The Objectivist ethics, in essence, hold that man exists for his own sake, that the pursuit of his own
    happiness is his highest moral purpose, that he must not sacrifice himself to others, nor sacrifice
    others to himself.
        -Ayn Rand

    You have to push as hard as the age that pushes against you.
        -Flannery O'Connor

In considering the philosophy of Ayn Rand, it is always important to keep in mind the prevailing intellectual climate against which she was forced to push.  Though her absolutist vision of individualism may appear overly harsh and dogmatic to us now, it may well have been a necessary counterweight to the general acceptance of statism in the West in the wake of the Great Depression.  At a time when European nations succumbed, disastrously, to the various allures of fascism, communism, and socialism, and even the United States experimented with the big government programs of the New Deal and Great Society, maybe her rigid espousal of freedom was a required response.  As another icon of the era proclaimed :

    I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also
    that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

The very extremity of their views made figures like Ayn Rand and Barry Goldwater easy objects of fun, but also inspired several generations of conservative/libertarian activists (most famously Alan Greenspan in Rand's case), who eventually saw these views vindicated with our victory in the Cold War and the return to smaller government and aggressive free market capitalism.

This collection of essays represents a systematic attempt to outline Rand's philosophy, with the first entry, "The Objectivist Ethics," offering the best statement.  Rand begins by defining ethics :

    It is a code of values to guide man's choices and actions--the choices and actions that determine the
    purpose and the course of his life.

Next she identifies the values that should guide those ethical choices :

    An ultimate value is that final goal or end to which all lesser goals are the means--it sets the
    standard by which all lesser goals are evaluated.  An organism's life is its standard of value :
    that which furthers its life is the good, that which threatens it is the evil.

Therefore :

    The standard of value of the Objectivist ethics--the standard by which one judges what is good or
    evil--is man's life, or : that which is required for man's survival qua man.

    Since reason is man's basic means of survival, that which is proper to the life of a rational being is
    the good; that which negates, opposes or destroys it is the evil.

    Since everything man needs has to be discovered by his own mind and produced by his own effort,
    the two essentials of the method of survival proper to a rational being are : thinking and productive
    work.

And so :

    The Objectivist ethics holds man's life as the standard of value--and his own life as the ethical
    purpose of every individual man.

Which leads to the idea that :

    The basic social principle of the Objectivist ethics is that just as life is an end in itself, so every
    living human being is an end in himself, not the means to the ends or the welfare of others--and,
    therefore, that man must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing
    others to himself.  To live for his own sake means that the achievement of his own happiness is
    man's highest moral purpose.

And living for your own sake really is just as selfish as it sounds :

    The Objectivist ethics proudly advocates and upholds rational selfishness--which means:
    the values required for man's survival qua man--which means : the values required for human
    survival--not the values produced by the desires, the emotions, the 'aspirations,' the feelings, the
    whims or the needs of irrational brutes...

    The Objectivist ethics holds that human good does not require human sacrifices and cannot be
    achieved by the sacrifice of anyone to anyone. It holds that the rational interests of men do not
    clash--that there is no conflict of interests among men who do not desire the unearned, who do not
    make sacrifices nor accept them, who deal with one another as traders, giving value for value.

Within this scheme then, what is the proper role of government ? :

    The only proper, moral purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means : to
    protect him from physical violence--to protect his right to his own life, to his own liberty, to his
    own property and to the pursuit of his own happiness.

    ...

    [T]he Objectivist ethics is the moral base needed by that politico-economic system which, today, is
    being destroyed all over the world, destroyed precisely for lack of a moral, philosophical defense
    and validation : the original American system, Capitalism.

    ...

    When I say 'capitalism,' I mean a full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism--with
    a separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of
    state and church.

Now I have to admit that I find much to commend in the philosophy that she's laid out, despite its many weaknesses as theory and despite the rather harsh results it might lead to in practice.  Moreover, take the theory out of the abstract and consider it in the context of her times, and it is certainly more attractive than the creeping authoritarianism, planned economies, and wealth redistribution that the West was headed towards for most of the 20th Century.

Objectivism has been the target of innumerable attacks and its weaknesses have been thoroughly documented, so I'll not try to rehash them all here (see the links below for some essays that do the job).  I'd just like to mention a couple of the things that really jump out at me.  First, though I agree with her position that reason should be the guide to human action and not feelings, this is a personal preference that we happen to share; there is no abstract necessity for mankind generally to choose reason.  And having so chosen, we both would opt for freedom as the primary value, but someone who has chosen the feelings as a guide to their ethics, would be justified, within the four corners of their ethos, in making a more mutual survival their primary value.  This is the difference, discussed here many times, between freedom and security, which I have argued has some correlation to gender.  Men, thanks to historical circumstances, and perhaps to biology, have tended to be more confident in their ability to survive and fend for themselves, and so have tended to come down on the side of freedom.  Women, understandably less confident, have favored security, that their survival might be assured even if it requires curtailing freedom in general.  To dismiss this countervailing viewpoint as irrational may even be true, but that does not delegitimize it.  If survival is the ethical purpose of every man, why shouldn't those who question their capacity to survive on their own seek to force others to help ?

The larger issue raised by Objectivism though is whether, even assuming an ideal world where the ethics could be applied absolutely, it suffices.  Would an existence wherein each of us was concerned solely with our own survival really be worth living ?  Even if it can be argued that we had arrived at the imperative to survive through a process of reasoning, would we be any better than animals ?  I think not.  And this is the most powerful criticism not merely of Objectivism but of pure reason, of capitalism, and of individualism in general : in the absence of any values external to man (presumably religious, but at least spiritual in some form), man's life or his freedom or his happiness are all standards arbitrarily adopted, and therefore not clearly superior to other standards which might otherwise be arbitrarily adopted.  So what makes my rational decision to choose freedom any better than the next person's emotional decision to choose forced sharing of resources ?  And suppose I get my freedom, what's the point if all I use it for is to further my own inevitably temporary survival ?  There have to be some broader purposes to human existence, don't there ?

Though life is indeed precious, the continued existence of each of us is simply not a fit measure for the meaning of our lives.  So in the end I find it easier to forgive Ayn Rand's stridency--her overbearing insistence on the primacy of the individual and individual concerns was appropriate to the time--than the narrowness of her vision.  Objectivism, like Existentialism, is ultimately too niggardly a philosophy for my tastes.  Freedom must be a means to get us somewhere, not an end in itself; otherwise it is simply one end among many that we might choose from.  We must raise our eyes from our own navels in order to find absolute meaning in our lives, but Objectivism stubbornly refuses to do so.

(Reviewed:06-Mar-01)

Grade: (B+) Orrin C. Judd

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