Ayn Rand - Opinion? (preferably informed?)

[josephpalazzo]

@James

Good post.

[lumpymunk]

The capitalism part may demand a much more stringent emphasis on individualism than most corporations have - potentially converting "normal" corporations with investors into cooperatives where each individual truly works for their own benefit. As-is, corporate executives have excessive amounts of unearned power and wealth. They use this wealth to turn the lower class into de facto slaves to the upper class, so the poor never (or rarely) have the opportunity to work for their own benefit.

The problem with corporations right now is how protected the decision makers are, thanks to the way things are structured legally.  Corporations are not individuals, and philosophically how they can be construed as such is the root of most of the problems.  This wouldn't exist without government passing laws giving them this legal status.  Trying to look at corporations as they exist now and drawing any inferences about what form they would take under the environment Objectivism advocates only drops the context.

Do you think Ayn Rand's ideas fit well with the natural state of the world (are practical), or do you think her ideas are difficult to apply or unfinished?

The objectivist response is that not only are they practical but mandatory.   Mandatory in the sense that "In order to achieve happiness on earth as a human being you must behave in certain ways."  This question is tackled in detail in the books "Philosophy: Who needs it?" and "For the New Intellectual."  These are a series of lectures that talk about the importance of philosophy in every day life.  Each are about the same length as Virtue of Selfishness.

Couldn't machines like IBM's Watson pick up the weight?

Certainly, to an extent...  What happens when the machine misdiagnoses a patient or two and a stream of legal battles attack the software developers to the point where (as is the case for being a doctor) the liability is so great that it no longer becomes an attractive career choice?  What will be the regulatory backlash of such a misdiagnosis?  How long before incompetant politicians begin passing laws to "fix" it?

How soon before they put some code in there that engages in essentially the same defensive medicine most doctors engage in now overprescribing anti-biotics to avoid legal trouble?

It's a balancing act to find out how much the government should or shouldn't be involved, but to always have one solution or another is just plain idiotic, and this seems to be Rands approach to things.

Mounds of literature more than make the case that government "meddling" is the root cause of all problems that the government then attempts to go back and "fix" after blaming "the market" which it poisoned in the first place.  The "great recession" was a perfect example.  This isn't an attack on Objectivism specifically though, in order to do that you'll need to attack the principles upon which objectivisms political theory is grounded.  It covers more than just Capitalism.  Individual Rights, Limited Government, and Objective Laws are also components of Objectivist politics.

http://www.atlassociety.org/objectivist_politics

Her philosophy is extreme and broad in it's approach to world problems, believing that every problem can be solved by capitalism and free markets, much in the way that Marxism believes that all problems can be solved with communism.

My first answer to you shows this to be incorrect.  Capitalism is just a piece of it.  Individualism is much more fundamental, and capitalism is the just application of individualism on a national scale.  Objectivism attempts to build its political philosophy off of its moral philosophy, and treats it as an extension of ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology.  Some countries explicitly do not endorse individualism, just like some countries explicitly endorse false conceptions of metaphysics (mysticism) and epistemology (faith).  Objectivism is not so shallow as to prescribe "sprinkle a little capitalism on it" to fix everything.

While Objectivism promotes capitalism, that aspect of it has really been given too much attention simply because that's the bit other ideologies agree with.  Republicans will promote Ayn Rand as a justification for Capitalism but ignore the more fundamental components of the philosophy that "lead up to" Objectivism's endorsement of Capitalism.  That contradiction is made perfectly clear when you consider "selfless charitable Christians" (Republicans) who attempt to promote a value-for-value based economic system of greed and selfishness.  The two are incompatible... but you never hear about any other aspects of Objectivism because the exposure is limited to that little bit.

[JamesTheUnjust]

It's a balancing act to find out how much the government should or shouldn't be involved, but to always have one solution or another is just plain idiotic, and this seems to be Rands approach to things.

Mounds of literature more than make the case that government "meddling" is the root cause of all problems that the government then attempts to go back and "fix" after blaming "the market" which it poisoned in the first place.  The "great recession" was a perfect example.  This isn't an attack on Objectivism specifically though, in order to do that you'll need to attack the principles upon which objectivisms political theory is grounded.  It covers more than just Capitalism.  Individual Rights, Limited Government, and Objective Laws are also components of Objectivist politics.

There's also numerous economists that see Randian approaches to economic issues as being half-baked at best and destructive at worst. Most market failures have zero to do with government and more to do with foolish business practices that work in the short run, only to result in massive contraction eventually. It's all good until the holiday is finally over, and then business want to blame some outside party -- a party which they routinely come crawling to fix their mess. This isn't to say the government has never created a mess on their own, or that they've never made a problem worse. My only complaint is when business men never take the responsibility from within their own corner of the private sector and acknowledge that some business practices are in fact, extremely short sided and reckless.

My first answer to you shows this to be incorrect.  Capitalism is just a piece of it.  Individualism is much more fundamental, and capitalism is the just application of individualism on a national scale.  Objectivism attempts to build its political philosophy off of its moral philosophy, and treats it as an extension of ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology.  Some countries explicitly do not endorse individualism, just like some countries explicitly endorse false conceptions of metaphysics (mysticism) and epistemology (faith).  Objectivism is not so shallow as to prescribe "sprinkle a little capitalism on it" to fix everything.

While Objectivism promotes capitalism, that aspect of it has really been given too much attention simply because that's the bit other ideologies agree with.  Republicans will promote Ayn Rand as a justification for Capitalism but ignore the more fundamental components of the philosophy that "lead up to" Objectivism's endorsement of Capitalism.  That contradiction is made perfectly clear when you consider "selfless charitable Christians" (Republicans) who attempt to promote a value-for-value based economic system of greed and selfishness.  The two are incompatible... but you never hear about any other aspects of Objectivism because the exposure is limited to that little bit.

Objectivism is just libertarian minarchism with half-baked metaphysics and repulsive ethics. There's nothing in Ayn Rands advocacy that is at all original. This is why so many libertarians and anarcho-capitalists loved her work, while she had nothing but strong contempt for them. It was because at the core of libertarianism is the advocacy for enhancing other life style through more free economies.  Ayn Rand could not have been less interested in this idea. She was far more interested in putting people in what she felt was their rightful, lowly places, where in she was superior to all, while being free of all responsibility of societal issues that may effect someone else.

All political philosophies have wonderful sounding principles. Conservatives talk about less government and rant and rave about freedom, but their actions seem to tell a hypocritically different story the moment you look at their policy. You have to look beyond the PR of a ideology and ask yourself what the relationship is between ones principles... and ones behavior. Kinda like when Christians talk about religious freedom but advocate all kinds of clear theocratic policy. Sometimes people use pretty words and slogans to draw people into an ideology, all the while having an underlying motive with an extremely questionable set of ethics.

[Mister Agenda]

The difference between conservatives, liberals, and libertarians may have as much to do with their moral intuitions as their ideology.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi ... ne.0042366

"As predicted by intuitionist theories concerning the origins of moral reasoning, libertarian values showed convergent relationships with libertarian emotional dispositions and social preferences. Our findings add to a growing recognition of the role of personality differences in the organization of political attitudes."--Jonathan Haidt

The short of it: An evaluation in regard to Moral Foundations theory (care/no harm, fairness/no cheating, liberty/no oppression, loyalty/no betrayal, authority/no subversion, sanctity/no degradation), people who identify as libertarian scored high on the liberty measure, and as low or lower on the other measures compared to liberals and conservatives. Liberals value the first two more highly and the last four less than conservatives. Conservatives value them roughly equally, which puts them significantly lower than liberals regarding care and fairness.

Predictably (this is my interpretation), liberals tend to think that people who don't value care and fairness as much as they do are selfish and unjust, conservatives think people who don't value loyalty, authority, and sanctity as much as they do are out to undermine society; and the libertarians say 'a pox on both your houses, why can't you just leave people alone if they're not hurting anyone?'.

This would explain why libertarians are a fairly representative cross-section of society rather than just a bunch of people who 'got theirs'. They aren't libertarians because of perceived advantage (many of them could take advantage of available beneifits), but because they have a 'libertarian personality'.

[lumpymunk]

Most market failures have zero to do with government and more to do with foolish business practices that work in the short run, only to result in massive contraction eventually.

Without getting off topic, this could have an entire forum dedicated to it.  It's understood there are different viewpoints.

There's nothing in Ayn Rands advocacy that is at all original.

Ayn Rand was the first to identify the logical fallacy of the stolen concept... which entails attempting to use a concept while denying the validity of its genetic roots.  Essentially this is the inverse of begging the question.  She describes this in an Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.

In addition, it isn't always in the presentation of a "new idea" that makes a philosopher original.  Most of the time originality comes in the way those ideas are presented (argued), integrated differently, or extended in ways previously not done.  This was Ayn Rand's primary achievement.

Ayn Rand's attempt was to present philosophy in a coherent way from start to finish (metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics, aesthetics), to determine where one must begin if one wants to understand philosophy, and proceed from there without contradiction.  We could have a separate debate on whether she achieved this, but I wouldn't be willing to engage with anyone who isn't well read on how she attempted this integration.

This is why so many libertarians and anarcho-capitalists loved her work, while she had nothing but strong contempt for them. It was because at the core of libertarianism is the advocacy for enhancing other life style through more free economies. Ayn Rand could not have been less interested in this idea.

Actually the reason is because in Ayn Rand's view, political philosophy is not possible without ethics, just as ethics is not possible without epistemology and metaphysics.  The idea of a philosophical viewpoint that was void of coherent metaphysics and epistemology can not produce a coherent political philosophy.  Any attempt to probe into the underpinnings of libertarianism or anarcho-capitalism collapses just like Christianity does in that there are so many sects that "build into" those political philosophies.

Another way to put it is, Ayn Rand didn't view these political philosophies as "substantive" or "sufficient" to accomplish their intended purpose because they lacked the philosophical underpinnings that an Objectivist understanding of politics brings with it.

Conservatives talk about less government and rant and rave about freedom, but their actions seem to tell a hypocritically different story the moment you look at their policy.

Ayn Rand would agree with your criticism.

Also if you're interested (probably not) you could check out...

http://www.aynrandmyths.com/

...helps to be informed about the subject you hold such strong opinions about.

[Jmpty]

The stolen concept fallacy was not a new concept, just giving a new name to Aristotle"s Reaffirmation through denial.

[lumpymunk]

Argument is pretty straight forward.

I offer you the reason why the reaffirmation through denial is a precursor to, but is not the same as, the stolen concept. The reaffirmation through denial involves me trying to disprove something by an argument which already assumes the existence of said thing. So, the usual example is the psychologist who tries to disprove the consciousness as an illusion of a bunch of chemicals in the brain. However, an illusion assumes someone is having the wool pulled over their eyes - i.e. it assumes some exists to be fooled.

Now, the stolen concept does more than this. When I commit this fallacy, I am not necessarily trying to disprove something via the assumed existence of it (though it may be what I do), but rather, I am attempting to affirm the application of a concept in a way that disproves its antecedents. Now, whereas the reaffirmation relies on accepting the existence of the concept itself to deny it, the stolen concept takes on the wider fallacy, of eradicating the very meaning of the concept when you try to cut it off from its conceptual ties. The classification of the reaffirmation requires grasping that you cannot contradict yourself; the stolen concept requires grasping that all knowledge is hierarchical and integrated.

//http://forum.objectivismonline.com/index.php?showtopic=14592&p=197699

You can also skip down and read part 4 in this link.
http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/metaphysics.4.iv.html

[Jmpty]

When you cut and paste others words, you should at least give them credit. You should perhaps read "Metaphysics" by Aristotle yourself, and then comment on how it differs from Rand.

[lumpymunk]

I edited it all nice and pretty for you Jmpty.  Forgive me for not wasting too much time trying to reply to your banal unanalytical contributions.

[Jmpty]

Man, some people get so testy when they get caught pretending to know stuff.

[lumpymunk]

Still off topic.  Check.
Still unwilling to actually discuss why your attempt to disprove the originality of the stolen concept fallacy failed.  Check.

Predictably worthless.

[Jmpty]

Ignoratio elenchi.

[josephpalazzo]

Unfortunately, this thread has devolved into a pissing contest.

Will the mods please close this thread?

Thank you.

[lumpymunk]

Easier still, just delete all of jmpty's off-topic trolling.

Thanks,

[Jmpty]

Easier still, just delete all of jmpty's off-topic trolling.

Thanks,

Well, I won't just sit here and be insulted. I'm going to sit over there instead. Please continue.