Objections
to Objectivism
Is
Selfishness Good?
Copyright
© 2001 by John
Ku
The Argument
from Sacrifice and the Badness of Altruism
Although
to my knowledge, Rand never explicitly formulates this as an
argument, many Objectivists seem to interpret certain passages in
which Rand describes the nature of altruism and sacrifice as proof of
its rejection and only alternative, egoism; it definitely seems to be
meant at the very least as a supplement to her argument for egoism.
One such passage on sacrifice is especially suggestive of the
argument that since altruism must necessarily advocate sacrifice, it
defeats itself by endorsing the giving up of the good for the less
good or the evil:
"Sacrifice" is the surrender of a greater value for the sake of a lesser one or of a nonvalue. Thus, altruism gauges a man's virtue by the degree to which he surrenders, renounces or betrays his values. The rational principle of conduct is the exact opposite: always act in accordance with the hierarchy of your values, and never sacrifice a greater value to a lesser one. . . Without such a hierarchy, neither rational conduct nor considered value judgments nor moral choices are possible. (The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 48)
This interpretation receives further support from the following passage from Galt's speech in Atlas Shrugged:
"Sacrifice" does not mean the rejection of the evil for the sake of the good, but of the good for the sake of the evil. . . The creed of sacrifice is a morality for the immoral – a morality that declares its own bankruptcy by confessing that it cannot impart to men any personal stake in virtues or values. . . By its own confession, it is impotent to teach men to be good. . ." (reprinted in For the New Intellectual, p. 172)
The
key premise, of course, is the claim that sacrifice is the surrender
of a greater value for the sake of a lesser one, but as one might
anticipate from the mention of the distinction between agent-relative
and agent-neutral value at the end of the last section, this rests on
a gross distortion of the ordinary concept of sacrifice. A sacrifice
is not "the rejection of the good for the sake of the evil,"
it is the surrender of some of one's own agent-relative values for
the sake of one that is of greater (agent-neutral) value despite its
being a lesser agent-relative value for you or perhaps none at all.
In other words, sacrifice is the giving up of some of one's own
personal interests for the sake of other, greater, impersonal (at
least with respect to one's own person) values. (I
have benefited from comments made in Michael Huemer's essay, "Why
I am not an Objectivist," regarding this point.) Thus,
sacrifice is indeed "the surrender of a greater value for the
sake of a lesser one or of a nonvalue" but only in the narrow
context of one's own agent-relative values.
Only if one is an
egoist will one equate this notion of sacrifice with the one Rand
describes because one thinks that the only things of value are one's
own agent-relative values, that is, that there is no greater context
of values outside of one's own agent-relative values, but then this
is ipso facto not a valid argument for it presupposes egoism!
The view of the nature of sacrifice that this argument must rely on,
is a consequence, or perhaps even a restatement, of the denial that
there can be anything of value beyond one's own interests. For that
very reason, it cannot be used as independent evidence to support
it.
There are other arguments
similar to this that Rand seems to offer that argue directly from the
nature of altruism:
What is the moral code of altruism? The basic principle of altruism is that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value. . . The irreducible primary of altruism, the basic absolute, is self-sacrifice – which means; self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial, self-destruction – which means: the self as a standard of evil, the selfless as a standard of the good. (Philosophy: Who Needs It, p. 74)
Elsewhere, she says:
Altruism declares that any action taken for the benefit of others is good, and any action taken for one's own benefit is evil. Thus the beneficiary of an action is the only criterion of moral value – and so long as that beneficiary is anybody other than oneself, anything goes. (The Virtue of Selfishness, x)
This
is altruism, she says. This is wrong. Therefore, egoism must be
right. I could not imagine a more clear-cut case of a false dilemma
or straw man fallacy. Either all and only self-interest is evil or
all and only self-interest is good. This is the dilemma Rand would
have you believe we face. Surely the Good must lie somewhere
in the mean! In short, altruism does not commit us to the claim that
self-sacrifice as Rand defined it is unconditionally good and serving
one's self-interest necessarily bad. And if you want to play with
semantics and argue that it does, then egoism is not the only
alternative to altruism. Rand seems to have conjured up the weakest,
most naive, completely self-defeating form of altruism; then,
having successfully argued against it, she rests content that she has
proven all forms of altruism to be similarly false.
Contrary
to what Rand would have you believe about what moral philosophers
have been teaching man to live by, I know of absolutely no moral
philosopher in history who advocates an ethics even remotely related
to the sort of altruism that she describes. In fact, every single
major moral philosopher has explicitly rejected the main elements of
such a morality. There is no doubt that Aristotle did; he's even
often accused of being an egoist! Hobbes was an egoist so
there's no question there either. David Hume describes the moral as
being that which is "useful or agreeable to the person
himself or to others" and as a result treats as vices
"celibacy, fasting, penance, mortification, self-denial,
humility, silence, solitude and the whole train of monkish virtues."
(Hume's Moral and Political Philosophy,
edited by Henry Aiken, p. 249, 251) Even the Utilitarians regard
one's values as just as important as anyone else's if not more so by
virtue of one's greater ability in general to satisfy more of one's
own desires than those of others!
Perhaps she had in mind then
that "most evil man in mankind's history" (The
Objectivist, Sept. 1971, 4.),
Immanuel Kant, whose ethical philosophy is summed up by
Leonard Peikoff, Rand's heir and current "leader" of
Objectivism, as "The moral commandment is: thou shalt sacrifice,
sacrifice everything, sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice, as an
end in itself." (The
Ominous Parallels, p. 82)
Supposedly, "Kant is the first philosopher of self-sacrifice to
advance this ethics as a matter of philosophic principle,
explicit, self-conscious, uncompromised – essentially
uncontradicted by any remnants of the Greek, pro-self viewpoint."
(ibid., p. 76) If, then, we find that even he rejected this form of
altruism, I take it we may cast aside the argument from the badness
of altruism as yet one more casualty of Rand's bizarre philosophical
isolationism.
What then do we find in Kant's philosophy? He
starts out the Elements of the Ethics in The Metaphysical
Principles of Virtue with the
first duties one has as being to oneself, one of them being not to
commit suicide as well as another being to "cultivate his
natural powers," (421) hardly indicative of the alleged fact
that "Altruism holds death
as its ultimate goal and standard of value." (Virtue
of Selfishness, p. 33) Rather he
upholds man as having a value that is "exalted above all price,"
(435) and as any good Kantian would tell you (and no, this is not an
oxymoron despite Rand's comments in For the New Intellectual, p.
33), he held not self-sacrifice but our humanity as ends in
themselves. Thus, he explicitly rejects servility as a vice as well
as anything else that involves "self-immolation," or
"self-destruction" on grounds that you violate the basic
dignity of human beings. These are simply indisputable facts!
He derives all this quite clearly from the second formulation of the
categorical imperative to "Act in such a way that you treat
humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of
another, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a
means." (Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals,
429) The only claim that even approaches anything Rand describes as
altruism is that an act done out of mere inclination has no
moral worth. But this neither implies that it is therefore evil nor
that any act that one had a personal desire to do is void of moral
worth. It does not even seem to me to be particularly controversial,
or does Rand endorse acting on whims? Ultimately, it seems to me to
be as harmless as, if not synonymous with, claiming that one should
act from reason instead of or at least in addition to emotion and
desire. For more on vindicating Kant from such misinterpretations,
see my Suggested
Readings for (Ex)Objectivists.
The standard Objectivist
reply to all this is that altruism when consistent
leads to what Rand described, it's just that it's never consistent,
followed by a lecture on evil being impotent and parasitic upon the
good. This is, of course, nothing but a bold assertion. How is this
claim supposed to be supported? Most
altruist moralities have just a few basic premises that can be
easily seen to be perfectly consistent with each other. Taking one
influential altruist doctrine: pleasure is good no
matter who it is possessed by; this ought to be maximized; where is
the supposed inconsistency? Taking a rather simplified version of
Kant, all human beings have infinite value by virtue of their
autonomy and ought not therefore to have their autonomy violated or
treated in a way that one cannot will to be universalized, where is
the inconsistency? I see no arguments for why any particular altruist
moralities are inconsistent.
Peikoff gives a vague semblance
of a general argument from the definition of altruism as
"anti-egoism," "the theory of self-sacrifice" or
as "the doctrine that man should place others above self as the
fundamental rule of life," that it must lead to what Rand
described. (Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand,
p. 240-1) But again, for any of these definitions, either there is
some room to say that self-interest is not necessarily immoral and is
at least sometimes permissible in which case no inconsistency has
been shown, or there is not and under such a definition, it is indeed
inconsistent with "altruism," but we may then simply deny
that it is "altruism" without having to be egoists.
Altruism is not about the badness of self-interest but rather the
goodness of others', but even if one restricts the definition of
altruism to the former, the argument from the badness of altruism is
unconvincing since one would have failed to construct a dilemma that
covers all logical possibilities.
Finally, there is a peculiar
argument I sometimes hear from Objectivists to the effect that the
goodness of others' interests ultimately reduces to the badness of
one's own and in that way, altruism ultimately leads to sacrifice as
an end in itself. According to this argument, whenever one's own
interests clash with those of others one has to choose one over the
other and therefore treat one as a value but not the other. Treating
others' interests as values then, in effect, nullifies any value in
one's own interests (though it seems never to be so clearly stated
and always interjected with such bromides as "man must live
according to principles," the purpose of which I do not
comprehend in the context of the argument). This argument, however,
fails to distinguish between a value having been nullified and it
being outweighed. Surely, the reasons stemming from the values are
still taken into account, it is merely that there were
counterbalancing reasons. The continuing presence of them is shown by
the fact that in some such cases, were the magnitude or quantity of
such interests multiplied, the reasons would correspondingly do so as
well often to the point that the decision of which interests to act
on is reversed. They are no more incompatible than holding any other
two objects to be of value – say, writing philosophy and eating
– being able to choose only one at a given time in some
circumstances surely does not prove that the other is never a value
nor even that it would have no value in that instance. I still have
some reason to do one of them even when I have more reason to do the
other. This confusion undoubtedly originates from Rand's definition
of value as "that which one acts to gain and/or keep,"
whereas a more accurate definition might be something more like,
"that which one does or would act to gain and/or keep given
appropriate circumstances." If we were to be even more
meticulous, we'd probably substitute more neutral terms such as
"promote" or "endorse" in the place of the
excessively egocentric phrase, "act to gain and/or keep."
Of
the arguments that Ayn Rand gives for selfishness then, I conclude
that none are sound. Thus far, this leaves us with merely a lack of
convincing reason for regarding selfishness as good. But are there
also reasons to think it is sometimes bad? In the following section I
shall construct a strong prima facie case for thinking so. The
rest of the next part will be devoted to showing Ayn Rand's replies
to be inadequate.
To The Conflicts of Men's Interests