Hi Colin, You wrote, "Would it be safe to say that from the view of P1, and his contextual morality M1, that facts of reality regarding P2 and the potential relationships which are obtainable therewith (e.g. that P2 is a volitional being and that there are certain facts of reality necessary as regards other people for him to pursue his contextual morality M2, which dictate how he will interact with them, and that in general general those facts inform what is required for the right society in which voluntary trade to mutual benefit is possible etc.), are the set of facts of reality which must be taken into account within morality M1 and which serve to inform principles which guide P1 toward acting in his long term rational self interest specifically in the social context of interacting with P2 (and more generally PX)?" Colin, I had to read this passage several times just to figure out what it is that you're asking, and I'm still not sure, as I eventually gave up. Your sentence is simply too long with too many subordinate clauses. You need to break it up into smaller sentences, because a sentence expresses a complete thought and there is a limit on how much the average reader can absorb from a single sentence. Are you familiar with what Objectivism calls "the crow epistemology"? Here is how Rand describes it in her Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology: "Since consciousness is a specific faculty, it has a specific nature or identity and, therefore, its range is limited: it cannot perceive everything at once; since awareness, on all its levels, requires an active process, it cannot do everything at once. Whether the units with which one deals are percepts or concepts, the range of what man can hold in the focus of his conscious awareness at any given moment, is limited. The essence, therefore, of man's incomparable cognitive power is the ability to reduce a vast amount of information to a minimal number of units - which is the task performed by his conceptual faculty. And the principle of unit-economy is one of that faculty's essential guiding principles." (Page 83) Also, I don't see value in using abbreviations like P1, M1, P2 and M2. It doesn't facilitate understanding, but tends to obscure it. These abbreviations are not words in the English language but are intended only as substitutes for them, so each time I see them, I have to to recall what they stand for. Why not simply use the word itself instead of inventing another symbol for it? It's easier on the reader. I'm not saying never to use abbreviations, but they should be used rarely and judiciously. The tendency today, especially in academic and scientific literature, is to overuse them, which often requires the reader to waste time looking up their meaning. Let me recommend a little book by philosopher Brand Blanshard entitled On Philosophical Style, in which he discusses the importance of writing philosophy clearly and intelligibly. It's well written, as you might expect, and very entertaining. Rand was a master at writing philosophy well enough so that the average educated layman could understand and appreciate it.
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