Put simply, she felt it was wrong to give someone else food if it meant your own family went hungry. But if you had plenty of means to provide for yourself and yours, then she felt it would be fine to give food to someone who was needy.
Watching the link I provided would flesh that out in greater detail.
Pointing to a YouTube video is not an argument. So if you’ve watched and understood, you should be able to explain in your own words what this “altruism or self-sacrifice” that doesn’t require people to “do without or otherwise harm themselves” is of which Ayn Rand so heartily proves, despite her emphatic declaration that altruists are evil and self-sacrifice is comparable to suicide.
I can see that it was a mistake to have edited my original snarky response to you.
I’ve explained twice now what she believed. I provided the link as evidence.
End of story.
It was your “original snarky response” I was responding to above – obviously. It was something along the lines of “Watching the video would help,” with no additional explanation.
In any case, your explanation amounts to saying self-sacrifice is fine, as long as it doesn’t involve sacrifice; altruism is fine, as long as your own needs come first. In other words, self-contradictory nonsense.
Then I apologize. I thought enough time had passed prior to your post for you to have been responding to the edited response.
As for the rest, there is a difference between saying someone is against self-sacrifice totally, completely and as a matter of principle, and saying that self-sacrifice is fine provided you can afford to engage in it without doing harm to yourself.
I’m unaware of any definition which holds that undue hardship (or hardship at all, for that matter) is a necessary element of altruism and self-sacrifice.
I didn’t watch the video but I’ve read a lot of Rand’s work. (I’m not an Objectivist myself.) Like a lot of philosophers/thinkers Rand takes words and explains how she’s defines them. (See Francis Schaeffer, father of the modern religious right, doing it with “personal peace” and “affluence.”) So it’s important to know what Rand means when she says “altruism” or “sacrifice” because she’s not necessarily using those words like you and I do in daily life.
Sacrifice: Something that costs you more than it benefits you.
Altruism: An ethical system that touts actions benefiting others and usually involving self-sacrifice.
Let’s say I happen to spend most Sundays helping homeless people acquire the proper clothing to wear for job interviews (don’t laugh, it’s a serious concern for people trying to get back on their feet). While I’m certainly paying a lot to help other people (in time if not in money) I derive an immense sense of satisfaction from helping folks get back on their feet. From an Objectivist standpoint I am not sacrificing anything as the cost I’m paying (in time or whatever) is less than the satisfaction I get from helping others. Therefore it doesn’t all under the purview of altruism as Rand defines it.
I think Starving Artist may have been better off saying Rand didn’t have a problem with showing a little good will towards our fellow human beings or even charities rather than to have used the words altruism and self-sacrifice.
Odesio
But notice that neither of these definitions require undue hardship upon the charitable party. The money Bill Gates is giving away, for example, is costing him more than it is benefitting him (in tangible terms anyway), and others are benefitting through his financial sacrifice. But neither is causing him or his family the slightest hardship.
And I used the terms altruism and self-sacrifice because they appeared in Gardner’s quote in the OP and were addressed by Ayn Rand herself in the linked clip.
She is not even named in many textbooks, surveys and introductions to moral and political philosophy.
Are you sure it’s costing him more than it’s benefitting him? He has more money than he knows what to do with, so, giving most of it away is no hardship. He can still buy anything he wants. So, it wouldn’t take much of a gain to outweigh that. And he appears to be purchasing what many others have tried to purchase after a life of amassing great wealth… a public legacy that is something other than the image, (or perceived image,) of how he amassed that wealth. And, on top of that, the publicity and image it creates makes his company more profitable. It’s a win-win for him. He can continue to grow the corporation he built with ruthless tactics, while changing the public perception of his tactics… The self-satisfaction alone must be immeasurable.
A crank and a loon read by other cranks and loons.
You might as well subscribe to Dianetics.
I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Many of the characters in Atlas Shrugged made extreme sacrifices in the name of their believes. For example Francisco d’Anconia didn’t have to allow his company to be destroyed. In fact, most of the great minds who followed Galt would have continued to be very wealthy if they had not gone on strike. Rand was against self-sacrice through force or coercion. IOW, people should not be made to give their wealth, freedom or lives in the name of another.
I’m not saying the study of law is a branch of philosophy. I’m saying law itself is. That’s how we end up with laws in the first place: somebody decides to make a rule embodying a particular philosophy.
No, sir. You are abusing the word “philosophy.” A value-system is not a philosophy, not in and of itself.
No, but it’s a logical extension of philosophy.
No. A philosophy can be, or incorporate, or support a value-system. But value-systems – and laws – are much older than philosophy. So far as we know, there was no philosophy of any kind in Hammurabi’s Babylon. With the arguable exception of Ecclesiastes, there is no philosophy in the Old Testament (certainly not in Proverbs).
Regarding altruism: In her private life, Rand was actually an extremely generous person, eager to help out people who shared her values. And that’s the crucial distinction. She was being generous, not out of some duty, and not out of pity or self-sacrifice. Her actions were consistent with her values, and that’s what integrity is all about. If she had sent a check to the Communist Party, that would have been self-sacrifice.
And regarding philosophy: A real philosophy can be broken down into four areas: Metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and politics. Rand wrote and spoke extensively on all four.
Yes, but the metaphysics and epistemology were really and dishonestly afterthoughts. See post #16.
No one’s claiming Objectivism isn’t a philosophy, just that it wasn’t sufficiently interesting or rigorous for professional philosophers to bother with it.
Because, of course, you came up with the doctrine of falsifiability all on your own.
It should be noted that, while Randian objectivism is by no means popular, there are professional philosophers (and academics of other types) who take her seriously. E.g. the Ayn Rand Society and members such as Tara smith at UT Austin; see also Tibor Machan at Auburn or Chris Matthew Sciabarra at NYU.
For what it’s worth, her metaphysics were rubbish, her epistemology brain-dead; she rarely took the time to understand the concepts for which she sought to provide answers. But I do believe that something like a eudaimonistic egoism, in the Randian vein, is the truth.