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I think this smuggles in the premise that pursuing survival (the 'pure' type) would never require you to temporarily diminish your momentary wellbeing for the sake of increased survival later on. In reality, pursuing survival pretty much requires you to incur 'hits' to your momentary survival. As the norm, I might add. A while ago I heard an anecdote by Harry Binswanger in which Ayn Rand was arguing with somebody who denied the law of Identity (A=A) on the grounds that a moving object has no particular spatial position. Every time you look at the object, it is in a different position, so where is it? Ayn Rand replied that the particular object isn't anywhere, it is in transition. Its identity is that it is changing its location. I think that the same thing can be applied to ethics. In fact, it was captured by Rand in her definition of life: 'A process of self-sustaining, self-generated action'. While it may appear a stationary definition, it is exactly the opposite. Survival is not merely a process of staying alive - it is a constant, never ending departure from your current position to a better state. This fact seems to have a expression in the way our brains are made: once you get where you want, you always have to move higher and higher, because you become progressively desensitized to what you currently have. If you suddenly find yourself without intellectual challenge, or doing the same things over and over, you become bored out of your mind. A lot of enjoyment is derived from the process of moving forward itself, from gaining values as well as enjoying values. Just to be clear, I agree with SL (and even Kelley) that flourishing is not the goal of life. To sunder the two is to ignore the hierarchy: life -> value -> survival -> moving forward (flourshing). Ayn Rand understood survival to be a state of transition from a lower state of robustness to a higher one. Death is also a state of transition, which is why you can't judge somebody's course by the claim that he is 'happy'. If his happiness is a slow march into the Lion's den, he's wilfully undergoing a process of slow death, no matter how well he tends to his physical health in the meantime. The excessive prudence that the' survivalist' displays is the result of his Gryllsian view of survival. He don't see the fact that life is actually a broad timeline filled with factors that cannot be separated from each other. Flourishers, on the other hand, tend to speak on the unstated, or unidentified premise that reality is full of things that conflict with survival while enabling flourishing. The flourishing-survival dichotomy is similar to the classical variants of the mind-body break: love vs sex, percepts vs. concepts. In reality, the thrill seeking & cool things that flourishers say they want to do (insteading of being tied to the 'boring' survivalist view) ARE what survival entails. A lack of pleasure and excitement is anti-life in the sense that it moves you away from survival and proper functioning. Rand captured this in the virtue of Pride: a person of unsundered rationality not only has the best life possible to him at any given moment in time, but he's also necessarily in a state of 'transition' to even higher self-esteem, wealth, health etc. Stilness means death, in the sense that every time somebody tries to remain where he already is ('freezing' his survival in place), he is actively hurting his survival, not maintaining it. In the example above, the hero does not gain five years of life by giving up his dream. Instead, he becomes spiritualy diseased. A person who shortens his life for a fuller experience does not forfeit survival, he acts exclusively on the principle of survival. This is not a negation of A=A. Ayn Rand was clear that the standard of value is survival as a specific kind of being. Survival as man does not mean merely longevity. It means pleasure, challenge, hobbies, love, art, friendship, constantly moving forward and other factors relevant to what he is. The values that man needs qua man are his actual means to longevity. A lot of people turn longevity into a contextless standard and then proceed to seek it in ways that not only hurts their own goal, but makes them survive not as men, but as diseased forms of life. Ayn Rand used the term 'metaphysical monstruosity' in Galt's Speech, and gave the example of a bird struggling to break its own wings, or a plant trying to destroy its own roots. So we can identfiy yet another dichotomy here: the longevity vs identity dichotomy. I think Rand would have agreed with me, since she put some examples in her books. For example, the before-mention Galt suicide threat, which appears in the same book as Galt's speech. Surely she must have counted on the fact that Galt's actions would shed some context on her abstract presentation. Galt is not choosing between death (suicide) and survival. He is choosing between two different types of death: by slow torture, or instantaneous. Galt is not motivated by any flourishing-survival dichotomy. His best use of reason told him that he has legitimate grounds to be 100% convinced that his life would become a living embodiment of precisely the thing that his own ethical code condemned. So paradoxically, his suicide over Dagny was a statement of a moral choice, in total agreement with survival qua man. There are legitimate cases where a change to a different course really isn't possible. Let's look at Galt. He longed for Dagny for a decade, a process that slowly imprinted her into his psyche as each day passed. Every time he had trouble getting motivated, he used her as fuel. He watched her go into the beds of two men he admired. He then got her, but.. what if she died at the hands of a bunch of petty people that represent what he despises the most? 10 years of striving and emotional investment, negated in an instant. A decade of his life, wasted. He probably understood the repercussions on his psychology that her death would have caused. He would lose desire to do anything, no matter how heroically he'd try to get on track. Implying he then wasted 5 more years in depression, and that eventually his desire for women returned, what competiton would there be? If another mercilessly-rational woman with the brains and character to build the John Galt line in a collapsing country was around, he would have known about her. For him, it's either the vice-president or nothing. It would haunt him forever. So, contra SL, I would say that sometimes, but not always, 'pursuing a different dream' can be anti-life. I will go on a limb and say that the pure survivalist, Kelley-type position is really the absolute same as the flourisher position, when all of the factors are brought into question. The most ardent Flourisher is actually the most ardent, pure and bare-bones Survivalist. And all 'self-actualization'-based ethical systems are useless unless people understand that self-actualization is not an intrinsic end in itself, but the effect, the natural result of a survivalist ethics. The alternative is accidentaly pursuing 'self-actualization' in a way that goes against its root (survival), which leads to consequences that are too obvious to mention. The self-realization vs survival dichotomy.

This is nothing short of brilliant.

Of course. The document to which I've been referring can be found here, and the quotes I've provided starting on p.73 (under the heading Flourishing and Survival).

I saw these quotes in Tara Smith's book, she integrates both interpretations when it comes to measurement and standard: She also differentiates a feeling of flourishing vs. the fact of it. The metaphysical vs. the psychological/experimental.

Yes! I agree with the other flourishers in this thread, that the idea that one's flourishing won't ever decrease life span or survival even infinitesimally (microscopically small!) to be wildly implausible. To a classical eudaimonist, especially a rational egoist, this would be just downright boring! Such a conception would be somewhere between a Bear Gryllsian and a Stoic, one should survive as long as possible without even microscopically lessening survival, achieving maybe a long, careful life of peaceful comfort and equanimity. I say, F that. Galt, for example, threatens to kill himself if Dagny (his highest value) is harmed by the Thompson regime. He also risks and endures torture to stand up for his values. By what measure? Since life always involves trade offs, one is forced to choose between acceptance of minor values and major ones. I think choosing as much and as intense values as possible is a part of the nature of choosing. No truly human life can confine itself to activities pursued merely to keep yourself safe from the smallest of risks. I agree with Aristotle that a short, intense life more accurately embodies the fully self-actualized human life than a long, mild one. A truly human self-actualization includes a tense state of striving and alertness for value achievement that embodies a heroic vision. In fact, I think the requirements of flourishing demand of us to accept risks, certainly infitessimal (and sometimes more) to our survival. In order to fulfill the requirements of courage, integrity, productiveness, pride, we should, as Nietzsche says "Live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas!" This should, of course be moderated by consequentialist (!) concerns (i.e., unity of virtue) of rationality, temperance, prudence. This, in the typical Aristotelian way, avoids the twin pitfalls of foolhardiness and timidity.

Well, since Obamacare with its mandate that everyone must buy health insurance or be fined via the tax system is a pure example of rent-seeking, and it was authored by health insurance companies who then lobbied for its passage, they are villains.

Objectivist dogma says that one's automated values reflect one's ethics. The reality is rather more complicated than that. But one's ethics do strongly influence one's emotions and habits. So, as a general rule, the person who has chosen to die is likely to continue (in most areas) as if he had not made that choice, simply because his programming gives the ethics he abandoned a kind of inertia. Thus, a man who loves his family but has chosen to die isn't likely to harm his family. This won't be a reasoned choice, because he can't reach any reasoned ethical conclusions. But, I expect, it would be a choice strongly supported by the emotions he feels in relation to his family. A thing that is wholly automatic is wholly outside the province of ethics. One's programming isn't quite that, in that it depends on one's prior choices. So, it can be morally evaluated -- though not by the person who has chosen to die.

This does not depend on which flavor of ethics one adopts. Every ethical proposition X, when fully stated, is of the form, "If you choose to live, then X." (Or, rather, a more complicated X. But that's a topic for another time.) The person who has not chosen to live has no reasoned ground to accept any X. Of course, losing the reasoning that supported his values won't have much effect on his emotions, so one might expect such a person to act more or less as he would have prior to his choice to die, at least in areas not related to the reason for his choice.

My apologies for the confusion. Rather, I was asking from the point of view of the suicidal man. Invictus had responded to Harrison, saying that to the man who no longer wishes to live, the choice of whether to blow up a bus of innocents alongside himself has no "value significance," meaning (as I take it) that such an act would be neither moral nor immoral (again: from the suicidal man's perspective), but amoral. My observation, meant to challenge this (if lightly), is that I do not believe that in reality people who decide to commit suicide would attach zero "value significance" to their method of suicide; I think that most suicides, even in their last moments, would consider drinking hemlock to be far more ethical than blowing up the proverbial (or literal) nuns and orphans. But is this irrational? If an Objectivist were to decide to commit suicide, making whatever "amoral" or "pre-moral" decision no longer to value life that we imagine such people do (which I am not convinced is actually a thing that exists, but whatever) -- then should that Objectivist consider all potential manners of exit (including the slaughter of others) ethically equivalent? Perhaps. Though based on my own understanding of "life as the standard of value," I would argue that I yet have reasoned value significance for opting not to harm those I love, even in the event of taking my own life... it is only the survivalist perspective, I believe, that necessitates that the suicidal man has no moral reason to prefer one method of suicide to any other. Just then as a psa, if I ever decided to take my own life, it would still be safe to sit next to me on the bus; but I would not necessarily sit by a survivalist and count upon his "emotion and habit."

That's getting just a little personal. That said, of course my idea of flourishing includes other people.. However, I prefer to deal with things in a logical order, and settling the fundamental issues of ethics is a prior condition to addressing a third level set of values. So, I shall continue with the fundamentals and, once I've nailed them down to my satisfaction, I will turn to derivative issues.

Indeed, that's one of the problems with the survivalist interpretation of Rand. If Rand's ethics were only necessary for literal survival, then how did the human race manage to survive up until Rand? If Rand's ethics were necessary, the human race would've died or long ago, unless everyone, or most everyone alive, is already a Randian hero accidentally, then her ethics are reduced to pedantic Bear Gryllsism. Clearly her novels point to a richer, more full conception of human life than mere survival as an ultimate end for man.

If blowing oneself up on a bus full of nuns and orphans is irrelevant to morality then the most we could ever say about it would be emotional ejaculations like "ew, that's gross" (as one might respond to the prospect of an anchovy pizza): we might find it personally distasteful and we might even try to prohibit it, but at the end of the day we must concede that it's a valid option. I do not believe it's a valid option for anyone, regardless of their circumstances. Although I find it just as distasteful as I'm sure you do, I also believe it's objectively and demonstrably wrong (wrong in the way that "2+2=5" is) and I'm prepared to try to demonstrate how and why. This isn't all that relevant to actual suicide bombers: don't argue with someone who wants to destroy you; run the Hell away and alert the authorities. However, there are countless other evils in the world today that stem from similar errors. Walk into any chapel service, for example, and you'll hear all the same types of distortions, falsehoods, misevaluations and sometimes open misanthropy which cumulatively allow someone to think to themselves that it'd be a good idea to blow up nuns and orphans. If you can't argue against the fundamental validity of worshipping death then to me that indicates room for you to learn more about egoism. Which is what I meant for my question to imply. So are you basically saying "ew, I don't like that"? That's true. I would prefer not to discuss yet the ways in which I think certain moral standards will harm their adherents. It'd be very difficult for me to discuss that without some amount of armchair psychoanalysis (which never ends well); although I disagree with most of the things that've been posted in this thread, I haven't seen anything atrocious enough to warrant that. So their sociopolitical ramifications -derivative as they are- seemed a less personal line of reasoning to the same conclusions. Perhaps something still better will occur to me. I was disputing your claim that a morality which applies universally to every choice we make would not reduce us to mindless, robotic slaves to the calculus. There are many different ways for me to try to program something. When I was first learning Java I would type something out (and retype and rearrange it until the compiler stopped yelling at me) and then immediately run it to see what it did. Later, there was a long period of time in which I'd code enormous subroutines and entire classes in an hour or two (certain that my conception was perfect and rushing to create it before I'd forget), run it and then send several weeks trying to determine what went wrong. Now I have a system. I make a list of all the classes I think I'll need, sketch out each one's most important parts, try to determine if any of them should be combined or split up and whether there's a better way to do any of the algorithms, repeat sketching and conceiving until I can't think of anything better and only then do I code anything (carefully). Does my system replace me as the programmer? I don't think so. I came up with it; I defined what sorts of designs were "better" or "worse" and I'm constantly expanding and improving it. Although it determines all of my programming-related choices and actions (at least when I'm on my A game) it's difficult for me to even conceive of it as anything other than a tool I've made for myself. I see Egoism as analogous to that. No, I was using an analogy to subtly point out what's wrong with justifying minimoralism on the basis of science and objectivity. If I had said that minimoralism is behaviorism, that would be a conflation. I didn't think the missing logical steps needed to be pointed out. Clearly I was mistaken about that, though. My bad. His survival is not dictated by his mental well-being, sir, no matter how "complex" the issues involved. That is a non-sequitur at bare minimum. And if he says "no, I just want to blow up a bus full of nuns and orphans" then ... ? -Galt's Speech

No reasoned value significance. But we're creatures of emotion and habit, as well as reason, and so even if I have abandoned my reasoned commitment to values, I will likely act based on my automated values, or at least the most compelling of those values.