Inducing Objectivism: Three Methods
How to inductively prove the evil of the initiation of force.
Objectivism is a true philosophy. More precisely, it is the true philosophy. A philosophy is a system of interconnected ideas addressing the most fundamental questions concerning existence, consciousness, and the relationship between the two. To be true, a philosophy must answer these questions correctly. It must accurately describe reality, human consciousness in philosophic terms rather than neuroscientific or psychological ones, and the relationship of consciousness to reality.
Since reality is a single, integrated whole, free of contradictions and governed by the law of identity and its derivatives, any theory that purports to describe reality from a fundamental standpoint must itself form a non-contradictory whole. Objectivism satisfies both requirements. It corresponds to reality, and it is internally coherent. It therefore describes reality and man as they are, at the most basic level, and advances a unified, non-contradictory system of ideas grounded in facts.
Because reality is the standard, it epistemologically precedes philosophy. Ayn Rand did not invent Objectivism in the way a fantasy novelist invents a world, although her novels played the indispensable role of concretising her ideas. Nor did she follow the rationalist tradition of deducing a philosophy from arbitrary starting points or stipulated axioms. She induced Objectivism. She built her philosophy step by step, hierarchically, from the data of sense perception, and then followed the rules of conceptual hierarchy once within the realm of concepts. This method kept her ideas anchored to reality at every stage and prevented them from contradicting either the facts or one another.
If you, too, wish to grasp the truth and necessity of Objectivism fully, you must induce its principles for yourself. This is the only way to regard Objectivism as being as certain as the existence of the page or screen before your eyes. Thanks to Ayn Rand, the conceptual structure has already been mapped. That gives you an immense advantage. Even so, induction remains a demanding intellectual skill. The aim of this article is to offer preliminary guidance in acquiring it.
Induction is the process of generalising from “some” to “all”, from “in my experience, some men are mortal” to “all men are mortal by nature.” It is the essence of human cognition. Deduction presupposes induction. Every deductive syllogism contains at least one inductively established premise. Consider the standard example: “All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.” The universal premise, “All men are mortal,” is an inductive generalisation. Deduction consists in applying a known attribute to a particular instance when it belongs to a broader category whose members all share that attribute. But the knowledge that all members of a given class of entities have a certain attribute is attained through induction.
Leonard Peikoff’s course Objectivism Through Induction, available for free on YouTube, remains the gold standard for learning this skill. For a deeper theoretical perspective, read Chapter 1 of The Logical Leap by Leonard Peikoff and David Harriman.
There are three basic methods of induction:
The genus method: inducing the broader principle first.
The reduction method: breaking a concept down into its subordinate concepts until one reaches perceptual data.
The concretisation method: identifying and integrating examples across time, space, and context.
What follows is an illustration of these methods through the induction of the principle that the initiation of force is evil. This topic will inform ACO members’ discussion sessions in February 2026.
Definitions
In this context, force means physical interference with another person or their property against their consent. Evil means that which is categorically immoral by its nature. On the Objectivist view, particular actions such as lying can be moral or immoral depending on context. By contrast, the vice of dishonesty is evil, and so is a person whose character is defined by it. Dishonesty presupposes a context in which honesty is possible.
The Genus Method
The genus of the proposition “the initiation of force is evil” is evil. To understand why force belongs in this category, one must first grasp what evil consists in. This requires examining a wide range of examples that differ in time, form, and apparent motivation. The purpose of this breadth is to avoid integrating by non-essential similarities.
Consider the following cases:
Lenin working to instigate the Bolshevik Revolution and establish Communism in Russia in 1917.
An American bank robbery in 1980.
The philosophical implications of a typical column by Ellsworth Toohey.
Enslaving men to build the pyramids in ancient Egypt.
A man lying to his wife about an affair.
A European explorer offering himself as food to a cannibal tribe in 1680.
The theme of Anna Karenina: the subordination of personal values to social expectation.
Some of these involve direct physical force. Others do so indirectly. Some involve no force at all. Some are practical, others intellectual. What might initially appear to unite them is that they are “bad choices,” but this is far too broad. Regretting one’s choice of meal is not evil. Narrowing this to “highly consequential bad choices made with knowledge” comes closer, but nonetheless doesn’t reach the essential issue.
What unites these cases is their destructiveness combined with either evasion or a motivation aimed at the destruction of values. They negate the requirements of human life and the cognitive processes on which life depends.
The Concretisation Method
Instead of beginning with evil as such, one may concretise the initiation of force and induce its characteristic effects. Paradigmatic examples include murder, assault, robbery, and slavery. Each involves the violation of a right. More fundamentally, each disables the victim’s capacity to identify and pursue the actions their life requires. Force paralyses the mind. Further, by negating the victim’s freedom of judgement and action, it eliminates the means of human survival.
The Reduction Method
Reduction is comparatively straightforward here. In the context of human relations, force is plausibly a second-level concept, analogous to concepts like furniture. Its subordinate first-level concepts include kill, injure, confine, and seize. These, in turn, are formed directly from perceptual experience of violence, coercion, and physical interference. Reduction traces the concept back to these perceptual roots and thereby anchors it in reality. In harder cases, like “the mind is the basic means of human survival”, reduction requires more steps.