The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand
THE VIRTUE
OF SELFISHNESS
"Ethics is not a mystic fantasy-nor a social convention-nor a dispensable, subjective luxury. ... Ethics is an objective necessity of man's survival-not by the grace of the supernatural nor of your neighbors nor of your whims, but by the grace of reality and the nature of life."
"The Objectivist ethics proudly advocates and upholds rational selfishness-which means: the values required for man's survival qua man-which means: the values required for human survival-not the values produced by the desires, the feelings, the whims or the needs of irrational brutes, who have never outgrown the primordial practice of human sacrifices."
Ever since their first publication, Ayn Rand's works have had a major impact on the intellectual scene. Her new morality-the ethics of rational self-interest-challenges the altruist-collectivist fashions of our day. Known as Objectivism, her unique philosophy is the underlying theme of her famous novels.
THE
VIRTUE
OF
SELFISHNESS
A New Concept of Egoism
by Ayn Rand
With Additional Articles
by Nathaniel Branden
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Copyright (c) 1961, 1964 by Ayn Rand
Copyright (c) 1962, 1963, 1964 by
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Contents
Contents 4
Introduction 5
1. The Objectivist Ethics 8
2. Mental Health versus Mysticism and Self-Sacrifice 21
3. The Ethics of Emergencies 26
4. The "Conflicts" of Men's interests 31
5. Isn't Everyone Selfish? 36
6. The Psychology of Pleasure 39
7. Doesn't Life Require Compromise? 44
8. How Does One Lead a Rational Life in an irrational Society? 46
9. The Cult of Moral Grayness 49
10. Collectivized Ethics 52
11. The Monument Builders 56
12. Man's Rights 60
13. Collectivized "Rights" 66
14. The Nature of Government 70
15. Government Financing in a Free Society 75
16. The Divine Right of Stagnation 78
17. Racism 81
18. Counterfeit individualism 87
19. The Argument from intimidation 89
Introduction
The title of this book may evoke the kind of question that I hear once in a while: "Why do you use the word 'selfishness' to denote virtuous qualities of character, when that word antagonizes so many people to whom it does not mean the things you mean?"
To those who ask it, my answer is: "For the reason that makes you afraid of it."
But there are others, who would not ask that question, sensing the moral cowardice it implies, yet who are unable to formulate my actual reason or to identify the profound moral issue involved. It is to them that I will give a more explicit answer.
It is not a mere semantic issue nor a matter of arbitrary choice. The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word "selfishness" is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual "package-deal," which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind.
In popular usage, the word "selfishness" is a synonym of evil; the image it conjures is 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.
Yet the exact meaning and dictionary definition of the word "selfishness" is: concern with one's own interests.
This concept does not include a moral evaluation; it does not tell us whether concern with one's own interests is good or evil; nor does it tell us what constitutes man's actual interests. It is the task of ethics to answer such questions.
The ethics of altruism has created the image of the brute, as its answer, in order to make men accept two inhuman tenets: (a) that any concern with one's own interests is evil, regardless of what these interests might be, and (b) that the brute's activities are in fact to one's own interest (which altruism enjoins man to renounce for the sake of his neighbors).
For a view of the nature of altruism, its consequences and the enormity of the moral corruption it perpetrates, I shall refer you to Atlas Shrugged-or to any of today's newspaper headlines. What concerns us here is altruism's default in the field of ethical theory.
There are two moral questions which altruism lumps together into one "package-deal": (1) What are values? (2) Who should be the beneficiary of values? Altruism substitutes the second for the first; it evades the task of defining a code of moral values, thus leaving man, in fact, without moral guidance.
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.
Hence the appalling immorality, the chronic injustice, the grotesque double standards, the insoluble conflicts and contradictions that have characterized human relationships and human societies throughout history, under all the variants of the altruist ethics.
Observe the indecency of what passes for moral judgments today. An industrialist who produces a fortune, and a gangster who robs a bank are regarded as equally immoral, since they both sought wealth for their own "selfish" benefit. A young man who gives up his career in order to support his parents and never rises beyond the rank of grocery clerk is regarded as morally superior to the young man who endures an excruciating struggle and achieves his personal ambition. A dictator is regarded as moral, since the unspeakable atrocities he committed were intended to benefit "the people," not himself.
Observe what this beneficiary-criterion of morality does to a man's life. The first thing he learns is that morality is his enemy; he has nothing to gain from it, he can only lose; self-inflicted loss, self-inflicted pain and the gray, debilitating pall of an incomprehensible d
Since nature does not provide man with an automatic form of survival, since he has to support his life by his own effort, the doctrine that concern with one's own interests is evil means that man's desire to live is evil-that man's life, as such, is evil. No doctrine could be more evil than that.
Yet that is the meaning of altruism, implicit in such examples as the equation of an industrialist with a robber. There is a fundamental moral difference between a man who sees his self-interest in production and a man who sees it in robbery. The evil of a robber does not lie in the fact that he pursues his own interests, but in what he regards as to his own interest; not in the fact that he pursues his values, but in what he chose to value; not in the fact that he wants to live, but in the fact that he wants to live on a subhuman level (see "The Objectivist Ethics").
If it is true that what I mean by "selfishness" is not what is meant conventionally, then this is one of the worst indictments of altruism: it means that altruism permits no concept of a self-respecting, self-supporting man-a man who supports his life by his own effort and neither sacrifices himself nor others. It means that altruism permits no view of men except as sacrificial animals and profiteers-on-sacrifice, as victims and parasites-that it permits no concept of a benevolent coexistence among men-that it permits no concept of justice.
If you wonder about the reasons behind the ugly mixture of cynicism and guilt in which most men spend their lives, these are the reasons: cynicism, because they neither practice nor accept the altruist morality-guilt, because they dare not reject it.
To rebel against so devastating an evil, one has to rebel against its basic premise. To redeem both man and morality, it is the concept of "selfishness" that one has to redeem.
The first step is to assert man's right to a moral existence-that is: to recognize his need of a moral code to guide the course and the fulfillment of his own life.
For a brief outline of the nature and the validation of a rational morality, see my lecture on "The Objectivist Ethics" which follows. The reasons why man needs a moral code will tell you that the purpose of morality is to define man's proper values and interests, that concern with his own interests is the essence of a moral existence, and that man must be the beneficiary of his own moral actions.
Since all values have to be gained and/or kept by men's actions, any breach between actor and beneficiary necessitates an injustice: the sacrifice of some men to others, of the actors to the nonactors, of the moral to the immoral. Nothing could ever justify such a breach, and no one ever has.
The choice of the beneficiary of moral values is merely a preliminary or introductory issue in the field of morality. It is not a substitute for morality nor a criterion of moral value, as altruism has made it. Neither is it a moral primary: it has to be derived from and validated by the fundamental premises of a moral system.
The Objectivist ethics holds that the actor must always be the beneficiary of his action and that man must act for his own rational self-interest. But his right to do so is derived from his nature as man and from the function of moral values in human life-and, therefore, is applicable only in the context of a rational, objectively demonstrated and validated code of moral principles which define and determine his actual self-interest. It is not a license "to do as he pleases" and it is not applicable to the altruists' image of a "selfish" brute nor to any man motivated by irrational emotions, feelings, urges, wishes or whims.
This is said as a warning against the kind of "Nietzschean egoists" who, in fact, are a product of the altruist morality and represent the other side of the altruist coin: the men who believe that any action, regardless of its nature, is good if it is intended for one's own benefit. Just as the satisfaction of the irrational desires of others is not a criterion of moral value, neither is the satisfaction of one's own irrational desires. Morality is not a contest of whims. (See Mr. Branden's articles "Counterfeit Individualism" and "Isn't Everyone Selfish?" which follow.) A similar type of error is committed by the man who declares that since man must be guided by his own independent judgment, any action he chooses to take is moral if he chooses it. One's own independent judgment is the means by which one must choose one's actions, but it is not a moral criterion nor a moral validation: only reference to a demonstrable principle can validate one's choices.
Just as man cannot survive by any random means, but must discover and practice the principles which his survival requires, so man's self-interest cannot be determined by blind desires or random whims, but must be discovered and achieved by the guidance of rational principles. This is why the Objectivist ethics is a morality of rational self-interest-or of rational selfishness.
Since selfishness is "concern with one's own interests," the Objectivist ethics uses that concept in its exact and purest sense. It is not a concept that one can surrender to man's enemies, nor to the unthinking misconceptions, distortions, prejudices and fears of the ignorant and the irrational. The attack on "selfishness" is an attack on man's self-esteem; to surrender one, is to surrender the other.
Now a word about the material in this book. With the exception of the lecture on ethics, it is a collection of essays that have appeared in The Objectivist Newsletter, a monthly journal of ideas, edited and published by Nathaniel Branden and myself. The Newsletter deals with the application of the philosophy of Objectivism to the issues and problems of today's culture-more specifically, with that intermediary level of intellectual concern which lies between philosophical abstractions and the journalistic concretes of day-by-day existence. Its purpose is to provide its readers with a consistent philosophical frame of reference.
This collection is not a systematic discussion of ethics, but a series of essays on those ethical subjects which needed clarification, in today's context, or which had been most confused by altruism's influence. You may observe that the titles of some of the essays are in the form of a question. These come from our "Intellectual Ammunition Department" that answers questions sent in by our readers.
-AYN RAND
New York, September 1964
P.S. Nathaniel Branden is no longer associated with me, with my philosophy or with The Objectivist (formerly The Objectivist Newsletter).
-A. R.
New York, November 1970
1. The Objectivist Ethics
by Ayn Rand
Since I am to speak on the Objectivist Ethics, I shall begin by quoting its best representative-John Galt, in Atlas Shrugged:
"Through centuries of scourges and disasters, brought about by your code of morality, you have cried that your code had been broken, that the scourges were punishment for breaking it, that men were too weak and too selfish to spill all the blood it required. You damned man, you damned existence, you damned this earth, but never dared to question your code. ... You went on crying that your code was noble, but human nature was not good enough to practice it. And no one rose to ask the question: Good?-by what standard?
"You wanted to know John Galt's identity. I am the man who has asked that question.
"Yes, this is an age of moral crisis. ... Your moral code has reached its climax, the blind alley at the end of its course. And if you wish to go on living, what you now need is not to return to morality ... but to discover it."
What is morality, or ethics? It is a code of values to guide man's choices a
The first question that has to be answered, as a precondition of any attempt to define, to judge or to accept any specific system of ethics, is: Why does man need a code of values?
Let me stress this. The first question is not: What particular code of values should man accept? The first question is: Does man need values at all-and why?
Is the concept of value, of "good or evil" an arbitrary human invention, unrelated to, underived from and unsupported by any facts of reality-or is it based on a metaphysical fact, on an unalterable condition of man's existence? (I use the word "metaphysical" to mean: that which pertains to reality, to the nature of things, to existence.) Does an arbitrary human convention, a mere custom, decree that man must guide his actions by a set of principles-or is there a fact of reality that demands it? Is ethics the province of whims: of personal emotions, social edicts and mystic revelations-or is it the province of reason? Is ethics a subjective luxury-or an objective necessity?
In the sorry record of the history of mankind's ethics-with a few rare, and unsuccessful, exceptions-moralists have regarded ethics as the province of whims, that is: of the irrational. Some of them did so explicitly, by intention-others implicitly, by default. A "whim" is a desire experienced by a person who does not know and does not care to discover its cause.
No philosopher has given a rational, objectively demonstrable, scientific answer to the question of why man needs a code of values. So long as that question remained unanswered, no rational, scientific, objective code of ethics could be discovered or defined. The greatest of all philosophers, Aristotle, did not regard ethics as an exact science; he based his ethical system on observations of what the noble and wise men of his time chose to do, leaving unanswered the questions of: why they chose to do it and why he evaluated them as noble and wise.