I've had the honor of being told I'm not an Objectivist by no less than Yaron Brook, but now Craig Biddle, also of ARI, has gone one better: I'm dishonest. Ironically, both times were at meals associated with guest talks hosted by clubs of which I was a leader.

His evidence? A philosophical argument in which I pushed him to defend his points and, when he raised David Kelley's name in order to use it as an expression of disapproval, I refused to sanction his insult.

Biddle argued that the negative side of a right is defended adequately by affirming the positive and then "inverting" it. He analogized this to deriving the principle that A cannot be ~A from the principle that A is A. I do not see that the analogy holds, and I am fairly confident that if I take the time to work it through I will be able to show why. A law of deductive logic cannot get us from "I need others to abstain from doing certain things to me" to "I must never do those things to others."* The former is justified by my needs, and the latter must be as well. (My view is that rights are binding as political principles: that we cannot justify an absolute moral prohibition on rights-violation, only a legal prohibition; that it is not always the case that if I initiate force I harm myself, but that it is always the case that I need a government that will prosecute the initiation of force. Moreover, I hold that the violence in Rand's fiction is consonant with my view, but not with the view that rights are prohibitions directly binding on the individual.)

Biddle's other defense of rights as morally binding principles rested on universalizability: He holds that a principle must be universalizable, and that affirming the positive side of rights without the negative means affirming a contradiction. This, so far as I can tell, incorporates Kantianism into Objectivism: It says I must not do something merely because I can't will that everyone else do the same thing--in this case, that I mustn't initiate force merely because I could not will that everyone else initiate force. But such a morality would be a morality of limited self-interest, where the limits come, not from the facts of reality, but from an a priori concept of what principles are--a concept that is, in essence, a weakened version of Kant's categorical imperative. (It is weakened in that it affirms only negative, not positive, duties, and thus demands only that we limit self-interest according to duty, not that we chuck self-interest and act only on duty.)

So far as I can tell, and as always I invite counterarguments, Biddle's defense of rights as prohibitions directly applicable to the individual is both philosophically wrong (i.e. not true) and historically wrong (contrary to Rand's view). But Biddle said that if I didn't grasp that he was right, he wouldn't be able to help me.

[Redacted]

Perhaps the two most surprising things: He sharply criticized me for referring to the seven virtues enumerated in Galt's Speech and The Objectivist Ethics as "canonical." And he insisted that no one was ever "excommunicated" and that it was a vicious slander on the part of Kelley, Bidinotto et al. to say otherwise.

A little while later, he said that if I had read the statements from both sides at the time of the schism and chosen TAS, I was dishonest and not worth talking to. I told him that he ought to back up the charge of dishonesty before the Honor Committee. He said I wasn't worth his time; I called him coward; he dismissed me from the table.

It seems to me it would be counterproductive at this point to demand that no further ARI people come to U.Va. However, I suspect it may be unnecessary.


*Clarification: I do not deny the value of deductive logic in ethics.  I  deny that this particular logical deduction is valid.

Redacted March 14, 2008, 5:31 p.m. EDT.