The Vice of Selfishness - A critique of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism (1987) | Hacker News Reader

The Vice of Selfishness - A critique of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism (1987)

liberalviewer.com

18 pointsvinutheraj30 comments

This essay appears to be pointing out a problem with many, if not the majority, of philosophies and ideologies: oversimplification.

Objectivism states that if all humans were to pursue their own self-actualization at all times, the world would automatically become a better place. Socialism states that if every man contributed his best and received what he needed, again, the world would become a better place. Neither is possible in the real world.

Economic hardship, social need, and lack of opportunity prevent many in the world from coming close to achieving objectivist self-actualization, and the greed and selfishness fundamental to human nature preclude many people from working for the benefit of others. Further, other elements of human nature, such as altruism and empathy, mean that there will always be many people working for the benefit of others rather than themselves. But, social and economic status often prevent these people from doing so, and require that they work for themselves, even if not achieving self-actualization in the process.

Essentially, the reality is that these philosophies are interesting to think about, but should not be used to govern the real world. The real world will always need a mix of capitalism and socialism, selfishness and altruism, love for oneself and love for others. It's never as simple as people like Rand or Marx make it out to be.

This critique is pretty lame, especially for some guy who claims to have been follower or student of AR for a time. He either wasn't paying attention or not very bright. The objections he raised are all addressed in detail by Rand in her writings. For example, the idea that Objectivism is against charity and helping the poor is one of the standard canards and misrepresentations. Objectivism has nothing against charity as long as its voluntary. Taking money by force to support a welfare class is immoral. Him and all his socialist buddies are free to give all their money to the poor if that's what they value. As far as the actually needy, i.e. those who are disabled or unable to care for themselves, they are literally dependent on those who are not needy and their need is not a moral claim -- not a moral obligation to be enforced by the govt. In a free society the voluntary charity would be generous and sufficient for these cases because unlike the ever growing need of a parasite class the actual needy is a fairly small and finite group and thus a marginal, side issue in ethics.

Now if these clowns really want to stop AR they should attack her theory of concepts. I'm waiting....

I wish I could up vote your response more than once. Good Job!

Here is a list of his counter-points to objectivism and my list of counters to them:

1) "If [social program] restrictions can make twenty million hungry, then destruction [of social programs] could quite possibly starve to death vast numbers of people."

This does not prove that objectivism is flawed just that migration to a purely objectivist system would be difficult. The real issue in this case is the populace being accustomed to a certain way of life and then changing it on a dime and expecting them to change on a dime or starve.

2) "The first flaw results from Objectivism's overextension of the correct repudiation of rewarding people for need to the prohibition of even helping those in need."

In Atlas Shrugged, Dagny is helped when she is injured after a plane crash by the industrialists that were abandoning society. Rather than view it as helping those in need, think of it as investing in those in need. If you're a leech on society and then you fall on hard times why should society work harder to find a way to save you? It's not pretty, and I'm fairly opposed to it, but it is logical.

3) "Further, by saying he will never live for the sake of another, John Galt and the Objectivists cannot live their lives for Ms. Genovese's sake even long enough to make a phone call."

Making a phone call in this situation would be an investment in your community. It would do even an objectivist a disservice to have a murderer running around and perhaps targeting them next. Self-interest would dictate that the crime be reported. What those people went through is something much more to the core of human instinct which unfortunately may or may not follow philosophical knowledge to the tee, even within the objectivist. :)

*Concession-

I will give the writer this point: I'm not sure what reason an objectivist has to try to maintain the world past his/her lifetime (RE: the OP's environmentalism point). This is something I'm curious about. Is the ultimate idea that other objectivists should work to ensure that this objectivist doesn't screw up their future?

[edited typo]

We are valuers; just because our lifetimes are finite does not mean that what we value vanishes when we die--there are children, friends, institutions, even a broader affection for the best of mankind in general, and love of justice and principle, that extend well beyond your own grave.

Ty for that!

This essay completely misses Ayn Rand's point.

Consider your life and the basic problem of deciding how to live it.

Being "selfish" means living your life according to what is most meaningful to you. For some that means heading to Wall Street, for others it means being a doctor, and for others it means working at Burger King.

In modern terminology, Rand's term "selfish" should be substituted accurately with self-actualized. Her term "selfish" was actually chosen as a deliberate synonym for "self-actualized" that didn't sound like psychobabble.

Now the question becomes, under what circumstances would anyone claim that a person should not be self-actualized? One might also wonder what would be the consequences of living one's entire life in a state of self-actualization vs non self-actualization.

It is this sort of question that Rand addresses in the book. She makes the rather bold moral claim that each human should live a self-actualized life, and that to avoid doing so is to commit a moral failing.

Now let's quickly examine the concept from a political perspective. What would it mean to not be selfish?

Suppose you are a young man who is very talented at the Violin. You know in your gut that to create beautiful music with the instrument will bring you tremendous happiness and pride. You want nothing in life other than to experience this happiness every day, so you practice long and hard. That you please others is nice, but it's secondary to your own love of music.

Rand would applaud such a person. Rand's critics would claim that the violinist should have been "selfless" and joined the clergy or perhaps become an orderly at a hospital, helping to clean up vomit and spilled fluids.

By definition, selfishness is doing something you want to do, and selflessness is doing something you don't want to do. So what Rand's critics are advocating is akin to self-flagellation. This is not a new idea, as anyone who has read or watched the DaVinci Code knows -- the wacky priest uses a spiked strap to make sure that he is not enjoying whatever he is doing, since self-sacrifice is his highest value.

So what about people who work for non profits, are they selfless? Not really. They simply enjoy making the world better more than they enjoy earning more money in each paycheck. Selflessness for someone who works at a non profit would be working in a job that was truly meaningless... such as perhaps working as a clerk in a huge corporation.

Political systems like Socialism which attempt to embody the idea of shared self-sacrifice would view the clerical job as every bit as noble as a more meaningful job because someone must do the clerical work for it helps society as a whole.

Rand's value of individual choice and self-actualization -- appreciating and glorifying the occasions when a person truly loves his life's work -- is fortunately not all that foreign to HN readers.

Thanks for this rebuttal. I did not have time to read the article.

It's interesting that these same concepts are found in existentialism -- another philosophy that has been given a bad rap by many.

That's wonderful, if you can hack it. However, in the real world, we have billions of people on the planet who are not capable of living the life they imagine.

What people take issue with is Rand's ideological claim that the best way for the people of Earth to achieve a future in which everyone has the capability to "self-actualize" is to focus primarily on their own "self-actualization." That's not obvious at all. Most people feel that our overall well-being is served when the most fortunate among us (those with the resources to pursue their own dreams, and excess resources beyond that) are taxed to some degree to try to give other people a better chance at a self-actualized life.

If Rand is wrong and morality is to be found only in doing things one doesn't enjoy, doesn't that sort of take the wind out of the sails of anyone who might claim to enjoy something like working to help the homeless, etc? Do you view all of those people as noble souls who would quite rather be working on a trading floor somewhere but are gritting their teeth in self-suppression as they provide social services to others?

Rand would argue that if someone derives meaning from solving a world problem such as homelessness, that his/her selfish (self-actualized) pursuit of that goal is the highest thing he/she can do.

note: Rand's essay is not at all about taxation. The conceptual overlap comes from the tradition of the church to use the ethic of self-sacrifice to get members to do its bidding... a meme that has also been used by the state to justify unequal taxation regimes.

I don't think the "ethic of self-sacrifice" argument is necessary to justify basic taxation -- simple social contract theory is enough -- but the meme works quite well b/c it allows the state to also be the arbiter of virtue.

Well, I don't believe that morality has anything to do with whether you enjoy what you do. I don't think I completely understand how I perceive morality, though, so I wouldn't want to get in an argument about it.

So perhaps we are on the same page. I don't think that the pursuit of self-sacrifice is inherently noble (or useful), but I don't think that the pursuit of self-actualization is inherently noble (or useful) either. I think that we should be enacting policies and laws encouraging people to act for the overall good of society, which often, but not always, will correlate with their own purely selfish aims. I think that it's possible to do that in a way that creates a better world than what we would find when everyone acts in their own interest alone.

Fair enough. It sounds like your view could be described as a utilitarian value system that you impose after the fact based on a preconceived notion of some ends you hope society will achieve.

You also seem to perceive that there exists a true greater good. I challenge you to introspect on that issue. I personally don't believe that the greater good really exists, and I attribute the creation of the meme to religious leaders who used their divine authority to declare what the greater good is so that the faithful would work to promote it in order to save their souls from eternal damnation -- notice the parallels with the modern secular notion?

More mathematically, every individual has a set of interests/preferences. You can consider a function that maps from possible choices (individual, state, etc.) to everyone's preferences and try to maximize the amount of utility generated. But the problem for planners is that sometimes what is in an individual's best interest is not actually what the person wants. So calculating the greater good involves myriad assumptions and fudges... and at its core any notion of the greater good involves making an aesthetic choice of how to transfer benefit/harm across some set of people.

For instance, any notion of the greater good applied to US politics probably neglects the harm inflicted on those who live just across the border who would be happy to work in the US but starve due to US immigration policies. Pretty soon the concept of the greater good (for any meaningful policy choice) conflicts with the idea of nationhood itself and becomes meaningless.

I recognize upon reading your comment that it is really quite a cycle -- culture changes our opinion about what the greater good is, and then we all go and talk about how to reorganize the culture to get it! I'll think about this some more tonight.

As Francisco d'Anconia would say, 'check your premises.' Your argument is predicated on the assumption that there are billions of people on earth not capable of living the life they imagine. Exactly Rand's point is that this assumption of yours is not the case, and that, in fact, these people choose not to live the life they imagine, either because they refuse to work hard enough for it (they're lazy), they consciously decide to loot the efforts of others by force (they steal), or they simply don't have the ability to do so (they're incompetent). In all cases Rand's argument is that these people should not be entitled to any of the productive efforts of those who produce.

I agree with the original commenter that the essay completely misses Rand's point. Rand does not ignore the complexities of social systems set up to repress and down-trod the disadvantaged. Such social systems are precisely the product of the looters who attempt to destroy productivity and creativity, not the result of a self-actualized group who achieves their collective self-actualization at the expense of others. The essayist's example of Genovese's murder and the conclusion he draws from it is a complete oversimplification. A selfish person would help a fellow human in distress for any number of reasons: to stop an injustice they see as unconscionable, for a reward, so that they could live with themselves afterwards, etc. 'Selfish' does not mean that one does not help others; it simply means that if one helps others it is for their own purposes, not because of charity or pity.

I've thought many times, though, that Rand conveniently ignores (insofar as I've read) the case of those who truly can't care for themselves: the sick, the insane, and perhaps the crippled as well. But it should be noted that when asked, Rand categorized herself as a novelist who developed a philosophy for the sake of writing her novels, not a philosopher who wrote novels.

>I've thought many times, though, that Rand conveniently ignores the case of those who truly can't care for themselves: the sick, the insane, and perhaps the crippled as well.

There is an interview with Ayn on a talk show and was asked about what should happen to the "ungifted". She believes that first it is the parents responsibility to support them but if they are poor and can't afford to then private charities should look after them.

Found the clip if your interested (around 5-6min in): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUwTHn-9hhU

"because... they're lazy... they steal... they're incompetent"

What about being trapped in a political system and/or culture that makes it impossible to live the life they imagine?

Every one of her novels touches (EDIT: focuses) on this. Anthem, We The Living, and Atlas Shrugged dealt more with the political, exhibiting characters who were unable to achieve their potential because of the political systems they had to endure. In The Fountainhead Roark spent decades suffering professionally and personally for living in a culture that values subjugation of the self to the interests of the crowd.

Also, Rand never promised that in her ideal society every individual would necessarily achieve whatever life they might imagine. Consistent with America's Declaration of Independence, it was the right to pursue happiness that she argued for.

That would work if self actualisation would be brought by money. But it's not, it's something which is much more encouraged by individual freedom then by any kind of welfare, however indirect. There are cases where abject poverty stops one from living the life he wants - but abject poverty is something completely eradicated in western countries (yes, including the homeless).

I am not completely against taxation btw (I support the idea of free healthcare, for example). But when it comes to getting to live "for yourself", taxes and welfare don't matter. Attitude does.

Just a minor nit, but selflessness would be doing something without regard for what you want, which does not necessarily preclude it from being something you want. Doing something which you do not want to do is still being driven be the self.

You mean like if you were to choose at random and then choose again if you had positive (non-neutral) feelings about the choice?

> "Being "selfish" means living your life according to what is most meaningful to you. [lists life choices], for others it means working at Burger King."

i find it hard to believe that given the same free will and opportunity some people voluntarily work at Burger King. i think there are socioeconomic and blank-slate issues at stake that ought to be considered before naively advocating "selfish free will."

That comment doesn't sound right to me.

I worked fast food in my teens. I liked it. I could have made a career out of it. It was always fast-paced, you met lots of people, there was a challenge in skills, it had kind of a frat atmosphere. Lots of good stuff.

But my enjoying it shouldn't count? Like I said,l I must be missing something. It is sounding to me like you are taking the position that some jobs are just beneath any of us, and we should only take them under duress.

I'm sure upon reflection you realize how much trouble you can get into with this line of reasoning, right? Sure there are lots of people -- most probably -- who do not enjoy their jobs. But I'm not even sure that relates to what type of work it is as much as the emotional mindset of the person involved. There are a lot of miserable millionaires out there.

And you wouldn't want to be in a position of telling people which jobs were worthy and which were not, would you?

Here is the same post on the objectivism forum, and their counter-arguments on the critique !

http://forum.objectivismonline.net/index.php?showtopic=15999

I think objectivists usually do a pretty poor job of articulating the philosophy... that thread seems to be no exception.

This is a pretty good list of the value judgments typically made by objectivists, and more generally libertarian-capitalists:

'First, in our system "underprivileged" people essentially do not exist. The percentage of people genuinely unable to support themselves is infintesimal. We do have quite a collection of moochers and bums, but that is no one's responsibility but their own.' 'What would stop welfare recipients from becoming working, productive members of society when their taxpayer-looted dole is cut off? Nothing but sheer laziness and a continued desire to remain parasites, in defiance of reality' etc.

And that was a great list of broad generalizations by you! Thanks for illustrating.

The guy who wrote this has a channel on YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/user/LiberalViewer?PHPSESSID=5a91ae4c...

and he talks about this critique on one of his broadcasts - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-tIY99QFFk

The writing style is very odd. It begins normally, but the second half or so is written in a high-school-student-esque manner. The last paragraph actually begins with the words "in conclusion"(!) It's as if the author had started to write this piece in an honest way, and then, halfway through, remembered that he was writing it for a class.

"Philosophy 120a November 4, 1987 Professor Fischer"

Apparently, he was writing it for a class: his class.

I can only hope that the article was written by one of Professor Fischer's students, rather than the professor himself :)

After watching his video on YouTube where he says he wrote it "20 twenty years when I was in college", I think he wrote it when he was a student but now, he is a professor. I agree that the writing style seems odd.

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