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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: FJB who wrote (278354)	11/3/2008 7:24:14 PM
From: JustLearning	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 794015

Hi Robert: [I won't delete this post on you :-)] Rand's definition of evil is expressed as follows: "The standard of value of Objectivist ethics - the standard by which one judges what is good or evil - is man's life, or that which is required for the survival of man qua man. Since reason is man's basic means of survival; that which is proper for life of a rational being is good; that which negates, opposes, or destroys it is the evil" My paraphrase of Rand's identity of consciousness, which she derived from Aristotle's definition, is: A non shareable attribute of man capable of obtaining knowledge that is congruent to reality using the tool of reason, method of logic, and stored as concepts and propositions which are relations between concepts. Regarding Kant and evil: Kant denied that consciousness has any identity, and by implication he denied the basic efficacy of reason (in essence) as a tool to comprehend reality, hence his basic premise is evil by definition. Regard Kant and Marxism: If you deny reason as the means of human knowledge then the only options for knowledge are through supernatural means, arbitrary convention, or statistical. Kant did not believe in the supernatural (I think this is correct), and since consciousness is an attribute of each individual man and cannot be shared with anyone else, this practically means that knowledge is what the strongest says it is. This implies you are ruled by a dictator or by a collective. They are both variations of the same principle and arises from denial of the identity of consciousness, and hence indirectly Kant is the father of Marxism. my two cents