epistemologue

Esthetics concerns itself with two issues which are essential to a fully integrated philosophic perspective: metaphysical value judgments and sense of life.
 
Qua branch of philosophy, esthetics studies the nature of art; its meaning and the role it plays in man's life. Esthetic principles, however, have application well beyond the evaluation of art works. Properly understood, they can shed enormous light on the way a man experiences himself, and how he sees himself in relation to the universe.
 
Esthetics represents "the soul of philosophy." A person could conceivably attain a high level of awareness of Objectivist metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and politics, but lacking a clear grasp of its esthetics, he is unlikely to make Objectivism his way of life. Philosophy will seem somewhat distant to him — somewhat removed from his moment-to-moment existence.
 
Ayn Rand was an artist, and in a sense she had to be. While you can learn a lot from her nonfiction (as well as Peikoff's OPAR and other works), if you haven't read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, you haven't yet experienced the full impact of the Objectivist vision. These novels are literary and philosophic powerhouses; they make their ideas real to the reader in a way no treatise or series of lectures ever could.

(This is an article I wrote for my romantic advice blog for men, The Leading Man.)
 
In her book The Passion of Ayn Rand, Barbara Branden quotes from interviews she recorded with Rand about her life and career. Talking about her years as a teenager in Soviet Russia, Rand spoke of walking with a young man who made an indelible impression on her:
 
"I don't remember the conversation on the way home, we just talked, nothing romantic. But he had a manner of projecting that he's a man and you're a woman and he's aware of it."
 
"By the time I arrived home," Rand said, "I was madly and desperately in love."*
 
(Years later, Rand would name one of the main characters of her novel We the Living — Leo — after him.)
 
If there is a single idea which a man must grasp and master if he is to build a powerful romantic relationship with a woman, it's polarity.
 
Polarity is the recognition of the fact that romance — at least heterosexual romance — is predicated on the existence of two sexes; there is male and female, man and woman, masculine/feminine.
 
To a Leading Man, the fact of sex, and therefore of sexual differences, is an enormously good thing. We do all that we can to positively stress and to celebrate that women and men are not exactly identical in every way.
 
Unfortunately, many men ignore, minimize or attempt to downplay sex differences. In their efforts to be respectful and "modern," they treat a woman they are romantically interested in as a buddy or pal.
 
Instead of torrid passion, these men often find themselves caught in a tepid friendship.
 
Polarity is essential to forming a deeply erotic connection with a woman. In romance, a woman wants & needs to be seen and experienced by a man as a woman — not merely as a person, and definitely not as a sexless neuter.
 
To fall in love with a woman means falling in love with her feminine essence. It means being turned on by the challenge that her femininity poses to you.
 
When polarity weakens in a relationship, things get boring. When it isn't there from the beginning, relationships often don't get off the ground.
 
A sophisticated man is not threatened by sexual differences. He embraces, enjoys and appreciates them. To the man who understands romance, "I'm a man, you're a woman" isn't a put-down, nor does it represent an attempt to return to caveman days. It's a basic fact of reality, one which underlies and makes possible the most exciting kind of relationship between two human beings.
 
*I have a number of misgivings about Ms. Branden, and I do not generally endorse her biography of Ayn Rand. However I have no reason to believe that this quotation is inaccurate.
 
© 2013 Kevin Delaney

I'm not suggesting that one rationalistically ignore pain, guilt, or negative feelings as though they don't exist. Pain is information, it's a signal that something is damaging (or interfering or threatening) your life, your values, the fullest good you are capable of achieving. You must actually pay attention to that information and understand where it's coming from and what it means.
If you're living a life of self-sacrifice when it comes to relationships and sex, or you're having your limbs chopped off, or your hand is on a stove, the origin of the pain is this improper action, and what it means is that you should stop what you're doing and change course (pursue a fulfilling relationship and sex life, pull your hand away from the stove, etc).
The idea that "pain doesn't matter" is to say that pain is not an incentive. As I've described it, it's information, especially it's information about things that are interfering with your values, those positive values which are true incentives. What you do with that information depends entirely on its meaning - if it's a known condition that you are doing everything in your power to cure, then the continued pain is not offering any new information, and it essentially does not matter. In particular, it's not providing, in itself, an intrinsic motivation to avoid the pain - the motivation to avoid the pain comes from your positive values, those positive incentives which are being damaged, threatened, and interfered with by this pain, your inability to achieve everything you want to achieve, to experience the fullest good you are capable of experiencing by nature.
There can come a point where someone is overwhelmed by pain, and they switch their ultimate motivation from the pursuit of values, of life and happiness - even seeking to avoid and escape from pain as a means to these ultimate ends - to regarding the escape from pain as the ultimate end instead. And the consequences of this switch are devastating to the ultimate end one ought to have, morally, by your nature as a living organism and as a man.

The point isn't so much living a painful life, but that life by nature and as standard of value dominates any disvalue that pain gives you. Life is a moral necessity would mean here that choosing death in the face of actual positive values ends any moral sense of life, erases any dignity you may have. To me, the greatest pain of all would be to opt for the -nothingness- of death when a positive is there.
Suicide as a morally proper choice reminds me of the idea "dying with dignity".
I'll let House comment on that:
 

To "depend upon the assistance of able-bodied people" is not in itself a problem. You're not "a burden to others" or "living as a fully dependent entity", that's ridiculously disrespectful and inaccurate. There is no force involved, these people are helping because you're a value to them, they either personally want to keep you alive, or are being paid by you or people who value you to do so.
You're not forcing or defrauding them, you're getting out of them what you have earned, whether materially or spiritually.
Your virtue is still what you're surviving on, if you're in a wheelchair or in a coma or whatever the current situation is. To need help is not a black mark, as long as you're able to get it voluntarily.
"Me Before You" did that really well, they showed that the idea of suicide for the sake of your loved ones is a total lie, everyone else in the movie was completely against it. It devastated everyone else. It's up to the people in your life whether they choose to help you when you're debilitated or not. If you opt for suicide sacrificially, for their sake, that's not you being beneficent, that's you taking their choice away. I don't normally have to explain to Objectivists that sacrificing yourself for the sake of others is a bad way to go.
 
I'm not accusing anyone of being cowardly necessarily. The real difficulty with resilience is being able to adjust to a dramatically different context in life. This is not an easy step to make mentally or emotionally. Thinking that you have no values left in the world after a devastating loss can be an easy mistake to make. Realizing that you are still alive and conscious, and that it is a truly priceless opportunity, despite everything else having gone horribly wrong, is not always an obvious conclusion. I can be both empathetic with people and have the dignity to judge them morally. To drop your moral standards because someone is suffering is not doing them a service.

In psychology, what Eiuol and I have described is called resilience. It's the ability to live a good life despite tremendous suffering or loss. 
Resilience is the ability to adjust your expectations and your goals according to your circumstances - even in the face of a dramatic change of your circumstances, as in the case of devastating loss or suffering. It's the ability to stay optimistic and look on the positive side - to seek and to find good things that are within your range.
Eiuol used the example of Christopher Reeves:
If Reeves committed suicide he would have achieved less than he was capable of - it would have been self-sacrificial. And yet if Reeves held himself to the same standard of being an able-bodied Superman actor, something more than what he was capable of, he would have achieved nothing but failure - and would not have achieved the things he could, which would be equally self-destructive and self-sacrificial.
So the fault you would find with a former athlete or actor who decides to commit suicide because they can no longer pursue their previous career, is that they lack resilience (incidentally, watch the movie Me Before You for a dramatization of exactly this issue).

That mind and body are integrated doesn't mean that one cannot at all rely on what others produce. It doesn't mean, for example, that growing your own food is the only way to be independent. If it did, we'd all be parasites in some way. What you seem to overlook are the numerous ways to live a good life, or how to work towards a good life. No one is wholly broken until they are dead, no one is forced to be dependent if their mind works and their heart beats. People do, in fact, lead happy lives despite what you call a disintegrated state, like that hypothetical football player. Part of the "anti-suicide" position here is that if you are able to think, then it is possible and even necessary to be aware of one's values, and the glory of one's ability to think.
Some have literally burned themselves alive without even screaming. So, unlikely.
"Someone with a painful cancer who does not have the temperament, training, or perhaps natural capacity to ignore his pain has that reality to deal with and no other."
Thus, it becomes a moral imperitive to acquire such skills in that situation. They are skills we need even in far less extreme situations.
"and that the person has fought through them all"
And why stop fighting any pains to come?
If the experience of life could be ONLY misery despite your mindset, your moral fiber, and resilience, all that you have said is all right. Except, such an experience does not exist, except perhaps for a real nihilist who sees all experience as misery. There is value in being alive, in taking in the world around you, the people, your creations - no matter how minor. Pain may alter how or where you find happiness, but it is a zero as far as its ability to make one's life worthless. -Pain- is not what should lead you to decide if life is worth living.
Pain is real, but a pain that is so bad that you rationally decide to end your life is not. Pain as a measurement of life's (dis)value is not real.
"Is "life-as-survival" the good, such that every other thing may morally be "sacrificed" for its sake?"
No. The woman had been living life before, the same values remain.

This isn't what I meant. I'm not saying that pain as such is a positive value, but rather experience as such is a positive value, and so the experience of pain is a value as an experience - although because it's a painful experience, that means it's not the fullest, most positive experience that you could be having otherwise.

Preface: I say suicide is applicable as morally neutral in cases where pain literally dominates capacity to think about things besides pain. Epist said this is effectively being dead, so it isn't suicide. So, that's a minor disagreement - and neither of us consider it to be life. Perhaps there are one or two other contexts, but definitely not what you listed. Once suicide is chosen, it's weird to call it moral, but it does deny one's life such that morality is effectively dead, too.
With that in mind, it is one's nature as a human to pursue life, implying ceaseless pursuit of values. As long as you are able to think rationally, pursuing life and values is always possible. Anything less is a denial of one's nature, what we already know of man's nature. I don't see a reason to object to this so far, or to think that a lesser value is taken in exchange for a greater one.
It isn't quite duty to pursue value's ceaselessly, it's not any denial of life as standard as value. It's your life, you pursue it. If you give up life because you were once a famous actor and are now a quadripalegic is plainly cowardly and foolish. Christopher Reeves still led a worthwhile life - that's who I am referring to. To give up as soon as life is a bit tough or needing to alter what -usually- makes you happiest. Changing course isn't the end.

A negative concept identifies the negation of another concept, its object, on which it logically depends. Negative concepts refer only to an absence of the specific object, not to the presence of anything else - they are merely the logical negation of the object, not the assertion of the existence of some other object. To assert the existence of a negative thing, as a different kind of existent, is a fallacy of the Reification of the Zero, a variant of the fallacy of the Stolen Concept.
The concept "nothing" does not assert the existence of something called "nothing" - there is no such thing as "nothing" in and of itself, only the absence of a thing (the word literally means no-thing). The concept "non-existence" does not assert the existence of a "non-thing" - there is no such thing as "non-existence" in and of itself, only the absence of a thing in existence.
In the same way, the concept "evil" depends on the concept "good". Evil is a negative concept indicating the logical negation of the good. The concept "evil" does not assert the existence of a "non-good", there is no such thing as an "evil" in and of itself, only the absence or contradiction of a good.1
Pain and fear are innate capacities to alert us that something is wrong, that there is a potential threat to our life and our pursuit of the good, but they do not by themselves offer us any positive value to seek. Pleasure tells us what is good, what is right, but pain can only tell us that something is wrong - it cannot tell us what is good or right.2 Rationally we can identify pain and suffering as a contradiction to the good, as a negative and an impediment, but innately pain simply does not offer us any pleasure, that is, it is a zero. It do not offer us the presence of any incentive to seek, so it cannot logically be the source of any conceptual values, nor can it be the fuel that makes us function.3
Man is by nature faced with a fundamental alternative: identity or non-identity, existence or non-existence – life or death. The concept of value, of "good or evil", is not an arbitrary human invention, but rather is based on a metaphysical fact, on an unalterable condition of man's existence: his life. The ultimate value, the final goal or end to which all lesser goals are means, is man's life. His life is his standard of value: that which furthers his life is the good, and that which threatens it is the evil.4 The choice to live is therefore the most basic moral choice that one faces.5
Only in life do we have any possibility of acting to seek the good or to enjoy happiness. Death offers no possibility of action or enjoyment. Moral action means to act for one's own rational self-interest, but there are no interests to seek in death. Only life can offer us a positive incentive. Death, like pain, cannot offer any positive incentive, but rather it is a zero.
Suicide is the act of sacrificing life for death. Suicide is the sacrifice of the good for the sake of a zero. But it cannot be in one's self-interest to destroy one's self. One cannot rationally or morally act to end their life.
John Galt
Atlas Shrugged 
 
Observe the contradiction present in Piekoff's "Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand" (aka. OPAR): 
and later,
On the one hand he says the commitment to life is essentially axiomatic, and that there's no basis for questioning it, and on the other hand that suicide is justified if you're suffering and your condition seems hopeless. This is an apparent contradiction. But Peikoff is not the pope, OPAR is not the Bible, and Ayn Rand is not God. It's possible that this is merely a contradiction. OPAR is not inerrant.
Finding such a contradiction does not fundamentally break the philosophy of Objectivism, either. On the contrary, the fundamental moral conviction of the Objectivist philosophy is that life is the ultimate standard. This defense of suicide is inconsistent with the basic moral premises of the philosophy. The mistake here is derivative, not fundamental. The philosophy as a whole is sound; only the position on suicide is not.
I submit to you that this position on suicide is a contradiction to the fundamental moral philosophy of Objectivism.
If you disagree, let's hear your arguments.
 
I'll start by responding to Peikoff's argument for suicide: can suicide be an "affirmation" of life if it's impossible to achieve happiness?
Suicide cannot be an affirmation of life - it's the deliberate choice to destroy life. You cannot affirm your life by destroying it.
As long as you are alive, and you are conscious to think and act, then you can either choose to act in the best interest of your life and happiness, no matter how tragically hopeless the situation may seem, or you can choose to sacrifice your best interest for something lesser. Suicide is the sacrifice of all possible interest. Death is non-existence, it knowably has no value at all - it is a zero. You cannot seek values in death. To act on the assumption that happiness is impossible would not be an affirmation of a happy life - that would be in fact be the most damning denial you could make.
In such a tragic situation where happiness seems impossible, the way to affirm your life is to continue to seek your happiness despite the tragedy and hopelessness of the situation. In Peikoff's own words:
That is an affirmation of life.
 
Footnotes:
(1)
John Galt
Atlas Shrugged 
 
(2) 
- The Objectivist Ethics, Ayn Rand
 
(3)
John Galt
Atlas Shrugged 
 
Howard Roark and Dominique Francon
The Fountainhead
 
Atlas Shrugged
 
(4)
See "The Objectivist Ethics", in "The Virtue of Selfishness" by Ayn Rand
 
(5)
John Galt
Atlas Shrugged 

Let's concretize this issue. Suppose you are in extreme, persistent pain, and the most complete state of suffering possible, but you are still conscious (If you want to talk about pain disrupting the capacity for consciousness in the first place, note that if you are not capable of conscious awareness, then you are in essence already dead. But as long as you are effectively capable of consciousness, no matter how disruptive the pain is otherwise, you are still alive.)
Let's essentialize the issue further and suppose further that you are in a kind of hell, trapped in your own mind cut off from the world outside, unable to see, hear, or perceive anything extrospectively whatsoever.
Even trapped in your own head and in torturous pain you are still alive, you can still think, you can still imagine and create, you can still reason and come to conclusions.
Imagine for example the creative process of writing a story, and the achievements that are possible to you in this activity entirely contained within your own mind: the pleasure of contemplating a plot, a beautifully designed series of events and dramatic conflicts which logically follow one another until they reach a climax, or the enjoyment of contemplating a character and their triumph over evil or a mistake in their philosophy, or the sheer poetic achievement of an idea stated beautifully and perfectly.
Or imagine the achievements possible in pure mathematics: the excitement of tackling a hard problem, the triumph of solving a formula, or the joy of proving a proposition. As John Galt said, "the noblest act you have ever performed is the act of your mind in the process of grasping that two and two make four".
You can still appreciate your own thinking. The practice of every virtue is still morally necessary, whether it's honesty with yourself about the objects of your thought and the relationships among them, or the productiveness of applying your creative ability to a meaningful end. No matter what torture you are undergoing, even in the worst imaginable level of suffering and hell, the practice of these virtues still leads to the achievements of values within your mind, the pleasure of which is a non-contradictory joy - it is the achievement of happiness.
Take another example: the composition of music. From Atlas Shrugged:
Even someone who is in the process of being tortured and suffering the worst possible pain, as long as they are alive, there are still values possible to them - in this case a work of art signifying a "great cry of rebellion", a defiant statement of someone who will not accept the necessity of suffering. One can still compose such art, or can at least sing such a hymn, "a hymn to a distant vision for whose sake anything was worth enduring, even this".
In life, achieving values and happiness is always possible.
Consider Roark, for whom suffering "only goes down to a certain point". Because he can create, because he can achieve positive values, nothing else can seem very important, and ultimately, "it's not really pain".
Or consider Dagny: she did not believe in suffering. She would not allow pain to become important. She knew that "it does not count - it is not to be taken seriously" - "even in the moments when there was nothing left within her but screaming and she wished she could lose the faculty of consciousness".  
As John Galt said, "I know the unimportance of suffering, I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one's soul and as a permanent scar across one's view of existence." We exist for earning rewards. That is what motivates us, that is why we act - not for escaping pain. Pain is not going to make us function; it's not an incentive.
To take any kind of positive action like committing suicide purely for the sake of escaping pain - so far from being an affirmation of what life ought to be, it would be a declaration that suffering is necessarily a part of life, that it is important and that it does matter. You are rejecting the belief that suffering is unimportant, and is only to be fought and thrown aside and not accepted as a meaningful part of one's view of existence.
To affirm life, even amidst the worst possible torture, is to bow one's head in a silent "amen" to life, amounting to the words: "This is where I shall stay to fight. Suffering does not matter. I exist for the sake of achieving values, and suicide is not going to serve that quest."

Let's concretize this issue. Suppose you are in extreme, persistent pain, and the most complete state of suffering possible, but you are still conscious (If you want to talk about pain disrupting the capacity for consciousness in the first place, note that if you are not capable of conscious awareness, then you are in essence already dead. But as long as you are effectively capable of consciousness, no matter how disruptive the pain is otherwise, you are still alive.)
Let's essentialize the issue further and suppose further that you are in a kind of hell, trapped in your own mind cut off from the world outside, unable to see, hear, or perceive anything extrospectively whatsoever.
Even trapped in your own head and in torturous pain you are still alive, you can still think, you can still imagine and create, you can still reason and come to conclusions.
Imagine for example the creative process of writing a story, and the achievements that are possible to you in this activity entirely contained within your own mind: the pleasure of contemplating a plot, a beautifully designed series of events and dramatic conflicts which logically follow one another until they reach a climax, or the enjoyment of contemplating a character and their triumph over evil or a mistake in their philosophy, or the sheer poetic achievement of an idea stated beautifully and perfectly.
Or imagine the achievements possible in pure mathematics: the excitement of tackling a hard problem, the triumph of solving a formula, or the joy of proving a proposition. As John Galt said, "the noblest act you have ever performed is the act of your mind in the process of grasping that two and two make four".
You can still appreciate your own thinking. The practice of every virtue is still morally necessary, whether it's honesty with yourself about the objects of your thought and the relationships among them, or the productiveness of applying your creative ability to a meaningful end. No matter what torture you are undergoing, even in the worst imaginable level of suffering and hell, the practice of these virtues still leads to the achievements of values within your mind, the pleasure of which is a non-contradictory joy - it is the achievement of happiness.
Take another example: the composition of music. From Atlas Shrugged:
Even someone who is in the process of being tortured and suffering the worst possible pain, as long as they are alive, there are still values possible to them - in this case a work of art signifying a "great cry of rebellion", a defiant statement of someone who will not accept the necessity of suffering. One can still compose such art, or can at least sing such a hymn, "a hymn to a distant vision for whose sake anything was worth enduring, even this".
In life, achieving values and happiness is always possible.
Consider Roark, for whom suffering "only goes down to a certain point". Because he can create, because he can achieve positive values, nothing else can seem very important, and ultimately, "it's not really pain".
Or consider Dagny: she did not believe in suffering. She would not allow pain to become important. She knew that "it does not count - it is not to be taken seriously" - "even in the moments when there was nothing left within her but screaming and she wished she could lose the faculty of consciousness".  
As John Galt said, "I know the unimportance of suffering, I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one's soul and as a permanent scar across one's view of existence." We exist for earning rewards. That is what motivates us, that is why we act - not for escaping pain. Pain is not going to make us function; it's not an incentive.
To take any kind of positive action like committing suicide purely for the sake of escaping pain - so far from being an affirmation of what life ought to be, it would be a declaration that suffering is necessarily a part of life, that it is important and that it does matter. You are rejecting the belief that suffering is unimportant, and is only to be fought and thrown aside and not accepted as a meaningful part of one's view of existence.
To affirm life, even amidst the worst possible torture, is to bow one's head in a silent "amen" to life, amounting to the words: "This is where I shall stay to fight. Suffering does not matter. I exist for the sake of achieving values, and suicide is not going to serve that quest."

Suppose I "feel" I have more in common with dophins than I do with humans... Further suppose that I am a human, and that dolphins and humans are both mammals, but different kinds of mammals.
 
No, not only do I feel I have more in common with a dolphin, I think I AM a dolphin... but somehow reality has "mis-expressed" my metaphysical identity.  Swapped my body for what it should have been.... somehow in the mammal warehouse the DNA elves messed up...  I aim to correct such an error by using laser surgery to remove all my hair, I have my legs sewn together surgically, have my skin pigmented grey, and have the skin and fat of my buttocks fashioned into a fin for the middle of my back.
 
What is the result?  Is it a dolphin?  Heavens no.  Is it human?  Certainly, bodily, it structurally and functionally is a contorted remnant of a human.  Is it more like "me"?  Certainly not... not if me means what I AM (here "was").
 
The me that I was, is the me that I have assaulted on the basis of a fiction and an evasion.  I wished I were a dolphin (not me), and I assaulted metaphysically what I was, a human... in the hopes to attain something unattainable... a rebellion on reality.
 
 
Although a metaphysical assault on reality... it succeeds only insofar as it destroyed identity (what I was) but an utter failure insofar as it was unable to substitute identity with the wish... I could not become a dolphin,
 
and the reason why is simply because I was not and never was one.

They who? And why do they think this way? You are speaking as though "They" is well-defined.
Your post doesn't stand against " the belief that man has the power of choice, the power to choose his goals and to achieve them, and the power to direct the course of his life." It doesn't mean bad things don't happen, it doesn't promise that progress always happens, moral decay is possible. At the very least, your post affirms that "progress" is not a guarantee. It does not show that by NATURE people are ultimately cruel or all idiots. What about the history of ancient Rome? What about the past 10 years? Sure, some people are malevolent, but no one here denies that.
Objectvism really only says capitalism is the ideal society, not that a Republic is the best way to implement this. There are good reasons to say it's good. Is there an individualist take on monarchy? Maybe.

i agree that "more strangers" existing is better than "less strangers". thought experiments that isolate the position that in general having more/less people in the world is valuable could be constructed. but the trolley problem is not one of them. too much context is unavoidably included. by the nature of the question itself, the trolley problem simply doesn't get as far abstracted as "5>1", and the fact that people jump there, or interpret it as a choice between "a group" vs "an individual", or whatever else, is not the fault of the question.
 
the threat involved is a train. trains run on fixed schedules that are knowable. usually the question has the 5 people tied down (presumably by some villain, as Nicky said: "those people didn't get tied to the tracks by the wind") who would have done that at the time they did because they knew a train would be approaching then. by this device that context is explicitly preserved. we know that the train is supposed to be in this place at this time, it is part of the scenario that it is justifiably expected by all that the train will run just this course.
we also know and should have in mind unless anything is said to adjust it, that trains are owned and run by companies, so this is private property you'd be interfering with. when the questioner includes that the person who is at the switch is not an operator, not an associated employee at all, but just a bystander, this context is also reinforced in the storytelling itself.
so the question can also be an exercise in retention of context, or attachment to reality, and reveal peoples' readiness to move away from it. SL had the right standpoint in his conversation with the imaginary professor: context should have to be explicitly removed through some story device, otherwise it's fair game, since the correct method of thinking is to hold concepts in a full way, as representing all of their content and detail.
the person who is posing the question is aiming at a specific variable, and is attempting to tailor the question in such a way that they've covered all the other bases. the questioner may be successful or unsuccessful at getting to their target.
Peikoff makes some of these points about the trolley question in his answer here, along with the idea that individualists do not consider people interchangeable (or as SL said earlier, rejects that "people and their lives can be reduced to arithmetic"): http://www.peikoff.com/2008/05/26/if-five-people-are-in-an-emergency-room-dying-and-one-healthy-person-in-the-waiting-room-could-save-them-all-if-we-used-his-organs-is-it-morally-permissible-to-do-this-even-though-hell-die/

I wanted to start a thread just for general discussion of a benevolent or malevolent sense of life, and in particular, the concepts of a benevolent universe premise (BUP), malevolent universe premise (MUP), benevolent people premise (BPP), and malevolent people premise (MPP). Which of these do you identify with personally, and why? And do you have any reservations or disclaimers you want to add?
In general, one can have a benevolent or malevolent sense of life. A "sense of life" is the basic emotional stance one has on life that comes from one's implicit metaphysical value judgments. Metaphysical value judgments are one's overall value judgments or feelings about the essential nature of existence, of man, and of man's relationship to existence.1
If one has an overall positive judgment about the metaphysical nature of reality and of man, then one's basic emotional stance on life will be positive. One will have a benevolent sense of life. Likewise, if one has an overall negative judgment about the metaphysical nature of reality and of man, then one's basic emotional stance on life will be negative; one will have a malevolent sense of life.
Someone with an overall benevolent sense of life has a philosophical conviction that their life and the universe are good and valuable, a conviction that is not shaken simply by going through trying circumstances. They have a conviction that joy, exaltation, beauty, greatness, and heroism are the meaning of life, and not any pain or ugliness that they may encounter. They believe that happiness is what matters in life, but suffering does not, and that the essence of life is the achievement of joy, not the escape from pain. Pain, fear, and guilt are inessential and are not to be taken seriously as a scar across one's view of existence. Their basic stance when it comes to any question is that they love being alive, and they love the universe in which they live. "We exist and we know that we exist, and we love that fact and our knowledge of it" (Augustine).
One's sense of life can be further analyzed into two basic categories: one's judgment of the universe, and one's judgment of man. An overall positive or negative judgment about the nature of the universe is what Rand calls the "Benevolent Universe Premise" (BUP) or "Malevolent Universe Premise" (MUP), respectively; a positive or negative judgment about the nature of man is the "Benevolent People Premise" (BPP) or "Malevolent People Premise" (MPP)2. A fully benevolent sense of life will combine a benevolent judgment of the universe and a benevolent judgment of man: both BUP and BPP. One may have a characteristically mixed sense of life, with a benevolent universe premise but a malevolent people premise (BUP/MPP), or a malevolent universe premise but a benevolent people premise (MUP/BPP).3
A benevolent universe premise (BUP) is characterized by a reverence for the Universe, and the belief that the universe, by nature, is intelligible to man, and that his happiness is possible in a place such as this. It's the belief that the things around you are real and ruled by natural laws, and that reality is stable, firm, absolute, and knowable. Tragedy is the exception in life, not the rule. Success, not failure, is the to-be-expected. It's the conviction that man is not ultimately doomed in this universe, but rather that a human way of life is possible.
A benevolent people premise (BPP) is characterized by a reverence for Man, and the belief that man, by nature, is to be regarded as rational and valued as good. It's the belief that man has the power of choice, the power to choose his goals and to achieve them, and the power to direct the course of his life. It is the conviction that ideas matter, that knowledge matters, that truth matters, that one's mind matters. It's this conviction that leads to a respect and goodwill toward men, and an attitude, in individual encounters, of treating men as rational beings, on the premise that a man is innocent until proven guilty. One is unable to believe in the power or triumph of evil; evil is regarded as impotent and unreal, and injustice is the exception in life, not the rule. Consequently one has confidence in one's ability to judge others, to communicate with others, and to persuade them by rational argument, and a belief that the great potential value of men is the to-be-expected. The rationality in others is what matters, not their irrationality, and in essence they are a potential source of value, not a potential threat of dis-value.
 
1. For more on "sense of life", see the chapter "Philosophy and Sense of Life" in The Romantic Manifesto, by Ayn Rand
2. "Benevolent People Premise" is a term coined by Objectivist Dan Edge in blog posts back in 2007. You can find them here and here. Also see his thread here on Objectivism Online here.
3. See how Ayn Rand applies the BUP/MPP and MUP/BPP mixtures to the field of literature in her chapter "What is Romanticism?" in The Romantic Manifesto, where she discusses "volition in regard to existence, but not to consciousness" and "volition in regard to consciousness, but not to existence".

This is a false dichotomy you're making between "intention" and "competence". The issue isn't a division between whether you desire something vs. whether you act to achieve it; it's between whether you desire something and act to achieve it vs. whether you actually achieve it. It's action vs. outcome. Virtue and morality pertain to the action itself, not to whether or not you happen to achieve the effects that you desire, which can depend on other factors. Roark acted with integrity despite not achieving the effect he desired, to build the building the way he wanted, because actually achieving that effect depended also on the actions of others.
If you're not sure whether rights enter into tragic situations, what about rationality, justice, or integrity? Individual rights are the application of moral principles to a social context. Whether or not the situation is tragic is irrelevant, the question of context pertains to whether or not the situation is social: if it is, then individual rights apply, for the same reason that rationality, justice, and integrity apply.

The original question in this thread is assuming an implicit, fundamental premise: that goodness or badness is measured by the quality of one's experience (happiness or suffering, respectively), and transitively, on the likelihood of such experiences in the future.
If one were to assume this premise, which we can call "utilitarianism" (and may be of the collectivist or egoist variety), then there are three fundamentally different ways to approach the question, depending on what kind of experience you hold as having moral weight:
1. Negative utilitarianism, which holds that only suffering is what counts, morally. This is the Epicurean view and is anathema to Objectivism.
2. Positive utilitarianism, which holds that only pleasure is what counts, morally. I don't know of this view being endorsed explicitly anywhere besides in my own essay on the subject entitled "positive utiltiarian egoism" (which I still favor, but no longer endorse; for my position, see the end of this post).
3. Utilitarianism (unlabeled) of the regular variety, in which pleasures and pains are held as commensurable values, morally. This is the traditional utilitarian view held by many.
If you hold the first view, then death is an inherently good thing, as it permanently ends suffering, and puts a stopper on any continued negative experiences that could have otherwise come after.
If you hold the second view, then death is an inherently bad thing, as it permanently ends pleasure, and likewise puts a stopper on any continued positive experiences that could have otherwise come after.
If you hold the third view, then death may be a good or bad thing, depending on your evaluation of the likelihood of the overall weight of continued positive or negative experiences that may come in the future.
The second view has been represented in this thread by Boydstun:
and (astutely, though perhaps mistakenly) by dream_weaver:
I'd add to these the following:
"Should man's primary concern be a quest for joy - or an escape from suffering?"

"Philosophy: Who Needs It,"
Philosophy: Who Needs It, 4


"You seek escape from pain. We seek the achievement of happiness. You exist for the sake of avoiding punishment. We exist for the sake of earning rewards. Threats will not make us function; fear is not our incentive."

...

"Do you ask if it's ever proper to help another man? No - if he claims it as his right or as a moral duty that you owe him. Yes - if such is your own desire based on your own selfish pleasure in the value of his person and his struggle. Suffering as such is not a value; only man's fight against suffering, is. If you choose to help a man who suffers, do it only on the ground of his virtues, of his fight to recover, of his rational record, or of the fact that he suffers unjustly; then your action is still a trade, and his virtue is the payment for your help. But to help a man who has no virtues, to help him on the ground of his suffering as such, to accept his faults, his need, as a claim - is to accept the mortgage of a zero on your values."

...

"It's not that I don't suffer, it's that I know the unimportance of suffering, I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one's soul and as a permanent scar across one's view of existence."

John Galt
Atlas Shrugged


"I'm not capable of suffering completely. I never have. It goes only down to a certain point and then it stops. As long as there is that untouched point, it's not really pain.
"Where does it stop?"
"Where I can think of nothing and feel nothing except that I designed that temple. I built it. Nothing else can seem very important."

Howard Roark and Dominique Francon
The Fountainhead


"She was seeing the brand of pain and fear on the faces of people, and the look of evasion that refuses to know it–they seemed to be going through the motions of some enormous pretense, acting out a ritual to ward off reality, letting the earth remain unseen and their lives unlived, in dread of something namelessly forbidden–yet the forbidden was the simple act of looking at the nature of their pain and questioning their duty to bear it."

...

"She survived it. She was able to survive it, because she did not believe in suffering. She faced with astonished indignation the ugly fact of feeling pain, and refused to let it matter. Suffering was a senseless accident, it was not part of life as she saw it. She would not allow pain to become important. She had no name for the kind of resistance she offered, for the emotion from which the resistance came; but the words that stood as its equivalent in her mind were: It does not count - it is not to be taken seriously. She knew these were the words, even in the moments when there was nothing left within her but screaming and she wished she could lose the faculty of consciousness so that it would not tell her that what could not be true was true. Not to be taken seriously - an immovable certainty within her kept repeating - pain and ugliness are never to be taken seriously." 

Atlas Shrugged and by Harrison:
 
And the third view is represented by the much-beloved (though morally abhorrent) post of Nicky:
 
Objectivism as expressed by Ayn Rand in her fiction and nonfiction does not accept the fundamental premise of the question, namely: the moral weight of good and bad is not found in one's experiences in Objectivism. Objectivism is not utilitarian at all. In Ayn Rand's philosophy, existence does not precede essence; good and bad are measured with respect to one's virtue, to one's integrity, and not to the likely effects on one's merely physical survival.
Death is regarded as bad in Objectivism because Existence is Identity.
The "good" is that which has kept its integrity. From Roark in The Fountainhead:
"An honest man has to be of one piece and one faith; what constituted the life source, the idea in any existing thing or creature, and why - if one smallest part committed treason to that idea - the thing of the creature was dead; and why the good, the high and the noble on earth was only that which kept its integrity."
The "bad" is not merely physical death, but rather the morally corrupt, and the self-contradictory. Rand writes in "The Inexplicable Personal Alchemy":
"If named, the driving motive of the dissenters would be an appeal which, to them, is irresistible: “But don’t you see? It’s *true!*”—and they would speak, regardless of circumstances, regardless of danger, regardless of their audience, so long as the audience had a human form, they would speak in desperate innocence, knowing that a life-or-death imperative compels them to speak, not knowing fully why.
And, facing a firing squad, if necessary, they would still feel it, with no time to learn why and to discover that they are moved by the noblest form of metaphysical self-preservation: the refusal to commit spiritual suicide by abnegating one’s own mind and to survive as a lobotomized automaton.
While her husband was being tried and sentenced to a prison camp, Larisa Daniel said, supporting him: “I cannot do otherwise.” As a human being, she could not."
This is the Objectivist justification for why death is bad. We are by nature living beings, and through our actions we can either choose life, that is, to keep our integrity, or we can choose death, that is, to sacrifice our integrity, and to contradict our metaphysical identity.

I wanted to start a thread just for general discussion of a benevolent or malevolent sense of life, and in particular, the concepts of a benevolent universe premise (BUP), malevolent universe premise (MUP), benevolent people premise (BPP), and malevolent people premise (MPP). Which of these do you identify with personally, and why? And do you have any reservations or disclaimers you want to add?
In general, one can have a benevolent or malevolent sense of life. A "sense of life" is the basic emotional stance one has on life that comes from one's implicit metaphysical value judgments. Metaphysical value judgments are one's overall value judgments or feelings about the essential nature of existence, of man, and of man's relationship to existence.1
If one has an overall positive judgment about the metaphysical nature of reality and of man, then one's basic emotional stance on life will be positive. One will have a benevolent sense of life. Likewise, if one has an overall negative judgment about the metaphysical nature of reality and of man, then one's basic emotional stance on life will be negative; one will have a malevolent sense of life.
Someone with an overall benevolent sense of life has a philosophical conviction that their life and the universe are good and valuable, a conviction that is not shaken simply by going through trying circumstances. They have a conviction that joy, exaltation, beauty, greatness, and heroism are the meaning of life, and not any pain or ugliness that they may encounter. They believe that happiness is what matters in life, but suffering does not, and that the essence of life is the achievement of joy, not the escape from pain. Pain, fear, and guilt are inessential and are not to be taken seriously as a scar across one's view of existence. Their basic stance when it comes to any question is that they love being alive, and they love the universe in which they live. "We exist and we know that we exist, and we love that fact and our knowledge of it" (Augustine).
One's sense of life can be further analyzed into two basic categories: one's judgment of the universe, and one's judgment of man. An overall positive or negative judgment about the nature of the universe is what Rand calls the "Benevolent Universe Premise" (BUP) or "Malevolent Universe Premise" (MUP), respectively; a positive or negative judgment about the nature of man is the "Benevolent People Premise" (BPP) or "Malevolent People Premise" (MPP)2. A fully benevolent sense of life will combine a benevolent judgment of the universe and a benevolent judgment of man: both BUP and BPP. One may have a characteristically mixed sense of life, with a benevolent universe premise but a malevolent people premise (BUP/MPP), or a malevolent universe premise but a benevolent people premise (MUP/BPP).3
A benevolent universe premise (BUP) is characterized by a reverence for the Universe, and the belief that the universe, by nature, is intelligible to man, and that his happiness is possible in a place such as this. It's the belief that the things around you are real and ruled by natural laws, and that reality is stable, firm, absolute, and knowable. Tragedy is the exception in life, not the rule. Success, not failure, is the to-be-expected. It's the conviction that man is not ultimately doomed in this universe, but rather that a human way of life is possible.
A benevolent people premise (BPP) is characterized by a reverence for Man, and the belief that man, by nature, is to be regarded as rational and valued as good. It's the belief that man has the power of choice, the power to choose his goals and to achieve them, and the power to direct the course of his life. It is the conviction that ideas matter, that knowledge matters, that truth matters, that one's mind matters. It's this conviction that leads to a respect and goodwill toward men, and an attitude, in individual encounters, of treating men as rational beings, on the premise that a man is innocent until proven guilty. One is unable to believe in the power or triumph of evil; evil is regarded as impotent and unreal, and injustice is the exception in life, not the rule. Consequently one has confidence in one's ability to judge others, to communicate with others, and to persuade them by rational argument, and a belief that the great potential value of men is the to-be-expected. The rationality in others is what matters, not their irrationality, and in essence they are a potential source of value, not a potential threat of dis-value.
 
1. For more on "sense of life", see the chapter "Philosophy and Sense of Life" in The Romantic Manifesto, by Ayn Rand
2. "Benevolent People Premise" is a term coined by Objectivist Dan Edge in blog posts back in 2007. You can find them here and here. Also see his thread here on Objectivism Online here.
3. See how Ayn Rand applies the BUP/MPP and MUP/BPP mixtures to the field of literature in her chapter "What is Romanticism?" in The Romantic Manifesto, where she discusses "volition in regard to existence, but not to consciousness" and "volition in regard to consciousness, but not to existence".

I wanted to start a thread just for general discussion of a benevolent or malevolent sense of life, and in particular, the concepts of a benevolent universe premise (BUP), malevolent universe premise (MUP), benevolent people premise (BPP), and malevolent people premise (MPP). Which of these do you identify with personally, and why? And do you have any reservations or disclaimers you want to add?
In general, one can have a benevolent or malevolent sense of life. A "sense of life" is the basic emotional stance one has on life that comes from one's implicit metaphysical value judgments. Metaphysical value judgments are one's overall value judgments or feelings about the essential nature of existence, of man, and of man's relationship to existence.1
If one has an overall positive judgment about the metaphysical nature of reality and of man, then one's basic emotional stance on life will be positive. One will have a benevolent sense of life. Likewise, if one has an overall negative judgment about the metaphysical nature of reality and of man, then one's basic emotional stance on life will be negative; one will have a malevolent sense of life.
Someone with an overall benevolent sense of life has a philosophical conviction that their life and the universe are good and valuable, a conviction that is not shaken simply by going through trying circumstances. They have a conviction that joy, exaltation, beauty, greatness, and heroism are the meaning of life, and not any pain or ugliness that they may encounter. They believe that happiness is what matters in life, but suffering does not, and that the essence of life is the achievement of joy, not the escape from pain. Pain, fear, and guilt are inessential and are not to be taken seriously as a scar across one's view of existence. Their basic stance when it comes to any question is that they love being alive, and they love the universe in which they live. "We exist and we know that we exist, and we love that fact and our knowledge of it" (Augustine).
One's sense of life can be further analyzed into two basic categories: one's judgment of the universe, and one's judgment of man. An overall positive or negative judgment about the nature of the universe is what Rand calls the "Benevolent Universe Premise" (BUP) or "Malevolent Universe Premise" (MUP), respectively; a positive or negative judgment about the nature of man is the "Benevolent People Premise" (BPP) or "Malevolent People Premise" (MPP)2. A fully benevolent sense of life will combine a benevolent judgment of the universe and a benevolent judgment of man: both BUP and BPP. One may have a characteristically mixed sense of life, with a benevolent universe premise but a malevolent people premise (BUP/MPP), or a malevolent universe premise but a benevolent people premise (MUP/BPP).3
A benevolent universe premise (BUP) is characterized by a reverence for the Universe, and the belief that the universe, by nature, is intelligible to man, and that his happiness is possible in a place such as this. It's the belief that the things around you are real and ruled by natural laws, and that reality is stable, firm, absolute, and knowable. Tragedy is the exception in life, not the rule. Success, not failure, is the to-be-expected. It's the conviction that man is not ultimately doomed in this universe, but rather that a human way of life is possible.
A benevolent people premise (BPP) is characterized by a reverence for Man, and the belief that man, by nature, is to be regarded as rational and valued as good. It's the belief that man has the power of choice, the power to choose his goals and to achieve them, and the power to direct the course of his life. It is the conviction that ideas matter, that knowledge matters, that truth matters, that one's mind matters. It's this conviction that leads to a respect and goodwill toward men, and an attitude, in individual encounters, of treating men as rational beings, on the premise that a man is innocent until proven guilty. One is unable to believe in the power or triumph of evil; evil is regarded as impotent and unreal, and injustice is the exception in life, not the rule. Consequently one has confidence in one's ability to judge others, to communicate with others, and to persuade them by rational argument, and a belief that the great potential value of men is the to-be-expected. The rationality in others is what matters, not their irrationality, and in essence they are a potential source of value, not a potential threat of dis-value.
 
1. For more on "sense of life", see the chapter "Philosophy and Sense of Life" in The Romantic Manifesto, by Ayn Rand
2. "Benevolent People Premise" is a term coined by Objectivist Dan Edge in blog posts back in 2007. You can find them here and here. Also see his thread here on Objectivism Online here.
3. See how Ayn Rand applies the BUP/MPP and MUP/BPP mixtures to the field of literature in her chapter "What is Romanticism?" in The Romantic Manifesto, where she discusses "volition in regard to existence, but not to consciousness" and "volition in regard to consciousness, but not to existence".

By Dan Edge from The Edge of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Ayn Rand's "Benevolent Universe Premise" (referred to in various essays, letters, and journal entries) is her description of a rational man's fundamental psychological perspective on reality. Operating on this premise, one views the universe as a place where he can succeed and be happy. He has a generally positive attitude about life -- he expects to be happy. This does not mean that he is never sad or never experiences failure, but that he believes happiness and success are his natural state of being. He does not repress or ignore negative emotions, but neither does he dwell on them unnecessarily. He focuses on the positive.

Rand contrasts this perspective with the "Malevolent Universe Premise," in which one sees the universe as a place where failure and pain are the norm. One who holds this premise may live virtuously and enjoy continuing success in life, but he is always waiting for the other shoe to drop -- he expects failure and unhappiness. When things are going his way, he begins to experience happiness anxiety. When something bad finally does happen, he feels miserable -- but justified.

For years, I have watched (mostly young) Objectivists struggle with a specific form of the Malevolent Universe Premise. I call it the "Malevolent People Premise." One with a Malevolent People Premise expects the worst out of each new person he meets. He realizes that everyone has the capacity to be rational, but he expects those he meets to be irrational. While he may develop relationships with new people who seem virtuous, he always expects to find faults, and he carefully scrutinizes new friends or lovers for any evidence of irrationality. When he discovers a flaw in the person, he feels betrayed and angry -- but justified.

I believe that the Malevolent People Premise is a subset of the Malevolent Universe Premise, and is psychologically destructive for the same reasons. Either premise can lead to happiness anxiety and severely limit one's capacity for joy. The alternative - a benevolent view of the universe and its inhabitants - is a critical component of a healthy mind.

I must stress that I do not advocate failing to properly judge people. Just as one with a Benevolent Universe Premise always must be ruthlessly honest and judicious in his evaluation of a particular aspect of reality, so one with a Benevolent People Premise must be honest and judicious in his evaluation of a particular person. When Mrs. Rand talked about the Benevolent Universe Premise, she often included a parenthetical like the one found in her Journals. One ought to maintain a Benevolent Universe Premise only "(if he remains realistic, that is, true to reality observed by his reason)." (Rand, Journals of Ayn Rand, pg 555). One can properly judge an aspect of reality, or an individual human being, while maintaining a positive general view of reality and mankind.

I consider myself to be a good example of someone with a Benevolent People Premise. I always expect the best out of people, particularly when meeting them for the first time. When I meet someone new, I am generally very enthusiastic, respectful, and friendly. This reflects my sincere expectation that the person will be rational and virtuous. No matter how many irrational people I meet (and believe me, I've met a lot), I still always expect the best from each new person. This does not mean that I ignore the possibility that people may be irrational, only that I do not consider that to be the natural order of things.

When I say that I treat all people with a certain degree of respect I mean all people. I am friendly to the Latino guy who does the landscaping at my office. I am courteous to the young man who sells me coffee at the gas station on the way to work. I am respectful to the very Orthodox Jews with whom I share this office building. I am kind to the children of the Hatian immigrants who populate my apartment complex.

If I looked carefully, I could find a reason to be wary of each of these people. The Latino guy doesn't speak very good English, and I oppose the multiculturalists who believe he has no responsibility to learn our national language. Perhaps the Latino guy sides with the multiculturalists, and chooses not to learn English on principle. The young man at the coffee shop has accepted a low-wage job, and many people who work as gas station attendants remain in those jobs because they have no ambition. Perhaps the young man is one of those people. The Orthodox Jews are famously ritualistic and devoted to faith-based principles. Perhaps some of my co-workers blindly follow a destructive philosophy which will negatively impact our working relationship. The Hatians are mostly poor and uneducated. Perhaps my Hatian neighbors fall into this category, and their children are trouble-makers.

All of these are legitimate possibilities, and they are things that my subconscious looks out for. I do not want to associate closely with those who will negatively affect my life. However, I am also aware of the potential positive impact these people can and do have on my life. The Latino man works to make the grounds outside my office look aesthetically pleasing; the young gas station attendant works to make coffee and gasoline accessible to me; some of the Orthodox Jews are my business partners, and made it possible for me to start my own company; and the Hatian children play sports in the apartment parking lot each day, displaying a youthful exuberance that is a joy to behold.

Everyone I meet has the potential to have a positive and/or negative impact on my life. While I am prepared for the negative, I focus on and expect the positive. Those around me detect this positive attitude, and most respond in kind. People can also easily detect the opposite -- one with a Malevolent People Premise sticks out like a sore thumb. If you have ever been pounced on by a crabby Objectivist you just met for some miscommunication on technical epistemology, then you know what I'm talking about.

Many young Objectivists are disheartened by the overwhelming tide of irrational philosophy in our culture. They feel alone and isolated in high schools and on college campuses. This is a natural reaction to the discovery of widespread irrationalism. However, one should watch out that this reaction does not become ingrained and solidify into a Malevolent People Premise. Keep in mind that every individual possesses free will -- each man has the capacity for rationality and virtue. You owe it to yourself to maintain a Benevolent People Premise, and open your heart to the great potential values that can be found in other rational beings.

(The Benevolent People Premise is also very important in the context of long-term friendships and romantic love relationships. Unfortunately, I am short of time, so that will be a discussion for another blog entry. )

To the best within us,

--Dan Edge

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Would you say that you're not the same as Rearden? Or do you agree with Rearden when it comes to sacrificing yourself, but not when it comes to sacrificing other people?

Leonard Peikoff explains that line in The Fountainhead:
From "Philosophy, Who Needs It?":
 

Tracinski states,
This is not what Ayn Rand says in her essay "The Ethics of Emergencies".
The essay begins with her asking us to consider the implications of someone who begins their approach to the subject of ethics with lifeboat scenarios - which she regards as a disintegrated, malevolent, and basically altruistic approach to the subject, that cannot ultimately yield a rational system of ethics.
She did not say that lifeboat scenarios are "irrelevant", that they are the 0.01 of cases that morality is "not intended for", she says exactly the opposite:
And she absolutely did not say that moral principles are "intended for the 99.9% of existence":
She does not say to act in accordance with your hierarchy of values 99.9% of the time, she says always. Sacrificing a greater value to a lesser one is not okay 0.01% of the time, it's never okay. She did not say that moral principles apply to 99.9% of one's choices - she says they apply to all choices.
She then goes to take those principles of ethics that apply in the 99.9% of existence in which one is not in an emergency, and proceeds to apply those very same principles to emergency situations:
As we can see in this example, the virtue of integrity, which applies in the 99.9% of existence in which one is not in an emergency, also prescribes what one ought to do in the 0.01% of life in which one is in an emergency, too.
I started a separate thread answering what one ought to do in the trolley problem here:
 

Dustin explained issues he has had in another thread:
Issues like these are so common they are almost epidemic among Objectivists.  See for example what Nathaniel Branden wrote, in 1984:
http://web.archive.org/web/20120106060148/http://www.nathanielbranden.com/ayn/ayn03.html
 
An Objectivist popped into the chatroom just the other night discussing their psychological issues with me. They were seeing a therapist because they were overloaded with stress from work, essentially because they were over-valuing material independence, and the therapist was having trouble helping them.
What I had to say to this person is this:
The virtue of independence doesn't pertain to material independence primarily. Virtues are about how you think and act, not about your material circumstances. It doesn't make sense to describe material independence as a "virtue"; that's a consequence, not an action. Virtues describe principles of action.
If you read Rand's description of independence, she's talking entirely about judgment and the mind: "yours is the responsibility of judgment", "no substitute can do your thinking", she rejects "the acceptance of an authority over your brain" - these do not comment on material dependence, or say anything negatively about relying on others, but rather they are focusing in on a particular issue of how you use your own mind.
When she talks about independence, she's talking about that virtue of using your mind, acquiring knowledge the best you can, thinking the best you can, and being able to come to judgments based on that thinking and knowledge. In essence, she's focused on how to think and act to the best of your ability. That does not preclude either material dependence, or relying on others in general. Virtues are not negative principles, they aren't there to instruct you what not to do, they are there primarily to talk about what you should do, based on what's possible to you simply by nature. By nature we are all capable of thinking, acquiring knowledge, and forming judgments - and morally, we should.
Independence as a virtue is a matter of sound mind and sound action, not a matter of a trade-off of material values. And if material independence were held as high in one's mind as a virtue of character, that could lead one to make bad trade-offs in one's life, such as pursuing material independence at the expense of other values like a good social life.
If one holds material independence - the outcome - to the standards of a virtue of one's character - which pertains to one's actions - that could lead to some serious distress and guilt, because one's esteem becomes tied to the material outcomes rather than to one's actual virtue and character. Imagine if Roark took working in the quarry as fault of his integrity; he wouldn't have made it out of there.
Virtue needs to be completely separate from outcome.
Consider this quote from Peikoff's lecture on "Certainty and Happiness":
"Let’s consider here a moral man who has not yet reached professional or romantic fulfillment, an Ayn Rand hero, say Roark or Galt, at a point where he is alone against the world, barred from his work, destitute. Now such a person has certainly not “achieved his values”.
On the contrary he is beset by problems and difficulties. Nevertheless, if he is an Ayn Rand hero, he’s confident, at peace with himself, serene. He is a happy person even when living through an unhappy period. He does experience deprivation, frustration, pain. But in a phrase that I think is truly memorable, from the Fountainhead, it’s pain that “goes down only to a certain point”.
He has achieved, not success, but the ability to succeed. In other words, the right relationship to reality. So the emotional leitmotif of such a person is a unique and enduring form of pleasure: the pleasure that derives from the sheer fact of a man’s being alive, if he is a man who feels able to live. I’ve described this particular emotion as "metaphysical pleasure".
   
Now metaphysical pleasure depends on one’s own choices and actions. And in that sense virtue does ensure happiness- not the full happiness of having achieved one’s values in reality, but the radiance of knowing that such achievement is possible."
I think this quote from Peikoff is helpful because it illustrates what it means to have self-esteem based on your character, independent of where you actually are in life - that is, independent of the outcomes.
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Dustin is by no means alone in the issues he's having. Objectivists have had these issues for decades, and they still do even today.
In Understanding Objectivism, Peikoff identifies another cause of this psychological problem in Objectivists: a concrete-bound mentality. As an Objectivist, one might hold themselves to the concrete elements of Rand's heroes instead of to the abstract moral principles the heroes exemplify. Since, objectively, one might not (and need not) value any of the particular concretes that her heroes value, the fact that one's emotions are not in line with such concretes can mistakenly lead one to the idea that one's emotions are out of control and must be repressed, which can lead to a great deal of distress and suffering.
Here's an excerpt from lecture ten of Understanding Objectivism describing the issue:
 
There is a similar issue known by the term "Howard Roark Syndrome", essentially the issue of taking Rand's heroes too literally, and thereby holding oneself to an impossible (or even an improper) standard. This was discussed previously on this forum:
Another post:
The consequences of this kind of problem can be an inability to act appropriately when dealing with other people (in the case of the second quote), or even broken relationships (in the case of the first quote), or in general, an under-valuation of other people, which can be a major factor in these psychological problems common to Objectivists.