Objections
to Objectivism
Is
Stealing Selfish?
Copyright
© 2001 by John
Ku
Ayn Rand as
Confused Virtue Ethicist
Distinguishing
"selfishness" from its popular usage as "a synonym of
evil," conjuring the image of "a murderous brute who
tramples over piles of corpses to achieve his own ends, who cares for
no living being and pursues nothing but the gratification of the
mindless whims of any immediate moment," Rand claims that "since
selfishness is 'concern with one's own interests,' the Objectivist
ethics uses that concept in its exact and purest sense." (The
Virtue of Selfishness, xiii)
Although the common notion of selfishness does exaggerate the
immorality of selfishness and fails to accord with rational
self-interest, I think that Rand overstates her case and ultimately,
she herself is susceptible
to the very objection she brings against the altruists who hold to
the popular construal of selfishness. When hard-pressed to account
for even the basics of morality on purely egoist grounds, she reverts
to a secondary notion of selfishness that once identified should be
immediately recognizable as divergent from rational self-interest and
yet another instance of the confusion between a self-interest and an
interest possessed by the self. She nearly admits as much in the
following passage:
Men have been taught that the ego is the synonym of evil, and selflessness the ideal of virtue. But the creator is the egoist in the absolute sense, and the selfless man is the one who does not think, feel, judge or act. These are functions of the self. (For the New Intellectual, p. 94)
Thus, we see that she does not appeal to self-interest, i.e. considerations of what are good or bad for oneself, but rather to notions related to the possession of a self in some psychological sense. This is made even more clear in the following passage in which she says, "Isn't that the root of every despicable action? Not selfishness, but precisely the absence of a self." (Ibid., 78) From this notion of selfishness, she does seem to be able to derive condemnations of such acts as stealing or the sacrificing of others in any form. In her own words:
All that which proceeds from man's independent ego is good. All that which proceeds from man's dependence upon men is evil. . . A man thinks and works alone. A man cannot rob, exploit or rule – alone. Robbery, exploitation and ruling presuppose victims. They imply dependence. They are the province of the second-hander. Rulers of men are not egoists. They create nothing. They exist entirely through the persons of others. Their goal is in their subjects, in the activity of enslaving. They are as dependent as the beggar, the social worker and the bandit. The form of dependence does not matter. (ibid., p. 94-6)
Would she consider then the recipient of charity to be
as immoral as a burglar? Putting such criticisms aside however, it is
more important to note that this concept of selfishness diverges in
meaning from the self-interest that ethical egoism is primarily
concerned with for even if it is true that independence is in one's
self-interest, surely this is not true a priori,
independent of any appeal to its consequences. Thus, this is
not the sort of selfishness from which you can infer, for example,
that torturing and killing animals for meat is good because it
benefits you, as so many Objectivists seem to reason.
If
anything, this most resembles the methodology not of egoism or any
other consequentialist or even deontological ethics but that of
virtue ethics, in which the focus is upon the possession of certain
character traits rather than on acts, in this case, upon independence
disguised as selfishness. Like many virtue ethicists, she seems to
rely almost exclusively on the intuitive goodness of the virtue as
she portrays it. Besides worries about the degree of objectivity that
is possible through such a method, it is likely that the intuitions
it relies on are at least partly other-regarding. Nor is it
sufficient to argue that it must be selfish because it is concerned
with the cultivation of some virtue in oneself since the
reasons we may regard it as a virtue at all may be altruistic.
Thus,
we see once more that to the extent Rand succeeds in condemning such
acts as stealing, she is not an ethical egoist. Despite her remarks
about selfishness being the possession of a psychological self or
selflessness the lack of an ego, ethical egoism cannot be inferred
merely from the virtue of independence. Although in literature, such
rhetoric might be prized as clever metaphors, in philosophy, it is
just another fallacy.