Stuart K. Hayashi

I see my historical remarks being addressed in a pedantic manner that sidetracks the conversation away from the actual issue. I will briefly address the supposed corrections to what I said. Michael Faraday invented the dynamo -- that is, an electromagnet. He didn't have any practical application for it. He did not invent a machine for the purpose of harnessing electricity to power other machines, particularly machines that lit up one's surroundings. Thomas Edison, not Faraday, invented a commercially viable electric generator that powered electric lights. And he did this before George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla. Edison's electric generator was an electromagnet and it operated according to scientific principles discovered by Faraday. The problem with Edison's electric generator was that it relied on a direct current, so a single generator couldn't power many households. Westinghouse and Tesla created a much more commercially functional electric generation system by employing alternating currents. More significantly, the supposed corrections do not address the philosophic issue actually being discussed, which is whether a philosopher, who merely wrote down his philosophy, is more evil than the dictator who implements that philosopher's written words and takes them to their logical conclusion.

Earlier I wrote, "I would say that a deliberate action is a completed action and a completed thought. A thought is not fully implemented or complete unless and until it is carried out in the physical realm." RTB replied, Of course Copernicus didn't travel to the moon. Given the state of technology and accumulated scientific knowledge at the time, he couldn't if he wanted to. This is why I don't give credit to Copernicus for the moonlanding; that credit predominantly goes to Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and the scientists and engineers who actually worked on the moonlanding project. I do give credit to Copernicus for using his mind to realize and explicate that the Earth revolves around the sun, which is work that has helped modern astronomers and astrophysicists. Thomas Edison utilized the scientific work of Alessandro Volta and Michael Faraday when he invented the electric generator, but it does not follow that Volta and Faraday are co-inventors of the generator; the inventor is Edison himself. If a modern man uses the discoveries and inventions of long-dead past innovators to create a new invention for his own time, the modern man can give proper credit to how the past innovators have helped him without claiming that the past innovators were co-creators of his own invention. In formulating Objectivism, Ayn Rand relied upon discoveries made by Aristotle. But I wouldn't go as far as saying that Aristotle is a co-author of Atlas Shrugged or Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. Likewise, I do not blame Karl Marx for the 40 million murders that Stalin committed; I only blame Karl Marx for writing apologias for collectivism that made it easier for Stalin to create the sort of political environment that enabled him to kill so many people.

I don't think every irrational thought or evasion results in violence against innocent people. However, I think that violence against innocent people is always the result of irrationality. Since I believe in the fundamental unity of mind and body -- of thought and action -- I've been puzzling over the ethics of those who advocate statism. I believe that statist intellectuals like Karl Marx are what laid the foundation for statist mass murderers like Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Josef Stalin to come along. If not for those like Marx, then the world's Lenins and Stalins wouldn't have had as easy a time coming to power. In that sense, I see statist intellectuals as complicit in the evils that are done when their statist doctrines are actually implemented in the real world. However, I have extreme difficulty in saying that just because Marx helped make Stalin possible, that Marx is necessarily as evil as -- or more evil than -- Stalin. It was with conscious deliberation that Stalin implemented the policies that murdered 40 million people, and he knew he was killing people. Marx's ideology contributed to the intellectual respectability of the political apparatus that empowered Stalin to do this -- and Marx even advocated the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie -- but seeing that Marx did not actually plan any specific murders or sign anyone's death warrant or pass any laws, I have trouble saying that Marx's evil is on par with Stalin's, or that the law should consider Marx an accessory to mass murder. I have trouble with saying that pro-totalitarian rhetoric is just as evil as the state-implemented murder committed under statism, because it seems to me that if speech advocating physical force (in the abstract) is a physical jeopardy -- and of a degree of evil -- that is equal to the physical implementation of force, then such pro-force rhetoric can be justly answered with government force. If the implementation of Karl Marx's exhortations lead to censorship, then is government censorship of Marx simply justifiable retaliatory force? Would it be on the grounds that Marx espousing his pro-violence ideology itself counts as an initiation of force? I think not. I think Marx's rhetoric helped make Stalin's murderous policies possible, and I think Marx's rhetoric deserves some moral blame, but I still think that Stalin is significantly more evil than Marx. Further, violence can be justly used against Stalin's communist policies, but not against mere rhetoric in favor of communist policies. But if, in the long term, all political actions proceed from irrational thoughts, and mind and body are one, then how can we make moral and political distinctions between government force and pro-government-force rhetoric? I think I have an answer. I would say that a deliberate action is a completed action and a completed thought. A thought is not fully implemented or complete unless and until it is carried out in the physical realm. Therefore, if someone talks a lot and advocates many totalitarian policies -- but does not do anything to implement them in physical reality -- then that advocacy remains a set of uncompleted thoughts or uncompleted actions. Thus, if Marx advocates totalitarianism and violence, but does not actually bring them about or plan their implementation, then his advocacy remains an uncompleted action and is not of the same ethical magnitude as the actual installation of totalitarianism. By that same token, when Stalin carried out those mass murders, he completed Marx's thought by translating it into a complete action in the real world. Even though pro-totalitarian rhetoric contributes to making totalitarianism possible in the real world, the mere rhetoric remains an uncompleted action, while the full implementation of totalitarianism is the completed thought and completed action. I think that to phrase it this way shows how the advocacy of force is still morally wrong, and of how actions are ultimately determined by the extent to which people do or do not exercise their rationality, but that totalitarianism's reliance upon pro-totalitarian philosophy does not necessarily make the pro-totalitarian philosopher as evil as the actual totalitarian dictator. What do you think?

I think the validity of fanciful thought experiments depends on the extent to which they are meant to be taken literally. For instance, I think someone could ask a question like this: If I were holding a mirror up to my face while I traveled at the speed of light, then would I be able to see my reflection in the mirror? I think that asking a question like that is okay if the questioner isn't trying to insinuate that it is possible for him to travel at the speed of light while holding a mirror. If we take the question on a more literal level, the questioner is trying to find out, literally, how light and speed relate with one another, etc. I think that "Swampman" story is silly, not because it is imaginative, but because we don't have real evidence that "philosophical zombies" exist, if we define a "philosophical zombie" as something that is human in every single manner except that it has no volitional consciousness; it is a machine made out of the same meat as every other human, and yet has no volitional capabilities and still manages to behave like every other functioning, contractually competent adult. I don't see a point in discussing philosophical zombies when someone doesn't have evidence they exist. (OK, I guess a college student who repeats everything his philosophy professor tells him is sort of a philosophical zombie, but the context is different. ;) ) If someone wants to point out that an entity repeating human words doesn't necessarily comprehend those words, one could use an example of something in real life, like a parrot or an "artificially intelligent" computer that is programmed to spit out a certain verbal answer to certain sentences that you type for it or speak audibly. Those are not the same as philosophical zombies, though. We know that parrots and artificially intelligent computers don't have free will because their responses do not have the same degree of spontaneity as humans do -- a parrot cannot coin a new word for you and then define it. When philosophers discuss philosophical zombies, they imply that there are no sensory means whereby you can distinguish a volitional, sapient being from a philosophic zombie. To a large extent, we're supposed to take the philosophical zombies seriously, as if there are literal truths that can be derived from contemplating these arbitrary postulates. David Friedman's example is particularly egregious, because he employs arbitrary metaphysics to "prove" that moral absolutes don't exist, and then he expects you to literally believe he has logically disproven moral absolutes, and that his anti-morality conclusion is metaphysically correct. Hey, by the way, here's a cartoon about philosophic zombies that mentions "Zombie Plato or Ayn Rand." (And here's one on postmodernism. Hehe.)

Thanks, C. Jordan. I laughed really hard with your John Galt answer. I should use that sometime.

Thanks for the responses, guys. This thread isn't primarily about the Ron Paul Revolution, I'm afraid. In this thread at least, we are having a Counterrevolution that deposes the subject of Ron Paul and returns the subject to that of the use of arbitrary metaphysics in philosophical arguments. I would like to thank Mr. Grade for returning this thread to its subject. I would say that a particularly popular philosophic argument that utilizes arbitrary metaphysics is Pascal's Wager. Pascal assumes that there is a fifty-fifty chance of the Christian God existing only because he can imagine it; he doesn't give any evidence. His "wager" doesn't even take into account the "possibility" (har har) that there "may be" a God that punishes someone in the afterlife for accepting Christianity. And as for an example of academic philosophers entertaining in arbitrary metaphysics for their very prestigious papers, I present . . . "Swampman." Yes, that is a paper that academics have apparently taken seriously. Why should I care about whether this swamp-created duplicate really understands his own words, when we don't have evidence of such swamp-duplicate/zombies existing anyway?

Perhaps all of you here are seasoned enough in your knowledge of Objectivism not to fall for the rhetorical trick I will describe. However, I often found myself falling for it even five years after I had discovered Ayn Rand, so I think this is something worth talking about for the sake of those who are new to Objectivism. I am referring to a common tactic of sophists who try to undermine people's confidence in Objectivism. These sophists posit some "hypothetical moral dilemma" to "prove" that there are holes in Objectivism, when the entire "hypothetical dilemma" relies on arbitrary metaphysical assumptions. David Friedman has used this tactic in The Machinery of Freedom to undermine his readers' convictions that there exist absolute property rights (without making a distinction between contextually absolute property rights and context-free, Categorically Absolute property rights). I will quote Ronald E. Merrill's paraphrasing of Dr. Friedman's argument in The Ideas of Ayn Rand, since I find Dr. Merrill's paraphrasing more amusing and to-the-point: With this hypothetical scenario, Dr. Friedman thinks that he has gotten the natural-rights-believer in a corner. He assumes that an honest person would have to answer yes. This reminds me of a "hypothetical moral dilemma" I would pose to my classmates in grade school: When my classmates asked for qualifying information (like "Do I even have to eat her bones, or are their parts of her body I don't have to eat?"), I would have to make up something on the spot. The problem is that, in my first five years of calling myself a student of Objectivism, I would have played Dr. Friedman's game by asking him for more qualifying details, such as, "How rigid is the world-saving equipment's owner in his refusal to sell it or give it away? I want to be absolutely sure that I cannot reason with him before I resort to stealing his property..." What I didn't understand back then was that questions that rely upon arbitrary metaphysical assumptions do not even merit being dignified in such a manner. They should simply be identified as arbitrary, and there is no way to reason with the arbitrary. I don't think this is perfectly understood among free-market advocates. Please correct me if I'm mistaken about this, but I think that sometime near the late '90s or early 2000s, Liberty magazine did a survey of its readers, and it asked questions that were along these lines: Suppose that you were hanging on a ledge of a tall building, and you would fall to your death unless your swung your body into the open window of somebody's apartment without getting anyone's permission first. Would you save your life this way? Most of the survey's respondents answered yes, and so R. W. Bradford concluded that this showed that the majority of Libertarians had come to reject the notion "of Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard" that private property rights are absolute. (As so often happens with Objectivism's critics, Mr. Bradford conflated Objectivism's contextual absolutes with the Rothbardian's notion that absolute moral principles must be Categorical Imperatives that must always apply regardless of context.) Such a question does not deserve to be seriously entertained. Why am I hanging on this ledge to begin with? Am I Spider-Man? What is the frequency of something like this happening in the real world? How many people hanging on ledges saved their lives by swinging their bodies into somebody's open apartment window? Mr. Merrill named the unspoken implication of all these hypothetical scenarios -- and practically every question that relies upon arbitrary metaphysics: In every one of the "hypothetical scenarios" I named above, the questioner provides no evidence that the scenario he posits is realistic or plausible. I have a problem when artists imbue their art with arbitrary metaphysics for satirical purposes and then expect their readers or viewers to take the arbitrary metaphysics literally. Harry Potter has fantasy metaphysics, but that's okay because it's just for entertainment; it's not satirical. The story of Frankenstein relies upon fantasy metaphysics to make a satirical point about how a man can destroy himself and others if he fixates too heavily on just one obsession, but at least the fantasy symbolizes something that can happen in reality: a scientist who didn't fully contemplate the repercussions of his actions cross-bred what would later come to be known as the killer bees. However, a lot of satirists have used arbitrary metaphysics in satirical art and expect their messages to be taken literally when the message itself relies upon the reader or viewer taking aspects of the story's metaphysics as literally true. For instance, I think that Oedipus Rex does expect its audience to take literally its message that somebody should "know his place," accept his "fate," and try not to make something of himself. But for someone to take that message literally is to take many of the story's metaphysical assumptions literally, and the metaphysics of the story are self-refuting. We are expected to blame Oedipus for destroying himself because he caused all of his problems in his attempts to defy his metaphysically-given fate. But if Oedipus's fate is metaphysically given, and his sorrow is predetermined no matter what, then how can Oedipus be responsible for his own misfortune? And though Soylent Green is not supposed to be fully taken literally, its environmentalist message is meant to be taken literally, and for the viewer to believe the story's message is for him to share the filmmakers' assumption that Malthusian economics and demography are metaphysically correct (which they are not). One can rationalize that Oedipus Rex and Soylent Green are "pro-Objectivist" in the sense that both stories feature people being punished for evading reality (in the case of Soylent Green, society is in its rotten state because people evaded the reality that everything environmentalists said in the 1970s was correct). But to rationalize the stories that way is to ignore that the "reality" being "evaded" in these stories was a metaphysics arbitrarily pushed by the satire's creators. (I've heard the rationalization that "accepting fate" in Oedipus Rex is merely symbolic for "accepting the laws of nature." I don't find that plausible. The people of Sophocles's time did literally believe in the supernatural, and the Ancient Greeks really did believe that people should accept the station they are born into.) Here's a more famous example of a satirist's message relying upon the extent to which his readers take his arbitrary metaphysics at face value: Suppose you want to live for your own sake, while violating nobody's rights. And you get rich that way. Then on Christmas Eve, three ghosts haunt you and threaten you that you will go to hell and die alone unless you become more altruistic. Well, I guess you're screwed if you don't want to be altruistic. I think that the reason why satirists and philosophers actually succeed at winning debates when they employ arbitrary metaphysics is that Objectivists and many non-Objectivists have a different criteria for considering a proposition "theoretically possible." If an Objectivist is to consider a proposition "theoretically possible," there actually has to be evidence of the possibility that can be indicated by sensory experience. But, in the case of many non-Objectivists, the sole prerequisite for a proposition to be considered "theoretically possible" is . . . somebody can imagine it. The thinking often goes like this: Is it theoretically possible that there is a sapient, decision-making, omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God that created all of Existence? Yes, it is theoretically possible because I have an easy time imagining it. Is it theoretically possible that Existence always existed, without having to be created by some First Cause? No, it is not theoretically possible, because I have a hard time imagining it. But I can imagine a 13.8-gram ice cube falling to the bottom of a transparent 4.545964591-liter container filled with room-temperature water and staying there for a thousand years without melting or evaporating. That is not reason enough to consider this scenario theoretically possible. Where's the evidence? There are no documented cases of a baby being genetically cloned from an adult human being through the process of Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer. But that this can be done is theoretically possible because there is evidence that it can be done -- the process has occurred with various mammals. There is sensory evidence of the possibility. There is no sensory evidence that tomorrow you will discover that some asteroid was heading toward Earth and went unnoticed until the very day that it would collide with Earth, or that the asteroid can only be stopped by a one-unit device owned by somebody who wants everyone to be killed by the asteroid. And for someone to use arbitrary metaphysics in his arguments does not require that he assume his arbitrary metaphysics to be correct. For him to even conflate his arbitrary postulations with "possibilities" is to employ the Argument from Arbitrary Metaphysics. Dinesh D'Souza uses it in his What's So Great About Christianity when he says, How do Kant and D'Souza know that this is a possibility? Because they can imagine it. Yet is it plausible to believe that if a baby were born without any sense of touch, sight, hearing, smell, taste, or balance, the baby would even know what is going on around her? We only know about reality through our senses. D'Souza argues that there exists at least one piece of information -- what I call "Datum X" -- that not only remains unknown to everyone at the moment, but is something that will necessarily remain incontrovertibly imperceptible to any sapient being's senses forever. This raises many questions. One is: if nobody can ever obtain Datum X through his senses, then how does D'Souza even know that Datum X exists? (Because he can imagine that it exists, right?) And, for argument's sake, I will briefly speak as if Datum X exists. People should only be worried about that which they can exercise some modicum of control over. If something is metaphysically unchangeable, then why should anyone fuss over it? I cannot change that the Earth is round, so it would make little sense for me to constantly bemoan how horrible it is that planets have to be round when I would be so much happier if Earth was cube-shaped. By that same token, if Datum X shall ever remain congenitally unperceived by everyone forever, then why the heck do many philosophers build their careers on blabbering about it? I think that there is a purpose in philosophers claiming to know that there exists some piece of data that can never be perceived by anyone's senses, and in assuming that something is possible as long as it can be imagined -- it serves the mystic's purpose of undermining respect for sensory-verified, observation-based, inductive reasoning. What do you think?

Hmmm, interesting that "Rand" is in the middle name of John Randolph Galt. I hadn't really noticed that when posting the above.

I cannot discern any philosophic implications from this information, but I do find it to be a rather interesting coincidence. On the Big Island of Hawai'i, there was a railroad whose president was named John Galt. This is from Gerald M. Best's Railroads of Hawaii: ...Narrow and Standard Gauge Common Carriers (San Marino, CA: Golden West Books, 1978), pages 137-138: J. R. Galt's full name was John Randolph Galt. I found more information about him from Men of Hawaii: A Biographical Record of Men of Substantial Achievement in the Hawaiian Islands, Vol. V revised, ed. George F. Nellist, (Honolulu, Territory of Hawaii: The Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Ltd., 1935). Page 201 marks the start of the entry for John R. Galt: Page 202 adds: John R. Galt was a railroad executive and a tax collector. Yikes! :logik: When I told a friend of mine -- another student of Objectivism -- about this, he replied that it was too bad that this industrialist couldn't live up to the glory of his name. One might say this isn't a big deal; a character in Atlas Shrugged even remarks that "John Galt" is such a common name that a John Galt is listed among Taggart Transcontinental's personnel. However, I still find this coincidence pretty cool. B)

Koontz's late '90s bad guys are "just evil" in the sense that Snidely Whiplash is "just evil." The only thing missing in Koontz's later works is the twirling of the mustache. The behavior of the Koontz's villains from the early 1980s is actually just as bad (sometimes even worse) than those from his late '90s writings. The major difference is that Koontz now thinks there's something morally wrong about authors delving into the villains' past and describing incidents that put the villains onto the path of immorality. I don't think that the bad guys in Ayn Rand's books are "evil and that's all there is to it." James Taggart isn't aware of what a bad person he is; he isn't proud of his immorality the way certain late '90s Koontz villains are. You know that he's motivated by pettiness. Ellsworth Toohey, the most consistently evil character in Ayn Rand's books, is more psychologically complex than Koontz's late '90s villains. Since childhood, Toohey has had a kind of inferiority complex and, in his envy, has wanted to tear down those he perceived as being stronger than he. The '90s Koontz might not approve of The Fountainhead explaining how much positive reinforcement Toohey's pro-collectivist antics received when he was a small child. He might call that "Freudian." The fundamental difference between the attitudes of Koontz and Rand toward literary villains is this: the "new" Koontz of the late '90s assumes that badness is inborn. The guy is born evil and there is no changing it. He's bad because that's the way God made him. Ayn Rand says that immoral behavior is the consequence of bad philosophy. Bad behavior is not congenital; a person still has the option of being good when he chooses to live rationally. The current literary universe of Koontz, for example, wouldn't have much room for a "Wet Nurse" character. Nor would Guy Francon have any reason to stand by Dominique at the end. I don't know if there is a correlation between writing style and political viewpoint. It's just that I noticed that Koontz's writings went downhill around the same time he became more explicitly "anti-government" and "religious right."

I began taking special interest in the books of horror author Dean R. Koontz after reading Barbara Branden's review of Watchers (back when it was on Mr. Brown's Daily Objectivist). As someone who has read many of Mr. Koontz's books, I have to say that his older ones from the 1970s and 1980s are much better than those he wrote from the late 1990s onward. Back in the 1980s, he came up with interesting explanations for why his villains were so bad. And although Midnight's plot was extreeeeeemely cliched, what with it revolving around the evil scientist-entrepreneur (who is the villain of every single sci-fi and action movie ever made) using his corporation to create a monster that turns on him and everyone else (the cliche Michael Crichton uses over and over again in Westworld, Jurassic Park, and Prey), it still had a really vivid narrative style that is superior to the narratives of anything Koontz wrote after 1999. I'm kind of sad to read comments of Koontz's that denigrate his earlier works. He says that he regrets providing explanations for his villains' motivations in the 1980s because that's "Freudian." He thinks it was "Freudian" of him to explain how much of the villains' behavior is the result of what happened to them during their childhoods. Koontz now says he knows better -- that evil people are just inherently bad and that's all there is to it. His new outlook has had a horrible effect on his writings -- his villains are now just one-dimensional, cookie-cutter "utter bad guys." They're evil because they're evil -- period. So all his villains are now like Dr. Evil except they're supposed to be taken seriously. Weirdly, I find that Mr. Koontz's writing style went downwill around the same time that his politics became more like mine. His "villains are just evil and have no complex psychology" kick was happening around the same time that he became more of an explicitly semi-libertarian, "Religious Right" quasi-pro-militia type. I didn't fully realize how adversely Koontz's newfound religious-rightism began to affect his art until I read The Taking. I have read books that relied on a deus ex machina before, but The Taking was the first story in which deus ex machina was not only a metaphor! (If you don't want to suffer through the incredibly lame conclusion like I did, you can check out the synopsis of it at TheBookSpoiler.Com). Reading The Taking was a horrifying experience for me, but not for the reasons Koontz had in mind. Koontz's criticism of socialism is wholly anti-Objectivist -- he says humans are too depraved and stinky for it: Oh, so those "utopian schemes" would work if only humans weren't "imperfect" and "fallen"? What saves mankind from communism is that mankind is too rotten for it? He sounds exactly like Thomas Sowell in The Vision of the Anointed. I want the "Freudian" Koontz back! He was a better writer. Anyhow, I found that the "Freudian" Koontz made the most remarkable comments about Ayn Rand in his 1981 book How to Write Best Selling Fiction, pages 296-297. Of course, I doubt Miss Rand would appreciate his description of her with a certain political label: Right on! Dean Koontz as we know him today might not agree with that anymore. But at least he had good taste back in 1981. One writer who still likes Ayn Rand is "John Norman"/philosophy professor John Frederick Lange, Jr., author of the controversial "Gor" series of sci-fi novels. In a 2001 letter to a science-fiction magazine, he wrote: I'm jealous of Joshua Zader. He always identifies a celebrity as an Ayn Rand fan before I do. But not this time, baby!

I'm glad to see Objectivist Living is back up. What a relief.

Mahalo for the warm welcome! Thank you Landon, Kat, Jody, Mike E., and MSK! MSK wrote, Thank you; I strongly agree. By that same token, MSK has the awesomest middle name ever. You're much worthier of it than that utilitarian Mill dude. :D/

Thank you for the links! Two friends and I meet every other week on a college campus to discuss Objectivism. Can that count as a club? 8-[

Hello everyone. I'm new here. I live in Hawaii and have been a student of Objectivism since 1997. I joined Rebirth of Reason recently and then decided that I should check out this forum as well. Aloha to you all!