[Morality Games]

Here is the reason why one's life is the standard of value and the 'ultimate' value of a person.

"grabs popcorn" Yay! Today I learn the meaning of life.

The term 'value' presupposes the answer to the question: Value to whom and for what? "It presupposes an entity capable of acting to achieve a goal in the face of an alternative. Where no alternative exists, no goals and no values are possible."

So, individuals produce or adopt values to suit their desires, which as you phrase it amounts to accomplishing something nice and avoiding something unpleasant as a result.

"Without an ultimate goal or end, there can be no lesser goals or means:

Living organisms are not computers waiting for Objectivism (or any other particular style of thinking) to program the appropriate algorithms so that they can function in real life. They are animals with egos, instincts, appetities, and in humanity's particular case, intellects.

They typically don't have ultimate goals or ends in mind (most likely not even in the nonconscious -- any information there doesn't seem to be concrete enough for that). They have immediate goals and ends in mind. They work toward these as effectively as can be done under the constraints of habit and other obstacles.

"Without an ultimate goal or end, there can be no lesser goals or means: a series of means going off into an infinite progression toward a nonexistent end is a metaphysical and epistemological impossibility.

So Ayn Rand noticed people can do just about anything with fallacious logic and language. Okay. But they generally don't need an ultimate goal or end to keep things down to a limit (aka, avoid the nonexistent end). Saying they need one to avoid infinite progression toward nothingness is itself fallacious.

This because they have their nature. The fact they are a finite being with limited means and immediate desires will motivate them to keep their imaginings, for the most part, down to a useful few. How they use their power (including evaluating) is inseperably tied to what they are. The 'idea of ideas' championed by Rand and others, whatever its guise, is not necessary at all for a meaningful life.

Metaphysically, life is the only phenomenon that is an end in itself: a value gained and kept by a constant process of action.

"pounds head" There is no such thing as an end in-itself, not life or anything else. Life is something beings feel to be desirable so they typically work to keep it. On the other hand, a man who just lost his entirely family in a car accident might suddenly find himself reasoning along a different standard.

''End' and 'in-itself' are human ideas -- the first refers to the image that the limit of an objective is about to be reached and 'in-itself' refers to the idea that an objective has its own features independent of my perceptions and is real because of them.

Ayn Rand felt as though her life was valuable because it allowed her to do things she liked to do. Okay. Almost everyone feels that way. But there is nothing objective about it -- it is a subjective determination. The man who commits suicide because he lost his family isn't straying from the facts or breaking some metaphysical law. He has considered the facts and made a judgment call based on them, no different than my decision to stay alive because I still have something worth existing for (or yours).

'It is only the concept of 'Life' that makes the concept of 'Value' possible.' "

I agree that you need to be alive to have values, but to act as though that magically makes it a metaphysical authority which supercedes human want is senseless. Even a logical suicidal man can acknowledge, "It is because I am alive I am able to value my death and the probability it will release me from my suffering." As he thinks this, at no point does the activity of life somehow appear more valuable than death, and there is nothing intrinistic to life which enforces such a value ... value is something given by humans. The suicidal man knows his desire and has made his value. Life here is not an end-itself, is just a means to an end (you must be alive to die, the man wants to die so he can escape his pain, so the man invests his life energies into acquiring the opposite of life, which is death).