On Pages 26, 27 and 28 of her book, The Virtues Of Selfishness, Ayn Rand contrasts animals and humans, advising that the later need to live by reasoning how to live well with a plan for their entire lives, decades into the future: "Man cannot survive, like an animal, by acting on the range of the moment. An animal's life consists of a series of separate cycles, repeated over and over again, such as the cycle of breeding its young, or of storing food for the winter; an animal's consciousness cannot integrate its entire lifespan; it can carry just so far, then the animal has to begin the cycle all over again, with no connection to the past. Man's life is a continuous whole: for good or evil, every day, year and decade of his life holds the sum of all the days behind him. He can alter his choices, he is free to change the direction of his course, he is even free in many cases, to atone for the consequences of his past--but he is not free to escape them, nor live his life with impunity on the range of the moment, like an animal, like a playboy or thug. If he is to succeed at the task of survival, if his actions are not to be aimed at his own self-destruction, man has to choose his course, his goals, his values in the context and terms of a lifetime. No sensations, percepts, urges or 'instincts' can do it; only a mind can."
My response: This is a rich paragraph. Humans are to use their mind to discover what they want to do with their lives; they are to have a life plan and work over the decades to make it a reality and their reality. What they did yesterday will follow them, and color and shape their tomorrows. If they did good, yesterday, tomorrow looks brighter. If all their yesterdays are filled with evil deeds, perhaps prison is their only future.
Rand continues: ". . . 'Man's survival qua man' means the terms, methods, conditions and goals required for the survival of a rational being through the whole of his lifespan--in all those aspects of existence which are open to his choice . . . Man must be man by choice--and is the task of ethics to teach him how to live like a man. The Objectivist ethics holds man's life as the standard of value--and his own life as the ethical purpose of every individual man."
My response: For Rand, ethics is egoistic, Aristotelian, and teleological. Youngsters must be taught to love themselves and place their own interests as individuals first. Rand the atheist detects that human life is short, and, from her point of view, there is no next world, so she puts all her eggs in one basket: this brief human life span is all that any of us have, so we must early latch onto a life goal, and not waste that life. The thinking moral agent can do good, which is to make something of his life while enjoying his life. It is but a short step from there to my ethics of maverizing, which is why I generally regard Rand with favor.
Rand continues: "Value is that which acts to gain/or keep--virtue is the act by which one gains and/or keeps it. The cardinal values of the Objectivist ethics--the three values, which, together, are the means to and the realization of one's ultimate value, one's own life--are Reason, Purpose, Self-Esteem, with their three corresponding virtues: Rationality, Productiveness, Pride.
Productive work is the central purpose of a rational man's life, the central value that integrates and determines the hierarchy of his other values. Reason is the source, the precondition of his productive work--pride is the result.
Rationality is man's basic virtue, the source of all his other virtues. Man's basic vice, the source of all his evils, is the act of unfocusing his mind, the suspension of his consciousness, which is not blindness, but the refusal to see, not ignorance, but the refusal to know. Irrationality is the rejection of man's means of survival and, therefore, a commitment to a course of blind destruction; that which is anti-mind, is anti-life."
My response: Moral value for me is the ethical concepts that, when followed, elevate us and make us better people, virtuous people. To reason, have purpose and to esteem the self, are all most worthy values; Thinking, Productiveness and Pride are virtues. To live so is to maximize appreciation of what it is to be alive, to take the self seriously, that is to live virtuously, a life well-lived. Her system seems solid; one can see where Stephen Hicks, her disciple, links reasoning, working, capitalism, virtuous selfishness, liberty and a free will, and the connecting of these states of being or human condition do seem organically support and flow out of one another. If the Mother and the Father, the ultimate self-actualized Individualists, that wrote natural law, were asked to scrutinize her ethics, they likely would agree that all these states of being and human conditions flow quite nicely out of natural law as spiritual and moral goodness, when activated and realized in productive work, prayer, in a mood and mode of love of self, others and the Divinities.
The Divinities, the Light Couple, would not quite agree that irrationality is the source of our vice, our living death, for reason can serve evil and selfless living of the unfocused mind too, but less so so than irrationally existing as a beast.
Still, Rand's brilliant line that that which is anti-mind is anti-life is liberating and inspirational. Though I start off as a metaphysical pessimist, there is hope and Rand's optimism for humans is realistic and to be wished for.
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