<\/p>\n
“You seek escape from pain. We seek the achievement of happiness. You exist for the sake of avoiding punishment. We exist for the sake of earning rewards. Threats will not make us function; fear is not our incentive. It is not death we wish to avoid, but life that we wish to live.” \u2013 John Galt, in Atlas Shrugged<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n After tackling the virtues of selfishness and the concepts of value and reason, I stumbled upon an article<\/a> in USA Today<\/em>. Eric Trump, son of Donald, \u201cmade sure there was no ambiguity regarding his opinion\u201d of David Duke, former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, agreeing with a Denver radio host that \u201c[t]he guy does deserve a bullet\u201d. Putting aside the innate issues of racism for now, one must unpack the threat of physical force on the metaphysical<\/em> level.<\/p>\n I do not believe in a pacifist society, as it will crumble under the first threat of force, but I also do not believe threats are moral. Irrational people exist, as is the nature of humanity. However, the solution is not in a polar opposite society. If our society, which is merely a collection of individuals, formed a gang of thugs that were only organized on the principle of protection against outside force, it would be chaos. We must find a solution at a halfway point. As I say in The Virtue of Selfishness<\/em>, \u201cthe use of force against one man cannot be left to the arbitrary decision of another\u201d(103).<\/p>\n To evaluate the questionable rationality of threats, one must take the objective<\/em> standpoint of punishment and established reasons for justice to be served against the irrational. Threats are not actual physical force, but they allude to it, and must be taken seriously. The objective <\/em>standpoint of justice holds reason <\/em>at its core. Threats are irrational because they stem from an emotion, feeling, urge, wish, or whim that is \u201can attack on man\u2019s self esteem\u201d (8). Ethicality stems from reason<\/em>, not whims.<\/em> A threat fits well in my definition of a whim: a desire experienced by a person who does not know and does not care to discover its cause.<\/p>\n Eric Trump was heedlessly acting upon his whims when he said that David Duke should be rightfully assassinated. This is clearly an attack on a man\u2019s self esteem, even if Duke is a man with substantial ties to one of America\u2019s most bigoted hate groups. Duke has been evidentially proved a racist, which is \u201cthe lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism\u201d (120). Trump \u201csaid the Clinton campaign intended to discredit his father by labeling him a \u2018bigot, a racist, xenophobic, this and that.\u2019\u201d (Cummings, USA Today<\/em>), yet he throws threats of physical force around without intent of consequences. Threats are irrational whims, and goes against the basic metaphysical principles of consciousness as reason. As John Galt in Atlas Shrugged<\/em> implied, these threats of force do not incentivize us to become \u201cbetter\u201d people, and therefore are irrational.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “You seek escape from pain. We seek the achievement of happiness. You exist for the sake of avoiding punishment. We exist for the sake of earning rewards. Threats will not make us function; fear is not our incentive. It … Continue reading