Whoa, there! First of all, human functioning hardly necessitates the existence of values and of an ultimate value that for any given living entity is its own life. There is no reason why a living entity has to keep existing and much proof that it cannot live forever. There are many different kinds of values by which living humans can, if they wish to do so, continue to exist; and it is probably impossible to say what an ultimate value for life's continued existence actually is. The only ultimate value that I can think of is the value that life itself feels good a majority of the time, and that therefore the organism should continue to exist. But even this value, as noted in (a) in this paragraph, is not a necessary derivative of one's existence.
For life to continue, the only "ultimate" values that are needed are the purely biological ones involved with breathing, eating, drinking, defecating, etc. Here is a true identity, an "a" is "a" that she refuses to see: To exist, a human does not have to be intelligent, happy, artistic, or highly reasoning. He or she just has to be alive.
Secondly, I know not where Rand magically dug out of the ether her view, "Thus the validation of value judgments is to be achieved by reference to the facts of reality." It is true that the individual's existence itself is a fact of reality. Therefore, any values she holds are part of reality. But what are valid value judgments and how do they relate to reality? According to the dictionary, valid means "1. Sound; well grounded on principles or evidence; able to withstand criticism or objection, as an argument; 2. Effective, effectual, cogent, etc." Now, how is reality to judge whether the individual's values are sound, effective, or cogent? According to the dictionary, again, value is "that quality of a thing according to which it is thought of as being more or less desirable, useful, estimable, important, etc." Well, is reality to judge whether anything is desirable, useful, estimable, or important? Or is it not the human person, the evaluator, who judges the value of something? It seems to me it is the latter.
Does evaluating have anything to do with reality? Probably. For example, if you value your life highly, and value milk highly because it presumably will prolong your life; and if you happen to be seriously allergic to milk, ignore your allergy, and it kills you when you drink it, your evaluation of it has been wrong--dead wrong! So if you do value, you inevitably have to evaluate some aspects of reality, and you may easily be fooled to do so to your own detriment. But--note well--even so, it is you who have evaluated wrongly (in relation to reality); and it is hardly the facts of reality that have made you wrong. Actually, it is your poor judgment (your false evaluation) of these facts that is the issue. You refer (as Rand says, but in a rather obscure way) your valuing (that life is good and drinking milk prolongs life) to the facts of reality (that you are allergic to milk); and part of your valuing (that drinking milk will prolong your life) turns out to be invalid, in the light of these facts.
Your checking these evaluations with the facts of reality, therefore, may partly validate your evaluation of yourself and of the world's influences on you. But not completely! For the most important part of your evaluating is your value judgment that your life is good, and that it is better that you continue. Thus, reality around you could be replete with cold, famine, solitude, and other unfortunate circumstances--and you, because of your religious beliefs, could still evaluate your own living as "good" and choose to continue it. Or the facts of reality could be that you are intelligent, talented, handsome, rich, and physically healthy--and yet because of your social philosophy you could decide that life wasn't worth living, and kill yourself. Both attitudes are irrational but have occurred throughout history.
Ayn Rand's implication, therefore, that the validation of all your value judgments is to be achieved by reference to the facts of reality does not seem to be correct. Probably all these judgments are in part significantly influenced by reality; but in the final analysis, you decide [1] whether to live or to die; and very often, as well, whether to be happy or unhappy, whether to focus on one thing or another, whether to think or not to think. The objectivist theory of volition and emotion points this out; but its theory of ethics seems to forget this very important fact.
Third, Rand's statement that "the fact that a living entity is, determines what it ought to do," is even more farfetched than her previous statements. Indeed, it seems to be almost a complete non-sequitur. It is the living thing itself, and not the fact of its existence that determines what it ought, or would like, to do. The fact that I exist by no means determines that I should live, or that I should love you, or that I should accept objectivism, or that I should do anything else. Naturally, all these oughts are contingent on my remaining alive: since, dead, I would have no choices. But as long as I am alive, I have many choices as to what I should or ought to do. These may be limited; but they still exist. "To a living consciousness, every "is' implies an "ought'," writes Rand. People are free to choose not to be conscious, but not free to escape the penalty of unconsciousness: destruction.
What she seems to mean here, is that if you choose to live and be happy, you had better choose to be conscious: to use your reason to focus intently on solving life's problems. She forgets, however, that you do not have to choose to live, certainly not to the absurd maximum she demands; and that if you do choose to live, you still have a wide choice of different oughts. The fact that I am gives me a choice of what I ought to do; my mere existence does not make me take certain paths, except possibly a few paths regulated by my automatic nervous system. That is, it makes me breathe, have a beating heart, and undergo certain other involuntary bodily functions. But it does not make me select one set of values or another, even though it probably biases me in favor of life and against death.
4. Ayn Rand continues: The standard of value of the objectivist ethics is the standard by which you judge what is good or evil--is your life: that which is required for your survival is the standard. Since reason is your basic means of survival, that which sustains the life of a rational person is the good. That which negates life is evil. (1964). We can easily find flaws in this statement:
a. Rand may take human life as the standard by which one judges good or evil; but no one else has to accept this standard if he does not wish to do so. To repeat: Man has to live in order to value; but he doesn't have to live. And many men in the course of human events have decided, volitionally, to die instead of to live. Some of them, at least, would seem to have been eminently sane: since they chose to die because they were in physical pain, because life was too arduous for them, or because they had little possibility of gaining notable satisfactions if they continued to live. Ethics, therefore, need not be based on your life but on the satisfactions, the pleasures, you think you are likely to gain while living. That, it seems to me, would be a more sensible standard than the standard of life itself. But you can, of course, base your wish to continue living on various other standards: such as on saintliness, on productivity, or creativity.
b. Even if human survival is taken as the basic good, it is pointless to say that, since reason is man's main means of survival that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good. For several things besides reason are man's basic means of survival: for example, perceiving, emoting, and doing. Can we therefore conclude, that which is proper to the life of a perceiving person is good? What about corpses, for example? A perceiving person at some time during his life perceives a corpse or two. Is, consequently, a corpse good?
And what about emoting? An emoting being tends to become anxious, hysterical, guilty, and hostile. Are anxiety, hysteria, guilt, and hostility necessarily good?
The main point is that all kinds of human attributes and reactions seem to be natural to humans and to be part of their "basic" means of survival. According to Rand, all these attributes and reactions should therefore be seen as "good." The fact that some of these human traits, such as reasoning, may lead to greater human happiness than do other traits, such as hysteria, is held by Rand as her criterion of good behavior; and her system of ethics therefore tends to become meaningless.
Rand writes that since people have to discover everything by their own mind and effort, "The two essentials of the method of survival proper to the rational being are: thinking and productive work." Ah, now the cat is out of the bag!
Rand pretty clearly started with the (unverifiable) assumption that productive work is the best possible thing for humans; then she asked herself how this assumption could be sustained; then she figured out that thinking or reasoning individuals will produce more work than will non-rational people; then she glorified rationality in her ethical system. Her ethics start with the double-headed premise and unjustified conclusion: "Because living is indubitably good, and because productive work by living beings is essential...." it is therefore morally necessary to maximize at all times one's personal productivity to be good, to be happy. And her system proceeds from these premises to establish on "rational" grounds its derivative postulates. Her two main premises and primary conclusion are, however, quite arguable.
By Rand's "logic," incidentally, one could just as well claim: "Since everything people need for survival has to be strongly evaluated and felt emotionally, their survival depends on their intense emotions." Rationality, by this kind of definition, would be synonymous with intense emotion--and where would objectivist ethics be then?
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