Myriad said:
Ah, this conversation again.
The obvious answer to your question is "Life entails risk." Sometimes, that means bad things happen to you and you have to deal with the fallout. Objectivism is not a philosophy for people who want to be taken care of--it's a philosophy for people willing to stand on their own. And that means accepting that sometimes, something bad happens and there's no way to repay you the damages.
Furthermore, post-hoc alterations of the original question are unjustifiable. The Objectivist sraw-man in your post successfully answered your first question. The fact that you kept looking for ways around it shows a certain lack of good faith in your argument tactic. And while you may not see it that way, you've got to understand that most Objectivists have extensive experience with people using exactly that method to do exactly that. It's akin to a religious believer coming here: we've seen it all, and we make assumptions about their intentions based on what we see them doing because people in the past that used those tactics has specific intentions. After the 500th time you see "Okay, but what if X?" taken to the nth degree in a transparent attempt to create a situation the Objectivist can't answer, you get gun shy about such conversations.
marplots said:
But, and here it comes... If those axioms fail to provide principles in certain cases, is it then OK to say the axioms only guide us in "normal" situations?
The issue is, applications of abstract principles are complex. The interaction fo two people necessarily is based on the nature of those two people--just as the interaction fo any two entities depends on the nature of those two entities. So it's not so simple as "If two people interact, X applies"; the nature of those with whom you interact--and your own nature--plays a critical role.
That's one reason that dealing with mental disabilities from an abstract ethical perspective is so difficult: we're not dealing with one thing, but rather with a suite of things, all of which have their own unique attributes. Some have to be dealt with in one way, while others have to be dealt with in other ways. The specifics depend on the individual disability, the degree of that disability, etc.
So yes, rights are the basic rules for interacting with normal people, and the default assumptions when interacting witih people in general. Dealing with abnormal people requires a different application of those same principles--and the specific application depends on the specifics of the abnormality.
(An exception is immediate self-defense. If someone attacks you violently, you have the right in 100% of such cases to defend yourself with violence, even killing them if necessary. You do not need to allow yourself to be beaten or even killed merely because they have a disability.)
Secondly, Objectivism is not derived from axioms. The axioms are guidelines--fundamentally a part of every rational statement, but not something from which you can derive all rational statements. This isn't math (and I've heard very good arguments that such principles cannot be mathematical). I doubt you meant that it was, but I wanted to make this clear: attempts to derive principles solely from axioms ignores Objectivist epistemology, which means: is an attempt to define Objectivism as something other than Objectivism. Principles are informed by observations. Someone acting on an Objectivist principle without taking the situation into account is an idiot, pure and simple, and has egregiously violated the philosophy.
The principles involved are individualism and non-initiation of force. Each person is an end in themselves, and no one can initiate force against anyone else. Among normal people, that means you treat them as if they were every bit as good as you but no better. Among abnormal people, you have to make judgement calls. A person incapable of knowing right from wrong (and I mean physiologically incapable, not just unwilling to learn) can't be held to the same degree of accountability as a normal person, not by any rational or coherent standards. The more a person is capable of, the more they are accountable for their actions. There's no way, as far as I can tell, to create a simple metric for this because there's no way to create a simple metric for mental disabilities.
I have read that Rand dismissed claims about property rights when it came to the American Indians because they didn't defend/exploit their "turf" (or something like that), which seems to fly in the face of certain basic principles about ownership.
No argument from me there. Rand was wrong, pure and simple. For one thing, such arguments are historically inaccurate--they DID develop their land, it's just that North America during colonization is the closest we've ever come to Fallout in the real world. For another, many of the actions taken by "civilized" Europeans were just as horrific and immoral as anything done by the "savages". By Rand's own logic that negates the claim of ostensibly civilized people (see her writings on Isreal).
I will defend her in part--her reasoning is sound, but not her conclusion.
How does one determine ownership in a true wilderness? Let's say you and I both wash up on a deserted island, and you and I decide that we hate each other, but being Objectivists don't want to kill each other. How do we decide who gets what? There are a few methods. We could try dividing the island in half, but that runs all kinds of risks. What if you get all the fresh water, or I do? And it's absurd to claim you own things you have no way of knowing about--how would you know? "You own what you develop" is based on the principle that you own the product of your mind--and THAT means that when you, say, dig a basin for a spring to collect in, you should get the rewards of that. Which means you should own it. This would give us each an equal chance at owning resources, as well as acknowledging that we don't own what hasn't been discovered yet. It's the most rational way I know of for dealing with this issue.
The first person to mine an asteroid should get to own that asteroid. Similarly, in a true wilderness, the people who develop the land should get to keep it--even if that development is putting a fence around it with signs saying "Keep out". (Note that simply planting a flag isn't good enough--the USA doesn't own the moon, and even if we did we abdicated any rights to it when we shut down that program.)
The issue isn't the principle, but rather the application. The natives of North and South America quite clearly HAD developed their land. Numerous writings from European settlers, and the experiences of the invasions of South and Central America, attest to this. But most history books until extremely recently (read, after I left school) refused to acknowledge that.
A lot of this is due to the time Rand lived in. Her principles are sound, but she was unable to overcome all the biases of her time. None of us are; the rational thing to do is to say "She's wrong for these reasons" and move on.
This is actually one of the specific things I thought about using as an example of where I deviate from Rand (the other is homosexuality). It's not so much that the principle here is wrong, but rather she applied them incorrectly, due to the lack of knowledge she had. (Her arguments about homosexuality appear uninformed by principles or knowledge, and can be dismissed as arbitrary by her own rules.)
In any case, one way to grasp a subject is to outline it's limitations, so I think there ought to be some value there.
I agree, to a certain extent. The danger is that such attempts often become attempts to define a system BY its limitations, or worse--attempts to dismiss a system because it HAS limitations. I just don't want that to happen here.
