The author reiterates his thesis that the motivation for power lust in liberals, conservatives, and totalitarians cannot be explained by “metaphysical importance” of economic or noneconomic activity per se, but only by the metaphysical fear that voluntary action in one or both of these realms evokes in statists of whatever stripe. Rand actually made both of these arguments, but only the latter has psychological explanatory power and plausibility in terms of Rand's discussion of the benevolent and malevolent universe premises, and (...) thus is to be preferred over the former. (shrink)

In his article, “The Logic of Liberty” (Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 12, no. 1), Roger Bissell uses an analytical diagram to show that Ayn Rand was wrong to characterize the differences between liberals and conservatives in terms of the mind-body dichotomy. Bissell claims that the key philosophical difference is not the mind-body dichotomy, but the malevolent universe premise. However, the diagram Bissell uses to discredit Rand’s position exhibits a serious design flaw: it presumes the mind-body split (...) by implying the metaphysical superiority of one over the other. This fundamental flaw in his analysis renders his criticism of Rand invalid. (shrink)

Dismissing criticisms that Leonard Peikoff's book, The DIM Hypothesis, is unscientific, deterministic, or rationalistic, this essay focuses on problems with the logical framework of Peikoff's study of Western culture. In particular, Peikoff has conflated two different kinds of rationalists and empiricists and has completely overlooked combinations of the Platonist and so-called “Kantian” modes. As a result, his three pure integration “modes” actually produce not just two “mixtures” but a total of six. Furthermore, without absolving Kant of very serious philosophical errors, (...) the author marshals evidence that the real culprit responsible for the culturally disastrous “Disintegration” mode was one of Kant's predecessors. (shrink)

THE CONCEPT OF CONSCIOUSNESS CHAPTER I THE RENAISSANCE OF LOGIC WITHIN the last two decades the scholarly world has witnessed a revival of interest in logic ...

The author discusses how Rand’s largely underdeveloped concept of the “dual-aspect objective,” first introduced in the 1960s, is vital for understanding how knowledge is grounded in reality. He defines it, then applies it to perception and introspection, and to concepts, propositions, and syllogisms. The author also defines content of awareness, carefully distinguishing it from both object and form of awareness, and applies those distinctions throughout. In addition, he discusses how truth is both dual-aspect and contextual, and he extends his discussion (...) in Part 1 of Rand’s “unit-perspective,” showing how units, too, have a dual-aspect, even on the level of syllogisms. (shrink)

In this third installment of his series on key, underappreciated ideas in Ayn Rand's epistemology, the author discusses the nature of differentiation and integration as the functional essence of consciousness and applies that insight to various cognitive and noncognitive processes of awareness, with a special emphasis on logic and illogic. He offers an extended analysis of the fallacies of “Frozen Abstraction” and “False Alternative,” as well as critiques of a long-standing Objectivist conflation of falsity and contradiction and a relatively more (...) recent Objectivist error, the fallacy of “genuine awareness.”. (shrink)

The author examines the canonical Objectivist model of free will and finds it wanting, amounting to a form of Agency—Indeterminism. Employing an Aristotelian Four Cause analysis, he explores the complementary roles of determinism and free will, as well as the conditional nature of necessity and contingency, in understanding how causality operates in the human realm. He proposes an integration of what he calls “value-determinism” and “conditional free will,” arguing that it amounts to a basic axiom of human choice and action, (...) and urges its acceptance in place of the Orthodox Objectivist view of free will. (shrink)

The author contends that the Objectivist epistemology has lacked a viable model of propositional knowledge for nearly fifty years, due to neglect of Rand's unit-perspective view of concepts. This pioneering insight, he says, not only is an essential building block of her concept theory, but also welds together the three levels of logical theory and provides the clearest X-ray picture of our multilayered conceptual knowledge. Using the unit-perspective to expand Rand's theory of concepts, the author then devises a theory of (...) the proposition, giving considerable attention to axioms and statements about nonexistent subjects. (shrink)

The author provides another metaphysical argument to bolster his thesis of the logical harmony of determinism and volition. He shows how the typical mainstream and Objectivist doctrine of “libertarian” free will commits the same logical error as the Sophist attacks on the Law of Non-Contradiction—namely, an out-of-context interpretation of, respectively, the Law of Causality and the Law of Identity as being unconditional absolutes, which they are not and cannot be.

ABSTRACT The author continues his challenge to the “official” Objectivist view of free will by addressing the implications of his value-determinism/conditional-volition model for various Objectivist moral concepts including value, sacrifice, virtue, obligation, and moral and legal responsibility and accountability. He argues that based on Rand’s definitions, the conventional understandings of sacrifice or betrayal of values, lapses in virtue, and breaches in morality need considerable reconceptualizing. The author gives special attention to Rand and Kant with regard to lying, use of force, (...) and acts of generosity, finding not nearly as much difference between them as is commonly believed. (shrink)

The author assures readers that Chris Matthew Sciabarra has met all Aristotelian requirements in full, providing not one but two definitions of “dialectics,” which, as the art of context-keeping, is indeed an essential part of Ayn Rand's philosophical method. He shows how Sciabarra's definitional process compares quite favorably in terms of timeliness, transparency, and benevolence to that of Rand and other Objectivists, and notes that Sciabarra's overriding concern, notwithstanding his obvious great respect for Rand's substantive philosophical achievements, has been to (...) identify and clarify the methods she and other thinkers have used to profound benefit. (shrink)

The author argues that Rand’s ethical theory is much closer in essence to the eudaimonist, self-perfectionist perspectives of Aristotle and the neo-Aristotelians, Douglas Den Uyl and Douglas Rasmussen, than to the “selfish,” egoistic ethics many assume to be her basic position. He discusses Rand’s anti-hedonist and pro-rational selfishness positions as corollaries of man’s life as the standard of moral value, as well as Rand’s point that treating either happiness or personal benefit as the standard of moral value is a reversal (...) of cause and effect. He also identifies the oppressive negativism in Rand’s discussion of the seven canonical Objectivist virtues. (shrink)

This bibliography constitutes the most extensive compilation of references on Nathaniel Branden yet published.

The author explains that his previous philosophical arguments for compatibilism provide a robust basis for ethical and legal responsibility. He defends entity causation, arguing that no coherent model of the universe, including human action, can be formulated that rejects entities as the nexus of identity and causality. Finally, he contends, ontological compatibilism and ethical compatibilism are both best supported by a more fundamental methodological compatibilism of philosophical and scientific approaches to seeking truth.

A psychological study of thought and language which takes an exposition of scientific linquistics as a point of departure.

The author explains how Rand was absolutely correct in saying that Aristotle “stated the formula” of the Law of Identity. He corrects long-standing faulty Thomist criticisms on this issue and gives due credit to thinkers such as Antonius Andreas, Leibniz, and William Hamilton. The author further contends that the gradual shift in Objectivist usage of the Law of Identity tacitly ratifies these erroneous criticisms and has actually contributed to the failure of Objectivist thinkers to develop Rand's concept theory into a (...) valid model of propositions and syllogisms. (shrink)

Empirical ethics research is increasingly valued in bioethics and healthcare more generally, but there remain as yet under-researched areas such as pharmacy, despite the increasingly visible attempts by the profession to embrace additional roles beyond the supply of medicines. A descriptive and critical review of the extant empirical pharmacy ethics literature is provided here. A chronological change from quantitative to qualitative approaches is highlighted in this review, as well as differing theoretical approaches such as cognitive moral development and the four (...) principles of biomedical ethics. Research with pharmacy student cohorts is common, as is representation from American pharmacists. Many examples of ethical problems are identified, as well as commercial and legal influences on ethical understanding and decision making. In this paper, it is argued that as pharmacy seeks to develop additional roles with concomitant ethical responsibilities, a new prescription is needed for empirical ethics research in pharmacy—one that embraces an agenda of systematic research using a plurality of methodological and theoretical approaches to better explore this under-researched discipline. (shrink)

This is an expanded, annotated bibliography of the work of the late Barbara Branden, who was Ayn Rand's first biographer, and who made many contributions to the early Objectivist literature.

The author compares two very different guides to Atlas Shrugged. The first, by Curry and Trifiletti, is a more straightforward though thoughtful examination, in sequence, of the novel's thirty chapters, while the second, by Tracinski, is a collection of mostly freestanding, insightful, and inspirational essays. Special focus is given to the treatment in each book of the length and literary merit of Galt's speech.

The author endeavors to show how dialectical methods can reveal and clarify Ayn Rand’s philosophy from the two vital perspectives of the lives of individual human beings in relation to the world and in relation to other people and the social institutions under which they live. In so doing, he applies Chris Matthew Sciabarra’s Tri-Level Analysis model of social relations (derived from Rand’s social commentaries) and relates Rand’s metaphysical value-judgments to the cardinal values and virtues of her ethics.

ABSTRACT The author disagrees with Aaron Weinacht’s contention that Ayn Rand brought nihilism to America. Rand wrote about issues that concerned nihilist thinkers such as Nikolai Chernyshevskii, but she reacted in a profoundly different way to those issues. The differences are not merely political–insofar as the nihilists were socialist and Rand was a capitalist; they were much deeper.

The author reprises his review of The DIM Hypothesis by arguing for an expansion and revision of Leonard Peikoff's model to include not three, but four primary positions regarding integration : Integration, Disintegration, Abstract Misintegration, and Concrete Misintegration—and to include not just two mixtures of those primary positions, but twelve. He offers it as a work in progress and a remedy to the over-restrictiveness and resulting misrepresentations of various philosophers by Peikoff's version of the model.

Do UK community pharmacists encounter the high drama dilemmas of the medical ethics literature or is a 'morality of the mundane' more appropriate? This paper presents the findings of a qualitative study that asked a sample of UK pharmacists to describe their ethical issues and to establish whether these were ethical dilemmas as understood philosophically or ethical problems of a more legal or emotional nature. It emerged that although many pharmacists referred to 'dilemmas', these were often problems involving a conflict (...) between an ethical value and a legal or procedural issue and often arose in the routine minutiae of dispensing prescriptions and selling medicines. Such ethical problems remained of concern for pharmacists and the commercial environment, corporate pharmacy ownership and pharmacists' subordination to doctors, all precipitated ethical problems. Law and ethics appeared to be understood synonymously but this may reflect a modernity that increasingly brackets out ethical experiences by encouraging reliance upon law and procedure. (shrink)

An adequate theory of rights ought to forbid the harming of animals to promote trivial interests of humans, as is often done in the animal-user industries. But what should the rights view say about situations in which harming some animals is necessary to prevent intolerable injustices to other animals? I develop an account of respectful treatment on which, under certain conditions, it’s justified to intentionally harm some individuals to prevent serious harm to others. This can be compatible with recognizing the (...) inherent value of the ones who are harmed. My theory has important implications for contemporary moral issues in nonhuman animal ethics, such as the development of cultured meat and animal research. (shrink)

Value capture occurs when an agent’s values are rich and subtle; they enter a social environment that presents simplified — typically quantified — versions of those values; and those simplified articulations come to dominate their practical reasoning. Examples include becoming motivated by FitBit’s step counts, Twitter Likes and Re-tweets, citation rates, ranked lists of best schools, and Grade Point Averages. We are vulnerable to value capture because of the competitive advantage that such crisp and clear expressions of value have in (...) our private reasoning and our public justification. There is, however, a price. In value capture, we take a central component of our autonomy — our ongoing deliberation over the exact articulation of our values — and we outsource it. And the metrics to which we outsource usually engineered for the interests of some external force, like a large-scale institution’s interest in cross-contextual comprehensibility and quick aggregability. That outsourcing cuts off one of the key benefits to personal deliberation. In value capture, we no longer adjust our values and their articulations in light of own rich experience of the world. Our values should often be carefully tailored to our particular selves or our small-scale communities, but in value capture, we buy our values off the rack. In some cases – like decreasing CO2 emissions – the costs of non-tailored values are outweighed by the benefit of precise collective coordination. In other cases, like in our aesthetic lives, they are not. This suggests that we should want different values suited to different scales. We should want value federalism. Some values are perhaps best pursued at the largest-scale level, others at smaller scales. The problem occurs when we exhibit an excess preference for the largest-scale values – when we consistently let the universal metrics swamp our quieter interests. (shrink)

Background: Increasing interest in empirical ethics has enhanced understanding of healthcare professionals’ ethical problems and attendant decision-making. A four-stage decision-making model involving ethical attention, reasoning, intention and action offers further insights into how more than reasoning alone may contribute to decision-making.Aims: To explore how the four-stage model can increase understanding of decision-making in healthcare and describe the decision-making of an under-researched professional group.Methods: 23 purposively sampled UK community pharmacists were asked, in semi-structured interviews, to describe ethical problems in their work (...) and how they were resolved. Framework analysis of transcribed interviews utilised the four decision-making stages, together with constant comparative methods and deviant-case analysis.Results: Pharmacists were often inattentive and constructed problems in legal terms. Ethical reasoning was limited, but examples of appeals to consequences, the golden rule, religious faith and common-sense experience emerged. Ethical intention was compromised by frequent concern about legal prosecution. Ethical inaction was common, typified by pharmacists’ failure to report healthcare professionals’ bad practices, and ethical passivity emerged to describe these negative examples of the four decision-making stages. Pharmacists occasionally described more ethically active decision-making, but this often involved ethical uncertainty.Discussion: The four decision-making stages are a useful tool in considering how healthcare professionals try to resolve ethical problems in practice. They reveal processes often ignored in normative theories, and their recognition and the emergence of ethical passivity indicates the complexity of decision-making in practice. Ethical passivity may be deleterious to patients’ welfare, and concerns emerge about improving pharmacists’ ethical training and promoting ethical awareness and responsibility. (shrink)

ROGER E. BISSELL points out scholarly and ahistorical lapses in Kamhi and Torres's Journal of Ayn Rand Studies essay, "Critical Neglect of Ayn Rand's Theory of Art" . He argues that they have misrepresented and neglected the views of others, and have inaccurately depicted the extent to which his own essays liken and contrast music with the other arts. Bissell criticizes their failure to acknowledge Rand's "microcosm" view of art as "re-creation of reality," which is fundamentally at odds (...) with the Kamhi-Torres perspective. (shrink)

This trailblazing book provides a comprehensive view of the ethical issues that cut across the addiction field, from Employee Assistance Programs to treatment and aftercare. By addressing probing questions that illuminate today's complex ethical landscape, LeClair Bissell and James Royce explore how standard guidelines for professional conduct benefit counselors and clients alike.

These essays explore ways that liberty can be better defended using a dialectical approach. In addition to libertarian theory and dialectics, some of the areas examined include evolutionary biology, psychology, economics, and sociology of the family and of American popular songs, social justice, and political change.

In The Case for Animal Rights, Tom Regan argues that although all subjects-of-a-life have equal inherent value, there are often differences in the value of lives. According to Regan, lives that have the highest value are lives which have more possible sources of satisfaction. Regan claims that the highest source of satisfaction, which is available to only rational beings, is the satisfaction associated with thinking impartially about moral choices. Since rational beings can bring impartial reasons to bear on decision making, (...) Regan maintains that they have an additional possible source of satisfaction that nonrational beings do not have and, consequently, the lives of rational beings turn out to have greater value.. (shrink)

Анотація. У статті проаналізовані досягнення Соціального Вчительства Католицької Церкви, репрезентовані працями Лева ХІІІ, Пія ХІ, Пія ХІІ, Івана Павла ІІ, що розкривають змістовні характеристики поняття «принцип субсидіарності», його роль і значення в системі християнських цінностей. Принцип субсидіарності робить можливими такі взаємовідносини в соціальному житті, коли спільнота вищого порядку не втручається у внутрішнє життя спільноти нижчого порядку, перебираючи на себе належні тій функції; заради спільного добра, спільного блага вона надає їй у разі потреби підтримку й допомогу, узгоджуючи у такий спосіб її (...) взаємодію з іншими соціальними структурами. Принцип субсидіарності скеровує соціальну практику на утвердження спільного блага в людському співтоваристві. Поширення і застосування принципу субсидіарності протистоїть небезпеці «одержавлення» суспільства та найзагрозливіших проявів колективізму, обмежує абсолютизацію влади, бюрократизацію державних і соціокультурних структур, стає одним із гарантів дотримання прав і свобод громадян своєї країни. (shrink)

In her BBC Reith Lectures on Trust, Onora O’Neill offers a short, but biting, criticism of transparency. People think that trust and transparency go together but in reality, says O'Neill, they are deeply opposed. Transparency forces people to conceal their actual reasons for action and invent different ones for public consumption. Transparency forces deception. I work out the details of her argument and worsen her conclusion. I focus on public transparency – that is, transparency to the public over expert domains. (...) I offer two versions of the criticism. First, the epistemic intrusion argument: The drive to transparency forces experts to explain their reasoning to non-experts. But expert reasons are, by their nature, often inaccessible to non-experts. So the demand for transparency can pressure experts to act only in those ways for which they can offer public justification. Second, the intimate reasons argument: In many cases of practical deliberation, the relevant reasons are intimate to a community and not easily explicable to those who lack a particular shared background. The demand for transparency, then, pressures community members to abandon the special understanding and sensitivity that arises from their particular experiences. Transparency, it turns out, is a form of surveillance. By forcing reasoning into the explicit and public sphere, transparency roots out corruption — but it also inhibits the full application of expert skill, sensitivity, and subtle shared understandings. The difficulty here arises from the basic fact that human knowledge vastly outstrips any individual’s capacities. We all depend on experts, which makes us vulnerable to their biases and corruption. But if we try to wholly secure our trust — if we leash groups of experts to pursuing only the goals and taking only the actions that can be justified to the non-expert public — then we will undermine their expertise. We need both trust and transparency, but they are in essential tension. This is a deep practical dilemma; it admits of no neat resolution, but only painful compromise. (shrink)

Recent discussions in the just war literature suggest that soldiers have a duty to assume certain risks in order to protect the lives of all innocent civilians. I challenge this principle of risk by arguing that it is justified neither as a principle that guides the conduct of combat soldiers, nor as a principle that guides commanders in the US military. I demonstrate that the principle of risk fails on the first account because it requires soldiers both to violate their (...) strict duty of obedience and loyalty and to exceed their special obligations to protect their fellow comrades, the state, the state's constituents and other protected civilians. I then illustrate that the principle of risk fails on the second account since it conflicts with the commander's primary obligation to protect and promote the welfare and lives of his or her soldiers. I conclude by arguing that we cannot reasonably expect soldiers and commanders to adhere to the principle of risk until there is a radical, institutional-level transformation of militaristic goals, values, strategies, policies, warrior codes and expectations of service members in the US Armed Forces. (shrink)

Монографія "Функціональність релігії: український контекст".