The Virtue of Selfishness (Signet) [Taschenbuch]

Rand is often provocative, and mention of her/and or her philosophy can create instant dichotomies. I will not, in this review, critique the ideational content of her work. I offer this review with some "objective", pardon the pun, criticism.

1. This work offers a concise, fairly complete philosophy (which you may or may not agree with), from the essential and foundational steps, to their eventual results in daily life. This complete-package approach is an interesting window into her philosophy. Several issues could have been explored in more detail surely, but this collection of essays acts primarily to spark thinking on behalf of the reader.

2. Her philosophy is a shocking alternative to the present implicity accepted norms in society. Her counter-arguments to both traditional and contemporary systems of ethics are interesting and worth consideration, even if you eventually endeavour to refute them.

3. This work presents profound ideas in rather straightforward text. Topics include: ethics metaphysics politics values comments on contemporary trends in philosophy comments on ethical relativism

4. This work provides some insight into the breadth and depth which simple assumptions may have on daily life. Rands ideas, and those she illustrates for purposes of refutation, are extrapolated from basic intellectual concepts to day-to-day effects on human life. This concept-to-consequence style of writing offers a holistic perspective that can easily be applied to the work of other philosophers. For this reason I suggest this book to students of philosophy to gain a perspective of the impact of philosophical ideas.

5. Finally, this is perhaps the most succinct and most accessible of Rand's works, and a reading of it should allow sufficient insight into the body of her thought to understand her stance on several issues. If you are looking for a 'summary of Rand', this is the book I would suggest.

Her thoughts are easily argued with, but that was her intent. To make people think, to make them use their minds in a clear and logical way, to examine the world around them and see where it was headed. Whenever anyone reads her books and says "But wait, is this so?", they come a step closer to making this world clearer, and brighter. And that, in essence, was the purpose of Ayn Rand's writing. To make the people of the world think, and see for themselves the state of the world, and the causes of it.

Take the previous reviewer's first example: "Metaphysically, life is the only phenomenon that is an end in itself: a value gained and kept by a constant process of action." [That's from "The Objectivist Ethics," in this volume.] Now Rand insisted repeatedly (e.g. in her letters to John Hospers, reprinted in _The Letters of Ayn Rand_) that when she defined a word, she stuck to the meaning she had assigned it. Yet in her argument here, she passes insensibly from "biological life" to "life with integrity," even allowing in _Atlas Shrugged_ that one might commit biological suicide in order to _preserve_ one's integrity. So much for life as an end in itself. In fact biological life is of purely instrumental value -- i.e. as a means to the achievement of values which really _are_ ends in themselves. But what Rand does is to build her own favorite virtues into the meaning of "life as man _qua_ man," and thereby define anyone who doesn't practice those virtues as quite literally _subhuman_.

Or take the previous reviewer's second example: "Epistemologically, the concept of 'value' is genetically dependent upon and derived from the antecedent concept of 'life.'" This is just nonsense, as Rand's own example of the "indestructible robot" shows. She wants to insist that an indestructible robot can't have any values -- but she does it by building in to her statement the hypothesis that the robot can't be affected by _anything_ in _any_ way whatsoever (a much stronger condition than simple indestructibility). Her argument that value depends on life (really, on "mortality") is therefore just bad. There's no reason in the world why immortal beings couldn't have values.

You'll spot her doing this sort of thing right and left. She'll tell you on one page that "values" make sense only for beings who can make choices in the face of alternatives -- and then turn around and tell you that plants have values that they have no alternative but to seek. She'll tell you that the very first question in ethics is whether we _need_ ethics at all -- and not only ignore the fact that "need" is already an ethically loaded term, but then turn around later in the volume and argue that "need" can't be the basis for any of our claims against one another. This despite her just-as-equivocal argument that "rights" are based directly on needs -- a well-known passage in which she passes without acknowledgement from the statement that "it is right" for man to use his mind, etc., to the statement that "he has a right" to do those things. The woman who allegedly never altered the meaning of her words in fact did it all the time -- she just didn't notice.

This volume's worst flaw is, as I've said elsewhere, that Rand tries to alter the meaning of "human being" or "man's life" so that it means, not biological life, but the sort of life she regards as moral. I'm not disagreeing that such a life _is_ moral, but it's a sign of trouble when you try to base an ethic directly on biological life and immediately find yourself distorting that standard to fit your conclusions. There are two standards here, and Rand conflates them; the result is not elevation, but corruption.

As a matter of biological fact, a human being is a human being from conception to death, no matter how immoral we may be in between. To equate immorality with subhumanity is to provide a fig leaf of legitimacy for anyone who really _does_ want to get away with murder.