Cato Unbound has recently completed an interesting debate between several scholars on the strengths and weaknesses of Ayn Rand’s philosophy. All of the contributions are worth reading for those interested in the subject. But I agree most with University of Colorado political philosopher Michael Huemer:
What is the best way to defend freedom intellectually? Is it, as Rand believed, to connect the philosophy of individual rights to a version of ethical egoism, which in turn derives from the metaethical theory presented by Rand in “The Objectivist Ethics”? I don’t think so. Objectivists seem to find that essay completely convincing. But hardly anyone else finds it at all convincing. This is not a trivial observation—one often finds that people who do not accept a whole philosophical system nevertheless find certain parts of it plausible. And one often finds that people who are not ultimately persuaded by an argument nevertheless see some plausibility in it. But neither of these things is true of the argument of “The Objectivist Ethics”—hardly anyone finds that argument even slightly plausible, unless they also buy into virtually all of Ayn Rand’s views.....
There are two major reasons why the best hope for political freedom is not to connect it ideologically with Rand’s ethical and metaethical theories. The first is that those theories are utterly unconvincing to almost everyone.... Connecting the two together serves only to discredit the cause of freedom and individual rights. It plays into the hands of those who say that the only opposition to socialism derives from greed and selfishness.
The second major reason is that ethical egoism does not support the philosophy of individual rights in the first place. Quite the opposite. Take Rasmussen’s statement of the basic individualist premise: “Each individual human being is an end in him‑ or herself … not merely a means to the ends of others.” This is a very common idea in classical liberal writings. Nearly identical statements appear in Rand, in Nozick, and of course in Kant. It is also, pace Rand, directly and obviously contrary to ethical egoism. For ethical egoism posits that the only thing that ought to matter intrinsically to me is my own welfare—for me, my own welfare or happiness is the only end in itself. It follows from this that I ought not to regard other individuals as ends in themselves; rather, I should see them only as means to my happiness—just as I see everything else in the world. This is a very simple and straightforward implication of the theory. I cannot hold my own well-being as the only end in itself, and simultaneously say that I recognize other persons as ends in themselves too....
At this point, most Objectivists fall back on the contention that, luckily, it is impossible for rational people’s interests to conflict. More particularly, that although it would be praiseworthy to use others for one’s own advantage if one should get the chance, opportunities are peculiarly scarce, so much so that there has never (or almost never) been a case in which anyone would have benefited by violating another person’s rights (for instance, by initiating the use of force against another). It would be truly wonderful if this could be proven. But actual arguments for this claim are unsurprisingly hard to come by, and it remains unclear why anyone would accept the claim, apart from a drive to reconcile Rand’s ethics with her politics.
Ironically, Ayn Rand’s egoistic defense of libertarianism runs into particularly serious problems in a society filled with statist injustices. In such a regime, many people have obvious egoistic interests in maintaining the status quo, or at least not taking the risk of becoming open dissidents. Eliminating the horrible oppression of North Korean communism is surely desirable. But it just as clearly runs counter to the egoistic interests of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il. Similarly, when people like Vaclav Havel and Andrei Sakharov risked their lives and careers to become dissidents in communist societies, they struck a blow for freedom. But they also undermined their own egoistic interests. Sakharov especially would have been better off had he remained a loyal member of the privileged Soviet elite.
In her novels, Rand praises characters like John Galt who risk their livelihood to oppose statist oppression. But it’s hard to reconcile this praise with her egoistic philosophy, except perhaps by positing that Galt’s victory will happen so soon and with such certainty that resisting the regime actually maximizes his narrow self-interest. Whether or not this was true of the fictional Galt, it certainly is not true of many dissidents in the real world.
Despite the shortcomings of her philosophy, I think Rand deserves enormous credit for being perhaps the greatest-ever popularizer of libertarian ideas. Huemer also argues that her positive legacy outweighs the negative. One can acknowledge that while simultaneously recognizing that her philosophy has major weaknesses and is ultimately a flawed justification for a free society.
Skyler says:
Of course you can. It’s in your own interest to protect others’ rights because otherwise you wouldn’t have any either. There is no inconsistency.
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February 6, 2010, 6:59 pmMichael says:
In which case you would still be regarding them as mere means to your happiness, and not as ends in themselves. This has the same practical effect for people sufficiently close to you (i.e. under the same government), but there is no basis under this ethical theory for the claim that everyone ought to have the same rights you enjoy. You deserve rights only if it is necessary for the protection of my rights.
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February 6, 2010, 7:11 pmAlast says:
Pure [fill in the blank] is rarely possible in practice, and even more rarely desirable in toto. Whether it is pure conservatism, pure capitalism, pure socialism, pure libertarianism, pure democracy, or pure Rand, it won’t work for long anywhere. There has to be enough flexibility and rationalism to 1) recognize the shortcomings of any philosophy when applied to the real world of human nature, and 2) the ability to adopt practical exceptions and extensions.
For a million hears, humans and their ancestors associated themselves into groups based on appearance, religion, geography, etc., for common efforts that fell into one of two categories — 1) to take things from another group or 2) to effectuate a common defense against another group. If that wasn’t a core part of human nature, wars would not have been a constant feature of this planet for millennial. Self-actualization, benevolence, and everything else is a minor and insignificant exercise of enlightenment given the results to date.
Until the practical aspects of human nature (and diversity thereof) are adequately accounted for, all of the theories are doomed to failure when put into practice.
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February 6, 2010, 7:14 pmNick says:
Other people’s rights are a fact, whether or not they’re in my interest or your interest or the interest of everyone we know. The answer, as it happens, is that yes, so they are. But even if they weren’t, we’d still have to respect people’s rights. We’d still have to do justice, and not violate it. Self-interested socialists don’t admit that. They acknowledge no limits to what they can do. Selfishness and greed is what their camp defends. And the Randians let them get away with this trick. Government greed grows and grows, and people say that socialism is not selfishness.
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February 6, 2010, 7:26 pmRobert Bloomfield says:
This statement flies in the face of all established economic and legal theory, and is disproved repeatedly by experience. This is why so many people (myself included) see Objectivism as adolescent fantasy fulfillment.
Moreover, the quoted sentiment undercuts the “going Galt” meme that the Cato editors cite as the renewed relevance of Ayn Rand is a great example of this. Great people stand on the shoulders on giants, and rely heavily on society for their success–consumer, employees, business partners...and government. Anyone who thinks any capitalist hero did it alone is dreaming.
People do have common interests. That is why they form governments. Of course, institutions aren’t perfect, and government creates incentives that grow government. But let’s address that problem, and stay out of fantasy-land.
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February 6, 2010, 7:27 pmNick says:
It is impossible for well-mannered, peaceable or reasonable people’s interests to conflict. Or for two people who respect each other’s rights to come to an agreement by bargaining or deal-making that’s only in this guy’s interests but not the other guy’s. This constraint, of having to make a reasoned argument instead of just using force, is what forces the two parties to trade. Otherwise, the deal is off. But government short-circuits this. People have common interests, and they form gangs or cartels or get the government to make their interests prevail.
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February 6, 2010, 7:45 pmArkady says:
If challenged to define “acting rationally,” wouldn’t the Objectivist reply, “To act rationally is to act always in one’s own self-interest”? But that renders deeply suspect the notion that it is impossible for rational people’s interests to conflict. For there’s no reason a priori to suggest that what’s in my self-interest is also in your self-interest; indeed, much of our experience would suggest just the contrary. And if that is the Objectivist reply to the rational action question, then it would seem to provide the basis for a reductio of the whole system. For if to act rationally is always act in one’s own self-interest, then sometimes it will be in your self-interest to use me as a means to your ends and in my self-interest to resist you so using me. Is this not conflict?
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February 6, 2010, 7:49 pmsbw says:
Do I really have to go back to Rand? Somehow I can’t see Ilya’s as the best representation of her case.
From reading it long ago, and getting beyond it to my own thoughts:
1) Individuals are the center of their unique spot in place and time.
2) Others are equally individual and live their lives as acutely as I live mine.
3) Experience has shown I’m not always correct, but my best future depends on getting as correct as I can be. Cooperation can help improve the accuracy of my mental map of reality.
4) Cooperating with others, who are equally interested in planning their best future, works for those who agree to cooperate. Cooperation generally improves quality of life.
5) This does not seem at odds with Rand. It seems an accessible expression in which others can find value.
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February 6, 2010, 8:01 pmbyomtov says:
At this point, most Objectivists fall back on the contention that, luckily, it is impossible for rational people’s interests to conflict. More particularly, that although it would be praiseworthy to use others for one’s own advantage if one should get the chance, opportunities are peculiarly scarce, so much so that there has never (or almost never) been a case in which anyone would have benefited by violating another person’s rights (for instance, by initiating the use of force against another).
Really? There are people who believe this? Amazing.
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February 6, 2010, 8:10 pmAnonsters says:
Any time anyone mentions Rand to me, I halt the conversation and refer them to Nozick. If you’re going to do philosophy, at least try to do it seriously and competently.
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February 6, 2010, 8:35 pmS says:
You do realize, I hope, that ‘the rational man’ is a useful fiction in philosophy and economics but it is still fiction.
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February 6, 2010, 8:42 pmzuch says:
Prof. Somin:
Alors! An author praising her fictional hero. What next? Bumper stickers about the kid’s honor roll status?
Cheers,
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February 6, 2010, 8:59 pmDesiderius says:
“At this point, most Objectivists fall back on the contention that, luckily, it is impossible for rational people’s interests to conflict.”
This premise is exactly the one that a more fruitful tribune of libertarian ideals, Isaiah Berlin, challenges again and again in his writings.
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February 6, 2010, 8:59 pmzuch says:
Prof. Huemer addressed this here:
Only if everyone agrees on “rights” (or “interests”) does this even stand a chance to work. And even then, they have to have enough meta-understanding to know that they must constrain their “rights” in a way that they would want others to constrain theirs in return (and also know that they will). Which is an aphorism quite a bit older than Ayn Rand, and not generally regarded as libertarian.
Cheers,
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February 6, 2010, 9:08 pmJavert says:
Fill your own statement in “the blank,” and you will see that this statement is self-refuting.
Ilya, you have a serious misunderstanding of rational egoism. It does not mean that one has the right to sacrifice others to self. (That’s Nietzsche, not Rand.) And egoism does not mean that life requires compromise or that it is worth living on “just any old grounds.” Egoists are not into short-term, immediate gratification. (That’s hedonism, not rational self-interest.) This is why Galt, and the other Atlas heroes, risk their lives. And it is why Roark refuses the Manhattan Bank contract in The Fountainhead.
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February 6, 2010, 9:13 pmzuch says:
Pray tell, where did you find these “self-interested socialists”? Anthropologists really want to know....
Cheers,
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February 6, 2010, 9:16 pmBrett Bellmore says:
Ah, yes, this would be why so few copies of her books sold...
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February 6, 2010, 9:18 pmbyomtov says:
Nick,
It is impossible for well-mannered, peaceable or reasonable people’s interests to conflict.
Excuse me. I’m going to go out to dinner tomorrow night, and am trying to decide between Tony’s Trattoria and Chen’s Chinese Restaurant (because, as Billy Crystal says, on Sunday night Jews aren’t allowed to eat their own food).
I happen to know that both Tony and Chen are well-mannered, peaceable, reasonable, people. Yet it does seem their interests conflict here.
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February 6, 2010, 9:26 pmzuch says:
Dunno about you, but I find a distinct lack of “co-operation” from many on VC. It’s just not working....
Cheers,
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February 6, 2010, 9:27 pmbyomtov says:
Despite the shortcomings of her philosophy, I think Rand deserves enormous credit for being perhaps the greatest-ever popularizer of libertarian ideas. Huemer also argues that her positive legacy outweighs the negative. One can acknowledged that while simultaneously recognizing that her philosophy has major weaknesses and is ultimately a flawed justification for a free society.
Even though her ideas are stupid, she deserves credit for convincing lots of teenagers that they make sense.
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February 6, 2010, 9:31 pmyankee says:
Ilya and I have disagreed about this before, but I would go further and say that Rand invented modern libertarianism. I don’t mean that Rand invent libertarian ideas: there were a lot of people expressing what we now see as libertarianish ideas before Rand. But Rand is the one who put them together, declared them a complete and unifying theory of politics, and got people to accept them as a package-deal.
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February 6, 2010, 9:52 pmNick says:
If they don’t respect people’s rights, they can do what they want. They can make you a means to an end, a resource, a living tool. Slavemasters, socialists, mobsters, feudal lords, monopolists. But “socialists” for short. They’re self-interested. And they’re not interested in what you would prefer. If they were well-mannered instead, they’d be less greedy. They’d use arguments. They’d use reason instead of a gun. You and these guys would discuss what you want, and what they want from you, and you’d allow them as much as you think is best, and they’d do the same on their end. They’d cease to be socialists. They’d be reasonable and civil instead.
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February 6, 2010, 9:58 pmzuch says:
Ummmm, put down the keyboard and walk away slooooowwwwlllyyy. We’re here to help you. Really. ;-)
You still didn’t answer my question, but I think I see what the problem is....
Cheers,
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February 6, 2010, 10:05 pmAnachronym says:
I’ll join the others above in picking on this snippet: this contention strikes me as a thoroughly totalitarian sentiment, at least taken on its own as an axiom.
The obvious corollary is that anyone whose interests conflict with those of a rational person — or one who believes themselves to be rational — is an irrational person. It would also strongly imply that the ideal Objectivist world consists only of rational people — that is, only of people whose interests do not conflict (with Objectivism).
And if you take those propositions as implied by the first statement, then it is hard for me to see how it is not rational — if other people are not ‘an end in themselves’, particularly ‘irrational’ ones — to take steps to bring such a world about. Your imagination can fill in what those steps might be.
I will admit I have not read Rand so there may very well be equally fundamental aspects of Objectivism that prevent these conclusions, but this is just my immediate reaction on reading the post.
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February 6, 2010, 11:20 pmmack says:
Ayn Rand — didn’t have children — while the theme of freedom and liberty in her works may appeal to many, the coldness and emotional disconnect of her philosophy appeal to few. The principals of the Christian faith are much more in tune with libertarian ideals, if one divorces it from provincial religious practice.
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February 6, 2010, 11:43 pmAnatid says:
I was under the impression that Rand’s theories rest upon partial or complete denial of the human capacity for compassion, gratitude, altruism, concern, empathy, and even pair-bonding?
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February 6, 2010, 11:56 pmSkyler says:
Ilya and others seem to have a very sophomoric understanding of Rand. She was not perfect by any stretch of the imagination and her views on sex are simply odd to me, but this idea that she said that the individual’s self interest is the only thing that matters is hogwash.
She was very clear that the fundamental idea of her philosophy is that “A is A.” That is, reality is what it is and that perceptions and conceptions do not change what reality is. Additionally, right and wrong are part of reality and are not changed by what we think are right and wrong.
Despite Ilya’s mistated portrayal of Rand, she never believed that one should act only in one’s own best interest. She concluded that one’s best interest in the long run was to act according to the principles of right and wrong — right and wrong being immutable properties of reality.
Ilya has put Rand’s cart before the horse and several others here miss the entire point of Rand’s philosophy.
Rand’s emphasis on the individual is not that each individual should only act in their own self-interest, but that individuals acting according to what is right will be acting in their own self-interest. In no way did she think that all people act in their own self-interest. What she advocated is that people who do act justly should not sacrifice themselves to others trying to enslave them or their minds.
Rand errs on a few issues, mostly in believing that she was infallible in understanding right and wrong. Right and wrong are absolute, but no individual’s ability to understand right and wrong is absolutely infallible. It is the struggle of mankind and civilization to come up with the best understanding of right and wrong as possible. It is the degree to which a society is successful in that endeavor that is the measure of justice of the society.
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February 7, 2010, 12:33 amJavert says:
Rand errs on a few issues, mostly in believing that she was infallible in understanding right and wrong.
I assume that you have a citation for this assertion?
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February 7, 2010, 12:44 amSkyler says:
Exaggeration. She certainly never admitted she might have been in error on even small points and was known to be pretty cranky about the pettiest issue. She never claimed infallibilty but her behavior was indistinguishable from one who would make that claim.
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February 7, 2010, 12:50 amDavid says:
Would it be a surprise to discover that this is also a fundamental of Christian ethics, originally stated in this form by (IIRC) Thomas Aquinas?
Every human being, being made in the image of God, is therefore endowed with an infrangible individuality and dignity. It therefore follows that human beings must always be considered as ends, and never as means.
This is the cornerstone of Christian humanism (for want of a better term), and is the reason why Christians oppose things such as organ-farming, torture, and military attacks on purely civilian targets.
Ultimately, it is the refutation of all millenialist movements (political and otherwise): since human lives are incommensurate, the needs of the many cannot outweigh the needs of the few, or even the one.
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February 7, 2010, 12:53 amDan Lavatan says:
Objectivism, while proporting to value rationality, has some anaylitical weaknesses. For one thing, valuing logic just because it is logical to do so is circular reasoning. Objectivists historically engaged in particulary irrational justification for behaviors such as asserting that smoking was logical as the ember represented the “flame of liberty” rather than recognizing the chemical influence of tobbacco on the brain. Atlas Shurgged contained a theoretically impossible Carnot engine as a major plot element.
However, I agree somewhat with their view that rational interests don’t conflict. As self-organizing systems we have a limited amount of energy. Oppressing my rights (as I see them) will cost an oppressor’s faction more energy than it gains. Kim Jong Il is an irrational alchaholic, and his standard of living would increase if he ran North Korea in a more sensible way.
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February 7, 2010, 12:59 amDan Lavatan says:
Objectivism, while proporting to value rationality, has some anaylitical weaknesses. For one thing, valuing logic just because it is logical to do so is circular reasoning. Objectivists historically engaged in particulary irrational justification for behaviors such as asserting that smoking was logical as the ember represented the “flame of liberty” rather than recognizing the chemical influence of tobbacco on the brain. Atlas Shurgged contained a theoretically impossible Carnot engine as a major plot element.
However, I agree somewhat with their view that rational interests don’t conflict. As self-organizing systems we have a limited amount of energy. Oppressing my rights (as I see them) will cost an oppressor’s faction more energy than it gains. Kim Jong Il is an irrational alcoholic, and his standard of living would increase if he ran North Korea in a more sensible way.
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February 7, 2010, 1:05 amSkyler says:
I also vaguely recall that Rand didn’t think highly of libertarianism.
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February 7, 2010, 1:06 amSkyler says:
Rand wrote that a cigarette was a small symbol of man’s mastery of nature by controlling fire. She never called it a flame of Liberty. I can’t even imagine her saying that. She didn’t talk much using words like liberty.
The engine was a plot device, not a real invention. Sheesh.
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February 7, 2010, 1:11 amDebating | Little Miss Attila says:
[...] . . . Ayn Rand. [...]
sputnik says:
I am reading all this and think,- how irrelevant it all is.
Just like the philosophical disputes in 1928 Germany or 1910 Russia.
The Tea party had a convention, the new cult of S.Palin is emerging, the ignorance is getting the upper hand.
I hope, Ilya you still have relatives left in Russia, will be the place where to escape before it is too late....
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February 7, 2010, 1:21 amThe ignorance says:
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? A little less than seventeen hundred, perhaps. “When the recession started, the Transportation Department had only one person earning a salary of $170,000 or more. Eighteen months later, 1,690 employees had salaries above $170,000.”
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February 7, 2010, 1:49 amzuch says:
Sophomoric? Isn’t that sufficient? Seemed to be when I was in high school.
Well, yes, well and fine to say that (without showing it). It may even be true. But isn’t that rather begging the question?!?!? And when you start asking how you proceed from this useless “insight”, you get to Rand’s answer:
No, it isn’t. It’s pretty much the basis for her ethic. Didn’t you read the books?
Others finesse this with “Gawddidit”. That has problems as well, but at least isn’t circular reasoning.
Cheers,
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February 7, 2010, 2:15 amzuch says:
And the book was fiction. Quite the medium for an exposition of the idea that there are objective facts we should all ponder....
Cheers,
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February 7, 2010, 2:21 amD.R.M. says:
If one substitutes a definition of “selfishness” or “rational self-interest” or “egoism” different from Rand’s definition, then, sure, you can prove her statements about those things do not hold true. But you haven’t actually proven anything except that you are using a different definition than Rand, which we already established at the beginning.
Now, one might very well argue that Rand’s definition of the terms is wrong as a matter of English usage. Congratulations, you’ve proven an adult who picked up English as a second language used English wrong. We can now correct her writings for that by replacing those terms with new ones, that are defined the way she defines them. Let’s say, “vandintness”, “rational covterist”, and “hoopyism”.
Now, do people have obvious hoopyistic interests in going along with the status quo? Are there possible conflicts in the covterists of rational people? Well, now you’re going to have to go back to Rand’s writings and actually look at her definitions before you answer. But at least you’ll actually be grappling with her ideas.
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February 7, 2010, 3:14 amD.R.M. says:
Certainly. Because in Randian thought, this equality is answered at a pre-ethical level of philosophy. As a fact of reality, you and other people are all objects of the category “individual human being”. Ethics are inherently subject to the facts of reality; if we conclude you have rights because you exist as an individual human being, then all individual human beings have the same rights as you, too. Your rational egoism is then constrained by the facts of reality. Any violation of another’s rights is accordingly a violation of rational egoism, because it is irrational to act in defiance of reality.
Yeah, there are now more and deeper grounds to argue against that. But Rand’s thought does survive the most superficial level of attack. If you think you’ve found an easy refutation of Rand, it’s almost certainly because you’re attacking a strawman based on a misunderstanding of Rand.
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February 7, 2010, 3:30 amCaptainchaos says:
The act of positing “individual rights” and “freedom” and “happiness” as intrinsic goods or ends unto themselves is an act of faith. Incidentally, in our present post-modern context the invocation of all of them tends to draw a person away from duty and community into solipsism and frivolity. Of course it is not hard to see that the logic and thrust of Rand’s ‘philosophy’ played out tend towards atomization, something Rand was not stupid enough commend to her own people (though certainly sufficiently hypocritical — which should surprise no-one) per her Zionism and the fact that her ‘inner circle’ were nearly all of her own people. You see, self-evidently, in the competition for finite resources as the grist for securing the continuity of life it is the more cohesive group, all else being equal, that will win out. Which is something Rand and so many of her co-ethnics get instinctively (to hell with what they say, look at what it is they actually do). And so too, it is not “freedom” or “individual rights” or “happiness” which are ultimate interests or ends unto themselves, there is a higher interest: life and the continuity of same.
I challenge anyone to refute the above, you will not be able to.
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February 7, 2010, 3:30 amDavid Sucher says:
I guess it’s a philosophy, of a sort and I don’t mean to be snarky but I think Objectivism is just like socialism, “not under 30 — no heart; still over 30 — no head.” That’s why libertarianism never takes off politically. Ever.
And that’s because Rand forgets one small little detail which dooms private arrangements — transaction costs.
Land, for example. Nobody (and that includes die hard libertarians) really want a libertarian system of land use. You know why? Because we already got rid of a nuisance/contract based land use system (yes they go together and actually were never really complete) because private ownership requires systemic cooperation over a broad population. The multiplicity of parties and physical/social/economic factors beyond subsistence farming make it too complicated to negotiate every arrangement. So we need systems of laws. It’s transaction costs which doom libertarian arrangements. It’s just too damned unfortunate but there is a structural problem (i.e. transaction cost) that prevents libertarianism. And once you get to own some property — over 30 — you realize that you need a state to enforce laws.
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February 7, 2010, 3:43 amorca says:
War being part of human nature seems like a stretch. I’d buy every society contains people who think they’d be better off if they could manage to start a war.
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February 7, 2010, 4:43 amRicardo says:
The key word in your statement is “definition.” Let’s take the following principle “a rationally self-interested person does whatever is in his own self-interest as long as it does not violate anyone else’s rights.”
If that’s true by definition under Objectivism, the problem is that Objectivism isn’t saying anything new or particularly interesting. Adam Smith argued exactly the same point but just with different terminology.
Rand didn’t intend that principle to be true by definition, though. She thought she had proved it through the process of reasoning.
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February 7, 2010, 5:52 amBrett Bellmore says:
I always figured the reason libertarianism doesn’t take off politically is that it’s inherent in the philosophy that, if you’re the sort of person who’s at all likely to adopt it, you’ll find working for the government abhorrent. I mean, I agreed to be a candidate for the Libertarian party years ago, and actually would wake up in the middle of the night screaming from a nightmare where I won the election...
I don’t see how a political philosophy can be “successful”, in the sense of electing people holding the philosophy, if almost everybody who takes it seriously self-selects out of politics, leaving behind mostly kooks, and con-men pretending to hold it. That doesn’t make it a bad political philosophy, just one that can’t realistically end up applied. Gandhian pacifism would be a great philosophy for running a street gang, too, (Everybody not in a street gang agrees!) but it’s never going to happen
Conservatism actually has much the same problem, which is why the ’94 election changed so little: By the time people get to high political office, all of the conservatives have been winnowed out, leaving behind only non-conservatives who think appealing to conservatives is a good way to get elected.
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February 7, 2010, 7:38 amJoe says:
you’ll find working for the government abhorrent.
I was under the impression that libertarians actually believed there was some use for government. They aren’t anarchists. I would imagine that, given the right position, a libertarian can survive as much as a priest can survive in New York City. Lots of sin, but they have some purpose and can do some good.
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February 7, 2010, 8:54 amDesiderius says:
David,
“Christian humanism (for want of a better term)”
It serves.
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February 7, 2010, 9:11 amBrett Bellmore says:
Yes, Libertarians think there’s some use for government. Doesn’t mean we find being part of a “necessary evil” an attractive line of work.
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February 7, 2010, 9:17 amrpt says:
It also explains why libertarianism/conservatives don’t perform competently while part of the “necessary evil”. They don’t believe in it and to do well would be to rebuke their own principles.
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February 7, 2010, 9:24 amrpt says:
They are actually diametrically opposed.
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February 7, 2010, 9:29 amW. Niddery says:
Your statement here is a strawman because it drops a crucial context. Rand very clearly recognized that there can be disagreement and disputes between honest and rational people. If she didn’t then logically she would have had to believe there was no need of contract law and a government to enforce it — that, in this respect at least, we could all “just get along” in some anarchic utopia. Clearly she did not believe or advocate this at all.
The claim of no conflict between rational men rests on the foundation of individual rights, including property rights; and where disputes arise, the existence and acceptance of a non-violent means of resolving those conflicts. Government is instituted, not only to protect rational men from irrational ones (ones who consider force and violence to be in their self-interest), but also to settle honest disputes.
The two of us may very well consider it each in our self-interests to acquire a thing of which there is only one. We may both pursue it. Only one of us can succeed in getting it. As long as we commit to pursuing our goals rationally — i.e. without resorting to force — then there is no conflict between us. One of us will still be dissappointed but able to accept the right of the other to that thing.
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February 7, 2010, 11:03 amJorgeShrugged says:
Let’s see. Instead of arguing her ideas, you offer a review on someone else’s ideas of why other people are not convinced by Ayn Rand. What’s worse is that someone thought such a third-handed review was worthy of being published. Since it was published however let me point out a few errors. 1st Rand was no Libertarian. She was a Capitalist and saw Libertarians as self-destructive and a means for tyranny. Secondly you equate selfishness with Kantian thuggery. The Objectivist Ethics rejects both forms of altruism. The questions “What can I do for you?” and “What can I do to you?” are the opposite side of the same Altruist coin. Our ethics is based on rational selfishness due to our nature as a rational animal. We recognize that all men are such and all have the same natural rights. We recognize our nature is volitional and we need an agent of organized force to wield it in a retaliatory manner against the thug that wishes to live in a manner not in accordance with his nature (by means of force.) Next time you try to offer your ideas on something, try to learn about what it is your writing about. It seems to me that instead of reading Ayn Rand first hand you took Hummer’s ideas and just added a big “a-men” to it.
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February 7, 2010, 11:04 amJorgeShrugged says:
Why should the standard be a-priori. If you really understand what a-priori means you would know that it is a truth beyond all experience of any kind. To paraphrase Kant, it is a fabrication of the imagination drawn without reference not to any specific type of experience, but apart from experience as such. Those who seek a-priori truths want a license to be able preach absurdities without the danger of conflicting with reality because a-priori “truths” remove us from reality altogether.
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February 7, 2010, 11:10 amW. Niddery says:
Does it? That would only be true if they both had some right to you as a customer. The only right they have is to make their business as attractive as possible in the pursuit of your patronage. Neither of them is harmed by you choosing the other since that choice is your right, not theirs. You could stay home giving neither of them your patronage and neither has been harmed by your choice, again because they had no right to you or your money in the first place.
So where is the conflict in this example?
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February 7, 2010, 11:13 amSkyler says:
Chaos wrote:
What the hell is that supposed to mean? Are you saying that because she was born Jewish that she’s part of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion?
There’s no place for that crap on this site.
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February 7, 2010, 11:45 amyankee says:
You can tell people have been drinking the Randian kool-aid when they earnestly complain about “Kantian thuggery.”
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February 7, 2010, 11:53 amSkyler says:
Well, Yankee, why do you like Kant?
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February 7, 2010, 12:11 pmDavid Landy says:
1.
But Ayn Rand totally disagreed with libertarian ideas.
2.
But it was precisely because John Galt had an egoistic philosophy that he acted as he did. He sought to retake and secure his livelihood against encroaching statists by denying them, what Ayn Rand termed “the sanction of the victim”. This was clearly in his interests, as he would know more than any — being the best, most productive, most intelligent individual he had the most to lose — and the most to gain — from a return to capitalism and a society governed by the ethics of rational egoism.
To be sure Galt would not have been “certain” of the outcome of his actions — but he had to act to protect himself in the face of a black and white alternative — sacrifice his life and happiness to the group — or fight for freedom and individualism.
The same could be said of the real life dissidents you mention — except they are unlikely to be quite so principled!
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February 7, 2010, 12:11 pmDavid Landy says:
I meant “the most to lose” from a descent into outright totalitarianism, above.
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February 7, 2010, 12:18 pmbyomtov says:
W. Niddery,
Neither of them is harmed by you choosing the other since that choice is your right, not theirs. You could stay home giving neither of them your patronage and neither has been harmed by your choice, again because they had no right to you or your money in the first place.
So where is the conflict in this example?
There may be no conflict between their rights, but there clearly is a conflict between their economic interests. Of course they are harmed if I choose not to eat in their restaurants. Any zero-sum economic situation involves a conflict of interest.
So I’m not clear on what this whole “no conflict of interest” is supposed to be about, not to mention what the underlying definition of “rationality” is.
Further, as a follow-on, Objectivists apparently believe that,
....although it would be praiseworthy to use others for one’s own advantage if one should get the chance, opportunities are peculiarly scarce, so much so that there has never (or almost never) been a case in which anyone would have benefited by violating another person’s rights (for instance, by initiating the use of force against another).
In what universe is this true? Slavery seems to be a use of others for one’s own advantage, involving an obvious conflict of rights, and opportunities have certainly been abundant in the past. Is slaveholding praiseworthy?
On a different level, doesn’t a thief violate his victim’s rights (sometimes by using force)? Is thievery rare? Are all thieves captured and imprisoned?
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February 7, 2010, 12:54 pmJavert says:
A cursory reading of books such as the Journals of Ayn Rand and the Letters of Ayn Rand shows just the opposite. She was very honest about the mistakes she made, for example about Nietzsche’s individualism, business deals, other people. And such a reading shows that she was amazingly patient and generous.
It is usually a good idea to know one’s target, lest one be guilty of launching unsubstantiated condemnations.
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February 7, 2010, 1:05 pmJorgeShrugged says:
Ayn Rand never claimed to have created Capitalism, but she was the first to provide a moral defense for it based on the virtue of selfishness. All preceding proponents of Capitalism (including Smith) were fundamentally Altruists and supported capitalism because it was the most efficient at providing the most to the most. To it’s defenders Capitalism has always been at best a necessary evil never getting the full “3 cheers” it well deserves. It was not until Rand identified it as the proper economic and political system so that man may achieve a government qua man that Capitalism got it’s first true defender.
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February 7, 2010, 1:06 pmC.T. says:
Jorge. . .a defense based on Capitalism’s instrumental value or on utilitarian grounds is no less of a defense simply because it isn’t necessarily a moral defense. I don’t think its correct to say that such defenses aren’t “true” defenses. If a less-than-full-throated defense of capitalism is able to claim more adherents than a moral defense, is it correct to say that Rand was the first true defender of capitalism?
–A recovering Randroid.
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February 7, 2010, 1:36 pmARP says:
Rand did not say there was no need for a state to enforce laws. In fact, she said quite the opposite:
As I understand Rand’s rational egoism, a moral individual works in his or her own self-interest to the best of his or her abilities. It is immoral and irrational to take a job or benefit that is unearned. Robbing another man is an irrational choice because loot can only provide short-term gain. If one is truly acting in his or her own self-interest, the rational choice is to produce to the best of his or her ability and engage in a bargained-for exchange.
It is also irrational to take a job beyond one’s ability simply because it pays more. While there may be short-term gain, one cannot successfully continue to hold a job beyond his or her ability. In this regard, two rational actors will never find their self-interests in conflict because they are focused on rational, long-term gains. The idea the robbing from another man is in one’s self-interest is irrational hedonism, not rational egoism.
Of course, the limited length of human life poses a problem. To use the above example, it may be in Kim Jong Il’s best interest to keep the status quo. I believe that the path he has chosen does lead to self-destruction (or, at best, stagnation), but it is unlikely to happen in his lifetime. On a longer time line, he would most likely realize the irrationality of his actions.
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February 7, 2010, 1:44 pmSkyler says:
Javert wrote:
I’ve read pretty much everything she’s ever published and I’m a great fan. There’s no getting around that she could get quite cranky over petty issues. And she really treated her husband like dirt.
None of these faults put a significant cloud over most of her philosophy. Her articulation is not infallible, but it was pretty darned good.
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February 7, 2010, 1:50 pmJorgeShrugged says:
So it is better to grant the ignorant their premise rather than to teach according to proper principles? A defense made upon improper principles will achieve the negation of that which it claims to value. A defense of Capitalism by means of Altruism (Utilitarianism included) will eventually lead to an advocacy of Collectivism (ex. John Stuart Mill.)
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February 7, 2010, 2:27 pmbyomtov says:
Robbing another man is an irrational choice because loot can only provide short-term gain.
What’s wrong with short-term gains?
If one is truly acting in his or her own self-interest, the rational choice is to produce to the best of his or her ability and engage in a bargained-for exchange.
What if one lacks the ability to produce much, so a series of short-term gains is the best alternative?
The assumptions behind the logic you provide need to be evaluated.
It is also irrational to take a job beyond one’s ability simply because it pays more. While there may be short-term gain, one cannot successfully continue to hold a job beyond his or her ability.
If the gain while holding the job is big enough, who cares? Want an example? Well, there’s a thread about Carly Fiorina, where there’s some discussion of her tenure at HP. I’m not trying to pick on her here, just point out that her experience is a pretty obvious refutation of this point. And of course ther are lots of incompetent people at lower levels than that who make out just fine.
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February 7, 2010, 2:50 pmmattski says:
“Proper”? You’re talking about value judgements (opinion) not facts.
I think Adam Smith’s insights far exceeded anything Rand cooked up. Rand was, after all, a fabulist. Smith was a dedicated observer.
In the hands of Rand the word “capitalism” is cartoonish. She uses it as an antipode to “collectivism” which todays libertarians elide into “socialism.” I rather think that the clearest understanding of the terms capitalism and socialism sees them as mutually arising facets of modern society. It is difficult to have one without the other.
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February 7, 2010, 2:53 pmSkyler says:
Wow. Why would that be the case?
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February 7, 2010, 3:05 pmsbw says:
zuch, back in the reply to me you challenge cooperation, which is so very wide a word. In what should we cooperate and when can we disagree? The relevant question on the issue is: “What are the minimum requirements for society?” Distinguishing society from everyday cultures, society is the edge at which any two cultures (or individuals) meet. Again, the question that Rand would have fun with, and others should, is “What is the minimum standard of behavior on can require of oneself and others when they interact?”
Natural law doesn’t work. Machiavellian moral relativism doesn’t work. I have deduced two: Humility and reciprocity. Humility is a sense of doubt about what one can know. Reciprocity treats with respect others who treat you with respect.
After this accomplishment, those who would move forward to construct an umbrella of peaceful problem resolution.
Notice, zuch, we haven’t agreed on everything, but we have constructively cooperated where it matters, to deal with when we disagree.
I’d love to have Rand’s take on this.
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February 7, 2010, 3:17 pmTimothy Sandefur says:
Prof. Somin–
I consider myself an Objectivist, and find Rand’s arguments for ethical egoism generally convincing, but I often hear this charge that raising the issue of egoism is somehow “bad for” the argument for freedom and so forth. Here’s my question. What is a person like me supposed to do? Am I supposed to lie to people in political debates and pretend that I subscribe to an ethics of selflessness? Am I supposed to pretend that I think that capitalism is compatible with that ethics? Am I supposed to just never discuss ethics? The notion that X is “bad for” the accomplishment of Y suggests that Y is so overriding a goal that I should agree to somehow disguise or discard X for its sake. But I don’t think that. If anything, I prefer X to Y. And I think that everyone, regardless of the content of their ethical and/or political views, would agree that X is more important than Y. So what, then, is the point of arguments about whether Objectivist egoism is “good for” or “bad for” the cause of liberty? One’s ethical views are not adopted as the means to the accomplishment of a political end....are they?
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February 7, 2010, 3:28 pmmattski says:
Because you cannot have a vital market without a vital state to protect it?
Because you cannot have liquid markets without state sponsored currency?
Because you a responsive government will tend to implement popular policies... you know, like Social Security, for example.
Look, modern economies are mixed. There is plenty of private enterprise and there are plenty of state-supported programs. More in Europe than the US, but the US is perhaps the most right-wing industrialized nation in the world. The reason we don’t have a more socialized health care system in this country is the power of the industry lobbies. This is pretty basic stuff.
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February 7, 2010, 3:36 pmMichaelM says:
“There are two major reasons why the best hope for political freedom is not to connect it ideologically with Rand’s ethical and metaethical theories. The first is that those theories are utterly unconvincing to almost everyone....”
No theory can be validated or refuted by counting those who agree or disagree with it. The theory of Rand’s Huemer is uninformed of is that change is the consequence of ideas. The change from tyranny to freedom cannot occur without a pre-existing ideological culture to initiate and support it. That is why Objectivists give away a half million copies of her books to teachers who request them and why John Allison and others fund academic chairs instead of political candidates.
Besides, Huemer’s knowledge of the impact of Rand in the minds of the present population of the earth is as close to zero as you can get. I can tell you that when I first integrated her philosophical ideas into my own philosophy 43 years ago, i certainly did not believe I would live to this day when her picture is carried through the streets in protests against the President’s political philosophy. And who then imagined that the country with the second largest group of her fans would be India.
Also, the first benefit of embracing Objectivism is not political change which every one of us realizes must await intellectual change. The first benefit, given the universal acceptance of expedient tyranny to one degree or another, is how to live a rational life in an irrational world. And that is a hotter commodity than Mr. Huemer suspects.
————
“The second major reason is that ethical egoism does not support the philosophy of individual rights in the first place. ”
Ethical egoism is the logical consequence of choosing life over death as one’s goal and therefore standard of all values sought to that end. Since the success or failure of pursuing one’s own life as an end in itself depends on values chosen by oneself, individuals require autonomy in the application of reason to action in the service of their own life.
When men choose to live in a society, it is that ethical requirement that necessitates the concept of individual rights that define, in principle, which actions that would interfere with the requisite autonomy must be prohibited by a neutral third-party institution, aka a government. As Rand described it, politics is the extension of ethics in the context of the life of an individual into the context of the individual’s life in a society of many individuals. Political principles are inherently moral principles. Ethics and Politics are separated only by context.
Consequently, rights may only be sanctions of actions and not guarantees of things. They may only impose a negative mandate to not interfere with the actions of pursuing an ethical life, whatever ethics you live by. The only forbidden value is coercion. Physical force being the only means of interfering with autonomy, Rand’s radical capitalism can be reduced to a single mandate:
No person shall initiate the use of physical force or the threat thereof to gain, withhold, or destroy any tangible or intangible value owned by any other person who either created it or acquired it in a voluntary exchange.
Note that it is not possible for one to oppose the politics of Objectivism without justifying and advocating the use of force to dictate others’ choices and/or to take their values for one’s own purposes. A more benevolent principle for human interrelationships is inconceivable. And you will certainly not find it in altruism that sets every individual up to be the sacrificial animal on the whim of any dictator or majority.
—————
Huemer: “At this point, most Objectivists fall back on the contention that, luckily, it is impossible for rational people’s interests to conflict. ... But actual arguments for this claim are unsurprisingly hard to come by,”
The Objectivist argument for the claim recognizes the distinction between that which actually is in the long-range best interest of our life in accordance with our essential nature that has been rationally identified vs. that which we assert to be of value based on feelings, whims, or false assumptions but actually is not.
The claim is not that two humans will never covet the same value. It is rather that in the context of a rationally ordered hierarchy of values, both parties will necessarily resolve the apparent conflict voluntarily without resorting to force, because the initiation of force for gain is inherently an irrational act. Keep in mind that at the top of the hierarchy of one’s values is or should be rationality and independence. It is rationality’s logical requirement to be consistent that demands the reciprocal respect for autonomy among all individuals.
——————
“Eliminating the horrible oppression of North Korean communism is surely desirable. But it just as clearly runs counter to the egoistic interests of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il.”
This first example from Ilya is corrupted by the assumption that power gained by enslavement, theft, and murder is a rational value with no overriding long term consequences.
——————
“Vaclav Havel and Andrei Sakharov risked their lives and careers to become dissidents in communist societies, they struck a blow for freedom. But they also undermined their own egoistic interests. Sakharov especially would have been better off had he remained a loyal member of the privileged Soviet elite.”
This second one is corrupted by the idea that a comfortable and secure life as a slave and is a higher value than the potential benefits of liberty that could follow from their calculated risks.
——————
The Objectivist virtues that qualify the actions that are appropriate in the pursuit of one’s values, both spiritual and material, in the service of one’s life include rationality, independence, honesty, integrity, productiveness and pride. Any act of dissidence for the sake of the freedom to pursue one’s life by these virtues is self-rewarding long before any offending regime is or is not vanquished.
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February 7, 2010, 4:03 pmCaptainchaos says:
LOL! I made falsifiable claims that I can back up with citation. That you do not possess the native wit to process information that falls outside your impoverished and truncated mental models is not my fault. What I am referring to is empirical evidence that corroborates my claim that ethnocentrism is innate, it is an evolved trait.
Again, I challenge any and all here to debate me on the merits of my claim. So far, it seems there is no man here with the stones to pick up the gauntlet. Not even alleged ‘intellectuals’ and ‘academics’.
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February 7, 2010, 4:07 pmSkyler says:
Mattski wrote:
A vital state is not a symptom of socialism. Rights must be protected by government.
Currency is not a symptom of socialism. Currency is simply a means of denoting value. Giving the government too much control over currency might be unwise (as history has shown time and again, most obviously since the Fall of 2008), but having a currency is not wrong.
Our responsive government went 150 years without social security. There are plenty of people who wish we didn’t enact it. It was not uncontroversial at the time it was enacted. Modern economies are mixed only because bad arguments have won out. Might doesn’t make right.
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February 7, 2010, 4:41 pmmattski says:
Are you saying that “Objectivism” was a stalking horse for Zionism?
Also, implicitly boasting about the size of your testicles is an indicator of the level of your thought.
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February 7, 2010, 4:49 pmmattski says:
Well, you’re simply arguing about value judgements, not facts. You say, “bad arguments.” So what? I disagree and so does most of the civilized world.
Qualitatively there is no clear line dividing an effective state, which you agree is necessary for a market economy, from “socialism.” A police department is “socialism.” So is an army. So is a network of interstate highways.
“Might doesn’t make right”??
I think you’re confused. To me, a popular program is by definition legitimate. Otoh, policies implemented by a plutocratic elite are good examples of the might of the state being turned on the people. And that is the chief challenge facing the US today...if you ask me.
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February 7, 2010, 4:59 pmBrian says:
Neither Huemer nor Somin even attempt to make the case that Rand’s meta-ethical argument grounding her version of ethical egoism is unsound. What we get is the assertion that all the cool kids say it’s unconvincing.
That is an unserious approach to ideas and to philosophy.
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February 7, 2010, 4:59 pmmattski says:
Skyler–
Here is an excellent example of a real-world problem where compelling arguments can be and have been made for using the state to ameliorate the destructive effects of rampant market forces.
Unfortunately, those who prefer to dwell in the cartoon-land of Ayn Rand cannot even begin to join such a debate in an intelligent manner.
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February 7, 2010, 5:17 pmARP says:
Short-term gains are fine, but not when they come at the cost of potentially losing in the long run. Individuals who repeatedly steal or commit fraud are invariably caught and, as a result, lose their freedom and have difficulty finding future gainful employment. These long-term results are certainly not in anyone’s self-interest.
Short-term gains through legitimate production do not cause harm to others and are certainly in one’s self-interest. Unless you are near death, you are better off holding a job stocking shelves for 30 years than trying to hold up a liquor store every weekend for the aforementioned reasons.
No one has perfect knowledge of their abilities. It is not immoral under Rand’s philosophy to try and fail, but it is irrational (and immoral) to take a job that you know you are unable to perform. While I can’t say I’ve closely followed Carly Fiorina’s carrier, I don’t think it was absurd for her to believe she could have been a successful CEO. Unfortunately for both herself and HP, she was not.
Someone who is incompetent at their job can only get along “just fine” if they are feeding off the productive ability of others, which means that someone else is not acting in his or her own self-interest. If everyone were acting in their own self-interest, they would not allow the moocher/looter to continue the immoral exploitation of their work. This is exactly what Galt and the other producers in Atlas Shrugged do. By acting in their own self-interest, they place checks on the immoral exploitation of their ability.
I am by no means an Objectivist, but I think a lot of the criticism here has been misguided. I don’t think that Rand was advocating only acting in one’s self-interest, but acting in one’s self-interest to the best of one’s ability. According to Rand, the act of “mooching” is immoral, which eliminates the conflict of interest between most rational actors. I do think that a lot of what Rand said makes sense, but there are also many things that I have difficulty reconciling. For instance, while she largely rejects “duty,” she does concede that children owe a special duty to their parents and must grant them greater leeway than other family members.
Even though I do not completely buy into Objectivism, I can safely say that I do not fear the man who lives by Objectivist morality because he has no interest in taking that which he did not earn. I wish I could say the same about many other “moral” codes.
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February 7, 2010, 5:46 pmBoss says:
Almost everyone would agree, indeed, that egoism is more important than freedom. Except that they wouldn’t call it egoism. They’d call it the common good or social justice or cohesion or some such phrase that justifies their selfishness and, along with that, their disregard for freedom and justice. What I mean is selfishness in the short-term, of course. I guess I must make the caveat that, in the long run, it is in everyone’s interest to not be a jerk. If they were rational they would not be a jerk.
But people are given the choice: make money using violence, or by not using violence. And people choose violence. They go the government path. So are they irrational? In the long run, they are. But it’s a means to an end. It gets the job done. They get the cash and, in their mind, they’re clean. Having cash given to you is untainted by trade. Opening a restaurant is evil, in their mind. Making money is evil. Taking it is OK. The thing is, why call yourself the selfish one? Why try to make the word mean something good, when people understand it to mean something bad? You can be selfish at other people’s expense. Why not point out the fact that people who don’t care about other people’s rights are selfish in the common sense of the word? They want to get cash at other people’s expense. They call it socialism, but it’s selfishness.
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February 7, 2010, 5:57 pmMichaelM says:
The moral parent-child relationship is strictly one of each fulfilling a responsibility that is in their self interest. It is the responsibility of parents to raise the initially helpless child who is a consequence of their actions to self-sufficiency. The child owes the parents nothing other than to respect them to the degree that they perform that task earnestly and that “special duty” that is to cooperate with them. Once the child is self sufficient, neither parents nor child have any continuing obligation or duty towards each other.
This not only does not exclude the extraordinary bond of love that more often than not arises during the adventure of this cooperative effort, it actually strengthens the bond, because all of their love for each other will have to be earned.
Any other duty ascribed to this relationship is just tribalism in the disguise of “family values”.
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February 7, 2010, 6:31 pmDesiderius says:
Mattski,
Why do you assume that free = right-wing? Certainly, the original right-wing was all about the aggrandizement of state power...
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February 7, 2010, 6:53 pmbyomtov says:
Short-term gains are fine, but not when they come at the cost of potentially losing in the long run.
Sure, there’s a tradeoff between long-term and short-term. That’s not what ARP said, though.
Individuals who repeatedly steal or commit fraud are invariably caught and, as a result, lose their freedom and have difficulty finding future gainful employment. These long-term results are certainly not in anyone’s self-interest.
Some are caught. Some skirt the law so they never do anything actually illegal. Some get away. Hell, Madoff nearly got away, and who knows, maybe he views his long-term loss as worth all the short-term gains. Time preferences vary.
No one has perfect knowledge of their abilities. It is not immoral under Rand’s philosophy to try and fail, but it is irrational (and immoral) to take a job that you know you are unable to perform.
Why is it irrational? Suppose Fiorina had thought she really couldn’t do the job. I don’t see why it would have been irrational to take it. If the Yankees offer me $10 million to pitch for them, would it be irrational of me to take it? I promise you I would fail miserably.
Someone who is incompetent at their job can only get along “just fine” if they are feeding off the productive ability of others, which means that someone else is not acting in his or her own self-interest. If everyone were acting in their own self-interest, they would not allow the moocher/looter to continue the immoral exploitation of their work.
Or maybe it takes a while to notice the moocher. Or maybe it’s not worth anyone’s effort to make an issue of it. Or maybe the moocher has a powerful sponsor. Ever heard of the boss’s son? Or mistress?
The argument here seems to be that any negative behavior that threatens Rand’s ideas is immediately categorized as irrational by some standard, or immoral. All very circular, but not very realistic.
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February 7, 2010, 7:17 pmMichaelM says:
The problem with trying to accommodate “short range selfishness” is that life is inherently long range and nothing that is short range can escape having consequences on long-range life. Therefore the ethical Objectivist may not condone or support a politics that would enable government participation in short range violations of individual autonomy.
While guaranteeing the individual right to pursue irrational short range actions, Rand’s radical capitalism obviates their harm to others by assigning to government only the one single task of removing force from human interrelationships — to guarantee that all will be voluntary. To engage in a relationship with a short ranger voluntarily is to earn whatever consequences may follow. And the short ranger is left with no way to obtain values without enticing others into voluntary trades.
In this capitalism, there is no government path. Government could not take anything from some to give to others, and it would not even need to own anything, leasing the land and equipment necessary to the performance of its task. Thus it would have no benefits to bestow on the short ranger. And any introduction of violence into a trade would be dealt with swiftly, as the government would have nothing else to do.
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February 7, 2010, 7:19 pmArkady says:
Or else what? Let’s substitute ‘guile or subterfuge’ for ‘physical force or the threat thereof’, now what? Wouldn’t you have to show that a person who acts like that is acting against self-interest? Or is not acting rationally and is somehow injuring himself? But suppose such a person has a modern version of the Ring of Gyges, say an extremely sophisticated computer program that allows him to raid bank accounts with absolute impunity (I don’t suppose this is that far-fetched). What in this would be injurious to the individual raider qua individual? It’s not apparent that such a person would be violating the canons of ethical egoism as you set them out:
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February 7, 2010, 8:28 pmSkyler says:
Again, the cart before the horse. Rand never said that people wouldn’t get away with lying, cheating or stealing. Many a brutal dictator has died peacefully in their sleep.
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February 7, 2010, 8:39 pmRicardo says:
And this is the heart of the dispute. Even if selfishness is a virtue it would only be one of several virtues. Virtue ethics involves balancing the various virtues and living a life that exemplifies all of them, not just one or two of them.
Aristotle for instance, considered benevolence (what Rand would probably term altruism) a virtue but, again, it was hardly the only virtue. Loyalty is a virtue as well, so someone who takes his child’s college money and gives it to poor people in Africa would not necessarily be a virtuous person. He would be exhibiting benevolence but ignoring his moral obligations to his children. Only someone who balances all these different moral obligations and virtues is the virtuous person.
Rand asserted that selfishness was all you needed in order to live a virtuous life and she did that by changing the definitions of the terms she used like “rational” and “selfish.” She assumes exactly what she needed to prove and since most non-Objectivists think her assumptions are not very plausible, they don’t find her arguments or statements persuasive.
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February 7, 2010, 9:01 pmCaptainchaos says:
I’m saying Objectivism was merely one of many 20th century ‘intellectual’ movements messianic in character led by Jews that attempted to model behavior for the goyim. Such as: Boasian anthropology, psychoanalysis, Frankfurt School, etc. ad nauseam. Movements that exhorted the European-derived host population to act in ways contrary to their ethnic interests as the Jews who conceived and led those movements pursued their ethnic interests. The historical record could not be more clear. Sociobiology holds the key to understand the human condition, not abstract moralizing as is prevalent here.
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February 7, 2010, 9:13 pmChrisTS says:
I don’t know if kool-aid would account for the notion of ‘Kantian-thuggery’ but it is certainly a surprising combination of terms.
Insofar as Rand seems to have ripped off Kant’s conception of the person as end-in-itself, what is the basis for the accusation of ‘thuggery’? Is it because, as a 19th c. thinker, he theorized in terms of duties rather than rights?
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February 7, 2010, 9:41 pmChrisTS says:
To echo a point made by Anonster, above: why do so many people here — educated people, not high school kids — focus on Rand? There are genuinely philosophical and careful libertarian theorists. Do those thinkers just not have the cache of a utopian novelist?
Think about it: wouldn’t it be odd if most socialists only read/talked about Bellamy or Morris or Hertzka?
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February 7, 2010, 9:44 pmC.T. says:
I love a good Rand thread on the VC. I start to follow an argument, then there’s a different argument spinning off, replies to the earlier arguments, strange tangents, the randroids appear, then new counterarguments based on their posts, etc. Love it.
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February 7, 2010, 9:50 pmJorgeShrugged says:
Value judgments can be formed properly (objectively) or improperly (whimsicaly). Reason is volitional, reality though is not. As to Capitalism, she describes it as an ideal not because it is the non-collective, but because it is the political and economic system proper to a rational animal. To have the notion that collectivism and capitalism are co-dependent one would have to willingly disregard the law of non-contradiction. To that I quote Avicena “Anyone who denies the law of non-contradiction should be beaten and burned until he admits that to be beaten is not the same as not to be beaten, and to be burned is not the same as not to be burned.” Or it could be that you suffer from fuzzy thinking and do not have proper definition for the terms you are discussing.
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February 7, 2010, 10:49 pmJorgeShrugged says:
Selfishness is a virtue, but amongst the other virtues it is the cardinal virtues that makes all others possible (integrity, honesty, productivity, ect.) To find an equivalent, one would have to look at the right to life. It is not only a right, it also makes possible the rights to liberty and property. Any other “proper” virtues may not contradict the cardinal virtue if morality is to be a tool for living life on earth.
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February 7, 2010, 10:53 pmJorgeShrugged says:
Either you have not read, Kant, you have not read Rand, or you have read neither.
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February 7, 2010, 10:55 pmRicardo says:
Even granting this as true, Objectivists still have all their work ahead of them in proving, for instance, that it is wrong to tell lies. Kant, for instance, had a very convincing — and maybe a bit too convincing — reason for why this is so. And even taking into account Kant’s writing style, his reasoning is remarkably clear. By contrast, I have never seen a convincing and concise account from an Objectivist on this point. There are many, many scenarios in life when it is in one’s short-term and even long-term self-interest to tell lies.
If you simply define selfishness to include honesty as part of the definition (that is, use “selfishness” as a simple short-hand for Aristotle’s virtues), you haven’t said anything useful or interesting. I’m interested in how we get from the virtue of selfishness to the virtue of honesty and I have not read any convincing account of this.
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February 8, 2010, 12:44 amRicardo says:
Captainchaos, if I understand you correctly, you are saying that psychoanalysis is a Jewish idea that was propagated by Jews, especially Jews writing in the German language, in order to advance their own interests above those of non-Jewish Germans.
I have no doubt you could provide citations for books and articles that also take your view. I would just hate to see what exactly your citation list would include.
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February 8, 2010, 1:37 amMichaelM says:
The principle I stated and you quoted summarizes the negative mandate the government must enforce in order to guarantee the rights for all individuals to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. Violation of that principle would be a crime. You may not substitute ‘guile’ for ‘physical force’, because you cannot violate an individual’s autonomy with guile unless it results in fraud. You gain nothing by substituting ‘subterfuge’ for physical force, because it is implicitly included by the word ‘withhold’.
In a society requiring all interrelationships to be voluntary, all interactions are essentially contractual. Fraud, deceit, failure to comply with terms, etc. all involve the withholding of a value that is only retrievable by utilizing defensive force. They constitute an initiation of indirect physical force.
Raiding a bank with a computer program is also an initiation of force and contrary to ethical egoism. As I have already said above,
“It is rationality’s logical requirement to be consistent that demands the reciprocal respect for autonomy among all individuals.”
That requirement is based on the nature of man. It is a necessary precondition for the pursuit of life qua human being. All rights claimed on those grounds must also be granted to other human beings.
The political consequences of violating rights are forfeiture of one’s own claim to rights and government compelled restitution and/or incarceration. The moral consequences of contradicting a rational code of ethics are psychological suffering and the corruption of one’s essential means of pursuing a successful life.
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February 8, 2010, 1:39 amSkyler says:
Again. You’ve put the cart before the horse. Truth is the first virtue. A is A.
Egoism and Selfishness are the result of understanding truth.
I understand why Rand chose to use the word selfishness. I just wish she used a less loaded term. Our culture is steeped in altruiistic and Christian ideologies. It is very hard to be persuasive when she purposefully used terms guaranteed to incite over reactions.
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February 8, 2010, 1:45 amJorgeShrugged says:
The standard you are looking for you will never find on a comments area of a blog. It simply requires too much verbiage. If you really want an answer to your question turn to “The Virtue of Selfishness”.
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February 8, 2010, 2:26 amRicardo says:
Unlike Jorgeshrugged, you have stated that truth (or perhaps adherence to the truth) is the cardinal virtue, not selfishness. In that case, at best selfishness may well be one virtue among many that would come out of that inquiry. In addition, statements like “truth is the first virtue” to be more theological than philosophical. It doesn’t tell me anything concrete and it’s not clear why we should accept it as a basic principle of morality as opposed to, say, Kant’s categorical imperative or the utilitarian formulation of greatest happiness for the greatest number.
But I think it’s clear why she chose that term. Her main theme was that capitalism is an intrinsically moral system. This is opposed to the classical liberal thinkers who tended to view capitalism as a system that produces material progress and happiness but that depends on the baser instincts (not virtues) of humans. To differentiate herself from the classical liberals, she has to go a step further and say that capitalism is based on selfishness but that selfishness is, in fact, not just a virtue but an overriding virtue. Rand’s argument loses almost all of its force if you concede that the selfishness that we all agree underlies capitalism is a different concept from the one Rand was talking about. Rand’s writing becomes a semantic bait-and-switch rather than a sound argument.
I think for purely pragmatic reasons we have to leave the argument at that. If the argument is long, convoluted, difficult to follow and does not seem to have convinced the vast majority of philosophers and political theorists, I can’t justify devoting limited time to studying it in great detail. Indeed, as a rational, self-interested person with a full-time job and many outside interests that take precedence over Objectivism, I almost have to cut my knowledge of Rand’s philosophy to what she wrote in Atlas Shrugged and what comes out of discussions such as this one.
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February 8, 2010, 2:58 amNS says:
Wendell Hoenir at The Objective Standard has a pretty thorough refutation of one of the CATO commentators:
http://theobjectivestandard.com/blog/2010/02/virtue-and-realization-of-human-life.asp
This is in response to Roderick Long, but it speaks to the same point Huemer is making.
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February 8, 2010, 4:51 ammattski says:
Desiderius, I think you’re responding to this:
In this case the hostility to state power is in the service of the individual, no? That’s why I classify it as “right-wing.”
You’re correct to say that, for example, Plato advocated for a powerful state in the service of a model that most political philosophers today would classify as right-wing. This gets into a weird–vertiginous maybe–question of taxonomy. But I imagine that what makes Plato’s Republic rightish and not leftish is the strong hierarchical structures he proposes.
???
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February 8, 2010, 7:39 amsbw says:
Rather than dissect Rand, do what she did and dissect yourselves to discover what will not work:
Virtues, cardinal or not, do not show how to behave, they are each an answer at the end of a process of thought. Teaching virtues is like teaching numbers instead of arithmetic. “Seven is a good number, learn seven and they will help you live your life.” To bad you won’t learn arithmetic that way.
Machiavelli, which is what many practice, became inadequate in the 20th century when science put such power in the hands of any who learn to use it that one can no longer isolate oneself from anti-social behavior.
Give up citing the classics. Philosophy under Wittgenstein and Godel did away with absolute certainty, leaving you without natural law, an individual, alone and uncertain.
Of course self-interest is the tool to use. It’s the only tool you have. Along with your ability to recognize patterns from your personal experience, you have to deduce how to convince others to help.
Now start over, and play nice.
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February 8, 2010, 7:53 ammattski says:
I confess to taking a certain perverse enjoyment in these Rand threads. For my money, few topics bring out the follies of philosophy in such stark terms.
First of all, just take a look around, for goodness sake. As I said above, modern industrial economies are mixed. That alone is strong evidence that free markets co-exist with—no, THRIVE with—social safety nets, socialized medicine, etc. This is commonly referred to as “empirical evidence.”
Second, as militant Buddhist (ok, the part about “militant” is a joke) I take extra special delight in challenging the “law of identity.” I not only get to cite eastern wisdom (All is Impermanent) I also get to cite western wisdom (You cannot step in the same river twice).
There isn’t any law of non-contradiction.
And I think Ricardo quite brilliantly illustrated that Rand was basically trafficking in semantics.
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February 8, 2010, 8:08 amWendy says:
History has been very clear on this. Only those who argued for a model of economics as selfishness, like Locke, have moved us toward freedom. Those like George W. Bush, who was open about not being “an Ayn Rand free marketeer” and believed that human beings have a duty to sacrifice for the needy, collapse freedom. For whatever reason, those who view the collective as a priority over the individual simply cannot let go of the government gun. They feel it is their duty to “do something.” Freedom only moves forward when people believe that they have a right to slap down the hand of anyone trying to reach into their pocket, and that is philosophical selfishness.
As far as conflicts of interest, first let me point out that no, you would not adopt the same life strategies under a regime as you would in a free country, Ayn Rand never said you should (“morality ends at the barrel of a gun”), and the idea of rules for denizens in a totalitarian regime is a distracting sideshow. The real issue is what happens in a free society.
But I think the notion that there are genuine conflicts of interest in a free society generally boils down to an entitlement mentality on somebody’s part. If you dig into reported examples of “conflicts of interest,” you will find that somebody wants something without having earned it. The author has failed to provide any examples of what she means, and I will take that to mean she doesn’t have any. Indeed, Prof. Huemer has to rely on the notion of the a priori in his argument, and there is no such thing as the a priori. If you do not have any real-world examples, then what you are saying does not apply to the real world.
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February 8, 2010, 9:44 amRicardo says:
Fortunately, we do have a bit more than self-interest. As Adam Smith — in one of the most underrated contributions in the history of moral philosophy — pointed out in “Theory of Moral Sentiments,” about 97% of the adult population is equipped with what we would today call empathy or a conscience. This gives us the ability to see others as fellow members of our species and to impute the same kinds of feelings and emotions to them as we would feel if we were in their circumstances. Moreover, it causes us to feel in some small measure exactly what they themselves are feeling at that moment.
The other 3% are called psychopaths. Those people need a Leviathan state in order to keep them in line — anything less and they will be out murdering, raping and stealing from everyone else. But for us non-pscyopaths, what we need is a system of thought that takes those crude and relatively weak moral sentiments and builds them into a recipe for a prosperous and free society. The variants of classical liberal thought, in my opinion, do the best job of creating such a society.
And that’s why some of us care about ideas so much. It’s the battle over those ideas and their advocacy that helps civilize us and creates the prosperous and free society that many of us wish to live in.
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February 8, 2010, 9:47 amWendy says:
You are misinterpreting your observations. The economy grows only because of its free elements. Where there are socialist elements, the market is being suppressed. Government interference does not help markets in any way.
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February 8, 2010, 9:49 amJorgeShrugged says:
I think for purely pragmatic reasons we have to leave the argument at that.If the argument is long, convoluted, difficult to follow and does not seem to have convinced the vast majority of philosophers and political theorists, I can’t justify devoting limited time to studying it in great detail.Indeed, as a rational, self-interested person with a full-time job and many outside interests that take precedence over Objectivism, I almost have to cut my knowledge of Rand’s philosophy to what she wrote in Atlas Shrugged and what comes out of discussions such as this one.
If you have enough time to read and reply to this essay, you have time to read the essay in “The Virtue of Selfishness.” The quick answer to the question “If selfishness is a virtue, why is honesty a virtue?” is as follows. First and foremost man must be honest with himself and not try to evade reality. His ability to reason and his very life require this. Since man is not alone in this world and is surrounded by other men he is to be honest in his relation to others. Other men have the same means to survival and thus the use of fraud ultimately interrupts a mans ability to apply his rational faculty to existence as it really is. Fraud and force are analogous and thus must be barred from the interactions within a civil society. To lie in a situation where ones life or property are under assault however is perfectly moral. Life (self)is the primary virtue, then truth. Truth to support life.
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February 8, 2010, 10:14 amJorgeShrugged says:
I dare you to deny the law of contradiction to my face. I will use my ju-jitsu to apply the Avicena standard to you.:)
As for our mixed economy, you call this thriving? What you said in your prior post was not that economic systems could be mixed, but that they are co-dependent and clearly they are not. In fact mix economies are contradictions that reality (markets) works at resolving.
As for the empirical evidence as to the virtues of socialized medicine all you have to look at is that the Prime Minister of Canada recently had to come to America to receive heart surgery.
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February 8, 2010, 10:25 amzuch says:
No, he didn’t. He’s coming, though, and will pay through the teeth for it. Good thing he’s rich as Croesus, innit?
Cheers,
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February 8, 2010, 11:04 ambyomtov says:
The standard you are looking for you will never find on a comments area of a blog.
True. Or anywhere else, for that matter. For Randroids, all objections are met by strange definitions, unrealistic assumptions about behavior, strange moral claims, and bogus arguments and truly odd history.
“Honesty is selfishness.”
“it would be praiseworthy to use others for one’s own advantage if one should get the chance..”
“there has never (or almost never) been a case in which anyone would have benefited by violating another person’s rights (for instance, by initiating the use of force against another).”
etc.
Fantasyland.
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February 8, 2010, 11:10 amzuch says:
While your observations are easy to ‘interpret’. “Two legs good, four legs bad”, IIRC.
Cheers,
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February 8, 2010, 11:13 amDavid Schwartz says:
I think the point that’s being missed in this analysis is that Rand argued that rights were actual attributes that humans in fact possessed and that these rights had moral primacy. That is, while self-interest was the ultimate moral end, rights violations were simply never moral, regardless of what end they might achieve. Being in one’s self-interest was a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for something to be moral and justified.
To address the original post, the contradiction you observe is correct to the extent that people act to their own detriment to defend the rights of others. It applies to Rand’s heroes because she really never developed a theory of selfish benevolence. (I think this is easily fixable, but nobody seems to have any interest in fixing the defects in objectivism. That’s sad really since it has at least three glaring defects that are easily fixed.)
However, your example does not show any conflict. While we can certainly see that it is in Kim Jong Il’s selfish interest to maintain the status quo in North Korea, Rand would not agree that it was moral for him to do so nor does her philosophy in any way lead to such a conclusion. Rand was quite clear that morality was about means *and* ends.
Rand would argue that it is not moral to violate rights because rights actually exist. Rights are moral pre-emptions of actions other people could take — scopes of personal authority on which others may not justify trespassing.
What it means to say that I have a right not to be coerced is that you do not have the right to coerce me, regardless of your goal in doing so. (With one exception that’s not relevant here.)
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February 8, 2010, 11:42 amTom Grey says:
I became Libertarian more from Heinlein, and many other Sci-Fi readers did as, with Moon as Harsh Mistress an arguably more realistic Libertarian society than that where Galt lives.
Still, to implement more of the Free Market, I think proponents should be talking more often about the Peaceful Market. The opposite of peace is not merely war, it is violence. Both actual and threatened violence. It is the use of force. It is when one is forced, involuntarily, to do that which is not desired.
Peace is the secret secret ingredient that really has made capitalism work — by restricting deals to peaceful, win-win wealth creators. With force, there is a win-lose deal (like taxpayers or robbery victims). Entrepreneurs, under free market capitalism, use greed in a way to positively organize others to create wealth. Under communism, the same guys would be successful by joining the commies, and willingly play by commie rules.
Successful entrepreneurs (terrible word, fantastic idea) care more about their own success, then about good rules. The USA has become a country of rich folk by insisting on most deals being done peacefully — by free will, free choice. The Free Market — the Peace Market.
(With force to protect property rights ... the violence inherent in the system. Which any civilization must have.)
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February 8, 2010, 11:55 amJorgeShrugged says:
Ok, then. If we are in fantasy land, what is your standard?
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February 8, 2010, 12:01 pmJorgeShrugged says:
Ragnar Danneskjold serves as this model. So does the mother at Galt’s Gulch.
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February 8, 2010, 12:05 pmJorgeShrugged says:
In fact, Rand would disagree that it is in his best interest from the standpoint of his inability to achieve happiness.
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February 8, 2010, 12:08 pmJorgeShrugged says:
You are correct, however there are 2 points the must be made clear. First is the delineation between initiatory and retaliatory force. The second provides market stability by ensuring those that violate the rights of the marketeers will be punished. The first is the form of force and fraud that must be precluded from a civil society. Secondly (and more importantly) that there is a virtue more fundamental than peace that explains the success of markets, that is reason. Capitalism is the way reasonable people exchange value for value. Peace and good will towards men are the bi-product of such reasonable interactions.
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February 8, 2010, 12:17 pmCB says:
Alan Greenspan was a Randian and where did that get us? The collapse of the global financial system. And now even Greenspan admits that his free market ideology was flawed.
I have lived through energy deregulation and had my kids doing their homework by candlelight as Enron plundered through the energy market leaving energy supplied like the third world, eventually leading to Enron’s enormous collapse and resulting devastation. I’ve lived through Greenspan’s financial tenure and watched as the financial industry plundered their way through the world’s resources leaving a shattered global economic system in its wake.
I could go on. I am amazed that people on this board must be so insulated from the real world that you can actually debate these ideas as if there was much value to them.
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February 8, 2010, 12:26 pmDavid Schwartz says:
That shows that she recognized such a theory was needed, not that she ever explained one. Ragnar Danneskjold is likewise a bit of a mystery without such a theory. I think most readers figured it out, but it does lead to an apparent contradiction between the behavior of heroes and the more formally stated philosophy.
Well, happiness is not an end in itself either. But you’re right, I conceded too much. I should have said something like: Even assuming that maintaining the status quo in North Korea was in Kim Jong Il’s selfish interest, Rand would still say it was not morally justified. Rights violations are immoral means and are not morally justified even if they could be used to achieve moral ends.
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February 8, 2010, 12:36 pmJorgeShrugged says:
There is no contradiction. Ragnar looted government aid vessels, exchanged the loot for gold, and created accounts at the Midas bank so that the “producers” could recoup some of their expropriated wealth. He did this because he values justice. Furthermore, he acknowledges that his life will be better off, not just materially, but spiritually (psychologically) as well as a result of achieving proper values (justice.)
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February 8, 2010, 12:53 pmJorgeShrugged says:
Exactly, because violating the rights of other men forfeits any claim to rights in your own life.
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February 8, 2010, 12:56 pmJorgeShrugged says:
First of all there is no such thing as a Randian. Secondly, Greenspan abandoned Objectivism a long time ago. What’s more, no Objectivist could work for the Federal Reserve except in a capacity to replace it with a real money standard.
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February 8, 2010, 12:58 pmmattski says:
Let me see if I can address your concerns...
If we tax ourselves to pay for a legislature which writes “laws” and to pay for a criminal justice system which “enforces” the laws and to build roads on which free persons and free commerce may travel, that’s “socialism”, agreed? I mean, if taxes are mandatory then you aren’t completely free anymore, are you?
So, your religious beliefs about “socialist elements” suppressing economic growth don’t stand up to scrutiny.
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February 8, 2010, 1:24 pmmattski says:
No, actually, I did not specifically point to the ongoing financial crisis as an example of thriving. And, perversely, your ideological assumptions appear to be causing you to draw catastrophic conclusions about the meltdown.
My reference to modern, mixed economies was a broad reference to the last 100 or so years of world history. In that time frame humanity has made pretty impressive strides, no? As for analyzing the financial crisis here is some empirical evidence that it was a lack of effective regulation more than anything else that made us vulnerable to market excess. If your ideology prevents you from seeing what the problem is that is a pretty damaging handicap.
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February 8, 2010, 1:39 pmbyomtov says:
Ok, then. If we are in fantasy land, what is your standard?
Sticking to what words actually mean. Backing up assertions with facts and logic, rather than imaginings. Seeing the world as it is.
Look at this:
OK. I agree. Kim Jong Il is behaving selfishly and immorally.
Total nonsense. How the hell does she know? And what about the millions of other cases where selfish behavior is immoral? If my factory pollutes the air, saving me money on pollution-control equipment, how is that not in my self-interest? Wait. I know. I’ll get a bad reputation, right? So there’s no need for anti-pollution laws, because I’d never pollute. That’s the objective, isn’t it? Never mind that history utterly refutes these notions.
The shell game here is obvious. Selfishness is supposed to be a virtue. But it turns out, to no one’s surprise, that lots and lots of selfish behavior is immoral — pretty awful in fact. So Rand’s trick is to explain that gee, that’s not really selfish because immoral behavior is not really optimal for all sorts of tenuous and often imaginary reasons. So rational people won’t do that. What a laugh.
It’s odd. I could expect that from some religious person who might argue that there will be punishment in the afterlife, but that’s not her point. To her, self-interest is what she says it is, and she says it’s whatever makes her ideas come out right.
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February 8, 2010, 2:40 pmJorgeShrugged says:
Actually empirical evidence suggest the contrary. Banking and real estate are the most regulated industries in America. The real root of this lies with the CRA, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Reserve. This last one is particularly insidious. Not only does it give us a worthless note, it has the power to arbitrarily set it’s supply and it’s price. Such arbitrary power distorts markets by making investments seem artificially feasible (when rates are lower than market demand) or artificially not feasible (when rates are too high). In fact you can look at the last 90 years of economic history and see how interest rates have created and deflated bubbles. Bubbles in fact are fed by distortions. Market sectors that for real reasons should experience growth become attractive targets for funds which if not for inflationary practices would not be available. If you do not understand this, your ideology prevents you from understanding basic economics.
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February 8, 2010, 2:58 pmJorgeShrugged says:
This is in fact more of a confession as to what you consider to be in YOUR self interest. If you believe it is evil for people to act selfishly you consider your self to be evil. You are then stuck in a contradiction resolvable only by death. Here is where religion usually enters.
JorgeShrugged:
Ok, then. If we are in fantasy land, what is your standard?
BYMTOV says:
Sticking to what words actually mean. Backing up assertions with facts and logic, rather than imaginings. Seeing the world as it is.
Jorgeshrugged responds:
That is the standard I have been postulating, but you reject that. You can’t be objective and altruistic at the same time. You would have to deny axiomatic truths about the nature of man and his relation to the rest of existence.
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February 8, 2010, 3:07 pmbyomtov says:
If you believe it is evil for people to act selfishly you consider your self to be evil.
Jorge,
Think before you write. I didn’t say it was evil for people to act selfishly. I said sometimes selfish behavior is evil.
Maybe some examples would help:
Trying to make profitable investments: selfish, not evil, admirable in fact.
Swindling others out of money: selfish, evil.
Working hard to advance one’s career: selfish, not evil, admirable.
Subverting fellow workers in order to gain a promotion: selfish, evil.
Owning slaves: selfish, very evil.
Working to free slaves: unselfish, not evil.
My point is that it seems to me, based on what I’ve read here, that Rand claims that all these evil things, and many more, are not selfish. The reasons given range form shaky to ridiculous, but seem to come down to not wanting to admit that selfish behavior can be immoral.
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February 8, 2010, 3:26 pmCB says:
The term Randian is certainly used frequently even if you state there is no such thing.
Greenspan was the closest disciple to Rand’s ideologies as anyone with that much power has ever been and hopefully ever will be, no matter how he might technically be dismissed as not being an objectivist in latter years.
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February 8, 2010, 4:33 pmCB says:
Unfortunately, the shadow banking system and the hedge funds, etc. are hardly regulated at all and they have become at least the size of the traditional banking system if not larger. And derivatives have also become an enormous sector and they aren’t regulated.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/13/AR2009051302393.html
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February 8, 2010, 4:39 pmW. Niddery says:
Failing to get something you had no right or claim to in the first place cannot be considered harm by any rational standard. Now if you go to one of those restaurants, eat their food, and then fail to pay, you are indeed harming someone.
By your definition, any time we leave a dollar in our pocket instead of spending it, we are causing “harm” as if that dollar somehow belongs to everyone but ourselves.
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February 8, 2010, 5:38 pmbyomtov says:
W. Niddery,
I simply mean that they are worse off if I don’t eat there than if I do.
If you want to be super-technical, before I make my decision they each have some chance that I will eat at their restaurant. Once I decide, one or both lose that chance, hence they are worse off than before — they are harmed. It doesn’t mean I burned down the restaurant, or told people it served lousy food.
And BTW, suppose I do tell people Tony serves lousy food. I have a perfect right to express my opinion, and Tony presumably has no right to prevent me from doing so. Yet I’ve clearly harmed Tony.
So how can you say that
“Failing to get something you had no right or claim to in the first place cannot be considered harm by any rational standard.”
Tony had no claim to a favorable opinion, or even silence on my part, but he was harmed nonetheless.
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February 8, 2010, 6:04 pmJorgeShrugged says:
The problem I have with your line of thinking is that to hold it you must obliterate definitions. A thing can not be what it is and its negation at the same time. You need a new definition of the word selfish. Evil behavior/choices can never be selfish because it is never good to act against ones nature. Once again I think that to hold the contrary view one would have to damn the nature of man (including one’s self.)
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February 8, 2010, 6:21 pmJorgeShrugged says:
–Hedging is a product of our fractional reserve system, not of a traditional (depository warehouse) banking system.
–Derivatives (CDO’s in particular) would not exist short of the regulatory frame work that make them attractive investments in the first place. They would not even exist short of the need of FANNIE and FREDDIE to push a product the market does not want. What’s more, the market would not even promote these sub-prime loans had they not been coerced by the CRA.
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February 8, 2010, 6:26 pmJorgeShrugged says:
Perhaps all the business you do not grace with your patronage should sue you for damages. Or maybe they should lobby the government to take some of the wealth you greedily don’t spend on them. This is where your line of thinking leads, to reducio ad absudium.
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February 8, 2010, 6:32 pmsbw says:
Ricardo, thanks for going back to Adam Smith’s “Theory of Moral Sentiments.” Most of us think we learned Smith in college so we could discard his work as of another time. Those who are not inclined to read “Sentiments” at 150 pages, or “On the Wealth of Nations” at 900 pages, would do well to read the best book of the decade: P. J. O’Rourke’s “On the Wealth of Nations” — 150 pages of succinct reminder of the substance of O’Rourke.
Then people would see where Rand was coming from, even if she may not have presented it clearly and compellingly. Smith doesn’t tell you what to do; he tells you what hasn’t worked in practice. If something doesn’t work in practice, don’t put lipstick on it and think it will work now.
You are left to choose between self-interest and foolish hope.
Pretty long thread just to come to that seemingly easy observation.
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February 8, 2010, 9:07 pmbyomtov says:
The problem I have with your line of thinking is that to hold it you must obliterate definitions. A thing can not be what it is and its negation at the same time. You need a new definition of the word selfish. Evil behavior/choices can never be selfish...
What???
This is a perfect example of what I described as the shell game.
Here’s a suggestion: before anyone tries to defend Rand they should be required to provide a glossary of terms, because it’s obvious that they are speaking a different language than the rest of us.
And I notice you didn’t address the issue of my telling someone the food at a particular restaurant was bad. Too tough, or still trying to figure out the best redefinitions of plain English words?
Anyway, I’m done. Your whole scheme is idiotic, and if that’s what Objectivism is all about it’s idiotic too. Not that that surprises me.
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February 8, 2010, 10:29 pmRicardo says:
It’s probably worthwhile to compare the philosophies of Kant and Rand. I say this because it hardly does Objectivists any credit to heap such scorn and invective on Kant. Ad hominem arguments are usually a sign of weakness in one’s own position.
Kant’s justification for the immorality of lying, if you recall, is that lying is a form of exploitation. To lie is to convince someone of something that you yourself know to be false for personal benefit. When I do this, I am taking someone’s tendency to trust me and using it against their own interests for my own benefit. In other words, I’m using that person as a means to an end rather than an end in him or herself.
I really don’t see how Rand’s view of honesty, as recounted by JorgeShrugged, is superior to this. Maybe that is part of the reason Objectivists have to tear down Kantian morals so much.
But the thing about Kant that seems to rile up Objectivists is he states at the outset that being a good person is not always fun or easy. Being good means sometimes setting your own interests aside. Those people who appear to be good in their day-to-day lives are not necessarily actually good: they simply have not been challenged by difficult circumstances that put their own interests in opposition to the obligations of moral behavior.
This rather obvious point seems to be what brings out the invective. But Objectivists don’t seem to have any substantive rebuttal to this. Instead, they simply assert that by definition self-interest and living a good and virtuous life are the same. Simply redefine self-interest and the problem is solved.
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February 9, 2010, 12:00 amJorgeShrugged says:
Thank you for the concession. It’s been my experience that when someone runs out of ideas they resort to insults and willful ignorance. Perhaps I was speaking the language of logic to technically, but since you don’t care to be enlightened I shall reserve my comments.
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February 9, 2010, 12:03 amJorgeShrugged says:
A redefinition is necessary when the term being used is taken as a contradiction to itself. That is what I was referring to. That the moral predicate on the virtue of selfishness can’t be both good and evil at the same time.
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February 9, 2010, 12:37 amJorgeShrugged says:
They differ in that for Kant, the moral standard is the “other”. In fact when it comes to morality, any other will do so long as ones standard is not one’s self. This fails because the individual is left with no definable standard. Marry this concept of morality with Kant’s epistemology and you will not even so much have the means of developing any standards or any concepts at all.
For the Objectivist, the standard is always one’s own life qua man. Lying is not absolutely immoral however it is in most contexts. Honesty is a virtue not just because other people are rational animals as well and fraud is a means of violating these rights, but because of the adverse affect it has on the liar. A man will never achieve real happiness (joy w/o guilt) by attempting to do so in a manner that violates his nature. Conversely there are contexts in which it is perfectly moral to lie. That being in the case of self-defense.
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February 9, 2010, 12:46 amRicardo says:
Of course there is a definable standard. You are right that Kantian morality is always in reference to others. Objectivists have a way of insisting that morality applies even when you are by yourself on a deserted island. I don’t find that a plausible or useful assertion. It is mixing moral philosophy up with self-help.
The problem is that this an empirical claim that turns out to be wrong unless it, also, is true by definition. The study of psychopaths shows that there are some people who feel no guilt about lying (or anything else, really) and may even take pleasure in the fact that they are getting away with it and outsmarting others. This claim that guilt inevitably follows a lie is armchair psychology, not philosophy.
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February 9, 2010, 2:34 amChris says:
“But they also undermined their own egoistic interests. Sakharov especially would have been better off had he remained a loyal member of the privileged Soviet elite.”
Let’s say this is true for argument’s sake.
Have you ever been in a position where you were punished or even tortured for doing what you think is good? I think eventually your psychology would break down and you would stop doing what you think is good. And that’s because there is no good apart from the good that you feel in yourself. Or if there is, I’d like someone to show it to me. The fact that you have intuitions that something is good or bad regardless of the consequences for you doesn’t mean anything. The fact that I’d be happier following one course of action than another does.
It’s counterintuitive to say that such matyrs are bad because what they did was good for us. But that doesn’t prove that there is some metaphysical goodness floating outside of us in the universe.
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February 9, 2010, 3:45 ammattski says:
Hoo Boy.
Thanks to CB for pointing out the unregulated sectors of the financial industry.
Jorge, maybe you can offer a theory as to why the financial crisis has had only marginal effects on our neighbor to the north.
But I’m not holding my breath.
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February 9, 2010, 7:17 amJorgeShrugged says:
What other works as the standard. What standard does this other have as his standard of good and how is that standard verifiable. The standard is irreducible to any single “other” by which a criterion for the good to be judged.
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February 9, 2010, 7:54 amJorgeShrugged says:
Even if you are alone you must determine what is good for your life.
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February 9, 2010, 7:55 amsbw says:
Kant or Rand can only serve as an indicator of the process you might find useful to determine for yourself whether lying is anti-social and, if so, when. Neither can point to a natural law, neither can produce a geometric-type theorem to “prove” it. Neither dog will hunt.
From your personal experience, not mine, you can recall instances when you thought you were correct, were mistaken, and were hurt by it. Making your mental map as accurate as possible is in your own self-interest. When you lie to others and when others lie to you, it creates defects in one’s mental map of reality. That is anti-social. Each generation–each person–gets to figure that out for himself or herself.
Fight over Kant or Rand if you want, but nudged by their writings the useful principle–the lesson extracted from experience–belongs to you, but is accessible to everyone.
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February 9, 2010, 8:10 amJorgeShrugged says:
This “pleasure” they get is the fleeting type that evaporates when it comes in conflict with reality. Once again though we see that reason and morality are volitional, but reality is not. They may lack the proper moral/ethical code that tell them what is good and how to achieve it, thus they may not feel the guilt (emotions are after all shaped by our values) but are guilty all the same.
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February 9, 2010, 8:34 amJorgeShrugged says:
Because they did not engage in sub-prime lending.
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February 9, 2010, 8:35 amJorgeShrugged says:
Your granting too much perhaps because you have no first hand experience with communism.
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February 9, 2010, 8:38 amJorgeShrugged says:
Haven’t you been following the posts? The natural law the Objectivists refer to in any context are the axioms of existence, identity, and consciousness. It is true that the objectivist ethics does not offer a set of commandments to live by, but offers you the tools by which to achieve certainty in your judgments and if found to be in error, how to correct them. If what you seek are a set of commandments that must be followed unthinkingly, then what you seek is religion not philosophy.
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February 9, 2010, 8:42 amsbw says:
Not me. Kant.
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February 9, 2010, 9:07 amJorgeShrugged says:
The impression I got from your statement was neither are relevant since neither can prove their positions. While morality is ultimately an abstraction from abstractions (abstracted from the abstracts of metaphysics and epistemology) it requires quite a lot of focused thinking to remain rooted in concretes. Objectivism holds that if any theory violates the axioms of existence, identity and consciousness, then that theory is incorrect. Kant however will claim that ultimate truths can only be derived apriori. It is the Kantian theory of the apriori that allows his followers to detatch themselves from reality so that they are not contradicted by it. However, in doing such, they lack any standards by which to be measured or which they can use to measure the predicate moral value of any thing, person, action or concept.
If what you seek is a mathematical proof, that proof is logic and it works much more like algebra than geometry.
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February 9, 2010, 10:43 amsbw says:
Correct impression, which, from your comment that follows, you seem to agree with.
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February 9, 2010, 10:58 amJorgeShrugged says:
No, I’m saying the proof lies in logic. It lies in non-contradictory identification.
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February 9, 2010, 11:17 amJavert says:
Actually, not. You and others are misclassifying Kant as an altruist. He’s a deontologist, i.e., he completely removes ends from morality — whether those ends are for oneself or for others. He believes in duty and sacrifice as ends-in-themselves.
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February 9, 2010, 11:26 amJorgeShrugged says:
Actually that would be a closer representation of Nietzche’s morality, however I would argue it’s just repackaged altruism. Weather the “other” is another individual, society at large, god, state, or the will of the dialectic, it’s just altruism in one of it’s many variants. Remember terms like “duty” and “sacrifice” requires the questions “to whom?” and “to what ends?”.
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February 9, 2010, 11:31 amJason Crawford says:
Ilya, thanks for a thoughtful critique. I’m an Objectivist and I think Huemer misunderstands Rand.
In particular, Objectivism does not hold that “although it would be praiseworthy to use others for one’s own advantage if one should get the chance, opportunities are peculiarly scarce.” Rather, it says that the self-interested individual must also principled; he must think long-range and not be narrow or short-sighted.
There are plenty of opportunities to take a short-term advantage over others. Any con man or thief knows that. But Objectivism says that you don’t survive, thrive, and become happy and healthy in the long term by becoming a criminal. You build a successful, stable life for yourself through honesty and hard work.
Similarly, someone risking his life to fight a dictatorship is acting on self-interest, on the grounds that he doesn’t want to live as a slave. Now, it’s not egoistic to become a martyr, and if you have no hope of succeeding, then sure—hide or keep quiet instead of just getting yourself killed. But if one has the slightest hope, then to me it’s worth it to fight. And our Founding Fathers thought the same.
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February 9, 2010, 12:46 pmsbw says:
JorgeShrugged, I don’t understand, but then, I can’t consider myself a very good student of philosophy. If the proof lies in logic, you should be able to lay it out so that it is accessible even to people like me.
For my case, early on, to make my case accessible to others, I did try to lay out the case that ethics and morality follow from personal experience projected in the future.
I’d be delighted to see the explanation how the proof of that lies in logic, or, failing that, how it doesn’t lie in personal experience projected into the future.
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February 9, 2010, 1:51 pmRL says:
The self-interested individual pursues values as the only means of sustaining, furthering and enriching his life, with all that implies. The self-sacrificial person necessarily pursues a course that rejects all values related to life on this Earth. That is the nature and contradiction of sacrifice: the “value” of renouncing values.
The self-sacrificial person upholds the absurd notion of what I’d call the “leaky bucket” ethics–that the bigger the hole and the more you lose the more you gain. (Not unlike Keynesian economics and deficit financing by the government.) It’s so absurd that they have to place their reward in the Twilight Zones of Heaven or Social Approval, because no one can act without a personal reward of some kind. The true self-sacrificer is borderline psychotic (psychosis: out of touch with reality): he needs the delusion of a chimera.
The self-interested individual wants to live, here and now. He simply wants his reward in reality and he’ll fight to the death, if necessary, to preserve his right to his reward. He’ll fight for everyone and everything he holds dear, because to betray or lose those things would make his life–and by implication, all life–impossible and meaningless. Only self-interested individuals who passionately pursue their own happiness can create or preserve values, create or preserve happiness on Earth.
Happiness on Earth is not created by “do-gooders” who sacrifice to “help” others. It is simply what you have when every individual is happily pursuing their own self-interest and achieving their own values. The self-sacrificer thinks happiness can be caused by short-circuiting the means to happiness and taking away the preconditions for it. The truly selfish individual blows no fuses: he electrifies his life with values (to pursue this metaphor) and the effect is to light the world.
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February 9, 2010, 2:55 pmJorgeShrugged says:
I’ll have to defer to the post by RL just above this one. I could not have said it more eloquently.
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February 9, 2010, 8:23 pmsbw says:
JorgeShrugged, from that, I’m not sure we are saying anything different. One might call it logic, Thomas Reid, philosopher from Scotland in the 1700s would call it common sense from experience.
I went back to my yellowed, marked up copy of Rand’s “Virtue of Selfishness” and prefer just the underlined passages I made to her philosopher’s jargon aimed at academically credentialed morons. Rand has meat to offer: “It it is true that what I mean by ‘selfishness’ is not what is meant conventionally, then this is one of the worst indictments of altruism: it means that altruism permits no concept of a self-respecting, self-supporting man–a man who supports his life by his own effort and neither sacrifices himself nor others.”
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February 10, 2010, 8:05 amsbw says:
Sorry. “It it is true...” s/b “If it is true...” [Preview is your friend.]
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February 10, 2010, 8:07 amJorgeShrugged says:
Perhaps what “we” are saying is not too far apart, but when words like “common sense” are used one runs into a bit of trouble. Common sense however is too often in opposition to good sense and is always altruistic in its standard. The common sense standard is the standard of “what would the common man consider good”. Since we can have no direct knowledge of who this “common man” is and what would be in his interest, we are left to first draw the sketch of this man then speculate as to what would be good in his estimation.” Fortunately for you you’ve had the good sense to reject that rubbish and you’ve based your standard on the evidence provided by your senses.
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February 10, 2010, 8:53 amsbw says:
Reid was warning philosophers away from Cartesian philosophical tar pits and did excellent work on sense experience.
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February 10, 2010, 12:54 pmJorgeShrugged says:
Of Descartes Rand said he had it backwards. “I am, therefor I think.”
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February 10, 2010, 1:07 pmsbw says:
Yes, and essential to thinking is that we doubt, which is why self-interest prefers community.
Alone together.
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February 10, 2010, 1:32 pmJorgeShrugged says:
Yes, exactly, but the common fallacy is that community is priori (comes before) the individual.
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February 10, 2010, 1:36 pmsbw says:
Then I think it is all clear:
Common fallacy is not common sense.
Self-interest’s preference for community does not enthrone community.
Altruism is community’s fiction to try to enthrone itself.
Self-interest does not mean selfish.
Self-interest can be compassionate.
People could do a lot worse than read Ayn Rand.
and (Heh!)
Fatheads should stop misrepresenting what they care not to understand.
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February 10, 2010, 1:49 pmJorgeShrugged says:
exactly
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February 10, 2010, 3:34 pmSteve-o says:
As the bible is the best-selling book of all time, I don’t think Ayn herself would agree with you that a book sells in proportion to the validity of its content.
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February 19, 2010, 9:35 am