Talk:Objectivism/Archive 3

message: i don't know if the following problem is an intrinsic problem of objectivism or whether it's a lack of clarity which could be improved by making the wording less ambiguous.
Indeed, on the Objectivist account, one of the corollaries of the right to life is the right to property, i.e., to the disposition of the product of one's own effort; on this view, one person's right to life cannot entail the right to dispose of the products of another's effort.
This seems to me to say that an individual human being should not own property which is the product of another's effort, e.g. you can own a house and a garden but not an organisation, since an organisation is due to many people's efforts.
On the Objectivist account, the rights of other human beings are not of direct moral import to the agent who respects them; they acquire their moral purchase through an intermediate step. An Objectivist respects the rights of other human beings out of the recognition of the value to himself or herself of living in a world in which the freedom of action of other rational (or potentially rational) human beings is respected.
OK, it's rather solipsistic, but at least this paragraph seems to me internally consistent.
According to Objectivism, then, one's respect for the rights of others is founded on the value, to oneself, of other persons as actual or potential trading partners. Here is where Objectivism's claim about conflicts of interest attains its full significance: on the Objectivist view, it is precisely because there are no (irresoluble) such conflicts that it is possible for human beings to prosper in a rights-respecting society.
OK, let's suppose that this is true regarding absence of irresolvable conflicts.
Objectivist political theory therefore defends capitalism as the ideal form of human society. Objectivism reserves the name "capitalism" for full laissez-faire capitalism...
Here is what i don't understand. There are 6 billion of us. If there is no collective property, and the only property considered morally acceptable is by individuals based on their personal efforts, then AFAIK there cannot be much accumulation of capital - certainly not on the scale to build aeroplanes or train lines or electricity generating and distributing systems, since any of these involve property which is the cumulative effort of many people, and since no collective property is allowed, nor ownership of property due to other people's efforts, these collective systems cannot exist in the model - at best there can be small, tribal-level, agricultural communities of 30-40 people as in '60s self-sufficient-back-to-nature experimental communities. In fact, even any sort of building beyond the size of a family house would have to be abandoned, since otherwise there would be either collective property or private property based on other people's efforts.
In any case, AFAIK, laissez-faire capitalism 
*encourages the accumulation of capital way beyond what any individual has created through his/her own efforts, and 
*it does not ban inheritance from one's parents
*encourages the setting of prices by bargaining power, not by rational interests
*it encourages the existence of companies with much more than one employee, i.e. where there is a collective form of property due to the collective efforts of many people in the company - the fact that one individual may own this property, or that a bunch of people, many of who did not contribute effort in producing the property, nevertheless do dispose of the products of another's effort to a very great extent, which is earlier stated to be contrary to objectivism.
So i don't understand the link between private property related to one's personal efforts and capitalism - the term private property in capitalism certainly can mean individual property gained from one's own efforts in production, but also means individual property gained by dominating others, by manipulating others, and/or by using one's claimed or real superiority over others, and it also means property owned collectively by a group or network of people which decides things secretly and is not subject to elections or any other form of democratic participation by the people contributing the efforts to that property...
It seems to me that objectivism, at least as explained here, is appropriate for hippy communities of 30-40 people, but not for a 6 billion member society.
Anyway, if this is an intrinsic self-contradiction in objectivism, then IMHO there's nothing to be changed in the article; on the contrary, if i've misunderstood, then maybe someone might want to make a clarification. 
Boud 01:30, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Yeah, your main misunderstanding is that Objectivism has nothing against creating wealth by collective effort. However, all that wealth does end up with individual owners thanks to contracts and trade. If I hired 2000 people to design and build airplanes, those people could consent to provide their services to me for a price. I would pay that price and thus buy from them the fruits of their effort. This is an elementary explanation--more detailed explanations can be given for more complicated situations. Philwelch 09:38, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for the response, but in that case IMHO there is a correction to be made. Instead of one person's right to life cannot entail the right to dispose of the products of another's effort., there should be the phrase one person's right to life cannot entail the right to dispose of the products of another's effort, unless the products of another's effort are transferred by contract and/or trade. Boud 01:18, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I took the opportunity to expand that section. Thanks! Philwelch 02:43, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)
replies: text:  Thanks, i modified your change a bit to make the logical relation clearer. i also added what i guess is probably intended in objectivism, that the receiving/giving of one's property is carried out under a contract with no coercion. I admit i'm only guessing here - but if objectivism says nothing about this, then it's a big weakness. In the real world, most transfers of the products of one's effort are traded under various forms of coercion, some more subtle, some more obviously manipulative, some overtly violent. Boud 15:22, 10 Aug 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  private property vs capitalism unclear 

message: I changed the original sentence "Sensory perception is considered axiomatically "valid", on the grounds that it is allegedly self-contradictory to deny the efficacy of the senses as sources of genuine knowledge." I remove the word allegedly because the verb "is considered" makes it clear that this is a tenet in Objectivism with which one need not agree. This being the case, it is unnecessarily redundant to call attention to the fact that not everyone agrees with the grounds of that tenet. Also, the word "allegedly" renders the sentence false, because an Objectivist would hardly claim to ground an axiom on an allegation!
: Blanchette 17:14, 4 Sep 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree with the change, but I'm curious: how can the earlier version of the statement be both redundant and false? If 'allegedly' is redundant, it adds nothing, and therefore a fortiori can't add anything that changes the truth-value of the statement. Conversely, if it adds something that makes the statement false, it isn't redundant. --Scottryan 11:19, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Paradoxical, isn’t it?  It’s gratifying to know someone is paying attention, Scott. I’ll assume that you agree with me that “allegedly” renders the resulting sentence false for the reason I indicated—the bad syntax—and without it the sentence is true.  Then by a strict standard, you are quite right, this could not be a redundant word.  But of course I think the writer’s clear intent was to write something like, “Objectivists consider sensory perception to be axiomatically "valid", on the grounds that it is self-contradictory (or so they allege) to deny the efficacy of the senses as sources of genuine knowledge.” This rewritten sentence removes my objection that the “allege” warning renders the sentence false while displaying the redundancy previously hidden inside the grammatical blunder. I must add that I have been impressed by the quality and objectivity of your contributions.  More on this below under  “New section on Objectivist esthetics”. Blanchette 22:21, 13 Sep 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Agreed on all points. In fact I'm the author of the sentence at issue and can confirm that my intent was just as you describe it. Thanks also for your complimentary remarks on my contributions to the article. As you probably know, I wrote the sections summarizing the Objectivist philosophy several months ago, starting nearly from scratch; others -- notably Phil Welch -- have done some helpful editing and rearranging since then, but the meat and bones are intact. I particularly appreciate your remark on my objectivity, since I'm the author of a book highly critical of the Objectivist epistemology; I'm glad to hear that I haven't 'slanted' the content accordingly in what is, after all, supposed to be an expository entry and not a critical one.--Scottryan 11:46, 14 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  From sensations to concepts 

message: I don't have time to do it this minute, but in case I forget to ... the Ayn Rand Institute changed their URL system, so the "Essentials of Objectivism" link needs to be fixed.  zenohockey 02:48, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Fixed. Thanks for the notice. --Scottryan 11:23, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  FYI... 

message: Forgot to fill in the edit-summary field, so I'll comment here.
I changed 'understanding' (back) to 'knowledge' in a remark about perceptions and concepts (and, less importantly, added emphasis to the words 'that' and 'what'). Whether the possession of a concept constitutes understanding rather than knowledge is open to dispute in general, and at any rate I'm not aware of any point at which Rand unambiguously claimed the former. (If anyone can cite one, I'll stand corrected, of course.) The parallelism as I originally wrote the sentence requires 'knowledge' in both instances anyway -- knowledge that something exists vs. knowledge of what exists -- which, if I'm not mistaken, was Rand's original parallel structure in the portion of ITOE on which I'm relying here. --Scottryan 11:55, 14 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Minor edit

message: To say that Rand regularly misrepresented Kant's philosophy is, one has to say, simply accurate. Whether that is itself important to evaluating her own philosophy is, of course, a matter of one's POV. But to offer, as somehow germane to the misrepresentations, the  notion that lots of others have criticized Kant, and this stuff about why "I must always litter in the forest" is logically contradictory, is simply irrelevant. Of course Kant is a fair target for criticisms -- and Kantianism would be a fine place to record them. Its a distraction here. 
As to the forest stuff, I'll try to give a bit of a reply on Kant's behalf, just for fun. Kant would say that people who take hikes in the forest do so because they enjoy its pristine quality. Littering once may make no significant impact, but reason requires that we consider the possibility that littering would become a universal law. If we do, we can also see that our act of littering contradicts the very reason why we are in the forest, and that contradiction is a rational basis for the hiker's refraining from the act. --Christofurio 15:42, Nov 8, 2004 (UTC)
:Rand's claim that Kant was an Idealist is also a gross misrepresentation (or misreading if you like).  I would conjecture that she simply did not understand Kant. --Ltbarcly 23:36, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: I Must Always Litter in the Forest???

message: In the body, at the bottom of the section "Metaphysics: objective reality" it states that objectivism rejects materialism because it (objectivism) rejects a mind-body dichotomy.  However, in the article Materialism it states that "In one view, materialism expresses the view that the only thing that exists is matter; if anything else, such as mental events, exists, then it is reducible to matter.".  Objectivism seems to be in total agreement with Materialism on this point.  I will edit the page as such.
:Objectivism as stated by Rand rejects materialism. At no point does it state that "mental events [are] reducible to matter". However, it appears that this has been clarified in the text. Philwelch 03:26, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: It is improper to simply say "This philosophy rejects Materialism".  If it does, in fact, reject materialism, then it must be in some way incompatible with it.  To simply make the assertion is to reject rationalism, as it is argument by authority only.  Since Objectivism claims to be rational, then it must either be incompatible, through views inconsistent with it, or not.  If it is not inconsistent with materialism then it might agree with some points and be silent with regards to others or be entirely silent with regards to it.--Ltbarcly 23:21, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Rejecting materialism?