The virtue of selfishness: a new concept of egoism - By Ayn Rand & Nathaniel Branden Page 0,2

“Counterfeit Individualism” and “Isn’t Everyone Selfish?” which follow.)

A similar type of error is committed by the man who declares that since man must be guided by his own independent judgment, any action he chooses to take is moral if he chooses it. One’s own independent judgment is the means by which one must choose one’s actions, but it is not a moral criterion nor a moral validation: only reference to a demonstrable principle can validate one’s choices.

Just as man cannot survive by any random means, but must discover and practice the principles which his survival requires, so man’s self-interest cannot be determined by blind desires or random whims, but must be discovered and achieved by the guidance of rational principles. This is why the Objectivist ethics is a morality of rational self-interest—or of rational selfishness.

Since selfishness is “concern with one’s own interests,” the Objectivist ethics uses that concept in its exact and purest sense. It is not a concept that one can surrender to man’s enemies, nor to the unthinking misconceptions, distortions, prejudices and fears of the ignorant and the irrational. The attack on “selfishness” is an attack on man’s self-esteem; to surrender one, is to surrender the other.

Now a word about the material in this book. With the exception of the lecture on ethics, it is a collection of essays that have appeared in The Objectivist Newsletter, a monthly journal of ideas, edited and published by Nathaniel Branden and myself. The Newsletter deals with the application of the philosophy of Objectivism to the issues and problems of today’s culture—more specifically, with that intermediary level of intellectual concern which lies between philosophical abstractions and the journalistic concretes of day-by-day existence. Its purpose is to provide its readers with a consistent philosophical frame of reference.

This collection is not a systematic discussion of ethics, but a series of essays on those ethical subjects which needed clarification, in today’s context, or which had been most confused by altruism’s influence. You may observe that the titles of some of the essays are in the form of a question. These come from our “Intellectual Ammunition Department” that answers questions sent in by our readers.

—AYN RAND

New York, September 1964

P.S. Nathaniel Branden is no longer associated with me, with my philosophy or with The Objectivist (formerly The Objectivist Newsletter).

New York, November 1970—A. R.

1.

The Objectivist Ethics

by Ayn Rand

Since I am to speak on the Objectivist Ethics, I shall begin by quoting its best representative—John Galt, in Atlas Shrugged:

“Through centuries of scourges and disasters, brought /about by your code of morality, you have cried that your code had been broken, that the scourges were punishment for breaking it, that men were too weak and too selfish to spill all the blood it required. You damned man, you damned existence, you damned this earth, but never dared to question your code.... You went on crying that your code was noble, but human nature was not good enough to practice it. And no one rose to ask the question: Good?—by what standard?

“You wanted to know John Galt’s identity. I am the man who has asked that question.

“Yes, this is an age of moral crisis.... Your moral code has reached its climax, the blind alley at the end of its course. And if you wish to go on living, what you now need is not to return to morality ... but to discover it.”1

What is morality, or ethics? It is a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions—the choices and actions that determine the purpose and the course of his life. Ethics, as a science, deals with discovering and defining such a code.

The first question that has to be answered, as a precondition of any attempt to define, to judge or to accept any specific system of ethics, is: Why does man need a code of values?

Let me stress this. The first question is not: What particular code of values should man accept? The first question is: Does man need values at all—and why?

Is the concept of value, of “good or evil” an arbitrary human invention, unrelated to, underived from and unsupported by any facts of reality—or is it based on a metaphysical fact, on an unalterable condition of man’s existence? (I use the word “metaphysical” to mean: that which pertains to reality, to the nature of things, to existence.) Does an arbitrary human convention, a mere custom, decree that man must guide his actions by a set of principles—or is there a fact of reality that demands it? Is