Another caution: Even if people should survive, and even if reason is their basic means of survival, it is still dangerous to say that what is good for the life of a rational being is good and that what negates, opposes or destroys it is evil. For the implication here is that the good is the good, and the evil is the evil, at all times and places. But this is false. The conditions for people's survival (and happiness!) continually change. It is possible that under certain conditions they might survive better if they were irrational than if he were rational. If all the nations of the world, for example, adopted Nazism, only stupid and irrational people might ultimately survive. Under those conditions, is that which is proper to the life of a rational person really good?
Rand is so palpably determined to prove that an immutable system of ethics exists, that it relates to human survival, and that reason is such an intrinsically "good" force that it will always lead to human survival and hence to the "good," that she ignores facts and sticks almost exclusively with her own definitions of what the "real" world is.
Rand is also stuck in survival mode. Just as the communists defeat themselves with their survival motto, "From each according to their ability; to each according to their need," Rand is stuck in hers, "From each according to their ability, to each as much as the market will bear." Both attempt to maximize production. Once we have enough to survive, certainly when we have luxuries, both of these extremes become pretty silly. For who is going to do work they do not like so others can have luxuries, or for luxuries for themselves that they cannot use? Only neurotic, disturbed people--extreme capitalists and collectivists.
5. John Galt, the hero of Rand's Atlas Shrugged says: "If I were to speak your kind of language, I would say that man's only moral commandment is: Thou shall think." (1957.) But no, moral commandments are chosen, are not forced; understood, nor obeyed. It almost looks like Rand is accepting the point that morals are invariably chosen--and can always be re- chosen. What she really seems to mean, however, is that once we "understand" the "true" nature of reality, of life, and of reason, we shall feel intellectually compelled to pick her objectivist, or absolutist view of ethics.
As ever, she is devoutly definitional and religious in her imposing "truth" on not only her followers but, really, on all the rest of us. This is akin to the pope and his cardinals saying that everyone, including non-Catholics, has to be baptized and regularly go to confession if they are to survive and be "saved!"
6. The most pernicious aspect, perhaps, of Rand's ethics is shown in her attitude toward "personal immorality:" ( Learn to distinguish the difference between your errors of knowledge and breaches of morality. If you are willing to correct it, your error of knowledge is not a moral flaw. If you judge humans by the standard of an impossible, automatic omniscience, you are a mystic. When you don't know something that is not immorality. "But if you refuse to know, it is an account of infamy growing in your soul. Allow yourself errors of knowledge; but do not forgive or accept any breach of morality. Give the benefit of the doubt to those who try to know; but treat as potential killers those specimens of insolent depravity who demand that you do things without reason." Such people proclaim a license that they "just feel' you should take. Beware of people who reject an irrefutable argument by saying: "It's only logic." They mean: "It's only reality." "The only realm opposed to reality is the realm and premise of death." (1960).
Here are several objections to Rand's ethical, or unethical viewpoint:
a. To say that a breach of morality is the conscious choice of an action you know to be evil seems sensible enough. But to include also as an immorality a willful evasion of knowledge, a suspension of sight and of thought, runs into territory that is not easily demarcated, and that is quite dangerous. Suppose, for example, that you are ashamed of your feelings of hostility to, say, your mother. You therefore, consciously or unconsciously, avoid thinking about her, and perhaps avoid the topic of mothers in general. Are you immoral because of your conscious evasion or unconscious repression? If so, which of us is not frequently immoral?
b. Assuming that you refuse to face certain facts or to investigate some aspects of knowledge because of your shame or anxiety, are you really an infamous person? Should you be eternally damned for this behavioral error?
c. If you discover that you or one of your associates is immoral in the sense that you or she refuses to know something, should you be unforgiving forever? Granted that an ethical error may exist (at least, by Rand's standards), should the mistaken individual be condemned as a person for all time just because she has chosen to be wrong? If so, this is truly a cruel "ethical" doctrine! And it seems to forget that the purpose of morality, presumably, is to help human beings, rather than to consign them to some kind of eternal hell.
d. If you volitionally do a wrong act or refuse to face knowledge, you would be pretty crazy if you did not have some kind of reason for making this error. Thus, if you deliberately and needlessly harm another human being, you probably will be thinking, as you do so, that she deserves this harm, or that you are so angry that you can't help harming her, or that, even though you are wrong about harming her, for you to act otherwise would be still more wrong. And if you choose to avoid knowing something, you probably will do so because you think it would be worse to face it than to avoid it. These choices may be erroneous; but since you made them for misguided reasons (as humans frequently will do), should you be looked upon forever as a horribly immoral person who is deserving of severe punishment?
7. Morality is normally based on the philosophy of enlightened self-interest. Since you do not wish to be needlessly harmed by others and since you would like to be aided by others when you are in unfortunate circumstances, you agree that it would be better if you didn't harm others and that you would come to their aid in their hour of need, (Ellis, 1965b, 2001b, 2003).
Objectivism, however, is so one-sidedly obsessed with the virtue of pure selfishness (whatever that really is!) that it can in no way see a morality that is partly based on helping others when they are troubled and needy. Writes Rand in this connection: a morality that holds need as a claim, holds emptiness--and non-existence--as its standard of value. "It rewards an absence, a defect: weakness, inability, incompetence, suffering, disease, disaster, the lack, the fault, the flaw--the zero," (1957).
What Rand will not face here--and she is, by her own standards, presumably immoral for not facing--is the fact that virtually all humans, on many occasions during their life, are weak, unable, incompetent, suffering, diseased, disaster-ridden, lacking, faulted, and flawed. It is too bad that they often are that way; but they are hardly, therefore, totally worthless. Rand's morality, clearly, is designed only to help the competent, able, and strong--the heroes of the world, and let the rest of us suffer and die!
This does not mean that every single one of us, to be moral, must spend his life giving to the poor, helping the suffering, and uplifting the weak. If we want to define morality as (a) first, taking care of ourselves and (b) second, avoiding needless harm to others, and (c) never damning them totally (giving them, in REBT terms, unconditional other acceptance [UOA]), that seems fine.
At least we will meet minimal moral requirements for individual and social living. But if we want to go beyond this to add (d) helping those who are less fortunate than we are, (while not foolishly sacrificing ourselves,) this too would seem to be a rational moral code, especially when we teach and help them to become more independent. But Rand insists that any amount of sacrifice for others is irrational and immoral--and she thereby constructs an unrealistic and impractical ethical system. Only in heaven--in which Rand obviously does not believe--might such a system work!
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