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I explained the flat earth slur when I made it. Your most recent post confirms that indeed, Randism has a flat earth problem as regards the ethical theory. Please don't take it personally.

First, I do not call for be-kind laws. I want to understand the essence of kindness. This is central to any ethical theory. Rand does nothing to explain it, she either defines it away as a form of selfishness, or points to the well-known difficulty of discerning true kindness.

Granted, some acts of purported kindness have ulterior motivation; granted, laws that enforce kindness are silly and defeat the purpose. Now, what does Rand have to say about genuine kindness?

Note that I did not bring kindness into a discussion of unrelated stuff as an evasive maneuvre. I claim that Rand has nothing useful to say on ethics and kindness is a central ethical concept.

You did not "explain the flat earth slur" when you made it. You just made it solely as an insult to an ethical theory you do not agree with. The mere claiming that a theory "is not an ethical theory," with out further explanation, reduces disagreement to a childish "I'm right and therefore you are wrong" argument. Then adding an insult to assert the rightness of such an argument, reduces any discussion even further and, only leaves cliches and sloganeering as the method of discourse. Such never leads to any clarity of understanding.

I do not agree with you that the "essence of kindness... is central to any ethical theory." Ethics is much larger than that, with the vast majority of its theories being unrelated to anything having to do with kindness. While you may correctly view it as central to a theory we may be discussing, I did not view it as central to any discussion we were having. Bringing it in to the discussion, broadened rather than narrowed the parameters, thereby reducing the precision of the discussion. Arguably you can say it increased applicability, on which I would yield the field to you to propose a theory of kindness.

Your position that Rand does nothing to explain kindness, either defining it away as a form of selfishness or pointing to its well known difficulty in discerning what it is, may quite possibly be all the attention it deserves in her theory of ethics. I don't recall the specifics much beyond the fact that I both agreed and disagreed with her, often changing from sentence to sentence. But my disagreements with her have never been a basis for me to say that "Rand has nothing useful to say on ethics." I wouldn't make such a broad generality about anyone, no matter how much I disagreed with them on particulars. Besides saying such, is actually meaningless.

Boy, that sounds like a bunch of crap. I sure hope I'm not laying it on a bit to thick.