposedly disagrees. (I mean, who in their right mind believes that rationality-as-context-keeping as the primary virtue is something to disagree with? But what else is one to make of what Rand's detractors stubbornly-ignorantly say?) And given that for 60-some years now the Academy has failed to do the minimal Mill-recommended thing, speaks volumes about a politically-charged corruption of the Academy. A disgusting, despicable corruption that shows true colors when the chips are down.
I won't hold my breath. Dishonest people might well prefer going to the grave dishonest rather than admit a bad behavior they indulged in for years or decades on end. If honest dialogue is not what they're after, then it's a state of intellectual war; they are enemies of truth and inquiry. That the academy would subsidize and protect this blatant dishonesty (in Rand-detractors' case, for six decades and counting) calls for an accounting that won't piss off the American people in its avoidance of addressing the core problems and means by which the Academic Humanities and Social Sciences parasitize upon them (the American people). If they treat an Aristotelian thinker such as Rand like garbage, what garbage behaviors won't they engage in (and at taxpayer expense, etc.)? When it comes to Rand (and capitalist thought generally), the "leading academic philosophy blogger," a tenured Law Professor at a top school no less, is dishonest garbage and I see no problem with calling him out for that. California taxpayer funds are used to financially support Duggan's blatantly dishonest trash under the guise of scholarship (and the scholars blurbing that book are similarly trash who bend over backward to ignore.
Perhaps I should come up with some sizable monetary bet, which I'd be guaranteed to win, to the effect that Rand's detractors will never rise to this challenge?
Being a Rand detractor (and I don't mean someone who disagrees with her polemical approach, else that would make Hospers a "detractor") is not an honest-and-informed option. No honest informed person thinks that context-keeping wasn't of fundamental focus for Rand (whatever errors she committed), as inextricable from her entire way of thinking. Should I make that sizable monetary bet on whether a Rand detractor could identify and explain what Rand was onto with this context-keeping stuff (before even getting to any commentary or critique of Rand on this topic). How does one reliably and integrally understand Rand's concept of self-interest without considering the entire context of her philosophy ffs? I mean, after all, Rand says the utmost achievement of one's values (a proxy for selfishness; agent-relative value) requires a mastery of the right sort of cognitive process (those much like Aristotle's, say), and hence why she bothered to venture into epistemology and method much more than she did in (e.g.) Galt's speech.
And it so happens that proper familiarity with ('correct grasp of') Rand's ideas usually results in a deep admiration for Rand whatever one's disagreements. You could just go and ask the aforementioned Society and Journal people yourself, or see Rand entries in this here blog.
So, how did the Academy become so populated with people so hubristically sure that Rand is a hack, lightweight, evil, etc. while never engaging in an honest dialectic with her defenders? (This must surely be asked about any academic "philosophers" who unprofessionally bash or dismiss Rand. The existence of the Ayn Rand Society all on its own should put these "philosophers" dead to rights in their professional malpractice. J.S. Mill, following his own advice, wouldn't debase himself so.) Along the same lines, how did it become so populated with people who refuse to engage in honest dialectic with the likes of Prof. Loury? It's not just pathetic, it's ridiculous. But it's not like the meltdown of the (non-STEM) Academy is any secret these days; the only issue is arriving at a proper diagnosis. And we can arrive at such a diagnosis if we refer to such litmus-test cases as Rand and Loury (and many, many others...). And the solution to this cause of the Meltdown is pretty simple: just be intellectually honest ffs, how hard can it be? Are you so wedded in your opinions to leftist/"progressive" ideology (now mutated into "wokism" and other such ideological framings foreign to the American mainstream and formulated by the "woke" one-sidedly without anything resembling an honest dialectic with that mainstream) that you refuse to have them challenged on a level field of play?
ADDENDUM: The Ayn Rand Society's Philosophical Studies series (3 volumes and counting, the fourth to be on the relation between Rand and Aristotle) contains back-and-forth between Objectivists and professional philosophers who don't identify as Objectivists but somehow found a way to take Rand seriously. Why can't everyone else (or at least those who hold an opinion on Rand) follow their lead? Ask enough questions like this and insistently enough, and Rand-detractors get cornered like the intellectual/ethical rats they are. (But to repeat, it's within them to do and be much better.)
ADDENDUM #2: Whereas the Understanding Objectivism course was only in expensive audio format for nearly 30 years (around $270 back in the day, and easily worth it), and as such was that much less accessible/available for scholarly research, the transcribed book version has been in print for 9 years and counting now. The existence of this material in book form has been made well-known by online Objectivists these past 9 years to anyone who will listen. This here gauntlet has been on the ground for 9 goddamn years and still the Rand-detractors won't lift a finger to be honest. Those Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies volumes are also now accumulating years of availability (although they're not quite as cheap as Understanding). The detractors pretend like none of this material exists. (Or maybe they just don't have a clue at all. Which is worse?) I've encountered countless Rand-detractors who, without a single exception, refuse to be honest and usually get nasty when challenged. That's a green light to induction about their character. I can't fathom what other conclusion one can rationally reach at this point. I've done the homework; I've provided abundant documentation/links in this blog post and others; I've contributed a journal article debunking a common lazy and undialectical caricature of Randian egoism; I know the lay of the land. And Rand-detractors are losers, end of story. They'd never accept the gauntlet-challenge; they are cowards such as they are. (But to repeat, it's within them to do and be much better.)
ADDENDUM #3: Readers familiar with this blog will already have some ideas about what I offer on the positive-proposal front. I envision an end of history (or some equivalent using other terminology) a defining or formal characteristic of which is dialectical method which means (among other things) universal steelmanning of ideas. (Mill and I believe Aristotle would approve!) What is dialectic (as to sorting through competing plausible opinions as distinct from context-keeping generally) than universal steelmanning? (And I speak here specifically of the intellectual aspect of an end of history; I'm making an educated guess that that this intellectual aspect will have ethical and aesthetic analogues.) And how distinct (in terms of referential extension) would universal steelmanning be, from more or less universal exposure of the citizenry to a formal Philosophical education (e.g., Philosophy for Children)? (The one rule I would institute for Philosophy for Children (P4C) is: Steelmanning Only. The rest is gravy.) I really don't think it's too demanding (once the principles are made readily digestible by the citizenry) to do steelmanning-only or at least aspire to that standard. But I've also said that the (or merely "an"?) end of history would have an Aristotelian character, primarily because of the dialectical methodological example Aristotle set (whatever his errors). But such appellations and terminology don't matter nearly as much as the methdological practice itself. (Did I mention that such practice is perfectionistic?) (Any dialectic constituting the 'end of history' must of necessity compare and contrast dialectic in the Aristotelian and Hegelian senses. It's not clear to me that Hegel claims to "supersede" Aristotelian dialectic so much as to incorporate it, with some 'dynamical' analysis of history as a process of ideas (small 'I' in Hegel's format?) coming to better and better fruition, through dialectic. So wouldn't Hegel say that no one can accord to ignore, dismiss, or - per the usual lowlife practice - strawman Rand's ideas about human perfection, i.e., intellectual perfectionism? Strawmanning gets in the way of progress toward the end of history -- so let's aggressively marginalize strawmanning behavior accordingly....)
