I agree with [one HBLer’s] basic thesis: rights are contextual, and the context must be judged by reference to both the facts of the case and the purpose of the principle. An example is: rights do not apply on overloaded lifeboat. Another way of putting this is that all moral principles, including rights, are objective
A member states: with friends and acquaintances who barely have a clue who Ayn Rand is, who are decent and/or good people, but mistaken, I often pronounce in my mind: all he needs is an hour with John Galt. You are, alas, mistaken. Atlas Shrugged gives readers many hours with Ayn Rand, yet not one in a
I’m pleased to announce that I will be teaching two courses at Ayn Rand University for the next two quarters (16 weeks total): Logical Thinking and ITOE, starting April 17. Each class will meet twice a week for 1 hour 15 minutes (that’s the amount of time I’ve found, empirically, to be right for my
I have just read a FEE article on monopoly vs. free markets and it has me riled up. It’s got a couple of good points but it misses everything important. So let me set it out. 1. If you are calling for an end to something you call monopolies and monopoly pricing, you can go
One HBLer said that to be a fine art something had to meet requirement R. Another HBLer gave a counter-example: architecture doesn’t meet R but is still a fine art. The counter-example approach is not a good one, except in the fields of math and logic because they don’t require weighing competing factors in a
Context-dropping is a major fallacy, perhaps the number one fallacy. Context-dropping is the attempt to have cognition without looking at all the relevant data you have. To know, rather than to merely believe, is to integrate into the full context. (See OPAR, Chapter 4 for why and how knowledge is contextual.) How does one “hold
In a discussion on a medical website of rejuvenation research, I found one pretty good comment amidst the Pharma-haters, so I wrote this (edited here for clarity). Thank you for posting the only rational comment I’ve seen in the sea of anti-science, anti-tech, anti-capitalist, anti-freedom comments preceding yours. To demonize “Big Pharma” is an amazing
The primary volitional choice is to take charge of your mind or not—i.e., to focus or not. “Focusing your mind” is a broad abstraction; what are the basic acts you use when you are in focus? To change the metaphor, the primary choice is to manage the operations of your mind or not. What are
I have been promising a book on Free Will for about a year, maybe more, so I think in good conscience I should give a progress report. I haven’t yet decided whether the book will be on the free will—determinism debate (and thus be largely polemical) or will be a positive book explaining free will
Sadly, I voted for Trump for President. I panicked over the idea of the Dems packing the Supreme Court, which Biden pointedly wouldn’t deny they’d do. But after January 6th, I rescinded my vote. Which of course is impossible. But I did it “in software.” Sometime later, I followed up by changing my voter registration
