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To: ModelBreaker
The Objectivist ethics proudly advocates and upholds rational selfishness ..not the values produced by the desires, the emotions, the "aspirations," the feelings, the whims or the needs of irrational brutes, who have never outgrown the primordial practice of human sacrifices...
30 posted on 04/16/2005 9:11:02 PM PDT by clyde asbury (Time isn't holding us. Time isn't after us.)
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To: clyde asbury
The Objectivist ethics proudly advocates and upholds rational selfishness ..not the values produced by the desires, the emotions, the "aspirations," the feelings, the whims or the needs of irrational brutes, who have never outgrown the primordial practice of human sacrifices...

That's not the way the heros in her books behave. They have weird sex like rabbits. I was once an objectivist and now believe that her ethics are a dead-end. Her personal life (presumably the epitome the application of Objectivist principles) reflected the moral confusion epitomized by the heros of her novels.

She did a great job of understanding and exposing what the left is about. But she failed, in my opinion, in the additional thinking she did and she especially failed to develop a workable basis for morality. I think the essence of her problem is that she confused selfishness in the economic sphere, which, if properly harnessed in a capitalist system is a public virtue, with selfishness in the personal sphere. The end of that trail is the 60's and the inability to distinguish right from wrong--I mean, Wesley Mouch was acting selfishly (even though he rationalized it as for the common good). Thus, how can Rand really say he was wrong. Her philosophy, if applied rigorously, would say his selfish behavior was OK. But she can't go there because he was a leftist and has to be bad. She's right in that respect but for the wrong reasons.

38 posted on 04/16/2005 9:29:49 PM PDT by ModelBreaker
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