Objectivism is not sound

Thanks, Pro A1: I. Inductive argument: When Rand said “live”, she meant “live qua man”, meaning “live as an entity with the qualities I have ascribed to entities that are subsumed by the concept “man””. Given this, a severely mentally impaired man, amoeba, or a baby could not choose to live, since none are able to act rationally. Implied within “acting rationally” is “acting volitionally”, since “[reason] is a faculty that man has to exercise by choice.” [1] To live qua man is to necessarily live volitionally, so entities like those Pro mentioned cannot live in the sense that Rand used the phrase and are completely excluded from the current discussion. They’re completely irrelevant – Rand specifically chose to talk only about those things that can and have chosen life, so nothing else should have an impact. Not everything chooses to live if you’re using “live” in the biological sense. A tree does not choose life. However, the kinds of entities that Rand was talking about – volitional entities – can, by definition, choose. Rand basically said that “Things which choose their actions choose their first action, which is to live.” By saying that O’ism never “shows” it to be true that the entities that it’s talking about choose to live can only be the result of pure equivocation. O’ism only talks about and only applies to entities which have to make the choice to live or die – by definition alone O’ism restricts the entities that it talks about to ones with such a choice. For Pro to say that, even if this is the case, O’ism must “show” that those entities have that choice is absurd – it’s like saying that if I say “all squares have four sides” Pro can invalidate my argument by saying “well, what about triangles? They have three sides. Are they squares? How can you show that squares have four sides given the existence of triangles?” The problem is obvious: the original statement encompasses what the original statement encompasses, so the qualities of entities that the statement does not encompass are completely irrelevant – that which it does encompass are encompassed by definition and by virtue of being encompassed. Response to the “Baby Issue”: A baby does not choose to live, but a baby is a special case: a baby will, by all odds, grow into an entity which will be able to make such a choice. The baby itself is valueless outside of the potential it has to stop being a baby – that potential is enough to grant it special protections and rights. Even if babies didn’t have rights, this wouldn’t be a problem – babies, if they didn’t grow into adults, would be equivalent to rocks, so killing them wouldn’t be immoral. O’ism is about living qua man, not qua baby, so this argument fails. “Would you not expect the hospital to be able to answer that question?”” I see no problem with the hospital not being able to answer that question. They can state what is the case (the exact process of the brain transplant and the implications of it), but they cannot make a case for its value because making such a case would require the evaluation of the values that are necessary for evaluation. There is no basis for doing so, since any basis would be the thing being brought into question. “[…] it begs the question” No answer can be given to that question. It is an unquestionable primary. What you can do, though, is make if -> then statements. For example, “If… you choose life, then… follow O’ism”. This is equivalent to saying “If… you want to go to New York, then… take road X” – is this advice faulty because it does not tell you why you should go to New York? The two alphabetical points: A.) It’s relevant if there are viable alternatives to O’ism in the context of the argument I was responding to. The accusation leveled against O’ism was that, if it does not provide a reason to live, and if not doing so would lead to the detriments Pro listed, then it self-contradicts in that it conjures forth these detriments while still claiming to be a life-based phil.. This matters if it is possible to have a rational phil. that doesn’t have these detriments. Yes, if these detriments do exist, an O’ist would much rather that they didn’t, but, if the rest of O’ism holds true, then life qua man is the ultimate standard of value, and this can only be upheld via rationality. Any non-rational belief is immoral. Given this, if O’ism is right about there being no “reason to choose life”, then any phil. that did give such a reason is irrational. Therefore, there is no contradiction in saying that choosing life is pre-moral, since saying anything else, no matter what the benefits would be, would be irrational. You cannot rewrite reality because it would be “better” if things were different – O’ism must stay within the bounds of what is, rather than what is ideal. If a lack of pre-moral purpose causes depression, then depression must be deal. That does not show a contradiction. If there is no better way to live on earth than to follow O’ism, then O’ism has still fulfilled its goal, regardless of whether it’s “abstractly” perfect or not. It’s irrelevant if things would be “better” with a pre-moral purpose – if O’ism is true, there isn’t such a purpose, so there’s no value in pretending that there is. B.) My purpose with this point was not to show that Pro is presupposing that live has value – it was to show that all phil. does so. You cannot hold any philosophical position without holding the idea that life has value, and, from this, it can be drawn that valuing life is pre-phil.. As such, you could never give a philosophical answer to why you should live, and, if this is the case, there’s no “better way” to live on earth than to accept this fact and follow O’ism. II. Rand wrote that values are means to happiness; the pursuit of values leads to happiness. If A results in B, then arguing that you should not pursue B is equivalent to saying that you should not pursue A. Values have the role of A in this relationship, with happiness being B. As quoted before, happiness is the achievement of values, so Pro is advocating abandoning value. The point I made is that not pursuing happiness, according to you, would be the way to pursue happiness. Where H = Happiness, h = happiness – 1, and P = the pursuit of happiness: H + P results in: h H results in: H Given this, the real pursuer of happiness would always choose the latter, meaning that in order to pursue the greatest happiness you must not pursue the greatest happiness, which is a meaningless, paradoxical, and contradictory loop. Therefore, the study is nonsense. A3: I The statement “a triangle has three sides” is timeless and does not depend on any particular cultural interpretation. If a shape has three sides, it is a triangle. If it does not, it is not. In the same way, if an entity is a “rational animal”, it is man. If it is not a rational animal, it is not man. This has nothing to do with the metaphysical status of any entity to any extent farther than looking to see if it meets the requirements of the concept. No matter how culturally charged the concept is, if it was formed according to Rand’s method, it’s absolute and 100% accurate in the context of what it covers. If a hermit is not a rational animal, it is not man. There is no inherent problem here – the concept is accurate as far as it reaches. Pro’s only way to object to this is to appeal to some “platonic form” that dictates what the concept of man really is. There will be more on this later. A is A; three-sided triangle is a three-sided triangle: What is “real value”? How do you determine if a concept has more “real value” than another? What does “unreal value” mean? Pro seems to think concepts should have some “absolute meaning” independent of experience/individual choice – ignoring the fact that conceptualization is just the process of selecting qualities and entities to abstract from all others. There can be no “wrong concept” as long as a quality from reality is distinguished from all others and set as “required” for all entities that wish to fall under the concept. How could there be? I’ve addressed the argument against induction above. Metaphors and induction: Pro is basing this objection off the idea that Rand is “clearly missing a lot of meaning in the term Man.” Where is she getting this “meaning” from, if not from Rand herself? If it is true that Rand’s conception of man doesn’t include this meaning, then she must be using her own concepts to say that Rand is lacking. The fact of the matter is that this is a clear-cut example of equivocation – Rand is using the term “man” in a way that she defines, but Pro objects on the grounds that the term “really means x, y, and z.” The problem is that the only way she could say this is if she’s equivocating two separate concepts, namely her own concept that she labels “man” and the concept that Rand labels “man”. Pro is challenging a statement because she’s using a word that the author gave a clear definition of differently than that author, not because of any flaw inherent in the statement. The argument is based on the conflation of the two words. To Rand, if a man destroyed his rational capacity, he was no longer man because that is how Rand defined “man”. To say that Rand is wrong because “man can be consistently irrational and still be man” is wrong directly by Rand’s definition. There is no “information being lost” because Rand chose a narrow definition. The fact is not that Rand was saying that irrational things are rational or anything else like that – she was saying that irrational things were excluded from the concept of “man”. Pro’s objection is akin to saying that the definition of a triangle as a “three-sided shape” is “too restrictive” because “six-sided shapes exist”, regardless of the fact that those six-sided shapes are not triangles. Unless Pro would like to say that there’s somehow something wrong with defining triangles or anything else in this manner, then her argument here fails. 1.) Virtue of Selfishness