>Abandoning consistency seems cheap yet rewarding: we can lie to our
friends,
>we can cheat our closest ones, we don't have to keep our promises. It's
our
>happiness what "we are most generally interested in". Especially with
>people we are close with, whom we know how to hurt. Lying is easy: when
>caught -- we just spit a series of nasty personal remarks and this should
>scare them off next time.
Tad--Your theory about MS Flip seems inconsistent, even from an Objectivist
oriented point of view. If we accept the axiom that our conscious ability
to reason is valid, then it follows that no one can construct a virus which
can over-power our ability to reason. How do you reconsile the axiomatic
acceptance of conscious reasoning with the possibility that a virus can get
engineered to wipe out reasoning?
Another question: If, you cannot find a cure for the virus, doesn't that
imply, according to your theory, that rationality is inadequate to combat
irrationality? On the internet ideas get spread by persuasion, but not
force. If you cannot spread reason by persuasion, the only alternative is
force. Doesn't this imply that using violence against people who you think
are spreading the MS flip software might be an option?
--David R.