re: #25 vidugavia

I might be a bit lacking in expressing myself as English isn’t my first language. What I wanted to attack was the notion I read into your post that ideas that originated as reactions to other ideas somehow was disqualified av “first principles”.

Ideas that originate as reactions to other ideas are disqualified as first principles unless they happen to be axioms themselves— and in Rand’s case, they are.

The monarchism Paine was facing and formulated his arguments against was in its core, at least as Paine saw it, rather coherent.

That’s irrelevant. Monarchism in general is not coherent.

Marxism is, and was at Rands time, at least as diversified as the main scholarly theories supporting kingship in the 18th century Europe but that isn’t really important.

I’m not talking about scholarly theories, I”m talking about actual existence.

Based mostly on a conversation with two self identified objectivists.

What you described sounds a lot like correct interpretation of language.

What did you mean by correct interpretation of language?

Stuff like this:

The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word “selfishness” is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual “package-deal,” which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind.

In popular usage, the word “selfishness” is a synonym of evil; the image it conjures is of a murderous brute who tramples over piles of corpses to achieve his own ends, who cares for no living being and pursues nothing but the gratification of the mindless whims of any immediate moment.
Yet the exact meaning and dictionary definition of the word “selfishness” is: concern with one’s own interests.

This concept does not include a moral evaluation; it does not tell us whether concern with one’s own interests is good or evil; nor does it tell us what constitutes man’s actual interests. It is the task of ethics to answer such questions.

As an example. Rand spends a lot of time identifying particular words and stridently stating what her definition of them is, and if someone criticized (or criticizes) Randism using ‘incorrect’ language she’d attack the argument for their incorrect language.

Well sort of. Marx saw the struggle of the proletariat as the only ones able to free all humanity by abolishing social classes.

Yeah, he also saw them as the most oppressed class and that oppression as the root of many evils. Which is what I said. That he also thought they were the ideal revolutionary force that would achieve equality is true, but that’s orthogonal to my point.

Exactly. Abolishing the things that oppress people and hinders their life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Both derives from rather classical enlightenment thinking.

Yes, they do. However, identifying the ‘things’ that oppress as almost all deriving from the political and economic system is a feature of both Randism and Marxism, and not of most other Enlightenment-era philosophies.

People that categorizes Ayn Rand as a marxist might be i need of some patronage.

Well, it’s a good thing I don’t categorize Ayn Rand as a Marxist, then, isn’t it?