I have just finished reading “The Virtue of Selfishness” and it is a great read and has turned me on to Objectivism even more.
But, I have been confused in one area. Ayn Rand logically makes it clear that an organism’s primary concerns should be selfish and it’s actions should therefore be furthering it’s ultimate value: life. This fact is substantiated very logically. But, she also states that a human’s violation of another human’s right is morally impermissible. She simply says that that is so but does not substantiate the claim (as far as I can recall). So, my question is logically how can a human not violate another’s rights? Defining this fact is critical to the difference between Objectivism and Subjectivism. Furthermore, where in “The Virtue of Selfishness” does she prove this thesis?
To make it clear, I don’t think rights should be violated but as of yet it has been more of a feeling that I have had than something I feel I can truly substantiate logically. To add, I agree it shouldn’t happen for the simple fact that I don’t want my rights violated but how should this be a universal moral?
To make it clear, I don’t think rights should be violated but as of yet it has been more of a feeling that I have had than something I feel I can truly substantiate logically. To add, I agree it shouldn’t happen for the simple fact that I don’t want my rights violated but how should this be a universal moral?
A handy rule on how to behave (actually how not to behave) is not to do something to another that you would not want done to you. Out of which the Usual Commandments against theft, murder, violence, fraud, etc. fall out directly. All quite logical and not needing a Deity on a flaming mountain top.
So, my question is logically how can a human not violate another’s rights?
I assume you are asking why violating another’s rights is immoral on Objectivist grounds? This is a somewhat tricky point, granted. What it boils down to is that to violate another person’s rights you have to initiate the use of force. Now, there are two basic reasons why one might do this. Either one is doing it in accordance with some moral principle which sanctions the initiation of force as morally good or one is acting without the guidance of a principle, i.e. on whim. The latter is clearly not in your self-interest, because your life has specific requirements which must be grasped through reason, and acting based on whim is a rejection of reason. And a principle which sanctions the initiation of force would obviously conflict with all the other Objectivist virtues.
I find it clarifying to think of the question not as “Why shouldn’t I initiate the use of force?”, but as “Why shouldn’t I be the kind of person who would initiate the use of force?” Being that kind of person has many implications for one’s own life, all of them bad – ergo not in one’s self-interest, ergo immoral.
You cannot simply choose “pure existence” without existing as something – existence implies identity. The choice to exist means that you have to exist as what you are. If you were a volitional cow, that would mean wandering the pastures, eating and regurgitating grass. But you’re not a cow, and you can’t exist properly, behaving like one. You also can’t sprint on all fours at 75 mph and take down gazelle, or filter plankton through big combs of baleen. To act against your nature is to work against your ultimate goal, namely existing as a man. An action which works against your ultimate goal is immoral.
A handy rule on how to behave (actually how not to behave) is not to do something to another that you would not want done to you. Out of which the Usual Commandments against theft, murder, violence, fraud, etc. fall out directly.
All of which is irrelevant to the question, which about Objectivism. Objectivist morality is not based on eye-for-eye fear of retribution.
I agree with David Odden – you need to look at what you are. You have a big brain, not claws, armor shell and razor teeth. Violence is not your means of survival but thinking. You should therefore not try to survive by killing other people.
Also, if ideas are your means of survival, another person who is alive might comes up with some (ideas) but a dead person clearly won’t. So it is not only “not your way” to attack and kill them, it is potentially to your benefit not too. (Of course, people have free will, and others may choose to act against their nature, but that is what police and courts are for.)
Also, think of logical consistency. The parts of your identity that make reason your means of survival are also present on them. So to say your rights must be respected due to these attributes is to say theirs must be too.
A handy rule on how to behave (actually how not to behave) is not to do something to another that you would not want done to you. Out of which the Usual Commandments against theft, murder, violence, fraud, etc. fall out directly. All quite logical and not needing a Deity on a flaming mountain top.
Bob Kolker
Do you seriously believe this is a proper or any valid justification to defend individual rights? What if I’m against private property and I simply don’t want my right to property to be respected by others? Does that give me a permission, under this emotional rule of yours, to violate someone else’s? Not at all. And…umm, BTW, why do you always write your name at the bottom of your posts if everyone here knows it’s you??
Do you seriously believe this is a proper or any valid justification to defend individual rights? What if I’m against private property and I simply don’t want my right to property to be respected by others? Does that give me a permission, under this emotional rule of yours, to violate someone else’s?
Tell you what, here’s my rebuttal to any argument in favor of respecting rights you may come up with: “Do you seriously believe that your stuuuuupid argument is justification to defend rights? What if I think my frog will turn into a princess as soon as I murder the reincarnation of Hitler? Does that give me permission, under this rule of yours which stuuuupidly assumes that I’m wrong, to just start killing people at random until i hit the jackpot?”
Tell you what, here’s my rebuttal to any argument in favor of respecting rights you may come up with: “Do you seriously believe that your stuuuuupid argument is justification to defend rights? What if I think my frog will turn into a princess as soon as I murder the reincarnation of Hitler? Does that give me permission, under this rule of yours which stuuuupidly assumes that I’m wrong, to just start killing people at random until i hit the jackpot?”
You should therefore not try to survive by killing other people.
I love it when people say things like this. It’s like they’re offering advice!
Ukelelemasta, one thing you will notice in these types of forums, is a tremendous amount of rationalism — especially on topics of this kind. (Rationalism is a kind of thinking error: it’s the attempt to address complex ideas by means of quick, deductive arguments.)
I strongly recommend that you purchase, read and study Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand by Leonard Peikoff, and spend as much time as you can thinking about these issues on your own.
Once you have a basic grasp of the ideas, you can come to a forum such as this and ask questions — but without a clear understanding of the basics, and most importantly of the mental methodology required to arrive at philosophic truths, you’re setting yourself up for confusion.
Do you seriously believe this is a proper or any valid justification to defend individual rights? What if I’m against private property and I simply don’t want my right to property to be respected by others? Does that give me a permission, under this emotional rule of yours, to violate someone else’s? Not at all. And…umm, BTW, why do you always write your name at the bottom of your posts if everyone here knows it’s you??
The way you defend your rights is to resist the offender against your rights. I was talking about how to behave when one is not threatened. When one is threatened, one fights back. Basic Self Defense. How does one fight back? Brains first. Our main tool is also our main weapon. Reason. If Reason does not suffice to deal with the threat, then force and war it is.
And even then, one must fight smart.
I like to sign my stuff. It is a matter of form.
Bob Kolker (oops there I go again. Signing at the bottom)
I love it when people say things like this. It’s like they’re offering advice!
This is a digression, but I have to point out that in an egoistic ethics the process of moral judgment bears a strong resemblance to giving advice. Think about it. If someone is acting immorally on an egoistic ethics, they’re harming themselves. Moral judgment consists in identifying that harm and recommending that the other person act in a different way that will make their life better. That’s advice!
This is a digression, but I have to point out that in an egoistic ethics the process of moral judgment bears a strong resemblance to giving advice.
True — but you have to wonder: to whom is a statement such as “do not try to survive by killing other people” directed? Who is so confused about this issue that such advice could have any personal meaning or impact?
If a person is truly confused, it’s going to take much more than a three-sentence, deductive argument to get them to see the light.
If a person is truly confused, it’s going to take much more than a three-sentence, deductive argument to get them to see the light.
Oh, absolutely. You’ll never gain a full understanding of any major philosophical point via deduction – philosophic principles should always be validated inductively. The main purpose of the brief sketch responses possible in a forum like this should be to direct the questioner’s attention to various facts of reality that can provide the base and structure for their own inductive investigation. That’s what I was trying to do in my earlier reply – clarify the question and identify a relevant fact.
The Objectivist ethics argues that one’s own life is the standard by which one should choose one’s actions, and that one has to act guided by principles that identify the long-range consequences of one’s actions. Inside this context, the question “Why should I respect the rights of other people?” becomes “What would be the effect on my life of accepting, as a principle, that the use of physical force is a virtue?”
I haven’t yet seen this argument presented yet, and I feel that this specific argument presents a better case than any of the others presented so far.
Rights exist because, by the nature of a man, they are necessary for survival in the context of a society. Without these rights, existence is literally -impossible-. You can’t support yourself without any one of these rights. However, because they are HUMAN rights, to breach the rights of any one person is necessarily making the claim that all rights are irrelevant to you - including your own. To survive by sheer force is antithetical to your own survival in society, and a society based on such survival will not last long.
Further, as other people have pointed out, Objectivist ethics are based on the nature of man. Man does not survive by force - he couldn’t stand up to the animal kingdom with his sheer force, and at some point he will need his mind to survive. The only reason someone who lives by violating the rights of others survives is because others LET him survive - meaning, others don’t retaliate. Once you take away that fact, that some people will be unwilling to retaliate, the man who lives by force will no longer have any means of survival. The simple fact is, man’s means of survival, by his nature, is the use of reason, and anything that goes against that also goes against man’s survival, and if ethics are based on the nature of man and his survival, anything that goes against reason is immoral.
All (proper) rights are political protection against force (the use of force initiated against you).
So let’s take the rights and the politics out of it: what is wrong with the initiation of force against another individual?
Say you live on an island with one individual, no other society or authority, and you deliberately hurt them for whatever reason. You will have ignored part of reality - that this individual is a rational being and as such the optimal way to interact with them is by trading/collaborating - therefore you will have acted irrationally. All irrational acts, under Objectivism, are immoral; any ignoring of reality, any refusal to think, is immoral. You will of course have deprived yourself of a companion, probably feel guilty, risked retribution, etc. but those reasons are secondary to the core irrational nature of the act.
So once we understand that, it’s easy to grasp why we create rights in our societies. And of course, it’s common sense that rights must be mutually respected, you cannot rationally contend to maintain rights for yourself while denying the rights of others. That irrational contention would, again, be immoral (and probably impractical too but that’s secondary). A millionaire with everything he needs/wants could still lose it all without rights.
And of course, it’s common sense that rights must be mutually respected, you cannot rationally contend to maintain rights for yourself while denying the rights of others.
I’ve seen this argument – call it the “Argument from Consistency” – repeated multiple times in this thread, but I’ve never found it all that persuasive. The basic premise is that reason requires that relevantly similar entities be treated similarly. Since you claim rights for yourself on the basis of your nature as a human being, you must acknowledge the rights claims of others who are also human beings. But this doesn’t really address the criticism, which is that other people *are* relevantly different from you in a key respect: they aren’t you. And the standard of moral behavior in an egoistic ethics is your life. But it is obvious that having force used against yourself and using force against another do not impact your life in the same way, and assuming that this asymmetry is irrelevant to the question of why you should respect the rights of others just begs the question.
In short, I claim rights for myself because having force used against me harms my life. But why does that mean that I can’t rationally maintain that I can violate the rights of others without harming my own life? There’s an implicit shift from a self-centered perspective to an impersonal perspective here that needs justification.
Well that’s the nature of rights. It’s like saying why can’t you maintain franchise for yourself while denying anyone else the vote - because what you have then is not a vote, the whole concept of voting/democracy has been contradicted. Rights, as a political entity, require a basis of mutual respect.
That’s why I analysed the question of why you shouldn’t harm someone even in the absence of any political rights. Because, yes, without that analysis there’s an unexplained shift from ‘my benefit’ to ‘benefit of everyone.’
Logically how is a violation of another indivdiual’s rights immoral
This may be tortuous, but it is how I’d answer the question. I don’t claim to be able to speak with any authority about what the proper Objectivist answer is.
Logically, this is understood by the nature and identity of the concepts of rights and morality.
If you understand morality to be, as Rand puts it, “a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions”,
AND
If you understand a right to be, as Rand puts it, “a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context”,
By definition, when one VIOLATES the “right” of another, they are impeding that person’s freedom to act upon moral principles. Conflicting with or contradicting morality is, by definition, immoral.
Well, it makes sense to me.