On Pages 49 and 50 of her book, The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand writes an essay named The Ethics of Emergencies: “The psychological results of altruism may be observed in the fact that a great many people approach the subject of ethics by asking questions such as: ‘Should one risk one’s life to help a man that is: a) drowning, b) trapped in a fire, c)stepping in front of a speeding truck, d) hanging by his fingernails over an abyss?’
Consider the implication of that approach? If a man accepts the ethics of altruism, he suffers the following consequences (in proportion to the degree of his acceptance):
1. Lack of self-esteem—since his first concern in the realm of values is not how to live his life, but how to sacrifice it.
2. Lack of respect for others—since he regards mankind as a herd of doomed beggars crying for someone’s help.
3. A nightmare view of existence—since he believes men are trapped in a ‘malevolent universe’ where disasters are the constant and primary concern of their lives.
4. And, in fact, a lethargic indifference to ethics, a hopelessly cynical amorality—since his questions involve situations which he is not likely to ever encounter, which bear no relation to the actual problems of his own life and thus leave him to live without moral principles whatever.
By elevating the issue of helping others into the central and primary issue of ethics, altruism has destroyed the concept of any authentic benevolence or good will among men. It has indoctrinated men with the idea that to value another human being is an act of selflessness, thus implying that a man can have no personal interest in others—that to value another means to sacrifice oneself—that any love, respect or admiration that a man may feel for others is not and cannot be a source of his own enjoyment, but is a threat to his existence, a sacrificial blank check signed over to his loved ones.”
Rand on Pages 50 and 51: “‘Sacrifice’ is the surrender of the greater value for sake of a lesser value or nonvalue. Thus, altruism gauges a man’s virtue to the degree to which he surrenders, renounces or betrays his values (since help to a stranger or an enemy is regarded as more virtuous, less ‘selfish,’ than to help those one loves). The rational principle of conduct is the exact opposite: always act in accordance the hierarchy of your values, and never sacrifice a greater value to a lesser one.
This applies to all choices, including one’s actions toward other men. It requires that one possess a defined hierarchy of rational values, (values chosen and validated by a rational standard). Without such a hierarchy, neither rational conduct nor considered value judgments nor moral choices are possible.
Love and friendship are profoundly personal, selfish values: love is an expression and assertion of self-esteem, a response to one’s own values in the person of another. One gains a profoundly, personal, selfish joy from the mere existence of the person one loves. It is one’s own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns and derives from love.”
My response: I agree with Rand that we should live by a hierarchy of rationally derived and concluded values, and generally we should not sacrifice the higher value (self-interest) for a lower value (other-interest), but one could save another’s life for reasons of self-interest generally, and from altruist motive sometimes, though my moderation and mixing of these two motives and moral systems would enrage Rand as false and incoherent.
I do not like her word selfishness because it is so loaded, but she I believe means by it rational self-interest, which is not a greedy, or malicious self-interest, most of the time.
Rand: “A ‘selfless’ or ‘disinterested love is a contradiction in terms: it means that one is indifferent to that which one values.”
My response: I believe she is offering that a selfless love cannot exist because selflessness is self-hatred which is also extended to others around. Love is self-interest and that will extend to others that we love or are interested personally or abstractly in general.
Rand: “Concern for welfare of those one loves is a rational part of one’s selfish interests. If a man who is passionately in love with his wife spends a fortune to cure her of a dangerous illness, it would be absurd to claim he does it as a ‘sacrifice’ for her sake, not his own, and that it makes no difference to him, personally and selfishly whether she lives or dies.”
My response: the moral purpose takes care of himself and others motivated by self-interest more than other-interest as his motivator, but he is good and loving for both motives and what is good for the self is good for the others, and what is good for others is good for the self, as long as the self makes a sacrifice to the group of his ow free will, because he sees his generosity as consistent with his will.
Rand: “Any action that a man undertakes for the benefit of those he loves is not a sacrifice if, in the hierarchy of his values, in the context of total choices open to him, it achieves that which is of the greatest personal (and rational) importance to him. In the above example his wife’s survival is of greater value to the husband than anything else that his money could buy, it is of the greatest importance, it is of the greatest importance to his own happiness, and therefore his action is not a sacrifice.”
My response: again, self-interest is good and other-interest is evil, and neither is one way or the other solely or purely. The two tend to blur together, whether saving his wife’s life is in his interest, or in their interest. I would speculate that the motive for a behavior, generally, is beneficial if it uplifts and heals the self and others as a motive and consequence, and it is hateful or evil if the intent was to act so as to inflict needless pain and suffering on the self or others, for a victimizer degrades himself (he may well find a sick pleasure in doing so) while degrading his target. This is sick self-interest and wicked other-involvement.
Rand: “But suppose he let her die in order to spend his money on saving the lives of ten other women, none of whom meant anything to him—as the ethics of altruism would require. That would be a sacrifice. Here the difference between Objectivism and altruism can be seen most clearly: if sacrifice the moral principle of action, then that husband should sacrifice his wife for the sake of then other women. What distinguishes the wife from ten other women? Nothing but her value to her husband who has to make the choice—nothing but the fact that his happiness requires her survival.”
My response: Obviously his first moral duty is to save his wife before saving 10 strangers, but it could be that Rand is too all-or-none in the moral choices she offers the agent. There are many gray areas in life, and our moral duty ordinarily is to pursue our self-interest, but other-interest may at time take precedence. My recommendation if we teach young people to be anarchist-individuator supercitizens that are egoists-altruist, then it would be rare or uncommon for anyone to need anyone to come to another’s aid because each would be so powerful, able, accomplished and self-reliaance that all of society would run well most of the time with the majority doing their own thing as their primary concern.
Rand on Pages 51 and 52: “The Objectivist ethics would tell him: your highest moral purpose is the achievement f your own happiness, your money is yours, use it to save your wife, that is your moral right and your rational moral choice.
Consider the soul of the altruistic moralist who would be prepared to tell the husband the opposite. (And then ask yourself whether altruism is motivated by benevolence.)”
My response: Sounds good.
Rand on Page 52: The proper method of judging when or whether one should help another person is by reference to one’s own rational self-interest and one’s hierarchy of values: the time, money, or effort one gives or the risk one takes should be proportionate to the value of the person in relation to one’s own happiness.”
My response: I agree with her mostly but not entirely for the 2ndary moral motive of self-sacrifice may be one’s duty occasionally; Rand is so absolutistic and no moral rule allows any exception, and life is not that pat; still, her rational egoism is preferable to any other moral system—most of the time!
Rand: “To illustrate this on the altruist’s favorite example: the issue of saving a drowning person. If the person to be saved is a stranger, it is morally proper to save him only when the danger to one’s own life is minimal; when the danger is great, it would be immoral to tempt it: only a lack of self-esteem could permit one to value one’s life no higher than that of a random stranger. (And conversely, if one is drowning, one cannot expect a stranger to risk his life for one’s sake, remembering that one’s life cannot be as valuable to him as his own.)
My response: If one believes in God and the afterlife, losing one’s life to save a stranger sure seems like selfless, self-sacrifice, and it is, but if one thought that one would get to heaven by saving a stranger, even if it cost’s one one’s own life, than that act of self-sacrifice serves one’s long term self-interest. And there are cases in history where a soldier will fall on a grenade to save five of his companions from dying, while he is blown to bit. I have argued elsewhere that heroism of gargantuan magnitude might be the generosity of a great soul finding it in his noble self-interest to take care of other people, even at great personal cost. The case of which moral motive is motivating the agent, and when which is morally preferable to act by, and when egoist motive is good or bad, or altruist motive is good or bad, are ethically gray areas. Each agent just has to make hp his own mind as to what his moral duty is, based on time and the values and information that he has to mull over before he chooses and act. One generally should be willing to lose one life to save a stranger if that is the only option, if one believes that a reward for such heroism in the next world is forthcoming.
Rand on Pages 52 and 53: “If the person not to be saved is not a stranger, then the risk that one is willing to take is greater in proportion to the greatness of that person’s value to oneself. If it is the man or woman one loves, then one can be willing to give one’s life to save him or her, for the selfish reason that life without the loved person would be unbearable.
Conversely, if a man is able to swim and save his drowning wife, but become panicky, gives in to an unjustified, irrational fear and lets her drown, then spends his life in loneliness and misery—one would not call him ‘selfish’; one would condemn him morally for his treason to himself and his values, that is: his failure to fight for the preservation of a value crucial to his own happiness. Remember that values are that which one acts to gain and/or keep, and that one’s happiness has to be achieved by one’s own effort. Since one’s happiness is the moral purpose of one’s life, the man who fails to achieve it because of his own default, because of his failure to fight for it, is morally guilty.
The virtue involved in helping those that one loves is not ‘selflessness’ or ‘sacrifice,’ but integrity. Integrity is loyalty to one’s convictions and values; it is the policy of acting in accordance with one’s values, of expressing, upholding and translating them into practical reality. If a man professes to love a woman, yet his actions are indifferent, inimical or damaging to her, it is his lack of integrity that makes him immoral.”
My response: Sounds good.
Rand: “The same principle applies to relationships among friends. If one’s friend is in trouble, one should act to help him by whatever nonsacrificial means are appropriate. For instance, if one’s friend is starving, it is not a sacrifice, but an act of integrity to give him money for food rather than buy some insignificant gadget for oneself, because his welfare is important in the scale of one’s personal values. If the gadget means more than the friend’s suffering, then one has no business pretending to be his friend.”
My response: her argument here about nonsacrificial generosity to a friend out of integrity not selfless generosity seems thin to me. Rand the metaphysical monist seeks to describe and define the world in rigid categories of right and wrong, good, and bad, attractive and ugly, with no borderline cases. She is doing her best to be scrupulously consistent in her unyielding insistence that the rule of contradiction applies in the moral sphere where contradictions are false and nonexistent, even though that is not how the world is or works. She can claim to have certain knowledge of objective moral truth, but sheer asserting this claim does not make it bind the world. I agree with her most of the time, but the moral realm is much more gray, moderate, and messy than she is allowing for.
Rand on Pages 53 and 54: “The practical implementation of friendship, affection and love consists of incorporating the welfare (the rational welfare) of the person involved into one’s own hierarchy of values, then acting accordingly.
But this is a reward which men have to earn by means of their virtues and which one cannot grant to mere acquaintances or strangers.
What, then, should one properly grant to strangers? The generalized respect and good will which one should grant to a human being in the name of the potential value he represents—until and unless he forfeits it.
A rational man does not forget that life is the source of all values and, as such, a common bond among living beings (as against inanimate matter), that other men are potentially able to achieve the same virtues as his own and thus be of enormous value to him. This does not mean that he regards human lives as interchangeable with his own. He recognizes the fact that his own life is source, not only of all his values, but of his capacity to value. Therefore, the value he grants to others is only a consequence an extension, a secondary projection of the primary value which is himself.
The respect and good will that men of self-esteem feel towards other human beings is profoundly egoistic; they feel, in effect: ‘Other men are of value because they are of the same species as myself.’ In revering living entities, they are revering their own life. This is the psychological base of any emotion of sympathy and any feeling of ‘species solidarity.’
My response: Human life is the source of all values for men in this world, but immortal life undergirds that sacredness of life that the atheist like Rand adore in this world When the life of the rational egoist, especially a self-realizing first-hander is an act of building cosmos in this world and the next, for the Good Sprits, then it can be accepted that life is the source or near to being the source of all value for God is life, and life well-conceived, well-executed and in an act of love.
The good will that men of self-esteem feel for others sounds an awful lot like a sense of brotherhood to me, but there is no sense quibbling.
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