The Rights of Bullies


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The Rights of Bullies

There's a guy I like who curates a lot of stuff on Facebook about Rand. His name is Michael Brown.

He just became the administrator of a Facebook fan page called "Ayn Rand." His problem was that the page had become overrun by spam and trolls. So he cleaned it up a little, then people stopped posting altogether.

To help him over this hump, and to see the comments of more orthodox Objectivists (many of whom have posted there), I opened the following thread:

Here's some food for thought on applying Objectivism to causality and individual rights. Do bullies have the right to freely assemble on their own property, arm themselves to the teeth, engage in military-like training and talk with relish among themselves about how sweet the conquest of their neighbors could be without any intervention?

So long as there are few bullies, I don't see much of a problem leaving them alone, but what about when the group grows and there are a huge amount of bullies--too many to stop easily? A gang. Shouldn't there be some philosophical equivalent of "uh oh" so you can do something about it before the inevitable attack? Or is the only answer to wait to act until the rights-abiding neighbors are sacrificed?

This seems simplistic, but it is not. It is applying causality, but instead of using the perspective of past and present to the future, it is looking from the future to the present. After all, the law of identity and the law of causality apply to bullies, too. The last I looked, bullies are not the kinds of folks easily persuaded by syllogisms to observe the rights of others in the future, even if their present actions do. A bully, identified by observing the past, will eventually bully people unless he or she has had a profound inner transformation of self-identity.

In other words, philosophically, do the individual rights of bullies in the present trump the future violation of rights of their inevitable victims?

I have my druthers (I'm a common sense man when all else fails), but I'm not advocating anything for the moment. Just asking questions and making a few observations.


This is a good topic for discussion here on OL, too.

If anything interesting happens over on that Facebook fan page with this (and maybe nothing will), I'll keep you informed here.

Michael

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