I don't see the problem here. Atlas Shrugged is a very complex book and has many parts that I find profound (eg. her thoughts on romance, the concept of sanction of the victim and her surprisingly sane views on the relationship between money and human values) and many parts that I find mind-bogglingly stupid (eg. her extreme rejection of anything associated with progressive ideology even when no government is involved, and especially the deduction from A is A to objectivism being true). Taking the parts of a set of ideas the you like, discarding the parts that you do not like, and using the good parts as a core from which you advance your own philosophy with legitimate ideas is not a bad thing; it's how all philosophical progress works.
I think we could have a good discussion around a lot of the issues you raise here, but I want to just focus on what I think is the most worth talking about.
> and especially the deduction from A is A to objectivism being true
This is a very understandable, but major, misconception. Very understandable because Atlas Shrugged is a novel, not a formal philosophy treatise, so how would you know any better? (Without spending a crap ton of time studying other Objectivist literature, that is, like I did.) Major because Objectivism is induced from reality, not deduced.
For instance, take ethics. The Objectivist ethics looks at the nature of man and then figures out what man needs to have a happy life. Well, how do we know about the nature of man? We don't deduce it from A is A; that would be impossible. Rather, we look at lots and lots of examples of men and determine what is always common vs. what differs from one to the next.
Almost everything in Rand's philosophy is very bottom-up, based on looking at tons and tons of examples out there in reality and then forming a generalization that holds in a specific, delimited context. But that isn't evident from her writing, at least not at first. And our whole intellectual culture today is very top-down. So it's easy to think the Rand is a top-down thinker and not a bottom-up thinker.
By "bottom-up" I mean starting with concretes in reality. "Top-down" is starting from intellectual abstractions, like A is A, or God, or "a society is only as morally good as its worst-off member," or the libertarian non-aggression principle, or "from each according to his ability," and so on.
Thanks for the well-reasoned response; always happy to talk about this stuff.
My main concern with that style of thinking in general is that, while it is good at finding principles, it is less good at finding cases where those principles do not apply. For example, one important idea from Objectivism is the principle that "there can be no conflict of interest between honest men". This is clearly usually true, and classical economics does a great job at explaining why, but there are also cases where it's false. For example, if I am a monopolist selling pharmaceuticals for $1000 when their marginal cost of production is $1, it will benefit me to raise the price to $2000 even if it reduces my potential customer base by 30%, but it hurts those people who can't afford the product anymore, and it also arguably hurts society as a whole. You can't make this argument in non-monopoly circumstances, for reasons discussed by Bastiat, Mises, etc, that I'm sure you're well aware of, but you can here.
As another example, there are circumstances in which it is personally, and arguably universally, beneficial to initiate aggression. For example, if you are starving in the woods and see a hut with its owner absent, you would probably want to break into the hut and steal food from it. If you are honest, you will come back in a month and pay for everything ideally 2-5x over, but even then you technically violated the property rights of the owner of the hut. Of course, the owner would probably be delighted that you stole the food and paid 500% of what it's worth and would have consented to such an arrangement had he known, but the practical communication difficulties of the real world make such consent impossible in that particular circumstance. Indeed, this problem is fundamental; the Chicago School of Economics proves that essentially all so-called market failures are the result of high communication costs.
Some objectivists will make exceptions for at least one of those cases, saying that standard ethics are not intended for emergency situations. If you admit that as an excuse, however, do you support the laws in the United States requiring hospitals to admit non-paying patients for emergency care? If you do not, then you will need to have some reasons why not. And at that point, your philosophy is basically consequentialist - so why not just cut out the middleman of an overarching philosophy and directly support those policies that have desirable consequences?
I do think there are good answers to that question, but I am interested in what you would have to say.
You are raising good points and I have (I think) good answers.
I guess fundamentally, my over-arching answer is that abstractions like "there can be no conflict of interest between honest men" and "do not initiate force" are not useful to anyone who has not personally induced them from reality. Only when you have done that can you see precisely why it's a valid abstraction and understand what the delimited context is.
Of course, by that point, the abstraction isn't really "useful," except as a mental shortcut or as a summary to tell someone else (which is likely to confuse them, unless they know to merely treat it as a goalpost that they can personally try to induce).
Most of the Objectivist literature is exactly that: a summary without the full induction provided. Fortunately, not all of the Objectivist literature is that way. After all, I am describing issues in Objectivist epistemology right now, I didn't come up with this stuff.
Regarding the first example: The principle doesn't apply in a mixed economy (i.e. one where you can get regulatory monopolies), except to say that it is in everyone's interest to have a freer, more rights-respecting system. That doesn't mean the principle is invalid, it reflects the fact that every principle is delimited to a certain context.
Regarding the second example: That is correct, non-initiation of force does not apply in an emergency situation. And that is not the only thing delimiting the context. For example, it does not apply in a state of anarchy, which is why you can morally yet forcefully establish a minarchy out of an anarchy. Rand-influenced anarcho-capitalists do not understand this point.
I don't think we should require hospitals to admit non-paying patients for emergencies, I think we should immediately create a totally free market for medical care. I think that the cost of medical care for humans would eventually approach that for animals (i.e. veterinary medicine, which is insanely cheap), at which point poor patients could all be admitted via charity, along with a large number of other benefits to everyone.
If we are not going to take that step, I guess we should keep forcing hospitals to treat these people, but I think you could argue either way. iF you are going to slowly phase in a free market in medicine, maybe you slowly phase out the free medical treatment. I say "maybe" because Ayn Rand does not deal with this mixed case, and I don't think there is a "philosophically right" answer. She would just observe that it's in everyone's self-interest to live in a society where the government does not put up barriers to pursuing personal values; a free market in medicine is an implication of that. So she (and I) would argue for instituting a free market as quickly as possible.
> And at that point, your philosophy is basically consequentialist - so why not just cut out the middleman of an overarching philosophy and directly support those policies that have desirable consequences?
It is basically consequentialist already. It's just that you need to talk about things like the nature of reality, valid epistemology, the nature of man, etc. to properly understand cause and effect at a broad level and, therefore, to make sound consequentialist arguments and to be able to refute all the people who say, "the best consequence is when we all serve God" or "the best consequence is when we all serve Society," or "the best consequence is to have an economy that mixes regulation with freedom because without regulation, selfishness [1] takes over and the system gets corrupted" and on and on.
[1] As you probably know, AR claimed that "selfishness" as used in the culture is falsely combining two unlike things, (1) rational self-interest and (2) victimizing others for short-term benefit, which she argued is not a rational strategy in the long run.
