You're taking huge liberties with her statements. And being a bad objectivist in the process.

Having 'faith', as in confidence, in rationality is not what is meant by religious faith bypassing reason: That casual use of the word 'faith' is not the philosophical meaning; the package deal equating them is destructive.

So, you do advocate going around with gun and killing people who cannot make up their minds? It was an element in a novel to dramatize a principle. Note that the other heroes all disabled their opponents without killing them. Galt's strike was to leave, not to shoot up the J. Edgar Hoover Building. Violence is the last resort of the incompetent. Dagny could have taken out the guard barehanded, the book being fiction. Rand chose to make a different point entirely. If the guard had even attempted to stop Dagny, he might still have lived through it. He gave up his right to life by refusing to think. That had nothing to do with a well-regulated militia.

Q: What is your opinion of gun control laws? A: I do not know enough about it to have an opinion, except to say that it is not of primary importance. Forbidding guns or registering them is not going to stop criminals from having them; nor is it a great threat to the private, non-criminal citizen if he has to register the fact that he has a gun. It is not an important issue, unless you're ready to begin a private uprising right now, which isn't very practical. [Ford Hall Forum, 1971]Q: What's your attitude toward gun control?A: It is a complex, technical issue in the philosophy of law. Handguns are instruments for killing people -- they are not carried for hunting animals -- and you have no right to kill people. You do have the right to self-defense, however. I don't know how the issue is going to be resolved to protect you without giving you the privilege to kill people at whim. [Ford Hall Forum, 1973]” From Ayn Rand Answers: the Best of Her Q&A, edited by Robert Mayhew (New American Library, 2005) come two questions and answers.

In 1972, Edwin Newman interviewed Ayn Rand for his show “Speaking Freely” on NBC-TV. Among other statements, Ayn Rand said: “I am not an enemy of labor unions. Quite the contrary. I think that they are the only decent group today, ideologically. I think they are the ones who will save this country, and save capitalism, if anybody can.” She went on to say: “But the one flaw is that labor unions are government-enforced and become a monopoly and can demand higher wages than the market can offer. This union power creates the unemployable. It creates this vast group of people, the unskilled laborers who have no place to go for work. The artificial boosting of the skilled laborer’s income causes unemployment on the lower rungs of society. Every welfare measure works that way. It doesn’t affect the so-called rich, if that the humanitarians are worried about it, always affects the poor.”

"Ayn Rand versus Conservatives" here in the Gulch: http://www.galtsgulchonline.com/posts/b8...

see below to LetsShrug

You can vote at 18. You can drive at car at 16. You can fly an airplane at 15 and get a license within a year. You cannot get commercial driver's insurance for trucking until you are 25 (sometimes younger). You cannot become President of the United States until you are 35. You seek absolutes where none exist.

You created a strawman. It is obvious that life begins at conception. The question is whose life is more valuable - and to whom? The Objectvist Ethics of selfishness grant the mother the fullest possible expression of her right to her life regardless of any other considerations - whether that of the unborn child within her body or an unborn child in Nairobil
Does the unborn child value its own life? We might grant that it does, but we cannot ask. We can ask the mother because the mother is rational, sentient, intelligent, self-aware individual. The unborn child, howevet rmuch is it is alive is none of those things.

If abortion is murder, then is a miscarriage manslaughter? Should there be a coroner's inquest? You cannot accidentally take a life without SOME investigation. If you want to be consistent, then you must insist, not just on a medical determination, but on a police investigation. The police may corroborate the doctor's decision, but police medical examiner, not an ER physician, would be the authority. And the mother who miscarried would still have a criminal record, just as you would if you accidentally killed someone with your car, but were found not culpable. Is that what you intend when you claim that abortion is murder? I mean: killing is one thing; taking a life is what it is; but murder is a legal action, with legal consequences.

Thank you. I think I have read that - but it was sooo long ago I have no recollection of it. I will see if it is in my library or if I need to acquire it.

I like the 'approach' approach (!) because, like most of the folks on this list, I rarely agree with anyone 100%...but if the underlying principle is strong, then I can alter the content to some degree without altering the philosophy.

Jan

At what point does it become a child - a human being with its own rights? That is the slippery slope.

Is it at birth? I have a four-week old (among other children). You want to argue that he is any less dependent on his mother than he was five weeks ago?

Is a child only human when it is self-sufficient? That rules out most children - and especially teenagers! And what about those with Asbergers or Trisomy 21 (Down's Syndrome)?

THUS the slippery slope: WHEN does one qualify for protection as a human being? If not in utero, at WHAT arbitrary point and based on what arbitrary reasoning - because that's exactly what the argument then boils down to if you accept abortion as part of your philosophy.

Being pro abortion equals being pro murder. If one does not wish to have such a choice presented, one should avoid the cause that created the situation.

If happiness is the fulfillment of rationality, I have faith that living according to reason enables me to be happy.

The communist empire did collapse, but with no cultural understanding of individualism it left a political vacuum in Russia ripe for the ex-KGB takeover in a stock ruthless dictatorship. Statism leads to aggression against other nations, with or without claims of "restoring" some prior empire.

It _is_ consistent, not "somehow wanting consistency". A fetus, embryo or cell is not a child and has no "rights". Embracing mystical souls with "rights" in accordance with religious dogma does not create philosophical consistency or clear up "muddy waters". At best it is philosophical rationalism detached from reality, and otherwise outright mysticism. It results in injustice against human individuals who do have rights, not to be sacrificed to religion.

You argue against violence against children, yet can somehow support abortion? And you want to claim that those are somehow consistent positions? At BEST you are left with the slippery slope of attempting to define WHEN a child qualifies for protection as an individual. Far simpler and more consistent to simply take the stance against both: no grey lines to muddy the waters.

One would (with present circumstances considered) question whether or not the collapse of the Soviet Union was really as complete as many think...

A valuable complement to "Philosophy Who Needs It?" is the essay "Philosophy and Sense of Life" in her anthology The Romantic Manifesto (not in the anthology Philosophy and Sense of Life). This essay explains why everyone must have some form of philosophy, explicitly or implicitly and which may or may not be consistent. The question is whether one goes about consciously and consistently formulating what it will be.

Ayn Rand was "pro-union" only as voluntary association, not the collectivist and statist union laws and not for the motives for unions by socialists. She supported some political positions taken by some union leaders, such as anti-communism.

She was not "anti-gun". Even Dagny used one at a critical moment. She opposed the use of force, including guns, in general for settling disputes and for government imposition of injustice. She did not oppose the police having guns or direct self-defense by individuals when required, but did oppose taking the law into one's own hands in retaliation. She stated that she did not know enough about the subject of gun control laws to take a position on what is appropriate, but did not think registering or prohibiting guns would prevent criminals from having them or that registering guns would be harmful to innocent citizens (in the context of the time).

She supported the US "entry" into WWII after the attack at Pearl Harbor, but not before that, the same position as the vast majority of Americans at the time. She said that the US had nothing to gain from entering the war other than the necessity of self defense after the attack.

She said that the USSR was "no threat" culturally and economically, not that it's nuclear weapons were not a threat. She said that a war with the USSR would be unnecessary if we stopped helping it economically because it would then collapse under its own evil system (which is ultimately what happened), not a non-threat due to "inefficiency".

She wasn't "sanguine about capital punishment" and didn't "beg" anyone else to "settle" the issue. She said that murderers deserved to die as a matter of justice, but that she could not support the government imposing it because of the wrongful punishment by death of the inevitable innocent improperly convicted.

Ayn Rand's philosophy is more than an "approach", it has content. See Leonard Peikoff's book: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand for the whole content in once place.

There is an interesting description of the circumstances and the event in an interview of Col. Herman Ivey, the philosophy instructor who invited Ayn Rand to give a public lecture, in Scott McConnell's 100 Voices: An Oral History of Ayn Rand, 2010. She was very well received and a transcript of her talk was included as the introduction to the West Point course textbook the next year.

Col. said, "[S]he was first suggested to me by Kelly Weems, an officer who worked for me at West Point. When he made the suggestion, I immediately realized why it was a valuable idea: I'd read her work and knew that she could provide the kind of generalized overview of philosophy that we needed, and besides she was a very well-known person, and it would be great to have someone like that come to my program, so I invited her."

"I had read enough and seen enough of life to know the quality and the value of her ideas, and that's exactly why I went to the authorities, the two people above me..."

She knew enough to reject the supernatural even as a young child. Reason and faith are opposites. She formulated a philosophy of reason, so of course it rejects faith, but that isn't something she deduced only at the completion of the formulation of her philosophy.

Ayn Rand was pro union and anti gun? What??

My 'iterative research' is the scientific method - or at least that is what I meant. As you note when you read scientific publications, the culmination of an experiment is often a victorious, "But the trans version of that molecule does not have the same metabolic effect!" and 3 people on Earth yell "Whoopee" and have a party. The typical increments by which science grows are often both tiny and boring - a published experiment is repeated with a small variation...then one day all of the little changes add up and we have people regrowing arms and legs and organs or living til 500 or something.

So you see, I agree with you. I was just focused on the 'tinyness' of science vs the 'pervasiveness' of philosophy. The contrast between the two made an image for me.

I am looking up The Logical Leap now.

Jan