Ayn Rand on the Virtue of Selfishness

Singer, Blum and Rachels all agree that there are duties of beneficence, and, it seems of pure beneficence -- beneficence that is not in any sense for my own benefit. Ayn Rand thinks all of this is misguided. Her target is the ethics of altruism. In our discussion of Rand, we wil focus especially on resemblances and differences between her view and Singer's. But since altruism is the view that she wants to oppose, let us begin with that term. Here is Webster's definition:

Altruism \Al"tru*ism\, n. [F. altruisme (a word of Comte's), It. altrui of or to others, fr. L. alter another.] Regard for others, both natural and moral; devotion to the interests of others; brotherly kindness; -- opposed to egoism or selfishness.
The ethics of altruism, then, is an ethics based on devoting oneself to the interests of others.

Rand maintains that such an ethics leads one to take extreme situations -- e.g., people drowning or caught in fires -- as the central ones for ethics. She thinks that anyone who accepts the ethic of altruism will have no self-esteem, will see humanity as a tribe of doomed beggars, will see existence as fundamentally desperate and will actually become indifferent to ethics due to a preoccupation with extreme situations rather than what we might call "real life."

Ayn Rand's obsession with altruism might well strike one as a neurosis. Relatively few people hold such a view. Almost all moral theorists have pointed out that our own interests count as much as anyone else's. Some important moral theorists have seen doing no harm as much more important than actively promoting the good of others. So it is not clear who is the real target of Rand's attack. But let that pass. What is interesting is that there is a curious similarity between her theory and Singer's even though the results are very different. Rand takes the basis of morality to include a rationally determined hierarchy of values. The rational principle of conduct, she tells us, is:

Always act in accordance with the hierarchy of your values and never sacrifice a greater value to a lesser one.
Perhaps anyone could accept this principle -- on its face, it seems harmless enough -- but it reminds me, at least, of the principle to which Singer appeals in arguing for famine relief: if we can prevent an evil without sacrificing anythng of comparable moral significance, then we should do so.

Suppose, then, that I regard the death of a starving Eritrean as a more serious matter than my own material comfort -- I regard saving his life as more important than my middle- class comforts. Then Rand's principle would appear to say: I should help the starving Eritrean.

This might appear to contradict what she says. After all, I would be sacrificing my own comfort for the starving person's lie, and Rand believes that sacrifice is always wrong. But notice how she defines" sacrifice." One sacrifices when one surrenders a greater value for a lesser one. If I genuinely value the Eritrean's life more than my own comfort, then giving up my comfort for his life is not, by her definition, a sacrifice.

Still, Rand would seem to think I am confused. She insists:

Your highest moral purpose is the achievement of your own happiness
. This is essentially the principle of ethical egoism. Ethical egoism holds that the source of all duties is the duty to promote one's own welfare -- that if something bears no relation to my welfare, then it is not a duty. So if I give up my happiness to save the starving Eritrean, I am sacrificing something that is objectively a higher value, at least as Rand sees it.

But isn't this just wrong? you might ask. After all, we frequently put ourselves out for our friends and loved ones. I would be nothing other than a cramped and mean individual if I never did anything for a loved one even though it was not convenient to do so.

Rand would agree in one sense, but disagree in another. Friendship and love are selfish on her view -- not a bad thing, as she sees it, by the way. I have made the welfare of my friends and loved ones part of my own happiness, and to ignore their welfare is to make myself unhappy. So a follower of her ethic can be expected to do things for certain other people. What s/he will not do is do things for strangers in non-emergencies.

Rand makes some very plausible points. If I value the life of a stranger higher than my own life, this might well display a very unhealthy lack of self-esteem. But if I panic when I need to save my drowning child, I lack the courage and integrity to live in accord with my own values.

But note: Rand tells us: the value that a follower of her view grants to others is "an extension, a secondary projection of the primary value which is himself."

This way of putting things runs the risk of confusing two very different ideas. One idea is that if I didn't recognize the value of myself, I might not really be able to grasp the value of other people. That seems true. But the other interpretation seems closer to what Rand actually had in mind: that the value I ascribe to other people rests on their relationship to my own happiness -- to what's in it for me. That is not the same, and is not something that Rand has actually given us any reason to believe.

In any case, Rand thinks it is wrong to base morality on the conditions that obtain in emergencies. She agrees: in an emergency -- an earthquake, a shipwreck -- it is quite appropriate to help strangers. An emergency, she tells us, is an "unchosen, unexpected event, limited in time, that creates conditions under which human survival is impossible."

Poverty, ignorance and such are in a different category, however -- at least, according to Rand. You may decide to help the poor man next door as an act of goodwill, but you have no duty to do so. And in any case, you shouldn't support him indefinitely. In fact, to do so, Rand would no doubt argue, is in effect to demean him.

In justifying this outlook, Rand writes:

In the normal conditions of existence, man has to choose his goals, project them in time, pursue them and achieve them by his own effort. He cannot do it if his goals are at the mercy of and must be sacrificed to any misfortune happening to others.
There is surely something important here. There will always be people in some kind of need or other. If one's whole life were at the mercy of the needs of strangers, one would never be able to get on with one's own projects -- in a certain sense that Rand stresses, one would never be able to live one's life. And though this is not a selfish reason, it is probably worth pointing out that if everyone lived as Rand's hypothetical altruist, much that makes the quality of life better -- at least on average -- for humanity as a whole would never be realized. (For example: scientific research is done by people who are passionate about it for its own sake. But it is almost certainly a good thing for all of us that certain people pursue this individual interest.) Both of these points might lead us to doubt Singer's principle. After all, my one measly life can't be of comparable moral importance to the lives of the hundreds whom I might be able to save by giving away all my excess goods and forgoing all luxuries and leisure. And if that is right, then Singer's principle would appear to tell me to live as though I were poor in order to give away everything but what I need for mere subsistence.

In fairness to Singer, this is probably not what he would say. In order to maximize my income to the point where I am giving as much away as possible, I need to hold a sufficiently well-paying job. But Singer points out that this will probably entail owning a car, dressing respectably and the like. If I were not to do these thngs, I would end up making less money and helping fewer people. Still, Rand would find the reasoning here to be perverse. It is perverse because it treats my own happiness as of virtually no account. It is not that it doesn't count at all -- after all, Singer is a utilitarian. It is rather that in comparison to the misery in the world, it is relatively speaking of almost no account, and hence to be given almost no value in my moral calculations.

Now again, Singer could respond. He could point out that if I make myself genuinely unhappy, I wil almost certainly not be able to do my job. ANd in that case, I won't make the money I need to make to help as many poor people as I can. So maintaining a certain basic level of happiness is necessary to do the best I can for others. But once again, Rand would object that even if we get a result that is at least in the general neighborhood of being right (my happiness is important), it is right for the wrong reasons. My happiness does not truly count on this scheme, since it is a mere instrument for the happiness of others.

Perhaps we could put it this way. In reading Rand, we are invited to consider the following proposition: my own flourishing should (or minimally, may) count for more in my own scheme of values that the flourishing of people unknown to me. My own flourishing may (Rand would say "should") count for more in my scheme of values than the happiness of some far-off poor person with whom I have no special connection at all. Although it may be hard to justify this principle on our familiar theories of ethics, it is a principle that has a lot of intuitive appeal. We certainly live our lives as thought we thought it were true, in any case. And to the extent that SInger's view flies in the face of this principle, Singer's view flies in the face of what is probably a rather stubbornly deep and persistent intuition. It is hard to deny, in other words, that we really do regard selfishness of a certain sort as a virtue, and tend to see people who lack it as lacking self-esteem.

Still, we need to be careful in making this judgement. There is a saying from the Christian tradition that one must lose one's life to find it. In context, it meant giving one's will over to God's will. However, we can set the religious interpretation to one side for present purposes. What is undeniable is that there are people who find a life spent in the service of others to be a profoundly and deeply rewarding life. For all of her human foibles (and she had some) this was no doubt true of Mother Teresa. But we need not go to such lengths to find glimpses of this. Playing a part in relieving the sufering of others -- or in contributing to their flourishing -- can really, truly be rewarding. It is not clear whether there is any room in Ayn Rand's philosophy for this truth. Furthermore, if one sets about doing it with one's own happiness as the goal, the enterprise is likely to fail. Looking for happiness is often one of the worst ways of finding it. Happiness is typically a by-product of pursuing thngs that seem intrinsically worthwhile - including things that are directed quite outside the ambit of one's own particular needs.

But let us bring the discussion back to earth by asking a few specific questions.

First, let us grant for the moment that "ordinary" poverty --whatever that may be -- is not an emergency in the way that a flood is. (Whether this is really true could be debated.) But what of Singer's own case, namely famine? Is Rand saying we ought to help out in an emergency? And if so, then shouldn't we all give to famine relief? And won't our lives be quite a bit different than they are now if we take this seriously?

But second, is it really true that "ordinary" poverty is so different from flood and the like? The lives of impoverished children -- who presumably are not in any way at fault for their condition -- are under serious threat from their poverty. At the very least, their prospects for living the sort of life that Rand seems to champion are greatly diminished? Can Rand really say we have no duty to help them even though we should help flood victims?

What one suspects here is that Singer and Rand both, in their own ways approach the question in a much too theory-driven way. Both have important points to make. Rand is surely on to something when she urges that we are not obliged to give up all our own projects for the sake of the needy. But Singer is surely right in claiming that it is simply wrong to ignore conditions of need when we can do something at little cost.

However this all gets sorted out, the right answer is likely to lay in the muddy middle. But there is a distinction found within yet another ethical approach that may be useful in sorting some of this out. In Kant's ethical scheme, our strongest duties are negative. We are obliged not to use others simply as means to our own ends without at the same time respecting the other person's own individuality and autonomy. I can use a bank clerk as a means to my own goal of withdrawing my money because the arrangement involves his or her consent; I still am treating him or her as an end. But I cannot steal the clerk's wallet; that would use him or her simply as a means.

But notice: my duty not to use you as a mere means to my own ends seems not to be accounted for on Rand's approach. It is not, in Kant's view, that I respect you in order to promote your happiness. It is that I respect you because I can offer no basis for singling myself out as special. On Rand's scheme, each person's highest duty is the promotion of his or her own happiness. But for all Rand's theory can show, it would be quite alright for me to harm you if it would genuinely promote my own happiness. Rand did not believe this, as far as I know. But I don't see that her theory has the resources to argue against it.

So minimally, there seem to be some moral duties that are not just a matter of my duty to promote my own happiness. There seem to be duties that pure ethical egoism can't account for. But we can go further than that. Once we recognize this -- once we recognize that there are things that matter for reasons that don't just amount to self-interest -- it isn't too hard to imagine that benevolence -- doing good for others who aren't in a position simply to help themselves -- may be a good thing for its own sake. Some such cases -- Singer's drowning child -- may involve specific duties to do specific things in specific situations. But others-- famine relief, perhaps -- will be imperfect duties, to use Kant's term. A perfect duty is a specific obligation to act -- or not to act --in a specific manner in a specific situation. Thus, in most any situation I am under a duty not to steal from others. Kant would also say that my life plan ought to include acts of benevolence -- acts of goodwill to others and acts of what is often called charity. But there are far more possible acts of charity for me to perform than it is possible or even reasonable for me to perform. If I gave to every worthy cause, I would quickly become impoverished, and Kant would not claim that I have any such obligation. So we end up with something like common sense: there is more that matters than my happiness; indeed, some things may be more important than my happiness. If I am a jealous husband, it might make me happy to have my wife's lover murdered. But that is quite irrelevant. It is simply wrong. Furthermore, we feel -- most of us, anyway -- that a life that includes no acts of beneficence and charity is a life that has something wrong with it morally. Just where the right balance lies is a much messier question -- it almost certainly does not lie in the balance struck in late 20th-century consumer society. But finding that balance is also very unlikely to be a matter of applying some simple principle in the manner of Singer or Rand.

1. Question: Rand defines "sacrifice" as forsaking a greater value for a lesser value. Is this the only reasonable definition? Is it a reasonable definition at all? How might you define it? What would you expect Rand's response to be?

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