Objective Ethics

On Page 15 of her book, The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand criticizes those that worship God or society as their deities and doing so under the umbrella of altruistic ethics. I am for worshiping God, not society, and I do not favor altruist ethics. Rand criticizes those that settle for life lived in the shadow of an abstraction or deity, or based on altruistic values: "This could hardly be called rational, yet most philosophers have now decided to declare that reason has failed, that ethics is outside the power of reason, that no rational ethics can ever be defined, and that in the field of ethics--in the choice of his values, of his actions, of his pursuits, of his life's goals--man must be guided by something other than reason. By what? Faith--instincts--intuition--revelation--feeling--taste--urge-wish--whim. Today, as in the past, most philosophers agree that the ultimate standard of ethics is whim (they call it 'arbitrary postulate' or 'subjective choice' or 'emotional commitment')--and the battle is only over the question of whose whim: one's own or society's or the dictator's or God's. Whatever else they may have disagreed about, today's moralists agree that ethics is a subjective issue and that the three things barred from its field are: reason--mind--reality." My response: If reason is something that ethics are outside of, then the epistemology of ethics is subjective, irrational, instinctive, whimsical, couched in anti-realistic ontology. An ethics that is objective, logical, epistemic and reality-based is epistemologically bankrupt and empty. Obviously, neither Rand nor I accept this, but we will need to read more.