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Comment by Philorandroid | Hacker News Reader

Again, you're confusing principle with quantitative absolute; the difference here is providing you with an exact list of things you should and shouldn't eat, versus saying "Don't eat poison, it'll hurt you." You can infer that chugging rat poison is probably not in the interest of a long, healthy and fulfilling existence. As such, Objectivism deductively and inductively proves that certain actions are an objective good for the soul as a condition of being human. Soul-tending, satisfying your values, being productive, etc.

No honest philosophy claims to supplant the special sciences, only serve as a foundation, nor will it tell you exactly what you must do to apply those principles to your life. If rigid dogma is what you expect or seek, I suggest investigating religion instead.

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> you're confusing principle with quantitative absolute

I really don't think I am, I'm trying to tell you that you keep referencing subjective values as if they can be assessed objectively. An example from the comment above is the following subjective value implied as an objective value: a long life is a better life than a not long life. I know it may sound preposterous but for every scenario we could imagine there is always a way to look at an action as a good thing or a bad thing depending on your perspective, even chugging rat poison. Perhaps the results of my death from poisoning is that someone else is able to survive due to the whatever circumstances surround the scenario; in this case I may be balancing the value of my own continued existence against that of someone else's and you want to tell me you there's a framework that is somehow going to guide me into making an objectively correct choice about who lives and dies?

> Objectivism deductively and inductively proves that certain actions are an objective good for the soul as a condition of being human

I disagree with this wholeheartedly.

I have seen zero proof of this and I really don't think it can be proved because the objective universe does not track goodness in any way, it is a concept defined entirely within our minds and does not have an objective physical reference we can test or compare against.

The more I think about this poison thing the less sense it makes, if you tell someone not to eat poison because it will hurt them you either need to tell them what things are poison or you really aren't telling them anything except that you don't want them to hurt themselves (whatever hurting yourself means) and that there are things out there that will hurt you that you call poison.

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