Ayn Rand

[Berzerker]

Tiny - I went through the second thread and found the entirety of your "contribution":

Wellcome to the club
This is some funny stuff, I'm already waiting impatiently for his next answer.

I'm not ****ing with you... but uh did you read the last thread...Berz did to Agathon what he did to everyone else. If you have too much spare time, why don't you read it again and try to understand the points people are trying to make and the responses they get from berz. Nothing but punch in the face. It seems like this guy doesn't understands anything or is just annoying on purpose

That last one was your attempt to convince Orange he was wrong when he supported me, and quite comical given the fact Agathon insulted libertarians in his opening post and only got nastier as the thread went along while I refrained from insults for quite a while before getting tired of his behavior. Both trolls, no issue being debated, no analysis, nothing but insults.

Then I went through about 12 pages of the first thread and found only these:

Well done David, this is the most ridicilous thing I have seen in months.

Again, no analysis, no explanation for the insult, just an insult.

If One_Brow would have power to adjust laws by his logic, then serial killers would have a blast

Oops, One Brow made the mistake of agreeing with David and me, so naturally you insult him too.

David attempts to avoid answering to a really easy question are funny, you should read them Well, it's possible that he is stupid enough to not been able to even understand the question, like it seems, he likes to debate the details (which have nothing to do with the actual question). So it's a small possibility that he is not avoiding, but thinks he is giving an answer

How nice, the troll insults David and offers nothing to support the insults again. Notice a pattern?

So what do the targets of your insults have in common? They agreed with each other, i.e., you were only targeting people with insults based on their politics.

[Berzerker]

Agathon -

As if I'm going to waste my time with you. You couldn't refute anybody if you tried - all you do is post miles and miles of cut and pasted material interspersed with irrelevancies. I haven't got a hundred years to be bored to death by you. Anyone who wants to check out your handiwork can do so.

You are always like this, not only with me but seemingly with anyone that disagrees with you, so you deserve the abuse you get.

Well gee, then I'll post only your question and my rebuttal and we'll see if your attention span can handle it.

I'll say it again: what the robber does is threaten a rights violation rather than actually violate a right.

And freedom requires the absence of coercion or constraint on choice or action. And coercion includes force and the threat of force.

I hope that doesn't overburden your brain cells...

[Berzerker]

Originally posted by Wraith

You haven't made a case yourself. The only reason I'm in this argument is because of some vicious misrepresentations of Objectivism and Libertarianism that I've been attempting to correct. You continue to ignore these corrections.

I've given an argument multiple times now and all you have done is counter with mere assertion.

As I said before, I will no longer address your strawmen arguments. This leaves little for me to say, since the only other argument you've made is an appeal to authority.

You sound like you've been reading some introduction to logic book. None of my arguments is a strawman. You show me where I misinterpret Rand - I lifted that stuff straight from "The Virtue of Selfishness".

Your question contains an invalid assumption, that is, a strawman. If you understand the philosophy as well as you claim you do, then you are doing this out of spite or malice. If not, you merely do not understand as well as you think you do. Either way continuing this is pointless unless you're willing to acknowledge that you do not know as much as you think you do.

There is no straw man. Why do Libertarians always accuse people who argue with them of this? I suppose because it is the easiest response to an argument you don't understand.

"Liberty" is not where these rights derive from. All rights derive from the most fundamental right, the right to life.

Nope. I know for a fact that not all Libertarians think this way. John Hospers in the "Libertarian Manifesto" certainly does not. In any case this is a laughable assertion since as everyone knows Libertarians think that suicide is morally permissible and the reason it is, is because individual liberty trumps any reasons we might have for thinking that life is sacred. Similarly the right to life derives from the right to liberty because if I kill someone without their consent I have violated their liberty; but if I kill someone with their consent Libertarians think there is nothing wrong. This shows that Liberty is doing all the work here and not some independently established right to life.

The rational behind the right to life is quite simple. Rights, by definition, are things that apply only to humans in a social context. A social context requires more than one person. If you go around killing everyone you meet, there is soon no social context.

That's an absolutely terrible argument for the existence of rights. The fact that rights require a social context to accrue to persons does not entail that the existence of a social context entails that people have rights. A social context is necessary for rights to exist, but it is not sufficient (now that's real logician's talk).

The full argument goes into more detail, but that's a quick summary. The right to property, etc, are all derived from the right to life, not this liberty you keep bringging up as a shibolleth.

I'm afraid you are mistaken here, since as I've just explained to you the right to liberty does a good job of justifying the Libertarian attitude towards the right to life whereas the right to liberty cannot be derived from the right to life without making certain other claims.

This is your fundamental error, and you refuse to be corrected on it.

Because, evidently, I am not the one in need of correcting. Here's hoping that some Libertarian will jump in and show you the error of your ways.

It's like claiming that someone building a road through your house without your consent isn't violating your property rights because you've still got the house.

It is not like that at all. If someone builds a road through your house without your consent then he has violated your rights. That isn't equivalent to my robber situation at all. What would make it equivalent is if the person gave you the choice of having the road built or being run over. Admittedly, that's not much different in practice, but it does show how silly the notion of negative liberty is.
----------------------------------------------------------------

Hmm...someone's guilty of hypocrisy, that was your copy and paste job, Agathon.

[Agathon]

Did somebody fart??

[Berzerker]

Blame it on your dog, we won't tell.

You're still dodging my rebuttal of your argument, oh brave and enlightened one.

[tinyp3nis]

Your analysing of my posting is so irrelevent and incorrect that even leads results as me caring about those peoples politics. Hard to say if you are even trying. If berz turns out to be Agathons dl (or the other way around since the postcount) it will be the best thing yet.

[Berzerker]

Can I get a translation, please? I don't speak gibberish.

[Wraith]

--"Now it sounds exactly like the society we have with taxes, lawyers, courts and government regulations."

Not exactly alike. Fairly similar, just a much smaller government. No farm subsidies on the one hand (to artificially raise the price of food) and no food stamps on the other (to let poor people aford the artificially expensive food).

--" I also assumed and this may be a false assumption that in a libertarian society the crown as it is called in Canada would not prosecute people for breaking laws"

Depends which Libertarians you talk to. The anarchists will probably agree with this, since they won't want any laws or government.
The minarchists will disagree. We'll say that the government was created to protect the rights of the people, and it's only true purpose is to protect those rights (and prosecute those who break them).

--"I'll say it again, is how this case is different."

Working a particular job is not a right (if it were, that would mean someone is obligated to give you a job, and the internal contradictions there should be self-evident). You do have a right to both your life and whatever property you have earned. The boss is not infringing on a right, the theif is infringing on one of two, merely letting you choose which.

--"I can't infer from "X has natural property Y" to "X is good" without ultimately having a premise along the lines of "natural property Y is the good" and that is always an open question."

She argues that life is the highest value. After all, if you lose your life you can't value anything at all anymore.
In any case, if you understand the argument and disagree with it, that's one thing. As I've said, I'm not interested in persuading anyone to change their minds.

--"Why do people have a right not to be threatened with the violation of their rights"

The threat of violence differs from the action of violence only in degree.

--"and is this right derived from the principle of liberty?"

Not as far as I'm concerned, whoever else you've been reading.

Wraith
Of course I'm warped - it's faster than impulse

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Wraith

--"I can't infer from "X has natural property Y" to "X is good" without ultimately having a premise along the lines of "natural property Y is the good" and that is always an open question."

She argues that life is the highest value. After all, if you lose your life you can't value anything at all anymore.

In this case life only has instrumental value rather than intrinsic value. In other words it is only useful insofar as it enables you to enjoy other valuable things. When you cannot enjoy these things any longer and living becomes an instrument of disvalue (say that you are in terrible pain in the last stages of cancer or something like that) Libertarians say we can kill ourselves or allow others to kill us.

So saying that life has the highest value for is is simply false.

--"Why do people have a right not to be threatened with the violation of their rights"

The threat of violence differs from the action of violence only in degree.

It does not. It is a completely different kind of thing. After all saying I'm going to climb Mt Everest does not differ merely in degree from actually climbing it.

--"and is this right derived from the principle of liberty?"

Not as far as I'm concerned, whoever else you've been reading.

Well then you need another argument for it.

[Ramo]

Before getting to your post, can you address Agathon's question about the robber not violating the victim's freedom under libertarianism if he is only bluffing?

I would indeed consider threat of coercion a form of coercion depending upon the circumstances, as threats can certainly impose constraints on the actions of a person. But I would agree with Agathon in that I don't know if it qualifies as such in a Randist sense; that is, I don't know if it's ethically consistent to prohibit threats of violence to extort money under a Randist ethical system. For, do I not have a "natural right" to speech? But my speech doesn't take the life or property away from anybody any more than the speech involved in threatening a person with firing someone from a job, etc. for money. Therefore, the state cannot prohibit my speech, correct?

The degree is not a product of libertarianism, you know roughly half the prison population would be freed under libertarianism.

Nonetheless, huge numbers would remain. Any the prisons themselves are incredibly authoritarian. Even the least objectionable prisons, such as those in Finland, still take away the liberty of people in them to an extreme degree. For that is the nature of prison. And, frankly, I don't find many libertarian capitalists fighting for less oppressive prisons.

It is true retaliation and self-defense are not identical, but the former is related to the latter. If I try to kill you and, in your defense, you kill me, I'm punished for my action.

But this is a different matter entirely. In the cases of prisons, the liberty of people are taken away after the fact. It isn't "self-defense" in the sense analagous to dealings between individuals. Just because someone is a murderer, doesn't mean he will kill me or anyone else.

If your defense fails and I kill you, the state's retaliation is still a result of my action.

If I've already been killed, the state didn't defend me. No action by the state could possibly defend me.

Then prison is not retaliation, it's prevention.

Retaliation and prevention are both after the fact (i.e. result from an "initiation of force"). That's the reason for my analogy.

If your self-defense results in my death, your action is still justified as is the state's in putting me to death in retaliation.

Retaliation? I thought libertarian capitalists were above state-sponsored revenge. I find violence and force motivatated by revenge just as immoral as violence and force not motivated by revenge. If you hit me, I go home, and then hit you, my action is no more justifiable than yours.

It is not a logical fallacy to claim a right to retaliate based on a right to self-defense, both are actions resulting from the initiation of force, one just comes sooner than the other.

That isn't a logically valid assertion. Self-defense is self-defense, retaliation is retaliation. Just because the motives of both actions are the same (some initiation of force), doesn't make them equally morally justifiable.

Leaving drugs and guns out, why? Rand was against retaliation or prevention?

I assumed she was against retaliation as I find it an ethically base and morally reprehensible action, but apparantly I was wrong. Anyways, her support is revenge is inconsistent with "natural rights" as well. And yes, she was against "prevention," or using force in anticipation of force. Otherwise she would've been pro-drug prohibition and gun control.

If you and I were the only people in the world and I was intent on murdering you and had already tried to accomplish my goal, wouldn't you be justified in restraining me, even by killing me?

Depending upon the circumstances, perhaps. But it is not consistent under a Randist system. Retaliation and pre-emptive restraint aren't justified from the Randist concept of self-defense.

Punishing people for attempted murder is not pre-emptive, they've already taken the action.

Punishing a person by locking him up in a prison is ethically reprehensible.

Lying? No, hypocritical.

We've had this debate before, but excluding extenuating circumstances such as painful disease or emotional trauma brought on by life's occurences, no one wants to be murdered.

Or different brain chemistry, etc., but yes most people don't want to be killed.

Therefore, this universal desire creates a standard by which a natural right to life can be discerned (as well as identifying the rightful owner of your life).

Near-universal desire, but you still haven't justified this assertion.

Only the hypocrite would murder others when he would not want others to murder him.

Wanting something isn't the same thing as believing it is morally good, and not wanting something isn't the same thing as believing it is morally bad.

[Urban Ranger]

DD,

Attacking Chomsky as a source? Tsk tsk.

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
Wraith,

"I'd point out the whole "rational self-interest" thing again, but I do realize it's pointless to argue this here."

We did that many moons ago and it got nowhere. But, even assuming that is true, "rational self-interest" does not lead to laissez-faire capitalism (i.e. Libertarianism). It leads to socialism.

A quick glance through the thread shows that there is no Libertarian response to my post. Any takers?

[Drake Tungsten]

Unless you're discussing linguistics, Chomsky is a worthless source...

[Ted Striker]

Man, these Lib/Rand threads are way too dry and exhausting.

Let's talk about something lighter like if Rand used a strap-on or not.

[Urban Ranger]

Ted, you troublemaker

[Imran Siddiqui]

Hey Ramo! Then how do you punish someone if throwing him in jail in ethically reprehensible? Is he simply allowed to murder as he pleases?