Objections
to Objectivism
Is
Stealing Selfish?
Copyright
© 2001 by John
Ku
Ayn Rand as
Confused Humean
It
might be suggested in response to the last chapter that though the
reasons offered by Rand are indeed present in other altruist
moralities, it is still self-interested because after all, to act
against them would be to lose the value of one's rationality.
Obviously, this is an unconvincing argument. First of all, it
concedes altruism. Although it may hold that we have another,
self-interested reason to act morally, it must still concede the fact
that there must first have been an independent reason for me to think
that I ought to do so, otherwise, I would not have thought that I
would be losing the value of my rationality for I would not have
thought I would be acting irrationally at all in the first place!
Also, it borders on psychological egoism and seems to rest on a
confusion similar to the one between interests and desires or
concerns. A self-interested reason is more than simply a reason
possessed by the self.
There is a similar argument that tries
to reduce reasons for acting morally to self-interest by claiming
that in not being moral, one would lose one's integrity. At
first, this seems no better than the first and I had dismissed it as
such. There is, however, a more charitable interpretation of this
provided by Hume's account of morality. Hume held a moral sense
theory in which the good was simply that which our innate feelings
approved of and the vicious was that which it disapproved of. As
Korsgaard summarizes Hume in her book, Sources of Normativity:
Since people love those who have useful and agreeable qualities, and since the perception of a lovable quality in ourselves causes pride, virtue is a natural cause of pride, and vice in the same way of humility. And since pride is a pleasing sentiment and humility a painful one, we have a natural desire to be proud of ourselves and to avoid the causes of humility. This gives us a natural desire to acquire the virtues and avoid the vices. . . Morality provides a set of pleasures of its own. . . And morality provides these feelings regardless of whether you think that morality is justified or not. This fact enables Hume to add the familiar claim that virtue is its own reward to his list of the ways in which virtue promotes self-interest without any circularity at all. (p. 56, 60)
Thus, under Hume's morality, acting morally is in our self-interest because we gain the pleasure of feeling pride and acting immorally is against our self-interest because we would disapprove of ourselves. Even though this seems far from any of the standard Objectivist accounts of morality, I have found through discussions with many of them that when those standard solutions are found wanting, a sufficiently large proportion of them resort to some account resembling Hume's to warrant addressing this argument. Although I am aware that it is seemingly incompatible with many passages from Rand's writings, there are also some that seem to suggest or support this type of argument. Most notably:
The capacity to experience pleasure or pain is innate in a man's body; it is part of his nature, part of the kind of entity he is. He has no choice about it, and he has no choice about the standard that determines what will make him experience the physical sensation of pleasure or of pain. What is that standard? His life. (Virtue of Selfishness, p. 8)
So, it is not uncommon
to hear Objectivists argue that there is a great pleasure in
achieving some value by earning it through productive means that
cannot be achieved by gaining the same object through parasitic
means, presumably because there is an innate psychological mechanism
approving of the former and disapproving of the latter. Rand
herself makes claims such as that happiness is only possible to the
rational, productive man (though I think this is better interpreted
as making a claim to the effect that the concept of happiness
requires more than a mere internal psychological quality in the same
way that a drug might produce qualitatively identical physiological
states as what is felt when one is in love but we are only willing to
call such a feeling love when it is produced by certain causes and
not others.)
At any rate, whether or not Objectivism
officially subscribes to such an account, I'm hoping that the mere
elaboration and depiction of this argument as founded on a Humean
basis was sufficient to undermine any plausibility it may have had.
Nevertheless, I shall sketch a few of its numerous objections. First
is the fact that it places the value of morality subordinate to
pleasure. Thus, though it may be that because of our current state,
being moral is the best means to the greatest pleasure (though even
this seems to me to be patently false) this is only a contingent
matter. If one were able to get such pleasure by plugging into a
machine, this life would be just as good as the moral life and any
means of securing such a life would be justified as well. (I'm not
sure this objection would apply equally well to Hume's account of
morality since unlike Rand, he does not seek to reduce the moral to
the selfish, merely to show that they coincide.)
Also, if this
is egoism, it is only so in a weak sense. It is not the sort of
egoism from which one can infer that charity is not important or that
we need not take others' interests into account when we act, etc. It
might be objected that though this may be true for others that if
they were not benevolent and generous, etc., they would disapprove of
themselves, but it's not true for me after reading Ayn Rand's books.
But this only strengthens the force of my next objection which is
that it walks the fine line between ethical egoism and nihilism. In
order to avoid being an arbitrary, unverifiable and unfalsifiable
claim, I would think that each person must be the final judge of what
is and is not pleasurable for him. So ultimately, I don't see how it
can avoid being reduced to the claim that morality consists simply of
doing what you feel is right. If someone can rape, pillage and murder
without feeling guilty at all, they would be no more immoral than
anyone else according to this account. In short, anyone considering
this view of morality would be more aptly termed a Subjectivist than
an Objectivist.
To Ayn Rand as Confused Virtue Ethicist