| | Fred and Robert W,
I just looked up your (Fred's) passage from Locke:
For whether by force he begins the injury, or else having quietly and by fraud done the injury, he refuses to make reparation, and by force maintains it, which is the same thing as at first to have done it by force; it is the unjust use of force that makes the war.
I believe he is talking about the effects of using fraud when he says "which is the same thing," not a redefinition of fraud as force. (Also, his context is war, but I will let that slide.)
I have no problem at all with using force to mean physical compulsion/damage as one concept, threat as a another concept to mean communication of intent, fraud as another concept to mean dishonest behavior in trade, and so on. This is the way the world uses them and I am quite comfortable with that.
I don't want to go off on a NIOF tangent, so to get back to Rand, there is a trend in the thinking of Objectivists and Libertarians that I believe has roots in a sometimes-used aspect of her rhetorical method. (I have been putting together an essay on this.)
This is from a cognitive/normative focus. Rand often used the same word in both the cognitive sense, then the normative sense in the same essay, only letting the context be the qualifier, i.e., not making an explicit qualifying statement. Thus she could talk about the ethics or morality of altruism and then later say that altruism is immoral (leaving out, "under a rational - or Objectivist - philosophy").
I observe the following trend. Great effort is expended by Objectivists and Libertarians to find a universal principle or axiom - to boil everything down to one observation as much as possible ("existence exists," or "reason is man's tool of survival," or even the rights principle, "no man has the right to initiate force against another," etc., just to cite Objectivist ones).
That approach works fine for principles and axioms. It does not work so well with a word - or even a concept.
On fraud and force, for the life of me, I cannot cognitively call fraud and force the same thing. The different words exist to denote different concepts.
Normatively, I can see where similar results occur, so I can see a connection between them. But not a cognitive obliteration of the meaning of one (fraud) and absorption of it by another (the new, all-inclusive "force").
Although I am not aware of anyplace where Rand actually did this, I see her approach as having been used by others as a prompt for such reasoning (stretching and redefining words and concepts to get an all-inclusive term where they don't fit).
Rand's over-emphasis on the normative in the "To Whom It May Concern" article even led her to write and sign the contradictions you (Fred) pointed out. That is one of the dangers of blindly giving yourself over to normative judgments without keeping the facts straight.
(All right, all right. She was hurt and that explains a lot. Still, the words she wrote continue to exist and continue to contradict the facts.)
So my point is, just as an imbalance in the cognitive-normative use of the mind (and the choice to do it is volitional, by the way) can lead to getting the facts all wrong, it can also lead to package-like concepts and words that overemphasize superficial similarities and ignore essential ones.
To illustrate by the force-fraud example. The effect of obtaining property from another by seizure or trickery is emphasized, however, it is a superficial aspect cognitive-wise. What is ignored in the new definition is the physical nature of force, or when the physical nature becomes manifest later, as in the Locke example, time is excluded from the concept; i.e., the idea becomes that something that happens later is the same thing as something happening now. Normatively that might be (and is) a valid consideration, but cognitively, it is simply not identifying reality correctly.
I guess I did go on a tangent after all. Sorry. This issue is vitally important to my own thinking, though, and I see it as a root cause to a great deal of misunderstanding and bickering in Objectivism and Libertarianism. (Even the root of Valliant's "convict at all costs" approach in his book is based on that kind of normative overemphasis.)
Michael
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