Does Ayn Rand Miss the Social Point of Morality?

by Will Wilkinson on February 2, 2010

Today is Ayn Rand’s birthday! What better way to celebrate than to apply the cold light of reason to her philosophy?

Below is a cleaned-up version of an email I sent to the participants in this month’s Cato Unbound on Rand’s moral and political thought in an attempt to stir the pot a bit.  When Doug Rasmussen wrote a post replying to my pot-stirring, I realized it would be helpful to readers to see just what it is that he is replying to. So here you have it…

As the discussion at Cato Unbound has developed, it has become fairly clear that Douglas Rasmussen, Neera Badhwar, and Roderick Long all share a similar neo-Aristotelian interpretation of Rand’s ethics. Or perhaps “reconstruction” would be a better term. In any case, it seems fairly clear to me that this form of eudaimonist virtue ethics, however attractive it may be, simply was not Rand’s stated theory. The theory she stated in “The Objectivist Ethics” is ambiguous between the “survival” and “flourishing” interpretation. But her later (more mature?) essay, “Causality and Duty” isn’t ambiguous at all. It is perhaps the most adamant brief for rationality-as-instrumental and morality-as-prudence ever written.

Back when I was a grad student and an Objectivist, I found the squishy Aristotelian flourishing types incredibly frustrating. (I say “squishy” with love.) “Can they read!?” I’d shout at my computer screen incredulously. Now that I find what I take to be Rand’s moral theory simply implausible, I find the squishy Aristotelian flourishing types admirably charitable. But I still consider the neo-Aristotelian line a revisionist interpretation or rational reconstruction. Is it really helpful to posterity to represent Rand as a laissez faire Bill Bennett?

Let me say a little something about one reason I drifted away from Rand. Starting from a morality-as-rationality, rationality-as-instrumental-to-survival interpretation of Rand (the interpretation obviously supported by the relevant texts!), I started to find contractarian theorists of morality-as-instrumental rationality, such as David Gauthier, pretty interesting. And through Gauthier (and James Buchanan) I came to better grasp the deep problem involved in getting just two instrumentally rational individuals to cooperate and capture the valuable surplus therefrom. It then occurred to me that there really may be a point after all in talking about morality as an institution separate from prudence. And that’s when I abandoned Randian egoism for David Schmidtzean “moral dualism” (a convenient half-way house for recovering non-neo-Aristotelian Randians). The rest is history!

Anyway, the point isn’t my intellectual biography. The point is that Rand seems to me to have missed something totally fundamental to morality: a concern for it’s social, coordinating function. The well-known social dilemmas that emerge from what Deidre McCloskey usefully calls a “Prudence Only” view of human behavior draws our attention to the need for an institution that brings separate and often conflicting interests into harmony. I don’t think there’s any denying that Rand brought much-needed attention back to the profound ethical importance of the cultivation of personal virtue in pursuit of excellence and happiness. But didn’t she sort of miss the social point of morality?

  • Morality is a wonderful topic.

    I've looked into how buddhist and anthroposophical views differ...

    Interesting post!

  • Jason
    I agree with Will about the interpretation of Rand's ethics. Moreover, I think "neo-Aristotelian" Randianism --- as well as the "neo-Aristotelianism" of Annas, Foot, Hursthouse, and others --- is not Aristotelian at all.

    All the stuff about happiness at the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics is cover-up and/or misdirection to keep the student/reader from appreciating the intrinsicist, duty-oriented character of Aristotle's moral philosophy. There is a lot of similar lip-service paid to happiness in Plato's Republic, but I don't think Plato really believed that stuff. Both Aristotle and Plato just knew they had to sell their duty-oriented thought to people who were concerned with their own happiness. Modern scholars who ignore the Stoic/Kant-esque character of the thought of Aristotle and Plato perplex me: the modern eudaimonist really just has a different view, and a highly unstable one at that. The linking of Rand to the "great tradition" of "Aristotelian" thought is a total fraud. She has far more in common with Epicurus, Hobbes, and Nietzsche.
  • Andy
    I'm afraid you've got a misplaced apostaphe in your last paragraph. "It's" is generally deployed as a contraction of "it is". The possessive of "it" is "its". You can read more here: http://www.grammarbook.com/punctuation/apostro.asp
  • You always miss what is to me the most elementary aspect of Ayn Rand's appeal. A lot of human philosophy, religion and ideology has worked to deny the very potent role that chance plays in all of our lives. Humanity evolved by chance; it's an accident that we exist at all. Early humans found themselves in a world where random happenstance often had incredible negative impact on their lives. So they invented religion, to deny this chance-- it's not just random, it's the will of god! They invented magic, they invented astrology, they invented fate....

    The modern form of this is bootstrapping rhetoric and the idea that your place in life is a product of your own agency. "My success is because of my virtue, your poverty because of your lack of virtue." Believing anything else would be to acknowledge the true but scary notion that we're not in control of a lot of our lives, and that random chance remains a huge sorting mechanism for material success and failure. And people can't deal with that, despite having all the opportunity to see smart, hard working people who fail and stupid, lazy people who live in the lap of luxury. There are many versions of this in American conservatism and libertarianism; Rand just takes it to an extreme, and lends to it an edge of moral certitude-- not only is it true that virtue sorts people between success and failure, to deny that is wicked or immoral.
  • srdv
    While I mostly agree with your point, I think it is a mistake to say that magic, astrology, etc were invented to deny chance. Based on my observations of various people, it looks like humans like to create narratives explaining how the world works. This wish to create explanatory narratives, rather then a hatred of random happenings, is why people have religion, magic, and even science.
  • Sarah
    You're right, though I'd say the belief that we can overcome chance is something humans need badly. The idea that will and effort can defeat fortune begins, I think, with Leon Battista Alberti and the humanists of his era. Modern scholarship might never have begun without such confidence...

    I read Atlas Shrugged as a deeply miserable and underconfident young person and it helped precisely because it made me feel I could determine my own fate. I didn't buy the business about egotism, thankfully, but I really needed an infusion of fanfare and glory and confidence in my daily life. I think a lot of people do. To function productively at all, you have to believe that your own efforts matter. And if it's partly an illusion ... well, I'd rather believe in an illusion that helps me live well, than become a basket case.
  • sam
    "Can you describe this institution, if it's other than the courts, and how it would bring harmony to conflicting interests?"

    Will is speaking of something primordial. Think of courtesy. Courteous behavior is a species of moral behavior. When we deal with one another in a courteous manner, we recognize that we each may have conflicting interests. Extending courtesy allows us to go about our daily lives without those conflicts escalating. Think of the many times in your life that, as a matter of courtesy, you yield to another's claim. Suppose you're in a supermarket, and you and someone else reach for the last can of soup of the shelf. Acting out of courtesy, you say, "Oh, that's OK, you go on and take it." (And really, it's the simple little things like this that make up almost the whole of our lives.) By your act of courtesy, you've resolved a conflict of interest. I think that's what he means by morality's "social, coordinating function".
  • "draws our attention to the need for an institution that brings separate and often conflicting interests into harmony."

    Can you describe this institution, if it's other than the courts, and how it would bring harmony to conflicting interests?
  • investoralist
  • In answer to your titular query, yes. But that's secondary. The reason she misses the social point of morality is that she ignores human psychology. That is, instead of basing her moral theory on empirical facts about human psychology, she tries to draw evaluative necessities from the imperative of survival. Had she done so with care, the whole thing might have made for an interesting exercise in conceptual analysis. But she didn't do even that.
  • MichaelM
    Will,

    Actually, you are the one who has missed the social point of morality, not Rand. Ethics is the philosophical science that defines the good for the individual, and is not a social science at all. The science that defines the good for the individual interrelating with other individuals in a society of men is politics, and you would have a tough time of it arguing that she ignored that.

    As Rand explained it, politics is the extension of ethics in the context of the individual into a social context. The ethical recognition that a cardinal necessity for a human being is autonomy in the application of reason to action in the service of life mandates the concept of individual rights in social interaction. Per Rand,

    "'Rights' are a moral concept — the concept that provides a logical transition from the principles guiding an individual's actions to the principles guiding his relationship with others — the concept that preserves and protects individual morality in a social context — the link between the moral code of a man and the legal code of a society, between ethics and politics. Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law." ["Man's Rights," The Virtue of Selfishness, 92]

    Note how Sparks123's answer is, simply put, the sense of Rand's morally based laissez-faire capitalism. While you were looking for the "social" in her morality, you should have been recognizing the morality of her society, the most benevolent scheme of human interrelationships ever formulated. It is impossible to disagree with her social morality without condoning, explicitly or implicitly, the use of force or the threat of force to take values from others or to dictate their choices, as altruists are wont to do.
  • ClayBarham
    At 105, it is not that Ayn Rand is bigger, but what she gave us that justifies what our founders described that is bigger. It is because we have all left things to chance and are now paying the price that makes what she said bigger. The Changing Face of Democrats on Amazon and claysamerica.com describes the 19th century Democrats who followed Jefferson and Madison, contrasted with modern Democrats who follow Rousseau and Marx, that being what Rand found of no worth as was the Old World. claysamerica.com
  • I agree that the neo-Aristotelian flourishing interpretation of Rand's ethics is a revisionist interpretation, and that the morality-as-rationality, rationality-as-instrumental-to-survival interpretation was Rand's actual view and is the one supported by her writings. And I certainly agree that it would be better for posterity if Rand's philosophy is understood accurately.

    But Will, when you're the one making these comments, that raises an obvious question: isn't this a confession of your own failure as editor of Cato Unbound? If you agree that the neo-Aristotelian interpretation is not Rand's actual view, then in a discussion of Rand such as the current one on Cato Unbound, shouldn't Rand's actual view be represented by at least one participant? And if you now regard Rand's ethics as implausible, and believe she missed something important about morality, doesn't that make it all the more important that when you organize a public serious discussion of Rand's ideas, you include someone who finds her actual view on ethics plausible and can answer these types of objections?

    The exclusion, of the one point of view that most clearly belonged in this Cato Unbound discussion, made reading it a very frustrating experience, seeing the participants repeatedly miss the point with no one there to point it out. I can think of at least four people who would have clearly been a good choice for representing the Objectivist point of view in the discussion: David Kelley, Will Thomas, Stephen Hicks, or myself. Including one such participant would have made the discussion much more interesting and much more informative, and I am frankly puzzled as to why you didn't choose to do so.
  • John
    Seems like you might be on board with a Gaus/Strawson/Baier style "social morality" approach to morality. I'm not sure what Rand is up to, though I still find her work exciting and interesting, but I think it must be something close to what Strawson calls an "individual ideal" rather than a social morality.
  • sam
    "The point is that Rand seems to me to have missed something totally fundamental to morality: a concern for it’s social, coordinating function."

    I'm surprised that anyone would be surprised at that. (I'm not saying you're surprised.) My take on Rand is that she saw the world through the wrong end of the telescope. Society for her is, I think, an artifact of exchanges between individuals. For her, the individual precedes any social arrangement involving other individuals. It's almost a kind of sociatel solipsism in which individuals make sporadic forays outside of themselves to secure benefits for themselves. Insofar as there is any coordination, it's epiphenomenal. I'd like to have seen her reaction to the private language argument.
  • Rand's social philosophy can be seen through the Trader Principle. That is, individuals improve their standing through free, voluntary exchange with other individuals. Individuals are clearly co-dependent on one another, but their relationships should be based on mutual benefit, not charity. Individuals disagree all the time, and that's fine. So long as they are not using force or fraud to settle their disagreements, why should it be the concern of society?
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