Ayn Rand’s Revolutionary Ethics, Pt. 2

Copyright © 2007, Barry L. Linetsky, All Rights Reserved

Ayn Rand set a scientific footing for ethics by demonstrating an unbreachable bond between ethics and reality. The Randian paradigm shift – I would call it a revolution - in ethics is her proof that there is an objective standard by which one judges what is good or evil. That standard is “man's life, or: that which is required for man’s survival qua man" (P. 25).

What man’s life requires is knowable in reality, and reason is required to figure it out. It's the role of philosophy to provide understanding of reality and man’s place in it, and to provide practical guidance for living happily and successfully. Ethics requires the discovery of the nature of man and the conditions that allow him to flourish according to his nature. In a famous formulation, Rand wrote: "Since reason is man's basic means of survival, that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; that which negates, opposes or destroys it is the evil” (P. 25).

Because man is devoid of the survival instincts possessed by most other animals, man’s survival requires that he function as a conceptual consciousness, applying reason and purpose to direct his actions toward survival goals. Everything man needs has to be discovered by a human mind and produced by human effort.

This is an existential fact that applies to each of us. We each must discover knowledge and act to bring about and sustain our own survival. This leads to two essentials of the method of survival proper to a rational being, says Rand: thinking and productive work. (As an aside, business is a way of organizing to make the most of both.)

To succeed at the task of survival, man has to choose his goals and values in the context of a lifetime. The longer the range of a person's thinking, the better he can plan and prepare for contingencies. Failure to think long range for oneself leaves a person vulnerable and dependent on the thinking of others, and leaves one’s fate to chance. When people fail to take control of their own life and responsibility for their own welfare, they are left to depend on either the charity of others, or worse, the looting of others. Rand wrote: "Man has to be man by choice - and it is the task of ethics to teach him how to live like man" (P. 27).

Rand holds each person’s life as the standard of value, and his own life as the ethical purpose of every individual life (P. 27). For Rand, a standard is an abstract principle that applies to every individual person. But every individual person has to live his or her own life by applying this principle to the specific purpose of living a life proper to a rational being. Rand wrote: "Man must choose his actions, values and goals by the standard of that which is proper to man - in order to achieve, maintain, fulfill and enjoy that ultimate value, that end in itself, which is his own life" (P. 27).

Rand defined virtue as the act by which one gains and/or keeps values, and she identified Rationality as man's basic virtue and the source or all other virtue. She identified irrationality - the willful and purposeful rejection of reason – as man’s greatest vice. She wrote that irrationality is the rejection of man’s means of survival. It is anti-mind and anti-life because for a man to reject reason - his only tool of survival as a conceptual being – is to set himself on a blind course of self-destruction (see p. 28).

Placing rationality as the central tenet of ethics – as the primary virtue – is merely the identification of facts about reality and about us as human beings. Reason is man’s primary means of survival. It is a fundamental and non-optional requirement of his life that man understand what this requires of him, and that he puts forth the mental effort required to learn to excel at its application.

For Rand, the purposeful pursuit of rationality and the disciplined application of reason to achieve one’s chosen ends against all obstacles has been so rare historically, that it represents for her the heroic in man. Rand’s personal heroic achievement resides in the dedication of her life’s work to defining and demonstrating why this is so.

Her research and thinking on what constitutes virtue for man and her identification of the primary virtues and their functions, led her to overturn and refute all prior attempts to define a valid ethical code by non-rational means. Her unique methodology of taking an inductive and deductive scientific approach to philosophy led her to a unified philosophic system that is Aristotelian in spirit, and which culminates in a rational, individualistic, integrated, this-worldly code of ethics. Rand firmly shifted the basis of a philosophic defense of ethics from altruism to a form of enlightened egoism. She called her total system of philosophy Objectivism, and referred to the Objectivist ethics as a morality of “rational self-interest – or rational selfishness” (P. xi).

While her methodological approach has been vilified and swept aside by those who believe that all virtue resides in altruism and personal sacrifice, and reject out of hand her premise that facts and value are inseparable, it remains that fifty years after the publication of her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, there has yet to be a reasoned and valid refutation of her philosophy.

Those most likely to criticize Rand as an original thinker and as making an important contribution to our understanding of the field of ethics are those who aren’t seriously seeking truth and knowledge in the field of ethics, but rather have an agenda to hijack the normative language of ethics as a means to emotionally coerce others into agreeing with the social or political agenda they are advancing (usually an agenda that involves the collecting of the sacrifices of others - often through the initiation of physical force or deceit - to pursue their own hidden motives under the guise of benefiting “society” or God).

It’s ironic that those least able to defend their own agenda’s by means of rational arguments are the people most likely to disparage an author while failing to address serious legitimate challenges to their ethical ideas. Far too many thinkers dabbling in the subject of business ethics brush aside the serious challenges that Ayn Rand posed fifty years ago because facing those challenges are felt to be either unnecessary, or insurmountable. It is unfortunate that Rand’s work in ethics has been largely ignored through intellectual dishonesty and evasion in the hope that the advocacy of erroneous conclusions can remain valid. Nothing could be more irrational, and, frankly, more unethical, than such an evasion of reality.