What’s Living & Dead in Ayn Rand’s Moral & Political Thought?

Will the author please give me one example, just one, of a right causing a constraint on self-interested action? And please explain how that action was in your interest, not just something you wanted to do or would "benefit now" from. I was a philosophy student in college and I am quite aware of the arguments typically given; so was Ms. Rand and that's why she argued at length in the Virtue of Selfishness and Capitalism the Unknown Ideal why such self-interest is a fraud.

Off topic but since property rights were mentioned in passing by both you and Rasmussen....

I presume the name Cato Unbound is derivative of Prometheus Unbound, which Rasmussen also referenced in his essay. If I recall correctly, Prometheus was originally bound/imprisioned for stealing fire, the property of the Zeus. It seems odd that such staunch defenders of property rights would adopt a name reminiscent of a thief.

Oh, and thanks for the link to the discussion. I enjoyed Rasmussen's essay and look forward to the responses.

Emma Zahn

Cato Unbound might be a reference to Prometheus Unbound, but I think there's a more prosaic explanation. It is an online magazine published by the Cato Institute and, since it is only published online, it isn't bound as a paper magazine or book would be. Thus "Cato" for the publishing body and "Unbound" because it isn't bound into book or magazine form.

I've always assumed that it was a three-way play on words: unbound like Prometheus, unbound as in not on paper, and unbound as in an open, free-wheeling discussion.

I remember the elevator in Harvard's Widener library used to have graffiti saying: "Free the bound periodicals!"

Ding ding ding!

Prometheus didn't steal Zeus' fire. He taught the technology freely. The only thing Prometheus could be guilty of if infringing on Zeus' patent (something many fans of property rights believe are simply monopoly privileges).

All of Rand's thought is dead, because methodology or argument matters and conclusions do not, and Rand contributed nothing of use to further thinkers.

I'd claim Rasmussen (and Den Uyl...) as the obvious exception, but they had to go back to Aristotle and sideways to modern virtue ethicists in order to progress.

It's interesting that not only has Rand's thought constituted an intellectual dead-end, but that it tends to stunt the intellectual growth. If I had two dollars for every Randist I've met who is at least as unfamiliar with and unengaged with rival philosophical ideas as was Ayn Rand herself, or more so, I could probably buy a beer for all of the libertarians without philosophy degrees who've read at least five pages of Schmidtz. Not Old Style or Coors, either, but good stuff like Orval!

That said, I think Rand’s emphasis on the role of individual rights in generating creativity and entrepreneurial effort remains enlightening.

If those kinds of day dreamy narcissistic affirmations for people who already know they're awesome float your boat, Emerson, by almost any metric, is better than Rand by huge margins.

Certainly off-topic, but what happened to John Hasnas final contribution to December's Cato Unbound "A Bit of Backpedaling"?

I'm getting a "Page Not Found" error: http://www.cato-unbound.org/2010/01/01/john-has...

Hmmm... Thanks for the tip.

Fixed! Somehow the URL got renamed.

Arguably off-topic, but this:

http://lhote.blogspot.com/2010/01/rand-and-what...

is a great blog post. The comments are even good.

You look at what Rand has written about democracy and such and it reminds you that the American libertarian project is about economic liberty (guest-starring civil liberties).

I think that's basically right as far as it goes. If you work forwards from any plausible notion of rational self-interest, you're going to get scenarios where there is a conflict between the obligation and the demands of self-interest. Indeed, we all know that on some level (if I borrow five dollars from you, I owe you five dollars, and it makes no sense to say that because I can do something more useful for myself with the five dollars, then I *don't* owe you five dollars). But if you work backwards from the rights notions you want to try to ground them in rational self-interest, you inevitably end up telling tales about what rational self-interest is. Rand is by no means alone in this. My suspicion is that *every* attempt to ground rights notions in something "deeper" will create similar problems (work forward from the grounding notion and you can't get there, work backward from the result you want and you are tempted to distort your conception of the grounding notion to complete your edifice. I think this is true for utilitarianism and contractarianism as well. But the deeper question is: what is the force and purpose of such projects? I think it can only be to put the proponent of them into the position of being able to reject other people's moral claims that the proponent doesn't like and insist that the other is, by the special terms of the project, "irrational." But as a practical matter, the auditor will always say "so? Nice project, but you're just rationalizing immorality." Since the very notion of such projects is iffy and controversial from the getgo, and the persuasive power of them is minimal, there's a real question as to whether it can ever be rational to so much as pursue them. Though this has no bearing on Rand, who is clearly a moral revisionist, one could say that one was attempting a vindication of existing moral practices instead of discovering new moral truths. But that presupposes that the existing practices constitute a coherent set in the first place (of course one can achieve such a result by cherry picking whose practices will get rationally reconstructed...). There almost no evidence to suggest that they do.

I conclude that the enterprise of moral philosophy is kinda pointless, except as a critique of attempts to do moral philosophy in the old way. The correct view identifies something called a "moral concern" or "moral interest" and takes it as primitive, recognizing the uncomfortable truth that these generally will not form a coherent set within a culture or even within an individual.

Unfortunately, this will not satisfy either the Objectivist or the libertarian, because the Objectivist wants to occupy a kind of high ground in relation to existing moral practices (at least some of them) the better to Shrug off the demands of others. The libertarian is less ambitious, but suffers from a similar problem: an attempt to occupy a high ground from which competing conceptions of the purpose of government can simply be dismissed as indefensible. It would be great for a political actor to be able to do that with conflicts between their political preferences and those of others, but you can't really. And wanting to do so is just a survival of the old "God is on my side" stratagem in veiled form.

What moral discussion should look like instead is the sketching of pictures of the human condition and human social relations, situating the things the sketcher likes and doesn't like in ways that another can readily see and appreciate. One good way to do that is to write a really big novel...