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.No, you did not admit that my entire position on Randian ethics is correct, just that my central thesis, her unability to explain kindness, is accurate. This admission was for the time being sufficent to me, and I took it. If you now wish to retract it, go ahead, and I will rephrase the last paragraph of #230 accordingly. You then proceed to say in that phrase that it is so because kindness does not deserve to be talked about much. That is the deflection, which I noted and explained why it is insuffucient defense of Rand.
I'll skip past the part of your post about rating schemes, which lacks specifics, to the point where you answer the $100 question by admitting that the man is more virtuous if he gives his $100 away. But you qualify it by saying that the two men are equal in kindness. So your answer applies to the question which is absurd and which I did not ask. So let me clarify.
I ask you to rate the actions of giving or not giving excessive $100 to a real need. I am not asking of other actions that the two men have taken. It is possible that the first man, -- the giver, -- is also a murderer and the second, -- the non-giver,-- is a Mother Theresa, but you are only evaluating that discrete $100 act, and not the rest of their personas. The action of giving from excess is normally described as an act of kindness. The action of holding on to excess in the face of need is normally described as an act of greed. Kindness, as well as bravery, honesty, etc. are virtues. So it is not possible to say that one has virtue and not name the virtue.
So, do you admit that the first man has some unnamed virtue -- and then the follow-up request would be to name it, -- or do you agree that the first man acted kindly and therefore virtuously, or what is it that you are saying?
I do not need to retract anything I said. Your admition that you misquoted me, is as equally deceptive, as your misquoting. I did not agree that what you claim as being central to your thesis, her inability to explain kindness, is accurate. I didn't even vaguely imply it. Thus I need not retract anything.
You then proceed to say in that phrase that it is so because kindness does not deserve to be talked about much.
I did not say or imply this either. What I did was restate 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," adding that it "may quite possibly be all the attention it deserves in her theory of ethics." Now it seems to me that if she defined it away as a form of selfishness and also pointed to its well known difficulty in discerning what it is, then she must have been explaining something substantial about it. But regardless of all that, I said that she "may quite possibly" have given it "all the attention it deserves in her theory of ethics." Now I would say that my words "may quite possibly" have a meaning that you completely ignored in drawing your conclusion as to what I had said. Furthermore, even if I had not included those words, which I did, a statement that she gave "kindness... all the attention it deserves in her theory of ethics," is not the same as stating that "kindness does not deserve to be talked about much," as you claim I was saying. There is a difference between the two.
But you qualify it by saying that the two men are equal in kindness. So your answer applies to the question which is absurd and which I did not ask.
The approximate question was asked twice by you in our exchange, with added criteria the second time it was asked. I used two paragraphs so as to distinguish between both askings. As for it being "absurd" I should like to ask you a question. Two men again are the main characters, both equal in all respects with the exception that the first is a generous kind man who regularly gives his extra money to help the needy, while the second is a greedy self centered scrooge who never gives a dime, using his extra money as kindling to start fires in his fire place, after throwing out his mornings newspaper. But on this occasion, the first ignores a request for help, and instead goes home, throws out the morning newspaper and uses his extra $100 to start a fire in the fireplace. It is the second one, who gives the the man in need his extra $100. Is the first man still the more virtuous? Or has all that he has done before been erased away? Is the second man now more virtuous? Which one do we call the kind man? Is the other (which one) not a kind man? Do we call him an unkind man?