Objections
to Objectivism
Is
Stealing Selfish?
Copyright
© 2001 by John
Ku
The Conflicts
of Men's Interests
Other
things being equal, stealing is wrong even when you can get away with
it. Stealing when you can get away with it is (sometimes) in your
self-interest. Therefore, ethical egoism must be wrong; there is more
to morality than doing what is in your self-interest. This, I
believe, is the simplest, most intuitive argument against egoism.
Parallel
arguments can be fashioned substituting killing or rape or any other
obviously and uncontroversially immoral action in the place of
stealing, but in order to make my arguments more manageable, I shall
restrict the discussion to just this particular act. The
first premise seems to me to be undeniable. I'm even inclined to
think that a theory that would deny that simply does not satisfy the
semantic conditions for being a morality. The so-called ethical
egoist proposing that we ought to steal in such cases is no longer an
inept moral philosopher; they will have become a nihilist questioning
why we should be moral at all. It seems that in order to propound a
viable morality, then, the egoist must deny the second premise. This
is the path Rand takes primarily by denying that it is ever in one's
rational self-interest to act against those of others:
There are no conflicts of interests among rational men. . . A man's 'interests' depend on the kind of goals he chooses to pursue, his choice of goals depends on his desires, his desires depend on his values – and, for a rational man, his values depend on the judgment of his mind. . . A rational man never holds a desire or pursues a goal which cannot be achieved directly or indirectly [i.e. by trading] by his own effort. . . He never seeks or desires the unearned. . . The mere fact that two men desire the same job does not constitute proof that either of them is entitled to it or deserves it, and that his interests are damaged if he does not obtain it. (The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 50-6)
There
are no conflicts of interests among rational men, according to Rand,
because interests depend on desires, desires are only rational when
its object is (fully) deserved, and no two people can be (equally)
deserving of the same object. On an alternate reading, interests do
not conflict among rational men because a desire for some object is
only an interest if it is deserved, and again, the premise regarding
the exclusivity of desert. Every single step of either argument is
wrong. There is no inconceivability in two people being equally
deserving of a job yet because of budget considerations only one
being able to be hired. Thus, desert does not appear to be exclusive.
But then, both people can have interests in the same object while it
is incompatible for them both to have that object. Conflicts of
interests are thereby generated.
The more significant
objection, though, is Rand's conflation of the notions of desires and
desert with that of interests. The sort of interests that are
relevant to moral philosophy is that which deals with objective
benefits and harms not conscious preferences or concerns. Claims
about what is in my interests are to be sharply distinguished from
such claims as that I am interested in philosophy. Of course, they
are not completely unrelated, but the main point is that something
can be in my interests, i.e. I would be better off with it, even if I
am not consciously concerned about it or desire it. If I am
temporarily depressed and suicidal and do not desire to continue
living, the fact remains that it is in my best interests to do so. Or
if I desire to drink a glass of water only because I am, through no
fault of my own, ignorant that it is poisoned, it is still not in my
interests to do so. Hence, they do not depend on goals and desires in
the way Rand supposes.
Furthermore, interests are distinct
from what is deserved. Hitler may not have deserved to live but
surely it was in his interests to continue to do so. Or, if by
sheer luck, I find a winning lottery ticket on the ground, surely it
benefits me even though I did nothing to deserve it. And if someone
comes along and steals all the money I won from it, my interests
would be damaged despite the fact that I never earned it to begin
with. It does not even seem plausible to suppose that it is
irrational to desire it – as if a truly rational person upon
coming across it would be absolutely indifferent to it because it was
unearned, not even seeking to cash it so he can go buy more
philosophy books – or supposing that he did cash it, that he
would not care if some burglar was stealing it from him.
In
short, interests concern what would be good or bad for an agent, what
would constitute a benefit or harm; deserts concern what an agent
ought to receive or is worthy of receiving on the basis of some good
or virtue they possess (or vice). This would appear to pose quite a
problem for an egoist wishing to argue that it is not in my rational
self-interest to ever act in a way that conflicts with those of
others on the basis of some facts about desert. In fact, it would
seem to pose a significant problem for egoists to even formulate a
valid notion of desert. Desert is primarily a deontological notion,
but why would an egoist care what people deserve in this sense? An
egoist by definition does not care about others for their own sake;
he cannot see them as worthy of anything except that which it will
benefit his own self to give them. As an egoist the only valid
understanding of desert one can achieve, then, is that the good or
virtue possessed by some agent that makes him worthy of receiving
(i.e. deserving of) some benefit consists of the fact that that agent
will thereby provide some benefit to oneself. There is no other
meaning of good or virtue for the egoist except conducivity to one's
self-interest. But if this is so, then the claim that it is in one's
self-interest for, say, someone else to get the job because they
deserve it, is utterly tautologous and vacuous when interpreted as
coming from a consistent egoist. One may as well have argued that it
is in one's self-interest for them to get the job because it is in
one's self-interest for them to get the job! The extent to which such
a claim does not appear to be vacuous is the extent to which it is
parasitic upon a substantive, deontological account of desert that is
incompatible with the egoist's.
Despite all of that, let us
suppose for sake of argument that there are some ways around these
difficulties and that Rand's claim regarding the absence of conflicts
of interests among rational men were defensible. Although this would
at first appear to help the egoist's case, on closer inspection, it
seems that even if it were true, it may necessitate altruism rather
than support egoism! It is widely recognized among philosophers that
there are two distinct sources of rationality: self-interest and
morality. (The egoist of course equates the two, but to do so at this
point would beg the question.) Now we can see that even if there were
no conflicts of interests among rational men, we can ask the further
question: as a result of which rationality? It would be of no help to
Rand's case if the sorts of reasons that she had to bring up to
convince you of this went beyond merely self-regarding reasons. If
the reason there are no conflicts among rational men is that rational
men follow a morality of altruism the purpose of which is to resolve
conflicts, that can hardly be regarded as making egoism more tenable.
In the following sections then, I intend to show how in order to
defend such a claim, Rand indeed had to sneak in reasons that are not
purely self-interested.
To Ayn Rand as Confused Utilitarian