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Author Topic: Objections to Objectivism  (Read 14606 times)

Capntastic

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Re: Objections to Objectivism
« Reply #165 on: October 13, 2012, 11:22:58 pm »

Maybe one route is through a bad neighborhood or one route is all downhill and bad for your brakes.  It's an example I'm not particularly attached to.  The point is that objective truth doesn't mean "only one thing can be true for any given question". 

Consider all of the medicines one can take if they have a headache.  It is true that all of those (aspirin, ibuprofen, oxycontin, morphine, vicodin, caffeine, acetaminophen, etc), on the whole, can help with a headache.  There are multiple objectively true answers to "what medications can help with headaches."

Depending on what the cause of the headache is, or other facts about the person asking, you have to make a value judgment about which ones would work better for you.  You might be able to whittle it down to, depending on your judgment criteria, one that is objectively the best choice.  But those are specific, person to person things that require intimate knowledge.  This is not to say that they are 'subjective', no less than 'the route to the park you should take' is subjective.  It simply means that, given current circumstances, one day you might be best with aspirin, and the next day a glass of water would suffice.
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GreatJustice

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Re: Objections to Objectivism
« Reply #166 on: October 14, 2012, 08:53:07 am »

This also does not change the fact that the resources involved are still scarce, whereas human needs and desires are not. Can you really say that every person on the planet would have everything they wanted without work required without reservations?
This is a pretty blatant misrepresentation of what was being discussed. That's not what was proposed or sought. What was proposed was that basic necessities -- food, shelter, etc. -- are possible to be turned post-scarce with today's technology. This is true. If we had the political backing for it, we've got the engineering problems related to that mostly solved, now (and time will, in all likelihood, only increase our prowess in that area), and the resources necessary to do so. If we as a species (or even just some of the larger powers) wanted to, and could manage to get around to getting the logistic aspect of it rolling.

As for human needs not being scarce... that's untrue. By the numbers, mankind's population is going to cap off at a certain level and then begin to reduce if technological progress continues as is, and it's a fairly trivial (if somewhat time consuming, I'd imagine) exercise from that point to identify precisely where our needs as a species will settle. At which point there's a limit on them, and, conceptually, they become scarce. Desires may be a different story, but they're not nearly as important, in all honesty, and scarcity-based systems are actually pretty good at handling those, as is.

Does every human only require food and water? What about medicines, if they have a condition of some kind? A specialized home and other support if they're disabled?

Inversely, electricity isn't a need for all people. After all, hundreds of millions through to billions of people existed before the common use of electricity. I think you're using "post scarcity" very loosely.

Furthermore, it isn't as though all the people of the world couldn't be fed with what we already have. On the contrary, under the right conditions, this post-scarcity world could be achieved right now. However, the governments of poorer countries have no interest in their people being fed, and non of their prospective replacements do, either. We could have a veritable planet of food and those places would still be starving without improvements in their political conditions.
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The person supporting regenerating health, when asked why you can see when shot in the eye justified it as 'you put on an eyepatch'. When asked what happens when you are then shot in the other eye, he said that you put an eyepatch on that eye. When asked how you'd be able to see, he said that your first eye would have healed by then.

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