Path: utzoo!hoptoad!well!dhawk
From: dhawk@well.UUCP (David Hawkins)
Newsgroups: alt.individualism
Subject: Re: KC; libertarians and abortion
Message-ID: <5518@well.UUCP>
Date: 24 Mar 88 00:22:56 GMT
References: <3386@dasys1.UUCP> <13350002@hpcuhb.HP.COM>
Reply-To: dhawk@well.UUCP (David Hawkins)
Organization: Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, Sausalito, CA
Lines: 60

In the referenced article, rb@hpcuhb.HP.COM (Robert Brooks) wrote:
>> (Hawkins):
>>Unfortunately individualism, at least in the guide of Objectivism,
>>replaces the right of the tribe/group to kill with the power of the
>>individual.   [material deleted]
>>If you say
>>that human life is only different from other animal life by its power
>>of reason then you get to decide whether a human is reasoning and
>>decide if it gets to live. 
>Please provide a reference for this.  I don't recall reading anything
>about a guard being shot in _Atlas_Shrugged_, and what you are saying
>isn't at all consistent with my understanding of Objectivism.

Rand starts defining ethics in _The Virtue of Selfishness" with:
"An organism's life is its standard of value: that which furthers 
its life is the good, that which threatens it is evil."  

So now she starts a series of substitutions without explaining them or
working through the process of why these are valid substitutions.  Her
final statement: "The standard of value of the Objectivist ethics--the
standard by which one judges what is good or evil--is man's life, or:
that which is required for man's survival _qua_ man."
So the result is that man has to survive as man -- as a reasoning
being.  So ethics now only applies to furthering the life of a
reasoning being.

This was the justification in Dagny's killing the guard
while rescuing John Galt--"Calmly and impersonally, she, who
would have hesitated to fire at an animal, pulled the trigger
and fired straight at the heart of a man who wanted to exist
without the responsibility of consciousness." _Atlas Shrugged_, p. 1066
in my paperback copy.  That's the problem with Rand's system:
you get to be accuser, judge, and executioner.  Rand doesn't
base this passage on force vrs. force, but on the man's not being
human because he refused to make a choice.  

"The most depraved sentence you can now utter is to ask:
_Whose_ reason?  The answer is _Yours_ . . . your mind is your only
judge of truth--and if others dissent from your verdict, reality is
the court of final appeal."  [Atlas Shrugged, page. 1017.]  I don't
see the difference between this and pure subjectivity.  If reason is
decided by the individual then it's subjective--it's related to the
subject.  If the individual decides to go around killing mystics with
Rand's ethical system as her/his basis then who's to disagree?  It's
clearly in there as a part of the whole system of thought.

This does tie in with Rand's views on abortion: "An embyro _has no
rights._  Rights do not pertain to a _potential_, only to an _actual_
being."  Ayn Rand, _The Objectivist_, October 1968, p. 6.

You  could argue that Rand intended for children to have some rights,
but you'd have to find an example where she listed what they would be.
But another arguement would be that they had no rights until they
became reasoning beings.  (That opens up another can of worms since
Rand claimed that you had to choose to become a reasoning/conscious
being--quite a task for an unreasoning being.)  8-)

-- 
David Hawkins       {pacbell,hplabs,ucbvax}!well!dhawk
Faith is never identical with piety.   -- Karl Barth