Objections to Objectivism: A Critique of Ayn Rand's Ethics

Objections to Objectivism
A Critique of Ayn Rand's Ethics
Copyright © 2001 by John Ku

Table of Contents

Preface

Part I: Is Selfishness Good?
1. The Argument from Theory of Values
2. The Argument from Sacrifice and the Badness of Altruism

Part II: Is Stealing Selfish?
3. The Conflicts of Men's Interests
4. Ayn Rand as Confused Utilitarian
5. Ayn Rand as Confused Kantian
6. Ayn Rand as Confused Humean
7. Ayn Rand as Confused Virtue Ethicist
8. Ayn Rand as Rule Egoist

Part III: Epilogue
9. How You Can Eat Your Cake and Have It Too
10. Conclusion
11. Suggested Readings for (Ex)Objectivists

The Correct View: (2006)
I think I've now solved the philosophical questions of morality, and reasons more generally (with my coauthor Howard Nye). I hope to update this at some point to relate Rand's views to the correct one, explaining what she got right and where she went wrong. In the meantime though, you can read the correct view in a convenient, pamphlet form. There is also a longer, more elaborated version here.

Now technically, an egoist could actually agree with the account of reasons we give there while still trying to maintain his egoism. This is because the theory we lay out is an abstract, meta-ethical one. In order to derive substantive results, one would have to supplement it with further empirical information about human psychology. Thus, the arguments in my original critique above are still very relevant insofar as someone might still try to apply Rand's arguments for egoism at this intermediate level of abstraction.

Though our theory of reasons is logically consistent with egoism, I do think that realizing what the nature of reasons are makes it harder to maintain an egoist position. I suspect that anyone still drawn towards egoism is horribly abusing evolutionary psychology and I would strongly urge them to read some good, contemporary evolutionary psychology on altruism. (Frans de Waal's Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals, while probably not perfect philosophically, would be a very good place to start.)

The crucial point that many people don't fully realize is that you are not your genes. You are a conscious being -- more exactly, a particular psychological system that a combination of your genes and environment has produced. Your genes may "act" selfishly but that doesn't mean you necessarily do. And the fact that your genes shaped your psychology to serve its "selfish" purposes is no more relevant to what you should do than your parents' purposes in producing you would be. I think genes basically never shape psychology to care about the genes' own purposes. So, for instance, rather than making dogs have the concept of gene replication and care directly about that, genes program them to care about food and sex, etc.

Similarly, in order to serve its goal of self-replication, genes very often produce genuinely altruistic motivations and emotions. Consider this from a prehistorical evolutionary perspective. Beings capable of reasoning about the means to their ends are only a very, very recent adaptation. It would be entirely impractical for genes to program minds to care for offspring/social groups only as a means to selfish ends before those minds are capable of reliably reasoning about means and ends. (A dog, for instance, would otherwise have had to reason that caring for its young though costly in the short run would have some long term benefit to it.) What happened instead is that in social animals, these activites were too important to be left for unreliable conscious calculations so the genes set up the minds to care intrinsically about such things through built-in emotions like sympathy, love, and later, even guilt and shame. So, even when humans did evolve with some better (though certainly still by no means perfectly reliable) means-end reasoning capability, evolution, as always, re-used the same designs that had worked in the past and gave humans those same emotions to intrinsically care about others and cooperate with them.

Of course I am not saying that the mere fact that our emotions favor something gives us reasons to act in accordance with them. It is the fact that the fundamental principles structuring our deliberation would favor endorsing those emotions along with their built-in motivational tendencies that grounds our reasons. When evolutionary psychology is understood and applied in the right way, I think it becomes clear that the point of having this deliberative system on top of our emotional system shared with other animals was not to radically change our values. Rather, it was to pursue largely the same goals and concerns our emotions direct us towards, but in a more flexible way that can adapt them to new situations and new information.

Finally, if you agree with all this but try to maintain that this is still egoism because you are caring about the objects of your emotions and motivations, then I'll agree that "egoism" is true but point out that you've now redefined it as the rather uninteresting thesis that you care about the things you care about.