A Note On Objectivism
Objectivism is a philosophical framework conceived and developed by Ayn Rand, a contentious but popularly-acclaimed Russian economist, philosopher, and novelist. Ayn Rand was a hyper-logical thinker, believing strongly in the process of identifying and analyzing assumptions and debating from that point on. Famously she would start conversations with, “What are your assumptions?” Objectivism was her life’s work, in which she pulled together a foundation of axioms for creating her views on ethics, morals, and life’s purpose.
The framework is incredibly self-coherent, but is frequently criticized as an ideological movement rather than a practical philosophy. In my opinion, even more drastically, it suffers from a pervasive feeling of secular religion. It seems Ayn Rand’s hyper-logic served not to make her a more reasonable person, but drove her to such perfect logic that she ignored the fact that even slight changes to her assumptions, which are not simple, would drastically alter or even reverse her end syntheses. Although at many times she argues from very basic axioms that are undeniable, she quickly pressed through the arguments which take her axioms and translate them into her general ideas without sufficient deliberateness. She then contends that they are irrefutable.
I do think, however, that there is something to learn from her idea of “rational egoism”, despite the fact that Objectivism as a whole is generally not taken very seriously by mainstream philosophers and academics. Her idea of rational egoism is that it is natural and logical to pursue maximizing one’s own happiness and self-interests. I think it is important because it deals with the selfishness less in moral terms, and more from a practical standpoint. Many times philosophers over-moralize acting egotistically or altruistically, when they seem to be more of descriptors of motivation than moral judgments on the actual actions themselves.
It is important to note that the idea that all persons act only in their own self-interest, which from a philosophical perspective is exemplified by Machiavelli’s framework, and which in recent times has found evidence in evolutionary theory and modern psychology, is flatly incorrect. Even if one ignores what many consider to be strong evidence in history for people acting purely selflessly, as well as psychological evidence for some types of irrational altruism in split-decision-making, modern evolutionary theory when examined under the lens of information theory yields an interesting and very difficult-to-contest rebuttal, the strongest of hard theory and evidence to date in support of altruism. The selfish gene theory, popularized by Richard Dawkins, argues that natural selection applies to information stored in genes rather than to entire organisms. The perspective is many-fold, but essentially it notes that Darwinian natural selection points to organisms as the smallest unit of the approach to survival to be selected against when a smaller unit is the approach stores in the information of a single gene. A strong example is that some collections of organisms, like Bees, sacrifice reproduction for all organisms (they are sterile or sexually undriven) except one which the rest protect and serve, therefore it must be the genes that reproduction favors genes rather than individuals. Altruism exist in nature; it stands to reason that it exists at some level in humans, probably partially motivated by psychological egoism but I would think in some form truly selfless at times—the examples from history and day-to-day life are there, and it now has an evolutionary explanation to back it up.
So real altruism exists. This is important because one therefore can’t deflect today’s cultural view that altruistic actions are the more “noble” motivation, which carries a weight of courage, virtue, and integrity as well as its typical flavor of selflessness. Can we really say that an action performed with an altruistic motivation is more courageous, virtuous or reflects that the person has more integrity? Even in a non-unilateral analysis as presented, this seems to not be the case. Both altruism and egoism come from gene evolution. Both increase the chance of (part of) you continuing to be propagated. So, it appears, altruism is selfish.
So what? It is not to say that motivations are irrelevant; a motivation is just as morally judge-able as the action itself. Yet almost all cultures have some conception of or cultural equivalent to chivalry: Japanese Bushidō, the Greek Hero, Buddhists’ selfless Nirvana, etc.
Cultural moral-elevation of altruism is probably just a consensus-equilibrium favored because it prevents excessive selfishness, which is the primary evolutionary tendency. Altruism isn’t morally “better”, humans just tend to pretend so because it prevents rampant egoism that most would agree would destroy a society. Although Ayn Rand would consider this perfectly selfish society to have realized maximized efficiency, I doubt many others would like to live in such a society. Ironically in the end, that is what she has showed us.
an essay
