Altruism and Morality June 20, 2008
Posted by Mark T. Market in Reflections.Tags: altruism, atlas shrugged, ayn rand, ego, fountainhead, gary cooper, john galt, morality, objectivism, philosophy, religion
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Author Ayn Rand’s works were controversial for their time and continue to stir minds today. Her works are today classified as the exemplars of the principles of the philosophy of Objectivism, also coined by Rand.
A controversial position of Rand’s philosophy is a critique of morality and altruism–much of which is the content of many religious themes and movements nowadays.
Consider the questions:
- Why is it moral to serve the happiness of others but not your own?
- Why is it immoral for you to desire, but moral for others to do so?
Here’s a clip which is a reading of the speech of John Galt–Rand’s character in her novel: Atlas Shrugged–which details a discussion of these and other questions regarding morality.
Having a critical mind is an attribute of objectivism.
In another of Rand’s works: The Fountainhead, her character the architect Howard Roark is on trial for destroying a building that he designed. His courtroom defense is an outline of more principles: Man lives for himself, not for others.
Man’s ego is the fountainhead of human progress
- Ayn Rand
Here is a clip of a movie adaptation of Rand’s novel, with Roark portrayed by Gary Cooper:
Your second question is incorrectly stated.
Thanks for the catch.
It’s not moral, although it’s licit and natural, to work for your own self-interest.
It’s not moral because most or all languages contain a word for “morality” and in all cases that word refers to acts done for something else than self-interest.
So what?
So if you destroy the word in that sense, then altruistic acts still are performed, but they are either unnamed or else frowned upon.
This is nonsense, and it creates force and fraud, since self-interest can never exist without conflict and the temptation toward force and fraud. In the real world, the temptation implies the reality.
For example, using implicitly Randian principles, the insurer AIG decided a few years ago to essentially monetize its credit rating by selling credit default swaps to banks. In a situation of rising confidence, older issues could be covered with newer issues, and “self-interest” was served at the time. But when house prices started to decline in late 2006, this was no longer possible. AIG has acted fraudulently because its interest conflicted with a general interest in probity.
The result? Thousands of little guys, screwed out of their jobs, their homes, and their savings raging pathetically that somehow, the banks got “self-interest” wrong.
^ Alan Greenspan, the avid Randian, has had his ideals shaken by the recent crisis. Yes, definitely the idea of rational self-interest gets muddled when it crosses from abstraction into practice.
For me, constant vigilance and criticism is essential for any sense of morality to exist. If we don’t check premises, we can slip into zealous fervor, for essentially the wrong things.