Objections
to Objectivism
Is
Selfishness Good?
Copyright
© 2001 by John
Ku
The Argument
from Theory of Values
The
clearest argument that Ayn Rand gives for selfishness is in the "The
Objectivist Ethics," where she argues that the very nature of
life and value require that one's ultimate value be one's own life:
"Value" is that which one acts to gain and/or keep. The concept "value" is not a primary; it presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what? It presupposes an entity capable of acting to achieve a goal in the face of an alternative. Where no alternative exists, no goals and no values are possible. . . It is only a living organism that faces a constant alternative: the issue of life or death. . . An ultimate value is that final goal or end to which all lesser goals are the means – and it sets the standard by which all lesser goals are evaluated. An organism's life is its standard of value: that which furthers its life is the good, that which threatens it is the evil. Without an ultimate goal or end, there can be no lesser goals or means: a series of means going off into an infinite progression toward a nonexistent end is a metaphysical and epistemological impossibility. It is only an ultimate goal, an end in itself, that makes the existence of value possible. Metaphysically, life is the only phenomenon that is an end in itself: a value gained and kept by a constant process of action. Epistemologically, the concept of "value" is genetically dependent upon and derived from the antecedent concept of "life." To speak of "value" as apart from "life" is worse than a contradiction in terms. It is only the concept of "Life" that makes the concept of "Value" possible. . . The standard of value of the Objectivist ethics – the standard by which one judges what is good or evil – is man's life, or: that which is required for man's survival qua man. . . The Objectivist ethics hold man's life as the standard of value – and his own life as the ethical purpose of every individual man. (The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 15, 17, 25).
By
far the most powerful objection to this argument is to be found in
the contribution by J. Charles King to the book The Philosophic
Thought of Ayn Rand, edited by Den Uyl and Rasmussen. In his
essay, he points out how the key premise in her argument is plainly
false. The existence of values is possible without an ultimate value.
There must, of course, be some ends in themselves for there to be
values, but Rand mistakenly identifies this with there being an
ultimate value. There may simply be a system of values in which any
number of values are ends in themselves, that is, without any of them
being valued as a mere means to some other end. In order to act,
there may be a need for some sort of ranking of these values, "but
from the fact that something is an end in itself, it does not follow
that it cannot be more or less valued than another thing that is also
an end in itself. Thus, the organization of a code of values, while
it may depend upon the existence of ends in themselves, does not
depend upon the existence of an ultimate value. The claim that there
must be an ultimate value, if there is to be any value at all, is
therefore mistaken." (p. 107-8.)
Perhaps a point of clarification is in order here for it is often argued that the very existence of a system of values does indeed necessitate an ultimate value. The weaker version of this argument relies on the premise that a value can only be justified by reference to some higher value. This, however, leads to an infinite regress and implies that for any ultimate value one might choose, if it is to be justified, it must be valued as a means to some higher value, which, of course, contradicts the very definition of an ultimate value.
Related to this is the claim that a conflict between any two values can only be mediated by the value of some higher end to which both of the values in question are means. Yet why should this be the case? Although it is certainly necessary to have some means of resolving conflicts within a system of values, a theory that provides an assessment of the comparative worth of each end in itself relative to the other ends in themselves, along with a rough procedure for quantification seems to suffice in this respect. If I can come to recognize that I prefer n units of x to one unit of y, I thereby have a way of resolving any conflict that might arise between my two values, x and y.
In a final attempt to salvage this line of argument, some attempt to derive the existence of an ultimate value given any number of ends in themselves. Proceeding to construct in their minds an abstract set of values that is constituted by all these ends, they point towards such a set and proclaim excitedly that they've thus shown that there must be an ultimate value. (Arguably this is precisely what Rand did with her notion of "life qua man;" she just took a set of stuff she really liked -- rationality, independence, productivity, etc. -- and then coined a term that by definition included all of these things, but we'll be getting to this sort of objection soon enough.) Obviously, however, this establishes the conclusion more by sleight of hand than substantial argumentation. Rand must show not merely that one's life ought to be valued, or even that it must be valued as an end in itself, or even as the highest of all one's values, but that it must be exclusively valued as an end in itself. Acknowledging that the value of an ultimate value is derived from that of other ends in themselves does not seem a very promising route to that conclusion, to say the least.
It might now be objected
that as a necessary condition for valuation, life must be valued in
order to have any values at all; thus, one can't value anything
without recognizing the ultimate value of life. But again, King
points out that "even were this argument acceptable, it would
only succeed in showing that life was always a value as a means,
not that life was always an end in itself or certainly not that life
was always an ultimate end." If I take contemplation about
philosophy to be an end in itself, then it is true that I must value
being alive since if I weren't, I wouldn't be able to think about
philosophy, but this shows that philosophy is the reason I place
value on my life not vice versa. So much for the argument from her
theory of values. (p. 111.)
There are further problems with
this argument, however, for even if it worked, it would prove only
that life qua survival was the ultimate value, not life qua man. This
would obviously have extremely implausible implications. Nor is it
solved by claiming that being rational and productive is man's means
of survival since that squarely places the value of life qua man
subordinate to life qua survival, thereby making it justified if not
obligatory to abandon reason as soon as
it will allow one to live just a little longer. Ayn Rand
clearly wanted not longevity but life as a rational and productive
being to be the ultimate value. Yet to argue to that conclusion
from her premises regarding life and its connection with value would
be to commit the fallacy of equivocation. The truth of the premises
rely on a meaning of life different from that in her conclusion. This
is clearly seen by the fact that such statements as, "It is only
for a rational, productive being that things can be good or bad,"
are ridiculously false. Thus, you can no more conclude from the
premises involving life qua survival that life qua man is the
ultimate value than you can infer from New York being "The Big
Apple" that it is therefore a fruit.
The fallacies are
only compounded by the standard Objectivist attempts to address this
problem. Most notable is what Rand herself referred to as the
"fallacy of the frozen abstraction." As Roger E. Bissell
explains in this
paper, it is most often used to substitute normative or
evaluative considerations for conceptual ones. Thus, in example C, he
shows how the Objectivist response that would claim that living
irrationally or unproductively makes one subhuman because man is, by
definition, "the rational animal" is guilty of this
fallacy; the proper definition is something more like "animal
with the capacity for rationality." Similar remarks apply to
solutions often presented by Objectivists that would try to make life
qua man coextensive with life qua survival by appeal to the claim
that the irrational are not truly living, they're in a slow process
of dying. (See for example, Objectivism: the Philosophy of Ayn
Rand, p. 216 and Virtue of Selfishness, p. 24.) The
central tenet Objectivists are supposed to hold is that life is the
biological basis and standard for teleological or evaluative
concepts; this is not impressive if in order to do so, they must
imbed such standards into their very understanding of what counts as
living.
Need this imply that there is nothing of value in
Rand's argument? Not necessarily. I happen to think that Rand touched
on a rather important insight when she claimed that it is only the
concept of life that makes the concept of value possible though it
would certainly be a mistake to think that this necessitates ethical
egoism or is in some way exclusive to Objectivism. Many of the
leading moral philosophers today share such an insight. In her essay,
"The Reasons We Can Share: An Attack on the Distinction Between
Agent-Relative and Agent-Neutral Values," Christine Korsgaard
makes a useful distinction between two ways to interpret
agent-neutral values (agent-relative values being things that only a
particular agent has a reason to promote whereas agent-neutral means
there is a reason for anyone to promote it): one being what Rand
called the Intrinsic theory of values that "holds that
the good resides in some sort of reality, independent of man's
consciousness" (Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal,
p. 22) or in Korsgaard's terms "values that would exist
in a world devoid of creatures who see and respond to reasons,"
and the other being what Korsgaard referred to as Intersubjective
in which "neutral reasons
are shared, but they are always initially subjective or
agent-relative reasons. So on this view, everything that is good or
bad is so because it is good or bad for someone."
(Creating the Kingdom of Ends,
p. 279) Obviously, it is neither appropriate nor necessary for my
purposes here to put forth the reasons she gives for why initially
agent-relative values become agent-neutral; it is sufficient that
this is a possibility – one that Rand seems not to have been
aware of.
We
can see then that accepting what Eric Mack calls the "crux of
Rand's central philosophical insight in moral theory, . . . [the]
intimate and profound connection between life and the process of
valuation," which he goes on to give an excellent explication of
in his contribution to The
Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand (p.
123), in no way commits us to egoism, the view that the only values
there can be for a given agent are goods that are relative to that
agent, i.e. in his self-interest. And so, it seems also that Rand was
too hasty in concluding that ethical egoism is the only viable system
of values as a result of the false dilemma she had constructed in her
mind – "There are, in essence, three schools of thought on
the nature of the good: the intrinsic, the subjective [whim-worship],
and the objective [egoism]" (Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal,
p. 21) – combined with her rejection of the intrinsic and
subjective. This tendency to set up very black and white false
alternatives will emerge again as we examine her further arguments
for egoism.
Before moving on to the next section,
however, I think it
is worth noting that even so-called intrinsic theorists of value
recognize this central insight about values presupposing valuers and
are able to account for it at least to some extent. Consider, for
example, the following passage from David Velleman's essay, A
Right to Self-Termination:
One might insist that values must have beneficiaries, because they wouldn't exist if there weren't someone who could appreciate them: nothing would be good or bad in a universe devoid of sentient beings. But the fact that values wouldn't exist without potential valuers does not entail that they must accrue to someone. Values are relative to potential valuers because they are normative, in the first instance, for valuation. That is, for something to be valuable just is for it to be such as ought to be valued in some way -- respected, loved, admired, wanted, treasured, or the like. The very concept of value therefore contains the concept of a valuer, actual or potential. The experience of valuing something can be beneficial, as in the case of appreciating the aesthetic value in a work of art. But the concept of value, in positing a potential valuer, doesn't necessarily require that he would benefit from the experience. Things can be venerable, for example, whether or not there is any benefit in venerating them; and they can be awesome whether or not one would gain by holding them in awe. So the fact that value must be capable of registering with someone, who would thus appreciate it, does not mean that it must be capable of accruing to someone, who would thus gain by it. Value requires a potential valuer but not a potential beneficiary.
To The Argument from Sacrifice and the Badness of Altruism