 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual lives. This is the Iran Book Show. Hey, everybody, welcome to Iran Book Show on this Puerto Rico. It's a beautiful Saturday, but then it's always beautiful here in Puerto Rico. I hope everybody's having a great weekend. And thank you for joining us, taking some time out of your weekend. I'm really looking forward to today's show. I think we're going to really delve in deeply into an important topic, a topic that is both relevant to many people's lives directly, to a political world, to a political culture right now, and that has, I think, deep philosophical significance. That is, I think, that it is an opportunity to really discuss some real important philosophical issues. So I'm looking forward to that. We're going to be joined by Ben Bear, who is a fellow, is that right? Yes. Fellow at the Ironman Institute, a philosopher, was a professor of philosophy for many years in the name of the universities in the tip of my tongue. Right, the places. What's that? Right, the places. Yeah, but the last one was in New Orleans, right? Yes. Yeah, at Catholic University, actually. Yes, so Catholic University. We taught philosophy. Ben has written quite a bit about abortion. And what is exciting, I mean, a couple of reasons why we're doing this now and they're related. One is that, of course, we're all waiting to see what the Supreme Court decides with regard to world versus weight. And because of the leak, we have a pretty strong suspicion in terms of what they're going to decide, which is basically to appeal world versus weight, which is going to be dramatic. And so that's one reason to talk about this. And of course, the second reason is that Ben has just published a book, why the right to abortion is sacrosanth. I don't think they could see it, but they'll see it in a minute when you talk, you can raise it. And so we'll talk about the book. Now, I'm going to play a little bit of devil's advocate here, so I'm going to ask kind of the, I'm going to try to channel some of the most more obnoxious people on my chat and ask some of the questions that I think you would ask, but it would be much easier, much, much easier instead of me channeling you for you to just ask the questions. So we have the super chat feature turned on. Thank you, Khmed Tija. I think, I'm sure I butchered that name, so I apologize, but thank you for the support. So we do have the super chat open and available. So you can ask questions, you can ask questions about anything related to abortion. You can also, and we'll leave these questions to the end, but you can also ask questions about anything that in the past I've told you, ask a philosopher, don't ask me kind of thing. So anything that you're curious about that you want to ask Ben, that you want to ask a philosopher, I'll feel free. So we'll take questions about anything, but the focus is going to be, is definitely going to be on abortion. So and everything related to that, and you know, we'll get to, I think we'll get to quite a few topics related. So let's start, Ben, with the book. So you've published this book, it's a collection of your essays relating to abortion. So tell us a little bit about what's in the book. It's available on Amazon, the link by the way is down in the description. It was working last time I checked, sometimes YouTube links don't work. Tell us a little bit about the book, what's in it? And then if you could say a little bit about why a book because all the articles have already been published. So why a book? Sure, so here's the book, why the right to abortion is sacrosanct. It's got, not everything I've ever written on abortion, but it's got the five kind of top most essential essays that we previously published in New Ideal that highlight and outline really the essential philosophic reasons why there is a right to abortion and why Ein Rand was a vocal supporter of that right and why it's deeply connected to the fundamental principles of her philosophy. So it starts out with a very provocative essay and I did that on purpose. The essay on why abortion should be legal until birth, which is a, that should catch the reader's interest because even among various defenders of abortion rights these days, including on the left, most people on the left, you don't see many people willing to stake that kind of radical claim, but that is the claim that Ein Rand made. And I think she had really good reasons for it. And I try to outline what those reasons are and how they stem from her view of what individual rights are. If rights are individual rights, they apply only to individuals, which means beings that are physically and physiologically individuated from each other and that's why birth is really important. Then I talk more about the moral basis that she has for this view of rights, how if you want to talk about the sanctity of life, and this is related to why we gave the title that we did, the only position that really defends the sanctity of life is the pro-abortion rights position. Abortion allows women to protect what's sacred about life is the second essay. And that's a position that recognizes that what's sacred about life is that you only have one of them. It's your one and only chance to make something of yourself and things are sacred only to individuals who are choosing the values that their life is going to constitute. And nothing can be sacred to a being that's not yet been born that doesn't make choices, that doesn't act, that doesn't have any consciousness. So that's, and this, and that essay elaborates on it. There's also an essay, abortion defenders are losing the moral high ground. This relates to the fact that the defenders of abortion rights on the left are, even though they are traditionally associated with the abortion rights position, they don't usually offer a moral defense of the position. They often even concede the moral premises of their opponents. And I argue this is part of the reason why they're losing this debate. Then we've got science without philosophy can't resolve the abortion debate. You often hear anti-abortion people saying that if you want to look at the science of embryology and biology and genetics, that that shows that either the fetus or the embryo is a human being with rights. And I argue this is not a scientific question. It's a philosophical question. It presupposes an understanding of what rights are and why they're important and that no amount of knowledge about what you see on a sonogram is going to tell you anything about whether or not the being has rights. And then finally, we've got Inran's radical case for abortion rights, which is where I put together all of the most important statements that Inran made on this subject to really clarify what her view was and why, as the title suggests, it was so radical that she really did support abortion rights until birth and was unique in this respect. And in holding it, she's applying just straightforward essential principles of her philosophy that this comes right out of the heart of her philosophy. And I should mention, Inran, this is one of the reasons why I am particularly interested in this topic. Because I think they talk sometimes about using abortion as a litmus test in politics. I think abortion is a good litmus test in philosophy because your position on it really shows whether you believe in individual rights and whether you, at the end of the day, understand the objective as principles that underpin individual rights. There's really not a way to find any kind of sympathy for the anti-abortion position if you truly understand the basic principles of objectivism. Good, and we're gonna go deep into that. So tell us a little bit about the importance of publishing a book and what you're trying to achieve. And let me encourage everybody. I think the Kindle version is actually free. I downloaded it. It's on Kindle with zero dollars. It's free if you have the Kindle Unlimited. Okay, I have Kindle Unlimited. And then paperback is $6. But it'd be great to get people to buy it so what's the real advantage here? Yeah, so all these essays have been published before. We're putting them all together in one place in order to leverage Amazon as a search engine. This is a place where people increasingly go when they wanna find out something about a topic because they wanna find out about abortion, they'll see what books have been written about it. And we want to give them a easy way of getting access to new ideal material. We're actually selling this at cost. So we're not making money from the sales bit per se. We've lowered the price as much as we can so that as many people can get their hands on it as possible. And the more people in your audience buy it, even if they've read these articles before, the better job that does for our algorithm which will increase this in the search results. We've got marketing plans going forward which are gonna probably help with that even more. If they donate to the Ironman Institute for this purpose it'll go toward marketing on Amazon and some other social media platforms. But yeah, this is mainly a marketing project and we're also hoping that it'll get more attention to the Institute more generally. I'm hoping to do more interviews like this one with more podcasts and maybe some radio or TV, we'll see. But the more the sponsors of the Ironman Institute help us out on that, the more I think we can do. Good, so just a last question on the book per se. Why sacrocent? I can't even pronounce it, sacrocent. Why use a religious, what's considered a religious term to describe the way to abortion? Well, this is a term that's associated with religion. But just as Ironman I think argues in her introduction to the 25th edition of the Fountainhead it's because religions had a monopoly on morality for so many years. That if you want to explain how morality is properly the province of rational philosophy you've got to take some of these terms back. And this is a great place to do it, especially when the language of sanctity and the sacred is so often exploited by the anti-abortion side to say that they are the defenders of the sanctity of life. When they don't, what they understand by the sanctity of life is preserving the life of, yes, a clump of cells, yes, a hunk of protoplasm, which is alive in some sense, it's a biological entity, but there is nothing about that entity that has what's distinctively special about human life attached to it. And what makes human life special, unique, sacred, sacrosanct is the life of a rational being who's making his or her way through the world making choices, trying to pursue happiness. And if that's what it means, then the life that matters in this situation primarily is the life of the mother. Good, so let's jump in at the heart of this question and the whole issue of abortion and that is the question of individual rights. So let's just do a primer on, a quick primer on where do rights come from? And then we can kind of delve into somebody says here that they believe in the individual rights of the unborn child. Why is that impossible? Why can an unborn fetus not have, why can he not have rights? Okay, so first thing to say, I think, and this is an example of how this is a position that comes right out of the heart of Objectivism's basic principles. Rights don't come from God. There is no God. I don't think there's a God. Iren didn't think that there was a God. So they're not mystical, magical entities that are endowed by some kind of supernatural being just by the grace of its whim. That's a starting point. We're assuming instead a secular scientific rational outlook. But of course it also doesn't follow from that rights are just arbitrary decisions by society. You get whatever rights Congress decides that you get. There are facts about human life and facts about human nature that are immutable, that have nothing to do with the whims of Congress, which are the basis of morality generally, but then also rights as a moral concept. And so then you have to talk about, well, what role does the concept of rights play in morality? As I assume most of your audience knows, Inran's view is that morality is a code of values for guiding your life, for pursuing a flourishing and happy life, a set of virtues that allows you to plan in the long range how to make something of yourself. And so then the concept of rights fits into this equation because it helps us, it's a concept we need to guide our interactions with other people. And importantly for Inran, the concept of individual rights is a concept related to our coexistence with each other in a social context. And so if you read, for example, her essay, Man's Rights, or her essay, The Nature of Government, where both of which are really essential texts for understanding her view of rights. What you see her talking about is what are the conditions needed for a rational being to live in a society with other people? We need to be able to plan our projects. We need to be able to plan our lives, to pursue values, to produce, to trade with other rational beings. The whole context here is, we are an individual who's acting, who's planning, who's making choices, and we're trying to negotiate boundaries around our lives such that we can do so in a way that's consistent with other people's doing the same thing. Because that way we can benefit from each other. We can benefit from the trade, the knowledge, the friendship that we get by living in society when there aren't a bunch of people running around trying to use force on us. We want some kind of boundaries against force being used where one person tries to manipulate, exploit the other. But this whole context is a context where we're talking primarily, not only, but paradigmatically, about adult human beings who are trying to make something of their lives. They're making choices, they're pursuing projects, and they're trying to do that in a way that's consistent with everybody's being able to do that so they can benefit from the trade. We're not talking about any kind of special moral status that attaches, say for example, just to our genetics. There's no mention in these essays made about the fact that we've got 46 chromosomes of a certain type. And that that magically conveys some kind of special status on us that's then worthy of protection. You have to think about, for Ayn Rand, individual rights, they guide our decisions. But just like any other moral concept, they guide our decisions from the perspective of what's the best way to profit from living in a social context? And our idea is if you respect other people's rights, it's good for your life, it's good for your self-interest. And that's pretty clear when you're talking about why you should respect the rights of another adult human being who's also engaging in projects and you wanna benefit from that. It's absolutely unclear why it's in your interest to protect a piece of protoplasm with the same genetic code as yours, but where it's not doing anything, it's not living in a human sense. And of course, if you're a parent or you're a prospective parent who wants to have a child who's made, who's done some thinking about how a child's going to play in your life, well, then you have a reason to have a child, but that's only if you choose it. And if you don't choose it, the life of a fetus or an embryo is not of value to you and it's not of value to anyone. It's not a value to itself because it's not yet a living human being who can value, it's not a value to a God who doesn't exist. So there's just no basis in Ayn Rand's theory of rights for thinking that an embryo or a fetus could have rights. It's why she thinks rights begin only at birth and it's, as you can see, that helps explain why birth is important because birth is when a being becomes individuated and individual rights are about protecting the boundaries around the lives of individual entities, individual human beings in a social context. So just to push on this, you know, in the kind of questions that I typically get, but you know, the fetus has a unique DNA. So you said it's irrelevant, but it makes it individual in a sense that it's different than the mother. And the don't rights ultimately attach to life isn't, is entey related to human life. And of course, a fetus is alive. So why can't we, why shouldn't we expand the concept of individual rights? Why shouldn't we be applying this concept to the fetus? Well, let me answer- It's live and it's individual supposedly, right? Let me actually answer that question first a bit indirectly to anticipate a question that often comes up. Because, you know, so what I said earlier was that the concept of rights applies paradigmatically and primarily to the lives of individuals who are pursuing plans in society. That doesn't mean that it doesn't apply, for example, to children or to infants. They're not the paradigm case of rights bearers, but I think children and infants still have rights. And it's important and interesting to note that they still don't have them in the full way that adults do. You take adults as the kind of center of the page example and you can extend it. Mutatus mutandus to younger and younger cases. And that, but, you know, notice that it changes as you move further away from the paradigm case. Children do not have the rights to all the same rights that adults do. They don't have the right to, you know, assign contracts, they don't have the right to vote, et cetera. It's only when they reach the age of majority that they have that full set of rights. And so there's a transitional period between being born and growing up to an adult where you get all the rights. And that's a sign of something, that the further away you go, the less obvious it applies. And then what's important is that in a case where before birth, where the fetus or the embryo is a necessary burden on the mother, you definitely can't extend it past that point because that's the point where it's, there's no way to resolve the conflict just by the nature of the biology. You know, rights are conflict resolving principles. And so you can only apply them where it's possible for people to avoid conflicts and the rights show how that's possible. It's not possible before that point when the fetus is necessarily a burden on the life of the mother. It's only when she's given birth that it's possible for her to, you know, give it up to somebody else who, if she doesn't want it anymore and there's no conflict anymore, that's possible. So as to the question about genetics and it's true in some sense that the embryo or the fetus has an individual genetic code, it's true in most cases. It's not true when they're identical twins, which is interesting to think about because if you think having an individual code is what's so important, then does that mean it's okay for one individual twin to kill the other? Cause it's not the, they've got the same code. But I mean, there's lots of ways to think of respects in which a thing can be individual or individuated. Lots of different respects in which it can be unique. I mean, I am, you can take any entity you want, you can describe what's unique about it. But it's, the question is, what's the relevant respect in which a thing is individual or unique? And it's not even really about the uniqueness. It's about the individuation, which means a separation. And for Ayn Rand, the view is that individuation is important because there are separate individuals who can go their separate way in society. And they need to be able to go their separate way in order for them to live because the mind requires freedom. And that is just not the kind of individuation we're talking about when we're talking about this being has a separate genetic code. There's nothing special about that. And I've never been able to get anybody to explain to me what's so special about it. I mean, they can say, well, that shows that it's human. And that's true. It's a human embryo. It's not a dog embryo. It's not a lizard embryo. All that is true. But the question is, what is it about being a human embryo as opposed to these other kinds of embryos that would warrant some kind of the protection of rights? And I never get an answer to that question. And honestly, I think that the real reason why people think that is one of two possible reasons. One is that they're religious and they think that God has given the embryo rights and they're looking for a way to rationalize that view using some kind of scientific language. And so genetics provides a nice proxy for what they think is God's will. And there's more to say about that. The other view is, I think more common when we're talking about people who are fans of Iran who don't think of themselves as religious. And it's that they've got a rationalistic understanding of what rights are and where they come from. They think, well, rights have something to do with being human. This is human in some sense, therefore this has rights. And so there's a nice little rationalistic deduction that you can give there. But it's one that doesn't pay any attention to what the actual inductive basis of the concept of rights is. And that's what you typically get when you have rationalism. And rationalism is also often, since you don't understand the concept, if you don't have a firsthand understanding of the abstract concept for yourself, you then tend to absorb the views of other people around you. And if you happen to be living in a culture that's highly religious, where all the religious people are using rights in this particular way, you'll maybe unintentionally end up absorbing that usage. I think that's the way rationalism often functions. So I see people in the chat kind of saying, okay, well, this isn't, okay, so put rights aside. I just care about the fetus and I think it's wrong to kill a fetus, right? So what's the important, why are rights here important? Why is it important to define whether an MBO has rights or not, that the mother has rights? What function do rights play in this context, really in all contexts? But what is the kind of the function that rights play here? Well, of course, there's a category of people who have every right, every reason in the world to care about the fetus. And that's the parents who want to have one. And I think, so if you're a expected mother, you certainly have a right to bring your child to term. And if someone tries to stop you from doing that, it's violating your rights, that's for sure. I also think that there are people who maybe aren't parents themselves or maybe they are, but they're talking about other people's children and they're thinking about their own experience having children and how they would never want to abort their own child. And then simply failing to empathize with the different position of the other people are in. Like, yeah, you would never make this choice because you wanted to have children, but imagine someone else is in a different situation and maybe they don't have the same hierarchy of values as you, they don't have the same priorities in life and they might have a different set of reasons than you do. So that's something that's important. And that's something that follows from the nature of individual rights, that different individuals do have different hierarchies of value. And if you understand and respect individual rights, then you need to allow the woman who has different priorities to make different decisions even when they're different from yours. So there's another, that's one important role for understanding the role of rights here. But again, it's the fact that you like babies or that you care about fetuses, maybe in your own case, doesn't generate any reason to think that any given fetus, any given embryo has rights. They're not about, rights are not about setting up and protecting your set of preferences and imposing them on other people, especially when the entity in question isn't a person in the relevant sense. So I was thinking in this context that, the importance of rights is that they define the actions of government, that is they define the categories of things that government should be concerned with versus what individuals would be concerned of. And certainly they're gonna be individuals who choose never to have an abortion and the individuals who choose yes to have, and they can be moral considerations applied to them. But when can the government prohibit you from action? It's only when you're violating rights. And that's why a government prohibiting abortion requires the government to somehow ascertain that the fetus has rights or that the embryo has rights. Yeah, and maybe an additional spin on that is that, so the position that women should be able to get an abortion until birth doesn't imply that every single abortion that a woman might get at any particular stage in pregnancy is thereby moral. I think a lot of them are, I think many of them are, and I think that needs to be emphasized, but not everyone. And so one point to think about here is, I mean, part of the reason people might have sympathy for the other side is they're thinking, maybe of some particular case where somebody was irresponsible and at the last minute made an irresponsible decision and maybe it was wrong. Maybe this was cowardice on her part, but that's irrelevant from the perspective of how we understand rights. You can have the right to do the wrong thing as long as you're not violating someone else's rights in doing it. And since, as I argue, the fetus doesn't have rights, that's the kind of action that a government should protect. Now I hasten to add that I really do think most of the time women get abortions, it is good for them and is rational. And that includes even a lot of cases in the late term. I mean, there's a lot of heat about late term abortions and the reason that articles like mine about how you should be able to have an abortion until birth, the reason they get this heat is imagining that these late term abortions are mostly irrational, irresponsible decisions, but it's just not true. First of all, there's a very small number of abortions. Like it's less than 2% of the abortions happen after 20 weeks. It's only 1.2% of something like that. Yeah, and most of them happen when it's a threat to the life of the mother or when we're talking about a severe fetal abnormality where the fetus isn't gonna, where the child wouldn't survive much after birth anyway. And these are often the same kinds of cases where the people who are opposed to abortion would allow for exceptions anyway. So it's really kind of a, it's a red herring. It is a red herring and the number of doctors who are willing to do late term abortions is very small. And I think if a woman just walked in and wanted it for irresponsible reasons, I'm not sure the doctors wouldn't do it. The doctors just wouldn't do it. So I think the immorality, the immoral cases of being controlled by the fact that doctors don't like these procedures. They're not pleasant and therefore avoid them. So let's talk about this all the way to birth because somebody in the chat said, somebody always asked this question. So is the birth canal magic? Before you're born, you don't have rights. And then two seconds later when you pop out there, suddenly you have rights, a right something that just conveyed to you in, you know, through the, I don't know through the birth canal, somehow conveyed to you. So again, I think a wrong view of rights and a transistor's view of rights, but tell us what's the mistake in conception here? Yeah, this question always comes up. And one, so there's no magic involved here. This is a view that comes out of a secular scientific worldview for sure. And it's funny that this question always comes up about this position because you have to wonder what's the alternative here? The alternative that's usually offered is conception. But I think imagining that rights are somehow bestowed at conception is the really magical way of thinking. For one thing, again, what's so special about a certain number of chromosomes? What's the magic's special sauce there? Why is that relevant to morality? And if part of the worry is, well, there's gradations throughout and, you know, the difference between the physical structure of the fetus two minutes before birth and the newborn child shortly thereafter is just a difference in degree. Well, that's true at conception too. It takes 24 to 48 hours for a sperm to fertilize an egg. So there's, what's the magic moment there? That's one thing I think people who raise this question should think about. But then the broader and the more important issue is how do we think about what you might call borderline cases more generally? I mean, it's true that how exactly if the philosophic principle is that a woman should be able to have an abortion until birth, there's then a separate question that different jurisdictions of law are going to have to settle about how to define that. And there's different ways you could define it. You could talk about breaching the birth canal. You could talk about the umbilical cord. There's different ways you could draw that line. And I think part of the reason people are asking this question is they're wondering, well, how do you decide to draw that line? Where is the bright line? And it doesn't seem to them to be a bright line. One thing I would say is, well, it's a lot brighter than conception because it's a percept, all of the conditions here are perceptually observable as opposed to something you could only really figure out by doing a chemical experiment, a biochemical experiment on a fertilized egg. So that's one point. But really the broader issue here is epistemological. And it's understanding that rights like any other concept in morality or any other concept in philosophy or really any other concept on any topic are concepts that are formed by humans for human purposes. And you mentioned intrinsicism your own. This is another example where I think this position on this particular issue is again, coming right out of the Heart of Iran's philosophy and here it's coming out of her epistemology. And those of you who are familiar with her epistemology know she has a whole theory of concepts. And if you read introduction to epistemology you'll see she situates her view of concepts as against the two other rival dominant views, one being the intrinsicist view that says that basically concepts are out there already formed for us by God or somehow by nature. The lines are already drawn for us by nature and it's just up to us to kind of passively let those concepts filter into our mind. There are metaphysical essences and then there's the subjectivist view that says we can form concepts any old way we like. And notice that those map onto the two dominant views of rights that rights are given to us by God or they're just kind of arbitrary decisions of society and the exact same issue. Objectivism rejects those two views of concepts in just the same reasons, for just the same reasons in just the same ways as rejects these views of concepts. It says, no, the lines aren't already drawn for us in nature. We have to draw them ourselves. But we can draw them on the basis of observable perceptual similarities and differences. So I mentioned the perceptual similarity and difference already. It's pretty obvious when a child is born versus when it's not. And for good reasons there has to be a cognitive purpose that's served by a given concept. Why do we need to think about rights generally? Well, I've already talked about that. They are concepts that serve the purpose of our understanding about how we need to make decisions with regard to other people in society. And then as a consequence for government, government needs to know how to protect people's lives to protect their interactions in society. So that's why we need the concept of rights. And when it comes to what they call borderline cases because of the fact that there aren't lines drawn in nature for us by God or by Plato's heaven or what have you. Yes, we are the ones who need to draw these lines. We human beings need to make choices. And there are facts that we can use to help draw those lines. I think the fact of birth is a pretty obvious and crisp difference. But yes, you'll still face choices about where exactly to define the line of birth for legal purposes. And I think that there's a range of options there. And given jurisdictions just going to have to make a decision. And then once it makes that decision, it will be objective for everyone to know that you can't cross this line and they can make their plans on the basis of that. It's just like in talking about the age of majority. You have to have a line somewhere where a child gets treated as an adult. And there it's really a borderline case where it's not anywhere near as crisp of a line. It's not like someone's born into adulthood by some magical process. It's, there's a very gradual process of maturity. Some people do it faster than others. But we have to have some line that we draw where you get the full set of rights that adults have and different jurisdictions draw it differently. And as long as everybody knows what the line is they can plan on the basis of that. And I mean, if you don't have a problem with the fact that we need an age of majority which is a much grayer line, you shouldn't have any problem at all with the fact that we need to draw a line somewhere around birth because there it's much more obvious that it's where it's needed. So what about the, and I think it's a, you've already answered this implicitly but what about all the arguments about viability? Right, why can't, as soon as the fetus is viable outside the womb, then why doesn't it get rights then? Right, so the general objectivist view that Einrand articulates when she's talking about abortion rights generally is that the reason that a fetus doesn't have rights is because a potential human being is not an actual human being. In virtue of its genetics, a fetus is a potential human being which means it might become one. It's not one yet. And again, by human being here we mean individual human being. It's a potential individual human being but it's not an actual human being. The woman is the actual individual human being. And I think that viability is just the same issue that all that viability is is that yes, the fetus has the potential to survive outside the womb if you supply lots of really high-tech medical intervention. And it's true that there is a difference once it becomes viable. So when there are medical complications and birth needs to be induced earlier because of that, it's good to know if it's viable for the sake of the woman who wants to save that baby because she wants to have children. You can have it now. You can have a C-section now and save its life. So viability is a real thing. It's important, but it has nothing to do with rights if rights only apply to actual individual human beings. Okay, so let's take some of the super chat questions that ones related to abortion. But let me remind everybody, you've heard a lot from Ben. If you have objections, I know some of you do, you know how to ask the question. The question is in the super chat. You can ask it. I will convey them to Ben. We'll get the answers. So use the feature. I'm not just gonna pull stuff from the chat itself. I can't track everything you say in the chat. So the super chat is a way you can put $2 on it, but it's a way to highlight it for me and I can see it. Okay, let's start with free trade who asks, in what sense would a woman's rights be infringed if in late term pregnancy, she would have the right to evacuate the fetus and give it up for adoption, but not to destroy it? Okay, I sometimes call this the Star Trek question. And I call it that because the only conceivable situation where I can imagine where it wouldn't violate her rights to do something like this is if you could literally use a Star Trek style matter energy transport device to just beam the fetus out of her body, where it would have no effects on her whatsoever and therefore give it up to somebody who wants to adopt it or something like that. Now that's never gonna happen. And the reason it's relevant is because I mean, just giving birth is an extremely stressful, if not traumatic procedure. And the fact that you can have a C-section doesn't help too much because it's a surgery, right? So either way, you're doing something drastic to the woman's body. And if she doesn't wanna have the child, she should not have to sacrifice that. And so anybody who says, well, we're not gonna make her raise the baby, you're ignoring entirely just the way in which the act of giving birth itself is a sacrifice for someone who doesn't wanna raise a child. And of course, the act of abortion itself is now without particularly late term. That's true. It's a pretty traumatic event as well for the woman at that point. But again, I can't imagine a viable MBO and a mother in complete health a week before she's about to deliver actually having an abortion. It just doesn't happen. You know, again, I think she has a right to do it, but practically it doesn't happen because doctors won't do it. And the abortion is non-trivial in terms of the risks involved. It's not a riskless procedure very close to birth, right? The later you wait, the more complicated a procedure, a medical procedure it becomes. Absolutely. It would be insane for somebody to do that, it would just be nuts. They do it late when even given the fact that a late term abortion is a definitely unpleasant procedure, they've made the decision that it's not as bad as the alternatives. And you have to think like, how bad could the alternatives be to motivate them to make that decision? They must be pretty bad. And yes. So let's see. Well, while we're on this topic, I'll just share, there was an article I read the other day in the New York Times called, Does being denied an abortion harm mental health? And there was an anecdote in the story that I just, you have to hear this because this is the kind of thing I'm talking about. I'll just read a couple of paragraphs here. In 2017, Katherine Sullivan was 17 weeks pregnant when she learned that her baby was missing an X chromosome in the result of a rare genetic disorder called Turner syndrome. The doctor presented termination as an option, but an anchorage Alaska where she lived, she could not find a provider who was willing or able to perform the procedure. She began calling clinics in different states and finally located one in Colorado. The cost $10,000 out of pocket was at a reach and went through five or six weeks of absolute torture Ms. Sullivan recalled. Eventually at 22 weeks, her daughter died in utero and was delivered at a hospital. I'm still working through the PTSD of being denied the choice of how to end my pregnancy, said Ms. Sullivan 39. I still feel shame about having wanted an abortion for this child that I wanted so much. She, I mean, this is someone who really wanted to have a baby, but no one was going to die in utero and didn't want to have to go through that process. And this is 22 weeks. We're not talking about a late term abortion. This is, she couldn't find an abortion. So she said she was looking for three, four weeks. So in the second trimester, not the third trimester at all. So it's the whole, I mean, the real tragedy here is the women in the first trimester and the second trimester going to be denied the ability to have abortions. And it's horrific what they're gonna have to go through. And then that women in the third trimester are gonna be denied when there are real reasons to have that abortion, like their life is in peril or the fetus is completely malformed. Let's see, I don't know what to say about this one, but because I don't know if this was said in what context it was said, but this is, Michael says, have you been someone you said that you can kill a baby after it is born if you discover it is retarded and will forever be stuck on the perceptual level? If you didn't know the fetus had these conditions while you were pregnant. I don't remember Harry ever saying that, but I do think that you could make the following kind of case and I'm not necessarily making this case, I'm saying it's arguable, but there are babies who are born sometimes, sometimes in ways that you couldn't predict and then the cephalic babies where they're babies born without brains. And I mean, I think it's very different than someone who's stuck at the perceptual level is what this person was saying. And there you have a human child in some sense, it's individuated, it's got the DNA, but if it has no brain, it's not capable of living anything like a human life. And they also usually don't live very long anyway. So I do think it's relevant that Ayn Rand says a child cannot begin to acquire any rights until it is born, but that's a necessary condition. And you might think, well, you need to add a few more sufficient conditions, like it's actually born with the brain. I remember the Zika, the Zika virus and the stories about babies born with Zika and they ultimately died, but they went agony, just agony for months and sometimes years because I can't remember the brain was swollen or whatever it was, and there was no cure. And mothers, because a lot of the Zika was in Brazil and places like Catholic where it's hard to get an abortion or they didn't want to get an abortion for religious reasons. People, women were having these babies and all it was was agony and misery and a disaster for the baby and of course the parents, just horrific. The only reason that I can think of to say that even that case, even an encephalic or Zika baby should be protected is something like the following. And I think this is generally part of the reason why infants should have the rights protected and that's something to do with the objectivity of law. And that's that you do need to have strict boundaries drawn by law that are publicly knowable and practicable by everyone. And even though the young infant in a normal case obviously isn't a rational being in the way that an adult is, it's still got a lot of growing to do. Obviously if any adults are gonna have rights they need to have been protected after they were born and there needs to be a bright line at which point the protection begins. And you could argue, I mean, I think generally you have to argue for infants generally that the reason why birth is the relevant bright line is it's one that everybody can see that everybody like once you've been born you know that this is a being worthy of rights protection. And you know, you could always think, well I don't know what its level of mental capacity is, okay but you do know that it's been born. And that's something then that everybody can respect. And so I think that's generally why infants need the protection of rights. Whether you could make exceptions for that in cases of babies born without brains is I think a good debate that legal scholars should have. Yeah, and again, this is why it's so important to have the right abortion because if you know in advance the baby will have Zika, you know in advance that they're gonna be born without a brain. Today we have the technology to be able to tell all these things. You wanna save this potential human being from a horrific life. And abortion is the only way to make that possible. And you don't wanna be in a position where you have to do it after birth. But you don't wanna be in a position where you have I don't know people making those kind of decisions because of the objectivity of law and the importance of that. So if you wanna give them it out and abortion is the way to solve that issue. But let me say something, take a step back from this kind of discussion. So I know that whenever we talk about this that somebody always wants to raise questions about these borderline cases. And because they're borderline cases they are of necessity difficult. I mean, you're gonna have to make a decision and there's not gonna be a clear straightforward basis for that decision in every single case. But the borderline cases are a distraction generally speaking because what's super important here is that we're talking about half of the country is about to lose the right to have an abortion when you're one week pregnant. And why are we talking about these borderline cases where it's often not legal anyway that's not where the controversy is. And even when it isn't legal most people think it should be that's because most even abortion opponents think there should be exceptions for these kinds of things. So the real debate is why should a woman be able to have an abortion when it's not because of weird abnormalities it's not because her life is an immediate danger it's not because she was raped it's not because it was incest it's just she had, she got pregnant inadvertently and it is going to change her whole life if she has to have this baby whether she gives it up for adoption or not it is going to change her life at the very least for nine months but even when she gives it up for adoption we'll still have an impact on her body for the rest of her life. And that's what we should be talking about. Yeah, and that's what's under threat because again, 99% of all abortions are before week 22 that's what's going to stop. And now there's discussion about in some states banning the abortion pill, right? Which is effective only in the first few weeks and yet I think that really indicates what they want which is to ban all abortions and that's just horrific because to make the argument that a truly a clump of cells which is what it is in those first few weeks is a human being that needs the protection of rights is a complete negation of the concept of rights. They're even talking about banning travel from state to state to go to a state where abortion is legal which is even this Supreme Court would have to see as unconstitutional. You would hope, you would hope. All right, let's see what else do we have here. So, Kimmet Tijer asks legal until birth or legal until the court is cut. I think that's where you, I mean, the court cutting is irrelevant because the placenta comes out anyway. So the baby's detached from the mother whether they cut the cord right then on there or not. No says related to that. Life begins when you start breathing and ends when you stop breathing. So anything more other than the question of different states could implement different lines? I mean, I think philosophy gives you a range. It says the line needs to be drawn somewhere close to birth and it doesn't give you more than that. It's because these, because rights are not intrinsic, they're not magical essences that suddenly spring upon us. Some, you hear the sound of a heavenly choir, bells ring and now you know you've got rights. No, they are human concepts with a human purpose and we're the ones who have to decide where their protection is going to begin on the basis of some observable facts, which are I think in this case fairly obvious and then it'll be up to different jurisdictions to decide exactly how that's implemented most objectively. All right, I'm just picking. We've got a bunch of non-abortion related questions so let's finish up the abortion ones. First Brian says thank you both. Jonathan Honing says Ben is great than your book and him on New Ideal. All of that is great. Thank you, Jonathan. Bonnie says, my copy comes Monday. Thanks for the ammunition. Let's see. This is a, one good thing about the book is that it's short. So it's just five chapters. It's about 50 pages with footnotes, less than that without. So if you know somebody who's on the fence about this issue, it's a short read. It's I hope a clear and accessible read. And it's particularly aimed I think at people who are left liberal types who are pro-abortion, but they don't have the moral foundation. They don't have the philosophical understanding of why abortion is moral, such that they can then go on and defend a right to it. And so this book is very much written for them. Let's see. Michael asks, if you kill a pregnant woman, should you be charged with two counts of murder or one? Yeah, so I've heard this one a few times before. It's, I certainly think if the woman is pregnant and she's pregnant because she wants to have a child, which is usually the case, then the fact that she and the fetus died does mean that this is a greater crime. Just like, there's degrees of this grand theft versus petty larceny, where the value of the stolen goods is higher. We'll hear the value of the life is higher because the woman wanted to have that child and presumably so did the husband. And now for the husband, there's a loss of two people, let's say, or for the maid. So I do think that in a case like that, there should be harsher punishment. I don't think that means you should think of it as two cases of homicide for the reasons that I've been arguing for because I don't think that even if the woman wants the child, that the fetus is a being with rights, but that doesn't mean that you can't punish it more harshly. And I think this then raises kind of complicated questions like what happens if the woman's on her way to get an abortion and she's killed along with her fetus is that does that still count because she didn't want the child? I think even there, even in a case like that, it should still be punished more harshly because there's still mens rea, there's still a worse intent on the part of the killer that he doesn't care that he's killing both the woman and her child. If he knows that she's pregnant. If he knows that she's pregnant, if it's obvious, yeah. And since the law is there to protect us from people with terrible intentions, that's what should count. Liam says rights are there to inform us about what government may or may not do, they don't come from government. I agree with that. Yeah. Let's see, I think this is the last abortion question. Although if, of course, let's see, wait about halfway to our usual super chat goal. So it's about $300, we've got $300 to go. So any remaining questions on abortion, I know some of you don't like the conversation and I'm impressed, ask an impressive question. I always find it interesting that the people who always beach and complain are the ones that actually don't put forward anything. All they do is bitch and complain. So ask a challenging question. Ask something that you think we have not addressed or that you think would stomp us. All right, let's see. Frank says in the past, was abortion ever considered wrong because every conceived zygote would become a human person who has never existed on earth before? Considered wrong by whom, I guess. Maybe this is a question about the history of abortion ethics and jurisprudence. It is interesting that- I mean, I think it's trying to draw out of you an answer about why it's okay to destroy a zygote who will become a human person and that's never existed before on earth. I mean, so it's interesting to look at the history of the way the Catholic church has thought about this. From what I understand, for a long time they did not oppose, well, they did not think that abortion up until what they call the quickening, which is when the fetus starts to kick and move was murder and that's part of the reason, not I don't think the only reason, but it's part of the reason why there weren't, and because a lot of other religions thought something similar, there weren't laws against abortion. There weren't formal laws against abortion until late 19th century. Now, even so, the church and other religions still thought ending a pregnancy before that was wrong. And that's part of the reason why they're against birth control. They're really consistent about it. So they didn't think it was murder before the quickening, but they did still think that it was wrong because they thought that generally speaking, the purpose of pregnancy is to bear children, that's God's plan for you, you shouldn't stop it. Maybe you're not a murderer if you stop it before the quickening, but it's still wrong. So it's the original Roe V. Wade decision, the Earl Warren decision tried to make a case that there was more tolerance for abortion in the past in the United States than I think actually there was. And the critics of Roe have made a lot of hay out of that fact that he's kind of, he was kind of selectively cherry picking the history. I think it's not a big surprise that abortion has been frowned upon for a very, very long time, both in law and in morality. And that's because the history of morality has, again, been monopolized by religion and religion doesn't have a good reason to respect the right to abortion, it thinks you have duty to be a mother if you're a woman. And that's kind of the end of the story. Well, I mean, it's worse than that because they think that the whole purpose of sex and though is to be a mother, that's why they're so opposed to birth control. Okay, let's see. So we're gonna, we're gonna, I mean, you guys can still ask questions about abortion. Please do, but we have a bunch of questions here that are unrelated to abortion. Okay. So we're gonna jump into those and we're gonna start, we're gonna start with Liam. We'll put $50 on the question. So we'll start with the big dollars. So this is a question I think about when you were teaching at a university. So when you taught, so I think he's writing this in the present sense, but it should be in the past sense. Do your colleagues know you're an objectivist? Have you been hostile? Have they been hostile towards you? How do your students react when presented with objectivist ideas? Do you see Ayn Rand receiving marginally more respect in academic circles since you started teaching? That's a really interesting question. So I was never in the closet about my objectivism. I was never advertising it explicitly among my colleagues. So there was usually a process of discovery that they had to go through before they learned more about my views. But you know, it would come up in conversation. And the places where I didn't spend a long time, the shorter gigs, it didn't usually come up. But the place where I taught the longest was Loyola University, New Orleans. I was there for seven years. And in seven years, it's gonna come up. And it did. And it came out gradually, but certainly when they first started to get the hints of it, there was definitely raising eyebrows. And before they found out, there would occasionally be offhand comments about Ayn Rand and without their knowing that I had a view of her that were made for awkward situations. But eventually it came out, I can't remember exactly all the steps by which that happened. And at that point, I had established myself in the department as somebody who knew what he was talking about, who knew philosophy, who knew how to teach. And they valued me as a colleague. And it's part of the reason why I, at that point, I said, hey guys, you wanted to let me teach a class about Ayn Rand? And they let me teach it. I taught a whole semester on Atlas Shrugged as a work of philosophy. And it was probably my most memorable teaching experience. I had the full support of the department in doing it. And they, I'm sure thought it was kind of crazy, but they let me do it. And I don't know if I would get away with that at every university, I'm sure I probably wouldn't, but the Catholic universities are a little unique in that they, I think they're more pluralistic in a way because they always have some members who are Catholic but they also know that if they wanna staff their department with a department full of competent professors, they're gonna have to hire some non-Catholics, as I was, of course. And I think as a result, they're probably a little more used to working with people from different worldviews and maybe more tolerant in that sense. And that, so that's probably why the experience doesn't generalize. But I had a positive experience with that. And I think that kind of thing is, that kind of situation is more possible to use a awkward turn of phrase than some people imagine. I think too many people imagine that because their colleagues in philosophy don't agree with Hein Rand that they'll be laughed off the stage if they bring up their association with her. And I think, in some cases they will be, but if you establish yourself, if you are a good colleague and they know you know your stuff, at a certain point they won't be able to dismiss you in that way. And so that does I think entail some tactical thinking about how you bring up the subject. Like I think it helps to establish yourself first. It helps to prove yourself as a teacher and as a researcher and as a philosopher first. But once you've done that, I think it's easier to have those conversations. And I think it's good to do it. I don't think you should stay in the closet. It's unhealthy. People who stay in the closet thinking, well, finally come out once I get tenure, then they don't once they come, once that happens. And if they do, it's very hard. And it dies in their mind. And your psychopistemology, the way you, being in the closet has a cost. Psychopistemological cost in the way you think. Well, there was also the question about the students reception though. Well, the students and then the other part was, have you seen any shift in academia overall in terms of marginally acceptance? Yeah, so students, just like with the professors, I didn't advertise to the students that I was an objectivist, but I did have readings from Ayn Rand and lots of my courses. And eventually I had a whole course on Ayn Rand. So especially after the course on Ayn Rand, it got out that I was the Ayn Rand guy at the university. And there were definitely students, some of whom are still my friends who got to know me better because of that because they liked Ayn Rand and they wanted to learn more. And we had reading groups and things like that. And I would say that the major disappointment that I had was that so many students, and I think this is a problem for all professors that so many students are intellectually apathetic that they don't even appreciate when you're giving them something radical. And when they just see it as one other name on a syllabus and they don't get excited, they don't even realize they disagree with it. They don't understand what you're saying, they don't understand what she's saying, why it's so unique or rare, how it differs from other philosophers. So with students, the bigger battle is with just apathy, not with opposition. And I'm sure that's different if you go to a place like Berkeley or Stanford or something, standard universities, the real battle is to get them interested in philosophy in the first place. And then that, oh, you could have a radical position and this is very different from other people. That's very rare. And then as for appreciation for Ayn Rand in the academic culture generally, it's a mixed bag. In certain ways it's gotten better, in certain ways it's probably gotten worse. It's gotten better in that we've got now an increasing volume of quality academic scholarship, which academics can look at if they want to and they can get an understanding of what the actual views are as opposed to the caricatures. I think that the caricatures are becoming less common among academic philosophers because of this. I think the more common reaction when they talk about Ayn Rand is to state her actual views but then to say they disagree with them and why and maybe even why they think they're terrible, but at least it's their her actual views that they're starting to talk about. So that's progress, I think. And where the, I think the biggest regress in academia has been not so much with regard to Ayn Rand in particular, but just with regard to the general enlightenment values of rational discourse and philosophy, where I think philosophy departments, which used to be kind of a refuge in academia from the worst trends in academia, the worst post-modernist continental trends where you found them in the English departments in the literature departments, the ethnic studies departments, they have infiltrated philosophy now, I think in the last 10 years in a way that they hadn't prior to that. And that is starting to, identity, politics and philosophy are becoming a lot worse. And then that ends up just excluding Ayn Rand from the syllabus because she has the wrong views or she's a traitor to her sex or whatever. All right, so we've got a few more abortion questions, which is good, particularly this first one because it's a question that I was going to ask and I should have asked and I forgot. So Colleen is asking, because again, something I hear a lot about. Where does personal responsibility come into the conversation on abortion? Should the woman have a level of responsibility to prevent an unwanted pregnancy? Aren't we letting her off the hook by allowing her to get an abortion after the fact? This would, that's me adding that. This would come up for the non-exceptional cases, health, rape, et cetera. So this is for, got pregnant for whatever reason and had an abortion. Do we condemn her because she wasn't responsible in her sex life? Here's the example I always like to get. So there's a, anytime you go driving, let's say you need to drive to work, you are taking a risk that you're going to be in an accident. Now, a responsible person will still probably drive and they'll take precautions. They'll put on their seatbelt, they'll get insurance, et cetera. Even so, every once in a while, people still get into accidents in spite of their best precautions. What is the responsible thing to do once that happens? Is it to just sit there with your injuries and not go to the hospital and not be treated? Of course not. The responsible thing is having gotten into the accident to go to the hospital and have it fixed, have your injuries treated. And by the way, that's true even if somebody wasn't taking the precautions, like if they didn't wear their seatbelt and now they get in an accident, they're hurt even worse than they should have been. Well, the solution is still to go to the hospital and to get your injuries treated. And it's the same thing with abortion. And the only reason that I think people don't see it that way is one of two reasons. Either because they think the fetus has rights, which means that there's a new set of responsibilities that you have toward it that you wouldn't if it were just a being without rights, or they have a negative attitude towards sex. And they think there's something just inherently irresponsible about engaging in sex for pleasure in the first place. And I think both of those views are wrong. And if you assume that the fetus doesn't have rights and if you assume that there's nothing irresponsible about sex, then responsible people pursue their happiness. They take precautions to avoid unwanted consequences, which in the case of sex means using contraceptives. And even still, if the accident happens and they get the unwanted consequence, the responsible thing to do is to then fix the problem and continue to try to take precautions in the future. And that's the way we would think about it in any other realm of life. The only reason that responsibility seems to mean something different in the case of abortions is if you think for religious or rationalistic reasons that the fetus has rights or if you're anti-sex. All right, let's see. Get to that in a second. Okay, Frank asks, monogamy and marriage are the best context for pregnancy, miscarriage, and abortion. Is sexual freedom of the non-married, the underlying problem? I'll just ask what problem? What's the problem? Good. Yeah, I don't think there's a problem. I mean, it's probably true that marriage is the best context for having children. It allows you to plan long range, especially financially, if you wanna have children, that security and stability is important. But I mean, there are at the same time plenty of responsible single parents. And there are also, because there's such a thing as contraception, you can have sex outside of marriage with perfectly reasonable assurance that you're not going to have children. And yes, mistakes happen, but then that is what abortion is for. And it's not irresponsible for the reason that we just talked about. And many married couples have abortions because they're not ready quite to have a child. It's not in the plan right now, accidents happen just outside of a marriage. Married couples who wanna have children and who are trying to have a child sometimes have to have abortions in order to do that. There are, and I don't know all the details about how the fertility procedures work, but sometimes you have to have an abortion in order for one of the two, let's say identical twin childs to have the best chances of survival. So abortion can be necessary for childbirth, believe it or not. All right, one more that I was looking for the quote. I'm glad Mark is asking this because this always comes up as well. Ironman wrote quote, one may argue about the latest stages of pregnancy but the essential issue concerns only the first three months. Some say this means she wasn't adamant or sure about both being the dividing line thoughts. I talk about this in one of the chapters in last chapter, Ironman's Radical Case for Abortion Rights. And it is true that she said that. First thing to say is it's also true that in many other places she wrote, we need to have abortion rights until birth. So then the question becomes, well, what did she mean by this passage given that she said all the other things? And I think that what you have to do is look at the context of that passage. That's a passage in her essay, a final survey or the last survey. And she's writing this, talking about the Republican conservative assault on abortion rights in the 1970s. And leading up to that passage, she is talking about how opposition, I'll just read a bit from the book here. Earlier in the article, Rand has indicated her view that opposition to abortion is a confession of a fundamental philosophical evil in a person's convictions. Her chief evidence for that this is that no one has anything to gain from the anti-abortion stand and therefore its motive is pure ill will toward mankind. So the way I interpret what's going on in that passage is she's saying basically, look, I've just condemned as evil people who are opposed to abortion in their earlier stages of pregnancy. You can argue with people who are opposed to it in the later stages. They're not necessarily so evil. They might just be mistaken. So you can argue with them. You can get into a conversation, not regard them as evil. It doesn't mean you agree with them. She still thinks that rights should extend Abortion rights should extend until birth and their child doesn't have any rights until it's born. But there are different degrees of opposition to abortion rights with different levels of immoral culpability. I think that's what she's talking about in that passage. Yes, I agree. We've got a lot of questions. All right, Jeff, so now we're switching topics, but related, this one's related. Jeff asks, is there a correlation? This is a hundred Canadian dollars. Is the correlation with the end-of-life rights where a person who has human rights no longer has a voice? My mother signed a DNR, do not resuscitate, after four strokes. We honored her wishes. What if the state forced her to live despite her wishes and go through recovery? I think that would be terrible. I don't think it's, this is not exactly the same kind of mirror, issue of abortion insofar as someone for whom a DNR applies is someone who I think still has rights. The debate there is not over whether you should kill them or not. It's about whether you should unplug the ECMO machine that they're plugged into or what have you. So it's not quite the same kind of issue. I certainly think that if someone has, in effect, contractually specified that they don't want this machine to stay plugged in for however long, that their rights should be respected and it would be a terrible infringement on their rights to not respect their wishes. The case that's closer to the question about abortion is when you've got someone who's brain dead and there's no further capacity that we know of for them ever to be a human agent again. And maybe they're on a machine that's keeping their heart beating, but by all scientific understanding we have, they're never going to live again. And in that kind of case, I think it's not just an issue of, do you get to unplug the machine? It's like, that's a case where I think you could, very legitimately make a case for giving them a lethal dose of morphine or what have you because they're not, regardless of whatever their, previously specified wishes were, they're no longer a human individual either in the sense that counts, they have human DNA, but the thing in them that makes it possible for them to be an individual agent in society is gone. And there's no longer, I don't think there's any longer a basis for the protection of rights in that kind of case. Yep. All right, let's see. All right. Fred Harper says, cheers for having guests on, always good stuff. I hope everyone who also enjoys and values these episodes throw support your way. Thank you, Fred Harper. Really appreciate the support. Let's see. All right. We've got a bunch of gun control questions, which is understandable given what's been happening and what just happened in the horrific case in Texas. So let's jump into these and let's see, we'll start with the 220 dollar one. Should an 18 year old like the one in Texas be allowed to purchase an AR-15 with no prior mental health screening or training requirements? Or do these impositions violate individual rights? Okay. So I think before I answer any questions about this issue, the first thing I should say is to make explicit Ayn Rand's own view on this subject, which is that she didn't really have a view on it and that she didn't take a definite position on it and didn't see how her philosophy implied a definite position. And that's a respect in which this is a different kind of question from say the abortion question, where I think the applications of Jectvist philosophy are straightforward and obvious. And I mean, she was asked about gun control and a couple of different Q and A sessions, which you can read in the Ayn Rand answers book, which Robert Mayhew edited, one person asked her, what's your opinion of gun control laws? She said, I do not know enough about it to have an opinion, except to say that it's not of primary importance. Forbidding guns or registering them is not going to stop criminals from having them, nor is it a great threat to the private, non-criminal citizen, if he has to register the fact that he has a gun. It's not an important issue unless you're ready to begin a private uprising right now, which isn't very practical. I won't read the second one, but it's to the same effect. And so, yeah, it's not obvious to me how stopping a 18 year old from buying an AR-15 would violate anyone's rights. I think there are reasonable gun control or gun restrictions, maybe a better way of putting it that could be passed, that could perhaps help prevent some of these catastrophes. I don't know that they would prevent all of them. I am sympathetic to the idea that this is a much bigger problem than politics, that there's a deeper kind of cultural rot that is responsible for what's going on here. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't, that you can't consider reasonable kinds of restrictions. And I think it's all too often portrayed as an alternative, one or the other, that it can't be both. And it's true that guns don't kill people, people do, but people kill with guns. And guns are a necessary condition for the kind of slaughter that you saw happen and involved earlier this week, that if the person had only had a knife, they wouldn't have been able to inflict nearly as much damage. And I think that's a fact that you have to acknowledge when you're thinking about what proper policy should be here. And that it's a fact that I was having this conversation with some people earlier this week who were gun enthusiasts. And I made the point that, and this was before the shooting, I made the point that the way to think about this in terms of philosophic principles is as follows. Government shouldn't initiate force. Its only job is to use force in retaliation against the force of criminals and foreign invaders. What counts as the initiation of force by criminals or foreign invaders, though, is perhaps not as always, not always as straightforward as some people think. So if you get held up in an alley somewhere and someone points a gun at you and says your money or your life and mugs you, they've used force against you, even if they've never pulled the trigger. They're threatening force. And the threat of force is a use of force. And anybody who thinks it should be illegal to mug like that agrees with that, that that's something government justly prohibits. And so then the question is, well, what exactly constitutes a threat of force? And could it ever be the case that the mere possession or certain kinds of use of certain kinds of weapons can also constitute a threat? And I think like the paradigm case here is, it's threatening by its very nature to own a nuclear weapon or even a tank. So then the question becomes, well, okay, where do you draw that line? Where do you draw that? And a line has to be drawn. So here's another parallel to the question you're talking about with regards to abortion. Some line between what constitutes threatening ownership and what doesn't needs to be drawn. And I think it is up to individual jurisdictions to draw that line. And some might reasonably decide that certain kinds of assault style weapons, because they serve no legitimate self-defense purpose that wouldn't be served by something less powerful, just to own them and to, or at least to carry them would constitute a threat. And it's a complex issue that I think philosophers of law have to debate about, but that ultimately state legislatures have to debate about and different ones might do it in different ways. And you might have exceptions and you might get permits that allow you to have weapons that other people can't if you've proven that you're responsible owner or what have you. But it's, I mean, especially when you're talking about an 18 year old where, gosh, they can't even drink until they're 21, letting them have a, buy a weapon like this, it seems questionable to me. Yeah, and you could imagine requirements for training, all kinds of things. But I agree with you in a sense that it's gonna be jurisdiction specific. I think if you out in the middle of nowhere, regulations might be different than if you're in the middle of the inner cities, if the gangs around you have big weapons, I mean, then the police should do something about that, but it should be up to you, but that could be taken into consideration. So it really depends on the circumstances in which I think, and that's why it's legitimate to have federalism or different rules in different places. Let's see. So Michael asks, I think that basically the same thing, isn't the issue with gun control and individual rights, the scale and scope of damage? If the self-defense tool is powerful enough to go beyond the scope of defending life and property shouldn't it be banned? I mean, I think that is certainly one important factor that should weigh into that decision. I think you have to think of other factors too, but it's not just, is it more than you need to defend yourself? It's also what's the objective threat that's posed to others by it? Yep. And that's not even just an issue of the weapon, the nature of the weapon itself, but also of its use. Like, so I could imagine there being weapons you could own, but you couldn't display in certain ways. And so like open carry laws, I think I can understand their rationale for certain kinds of weapons and not for others. Like you see a guy walking toward an elementary school, open carrying his AR-15. He hasn't gone on school property yet, but he's walking in that direction. The police shouldn't stop him. I think they should. And that's what they were trying to do, though apparently not trying very hard. No, and it turns out, it looks like they didn't enter the building. I don't understand that. Well, they did enter the building, but then we waited outside the classroom in the hallway for 15 minutes while they were hearing shots. That's just mind-boggling to me. And then parents were trying to rush in. Other people were trying to do something about it. The police were also stopping the Border Patrol agents who wanted to go in from going in, apparently. All right, let's see, just related to this. So just a quick one, because it came up in the chat. What is your view? I don't know what my view is, but what is your view about the right to own guns in the context of preserving liberty? That is, that the real purpose of the Second Amendment, and it probably was, as the founders conceived of it, is to arm us so that we can revolt against the government and replace it. I am not a constitutional scholar, but I doubt that that's the rationale for the Second Amendment. It's put in terms of a well-regulated militia, which I assume would have been viewed at the time as the militia of the state and the need to defend against foreign aggressors. Now, generally speaking, but leaving the constitutional issue aside, the idea that the reason that there's a need for gun ownership is to, in effect, protect you against a tyrannical government. I find absurd for two major reasons. One is that if your government really is tyrannical, there's very little that any amount of gun ownership is going to help you if they have tanks and nuclear weapons and you don't. But the other is that there's just a weird conceptual problem with the allegation because, and I don't quite know how to put this, but rights are things that governments are there to protect. And it doesn't really make a lot of sense to say, you have a right to this thing because government isn't protecting you. Rights are rules for proper governments. And so if you're already to the point where your government's improper and it's not protecting your rights, the fact that you get to say, oh, I have a right to this thing is sort of meaningless. And it might well be the case that when you have a tyrannical government, that it will be good to have weapons so that you can rebel against it. But then that's not any longer a question of rights. Except to the extent that your rights, your concept of rights should guide you in formulating your reasons for opposing this government. This government we're going to overthrow because it's violating all of our rights. The fact that you've got the right to own a weapon is inconsequential at that point. It's like all these other rights that it's violating that that's why we should rebel against it. Yeah. Liam makes the point that there are a lot of stabbings in countries that have outlawed guns, but knives limit damage to small exchanges whereas AF-15 lead to 20 dead kids in a few minutes. By the way, soda knives, I mean, there were these cases, there was this case in Japan where I think it was a samurai sword or something like that. Also at a school, just horrific. You know, these are complex issues. This is why Rand, I think in another quote she says, legal philosophers should really be thinking about this. This is something that would have the required real thought. Yeah, I'll read that other quote since there's some other things that are relevant here. She says, someone asked your different Fort Hall form, what's your attitude toward gun control? And she said, it's a complex technical issue in the philosophy of law. Handguns are instruments for killing people. They are not carried for hunting animals and you have no right to kill people. You do have the right to self-defense, however. I don't know how the issue is to be resolved to protect you without giving you the privilege to kill people at will. Yeah. All right. Now, you know, philosophies of law should be thinking about this. Just because Ayn Rand didn't have a view doesn't mean we can't have views. And certainly that philosophy of law can have philosophers of law can have views. But I think the fact that she didn't have a view should cause anybody to hesitate before they assert a definitive view without really thinking it through. Ayn Rand was a genius and a philosopher who thought about almost everything. And here she is saying this is complicated. Maybe that should cause a lot of us to kind of step back and say, huh, if she didn't have a definitive view, how sudden can I be in my views? Not to say you can't be, but just think about it. Just give it, hesitate for a little bit. And you know that the reason that she didn't state a view wasn't because she was unafraid. Oh, no. Because she was afraid to state controversial opinions because look at what she said about abortion and on a million other issues. Okay, so we have, let's see, one, two, three, five more questions if you have the time. Yeah. Also, let's see, for the super chat perspective we're short, about $75, $78 to our goal. So if somebody wants to step in with some $78 question, that would be perfect and get us to our goal. All right, let's see. This is really a question to me. It's a question that's disguised as an insult, which is typical of many people who ask questions here. But so I'll just answer it quickly. This doesn't take much. You said that George Reesman's book on capitalism was not well-written. Does that mean you've actually read the book? No, of course I haven't read the book. It's not well-written. But how would I know it's not well-written if I haven't read the book? Let me see. No, I haven't read the book. And maybe I misspoke about it not being well-written. It's not that it's not well-written in terms of grammar, in terms of English, or in terms of it is actually well-written in that context. It is that it's presented in a very rationalistic way and therefore it's much harder than it needs to be to grasp. And it's badly written in that sense. A lot of the chapters I think should have been rewritten in a way that is easier to understand and easier to grasp and easier to integrate and concretize. But yes, I've read the book. That's why I have an opinion about it. I tend not to have views about books I haven't read. Yes, but- I've tried reading it twice, but didn't get past the first few chapters because I wasn't motivated. It's hard. I mean, I was motivated because this is my field, but I have to say I've read it, in a sense I've read it more than once, not because I've read it through more than once, but because every time there's an interesting, there's a question in economics that I'm not sure about or they just wanna, I wanna kind of fortify my knowledge of, it serves as a great encyclopedia. It has a great index. I highly recommend it as this, it has a great index. You can go to the index, you can find the section, you can read the section on that topic. It's actually easier that way because to integrate it in smaller chunks, it's much easier. I also find that in the first chapter, particularly he makes the big philosophical errors that he's the biggest mistake he makes in the book is he calls economics a deductive science. And the book is written that way and that's the problem with the book. It's written as a deductive science rather than as all sciences are written in an inductive way. All right. Okay, if we had enough numbers to plausibly initiate a successful, objective revolution, I guess this relates to the guns. Would you organize and order the launch, order the launch, I have that power, or go through the voting process? I wouldn't have anything to do with it if, unless what you mean by having the numbers is that you have the majority of the population on your side because if you don't have that, it's gonna fail. And it will just be a bloodbath because... You could have a significant minority of the population. You could have the intellectual high ground. You could have a lot of things that could still win. Yeah, that's a good qualification. As arguably was the case in the American Revolution, but if you don't have people who count who agree with you, the example I always remember, Harry Benzmeyer used to kind of caricature this attitude by saying the people think if they, I don't know, stage a coup, break into the White House and now they're standing behind the presidential podium. See, I've got the presidential seal. Now you have to listen to me. Well, that's obvious, obviously ridiculous. The fact that you've staged this coup doesn't mean you'll have any kind of popular support. It doesn't mean you'll be able to govern. And eventually it'll be crushed. And we really need to do everything we can right now to forestall civil war in this country. That's the biggest thing I'm worried about because when you have a civil war, where neither side is likely going to be in the right, nothing good's gonna come from that. It's a disaster. And look, a question like that really depends. If you can do it through the voting process, of course you'd rather do it for the voting process than kill a bunch of people, right? Violence is truly in this context a last resort. But if you're faced with a tyrannical, if the United States government is already tyrannical and you have enough people that you might be able to win and you can't use the voting process because it doesn't exist, then yeah, revolution is tenable. But it's not, if you could get it through peacefully, of course you would wanna get it through peacefully. I'm gonna relate this to the abortion controversy because one of my, right now, one of my biggest problems with the left is because of the fact that they don't have the philosophical basis for their support for abortion rights. Because they've adopted the altruist morality themselves, which is at odds with abortion rights, suddenly they're losing the battle because they've never been able to defend it in the first place. And all that they can do is yell and scream and stage protests outside of the homes of the justices. And none of them or very few of them are actually even thinking about what would it take to change the minds of the people who disagree with me? Especially now that they've no longer got the Supreme Court behind them. So they can't just say, it's my right because the Supreme Court says it is. They actually have to, if they want to protect abortion rights, they're gonna have to change the laws. They're gonna have to change the laws at the state level, maybe at the federal level. But none of them know how to try to change people's minds about what the laws actually should be. Now they don't have this crutch of the Supreme Court anymore. And they're left screaming. And it's maybe good for the purposes of sort of rallying the troops who are already in agreement to do whatever. But if they don't actually care to change the minds of people who disagree with them or people who are on the fence, it's only a recipe for violent conflict. And that's not gonna do anybody any good. No, and you see the same thing on the right on issues they're passionate about, so that you get a situation where both sides are moving towards a position where force will be the only way to arbitrate disputes. And that's civil war and that's all anarchy and it's either way, it's a disaster. And I shall also mention, we get a lot of questions at ARI about why you guys writing so much about abortion. This is a left-wing issue. Are you just trying to virtue signal to make the leftists like you? No, we're trying to change their minds. That's what it looks like to try to change the culture. If you think that the left is bad and if you think that they are so powerful and their positions are so wicked that we need to do something about their positions, how are you going to do that short of revolution? Well, you need to find some of the better people on the left to peel them away from that movement and get them to see reason. And one way that you do that is you find some issues on which you have common ground and try to give them a better way to understand those issues so that if they, for example, care about abortion rights, you can say, here's a better, more rational foundation for abortion rights. And oh, by the way, if you accept that, you might notice that this has some implications from some of your other positions that if you want to defend an individual right to abortion, well, maybe you should be more serious about individual rights on other issues too. There's no other way that we're going to change the culture except by changing minds through rational arguments. And if your model instead is just spend all day on Twitter saying how evil the left is, what is your strategy for how things are going to get better? That's the question people should think about. Yeah. And it's bizarre because when we happen to agree on a particular issue with people on the right, nobody accuses us of virtue signaling to the right. We're not on the right. And part of the problem is that people can only think in terms of right and left and nothing else. All right. Hopper Campbell says, I think the West will flirt with tyranny but not go all the way. We as a species are beyond that and aren't going back. I don't know. Look what's going on Ukraine. I don't know if we're not going back. Let's see. I'm much more worried about civil war than I am about tyranny. I go back. Well, it's the same thing because you won't get civil war unless the two tyrannical regimes and the conclusion of a civil war is tyranny. So you they're very much, I think that's fair. And in hand. Let's see. All right. He's one general and the others all relate to that. Okay. So why stoicism mainstream and objectivism? Interesting question, which I'm not having a super expert on, but I have thoughts. The. Well, one. One reason is that stoicism has a 2000 plus year history behind it in which it's had a chance to influence the culture. And. It's ethics where it's been the most influential is. Indistinguishable from the mainstream altruist ethics on all the matters that count. I mean, it's like, so the, the ancient stoics. I wouldn't say they were altruists. But they were advocates of duty. And they were advocates of suppressing concern for worldly goods. And both of these, both of these points played into the hands of Christians. Christian ethics is highly influenced by stoicism. So. I mean, in a lot in a number of important ways, the reason that mainstream ethics is where it is today is because of in, in part, a stoic influence. So it's, it's not. Very radical for some people to say, well, let's, let's go back in time a little bit. Let's, let's rewind. To the, to the roots of what we have today. There's no radical break there. But objectivism is a radical break with that whole tradition. All right. Is a minor in philosophy or an internship at AI, a valuable experience for a STEM student? I would say first about minoring in philosophy that I mean, it depends a lot on what it is you'd like to do with your STEM degree. Certainly, and it also depends on where you are studying and what kind of classes you're going to take as a part of a philosophy minor. Somebody who wants to, I don't know, become an intellectual property lawyer who needs to usually major in a STEM field in order to do that would certainly be well suited to make minor in philosophy because that will give you some of the skills that you need to do law school. It's hard to say more without knowing more about the particular person's interests and talents and where they want to go in life. But then as far as interning at AI, I'm not exactly sure what the status of our internship program is right now, but we do have, we have had a few interns in the past. We don't have the big internship program we used to where we brought in like 20 people every summer. But we do occasionally bring in select interns who usually who have a specific skill that would be useful to us and we have them work on delimited institute projects and they get to know us better and we on the side offer some kind of intellectual development. But the broader thing that I think someone in this position should be interested in right now is Ayn Rand University in the Objectives Academic Center. And that's regardless of whether they're going into philosophy or a STEM field. We are rapidly and dramatically expanding the offerings of the Objectives Academic Center in the Ayn Rand University to be valuable to people in a number of different intellectual disciplines and we're also I should add where this is going where there are plans in the works to make it more modular so that you don't necessarily sign up for the whole multi-year program and the whole package that includes you can do more picking and choosing among courses that are more relevant to your interests. We're allowing for more of that soon I think. So that's something I think the person should look into. All right, last two questions are from Justin. Were you concerned about financial prospects when you chose an intellectual career? Of course. Yeah, you can't it's it you have to definitely think about that it's and especially somebody these days. So I was a philosophy major in the late 1990s and I did the mid to late 1990s and I graduate school late 90s early 2000s. And even then it was a pretty speculative bet that you were going to get the degree and then get a job in philosophy that would be remunerative. I went 10 years in after graduate school as a professor in one program or another. And so I was able to make ends meet for 10 years on my own. And I could have done it for longer, but it was it was not. I wasn't growing professionally and my pay was stagnating and I wouldn't be able to grow financially. But I made I made ends meet. I think for somebody thinking about entering philosophy today, it's even this is I know he asked about intellectual fields is the one I know the best. It's even harder. There's even fewer jobs and it's even more competitive. And that's not just because they are prejudiced against objectivist. It's a problem anybody going into these fields is facing. And so you've really got to have a plan. You've got to have a real interest in the subject. You've got to know that you are interested in the practice of the subject, which means you want to teach and you want to write and you're interested in getting good at that. Because that's what the profession consistent. You don't just get to sit around and think about philosophy all day. You have to be able to offer value. And then that includes thinking about what are you going to write about? And what do you have to say that will be a value to other philosophers? You can't just you can't just go in there saying, I'm right about everything. You have to have a plan for how you're going to apply her ideas to particular solvable intellectual problems. And then how you're going to market yourself as an intellectual. So you have to think about all the same things that anybody in any other field would have. How can you create value? How can you be entrepreneurial? And you have to have a plan B. If that doesn't work out, what are you going to do instead? Because the odds are getting worse and worse that it won't work out and maybe the best way that you'd hope. So fortunately, I can say that the Iran Institute is very interested in increasingly becoming the plan B option. We are looking to develop intellectuals in our training programs who will try to make a go of it in mainstream academia and other intellectual fields and see how that works. And if we think you have value to offer as a teacher and a writer and a scholar, then we want to hire you and we want to have you work at the Iran University. And we're growing into something more like a real university. So there's a real plan B emerging there. You've got to be somebody who can actually offer us value. And the way that you demonstrate that, the primary way you demonstrate that is by taking classes with us and showing what you've got. Good. So we got a few extra questions. OK, why should one, this is Justin again, why should one care about cultural and political change when it has little effect? Why not just focus on oneself and completely forget the culture? Well, you live in the culture. And so go back to what we've been talking about today. If you're a woman who wants to pursue her happiness, wants to enjoy relationships with other people and the pleasure of sex, but who doesn't want to have a child just yet. Here's a case where the state of the culture is about to dramatically influence your life because it is about to cut a major freedom that you need to be happy. And I mean, where I sympathize with the question is that, yeah, there's not a lot that any one individual can do to change the culture for the better. Cultural change generally happens only very slowly. And we might not see a lot in our lifetime. But so that's why it's important that there is a division of labor. Some people are going to be better at arguing for forms of cultural change than others. And so if you're not someone who wants to become a professional intellectual, you should still be concerned about the direction of the culture. But then you might not be able to help much about it dramatically. Yeah, you'll want to focus most of your life on your professional interests and your relationships. But don't do it in a way where you're burying your head in the sand and where you're saying it's not going to affect me. It will still affect you. And so that's a reason to support people who do have the tools to argue for better cultural change. And then if you're somebody who does have those tools, you should consider a role in a profession that can make a difference. And I think the more of us we have, the bigger of a difference we can make. Well, and I think most of us, hopefully all of us, enjoy the challenge, enjoy the intellectual work. It's not like we're doing it out of a sense of duty or sacrifice or anything like that. This isn't one out of those who live, who fight for the future, live in it today is a really important idea. And what, what it illustrates, I think is that it's not just about, oh, I'm doing this all as a means to the end of some long-term goal that maybe I might get, but I might not. And then if I don't, my life is going to be pointless. No, it's, it's there's, there's meaning to be found in the fight in, and you, especially when you're doing it with other people who share your values and you're creating a little galtz, galtz for your life in microcosm. And that's part of the end. It's not just the means. Right. Which, which and or how many airway courses can I do online long distance? He's saying courses for like a philosophy for businessmen. So not he's not an intellectual professional intellectual. Well, all of our courses are online. As to which courses would be of most reference to someone in business. I'm not sure that I can recommend any particular ones right now that are focused on that specific subject. But our general introductory course. That's like the first and second year seminar on objectivism is, is aimed at everybody. It's aimed at both what we call intellectual professionals and professional intellectuals. And so that the first category includes people who are in business or in science or in engineering and they, but they, they want to understand the power of philosophy in life in general. And we'll, and we'll be specializing more. Well, I think we'll be offering more courses for people in, in more fields. There's, there's probably some big announcements that towel is going to be making in this summer's Ocon about that, that I shouldn't say more about, but stay tuned for, for those announcements. Good. All right. Last question. European countries have sharp factions, but rarely descend into civil war. Why do you think the US is different? Well, that depends on when we're talking about, right? There's been plenty of civil wars in European history. So maybe the person's talking about in late 20th, early 21st century, although even there, right? We've got the Bosnian civil war. We've got what's happening in Ukraine right now. I think one of the reasons that the Ukraine war is so shocking is that, yeah, you have, there've been a lot of people who've said, oh, this is, this is so racist that we care so much about this war that's happening in Europe when there's these wars happening all over the world in Africa or wherever, but we don't get, we don't put nearly as much attention on them. Well, I don't think that's the reason that there's so much focus on the West and what's happening in Ukraine. The West has had this view. We're above all that, that we're, we're civilized, that we've, we've solved the problem of war and peace in, in Europe. But apparently we haven't, like it's, it's, there is, it's not just Russia invading Ukraine. So there's a civil war in Ukraine and has been, you know, for at least 10 years or so. And that's in a, that's in a part of the world where, you know, there's, there's high speed internet access and there's, you know, otherwise people are, you know, you know, writing on Facebook about their lives and their professional careers, but then there's a war going on. And, you know, there are parts of Western Europe where the history of that kind of conflict is not that far in the past. And could, could happen again. I was just watching an interview of the leader of the, the, the Sinn Féin Party in Ireland and how they are, you know, pushing now again for union with the North. And, well, that's going to, if that, if they abandon the, the Good Friday Accords, they're going to have another, another civil war on their hands in Ireland, which, you know, we thought we had put to bed 25 years ago, but it could, it could easily happen there again. And the way that tribalistic thinking is, is spreading throughout the West. There's, there's, there's less and less stopping that kind of thing from happening. And, and so I don't know that Europe is that far ahead of the United States in this regard. If anything, they're behind us. I agree. All right. Jeff is taking us over the top. So we have reached our targets. That's great. Thank you, Jeff. He says, thank you for coming on the show, Ben. Also for taking on the Twitter mob. Important show. Thanks, Iran. Thank you, Jeff. Thanks. I have all the super chatters. Thanks for the questions. Thanks for the support. Really, really appreciate it. I thank you, Ben. This has been a great conversation. I agree with Jeff. It's an important topic. That needs. Needs more, more visibility out there. The book again. Why'd you, why'd you give one more shows to book again? The motion is sent consent. It's on Amazon. It's cheap. There's Kindle. There's print versions. The more copies you buy, the more you help the algorithm, the more people on Amazon see it. That's the main thing that we're going forward. As you mentioned, this is the first, hopefully in a series, we're planning to do more new ideal collections like this, marketing the same way on new on Amazon. And we'll probably expand this in the future. Amazon makes it very easy to update additions. And so as I write more on this topic, more will go into it. Excellent. Thanks everybody. It's been two hours. Wow. Thanks, Ben. And I will see you guys tomorrow. We've got a show at two o'clock tomorrow. 2pm tomorrow. I'll see Ben at OCon. The end of the end of next month. And so have a great weekend, everybody. Thanks. Thanks, Aaron. Bye. Thanks, Ben.