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Ethics

First of all, Congratulations on this excellent website. It is a pleasure to discover a place on the Internet where the public may present philosophical questions for review by experts. My question is in regards to selflessness and selfishness. I view self-sacrifice as noble and a moral good, and that selfishness is repugnant and a moral wrong. With this in mind, I would like to ask about how to counter an idea posed in a quote by Ayn Rand: “Why is it immoral to produce a value and keep it, but moral to give it away? And if it is not moral for you to keep a value, why is it moral for others to accept it? If you are selfless and virtuous when you give it, are they not selfish and vicious when they take it? Does virtue consist of serving vice?” Can this view of selflessness be countered? I am essentially concerned about if an act of selflessness/self-sacrifice merely allows a selfishness elsewhere to be validated and to profit. Does a selfless act, by necessity, exist with and serve a selfishness?...

Your question reminds me of a quote that a friend uses as her email signature: "If I'm here to serve others, what are the others here for?" There is an important point here, and it's one that Rand is getting at, namely: an ethics of pure selflessness is, if perhaps not incoherent, at least ungrounded. It must be okay for people to enjoy certain benefits if it's morally worthy for others to work to secure those benefits for them. However, Rand then goes to the other extreme, endorsing instead an ethics of pure selfishness. One can readily acknowledge both the legitimacy of self-concern and the obligation to concern oneself with the welfare of others. There is no contradiction. So, for instance, on a utilitarian conception of justice, one gets to count one's own utility as fully as anyone else's. If helping another would involve a great sacrifice on one's own part, assuming the benefit to the other is not correspondingly greater, one is not obliged to make the sacrifice. But, it is still...
Ethics

Why is it so widely accepted that human beings have intangible rights such as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Humans as a part of nature, have these "rights" broken all the time by other humans and our environments. Do you think this may have to do with a strong desire to feel secure in the world we live in? It seems that in reality, the only natural rights are granted by whether or not you have the power to seize them.

I'm not sure what you mean by "intangible" here, but no matter. It strikes me that the question is based on assimilating the existence of a right to its observance. It may well be, and I believe it is, that rights are being violated all the time. I don't see how that is evidence that one doesn't have any rights, unless of course what one means by having rights is having them respected. But why think that? Now another question one might ask is, if there is such wholesale violation of rights, what good do they do me? Here I think the answer is, sometimes very little. Still, moral obligations, to which rights give rise, hold even if people by and large don't carry them out. Also, I think we do find many domains in which people making moral arguments does serve to change behavior for the better, and it's crucial to the cogency of such arguments that there really exist the rights and duties to which they appeal.
Ethics

To accuse someone of lying what evidence must one have? Let us assume that someone argued that Saddam Hussein had WMD. We now know that to be incorrect. What is the missing element to evidence that s/he was lying other than a personal statement from her/him to that effect?

Lying involves an intentional act of deception. If someone truly believed that Iraq before the US invasion possessed WMD and asserted as much, this wouldn't be a case of lying. We all make claims from time to time that turn out to be false, but we are not (usually - see below) morally culpable. However, it's lying if one makes a false claim believing it to be false, or at least not believing it to be true. (Of course in some circumstances one might be morally culpable for one's ignorance, or for making a claim that has serious consequences without sufficient justification. So if someone in a position of authority went around claiming that Iraq had WMD without solid evidence, even if they believed it, they would be morally blameworthy. But that doesn't mean they were lying.)