A Rational Egoist's Rights are a Mystical Altruist's Wrongs

A response by Paul McKeever to XOmniverse's video, "Anarchistic Law", which was a response to Paul McKeever's video, "In Defence of Ayn Rand #10: Anarchism's Flawed Analysis".

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• anarchy
• anarchism
• anarchistic
• law

[marneedear]

Hi Paul. Nicely done. Helped me clear up my own ideas, especially the discussion on common law. Love the vids.

Cheers.

[PaulMcKeever]

Thanks MD. I acknowledge this one was more about the history and state of law, and about the morality that prevails among most individuals, than about philosophy. But the evidence provided by the common law & equity was too pertinent to pass up.

[TheAnonymousAnomie]

@LakeShaman

read Max Stirner's The Ego And His Own.

He was probably the archetypical Egoist, and if you ask me I'd tell you he was also an early proponent of evolutionary ethics.

[OldSmellyCrotch]

Speaking of conflicts......if the prosecutor represents the "Crown" and the Judge represents the "Crown" also, isn't this what we commonly call a "conflict of interest"??

[olvew]

I feel the argument is incomplete without dealing with David Friedman's thesis about efficient law; do you have any comments on this?

[psychiatristman00]

can i just mention a few things:

1) ayn rand was a raving queen. regardless of her philosophy, that woman was crazy.

2) those who follow rational egoism as an ethical system might not be acting wrongly, but they are depriving themselves of the virtues of true self-sacrifice and social justice. believe it or not, some form of a collective does exist simply because empiricism indicates its existence. people are profoundly influenced by their cultural and environmental settings.

[olvew]

It's really much simpler. Accept it or die. It's not a threat, it's a simple statement of fact.

[danmifune]

When I look at the world must I always try to prove it exists?

Of course reality exists the question is again, can reason 'prove' it? Do we really need to?

[danmifune]

Seems to be a lot of stale truisms here.

The question should be 'is the objective world knowable?' The Rand writing that has been posted here ignores this although it does alude to the Kantian: "The most depraved sentence you can now utter is to ask: Whose reason? The answer is: Yours." this is subjective!

Reason alone is not how we come by knowledge, we must rely on intuition and imaginiation. Logic and analytic reasoning severely limits our experience of the world.

[danmifune]

The best way to understand an objective world is through language- in convention we wave a shared language, but again there's no proving possible.

Check out your Wittgenstein.

[olvew]

...-let the head-hunter who does not choose to accept the validity of logic, try to prove it without using logic-let the pigmy who proclaims that a skyscraper needs no foundation after it reaches its fiftieth story, yank the base from under his building, not yours-let the cannibal who snarls that the freedom of mans mind was needed to create an industrial civilization, but is not needed to maintain it, be given an arrowhead and bearskin, not a university chair of economics.