Is Killing a Viable Objectivist's Tool?
Posted by dansail 8 years ago to Philosophy
As quoted in Wikipedia regarding Nathaniel Taggart: "When a Senator attempted to block one of his initiatives with a law that Taggart saw as serving no higher purpose than to obstruct him, Taggart had the man murdered. The offending bill died with that politician. This is important because his descendant Dagny Taggart would threaten to do something similar if any politicians tried to stop one of her own initiatives."
My question is this: Does Ayn Rand support murder in the case of political obstructionism? Or was it just good fiction to lay a precedent in Atlas Shrugged? What is permitted to shut down threats when someone proposes to obstruct?
My question is this: Does Ayn Rand support murder in the case of political obstructionism? Or was it just good fiction to lay a precedent in Atlas Shrugged? What is permitted to shut down threats when someone proposes to obstruct?
There are a lot of topics that could be discussed here, including the fictional history of the Taggart Transcontinental railroad and the legends of its founder Nat Taggart, but not based on second-hand sources that misrepresent the novel like that website does.
On the other hand, when Howard Roark destroyed the Cortlandt project, he took care that he should kill no one. Hence asking Dominique to decoy the night guard away.
A creator will find a way to do what needs to be done inspite of the looters and will succeed.
If you haven't read it, read The Fountainhead.
On the other hand, would I defend someone like Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid or Obama if someone else attempted to kill them- HELL NO.
Eat or be eaten?
allosaur may be my moniker but I don';t want to go there.
If you know anything of Rand, you know that no crime - let alone murder - is moral unless committed in self-defense.
along with that. Children are innocent.
However, if they are _physically_obstructing justice, it might be permissible. I am still not quite assured about the rights about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If one drops a bomb on an enemy armaments factory, even if it is crammed with civilians, I think it is all right, because, in making the weapons to be used against us, they might as well be military. And if innocent people are in the way outside the plant, sorry, they shouldn't be obstructing justice. And if it's not their fault, it's not our fault, either. But I'm not sure that
those bombs were dropped on armament factor-
ies, or other such places.
child born in certain nation will necessarily grow up
to be a murderer. That assumption ignores man's
free will.
I am aware that in Vietnam, children were sent
with grenades to kill our men, and then of course
it was necessary to shoot them first.
in WWII Truman faced a decision....use the A bomb on Japan knowing that women and children would die horrible deaths, but 10s of thousands of American G. I.s would live rather than die invading and taking Japan one inch at a time....he made the decision of which i am grateful as my father-to-be was a marine fighting in the Pacific and might have been killed in the fight to take Japan and would have never been born and tens of thousands of the baby-boomer generation would never have been born...he saved 10s of thousands and gave birth to millions of other Americans....Rand agreed that Truman made the right decision...
In Vietnam, LBJ and his cabinet and the Joint Chiefs of Staff made a decision not to A bomb Hanoi or Haiphong in order to spare women and children living there....they choose instead to sacrifice 10s of thousands of American G.Is and the children they would have fathered (i had the opportunity years later as a pilot for American Airlines to sit next to Henry Kissinger and know this as a fact as i had a discussion with him about it...)
now today, you face a decision to stop a terrorist country (Iran) by bombing them out existence (which will cost the lives of women and children living there) or wait for them to develop the A bomb and set it off here in the U.S. (as an instructor pilot for the Air Force, i had the opportunity to train foreign military pilot candidates from every continent in the world, including those from Iran (when the Shah was in control), Iraq, and Kuwait)...i got quite an education into the middle eastern mind...it is hard for a western civilization mind to comprehend their mind-set...they are Eric Hoffer's True Believers...they would not hesitate to kill our women and children as we are infidels to them and will wait on them for all eternity in nirvana...this life is but a mere blip in time...
so do you spare the women and children of Iran or do you condemn future western women and children who will die horribly...
Leonard Peikoff agrees with Truman's decision...save western civilization...send a message to the middle east that where they are heading will not be tolerated and that we will not sacrifice our military men and women in a hopeless attempt to contain them...
make a choice...it is difficult and it isn't...
Free speech is the least important freedom. If every other freedom is gone; i.e. the right to own and control your property, then the right to complain about the confiscation of your property while it is removed means very little. If you become a declared enemy combatant by the state and hanged the fact that you have the right to whine about it before the sentence is carried out is meaningless. It amounts to nothing more than the state being able to identify you by listening for the complainers.
If you believe you do not have the right to resist the state until the state gives you that right the state has succeeded in becoming a tyranny and you have no rights. You are asking permission from the slave owner to be free, it is unlikely your request will ever be granted.
gart had the man killed. She merely insinuates it.
But she does have Dagny threaten to do it if a sim-
ilar situation occurs.
Hard to say whether Ayn Rand would actually
condone such a thing. She did say things that
indicate a respect for the rule of law, and against
taking the law into one's own hands.
If the State (government) has set up a situa-
tion where it is impossible to get a fair hearing,
I suppose that it is permissible in such a case
to use such a retaliatory act of force.
But morally, I think one is obligated to be very careful in thinking about whether the situ-
ation has reached that point yet.
Bit of history - Remember Ayn and her family escaped pre-revolutionary Russia (likely a good thing) - escaped a group of thugs and looters who believed so strongly in the "Make them submit to our will or destroy them" philosophy that it carried from before Ekaterinberg all the way through Dzhugashvili to Gorby (and possibly beyond)...
So killing those who stand in your way - and having Dagny revere this trait in her grandfather - is (in a VERY strange paradox) having the objectivist heroine of the book embracing perhaps the most of anti-objectivist's traits - to become a destroyer in the manner of her grandfather. TO me - that is about as un-objectivist as one can get - Destroying rather than creating.
Thus, it is sometimes better to remember that, while Atlas IS a life-changing book (it certainly changed mine!), and within are the gems to lead a successful prosperous and objectivist life, it is above all a work of fiction... And while Objectivism in its purest form is great philosophically, you should base your life on logic and rationality, rather than hook line and sinker out of a book by a fiction author.
Russia? She had to escape post-revolutionary
Russia.--However, your last sentence does make
quite a lot of sense.
later, she had a visit from her sister and brother-in-
law; the sister (and, I assume, the brother-in-law)
elected to return to Russia. She tried and tried to
get her parents into the United States; I read in a
compilation of the letters of Ayn Rand that the
last communication she got from her parents was a telegram in 1939 saying "Cannot get per-
mission". I think I read in Who is Ayn Rand?
about a vacation out of Russia that her family
went on when she was a child.
Atlas Shrugged did not advocate "killing those who stand in your way" and the question does not "expose the flaw in Ayn's philosophy". The original question is a false alternative based on a misrepresentation of the novel as a false premise, not a "seminal question". https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post...
Atlas Shrugged is a philosophical novel, not just a "work of fiction". She wrote it to portray her view of the ideal man and developed her philosophy in support of that. In the novel her philosophy was illustrated, and explicitly summarized in "Galt's speech", and is described in detail in non-fiction https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post.... She was not just "a fiction author" and no one has advocated "basing your life on hook line and sinker out of a book by a fiction author".
(Well, it was defending Galt's life, but it amounts
to the same thing).
I also wonder if Rand just exercised her own secret wishes into print.