kfl%mx.lcs.mit.edu@mc.lcs.mit.edu (08/25/86)
From: <Someone on usenet - address did not come through>
Obviously, then, Keith is not a Libertarian, but a libertarian.
Are there any "card-carrying" members of the Libertarian party on
the list?
It is true I am not a member. But I strongly object to this
fragmentation. Objectivist vs. Libertarian vs. libertarian. What
will it accomplish? There are many good ways to justify a libertarian
system, and Objectivism is an especially good one. But not the only
one.
The way I have always thought of it is that libertarianism is a
political system, or rather a large set of fairly similar political
systems, while objectivism is a philosophical movement from which one
form of libertarianism can be derived. I suppose I consider myself to
be both a libertarian and an objectivist.
I do not object to any part of Ayn Rand's philosophy. I do object
to her implicit metaphilosophy that one must believe all of her
philosophy as a first step to libertarianism.
When I try to convince an active Christian of libertarian ideals, my
first step is not to try to convince him that Christianity is bunk. I
think that is what Ayn would have me do. My first step would be to
show that Christianity and libertarianism are perfectly compatible.
Ideally, to show that libertarianism can be derived from the Bible.
She spends several pages ridiculing logical positvism. Well, some
of my best friends are logical positivists. I think she would have
done better to explain why a logical positivist must support a
libertarian system, rather that implying that if you are an LP you
might as well go whole hog and join the communist party or something.
She mentions ESP on many occasions, to lambast its supporters as
nonobjective twits. Well, I don't believe in ESP myself. But I
regard it as an experimental question. In other words, I would not
change my political beliefs one bit if ESP was proven real tomorrow.
Ayn Rand seems to imply that I should.
And I think there are some weak points. For instance Rand mentions
in passing the right to an abortion, as if it was obvious how that
follows from the rest of her work. Maybe I'm just not very swift, but
I don't see how to derive that from the rest of the book. If someone
had made a mistake in typesetting and put in that she opposed
abortion, it would have fit just as well. The only thing which would
NOT seem to have fit is a non-vehement assertion either way.
Libertarians are split pretty evenly on the abortion question, just as
is the general population, and for mostly the same reasons.
Ayn Rand despised libertarians, thinking that they had "perverted"
her ideas of political liberty into a political system without
morality.
I can only find two places where Ayn Rand ever mentioned
libertarianism. Both are negative, but it is not clear in context
whether she is opposing libertarians or whether she is opposing
certain groups falsely identifying themselves as libertarians.
On second thought, I am not really sure there is a distinction!
She doesn't seem to think it worthy of much notice, for such a
life and death issue as Eyal Mozes thinks it is. As I said, she
seemed to mention the word 'libertarian' only twice that I can find.
And she is certainly not short of words for anything else she feels
strongly about. For instance she spends 25 pages debunking B. F.
Skinner's silly _Beyond Freedom and Dignity_ when it could have
been done in one.
...Keith
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