Israel Practices Self-sacrifice of German Immanuel Kant
Reader comment on item: Hezbollah's Victory, Israel's Decline

Submitted by Paul Saunders (United States), Feb 3, 2004 at 12:41

Israel's and America's state moral theory is based upon altruistic socialism. Altruistic socialism is derived from the thinking of a sequence of scholars : Immanuel Kant, Hegel, Marx, Auguste Comte, Lenin (communist), Rocco (fascist), and others. It's core is taken from Kant's moral principle that no action has moral worth unless it is done in opposition to one's own "inclination".

By "inclination" Kant meant the action you would take to pursue your own rational self-interest. In Kant's moral philosophy the highest good was self-sacrifice in performance of your moral duty. Kant's over-arching goal was to save God and religion from the assault of rational Enlightenment thinkers (deists and atheists) and empiricists (David Hume and others).

Comte rejected Kant's attempt to save God and religion by replacing Kant's "duty to God" with "duty to others." Thereby replacing Kant's moral duty with the altruistic moral philosophy of "living for others." The socialists (Marx, Rocco, etc.) transformed Comte's general moral dictum into : living for society, living for the good of society, living for the state, living for the proletariat, living for the volk, and living for the race. The ultimate result of implementing this moral philosophy was over 90 million innocent human beings slaughtered in countries around the world by fascists and communists.

Author and philosopher Ayn Rand established for the first time in history that the source of moral philosophy, of valuing, derives from a single human choice "life versus death". She established the principle that "Life is the standard of value" for every person and that each person's moral purpose in life was the rational pursuit of their own rational values. All of Ayn Rand's moral virtues are derived from the supreme virtue of rationality. The derivative virtues are : independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, and pride (pride as moral ambitiousness). In order for every person to carry out the pursuit of their values, each person must possess many inalienable individual rights such as life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. Rights are moral principles defining and sanctioning a person's freedom of action (speech, assembly, press, religion, trade, etc.) in society.

Since every person possesses individual rights, no person may violate the rights of another person by initiating physical force against that person. Any person or group who initiates physical force is a criminal to be dealt with by the police and law courts. Any nation initiating physical force against another nation would be dealt with by the military forces including pre-emptive strikes in self-defense when necessary.

Israel and America in the past acted on rational self-interest and thrived. Due to its intellectuals, Israel and America today are operating on Immanuel Kant's moral philosophy of self-sacrifice. Both nations will slowly die unless they reverse their course and embrace rational self-interest and objectivity as discovered and described by Ayn Rand.

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