Reddit reviews Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (Ayn Rand Library Book 6)

Ancap isn't anti-government, it's anti-State... a subtle but necessary distinction.

In any event, I'm not a Randian... but I think she made some contributions to the debate & a lot can be learned from both her successes and mistakes.

If you aren't into her writing style (as some aren't) check out the nonfiction stuff... also Leonard Peikoff did a pretty good synthesis - Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand - http://www.amazon.com/Objectivism-Philosophy-Ayn-Rand-Library-ebook/dp/B002OSXDB4/

Dude, stop this. You shouldn't be defending Objectivism until you have read and understood Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology and OPAR.

If you're trolling then... well fuck you.

My intention was simply to point out that she addresses the questions that /u/untouchedbread was struggling with.

That said, I think your response to her argument is deeply flawed. First, Atlas Shrugged is an incredibly philosophical novel, but it is still a novel, not a definitive source of precise formulations and addressing of counterarguments. Second, all of the issues you raise in the criticism you linked are specifically addressed in Leonard Piekoff's OPAR. (Rand acknowledged the lecture course from which OPAR was derived as an accurate presentation of her philosophy.)

I can go look up page numbers if anyone is interested, but your primary confusion seems to lie in the difference between survival, life, and life qua man. For example:

> "But so long as it lives, ... it is unable to ignore its own good, unable to decide to choose the evil and act as its own destroyer."

> The claim here is that living things other than human beings automatically act for their own survival. That claim is false.

That claim is false, but it was not the claim that Rand made. The concept of life she uses here (and throughout her works) is not simple survival, but closer to eudaimonia. A man might survive under nazism, but not live. The mantis might survive without reproducing, but not live.

> But the fact that he lives a full span of life is evidence that he is not in fact destroying himself.

The fact that he has survived a full span of life is evidence only that he has not been consistently self-destructive.

> Somehow, something extra has been slipped into the argument to convert "life" into "the kind of life Rand thinks you should live,"

Rand is saying that though your personal eudaimonia is your end goal, it would be foolish to try to determine what causes your eudaimonia by trial and error. You know that you are human, and you can know what is objectively required for human happiness in general. Thus, you don't have to try living under communism before knowing that it would hurt you; you know that communism contradicts the requirements for living life qua man and thus, that it would be bad for you personally as well.

This doesn't mean that there is nothing individual about your happiness that you must discover for yourself, only that you need not look everywhere. In other words, you know that the actions that will lead to your happiness lie within a certain range. Rand says that you will not achieve "a state of non-contradictory joy" as a bank robber, but nothing about whether you will achieve it as an architect, baker, or computer programmer.

I've been thinking about this lately. Who decides what is moral and what isn't. One person can say that killing people is immoral, but why does that make it true? Some people probably think that killing people is moral. So what makes one of them "right"?


I haven't actually read it yet but somebody recommended that I look into Ayn Rand, a philosopher who talks about why philosophy is objective. I was recommended this book https://www.amazon.ca/Objectivism-Philosophy-Ayn-Rand-Library-ebook/dp/B002OSXDB4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1485900801&sr=8-1&keywords=objectivism+the+philosophy+of+ayn+rand


Maybe you could give it a read. Let me know what you think.