Rand On Ethics

 

I am going to quote much of Ayn Rand’s Page 15 of her book, The Virtue of Selfishness: “The avowed mystics held the arbitrary, unaccountable ‘will of God’ as the standard of the good and as the validation of their ethics. The neomystic replaced it with ‘the good of society,’ thus collapsing into the circularity of a definition such as ‘the standard of the good is that which is good for society.’ That meant, in logic—and, today, in worldwide practice—that ‘society’ stands above any principle of ethics, since it is the source, standard and criterion of ethics, since the ‘good’ is whatever it wills, whatever it happens to assert as its own welfare and pleasure. This meant that ‘society’ may do anything it pleases, since ‘the good’ is whatever it chooses to do because it chooses to do it. And—since there is no such entity as ‘society,’ since society is only a number of individual men—this meant some men (the majority or any gang that claims to be its spokesman) are ethically entitled to purse any whims (or any atrocities) they desire to pursue, while other men are ethically obliged to spend their lives in the service of that gang’s desires.

 

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—instinct—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 disagree about, today’s moralists agree that ethics is a subjective issue and that the three things barred from its field are: reason—mind—reality.

 

If you wonder why the world is now collapsing to a lower and ever lower rung of hell, this is the reason.”

 

My response: To start with, Ayn Rand discounts David Hume’s view of the impossibility of fielding a credible system of Objectivist Ethics because an is, is not an ought. Skeptical Hume offered that the gap between facts and values is unbridgeable, and skeptical moralists of the last 75 years or so likely concur with him.

 

I side with Rand—mostly—to nullify our current descent into hell on earth, we need to field an Objectivist system of values immediately to seek to overturn the gains of the nihilistic moral skeptics on the secular Left. My Objectivist Ethics are moderately qualified, that they will guide human behavior reasonably well, based in probable certainty of being right and good. Rand the uncompromising moral purist and absolutist, will insist that her Objectivist Ethical System is 100% correct and 100% good, and her admirable ethical system has been marginalized and ignored for 75 years by professional thinkers and moralists.

 

Rand criticizes Subjectivist Ethicists for engaging in circular argumentation for their whimsical criterion supporting their morality.

 

They may argue about which whim is their standard, but they all agree that irrational, arbitrary standard for their ethical system is acceptable.

 

I like how she has aligned rational explanation of one’s ethical system with rational egoism and Objective moral certainty.

 

Her opposition, now in philosophical ascendancy in the circles of professional thinkers, somehow align a subjective, irrational explanation of ethics with altruism and group needs.

 

My own Mavellonialist ethical system would be Objective-Subjective, Individualist-Groupist, and Egoistic-Altruistic.