Ayn Rand and the Future of Freedom

Author’s note: The following is adapted from talks given to participants of the Students For Liberty Prometheus Fellowship.

Think about all the years you spent in school, all the books you read, all the facts you learned, all the things you know.

Or should I say, all the things you think you know. Are we actually capable of knowledge? Today, there is broad skepticism about whether knowledge and certainty are possible. Let’s review some of the common arguments and see where they lead.

How do you know you know anything? Isn’t “knowledge” based on perception? And isn’t perception relative to the perceiver? Perhaps there is broad consensus on some things, but for centuries—nay, millennia—the consensus said that Earth was the center of the universe. Consensus is no indicator of truth. We’re left with one person’s word against another; and if that’s all we have, we can’t be certain of or know anything.

And if we can’t tell true from false, then we can’t tell right from wrong either. When it comes to good and bad, it’s to each his own. For others, intifada, jihad, and honor killings might be good; for you or me, bad. For others, socialism or religious dictatorship might be good; for you or me, bad. If we’re incapable of knowledge, if our reasoning minds cannot grasp facts of reality, if everything is a matter of opinion or feelings, then we are essentially hopeless to work through our differences and settle disputes. Perhaps individuals or communities with different belief systems can coexist peacefully for a while. But ultimately, people will disagree, and when they abandon rational argument, many instead try to force their views on others. Hence, history—not to mention our world today—is a bloodbath of sectarian violence, religious wars, ethnic conflict, and so on. So much for “live and let live.”

Thus, the “solution” that many come to: Establish a dictator. Thomas Hobbes was right; we need to give a strong leader absolute authority over all things, so that he can rule over us and, hopefully, keep the peace.

That’s an apt description of what people thought during the 20th century, and what we got were the reigns of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao. But, some may say, our leading minds have woken up since then. They’ve realized that there are “truths,” and they are knowable. However, “truths” are relative to one’s culture, race, class, sex, sexual orientation, waist size, and so forth. There is what’s true for black people, what’s true for white people, what’s true for Asian people, what’s true for Latin American people, and so on. There is what’s true for the rich, the middle-class, the poor. And our cognizance of how these “truths” overlap is a field of vigorous study and burgeoning “knowledge” in itself: intersectionality.

If you’ve spent any time on a college campus lately, then you know I’m not making up any of this. And, today, scores of influential intellectuals are committed to the view that “truths” and corresponding ideas of right and wrong are relative to one’s culture, race, gender, and so on. Witness, for instance, the Smithsonian bulletin that listed “objective, rational linear thinking” as an aspect of “whiteness and white culture.”¹

According to this postmodernist line of thought, “knowledge” is simply that which a given group regards as “true,” in line with that group’s cultural norms. Collections of culturally relative truths form “discourses” or “metanarratives” about how the world works. The “discourse” of those with the most sociopolitical power sets the terms of debate in a given place and time, disqualifying alternate “forms of knowing” from impacting how society functions. In the terms of French philosopher Michel Foucault, those with the most “power-knowledge” thereby establish “regimes of truth.” As Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay summarize, “In postmodern thinking, that which is known is only known within the cultural paradigm that produced the knowledge and is therefore representative of its systems of power. As a result, postmodernism regards knowledge as provincial and intrinsically political.”²

Therefore, on this theory, language is a form of “power,” and societies “systemically privilege” certain groups whose “discourses” and “metanarratives” dominate that system and subjugate minorities. Without even necessarily intending it, those of dominant groups organize society hierarchically, serving their own interests at the expense of all others. The moral and political implications of this theory are clear: Down with the oppressors—fight for the oppressed!

Who are the oppressors and the oppressed? Unsurprisingly, as Pluckrose and Lindsay point out, postmodernists hold that the dominant systems today are “patriarchal, white supremacist, and heteronormative, and therefore necessarily grant unfair access to straight, white Western men and work to maintain that status quo by excluding the perspectives of women and racial and sexual minorities.”³ In this view, dominant ways of knowing and dealing with the world—including science, logic, objective reasoning, civility, rule of law, and property rights—were created by white males, and by using them, we unconsciously perpetuate the oppression of all other groups.

If language is a form of oppressive “power,” the implications are clear: It’s OK, in the “woke” postmodern view, to “cancel,” shout down, ban, or otherwise suppress the speech of those spouting the dominant “discourse”—because such speech is “violence,” and stopping it is “self-defense.”⁴ As one advocate of this view put it in an article for The Guardian, “The uncomfortable truth is that, sometimes, violence is the only answer left.” On this premise, violently stealing the property of “oppressors” is likewise considered an appropriate response. “When I use the word looting”—said Vicky Osterweil, author of In Defense of Looting, on National Public Radio—“I mean the mass expropriation of property, mass shoplifting during a moment of upheaval or riot. That’s the thing I’m defending. . . . Looting strikes at the heart of property, of whiteness and of the police.” Those who oppose looting, she continued, are motivated by “anti-Blackness and contempt for poor people who want to live a better life.”⁵

Although postmodernism was formulated by overtly leftist French intellectuals (who were also white males), many of its core tenets are perpetuated today not only by “woke” leftists but also by conservatives. “Marx is right to see that every society consists of cohesive classes or groups, and that political life everywhere is primarily about the power relations among different groups,” writes Yoram Hazony, de facto head of the National Conservative movement, in his book Conservatism: A Rediscovery.⁶  Hazony—whose National Conservatism conference has been keynoted by Ron DeSantis and has featured Senators Rick Scott, Marco Rubio, and Josh Hawley along with a slew of other prominent Republicans—attacks liberalism (the broad name for social systems based on liberty and individual rights), saying that it “is ultimately the theory that the state can be neutral. Stew in this false theory long enough and you end up believing that *you* yourself can be neutral.”⁷

In Hazony’s view, shared by many national conservatives, liberalism’s misguided attempt at political neutrality, including the very possibility of equality before the law, stems from its naive confidence in the reasoning power of man’s mind and from such bold pronouncements as the notion of universal individual rights. In truth, Hazony holds, no matter how seemingly all-encompassing our formulations of rights are, they always necessarily reflect the preferences of some dominant group. “Marx is right when he says that the dominant group tends to see its own preferred laws and policies as reflecting ‘reason’ or ‘nature,’ and works to disseminate its way of looking at things throughout society,” he writes, “so that various kinds of injustice and oppression tend to be obscured from view.”⁸ Thus, Hazony’s philosophy bears a striking resemblance to postmodernist “standpoint theory” indicated above, which holds, in effect, that what one regards as true depends on where one stands.

Marx erred, Hazony adds, primarily in thinking that dominant groups are always oppressive. Conservatism, in his view, seeks to conserve social unity by teaching those in power to make concessions to those lower in the social hierarchy. Hazony explains:

[I]f it is possible for weaker groups to benefit from their position, and not just to be oppressed by it, then we have arrived at the possibility of a conservative society. This is a society in which there is a dominant class or loyalty group (or coalition of groups) which seeks to balance the benefits and the burdens of the existing order so as to avoid oppression and repair it where it arises.⁹

Such concessions are precisely what Hazony and other conservatives think “rights” refer to. Rights are not, as liberals (in the classical sense) would have it, protections sanctioning a person’s pursuit of values. Rather, they are claims to goods that a government grants to some at the expense of others. “Which goods can be made available is a practical matter that cannot be determined without trial and error in actual societies,” Hazony writes in The Virtue of Nationalism. “True rights, those that incur obligations on others to take action, are for this reason incalculable without reference to the constraints of real-world contexts.”¹⁰ For instance, he argues, a person’s right not to be drafted into the military depends on whether the military needs him. So, Hazony holds, governments must be pragmatic, granting certain groups “rights” to things as and when those things become available and align with the goal of conserving the nation.

Thus, Hazony aptly illustrates the political trajectory of philosophies that abandon the supposedly simpleminded Enlightenment-liberal view of man’s rational efficacy to formulate universal truths, including the foundational idea of “the liberal construction of the West,” which “assumes that there is only one principle at the base of legitimate political order: individual freedom.” He writes,

This is flattering to the individual, since it makes it seem as though the important choices are almost always his to decide. However, it is painfully lacking as a description of the empirical political world, in which mutual loyalties bind human beings into families, tribes, and nations, and each of us receives a certain religious and cultural inheritance as a consequence of being born into such collectives. It ignores the responsibilities that are intrinsic to both inherited and adopted membership in collectives of this kind, establishing demands on individuals that do not arise as a result of consent and do not disappear if consent is withheld.¹¹

Many advocates of such supposedly “empirical” philosophies pay lip service to rights and even the existence of universal—albeit, supposedly unverifiable—truths. However, their fundamental skepticism necessarily leads them to construe rights as privileges to be meted out by government. Maybe the dominant group rules benignly to “conserve” the nation; maybe it does not. Either way, their skepticism leads in practice to a politics of: Political might equals “right.”

Many who accepted their professors’ view that “political life everywhere is primarily about the power relations among different groups” have spread their wings and left campuses. Now they are everywhere, setting HR policy at Fortune 500s; running prestigious cultural institutions, think tanks, and political action committees; and winning elections. And they are determined to implement their views of right and wrong, to correct imbalances of “power” by creating policies and passing laws that favor one group at the expense of others. In the process, they are dismantling what elements of freedom remain in the Western world.

For those who want to defend liberty, the problems run deep. Without moral knowledge—including knowledge of what societies properly must prohibit and of what people ought to be left free to do—there is little hope for securing individual rights and liberty. But we cannot validate our moral knowledge if we cannot validate our knowledge more generally—knowledge held in the form of concepts. And we cannot validate any knowledge if we cannot validate the perceptual evidence upon which all knowledge ultimately is based. So, if we want to effectively defend liberty against today’s skeptics, we need answers to their deep, philosophic arguments and claims.

As far as I’m aware, only one person in history has offered solutions to these pressing problems: Ayn Rand. What follows is an overview of several key philosophic problems, the ways in which past thinkers struggled to resolve them, and an indication of how Rand answered each. I won’t cover all her major philosophic achievements, just those most pertinent to the task of defending liberty. Nonetheless, given the nature of the topics we’ll cover—perception, conceptual knowledge, morality, and politics—our task will necessarily be demanding. And I have time only to summarize the issues and positions involved. But if you give me your attention, I think you’ll see how important each one of these issues is to a future of freedom and flourishing, if there is to be one. And if you follow the leads herein and study these issues and ideas for yourself, then—among many other benefits—you will no doubt vastly amplify your ability to defend liberty against the barbarians at the gate.

Saving Sense Perception from the Skeptics

Why do some people claim our senses can’t be trusted? Many of their arguments stem from confusions about optical illusions.

A stick appears bent in water. Or an entire city appears at a distance in the desert, but it isn’t where it appears to be. Conclusion: The senses give us erroneous information, so we can’t rely on them for knowledge of reality. So, each individual must simply go by his own view of things. As scholar of Greek philosophy W. K. C. Guthrie put it, “the way things appear to one man is the truth for him, and the way they appear to another is the truth for him. . . . Truth is purely relative.”¹²

What does this mean for how we should treat others and structure society? Guthrie continues, “Must we not suppose that justice and injustice, right and wrong, have an equally subjective and unreal existence? There can be in nature no absolute principles governing the relations between man and man. It is all a question of how you look at it.”¹³ “[B]ecause no one’s moral commandments are universally valid, they are not binding on anyone else,” writes professor and author Andrew Bernstein, explaining this view. “Society’s laws . . . are merely beliefs held by a group of people, no more necessary for a recalcitrant individual to accept or obey than if the state proclaimed we must embark on a quest to locate a cadre of winged fairies guzzling red wine on the dark side of the moon.”¹⁴ Thus, as the ancient Greek thinker Thrasymachus reportedly held: Might equals right.

The sensory skeptics have many such arguments, some of them more complex than others. For instance, what about the differences in perceptual experience between a color-blind man and a normal sighted man, or between the hearing impaired and those with normal hearing? The sense organs of some can differ quite dramatically from those of others. This causes enduring disparities in how different people experience the same things. And given this variability of the senses, how can we possibly hold that perception is a valid means of knowledge? For all we know, color blindness is just a particularly pronounced and obvious disparity. But perhaps we all perceive the same things in at least subtly different ways.

Aristotle offered many arguments against such skepticism. He held that under normal conditions, the senses give us direct knowledge of reality. Under abnormal conditions, we use our senses, along with careful reasoning, to determine the cause of any disparity, correct for it, and continue gaining knowledge and achieving our goals.

Suppose you always make a soup using the same recipe and love the savory flavor. However, today, the soup tastes bitter. Unless you are stirring for an argument, it’s unlikely you will conclude that the senses deceive us, that they can never be trusted, and that we are thus incapable of knowledge. Nor is it likely you will conclude that the recipe is bad, given that it’s yielded yummy soup many times before. Aristotle held that such responses are irrational.

What reaction would be rational? What might we do instead? Maybe we taste the separate ingredients to find out if any have gone bad. Or maybe we’re feeling a little ill, which, as we know from experience, can change how things taste. So, we have a spouse or family member taste the soup. In other words, whatever our course of action, we continue relying on sensory evidence to gather information so that we can isolate the cause and correct for it. (Here we have the basis of the scientific method, one of Aristotle’s greatest bequests to humanity.)

Aristotle recognized that our sense faculties rely on physical organs, each with a certain nature, and he readily acknowledged—indeed, emphasized—that changes in relevant causal factors can alter how we experience the world. But our senses don’t lie; they tell us, for instance, that a thing tastes the way it tastes in our specific circumstances. Problems arise not at the level of perception but of interpretation, especially when people wrongly identify an aspect of their perceptual experience as a characteristic of the thing itself—when they confuse the how of perception with the what. Insofar as we remain cognizant—and factor into our judgment—that our sensory experience is a function of things impinging on our sense organs under specific causal circumstances, we can avoid error. We err when we forget this and say, instead, that the soup just is bitter.¹⁵

There are no grounds, here, said Aristotle, for throwing out the evidence of the senses; sensory evidence is our means of detecting discrepancies, isolating their causes, and dealing with them. If a straight stick appears bent in water, a rational person does not thereafter distrust his eyes; instead, he reaches out and touches the stick, confirming that, indeed, just as his past experience testifies, straight sticks remain straight. He thus uses his other senses to investigate; further, he can use them to isolate what causes the stick to appear bent, which is precisely what scientists have since done: Water is denser than air, so light (and virtually everything but sound) travels more slowly through water than air. This change in speed bends (refracts) light at the water’s surface. Light reflecting from the stick and reaching our eyes is likewise bent at the water’s surface, causing part of the stick to appear where it is not—and thereby making it look bent.¹⁶

Aristotle also leveraged the law of noncontradiction in his response to sensory skeptics. The law, which he formulated, states that a thing cannot be both A and non-A at the same time and in the same respect (A standing for any quality). So, soup cannot be both bitter and not bitter at the same time and in the same respect. It can, as we’ve discussed, be bitter and not bitter at the same time in different respects: bitter to a sick person and not bitter to a healthy one. But underlying experience is one reality, and the facts of reality cannot contradict themselves. So, Aristotle said, we can—and, in fact, must—find ways to grasp reality and resolve seeming contradictions. Skeptics, by contrast, give up that quest, leaving the contradictions unresolved and concluding that what’s true for me may not be true for you. Thus, in the skeptic’s view, everything can be at the same time both true and false: true for some and false for others. But, said Aristotle, this position violates the law of noncontradiction—and it is thereby self-refuting: “For he who says that everything is true makes even the statement contrary to his own true, and therefore his own not true (for the contrary statement denies that it is true), while he who says everything is false makes himself also false.”¹⁷

Given this, skeptics cannot sensibly pronounce in favor of skepticism because they must break their skepticism in doing so; they must pronounce a truth claim about the way things are while denying the very possibility of truth claims. This is why Aristotle’s fellow Athenian, arch-skeptic Cratylus, “finally did not think it right to say anything.”¹⁸

Rand agreed with much of Aristotle’s analysis and built upon it.¹⁹ She distinguished between the object of perception (the thing one is perceiving) and the form of perception (the specific characteristics of that perception). When we perceive an object, that perception has a particular form, which is dependent on the means (the sensory faculty) by which we perceive it.

Suppose I ask you to close your eyes and hold out your hand. I drop something into your palm, and you feel a cold, hard, irregularly shaped object. We’ll call that form #1; the object, whatever it is, is such that when you feel it, it feels cold, hard, and irregularly shaped. I tell you to open your eyes, and now you see something shiny, metallic, and flat, with a wide end and a narrow end, and with one smooth side and one jagged side. Call that form #2; the object is such that when you see it, it looks shiny, metallic, and flat, with one wide end and one narrow end, and with one smooth side and one jagged side. We grasp the same object, but the form in which we grasp it depends on the sensory faculties we use. Now, what if someone were crazy enough to say, “Your tactile perception says it’s cold and hard, but your visual perception says it’s shiny, metallic, and flat. The senses contradict one another, therefore we cannot trust them”? I can’t think of any skeptics who actually say this, because even they realize, if only implicitly, that it is the same one object grasped differently, leading to differences in the form of perception. These different forms, even they seem to realize, are not to be confused with the object itself.

Take a different example. My sense of smell is quite impoverished by comparison to my dog’s. Whereas dogs typically have more than one hundred million sensory receptors in their noses, humans typically have about six million—and I’m probably far below average. If I were to smell a key that you just handled, I likely would experience only the faintest smell of the metal itself. My dog’s nose, by contrast, gives him a wealth of sense data, including data about the people who have handled it. The form of my dog’s scent perceptions is quite different from mine. If I were to smell a telephone pole, I would perhaps perceive only the scent of wood. My dog, on the other hand, would smell the wood, the markings of whatever dogs have passed not only in the last few minutes or hours, but the last couple of days, and probably a whole lot more besides. From the scent of the markings, he could discern the gender of those other dogs, whether any were ill or in heat, and more.

It is irrational to conclude, from the fact that my dog’s scent perception has a different form than mine, that neither of our perceptions are perceptions of the world or are valid—or that all perception, because relative to the perceiver, is thus subjective. Indeed, for at least the past fifteen or twenty thousand years, people have recognized that a dog’s form of scent perception is different from man’s, that it is far more acute, and that dogs properly trained are incredibly useful for hunting and tracking. Nor should we conclude from this that the form of a man’s scent perception is invalid. Within his range of sensitivity, what man perceives is real. It is not subjective, not subject to whim or wish. His perception is the product of inexorable natural causes. Although he can attend to them more or less, he cannot will his perceptions to be different than they are. The entities involved are what they are, and the result is determined by the identities of those entities in action.

Likewise, a color-blind man perceives color in a different form than does a normal sighted man. Although the form of perception is relative to the perceiver, it is not subjective but objective, determined by the nature of the entities involved, none of which can act in contradiction to their identities. Thus, a stoplight acts on his senses in such a manner as to produce a color perception of brown, whereas the normal sighted man perceives it as red. The greater acuity of the latter does not invalidate the former any more than the dog’s scent perception invalidates a man’s. Different forms of perception can offer more or less data, but the data is reality. What all perceivers get, implicitly, is: The entity is of such a nature that when I perceive it, I perceive it in such-and-such a form.

A person who gets less information directly via the senses—whether because he is color-blind, myopic, hard of hearing, or what have you—must infer things that others directly perceive. A color-blind man does not merely ignore red lights. But instead of directly perceiving a light’s color and thereby grasping its meaning, he must infer its color and its meaning from its position on the traffic light. If it is the topmost or leftmost light on the signal, he infers that the light is such that normal-sighted people perceive it as red, and thus that it is a stoplight. If he’s in a new country where they buck the trend, then he observes that others are slowing down or stopping when, say, the bottom (or rightmost) light is illuminated, and he infers from this that this light indicates that he should stop.

Rand pointed out that differences in a man’s form of perception don’t lead him to different knowledge; they don’t keep him from understanding stoplights, never mind history, psychology, philosophy, physics, mathematics, engineering, and so on. Perception provides the basic data of experience, from which we abstract to form concepts and begin reasoning. Cognitively, we go from the concretes we perceive to abstract, universal knowledge. Ultimately, differences in perceptual form are superficial and do not impact one’s ability to abstract to form concepts, generalizations, or whole sciences.

Rand, too, saw that skeptics failed to recognize the distinction between the object of perception and the form of perception (or, in more Aristotelian terminology, between what they perceive and how they perceive it). They mistakenly interpreted different forms of perception as testimony of contradictory objects—testimony that therefore had to be thrown out. And unfortunately, most were not so consistent as Cratylus. Their legacy was an even more fundamental argument against the senses. It is as follows:

1. Our perceptions of external objects are processed (and thereby necessarily changed in some respect) by our sensory faculties.
2. The processed percept must be different from the external object itself.
3. Therefore, our senses don’t give us knowledge of the external world, only a sort of proxy.
4. And further, because we can’t access the world directly, we can’t assess the accuracy of that proxy. We are inextricably cut off from reality.²⁰

That is, because the senses have a particular identity, they necessarily must impose that identity on everything we perceive. So, what we perceive is not reality as it really is, only reality as we happen to perceive it, through our limited, human modes of perception. As one commentator put it, we could perceive reality as it really is only via a “mirror-like mode of representation.”²¹

On this view, Rand observed, we could perceive reality only if our means of perception had no nature of their own, which means only if they had no identity. As she put it regarding Immanuel Kant’s philosophy, which relies heavily on this argument:

[M]an is limited to a consciousness of a specific nature, which perceives by specific means and no others, therefore, his consciousness is not valid; man is blind, because he has eyes—deaf, because he has ears—deluded, because he has a mind—and the things he perceives do not exist, because he perceives them.²²

But only by virtue of a sensory faculty’s identity—the fact that it operates in a certain way—can it sense anything. The nature of every single existent is limited by the fact that it is something specific, has a specific identity, and can act only in accordance with its identity. This is known in philosophy as the law of identity; a thing is itself; A is A. It is a logical corollary of Aristotle’s law of noncontradiction. A thing cannot be A and non-A at the same time and in the same respect because A is A.

Rand recognized that it is this basic law of identity that sensory skeptics, therefore, take issue with. Requiring, as condition of their validity, that sensory faculties have no specific identity, is to demand that they be nothing in particular, that they operate by no particular means. But that is simply not how reality works. Take mirrors, for instance, a favorite analogy for how sensory skeptics think perception ought to work. Like everything that exists, mirrors have a specific identity. This enables them to reflect a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. But some wavelengths are absorbed by the mirror, and others pass through it, just as X-rays pass through our bodily tissues. Mirrors, therefore, are limited by their identity and can’t, in the characteristic skeptic phrase, “reflect reality as it really is.”

Building on Aristotle’s ideas, Rand swept away the baseless arguments against the senses, holding that sensory evidence provides the foundation of all knowledge—the data from which we form concepts, the primary means by which we retain and communicate knowledge. Let’s move on now to concept formation and to Rand’s solution to a perennial and all-important problem in philosophy: the problem of universals.

Solving the Problem of Universals

Universals are our concepts, the building blocks of language, the general terms we use to refer to all the particulars we deal with on a daily basis. For instance, “dog” is a universal or concept that refers to all the different dogs that have ever existed, that currently exist, and that will exist in the future. But whereas we can see, touch, and hear particular dogs, the universal concept or classification “dog” is imperceptible; it’s an abstraction. But what exactly are abstractions?  How do we know that they are valid? Is there anything that unites specific things into classes, anything essentially similar about them, thus warranting our use of one concept to refer to all of them? Or are concepts mere arbitrary constructs? Are they relative to one’s group, serving as the basis of “discourses” and “metanarratives” that perpetuate one group’s dominance over others?

Philosophers have given a variety of different answers to such questions. Note, though, that if concepts are not based in factual reality, knowledge as we know it is impossible. We hold our knowledge primarily, if not exclusively, in conceptual form. So, if our concepts have no universally valid basis, neither then does any of that knowledge. The problem of universals is, therefore, the central problem of knowledge, and the central question of the branch of philosophy that studies how we know what we know: epistemology. Because so much hangs on it, it is, in a sense, the central question of philosophy as such.

And it is an all-important question for human life. When skeptics declare that we’re incapable of knowledge, you can certainly take the commonsense view that, “Of course we have knowledge. Look around you. Humans have flown to the moon, for god’s sake.” But when masses of people become convinced by skeptical arguments, we get widespread cultural relativism and devastation. To take a contemporary example, if we can’t know who has a rightful claim to political sovereignty over the area now governed by the state of Israel, then one’s decision to side with or against Israel is essentially arbitrary. If we have no knowledge, then we must simply go by feeling. And because, on this view, we can’t possibly reason with one another—reasoning requires concepts—our only recourse is to force our views on others. So, as far removed from our lives as the problem of universals and the broader “knowledge problem” may seem, these are, in fact, of life-or-death importance. As Voltaire so eloquently put it, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” And those who want to advance freedom must also effectively diagnose and treat a culture in decay, which requires more than simply appealing to common sense. Freedom fighters must understand, at least in essentials, the nature of the skeptical arguments regarding concepts and knowledge and how to answer those arguments.

We’ve already dealt with one of the skeptical arguments: The senses deceive us, but they are the basis of all our concepts; so, our concepts are baseless. We’ve just seen how Rand dealt with this line of attack, so we can move on.

A host of other arguments have been put forth by thinkers broadly labeled “nominalists.” Their name stems from their position that there are no universals, only names we more-or-less arbitrarily ascribe to things. (“Nominalism” means “name-ism.’) Their arguments were responses (primarily) to two thinkers who defended universals: Plato and Aristotle.

Plato held that because universals are immaterial, nonspatial, unchanging, and supposedly represent the ideal of a given class of things, they must not derive from the material, spatial, changing, and imperfect concretes we perceive. Rather, it’s the other way around: There is, he supposed, another realm, over and above this one in which we live, a realm where universals reside. That is, they are actual entities, though unlike any we can imagine (given that they’re immaterial, nonspatial, etc.). He called these universals “Forms,” and they supposedly are the perfect forms of every universal class—the perfect apple, the perfect chair, the perfect dog—whereas the concrete instances of those forms that we perceive are something like the imperfect reflections of a distorted, fun-house mirror.

Aristotle demolished Plato’s arguments, pointing out that there is no evidence of such a realm, and that Plato wove the idea out of whole cloth merely to rationalize his conclusions. Universals are not independently existing entities, Aristotle said; rather, they are a means of regarding things, which focuses our attention on their similarities.

What makes similar things similar? Aristotle’s thoughts on this, and much of his work, has been lost to history. What remains, much of it speculated to be student notes, is difficult to understand, giving rise to many conflicting translations and interpretations. Although likely wrong, many interpret Aristotle as having meant that, as Aristotle scholar Gregory Salmieri summarized: “The particulars that fall under a universal do so in virtue of sharing some identical component or aspect, which exists independently of any thought or speech about the universal and provides a basis in reality for universal thought and speech.”²³

On this interpretation, after encountering many things of the same type, we can abstract away their differences and focus on their similarities—those similarities being identical components or aspects shared by all things of a given kind.

How did nominalists respond? Let’s consider a couple of their most influential arguments. The first is what philosopher Leonard Peikoff humorously labels the “I can’t find it” argument. “I can’t find it” is a perfectly reasonable response to Plato’s theory of Forms, because, as Aristotle made clear, it’s a baseless theory, a myth without evidence. But they said the same in response to the common interpretation of Aristotle’s theory—that we simply focus our attention on a characteristic or attribute shared by all things of a given type. Take dogs again. If we ignore all their differences and look solely for their similarities, we can’t find any. We must ignore their height and weight, because they don’t all share exactly the same height or weight. Nor are they exactly the same color. Some dogs are three legged, so we must omit the number of legs as well, and with it, paws and claws. And so on. So, if we’re supposed to find the universal by omitting the differences between all the particulars, we’re left hopelessly looking and never finding anything that all dogs share.

Or take another influential nominalist argument, the “borderline case argument.” Where do we draw the line between green and blue? No matter how closely you examine the color spectrum, no definitive point marks the line between green and blue. There’s an area of transition that is more green than blue, and then more blue than green, but it is a perfect continuum. Where you draw the line is just a matter of choice. And so it goes for all distinctions, they argue.

All classifications, in this view, simply reflect a human choice to categorize things in a certain way, but no underlying facts necessitate such categorizations. It’s true, nominalists acknowledge, certain things have rough similarities that make certain groupings useful or convenient. But there’s nothing identical that all things of a supposed class share, and thus no basis to say that one classification is right and another wrong. If you want to make up the word “schnaw” to refer to Volkswagen Beetles from the 1940s, American presidents with last names beginning with the letter “C,” and the moons of Jupiter, that’s as valid as any other supposed “universal.” Perhaps the facts suggest some categories and not others, but reality doesn’t necessitate or rule out any. It’s all a matter of human choice. Words are subjective. And on this view, as you’d expect, definitions are subjective, as are generalizations, so they don’t express any actual knowledge. They merely tell us how someone has chosen to use words.

So, here we have the problem of universals. How did Rand solve it?

This is the most complex issue in all of philosophy, and the full detail of Rand’s answer is laid out in her longest nonfiction monograph, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. I suggest that you read it for the full explanation, but here I will give you the highlight reel, so to speak, while indulging in my favorite topic at the moment: my son, Leo.

Leo is sixteen months old and has learned to speak only a few words, but as he develops, I am watching the process of concept formation unfold. By about six or seven months old (long before he knew any words), he had developed an affinity for water bottles, and he would army-crawl long distances to get to them. At first, he only went for a certain type of water bottle, a disposable type we buy in bulk and that he sees us using most often. Some of these had their labels intact, whereas others had their labels torn off. The difference is quite obvious: a large bright blue label sheathing the entire bottom half of the bottle, versus no label, just transparent plastic. He could not miss the difference, but he went for both indiscriminately. His behavior testified to his recognition of certain facts: These objects, despite their differences in color, work the same way, serve the same purpose, have the same nature. Although they are different physical objects, they respond in the same way to various movements. Therefore, they are units of one and the same type or class, regardless of their differences in color. He recognized, in effect, that a bottle must have some color, but it may have any color, and so he omitted color from his developing concept of “bottle.” After all, color doesn’t impact the fact that they share an essential identity. Of course, all of this was unfolding wordlessly in Leo’s mind. In Rand’s view, a child’s developing concepts are at first held visually; the sight of the object—not a specific word—is what calls forth Leo’s growing understanding of what a bottle is and how it functions.

In time, he noticed us drinking from another type of water bottle, which has a very different shape. Whereas the first type is wide at one end and narrows at the other, the second is essentially a medium-sized cylinder with a short, narrow section at one end. It has a wide, green cap, as opposed to a narrow, white one, and instead of a removable blue label, it has a few white letters printed on the side. Leo began to hold out his arms and babble when he saw us drinking from this other sort of bottle, his unmistakable way of requesting an object that interests him, just as he had with the first type. When we gave him this latter type of bottle, he excitedly gripped it just as he had the first, and he chewed on the cap in a similar manner. His developing concept of “bottle”—which he still held only visually—had developed even further. He soon went on to gesture for, play with, chew on, and drink from a range of bottles with different shapes and colors, his behavior testifying to his recognition that these objects, despite their differences in color, shape, size, and so forth, work in same way, serve the same purpose, and thus share the same essential nature. He recognized, in effect, that a bottle must have some color, shape, size, and so forth, but it may have any of these, so long as it suits its purpose. His implicit, visual concept of “bottle” became more general, more universal, as he came to realize that a range of things can share essentially the same nature, serving the same purpose, despite superficial differences that don’t impede such use.

Throughout this growth process, his awareness of the essential similarity between different bottles has been heightened by his simultaneous awareness of the greater dissimilarities between all the bottles he’s encountered and, for instance, our cat. She has four legs, moves of her own accord, makes strange sounds, and resists being touched. Leo cannot pick her up, drink from her, use her as a teething toy, or bounce her across the floor. What this contrast further reveals are the commensurable characteristics of like objects, that is, characteristics that can be measured by a common unit. In some nonverbal form, Leo recognizes that all bottles have a certain function: a capacity for holding liquids. Obviously, he has no idea what ounces or milliliters are, but he recognizes that bottles hold liquid. Different-sized bottles hold different amounts, but they share a characteristic that can be measured and compared. And his recognition that cats and many other objects are not measurable in terms of liquid-carrying capacity helps illuminate that bottles have an identical quality that varies in quantity from bottle to bottle. He’s thus able to see sameness more clearly against a background of difference.

There’s much more to Rand’s theory of concept-formation, which is the exclusive topic of ITOE, which I heartily recommend. But what we have here is enough already to answer the nominalists. They say that when we strip away all the differences between two supposedly similar objects, nothing is left, no core similarities between things. Hence, in the search for universals, their conclusion is, “I can’t find it.”

Rand answered that, of course, it’s true that every individual thing is unique. Even mass-produced water bottles, which appear homogenous to the naked eye, can be shown under a microscope to have many differences. The sameness or identity is neither a semi-divine Form in another dimension nor something inherent in the object itself. Nominalists are right to attack Plato’s Forms, and they are on to something in their criticism of the common (mis)interpretation of Aristotle’s theory. That is, particulars don’t “fall under a universal . . . in virtue of sharing some identical component or aspect, which exists independently of any thought or speech about the universal.”²⁴ Nor is the only alternative that universals or concepts are necessarily subjective, without basis in reality. Concepts are created by us for our human purposes. But concepts can only serve a purpose if they actually identify facts. Concepts do have utility, as even the nominalists acknowledge, but only because they are not mere arbitrary groupings; rather, a concept is a retainable recognition that certain things have identical qualities in varying quantities. Concepts leave out specific quantity measurements, holding on to the identical quality. So, our concepts are based in facts.

Rand, therefore, reached her idea of objectivity by overcoming two major hurdles that had tripped earlier thinkers. They had either failed to specify how we recognize essences or had speculated that we do so by finding some fundamental identical feature shared by all of the type. Their view (whether implicit or explicit) was that an identical characteristic had to be identical in every respect, including degree, and that one merely omits from the concept everything not identical. Because they took “identical in every respect” to mean identical in both quality and quantitative measure of that quality, they found nothing shared fully by any two things and concluded that concepts are subjective.

Rand’s first correction of prior theories of abstraction was to point out that homing in on the essence of a class does not require omitting qualities that happen to differ quantitatively. For instance, the concept “human” recognizes a fundamental similarity between all human beings, which differentiates them from all other types of beings: humans possess a rational faculty. In the context of forming this concept, it does not matter that some people are vastly smarter than others, or that some choose not to use their rational faculties. We form concepts by focusing on a fundamental, shared quality, and we omit the quantitative differences. Humans must have some capacity for rationality, but any degree of it is enough to be included in the concept. In other words, concept formation requires not attribute omission, but measurement omission.²⁵

Rand’s second big correction to prior theories of abstraction was to reject what she identified as a widespread false alternative between intrinsicism and subjectivism, held implicitly or explicitly by nearly every major philosopher before her. Universals are not in objects, not intrinsic to them. Nor are universals merely in the mind, without basis in fact, and therefore, subjective. Rather, they are a mind’s recognition of the fact that objects share identical characteristics in differing quantitative measures. Legitimate concepts, therefore, are neither intrinsic nor subjective but objective—signifying in retainable, repeatable form, a mind’s grasp of reality. This, and as we’ll see, Rand’s answer to the philosophic problems concerning the nature of values, are the reasons her philosophy is called Objectivism.

Turning Morality into a Science

We’ve seen how Rand validated the evidence of our senses and clarified how proper concept formation leads to objective, conceptual knowledge of reality—two immensely important things that prior philosophers tried and failed to do for centuries. How did she fare regarding moral values? In addition to objective knowledge about such things as atoms, lenses, nutrition, and so on, are we capable of gaining objective knowledge of morality? If so, how? If not, where does that leave us, especially regarding liberty?

What is “the good”? With very few exceptions, thinkers through the ages have given essentially three answers: (1) The good is to serve the will of a divine being, (2) it is to serve “the group,” whether one’s family, church, community, country, class, race, or other collective, (3) “the good” is subjective, and each individual should follow his own whims.

Let’s look at each in the forms in which Rand first encountered them. Note that she decided at the age of nine that she wanted to be a novelist and to write books that would project a moral ideal for mankind—that would show heroes and heroines who know what the good life is and go about living it. She had to learn not only how to convey that ideal but also what that ideal is. Her quest led her to think deeply about morality, and she discovered that many widely accepted ethical ideals just don’t make sense. And because they’re irrational, they lead to misery and, often, to oppression.

The moral views that predominated in Russia throughout Rand’s childhood were religious. The Russian Orthodox Church broadcasted the view that the good consists in accepting a supposed moral duty to serve God’s will, which entails renouncing one’s own interests and devoting oneself to serving others—ideas which were reinforced in Rand’s home by her family’s Jewish beliefs. Although the Russian Orthodox Church held tremendous sway over the beliefs and actions of many Russians, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 brought a new amalgam of ethical and political ideas to center stage.

Vladimir Lenin, the most prominent mouthpiece for these ideas, fomented a communist revolution based on the theories of Karl Marx.²⁶ Marx had taught that capitalists exploit workers, “alienating” them from their labor by keeping the fruits of that labor while paying them less than their work contributes. Thus, a few accumulate more and more at the expense of everyone else. The majority are relegated to a life of ever-increasing poverty. That is, until they—the starving and angry “proletariat”—finally overthrow their “bourgeois” oppressors, outlaw private property, and establish a dictatorship responsible for dividing things up according to government order and ensuring the people’s happiness.

After Russia’s czar stepped down in 1917, Lenin orchestrated a coup, establishing himself as head of Russia’s new communist dictatorship. Thus, the Leninist-Marxist view—which held that “the good” is synonymous with “the common good” or “the will of the majority”—became the law of the land when Rand was twelve. Like their Christian counterparts, communists preached self-sacrifice, holding that the ideal man readily forfeits any personal value or ambition in order to execute society’s demands and thereby serve “the common good.” Although the objects of self-sacrifice differed, Rand saw that both creeds were essentially similar. Both demanded that people renounce their values, either for God or for “society.” Both were variants of altruism, Latin for other-ism, which is the view that the moral purpose of your life is to live for others.

Further, Rand saw that both ultimately require that one take them on faith. Religion, of course, does so explicitly. It demands faith: belief in the absence of evidence, even in defiance of evidence and logic. And though not explicitly, communism likewise rests on faith, demanding sacrifice for the “greater good” without any evidence to show that human sacrifices lead to anyone’s good—indeed, in defiance of evidence that it does not. Religionists believe in God because they have faith—that is, feel—that he exists and that he demands their obedience; communists, although historically they’ve dressed up their views as “scientific socialism,” ultimately hold that people should serve the community because that’s what they feel people should do. But, of course, different people feel differently. Christians feel things to be true that communists feel to be false. Jews feel things to be true that Christians feel to be false, and so on for the hundreds of religions, sects, political movements, and more.

So, Rand recognized another fundamental similarity between the various moral ideas that surrounded her. Not only were both the church and the communists proponents of altruism, but both were also practitioners of subjectivism, the view that feelings are the means of discerning—or even of creating—facts.

Rand found a seeming alternative in the writings of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche held that the ideal man has his own vision of what the world ought to be and boldly acts on it in defiance of opposing views, however widely held. In his view, the ideal man is not an altruist. He does not ask for his fellow man’s sanction or permission, nor does he concern himself with acting for their benefit. He does what he thinks is right, and he is ready to stand alone against everyone to uphold his own conception of how things ought to be. Rand was attracted to Nietzsche’s egoism—his insistence of living for oneself—which contrasted starkly with the altruism being preached all around her.

But as with religion and communism, she realized in time that Nietzsche, too, was a subjectivist. He held that the ideal man acts not on reason but on feelings. He does not establish his vision or goals rationally, based on facts, but, instead, on animalistic urges that well up from within him. These supposedly are sacred and not to be questioned, by him or anyone else: To the extent that he analyzes and evaluates his blind cravings, he corrupts his soul and degrades his moral stature.

So, Rand, at the start of her quest to define the ideal man and to lay out how he goes about living “the good life,” stepped into a field teeming with irrational ideas about how we should live our lives. And she saw firsthand what a moral code antithetical to reason leads to—most vividly in the case of Leninist-Marxism. After the Soviets came to power, she witnessed the country descend into poverty and oppression. Communists took control of the economy, assuming the prerogative to dispose of the individual’s life and property at its discretion, for “the good of the proletariat.” Businesses were seized from “bourgeois” owners, including Rand’s father, who owned a pharmacy.

As I’ve written elsewhere:

As productive activity was repressed, living conditions became unspeakably awful. Anything beyond the most basic commodities was impossible to find or unaffordable for the great majority of people—and even those basics were difficult to get. Ration cards were given to students and Communist Party members. Rand got one while studying history at Petrograd State University. Every week, she would stand in long lines, waiting to collect whatever the co-ops happened to be handing out. Her family, like many, lived at the level of bare subsistence, often surviving on millet, a seeded grass that most of us have only ever seen in bird food. Rand’s mother later recalled that they ate “cakes made of potato peelings, which to our hungry stomachs had seemed more delicious than the nectar of the Olympic gods.”

Perhaps the greatest indignities stemmed from the housing situation. As demand for urban housing grew, and buildings became unsafe due to lack of maintenance, the Communist regime passed the Domicile Norm, which dictated the amount of living space allowed per person. Government planners split up houses and apartments, assigning tenants and ordering owners to move into smaller and smaller portions of their own homes—essentially treating private residences as state-run dormitories. Not only were entire families forced to share a single kitchen and bathroom, but they often had to share these with complete strangers, a source of constant tension. And just a few years earlier, Rand and her family had enjoyed relative affluence.

But no contrast could have been more illustrative than that between the nation of her birth and the one she escaped to in 1926: the United States of America. In America, the individual’s right to his own life was recognized and largely protected—and this freedom had made possible an incredible standard of living. Rand wept when she saw New York City’s skyscrapers from the ship that brought her over—symbols of prosperity and progress, of ability unleashed and allowed to achieve greatness.²⁷

Rand would go on to integrate a massive range of observations about history and humanity and to identify that true morality derives not from blind urges or supernatural deities but from facts of human nature. She recognized that to flourish, people must use reason to grasp those facts and act accordingly. A genuine, fact-based moral code, as one of her students later put it, “is the instruction manual in regard to proper care and use that did not come with man. It is the science of human self-preservation.”²⁸ One might add, it is the science of human flourishing. Let’s look at what that science entails, according to Rand.

The Standard of Value

Rand did not start—as did virtually every philosopher before her—by asking what moral code we should accept. Rather, she wrote:

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?²⁹

People only need ethics—“a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions,” as Rand put it—insofar as they need values. If they don’t need values, then they don’t need a code of values, either. So, what are values, and do people need them?

Rand observed that all living things face a basic alternative: life or death. To remain alive, an organism must attain certain values. Plants, for instance, need a certain amount of water, nutrients, and light. They grow roots to absorb water and minerals from the soil and leaves to capture heat and light from the sun. Animals likewise need certain values to stay alive. My dogs need food and water; they need to maintain a certain body temperature, neither too hot nor too cold, and so on. And the same broad points apply to humans; we need certain values to live and thrive, and these needs stem from our nature as human beings.

So, Rand pointed out, all life depends on values. And the reverse is true, too. If an organism perishes, so does its capacity to value; once it dies, nothing can be of value to it. Life is what makes values necessary—and life is what makes values possible. Neither a rock nor a rubber tire can have any values; they don’t face an alternative of life or death, so nothing can help or hinder them; nothing is good or bad for them—only for us living creatures.

Good and bad, therefore, are not subjective notions dependent on a person’s whims or preferences. Communism is not good for some and bad for others, just based on what they happen to like. Nor are “good” and “bad” merely the products of supernatural dictates. Rather, Rand showed, the objective meaning of “good” and “bad” stems from the natural requirements of an organism’s life.

The factual requirements of an organism’s life provide an objective standard of value, of good and bad. These requirements are not up to anyone’s arbitrary preferences or faith. The good is that which furthers life; the bad is that which harms it. As Rand put it in Atlas Shrugged, “All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that which destroys it is the evil.”³⁰

Reason

Next, Rand recognized that, unlike other living things, man’s basic means of living is reason. A sunflower or an eggplant grows automatically and without consciousness to reach the sunlight and nutrients it needs. A squirrel or a whale can rely largely on instinct, a sort of nonconceptual awareness baked into the consciousness of these animals. But man has no automatic means of attaining the values he needs. The human mind enables us to pursue a massively broader range of values than other animals (or plants)—we can build skyscrapers and airplanes and practice medicine, for instance—but attaining even our basic values requires thought and action.

We are not born with knowledge, and we don’t acquire it automatically. To acquire it, we must observe reality and think. We can’t distinguish food from poison without observation and thought. We can’t build a teepee or a hut, or even seek out a cave, without observation and thought. We can’t discern a friendly coworker from a sniping opportunist without observation and thought. And we can’t invent electric lightbulbs or conduct triple bypass surgery without observation and thought. Unlike other animals, a human being lives by the work of his reasoning mind. Nothing is more important to our ability to survive and thrive than keeping our minds connected to reality via observation and rational thought, and that requires ongoing conscious effort.

This is also the reason man needs “a code of values to guide [his] choices and actions.” As we’ve discussed, we gain and retain knowledge in the form of concepts, and we use concepts to identify principles—statements of fundamental truths by which we can guide our actions. Just as people must use their minds to identify, say, the engineering principles by which to build a sturdy bridge, so they must use their minds to identify the principles by which to build a flourishing life. Just as we aren’t born with the former, so we aren’t born with the latter; and we don’t acquire such knowledge—or apply it—automatically. The proper purpose of ethics, therefore, is to help us identify and retain the broadest truths about what we must do to live and thrive. To repeat: “It is the science of human self-preservation.”³¹

Because reason is man’s “survival instrument,” said Rand—because man’s life is the standard of value, and because everything required to sustain it depends on his use of reason—rationality is the primary, most fundamental virtue. It is the basic virtue that enables us to gain all the values we need to live. To the extent that we stop using our reasoning minds, we put our lives and ability to flourish in jeopardy. In fact, the entirety not only of Rand’s ethics but of her philosophy of Objectivism can be boiled down to two simple words: Be rational. Everything that human flourishing depends on flows from the virtue of being rational.

Independence versus Second-Handedness

Can others think with our minds? Clearly, no. It is up to each individual to keep his mind connected to reality, Rand observed. People can and thankfully do share ideas and collaborate, she wrote, but

The mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought. An agreement reached by a group of men is only a compromise or an average drawn upon many individual thoughts. It is a secondary consequence. The primary act—the process of reason—must be performed by each man alone. . . . No man can use his brain to think for another.³²

Because reason is man’s basic means of survival—and because each individual has sole control over his own mind—nature necessitates that individuals think for themselves. If they want to flourish, they must grasp the factual requirements of human life and chart a course that aligns with them.

Happiness and Hierarchy of Values

And just as thinking for yourself is a necessary aspect of rationality, so is living for yourself, for your own happiness—the idea known as egoism (or I-ism). When we add in the rationality component—the most fundamental difference between Rand and Nietzsche—then what we’re talking about is more properly called rational egoism.

Why must we pursue our own happiness, our own flourishing? Flourishing is our highest potential. Can anyone else reach your potential for you? Can anyone else sing with your voice, smile with your face, think with your mind? No. We come into this world as individuals in mind and body. As Frederick Douglass put this point in a letter to his former “slave master,”

I am myself; you are yourself; we are two distinct persons, equal persons. What you are, I am. You are a man, and so am I. . . . I am not by nature bound to you, or you to me. Nature does not make your existence depend upon me, or mine to depend upon yours. I cannot walk upon your legs, or you upon mine. I cannot breathe for you, or you for me; I must breathe for myself, and you for yourself. We are distinct persons, and are each equally provided with faculties necessary to our individual existence.³³

As we’ve seen, rational morality shows us that the factual requirements of human life provide an objective standard of moral value, and the purpose of morality is to enable us to flourish. But that is inherently up to each of us as individuals. We each must grasp the requirements of human life and the facts of our own unique identity, chart a course that aligns with them and makes us happy, and then follow through. Just as you’re responsible for whether you eat junk food or healthy food, so you’re responsible for all your own actions, the thinking from which those actions stem, and the physical and mental consequences to which they lead.

Take it the other way around, as altruism demands: Suppose that, instead, our sole moral responsibility is to serve other people, and that concern with one’s own interests is evil (e.g., that the “common good” takes precedence over the good of individuals). How can we achieve the “good of the community” if not by achieving the good—the happiness—of the individuals who make it up? And how can any individual be happy if he’s convinced that the one person who has any control over that—himself—is barred from acting to achieve it? That’s like having a car and the strong desire to go to the beach, but you’re constantly being pinged by Uber, and you morally must respond. You have to pick up these people and take them to their destinations, or you’re not a good person. So, you drive and drive and drive, hoping that someday you’ll pick up someone who wants to go to the beach. But no one ever does. And if one day you just say, “screw it, I’m going anyway,” you finally get there, sink your toes into the sand, but you can’t enjoy it, because the whole time, you’re thinking about your supposed duty to pick up all those people whose Uber requests are pinging your phone. That’s altruism: We all have cars, but no one’s supposed to drive himself where he wants to go. We all have lives, but no one’s supposed to live for himself—even though he’s the only person for whom he can actually make choices and achieve flourishing. We all have dreams, but no one’s allowed to pursue his own.

At this juncture, Rand would ask: Do you see how evil altruism is? It’s diametrically opposed to the requirements of living and thriving, and people can only live by it inconsistently—if they cheat on it here and there—if they go to the beach from time to time, even if they can’t fully enjoy it.

That’s absurd, as Rand pointed out. Circling back to an earlier point, she said that every person “exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.”³⁴ And that requires “rational self-interest,” or “rational selfishness,” or “rational egoism.” Yet, selfishness is near universally condemned as evil. Why?

Selfishness versus Vice

In her book The Virtue of Selfishness, Rand wrote, “The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word ‘selfishness’ is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual ‘package-deal,’ which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind.” This “package deal” combines the concept’s legitimate meaning—“concern with one’s own interests”—with the image of “a murderous brute who tramples over piles of corpses to achieve his own ends, who cares for no living being and pursues nothing but the gratification of the mindless whims of any immediate moment.”³⁵

The chief error of thinkers who accept this “package-deal” is what they regard as being in a person’s self-interest. Lying, cheating, stealing, raping, pillaging, murdering—none of these lead to a person’s long-term happiness and flourishing. These and all other vices entail disconnecting one’s mind from the facts of reality—most definitely including the facts about what a happy human life requires.

Take dishonesty, for instance. Dishonesty is an attempt to fake reality, to pretend that things are other than they are, typically to gain some value one hasn’t earned. For instance, suppose you lie on your résumé and in job interviews. You tell a potential employer that you have experience and qualifications that you don’t actually have. You get the job, and perhaps you feel a moment of eager excitement. But blocking any sense of genuine joy and accomplishment is the knowledge that you’re a fraud and the fear of being found out. That eager excitement, if you ever felt it, is almost immediately drowned in a feeling of dread. At work, you must watch your every move, trying to keep up the charade, trying to be someone you’re not. You must become a fictional character in your own life, fraying your nerves with the constant question, “What would someone more knowledgeable and experienced think and say in this situation?” You tell yourself it’s not who you are, it’s just what you do five days a week, and you can let down your guard outside the office. But when your coworkers ask you out for drinks, you find that what could and should have been a fun outing is utterly exhausting. You can’t let down your guard. Trying to fall asleep at night, you find your mind looping snippets of your conversation, asking but unable to answer the burning question, “Did I give myself away?” You are a fraud, you know you’re a fraud, and your emotional life is in turmoil.

Not to mention, little by little, your colleagues start to piece it all together. You ask a question you shouldn’t have had to ask. Your analyses of problems and your proposed solutions are shot down by coworkers because of obvious defects that those with even a little more experience than you can easily see. You simply can’t achieve the goals you’re assigned because you lack the skills. You’re an impostor, you know it, and everyone else is beginning to see it as well. It won’t be long before you’re fired, and you won’t be getting a good reference for your next job application. You tried to fake reality, but the facts have caught up with you.

That’s the pattern for all vices.

Take another. Suppose, instead, that you’re the hiring manager in the same situation. Two people applied for this job. One is your underqualified friend; the other is a highly qualified stranger. You know the stranger would be a better fit for the job, but you hire your friend instead. You hope your boss doesn’t find out. To ensure that doesn’t happen, you treat your friend coolly when you see him at work. You keep your interactions brief and to the point. You turn down his lunch invitations and go out, instead, with people whose conversation bores you to death. After all, you can’t reveal the nature of your relationship. You tell your friend after hours what’s going on, but it’s little comfort to him. The facade he’s been trying desperately to maintain has made it impossible to connect with any of his other coworkers, his work projects are failing, and impostor syndrome is bearing down on him. He’s thinking of calling it quits after only a month on the job, after your company has just barely made that initial and expensive investment of training him. In anger, you tell him to keep his cool. If he quits, you’ll have to start the hiring search over, which won’t look good for you, and the more highly qualified candidate has already been hired by a competitor. That competitor’s company is gunning for your customers—and winning them. Perhaps your company will have to downsize, and perhaps you’ll be on the chopping block. Your friendship and career plans suddenly seem to be unraveling. Why? What happened?

So much for trying to fake reality.

In Rand’s view, every vice boils down to betting against reality—which necessarily means losing, psychologically and materially. To whatever extent one is dishonest, unjust, lacks integrity, or uses force or fraud to get the unearned, he is at war with reality, a formidable opponent indeed. Each of us, said Rand, “has the power to suspend, evade, corrupt or subvert his perception of reality, but not the power to escape the existential and psychological disasters that follow.”³⁶

Actual selfishness—acting in one’s long-term self-interest—requires just one thing: Being rational. Going by reality. Not trying to “fake it till you make it,” because you will never make it by faking anything. Everything that Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism recognizes as a virtue is simply an application of this basic requirement of human life. Independence is the virtue of keeping one’s mind connected to reality by accepting the responsibility of “of forming one’s own judgments and of living by the work of one’s own mind.”³⁷ Integrity is the virtue of loyalty to the result of one’s independent thinking, to one’s convictions and values. Honesty is the virtue of refusing to fake reality, refusing to pretend things are other than they are. Justice is the virtue of rationally judging other people by the objective moral standard discussed above—the factual requirements of human life—and treating them as they deserve. Those whose actions comport with the requirements of human life are good and should be treated accordingly; those whose actions flout the requirements of human life are bad and should likewise be treated accordingly.

Productiveness is the virtue of creating the values on which one’s life depends. In an advanced, division-of-labor economy, productiveness entails acting on what Rand called “the trader principle,” giving value for value in all our dealings with other people—in other words, acting justly and, thus, rationally. In Atlas Shrugged, she explained how the trader principle applies not merely to the economic sphere but to our personal lives as well:

A trader is a man who earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved. A trader does not ask to be paid for his failures, nor does he ask to be loved for his flaws. . . . Just as he does not give his work except in trade for material values, so he does not give the values of his spirit—his love, his friendship, his esteem—except in payment and in trade for human virtues, in payment for his own selfish pleasure, which he receives from men he can respect.³⁸

This sheds light on another falsehood baked into the common “package-deal” regarding self-interest: the view that selfish people have no care or concern for others. Rand recognized that other people are an enormous source not only of material values but of spiritual values: love, friendship, esteem, knowledge, entertainment—all those values pertaining to consciousness (as opposed to our physical bodies)—without which flourishing is impossible. It is not in spite of but because of a person’s rational self-interest that he cares about the happiness of those he values. “Concern for the welfare of those one loves is a rational part of one’s selfish interests,” wrote Rand. “If a man who is passionately in love with his wife spends a fortune to cure her of a dangerous illness, it would be absurd to claim that he does it as a ‘sacrifice’ . . . and that it makes no difference to him, personally and selfishly, whether she lives or dies.” By contrast, it would be a sacrifice—“the surrender of a greater value for the sake of a lesser one or a non-value”—to blow that fortune gambling or give it away to needy strangers and let his wife die. This would be a betrayal of his rational self-interest and would make him immoral and miserable.³⁹

Likewise, it wasn’t a sacrifice for me to shovel my neighbor’s driveway when he was recovering from knee surgery. I value him, not only because he lets me borrow tools when I need them, but also because I enjoy our conversations, benefit from his advice, and respect him as a person. I don’t help him because I put his interests above my own. I help him because it is in my interests. It is rationally selfish for me to do so. Nor is it a sacrifice when I hold a door for a stranger, hand the mother at the table next to mine the toy her infant just threw, yield the right of way to a driver trying to merge, or practice a million other common courtesies that don’t require giving up a greater value for a lesser one. Other human beings, until and unless they prove otherwise, represent an enormous potential value and so warrant, says Rand, a “generalized respect and good will.” She continued, “A rational man does not forget that life is the source of all values and, as such, a common bond among living beings (as against inanimate matter), that other men are potentially able to achieve the same virtues as his own and thus be of enormous value to him.”⁴⁰

Last among the virtues that Rand named is pride, which is the virtue of “moral ambitiousness,” of seeking to keep one’s moral character spotless and unsullied.⁴¹ Rand wrote that “man, who has no automatic values, has no automatic sense of self-esteem and must earn it by shaping his soul in the image of his moral ideal.”⁴² Being morally ambitious—practicing the virtue of pride—is essential to earning self-esteem. It doesn’t mean that one never makes mistakes, but that he strives never to act immorally (i.e., in an irrational, antilife manner), and that when he does, he tries to make amends while accepting whatever consequences justice demands.

By practicing these virtues—rationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, and pride—Rand showed that we can achieve the cardinal values on which our lives depend: reason, purpose, and self-esteem. And the ultimate reward of all this—of understanding the requirements of human life, charting a course that aligns with them and that we enjoy, and seeing it through—is happiness.

Deriving Individual Rights from Rational Morality

Rand held that there is only one thing that others can do to prevent us from acting on our judgment in pursuit of our flourishing: use force against us. Of course, others can convince us that we’re wrong about something and so give us reasons to act differently, but then we are still acting on our judgment. Or we can renounce independence and choose to act on other people’s conclusions—acting as second-handers; but then we’re acting on our judgment that we should place some consideration over and above our judgment—thus blinding ourselves and thereby choosing a collision course with reality.

But when, if ever, do we act in contradiction to our judgment? When people force us to, such as when a thief holds a gun to a man’s head and demands, “Your money or your life.” The man’s judgment is that he should have both; it was his mind and effort—his life—that created the money. But, by initiating force against him, the thief demands that his victim renounce this judgment and accept a contradiction—that he should keep his money, and that he should give it up to this brute.

One could argue that the victim is still acting in accordance with his judgment, his judgment that he values his life more than his money. But this evades the underlying reality: The thief is acting on the contradiction that he can achieve values by plundering them from others; the victim knows otherwise. He knows on some level that the values in question could only be achieved through thought and effort and properly belong to him whose work produced them. But he is forced to act in contradiction to this knowledge, to the requirements of his life and flourishing, and against his own nature as a rational being.

On Rand’s view, all of this holds true whether the brute uses force directly, as in the case of the thief, or indirectly, as in the case of a fraudster. Suppose a luthier painstakingly copies a Stradivarius and finishes it to look indistinguishable from a real vintage violin. He fabricates letters that supposedly document the initial sale and chain of custody from its original owner in 18th-century Italy to today. He puts one over on a famous violinist whose rich patron buys it for him. The buyer, who paid millions, did not get what he paid for. His judgment is that an authentic Stradivarius is worth millions, but a copy is essentially worthless. The luthier purposely misled him to act against his judgment. At what point does the luthier initiate force? When he takes possession of another man’s property—his money, in this case—under conditions that the buyer never consented to. Although the outward form may be different, Rand thus held that a fraudster’s actions are morally indistinguishable from those of a thief. Both the thief and the fraudster use force to obtain a value from someone who did not consent to the conditions of that transfer.

To live and flourish, people must be free to act on their judgment—free of those who would initiate force against them. This includes all human beings, by virtue of their nature as human beings. The fact that man is, as Aristotle put it, “the rational animal”—and that he must live by using his reason to create the values on which his life depends—is the basis for Rand’s view that a proper society prohibits the initiation of force (it’s proper to use force only in response to those who initiate it). And it is also the basis for Rand’s distinctive view of individual rights.

Theorists throughout history have offered essentially only two ideas on the source and nature of rights: (1) rights are given to man by God, and (2) “rights” are actually just permissions granted by government.

John Locke (1632–1704) is perhaps the most famous of all rights theorists and the chief influence on the political ideas of America’s founders. He held, as I put it in my article “John Locke: The Father of Liberalism,” that

By using their reason, men are capable of discovering a “law of nature,” which tells them that all men—despite differences in strength, intelligence, moral fortitude, and so forth—are fundamentally equal in one respect: each has “a right to [his own] preservation,” a right to use and preserve his own mind, body, life.⁴³

Given this and many similar formulations, Locke is widely regarded as a natural rights theorist, a thinker whose ideas on rights are grounded in his views on man’s nature. However, Locke’s ideas were widely repudiated in the early 20th century by American politicians calling themselves “Progressives.” The century since has been a gradual cashing in on the Progressives’ arguments, with the growth of government and the diminution of freedom or respect for individual rights. Why was Locke’s “law of nature” basis for rights so vulnerable to attack? As I wrote,

[V]irtually every criticism of Lockean liberalism derives from one fundamental problem.

Consider Locke’s “law of nature,” which he says is “the command of the divine will, knowable by the light of nature.” Although it supposedly comes from God, we discover it by reason, and it leads us to understand that all men ought to be equally free. But Locke doesn’t say how we discover it, nor do his followers. Jefferson, for instance, held that, if not the law itself, then at least its effects—our rights—are “self-evident.” However, many people have disagreed that they are self-evident and even have ridiculed the idea. As philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre put it, “there are no such rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and unicorns.” Without a clear, reasoned explanation, both Locke’s “law of nature” and its implications for our conduct are open to interpretation—or outright rejection. . . .

American “Progressives” later repudiated the very possibility of Lockean God-given, “natural,” or “inherent” rights, on the grounds that such rights contradict evolutionary science. In a 1916 speech, Frank Johnson Goodnow said that the “conception of private rights as inherent and not based upon [man-made] law” came about “because it has been believed that the individual has rights with which he has been endowed by his Creator.” But, he continued, in the light of newly discovered science, this makes no sense. “The political philosophy of the eighteenth century was formulated before the announcement and acceptance of the theory of evolutionary development,” which revealed that the individual “is primarily a member of society and that only as he recognizes his duties as a member of society can he secure the greatest opportunities as an individual.” In other words, science cut the ground out from under religion, obliterated the theory of God-given “natural” rights, and left the individual at the mercy of the collective.

In 1935, another Progressive spokesman, John Dewey, further clarified the problems with the notion of god-given rights.

Referencing Jeremy Bentham (who famously said that natural rights are “nonsense upon stilts”) and David Hume (who denied the possibility of deriving any moral principles via reason), Dewey mocked the idea of natural rights and liberties. Modern liberals realize that “Natural rights and natural liberties exist only in the kingdom of mythological social zoology,” he jeered. “The ideas of Locke embodied in the Declaration of Independence were congenial to our pioneer conditions,” but they’re outdated now, and liberals need to reverse course. “Organized social planning,” he concluded, “is now the sole method of social action by which liberalism can realize its professed aims.”

Thus, Dewey and his fellow Progressives helped to create a chasm between what (for the sake of clarity) we now call “classical liberalism”—a system of ideas developed to support liberty—and what has come to be called “modern liberalism” or “Progressivism,” a system of ideas developed to replace liberty with all manner of government interference in the lives of individuals.

Because Locke’s conception of rights and, by extension, the American Founders’ conception, ultimately was based on God—and because no one could prove the existence of God, much less rights that emanate from him—classical liberalism and the freedom it championed could not endure.

If we want to secure a future of freedom and flourishing—if we want to advance the Enlightenment and live in it today—we must progress beyond the theory of God-given natural rights. We must come to understand the secular source and nature of rights, and we must be able to explain clearly and on fully rational grounds what rights are, where they come from, and how we know it. To my knowledge, the only thinker to provide such a basis for rights was Ayn Rand.⁴⁴

Supernatural and social accounts of rights—holding that rights come from god or are just permissions granted by government—are akin to the common misunderstandings of electrical phenomena prior to the work of Benjamin Franklin. Just as early “electricians” sought to account for the evidence with a theory that posited two different electrical fluids (resinous and vitreous), so those attempting to understand the social requirements of human nature cognized it within the faulty framework they had at the time. They recognized many facts, but they interpreted them incorrectly.

Rights are not things implanted in us by a god or given us by governments; they are a recognition of the fact that to live as the type of beings we are, we must be free to act on our judgment, so long as we don’t violate the rights of others to do the same. Rights are essential conditions of existence for rational beings. As I wrote in “Adam Smith, Ayn Rand, and the Philosophic Foundation for Freedom”:

Rights are principles, akin, in that respect, to the principles of physics or biology. Think for a minute of Newton’s first law of motion: A body remains at rest, or in motion at a constant speed in a straight line, unless acted upon by a force. This is a principle—an abstract generalization about how the world works—derived by observation and logic. No one can look out at the world and see Newton’s first law of motion; nonetheless, everyone can see the evidence that gives rise to it.

Rand held that we can likewise use observation and logic to arrive at the principle of individual rights. She pointed out that, unlike other animals, man lives by using his mind. Man must act on his reasoning to create the values on which human life depends. That could be as simple as tracking prey, using dried leaves to start a fire, building a hut, or discerning edible berries from poisonous ones. Or it could be as complex as inventing antibiotics, building a gasoline engine, organizing a multinational supply chain, or providing psychological therapy. To create such values and thus live as human beings, people must be free to think and act on their rational judgment—their basic means of living. The evidence of Rand’s experience—first in Soviet Russia, then in the United States—made this vividly clear. The facts of man’s nature require that he act on his judgment to survive and thrive, and the principle of individual rights identifies this causal relation, just as principles of physics identify causal relations in that field. This is why Rand wrote in Atlas Shrugged:

The source of man’s rights is not divine law or congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A—and Man is Man. Rights are conditions of existence required by man’s nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature forbids him the irrational. Any group, any gang, any nation that attempts to negate man’s rights, is wrong, which means: is evil, which means: is anti-life.⁴⁵

Philosophy and the Future of Freedom

If we want to secure a future of freedom and human flourishing, then we cannot rest our arguments merely on “common sense,” on sound economics, or on theories of god-given rights. These approaches have been tried. The state of today’s world—the sweeping movements threatening freedom in the West, the dictators and zealots starting wars in the East—testifies to their failure. And these approaches have failed for a very clear reason: Politics is downstream from—and thus dependent on—more fundamental philosophic issues. If people think we’re incapable of using perception and reason to grasp reality, they turn instead to feelings as their arbiter of what is true and what is good. If they “feel” that something is morally good, they strive to implement it. And if their assessment is wrong, if they uphold irrationalities as “the good,” the consequences are disastrous.

To effectively defend liberty, we need a fact-based moral code, and we need answers to the skeptics who regard attempts to define such a code as inherently impossible. Facing today’s opponents of liberty without arming oneself with sound answers to their deep, philosophic arguments is like showing up with a knife to a nuclear war. It is worse than futile, because it convinces those who matter in such a setting—the audience—that advocates of freedom cannot be taken seriously, that all the intellectual power in today’s world is on the side of statists who deny any factual basis for individual rights and seek to violate those rights in sundry ways.

This is why Rand—regarding capitalism, the system of individual rights—wrote: “There is a fundamental difference between our approach and that of capitalism’s classical defenders and modern apologists. With very few exceptions, they are responsible—by default—for capitalism’s destruction. The default consisted of their inability or unwillingness to fight the battle where it had to be fought: on moral-philosophical grounds.”⁴⁶

She said that her philosophy, Objectivism,

is a philosophical movement; since politics is a branch of philosophy, Objectivism advocates certain political principles—specifically, those of laissez-faire capitalism—as the consequence and the ultimate practical application of its fundamental philosophical principles. It does not regard politics as a separate or primary goal, that is: as a goal that can be achieved without a wider ideological context. Politics is based on three other philosophical disciplines: metaphysics, epistemology and ethics—on a theory of man’s nature and of man’s relationship to existence. It is only on such a base that one can formulate a consistent political theory and achieve it in practice. . . . Objectivists are not “conservatives.” We are radicals for capitalism; we are fighting for that philosophical base which capitalism did not have and without which it was doomed to perish.⁴⁷

I’ve given but an indication of that philosophical base. I’ve sketched Rand’s views on how and why the senses are valid, concepts based on them are valid, true morality is based in observable fact, and individual rights are based on true morality. It’s up to you whether you will take these philosophic issues seriously, study them in-depth, and grasp the full nature of the tools that Rand offers. They are powerful tools, but only for those who know how to use them. As Rand said, “Reason and Morality are the only weapons that determine the course of history. The collectivists dropped them, because they had no right to carry them. Pick them up; you have.”⁴⁸

About Jon Hersey

Jon Hersey (@revivingreason) is managing editor of The Objective Standard and holds fellowships at Foundation for Economic Education, where he writes in defense of freedom, and at Objective Standard Institute, where he teaches courses and hosts the podcast “Philosophy for Flourishing.”

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