Tag Archives: altruism

[Video] Defining Basic Moral Concepts

package dealsIn this talk from the 2015 Objectivist Summer Conference, , author of In Defense of Selfishness, discusses the difficulty in defining moral concepts, among other concepts, due to package deals. Package deals are terms that try to integrate items by non-essentials, read more

Podcasts and More for February 17

Weekly podcastsThis week’s podcasts covered topics from egoism vs altruism to fossil fuels to whether spouses should always share activities, and more!

Don’t Let it Go…Unheard – This week hosts Amy Peikoff interviews Center for Industrial Progress’ founder Alex Epstein about his new, excellent I might add, book The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.  They discussed:

  • Alex being threatened if he were to appear at a Divestment Day event
  • The story about temperature records being “adjusted”. Alex had an interesting take on this issue, seeing it as non-essential. The essential fact is that fossil fuels are moral in that they enhance the human environment.
  • Keystone pipeline
  • Fracking and earthquakes

After the 30 minute interview with Alex, Bosch Fawstin joined Amy and they discussed a plethora of stories, including:

  • Chapel Hill shootings
  • France can know block suspected terrorism websites without a court order – so much for the free speech everyone was marching for after the Charlie Hebdo attack.
  • The government announces that they have been wrong on their cholesterol recommendations for 40 years. I should note that the man, Ancel Keys, who first proposed the hypothesis about cholesterol was correlated with heart disease knew that dietary cholesterol had little or no effect on blood cholesterol.
  • And a lot more.

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Altruism – Quotation of the Day

altruism egoism virtue of selfishnessOn his new weekly podcast, Yaron Brook has started giving listeners “homework” to help build a foundation for the issues he we be discussing on the show. For this week’s show he asked that everyone read the introduction to Ayn Rand‘s The Virtue of Selfishness. I had read this a couple of years ago, but a previously un-highlighted paragraph jumped out at me.

The Evil of Altruism

The context of this quotation is a discussion of the difference between egoism and altruism. The most essential read more

Ayn Rand’s Ideas: An Introduction

An excellent introduction to major topics in Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism presented by Onkar Ghate from 2003. The video includes a Q&A session with Onkar Ghate and Yaron Brook. Topics include: Individualism vs Collectivism, What are rights?, Proper role of government, Egoism vs Altruism, Ethics, Mysticism vs Reason and more.

The Q&A session is particularly interesting. Many of the folks had challenging questions which resulted in some great answers. I was somewhat surprised read more

A Perfect Example of Leftist Philosophy

I came across this little tidbit following a link from a Reason.com article about the absence of high profile Hollywood anti-war celebrities speaking out against President Obama’s proposed strikes against Syria.

I came across this quote and had to go back and reread it.  To me it perfectly sums up the leftist philosophy of altruism, or self-sacrifice.  Actor Ed Asner is quoted in the Hollywood Reporter as saying, in regards to President Obama:

I voted for him, but I’m not proud. He read more