What's The Straight Dope on Objectivism?

Factual Questions
41

Woops, I just realised I’ve been saying Liberalism where I meant Libertarianism. Bah.

It’s possible that I’ve misread of course. But I suspect that to Ayn Rand, she considered saying, “But don’t be an ass” to be too obvious that she never said it clearly. Plus she was arguing against altruism. It’s hard to say “Don’t be altruistic, but care about people” in a way that isn’t wishy-washy.

Well, here to break it down into a sort of logic pyramid:

  1. Capitalism rewards you for the honest work you did, in a directly linear respect to how much work you did.
  2. One person, in Capitalism, can earn more money than any other 10 because he can improve the abilities of others enough to make his value worth that of any ten workers.
  3. The lower paid workers are, however, also doing honest work. And so must honestly be paid a value equal to the work they did. To do otherwise would be unethical.
  4. Anyone who does do honest work, is not a “bad person.”
  5. Since the primary method by which value as a worker is assigned is to how much value you add to society, only by advancing society can you make money.
  6. Since the greatest way to advance society is to advance the abilities of the rest of society (i.e. to increase productivity), the more you benefit the rest of society, the more money you earn.
  7. And since the primary goal is to do well for yourself, the most moral thing you can do in life is to aid those who are honest in doing honest work, and do it better than they could have without you.

Her argument against Libertarianism is that it is a mix of her ideas with anarchism. In an anarchic system, the freedom of the individual are held as supreme. But of course that’s fundamentally self-defeating as people have to live among others, and work with others to achieve advancement. As a quick and dirty, “Leave me alone to do my thing” in regards to the government, the Libertarian and Objectivist ideas might come to the same proscription, but in the long run, Objectivism assumes that you will be working with other people in an honest fashion as that’s the most profitable to yourself, not freedom.

Not Rand, but here’s a FAQ from an Objectivist site:

42

Would you give an example of such a poor argument?

43

It’s been years, but I’ll try. One that I particularly recall was based on her caricature of common-sense morality. According to her, common-sense morality claims that every self-interested act is evil, and that the only act that has any worth (according to common-sense morality) is an act in which one’s own self interest is ignored (or, better, sacrificed) for the interest of another. Thus, common-sense morality makes morality your mortal enemy, is opposed to the values of life and self-preservation, and should be abandoned in favor of rational egoism. The problem with this argument, of course, is that her characterization of common sense morality is total bullshit, a strawman invented to give her argument traction. Real common sense morality (as opposed to her made-up version) would not say (for example) that you are morally obligated to rush into a burning house and die if by doing so you could save the life of a stranger. But this is what she is accusing common sense morality of claiming. Of course, if common-sense morality said that, it should be abandoned. But it doesn’t say that (and even if it did, rational egoism would not be the only alternative). So her argument sucks, and sucks in a way that makes me question her honesty and integrity as a philosopher: she had to know that she was setting up a strawman; she just didn’t care.

44

I seriously doubt that Rand would refer to altruism as “common-sense” morality; she’d be more likely to characterize *her own *morality as “common-sense.”

Be that as it may, I wouldn’t consider this a strawman argument at all. Most people would consider this sacrifice to be noble and heroic, the epitome of their ethical system. Not that such an action would necessarily be a “moral obligation,” but even better, an act of self-sacrifice that was *chosen. *And if he actually lost his life in that act, he’d practically be granted sainthood. Hardly what I’d call a strawman.

45

The Straight Dope on Objectivism is that it is a “philosophy” where none of its adherents is actually capable of its complete comprehension, and to which no one capable of its complete comprehension would ever adhere.

46

That’s just the thing. Almost everyone would admire such a person, but almost no one would say that person was obligated to do what she did. There’s a strong distinction between these two attitudes. Apparently, Rand claimed that most people would say that person was obligated to sacrifice herself. If she did make that claim, she was incorrect.

Presumably, from what I’ve gathered from this thread, even an Objectivist can consistently admire a self-sacrificing act, if self-sacrifice was in some sense in one’s own interest. (Survival isn’t the only interest. That’s what I’d say, anyway, and I don’t get the impression Rand would disagree.) If I’m right, if the Objectivist can admire the burning building runner just as I (an Altruist) can, and if her argument has been reported accurately, then I think its right to say her argument as described is a pretty bad one.

-FrL-

47

No, Rand would not admire someone risking his own life in order to save a total stranger. That act would totally disgust her. She would, however, consider it heroic to risk one’s life to save the life of a loved one. To Rand, virtue is the act of acquiring and protecting one’s values, and one can value another human being to the point of not wanting to live without them. If life without that person would be unbearable, risking one’s own life wouldn’t be a sacrifice. ***Not ***to attempt to save them would be unthinkable to her.

To Rand, there are no unchosen obligations. If you choose to love and value a person, then you should act accordingly. But to choose to value the life of a random stranger above one’s own life . . . she would call that an unspeakable evil.

48

If this is a correct interpretation of Rand, then its interesting, because its in line with a thread in contemporary ethics which ties moral obligation to commitments like the one you describe. No names come to mind but I think there was an article called “The Ethics of Care” in which the basic idea was put forth. To my recollection, this view in ethics is often associated with feminism.

-FrL-

49

Perhaps a nitpick, but… I don’t believe Rand would consider that act in and of itself to be unspeakably evil-- she would simply consider it to be morally wrong (since her morality is one of self interest). What she would consider unspeakably evil would be someone teaching that the highest moral goal is selflessness and that the best way to demonstrate that selflessness would be to give one’s life for a person who was of no value to you.

50

Well, she didn’t use the phrase “common-sense morality”; I can’t remember what phrase she used. But her alleged target was the morality that was accepted by most people, and I think she badly mischaracterizes such morality.

To give another example, IIRC, she claims that according to the common morality any action performed purely for one’s own benefit is evil. But virtually noone really believes this; it is not an element of common morality. She would have us believe that if I have a night alone, and I decide to go to the video store and rent a DVD and watch it by myself purely for my own enjoyment, the morality subscribed to by the majority of people would condemn this action as wicked. Of course you might find some nutbags in professional philosophy who would think this (e.g., Peter Singer is probably committed to this by his theoretical commitments), but to claim that this is an element of our common morality is the worst kind of strawman.

51

That’s correct. Another example she put forward in one of the interviews linked here would be funding education for mentally handicapped children at the expense of funding education for the gifted. Funding education for mentally handicapped kids is fine, so long as it isn’t your primary value. But taking funding away from something that represents your highest values to give it to someone needy is to her, evil.

Rand is perhaps one of the most misunderstood writers around, mainly because her belief system is both hard to grasp and polarizing, so her enemies misrepresent her or hate her without understanding, and her friends buy what she syas without getting the gist of the underlying philosophy.

I’ve known ‘objectivists’ who think that Rand taught them to be selfish - to disdain others, to ignore the needs of anyone but themselves. But Rand hated hedonists, and it’s clear that her rational egoism is much more complex than, “me me me me”. On the other hand, I’ve known opponents of Rand who think the same thing - that what she represents pure selfishness of the, “kick the smaller guy off the curb, I’m walking here” variety.

Rand believed in using reason to understand the world, and that ‘proper’ values champion the virtue of reason and the right of individuals to act on their own behalf and not be obligated by force to help others.

And altruism is not synonymous with charity. Rand had no problem with charity. In Atlas Shrugged, Galt’s Gulch was full of charity cases, in a sense. For example, if there’s a writer who’s work you value, and that writer needs surgery and couldn’t afford it, Rand would have no problem helping that writer. The act is not altruistic, because you are extending your own values by supporting someone who creates things you admire and want to be in the world. On the other hand, if a writer who representing everything Rand hated needed surgery, she would consider it evil to take money from things she valued and give it to the writer, simply because he ‘needed’ it more.

Altruism is the underlying philisophy of government social welfare - the notion that you must work a certain percentage of your life and give the proceeds to someone else, simply because a third party has decided that they are needy and therefore you must supply their needs. Rand was deeply offended by a tax system that would take money away from you that you wanted to use for your own child’s education, because someone decided that another person needed your money more. And then perhaps the government would give a grant or subsidy to your child for school, taking the money from yet another person against their will.

The flip side of this is that Rand would never demand that someone else had an obligation to help her. To use force to take what you want from others is every bit as evil, and is just the other side of the same coin.

BTW, if you watch the Donaghue interview, listen to her ideas about what to do about the middle east - it shows where Rand could go horribly wrong, and where her dogmatic thinking could take her right off the rails. Her opinion was that since the people in the middle east could not develop their oil on their own, they had no ownership rights to it, and therefore the U.S. should just walk in and take it all. She claims that all the development effort the west put into building the oil infrastructure gave them the moral authority to just take the oil. Not only is that boneheaded thinking, it’s actually the antithesis of what she claims to believe.

But she got stuck on one small aspect of the situation (that the people in the Middle East are irrational and incapable of acting on their own, and being ‘subsidized’ by the rational), and missed everything else about the situation (such that the oil infrastructure was built on contracts and agreements between interested parties, for mutual benefit. And that the middle eastern people COULD build their oil infrastructure - by contracting it out to others for fair value. Which they did).

52

“Ethics of altruism” is the phrase you’re looking for. And you’re right, her entire argument for ethical egoism is to pose a ridiculous strawman and then commit an excluded middle fallacy by asserting that her view is the only alternative.

Here’s a few quotes from a short essay called “The Virtue of Selfishness” that appears in one of my intro philosophy anthologies.

“Ethics of Emergencies” is in some ways even worse. She argues (I use the term loosely) that it’s morally permissible to help others (aside from people you value, that is) in emergencies, but not in “metaphysically normal” circumstances. So if someone is poor and starving to death as a result of the poverty, you shouldn’t help him because that’s an ordinary part of the human condition, but if he’s shipwrecked and drowning you can pull him from the water because that’s not a “metaphysically normal” state.

Rand is scoff-worthy. Ethical egoism itself isn’t scoffed at by philosophers, as there are arguments to be made for it and various people have argued coherently and more or less compellingly for it. But Rand? Rand couldn’t tell a sound argument from her left elbow.

53

This is exactly the type of thing I was thinking of. It is such a brazen strawman. Like I said, the obviousness of it raises two concerns for me. The first is about Rand’s integrity: though a bad philosopher, she was by no means stupid, and so I question the integrity of anyone who would advance such an argument. If she really did think this, then this shows she was a dogmatist whose rigidity prevented any type of critical thinking when applied to her own writings.

The second is that it should be obvious to any reader that this is a strawman. But so many laypersons claim to find Rand convincing. How can an intelligent person be convinced by such a weak argument? I am a philosopher, and committed to the idea that ordinary people can use critical thinking to come to reasoned conclusions about important issues, if only they apply themselves; and people convinced by Rand’s philosophical writings really make me despair sometimes.

54

Your example is implicitly self-contradictory. Being poor may be a result of misfortune, or it might be because of laziness. You’re assuming the former, and assuming that such is what she would be referring to. That’s pretty doubtful.

Misfortune resulting in poverty is no different from misfortune resuting in being shipwrecked.

Now true, she might have been blissfully unaware that people can go broke due to simple bad luck, and so gave an example where she assumed herself to only be talking about lazy people. But the example of being shipwrecked clearly shows that helping someone due to bad luck is fine.

55

Trying to avoid GD territory…

It seems pretty clear to me that what Rand is responding to here is the altruists’ own straw-man, that of the selfish brute clawing his way over the corpses of those blocking the path to his goals.

And, certainly, arguments in favor of a self-interested philosophy are commonly met with protests that man will surely degenerate into a murderous greed-monger without God or government to keep him in check.

56

Mebbe. But that doesn’t make her own arguments any better. Two wrongs don’t make a right, and two strawmen don’t make…uh…something good.

57

Ayn Rand did indeed condemn “altruism”, defining it as “selflessness”. She did not condemn charitableness or benevolence, however.

58

Well, of course nowadays Rand’s portait of “the ethics of altruism” seems a bit of a straw man. But think back to the period she was formed by. The communists REALLY DID equate the industrialist and the gangster. People really did disdain commerce. There really was a fascist ideology, a socialist ideology, a communist ideology, and it really did exhalt the collective and the sacrifice of the individual for the good of the group.

And communism wasn’t just an ideology that was followed in Soviet Russia, lots of people all over the world found it appealing. “Of course, I don’t agree with everything Stalin did, but you have to admit, blah, blah, blah.” Once upon a time people took communist ideology seriously even if they didn’t agree with it, there used to be real life ideological communists and fascists. Nowadays we dismiss such people as raving lunatics or sophists, but they were a lot harder to dismiss in the 30s and 40s and even the 50s.

59

Uh…do you read these boards much? I would call that a fair characterization of the philosophical beliefs of the majority of Dopers. Not all of them, no, and the SDMB isn’t society at large, thank the thousand little Gods, but that’s the prevailing attitude here, at least in most political threads.

60

Are you serious? I don’t recall ever seeing a doper espouse that position. Can you cite an example of someone claiming that any action performed purely for one’s own benefit is evil? You will find people who claim it is evil if it is at the expense of others, but I doubt anyone would argue that any action purely motivated one’s own benefit is evil, no matter how it affects others. Even Kant (whom Rand thought was the greatest source of evil in all history) didn’t argue that. He merely argued that such actions couldn’t be moral, which is different from arguing that they are immoral.