In fact I had just addressed this issue on my morality thread:
But you just know in your heart of hears that none of this is applicable to you.
Right?
In fact, this sort of discussion takes me back some years to a class I attended at Essex Community College. Right after being discharged from the Army. The class was called “Abnormal Psychology”, taught by Ms. Vanetta Burkhardt.
She had just asked the class if they could kill someone. And, of course, the overwhelming majority of them [who were just out of high school], in touch with their “real me” in sync with “the right thing to do” insisted that course they could not, would not.
Then it was my turn. I had not just come out of high school. I had just come out of the Army, a Vietnam vet. And I told the class that, in many remarkable ways, the gap between the man I was before being drafted and the man I had become with his DD214, was such that I didn’t think the two of them could ever reconcile each other’s frame of mind after hours of discussion. Maybe not, in some respects, even recognize them.
What I would do/could do before the Army and what I would do/could do after it…?
All I do is to suggest in turn that had my experiences been very, very different from the cradle to the man I was before the Army, who could really say how wide that gap might be?
I just speculate further on why the objectivists here won’t go down that path with me by subjecting their own value judgments to the arguments I make.
Out in a particular world, given a particular set of circumstances, given a particular point of view derived existentially from the manner in which I construe the juncture of identity, conflicting goods and political economy.