In Defense Of Ayn Rand

I have no idea how Ayn Rand would feel about the way her philosophy is being used today. She’s been dead since 1982, and the majority of the consequences of her beliefs had yet to bear out in entirety. It’s possible if she had lived through these years she would have doubled down on the beliefs that fueled libertarianism, but I also find it hard to imagine a world in which Ayn Rand doesn’t question how she came to be on the same side as Ted Cruz.

I started reading Rand in 2002. I have read almost all of her published works. I have written research papers on her. I would even go as far as to say she was one of my teen heroes. I have a bachelor’s degree in economics as a result. I also think Libertarians, as they identify themselves in the US, are a bunch of selfish assholes that have far too much free time and not enough actual responsibility. Working in your own self interest has never been an acceptable excuse to cause harm to others.

Academia refers to Rand’s philosophy as ethical egoism. It gets tied to the idea of psychological egoism: that our minds are predisposed to lookout for our individual self-interest. Ethical egoism takes the implications of psychology and effectively declares that it is moral to act in your self interest because that is the most efficient way for everyone to get what they want. However, there is no actual proof that we are psychologically predisposed to behave in our self-interest. In fact, there are plenty of cases in which humans often forego their own self interest to pursue a different goal.

The idea that we are capable of working against our own self interest some of the time is often used as proof of fallacy in ethical egoism. When in reality, it speaks to the idea that our internal calculation of worth is far more complex than we give it credit for. We see this in mathematics. Mathematicians developed game theory to prove how to best act in a given scenario. Except that there are virtually no real world scenarios that play out the way game theory dictates they will. It is impossible to account for the creativity of the human mind. If the mathematically best options always worked, there would be no reason to play the game at all.

Every single one of us has different motivations, different desires, different wants, different beliefs. No one will better represent your ethic than you will. Every capitulation to your integrity made gives power to someone else whether you acknowledge it or not. So, yes, ethical egoism implies that it is fine to be selfish, but it never says that you get to throw out the rest of ethics as a result. My integrity helps me determine how to be my best self, but it does not get to dictate what someone else’s best self should look like.

There are a few basic ethical guidelines we can all use to understand what makes sense for our morality. First, hedonism, simply put this is the strive for finding your happiness. It’s the process by which you build yourself up and break yourself down again tossing away the bits that don’t fit. It never ends. There is no perfect state of hedonism. Seeking happiness does not guarantee happiness. But every single day you get to live life and hope to come upon it. Every morning you can wake up to decide if you were happy with yesterday or if you want to try something different today.

Many argue that hedonism is wrong because suffering is a part of life. That we should express stoicism and resolve at all times to express the proper respect for life and the suffering that it brings. They aren’t wrong, but neither is hedonism. Part of finding your happiness is being able to show up for friends and family when they need you and the way that they need you to. Stoicism in the face of crisis is absolutely one of my hedonistic goals. But not taking the time to enjoy the beauty that is in life as well is short changing your experience and unlikely to result in true happiness. Maybe you are a natural stoic. These people absolutely do exist. Those with the ability to be cool, calm, reserved pretty much constantly. That’s okay. Stoicism can be your hedonism or at least a part of it.

Which leads to the second primary guideline of ethics: autonomy. You and you alone can decide what is best for you. Autonomy means having full agency of every facet of your life. Being autonomous also requires respecting the autonomy of others. Kantian ethics establishes an entire framework for determining whether or not an act is moral based on it’s impact to others autonomy. It can be summarized with the golden rule: do onto others as you would have done on to you.

But it’s not enough to simply do onto others, it’s also about what you are not doing. If you were hungry and someone ate in front of you without sharing, you would be upset. If you got into an accident and no one stopped to help, you would be upset. If you told someone they injured you and they didn’t believe you, you would be upset. Our inaction is as impactful as our action. Yes, we are individual beings with individual needs and wants, but we are also beings existing in the same space and time. On a cosmic scale we are inseparable from one another and it’s about damn time we started acting like it.

This is where the third guideline, virtue, comes in. Virtues are the set of idealistic characteristics we attribute to people that we view to be moral. A large portion of ethical study and writing has gone into defining the virtues of humanity. It will likely come as no surprise that the list is incomplete, controversial, and contradictory. Nevertheless, there are 3 that I find encapsulate the concept of virtue: honesty, generosity, and composure. Generosity guides the way you interact with other people, composure guides the way you interact with yourself, and honesty is the tool used to keep these things in sync.

No person, alive or otherwise, to date is all 3 of these things all of the time. And it’s nearly impossible to know the extent to which another person exemplifies these virtues. But here’s the thing about virtues: they are only virtuous if you do them because you want to, not because you have to. Sure, there could be societal impacts to being virtuous or not, but any amount of doing to avoid consequence or gain favor completely negates the virtue being extolled. The reward for being honest is being honest. It may not seem like much, but it’s what you get. You get to live in a world where the things you say are a mirror to your experiences and perspectives. You keep composure in your truth, and expand your generosity to accept that other’s truths are true for them.

Many virtue ethicists also like to include justice in their concepts of morality. Extolling the value of correcting others and setting them on the virtuous path. However, if they are defining justice as rewarding virtue and punishing vice, they are not being honest in their definition of virtue. Virtues are rewards unto themselves. If vice is the opposite of virtue, then vice is a punishment unto itself. Justice should never be about punishment and reward. Justice should be about restoring autonomy, addressing violations of hedonism, and establishing the agency of deciding to be virtuous for your own self.

So yes, Ayn Rand will have to go down in history as one of the foreparents of a dangerous radical time in American history. But we should probably not forget that she did not exactly invent these ideas. She put to paper the philosophy and ideology that had already come to thrive in the US, predominantly via white men. She was an unexamined product of her time and our records should be updated to reflect the flaws in her beliefs. I also can’t and wouldn’t take back the hero role she played in my 16-year-old life. I may not be capable of being anything other than an egoist, but my self-interest is being the most ethical version of myself.