Category: Commentaries

The latest issue of The Objectivist Center’s monthly journal Navigator is out.
In ‘The Problem of Animal Rights,’ I discuss and critcize the arguments that philosophers have made in favor animal rights.

I think that the proper basis for individual rights?which I take to be Ayn Rand’s theory of rights?excludes extending rights or legal protections to animals…. This article will simply describe that theory and then employ it to rebut arguments that claim an extension of rights to animals is morally required.

Also in this issue, Robert Campbell reviews Owen Flanagan’s The Problem of the Soul in ‘What Does Science Say about the Mind?‘ And in ‘John Rennie: Enlightenment Engineer,’ Roger Donway profiles the man who rebuilt London Bridge.
See the full issue of Navigator for these and other articles.

The latest issue of The Objectivist Center‘s monthly journal Navigator is out.
In ‘Mozart’s Don Giovanni: An Enlightenment Hero?’ John Kerns begins with this intriguing question:

How are we to judge Don Giovanni, the protagonist of Mozart’s famous opera? Is he an Enlightenment hero, a symbol of independent thinking and action standing in opposition to church and convention? Or is he a dissolute roué evading responsibility for his actions or, even worse, a murderer and rapist?

Also in this issue, William Thomas reviews Alexander York’s novel, Crosspoints in ‘A Romantic Manifesto’, Michelle Fram-Cohen looks at the inspiring works of painting Uri Gil in ‘An Israeli Airman Attains New Heights in Painting’, and Robert Bidinotto writes how ‘Hollywood Canonizes an Eco-Terrorist’.
See the full issue of Navigator for these and other articles.

Atlasphere member Gordon Wood forwards a commentary by Canadian columnist Charles Adler addressing the liberal claim that Ronald Reagan “seduced his nation and many others overseas through the power of his personality.”
Adler points out that it was the strength of Reagan’s principles, not his personality, that drove world change under the late president’s watch:

Come Friday, “Freedom’s Champion” will receive a state funeral. But unfortunately the mythology manufactured by his critics won’t be buried. Many of them who live in our own country will continue to say that Ronald Reagan was a just a “B” actor who brought his John Wayne act to Washington and got lucky because Communism just happened to start imploding on his watch.
Truth is, Reagan was no John Wayne. He was more like John Galt, the man in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, who is willing to speak hard truths in behalf of individual freedom and the creativity it inspires.

See the full article (scroll down) for further analysis.

Writing for the Ayn Rand Institute, Alex Epstein has published an article at FrontPageMag taking issue with the “perverse priorities of our politicians and journalists” over “world opinion” about Abu Ghraib.
His original title put it more frankly: “World Opinion Be Damned.”
From his commentary:

The alleged solution to this alleged crisis of “world opinion” is to show more deference toward the rest of the world. Otherwise, we are told, the world’s anger will bring more terrorist attacks and less “international cooperation” against terrorism.
All of this evades one blatant truth: the hatred being heaped on America over Abu Ghraib is undeserved. Throughout the Middle East, torture–real torture, with electric drills and vats of acid–is official policy and daily practice. Yet there are no worldwide condemnations of the dictatorships that practice such atrocities–let alone the Arab-Islamic culture that produces so many torturers. But when, during a war, a handful of American prison guards subject a handful of Iraqi POWs to comparatively mild humiliation–which the U.S. government denounces and promptly investigates–“world opinion” proclaims itself offended and condemns America.
Abu Ghraib is just the latest example of the injustice of “world opinion.” Since September 11, the United States–the freest nation on Earth–has been ceaselessly denounced for any step in the direction of self-defense against terrorism, while terrorist regimes Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and the Palestinian Authority get a moral free pass.

See the full article for further analysis.

Writing for the ARI MediaLink, Thomas Bowden has published an op-ed titled “Assisted Suicide: A Moral Right” that cuts to the heart of the assisted-suicide debate:

When religious conservatives like Ashcroft use secular laws to enforce their belief in God’s will, they threaten the central principle on which America was founded. The Declaration of Independence proclaimed, for the first time in the history of nations, that each person exists as an end in himself. This basic truth?which finds political expression in the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?means, in practical terms, that you need no one’s permission to live, and that no one may forcibly obstruct your efforts to achieve your own personal happiness.
But what if happiness becomes impossible to attain? What if a dread disease, or some other calamity, drains all joy from life, leaving only misery and suffering? The right to life includes and implies the right to commit suicide. To hold otherwise?to declare that society must give you permission to kill yourself?is to contradict the right to life at its root. If you have a duty to go on living, despite your better judgment, then your life does not belong to you, and you exist by permission, not by right.
For these reasons, each individual has the right to decide the hour of his death and to implement that solemn decision as best he can. The choice is his because the life is his. And if a doctor is willing to assist in the suicide, based on an objective assessment of his patient’s mental and physical state, and on objective evidence of his patient’s consent, the law should not stand in his way.

Read the full article.

The latest issue of The Objectivist Center‘s monthly journal Navigator is out.
In “What Hath Man Wrought!“, William Thomas reviews Charles Murray’s new book Human Accomplishment. Thomas writes:

Murray’s new book, Human Accomplishment, is a study of the known history of such remarkable leaps. It covers the 2,750 years from 800 B.C. to 1950, employing both anecdote and argument to awaken “a sense of wonder” at the greatest feats of human accomplishment in art and science.

Along with the review, David Kelley interviews Charles Murray about the work’s philosophical premises and arguments.
In her short commentary “Honoring the Choice to Die,” Michelle Marder Kamhi confronts the question of how to die with with dignity and humanity.
See the full issue of Navigator for these and other articles.