Rand, Utilitarianism And The Braying Ass Of Ignorance
In the recent homage to the late Patrick Swayze I watched, with my aspiring young dancer, yet another replay of Dirty Dancing. I was reminded of the misunderstanding of most of those who are derisive of Rand’s work when the ultimate antagonist of the plot proclaims the right to leave a woman he has impregnated by tossing out a copy of The Fountainhead saying something to the effect that “little people don’t matter.” Unfortunately, this is the common perception of Rand. And it is made of ignorance.
Alternatively, there are no shortages of quotes from the right, wrongly extolling Rand’s wisdom, that massive accumulations of wealth are the byproduct of one’s hard work, abilities, and creativity. This, too, comes from a basic ignorance of Rand.
I have never been an Objectivist (Randian) but I do, on many issues, have Randian sympathies. I depart from her on several major issues such as her atheism, her derision of popular culture and, what I consider her most serious weakness, her “re-definition” of utilitarianism. We’ll get to that later. But addressing the first two errors in understanding I’ll leave that to the fresh young mind of Will Wilkinson as he points out the problem with Jonathan Chait’s review of two new books that have been written about Rand:
Let’s take a moment to think of the many ways worldly success and moral merit come apart in Rand’s immensely influential fiction. In The Fountainhead, Peter Keating traces the trajectory of the sell-out. He achieves professional success through slavish conformity to banal popular taste. He is the archetype of Rand’s despised “second-hander.” Rand’s point is not that pathetic second-handers with desperate cravings for external validation do not work their way into the top income decile. Her point is that they do! But they don’t really deserve it. If there’s cosmic justice, it’s in the fact that successful second-handers are miserable because they know they don’t deserve it. Rand’s condemnation of Keating is also a not-very-subtle condemnation of popular taste, which she generally judges execrable. Whatever else it might be, The Fountainhead is a searing critique of getting ahead by giving the people what they want. From a quick read of Rand’s lesser doorstop, one might suspect that, exceptional cases aside, the distributions of both income and social esteem bear a strong relationship to skill at peddling popular bullshit.
(…)
In Atlas Shrugged, Rand doesn’t much conceal her disgust at James Taggart, the immensely wealthy heir to a railroad fortune who tries to consolidate the position of his inherited company through political pull. In Rand’s taxonomy of villains, he is a “looter.” Rand’s point is not that looters don’t get ahead. Her point is they do. And it works because actually productive people are either too dumb or guilty to grasp that moralizing political rhetoric is as often as not a bullshit front for corporatist political predation. From a quick read of Atlas Shrugged, one might expect that the distribution of income and social esteem in a “mixed economy” bears a strong relationship to membership in pressure groups, and the quality of their lobbyists and PR flaks.
The mostly tragic world of Atlas Shrugged is one in which the truly creative and productive are rewarded with unending resentment and exploitation while politically-connected corporations pay Washington insiders to rig the mechanisms of redistributive democratic politics to reel in and lock down unearned gains. Rand thought the world we actually live in is dangerously close to the one she depicted. (Emphasis added.)
In those two ideas I embrace Rand without hesitation. The “cure”, for lack of a better word, to the second point is that government collusion with corporatists can only be achieved by reducing government to the point where it offers no advantage to industry over individuals. And if she were alive today I bet that she would make the point, that most libertarians make, that no level of campaign finance reform or restrictions to free speech can restrict the influence of power as long as government maintains such a huge role in controlling resources though the political economy.
As I mentioned before I depart significantly from Rand on the issue of utilitarianism. Although I think that her libertarian foundations comport with a more classical definition of “the greater good for the greatest number of people” she completely avoids a classical underlying construct of Mill’s idea the utilitarianism must first and foremost protect the individuals’ sovereignty from government force unless it’s used to protect that sovereignty from others. Perhaps Rand was speaking to a more modern construct of utility as, in the time of growing Communism, talked more of personal sacrifice. I cannot say that I understand this thread of her thought insofar as, and perhaps I’m too ignorant, her discernment between altruism and kindness in the context of personal choice and she defines utilitarianism in the form of altruism.
The basic principle of altruism is that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value. Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good will or respect for the rights of others. These are not primaries, but consequences, which, in fact, altruism makes impossible. The irreducible primary of altruism, the basic absolute, is self-sacrifice – which means: self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial, self-destruction – which means: the self as a standard of evil, the selfless as a standard of the good.
But even if I were to reject in toto her Virtue of Selfishness (which I don’t entirely) I still can’t throw her ideas out with the bathwater just as I can’t throw the ideas of Mill out simply because, in his later years, he advocated a socialist co-operative replacement to wages for paying labor. Ideas matter and good ideas are not excluded by different bad ideas even if they come from the same mind.
Now, to the extent that Randians, or any other libertarians, have an epistemology built upon “the greater good” I have no proof the notion of rational self-interest conflicts with it. It is, after all, a rational self-interest to want to have your community – either big or small – enjoy abundance of life if for only so they don’t impose their reliance upon you. But therein lies the rub; what is the “greater good” and how is it affected by rational self-interest?
Ludwig von Mises based many of his ideas of libertarianism on utilitarianism embracing the notion that the collective judgments of economic decisions by millions of consumers produced a greater good than a constructed political economy divined by technocrats. Empirically I think this can be shown as largely correct. On the other hand, Friedrich Engels made the same argument which is deeply imputed in socialist interpretation and by association to Marx. Engles and Marx would say that socialism comports to rational self-interest in the context that egalitarianism rids us of the evils of exploitation. In other words, it’s in everyone’s interest not to be able to be exploited.
This is where we’re brought back to ignorance. The current dialogue, where the terms “self-interest” and “greater good” are dashed about as pejoratives in the left-right divide, is meaningless. It speaks to the abilities of us to think well and consider ideas on their merits. For all of the deficits that one can discern of Rand her ideas are worth study – if for nothing more than to really define where she is actually wrong.
Dave:
As you know Rand was big on original definitions and meanings. I think the following helps explain the adjectives she uses to describe utilitarianism via altruism.
From Wiki: “Altruism is an ethical doctrine that holds that individuals have a moral obligation to help, serve, or benefit others, if necessary at the sacrifice of self interest. Auguste Comte’s version of altruism calls for living for the sake of others. One who holds to either of these ethics is known as an “altruist.”
The ethical doctrine of altruism has also been called the ethic of altruism, moralistic altruism, and ethical altruism.
The word “altruism” (French, altruisme, from autrui: “other people”, derived from Latin alter: “other”) was coined by Auguste Comte, the French founder of positivism, in order to describe the ethical doctrine he supported. He believed that individuals had a moral obligation to renounce self-interest and live for others. Comte says, in his Catéchisme Positiviste [1], that:
[The] social point of view cannot tolerate the notion of rights, for such notion rests on individualism. We are born under a load of obligations of every kind, to our predecessors, to our successors, to our contemporaries. After our birth these obligations increase or accumulate, for it is some time before we can return any service…. This ["to live for others"], the definitive formula of human morality, gives a direct sanction exclusively to our instincts of benevolence, the common source of happiness and duty. [Man must serve] Humanity, whose we are entirely.”
Rand’s description is her view of the eventual conclusion reached by such a philosophy.
Hope you had a good weekend.
JAC
JAC, I am familiar with Comte and understand the altruism as a moral ethic. I can’t seem to find much else, however, from Rand that doesn’t seem to conflate altruism with utilitarianism – and I think the former is but a sub-strain of the latter. Do you know of any writing where she addresses utilitarianism more directly?
Dave:
I think she views utilitarianism in its original sense as just an extension of altruism. Altruism is the root not the other way around. I have seen her refer to altruism in the sense of an “ethic” but also as a more basic root. She viewed it as being in conflict with the metaphysical and epistemological realities, as she described them.
Her epistemology was based on the primacy of Reason. In order to justify Altruism then one must reject Reason. This is where the Real Philosophers lose me a little. The whole chicken and egg thing relative to metaphsysics and epistemology.
Anyway, I will do some looking for her words on the subject and get back to you.
I am just getting into a book now titled “Ayn Rand’s Normative Ethics, The Virtuous Egoist” by Tara Smith. Some interesting stuff so far. Have you ever read that one?
An interesting read so far on ethics and virtues.