Ayn Rand accuses altruists of a slight of hand that allows them to foist their system off to the unsuspecting public. Here she is from Page viii from her book, The Virtue Of Selfishness: “For a view of the nature of altruism, its consequences and the enormity of the moral corruption it perpetrates, I shall refer you to Atlas Shrugged—or to any of today’s newspaper headlines. What concerns us here is altruism’s default in the field of ethical theory.
There are two moral questions which altruism lumps together in one ‘package-deal’: (1) What are values? (2) Who should be the beneficiary of values? Altruism substitutes the second for the first; it evades the task of defining a code of moral values, thus leaving man, in fact, without moral guidance.”
I am not skilled enough of a formal ethicist to know if altruists everywhere, always have failed to define a code of moral values as Rand accusing them of failing to do, but I do know that altruists believe the beneficiaries of values is to be received by others at the cost of the self, and a noble life is one lived in selfless service of others and the community, altruists insist.
I agree that we must define our code of moral values before we can provide people with a system of values to guide their lives by, a desperate deficiency that Rand hopes to fill with her program of rational egoism.
I am not much against her plan, but would subscribe to the view that the beneficiary of practiced egoism is everyone, the private self, one’s family, God, others and humanity in general.
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