Early Encounters with Rand:
The first time I picked up Ayn Rand’s book, The Fountainhead, I was 14. Two days later I put the book down, disappointed in its colorless conclusion and offended by the arrogant indifference of its protagonist. This was around the time I was rejecting much of my childhood religious conditioning, and I didn’t give much thought to Ayn Rand for another 10 years after that initial encounter with her horrendous philosophy.
In college and my early days in grad school I went through a pro-lassiez-faire phase, arguing against social philosophies that advocated anything short of complete self-interest. Much of these arguments went down over tequila shots and canasta with Eastern European math prodigies. It was a time for much maligned thought and all that thinking was leading me in a different direction.
Eventually, I came to ponder on the idea of free-will. I began to develop a nuanced utilitarian socio-political philosophy that followed from acceptance of the moral implications of the absence of free-will.
Around this time I came across a little collection of essays put together by Rand, called “Capitalism: An Unknown Ideal”.
This time things were different. I had the tools to think with; and think I did. This time I was not just disappointed. I was appalled at how incoherent her philosophy had become to me, over the years, in light of modern science and a more rounded understanding of ethics. Moreover, the central thesis of her entire philosophy was clearly wrong!
The Central Flaws:
Tom Clark, Director at the Center for Naturalism, writes of a couple of flaws in Rand’s reasoning. These flaws in her philosophy are so fundamental that they are built into the fabric of Objectivism itself. They noticeably conspire to discredit any claims of naturalistic reason – Objectivism’s fundamental assertion! According to Tom, these flaws are:
Flaw 1: Rand’s belief and assigned importance to a non-material soul and free-will makes her philosophy non-naturalistic. No matter how much reason she uses from that premise on, it remains an ideological philosophy and not a naturalistic philosophy.
Flaw 2: Objectivism by definition makes the naturalistic fallacy. That is, you can’t go from “is” statements about the natural world to making “ought” statements about it, claiming that the “ought” follows from the “is”.
Objectivism, Free-will and Values:
Leonard Peikoff writes in his book Objectivism, the Philosophy of Ayn Rand,
A course of thought or action is 'free,' if it is selected from two or more courses possible under the circumstances.This is the subverted definition of free-will that objectivists use to defend their ideology from claims that it is non-naturalistic. By this definition of freedom, computers and even simple hand-held calculators have free-will, exercising it multiple times whenever they process any simple command. It is a definition that pointedly avoids the question of ultimate causes as addressed by naturalism. According to Sue Blackmore, there is no doubt that we make choices all the time. The illusion is in the intuition that we are free to make those choices.
The naturalistic fallacy is easier to identify in objectivist philosophy as Rand and her followers make no attempt to disguise it using subversive language. Simply put, objectivism proclaims a universal morality that it purports to derive from observing the natural world objectively. As mentioned before, this is a violation of scientific naturalism. There is no objective path from observed reality to a positivist social and personal ethics. This tradition in naturalism long predates Rand.
When Rand was asked specifically about her epistemology, she said: "I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows."
On analysis, it is obvious that neither free-will nor values flow from pure reason. Both these are extrinsic to naturalism but are inextricably tied to Rand’s philosophy. Despite her claim, Rand does not apply “the supremacy of reason" to her idea of free-will, where it should be applied, and she applies reason to ethics where (without making the naturalistic fallacy) it can not.
Natural Ethics, Sans Free-will:
If we remove these two flaws, we are left with philosophical naturalism, the idea that all that exists is natural reality- a concept that rejects the existence of any supernatural. Now, this does not have the reach of objectivism because naturalism is not influenced by moral emotions like objectivism is.
So, does the naturalistic method inform us about free-will and ethics?
I believe that it does.
The utility of reason is in describing the natural world. That is all that lies within its scope. What we do with that information garnered by reason lies beyond reason itself. I do believe that a truly naturalistic philosophy (without free-will beliefs) will inform our understanding of ethics, but the ethics doesn’t flow from reason. The abortion and stem-cell research issues, addressed here, are examples of how morality can be influenced by reason without claiming it to be part of reason itself.
When we remove the idea that there is an objective free-will, naturalism informs our ethics that our concepts of justice are based on an illusion. When we remove the naturalistic fallacy, naturalism informs us that ethics is subjective.
Understanding naturalistic ‘facts’, we can then work together to build a subjective moral code that is more consistent with the (naturalistically) observable fact that our morality is constantly evolving as cultures and our understanding of biology evolve.
Rand’s philosophy, if taken to its extreme interpretation, can lead to a form of Social Darwinism. This shows the dangers in making the naturalistic fallacy. There are those on the left who have made this fallacy before as well in order to support their claims (for example, E.O. Wilson). In fact, Wilson’s sociobiology-derived leftist interpretation of ethics is at least based on a more recent and scientific understanding of social systems and human group behavior. The fact is that he makes the naturalistic fallacy, nevertheless.
The Objectivist’s Motives:
Rand’s argument, as she has stated often, is that selfishness is best for the common good. What she failed to understand is that the kind of “selfish” actions that are actually needed for the common good of the species is actually governed by self-less emotions at the individual level. Biological altruism is selfish behavior at the genetic level, but at the emotional level it is self-less. The selfishness arises as a genetic fitness advantage that the individual is not consciously calculating. Rand’s excuse for her moral philosophy is based on a false understanding of biological altruism. Sociology theory has moved well away from such idealistic concepts as Rand’s, but the dogmas still prevail in politics and economics, where power rather than free-flow of ideas is the norm. Economic theory has, in recent years, started to take into account the discoveries of sociological theory of the last four decades. Until the recent market collapse, Rand’s ideological cohorts such as Alan Greenspan had aggressively imposed the morally and economically empty dogma of unregulated free-market economics, using power and subterfuge rather than academic legitimacy.
I recently wrote about The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan and how it was possible for him to realize that being gay does not involve free-will - since he happens to be gay - while he still cannot see how being under-privileged might also not. Sullivan happens to think that being gay is genetically determined and therefore must not be prejudiced against, while he asserts that the poor deserve their misfortunes. This is compartmentalization of one’s understanding of free-will; it doesn’t exist when you suffer the negative social consequences of a certain condition, and it does when others are suffering from a different form of prejudice.
This is a form of selfishness that must be, to some extent, intrinsic to certain people.
It is very likely that if Rand was born as one of those lesser minds that her cold-hearted lead-characters flick to the side on their way to the top, she may have had different ideas about free-will. Arguably, she was too clouded by her illusions of free-will and grandeur to be aware of her own lapses of reason.
