The Right Morality: Rational Self-Interest Could Reinvigorate Campus Conservativism
By Giles Howard on Mar 16, 2010 in Featured
For many, college is the time when they venture out on their own ideologically, discarding the beliefs of their family and friends in favor of new ideas that they either stumble upon or are exposed to in their new setting. Indeed, the way in which the college experience severs the social and geographical bonds that tie young people to the community of their adolescence creates a vacuum of influences where new ideas flourish and a new morality often develops.
Importantly, this campus-centered morality is founded on an appearance of thinking for oneself but regularly involves the uncritical adoption of another person’s needs as the morality’s driving force. This is evident in the international humanitarian who organizes students to stop hunger in Africa; it’s evident in the new socialist who self-consciously sloughs off his middle class background to decry the excesses of capitalists and starts a group working to unionize service employees; most of all, it’s obvious in the student who worked tirelessly to elect Barack Obama in 2008 because he or she felt that health care was a right.
What all these archetypes of college life have in common is that they involve the college student’s acceptance of another person’s needs or values as more important than the individual student’s own. Ayn Rand called such people “second handers” – those who live through others — explaining that, “After centuries of being pounded with the doctrine that altruism is the ultimate ideal, men have accepted it in the only way it could be accepted. By seeking self-esteem through others. By living second-hand.”
Indeed, the dominant campus Left that so many politically active students identify with is a political movement whose morality is “second-hand,” whose ideology is defined by altruism and whose adherents, though claiming to think for themselves, just uncritically adopt this other-focused way of thinking.
Dr. Allan Gotthelf, a visiting professor in Pitt’s Department of History and Philosophy of Science and an expert on Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism, explained the relevant part of Rand’s view of morality in two principles: First, “Each person has a right to pursue his own rational self-interest” and second, “We will benefit from [others] pursuing their own self-interest, just as they will from our pursuing ours.”
These pillars of Objectivism constitute the morality of that segment of the political Right that values individual responsibility, free markets and small government and it is this morality that is largely absent from college campuses today whereas the Leftist morality of altruism pervades higher education.
Part of the reason for this, Gotthelf said, is that the first-mentioned principle of Objectivist morality isn’t defended or advanced in American society. Instead, Gotthelf said, “people are imbued with the moral sense that lies behind socialism” in their places of worship, schools and families throughout their lives and, although they are “too American” to accept the political dimensions of socialism, they buy in to its morality.
This acceptance of altruism constitutes a perversion of that first liberating impulse that many students’ encounter when they arrive at college: the new responsibility for one’s thoughts and actions. Rather than accept the Left’s second-hand ideal of altruism and self-sacrifice, students should fully pursue that first impulse.
Of course, I realize that, as Gotthelf said, “it’s not easy to be first-hand.” The groups dedicated to saving Darfur, unionizing university employees or volunteering on alternative spring breaks all tug at the emotional heartstrings of college students and conform nicely to the socialist ethic of altruism that pervades our society. Indeed, scoffing at these groups and their goals seems callous on a campus where we are told regularly that we are privileged and need to give back to those less fortunate.
Students who already reject the second-handedness of Leftist altruism must overcome this pressure and begin to defend this first principle of Objectivism if the ideological makeup of college campuses is ever going to change. It’s no longer enough to oppose the specific political initiatives of the Left because its embrace of altruism as morality makes it far stronger – on campuses and around the country – than the Right will ever be until it acknowledges and advances the morality of its cause.
We must be clear that the rational pursuit of self-interest is a moral action and that the only way to live is to live a life for oneself rather than for others.
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After reading your column, I couldn’t help but feel a frustration similar to that of reading the courtroom monologue given by genius, and self-righteous hero Howard Roarke. My frustration is ignited not by the theory of Objectivism, but in the last sentence of your column, and i quote, “the only way to live is to live a life for oneself rather than for others.” This is a very loaded statement. The ONLY way to live? I want to quote the humanitarian architect Samuel Mockbee who states “I just want everyone to be happy, and what I do is self-serving, because I get to use my natural talents and sensibilities, education and imagination.” Saying that there is only one way to live is truly scary.
Ayn Rand | Mar 17, 2010 | Reply
To clarify, I think that pursuing rational self-interest is the only way to live that will produce a free world. Certainly, there are other moralities and other ways to live but they tend to justify systems like communism, socialism and welfare states that are demonstrably unfree societies.
Giles Howard | Mar 17, 2010 | Reply
Defining rational self interest is an impossible endeavor, for self-interests vary infinitely, contradicting one another and causing extreme conflict. Check out christiania
Ayn Rand | Mar 17, 2010 | Reply
Also, say two groups have conflicting self interests, what happens then? There has to be some compromise, some social harmony.
Ayn Rand | Mar 17, 2010 | Reply
Hello Giles,
You remain among my favorite Pitt News authors for your wit and clarity despite my present disagreement with various claims made above, I will move straight to the point out of respect for your time and attention.
I want to argue briefly for sociality as a condition of selfhood and the consequent inseparability of the individual’s good and the collective good. Society is one harmonious physical-social event or collective action of which individuals are particular moments and aspects, both the content and form of our self-narration are created through co-existence and dialogue with others.
What we call “the mind” is not a thing independent of the flow of time but rather a label for our capacity to see and talk to ourselves as if we were someone else and that someone else is an abstraction of the particular others with whom we coexist in community. Individual thought only emerges as the result of our being born or thrust into a situation where the truth of certain fact and value claims are inevitably taken for granted and it is only through personal experience and dialogue with others that one is ever in a position to RETROACTIVELY evaluate what they were originally taught. In short, self-made individuals do not and cannot exist, and because of this Objectivist ethics is demonstrably structurally flawed at its foundations.
Individual freedom is structurally and morally only semi-autonomous from society at large from start to finish. Even now, we exist in bodies birthed by parents indebted to their respective families and the larger social structure, we speak with borrowed words, we communicate typing on keys and looking at monitors that exist through the labors of others, our whole life rests upon deeds done and duties executed by others as our feet rest on the ground. I would encourage you and your readers to consider the Stoic philosopher Epictetus’ proposal that “seeking the very best in ourselves means actively caring for the welfare of other human beings.”
William Ballow | Mar 18, 2010 | Reply
First of all, an ethics is a body of abstract principles to guide one’s life. It is not a list of yeas and nays for every possible concrete alternative one can face in life. That one should always act in his own rational self-interest is such a principle and it is to be expected that there could be an infinite number of different choices or actions that could comply with that principle.
The question we must answer, for our own good, is which of these differing choices actually are in our rational self interest and which are not. Defining and deciding which are or are not is not impossible. On the contrary nothing that exists, neither entities nor relationships, may be regarded as impossible to define. That would mean that an entity or relationship would not have an identity, and that could only mean that it did not exist.
When one finds two choices that appear to fulfill the same principle, but conflict with each other, it is time, as Rand so often said, to check your premises from which they derive.
MichaelM | Mar 19, 2010 | Reply
“Also, say two groups have conflicting self interests, what happens then? There has to be some compromise, some social harmony.”
Ethics defines a code of values by which a human individual can pursue his life as an individual. Ethical principles are extended to and applied to human social relationships by the philosophical science of politics.
The Objectivist ethics holds that a volitional being with a rational capacity as his means of survival requires autonomy in the application of reason to effort in the service of his own life. And it recognizes that the only possible enemy of such autonomy is physical coercion — force. It holds that the single fundamental moral question of social interrelationships is freedom or force.
The rational egoist advocates therefore a government with a single mandate to guarantee that no person may initiate the use of physical force to gain, withhold, or destroy any tangible or intangible value of another person who either created it or acquired it in a voluntary exchange. Its sole job is to remove force from social interaction by using the defensive force it is authorized to use to stop, prevent, or punish initiated force, with the ultimate goal that all human interrelationships shall be voluntary.
So to answer the commenter’s question, — “what happens when interests collide?” — it is the concept of individual rights universally and consistently applied that precludes that from occurring. In the Objectivist radical laissez-faire capitalist society, everyone may pursue their own interests whether they conflict with those of others, or not. They may not, however, impose them on others by force, either individually or in concert with others or even a majority of others.
When all interrelationships are voluntary, there is no way to get a value of any kind from someone else without offering them something they value more in exchange. In a society of voluntary relations, the insatiable quest for riches against which the student left perpetually rails at becomes the very thing that raises the standard of living of the poor. Consider Sam Walton who died the richest man in America after raising the standard of living of the country’s poorest more than all the government programs and private charity during his lifetime.
Similarly, a wealthy Objectivist might invest in the education of a bright young student who demonstrates his potential value as a productive human being but who could never amass the wealth to go to a university, by giving him a scholarship or loan. The student recipient will have earned that investment by being worthy of it through his own actions and the value the donor places on furthering such in the society in which he lives. The student will not be participating in the scheme that asserts the need of one man validates a claim on the life of another. That is the aspect of altruism that degrades both parties by reducing them to the respective roles of parasite and victim.
MichaelM | Mar 20, 2010 | Reply