Our colloquy on Ayn Rand’s moral and political thought over at Cato Unbound continues to steam along with essays from Michael Huemer and Neera Badhwar.
Huemer lucidly sets forth the most obvious difficulty with Rand’s attempt to make the transition from ethical egoism to a strong theory of rights:
[E]thical egoism does not support the philosophy of individual rights in the first place. Quite the opposite. Take Rasmussen’s statement of the basic individualist premise: “Each individual human being is an end in him‑ or herself … not merely a means to the ends of others.” This is a very common idea in classical liberal writings. Nearly identical statements appear in Rand, in Nozick, and of course in Kant. It is also, pace Rand, directly and obviously contrary to ethical egoism. For ethical egoism posits that the only thing that ought to matter intrinsically to me is my own welfare—for me, my own welfare or happiness is the only end in itself. It follows from this that I oughtnot to regard other individuals as ends in themselves; rather, I should see them only as means to my happiness—just as I see everything else in the world. This is a very simple and straightforward implication of the theory. I cannot hold my own well-being as the only end in itself, and simultaneously say that I recognize other persons as ends in themselves too.
I think the best way to try to save Rand’s view is to emphasize, as Rod Long does in his essay, the neo-Aristotelean interpretation of Rand’s ethics according to which “the requirements of moral virtue were conceived as a constitutive part of the agent’s own interest.” That is to say, virtue is not merely instrumental to the achievement of one’s values. Virtuous action just is some essential part of your overall well-being. When that’s the case, you can’t duck out on virtue whenever that might seem convenient. Ducking out on virtue would gut a requirement of life as a rational being. Or, put another way, it may seem that it is sometimes convenient to duck out on virtue, but it isn’t really.
Does this work?
In today’s essay, Neera Badhwar provides a sympathetic overview of this sort of strategy but registers some doubts:
Like Aristotle, Rand holds that the virtues, including justice, are not only means to the agent’s happiness, but also an essential, constitutive part of it. Julia Annas calls Aristotle’s ethical egoism a “formal” egoism because it essentially incorporates regard for others. Rand’s eudaimonistic egoism, likewise, is a formal egoism. But can even a formally egoistic justification of virtue give the right account of why we should be just and respect others’ rights? Surely the right account is that we should give others their due because it is their due — because people are ends in themselves — and not because doing so is necessary for our happiness. This objection, however, owes whatever force it has to the thought that justice can be inimical to our well-being, but we ought to be just even so. But as noted above, Rand holds that injustice is even worse for us. Giving others their due, she believes, is rational both because it is the appropriate response to an important normative fact, and because responding appropriately is necessary for our own happiness. Indeed, Rand defines each virtue in terms of the recognition of, and motivation by, some important fact, and holds that the pursuit of happiness is inseparable from the activity of maintaining one’s life through the rational pursuit of rational goals, that is, from virtuous activity (“The Objectivist Ethics,” 29, 32). Here, again, her view resembles that of Aristotle, who tells us that the virtuous person is motivated by what is truly good, pleasant, and useful, and that being motivated thus is the chief component of his happiness.
Rand’s fiction depicts her heroes’ virtues acting as a shield against misery even in the worst of misfortunes, and her villains’ vices as causing psychological turmoil or, at best, leaving them incapable of enjoying life, even in the greatest of good fortunes. Her depiction of Gail Wynand in The Fountainhead suggests that not only does he not get much out of life, but also that his ignorance of his own vice and of what is truly worth pursuing is in itself a great loss. Rand does not consider the possibility of circumstances under which someone who is less than perfectly virtuous may avoid disaster by doing a small wrong and, thus, end up better off than by doing the right thing. Rather, she suggests, like some other moralists, that even one small wrong is likely to introduce a fatal flaw into one’s character — or, alternatively, that no wrong is ever really a small wrong. But this is unrealistic. Not every wrong action leads to an unraveling of one’s character, and not every wrong action merits endless guilt and self-reproach. Moreover, some misfortunes resulting from an act of integrity or justice can reduce a person to despair, as they do Henry Cameron and Steven Mallory in The Fountainhead. Under such circumstances, I think the eudaimonistic justification for acting virtuously fails — but not, perhaps, all egoistic justification. For it can still be a matter of pride and integrity to do what is right, regardless of the consequences.
I’m looking forward to seeing Huemer’s reply to the “virtue-as-constitutive-of-well-being” strategy.
On the face of it, the neo-Aristotelean interpretation of Rand’s virtue theory implies only that selectively shirking the demands of virtue harms the agent’s interests, not that respecting others’ rights is a demand of virtue.
As long as virtue and vice are defined relative to a substantive conception of the individual agent’s self-interest, rather than defined relative to the requirements of a mutually advantageous scheme of social cooperation, congruence between virtue and rights will be very doubtful. This happy convergence of the good and the right is much more likely if we begin with a credible picture of human nature that emphasizes human hypersociality and the complex cultural background conditions required for the development of the norms and expectations behind well-functioning schemes of property rights. But that’s not what Rand offers us.
Another way to think about the problems in Rand’s transition from egoism to rights is to ask whether her moral and political thought has the resources to deal with disputes over the requirements of virtue and or the definition of justice or rights? How would she answer Locke when he says:
… though the Law of Nature be plain and intelligible to all rational creatures; yet men being biassed by their Interest, as well as ignorant for want of studying it, are not apt to allow of it as a Law binding to them in application of it to their particular cases.
The upshot of Locke’s thought here is that social order — the coordination of individual action in a peaceful, stable, ongoing scheme — requires that individuals regularly set aside their inevitably conflicting idiosyncratic conclusions about the requirements of virtue or justice and submit to a distinctively public rule of law. Effective coordination, social order, requires that individuals comply with public rules — with an official interpretation of rights — that they sometimes do not judge compatible with their private interpretation of the demands of virtue.
Now, it’s not clear to me that it is even permissible for a Randian egoist to follow a public rule when (a) she judges compliance to be contrary to her self-interest and (b) she is sure her noncompliance won’t be detected. This does not seem to me a promising basis for social order and civil society.