On Page 23 and Page 24 of her book, The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand writes the following: "A being who does not know automatically what is true or false, cannot know automatically what s right or what is wrong, what is good for him or evil."
My response: She is spot on about this: dogs, cats and rabbits know instinctively how to act, without hesitation or self-doubt: their sense of what is true or false, or right or wrong morally or right or wrong in terms of being correct or incorrect is rock-solid for them. Humans are innately lacking in such confidence, but with our rational and sentimental intuitions directed to find answers, we can unnaturally build knowledge to provide us this answer epistemologically, ethically or veridically.
Rand the atheist likely would have no use for Jordan Peterson, but Jordan has lectured that humans are born with a faculty called the conscience, but no one really knows what it is, where it comes from, or how to study it, but it is pervasive and influential in human affairs. My hunch is that conscience is ethical, rational intuition, part of the divine spark that we are born with, enriching and conditioning all that Rand ethically challenges humans to devise by rational effort and study.
Once we find these answers, even if they are fallibly certain, we have an ethical foundation upon which to build a good, wholesome, meaningful life, a primal void in human psyche that must be filled.
Rand continues: "Yet he needs that knowledge in order to live. He is not exempt from the laws of reality, he is a specific organism of a specific nature that requires specific actions to sustain his life. He cannot achieve his survival by arbitrary means nor with random motions nor by blind urges nor by chance nor by whim. That which his survival requires is set by his nature and is not open to his choice. What is open to his choice is only whether he will discover it or not, whether he will choose the right goals and values or not. He is free to make the wrong choice, but not free to succeed with it. He is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road that he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see. Knowledge, for any conscious organism, is the means of survival, to a living consciousness, every 'is' implies an 'ought.' Man is free to choose not to be conscious, but not free to escape the penalty of unconsciousness: destruction. Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer--and that is the way he has acted through most of his history."
My response: We must use our imagination, our hunches, our logic, our experimenting, our powers of reason, testimony et al to grow our knowledge so that we can gain deeper and wider wisdom built upon this applied knowledge.
The laws of reality do apply: we are mortal, and will die. Nothing can change that. God is moral and disobedient, immoral humans will reap the consequences of that rebellion in this world and in the next. That fate for all of us is ineradicable and unavoidable. To sustain our lives and live well, we must act in certain ways and not act in other sinful, foolish, or destructive ways.
Rand warns that we cannot survive and flourish by arbitrary means, by random motions, by blind urges, by chance or whims, but these erratic, often irrational temptations and coping mechanisms cannot be separated from being fully human. We are not Spocks: living robots or computers that are without feelings, purely and severely logical. Rands heroic striver, to some degree, seems like a cardboard character. Bother Hoffer and Peterson would remind her that there are many drives and forces internal and bestial at work on the conscious mind of each living human, so we are instead rich, dark, self-destructive, herd beasts with a weak modest thinking apparatus called the mind, and we are also individualist second. Still, she is correct that he can choose to individuate, pursue his own interest, and be good and productive and rational, and then lead a good life, or he can choose to throw it all the way, and there are cause and effect predictable consequences for his rebellion against natural law of material nature and natural law or the principle of Logos interwoven into all nature as divine law.
Rand continues: "What, then, are the right goals for man to pursue? What are the values his survival requires? This is the question to be answered by the science of ethics. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why man needs a code of ethics."
My response: Rand obviously is announcing that ethics is ascertainable, that there are identifiable right goals that is our moral duty to identify and pursue. We must chase after and grab onto these goals if we are to live and survive, and a code of ethics will lay out these aims. She is correct for the most part.
Rand continues: "Now, you can assess the meaning of the doctrines which tell you that ethics is the province of the irrational, that reason cannot guide man's life, that his goals and values should be chosen by vote or by whim--that ethics have nothing to do with reality, with existence, with one's practical actions and concerns--or that the goal of ethics is beyond the grave, that the dead need ethics, not the living.
Ethics is not a mystic fantasy--not a social convention--not a dispensable, subjective luxury, to be switched or discarded in any emergency. Ethics is an objective necessity of man's survival--not by the grace of the supernatural nor of your neighbors nor of your whims, but by the grace of reality and the nature of life."
My response: What I admire about Rand is her firm moral commitment. She is a staunch ethicist. She insists that right and wrong are identifiable. She is fearless in labeling one choice as evil, and another as good. Of course, she might seem all-or-none sometimes, but it is better to take a stand than take no stand, for fear of being mistaken. We will all be mistaken, to varying degrees, but we still have a duty to categorize acts and good or evil, then promote the good, and oppose evildoers.
She completely refutes that irrational insights in ethics or felt choice-selection have a place in ethics, but she is more right than wrong, but she is a bit wrong. Ethics is central to a life well-lived and it impacts every aspect of our lives in this world and in the next.
Ethics is an objective metaphysical necessity more than it is fed from irrational, situational source, more divinely derived than societally derived, but both are sources of ethical insight.
Let me quote Rand: "I quote from Galt's speech: 'Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice--and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man--by choice; he has to hold his life as a value--by choice, he has to learn to sustain it--by choice, he has to discover the values it requires and practices his virtues--by choice. A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.
The standard of value of the Objectivist ethics--the standard by which one judges what is good and evil--is man's life, or: that which is required for man's survival qua man.
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.
Since everything man needs has to be discovered by his own mind and produced by his own effort, the two essentials of the method of survival proper to a rational being are: thinking and productive work.
My response: Man is a rational being that must choose to affirm his life as a value, valuable for him and the world spiritually (this does not interest Rand), morally and socially. Man is also an irrational animal.
I like her definition of Objectivist ethics as that which support man's life (the good) or detracts from it (the bad). I like her pointing out that thinking and productive work are for humans to live well, and if we add belief in God, and maverization theory, then her ethics and mine are not that far apart.
On the rest of Page 25, Rand differentiates between good men, the few that work and think (producers) versus the mass of unfocused, mental parasites that imitate and live off the efforts of the producers. These evil masses evade " . . . the responsibility of being conscious."
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