Accueil
"On Ayn Rand’s view, ethics has a teleological foundation. There is an end that serves as the standard for defining moral values and virtues, and in relation to this end, moral norms impose obligations. The reason-giving force of these obligations, all things considered, dépends on what normative status Rand accords the end that morality serves. And on this she is unambiguous. The end for which morality is needed is also the ultimate end for a rational agent qua rational agent and the foundation of all of such an agent’s (normative) reasons for action." (p.3)
"I want to consider four well-known views about the rationality of ultimate ends from which Rand’s view can be distinguished. Historically, these views are associated with Hume, Moore, Kant, and Aristotle, respectively." (p.4)
"Rand here characterizes desires as having an underlying evaluative basis: we desire what we value, and the normative judgments underlying our values can be rational or irrational. The rationality or irrationality of our values ramifies up through the chain to the desires, goals, and interests that are founded on them. It will be rational (or irrational) to desire Something as an end insofar as it is rational (or irrational) to value it as an end. The problem with Humean views, from Rand’s perspective, is that they mistakenly treat our desires for our ends as primaries—as basic psychological phenomena (“original existences” —and thus erroneously conclude that desires are subjective responses immune to rational criticism." (pp.5-6)
"Intrinsic value theories, in the sense I mean, compose a wide class. They can be metaphysically realist, positing that intrinsic values exist or subsist independently of our thinking about them. But an intrinsic value theory need not be developed as a form of value realism; in a Kantian spirit, it might instead take the form of a theory of practical reasoning in which a commitment to certain intrinsic values is held to be a constitutive feature of rational agency. Kant, for instance, took it to be constitutive of rational agency to act only on maxims expressing respect for humanity as an end in itself […] Another axis of variation among these theories concerns the putative bearers of value, which might for instance be persons, actions, maxims, states of affairs, or natural or artificial objects such as mountains or artworks. What these theories have in common is the ascription—either as a realist claim or as a practical presupposition—of a form of normative value that grounds desire-independent reasons to act on behalf of whatever bears this value. For instance, if malnutrition and the suffering it causes are intrinsically bad, and proper nourishment for people is intrinsically good, then everyone has some (not necessarily conclusive) reason to divert resources to the relief of malnutrition, whatever their desires and whatever their personal connection to those affected." (p.6)
"If something is intrinsically valuable, its realization or protection is supposed to be normative for one’s actions whether or not one benefits in any way from that thing. Similarly, intrinsic values are supposed to be normative for one’s action independently of whether they serve one’s antecedently established purposes, and their value (qua intrinsic) is supposed to be independent of their being valued. Whereas Rand faults Humean theories for neglecting the evaluative basis of desires, she faults intrinsic value theories for neglecting the teleological basis of values, that is, their basis in the goals and purposes of living organisms." (p.7)
"Rand’s overall philosophy is Aristotelian in a number of significant ways. But she says little about Aristotle’s ethics, and what she says about the foundations of his ethics is quite critical." (p.9)
"On Aristotle’s view, a rational agent makes eudaimonia or living well his ultimate end and grasps that the fundamental constitutive requirement of living well is “activity of soul in accordance with virtue” […] Virtue, in turn, is partly intellectual and partly moral or character-related. The moral virtues are states of character that involve acting with a view to, and for the sake of, what is fine. The concept of the fine is central to Aristotle’s account of practical reasoning, for without it the concept of eudaimonia would lack rich enough content to yield any specific prescriptions for action ; we would be advised to seek to live well without a conception of what living well means.
But the concept of the fine seems to run into the same kind of problems as those which Rand finds in the concept of intrinsic value. Indeed, since recognition of the fine is supposed to be a stopping point in practical deliberation, it seems natural to construe fineness as a kind of intrinsic value [...] What is fine (say, to stand firm in this battle in this way at this time; or to enjoy this form of pleasure at this time to this extent) is so in itself. Further, although the fine is connected with eudaimonia and thus with benefits to the agent who does what is fine, the direction of this connection is the reverse of what Rand thinks it should be. For Rand, properly grounded value claims make the good of the agent the standard of what is of value to that agent. But for Aristotle, we do not discover what is fine by discovering what we have to do to live well; rather, we discover what we have to do to live well by discovering what is fine, and the fine itself is (he seems to think) intrinsically normative. It is in virtue of doing what is—independently—fine that we also live well. And it is as a result of our being able to flesh out our idea of living well, via a grasp of the fine, that the formally normative notion of “living well” becomes substantively normative, that is, capable of underwriting reasons to do one specific thing rather than another (rather than just whatever it might be that living well involves)." (p.10)
"Fineness is a property of intentional human actions; when we ask what is fine, we are asking what is a fine thing for a human being to do. It is plausible to think that, for Aristotle, the answer to this depends on facts about our human nature, since doing what is fine is a form of self-actualization (the criteria for which could hardly be independent of our human nature). Thus, perhaps fine human actions are only fine when they are the actions of human beings; the fine for another species of rational beings might look quite different due to their differences from us. This makes the fineness of fine actions both less intrinsic and more seemingly dependent on a prior conception of human flourishing.
But Aristotle’s view is at least ambiguous. Insofar as the fine is supposed to be an independent, intrinsically normative input into a conceptionof living well, Rand would reject Aristotle’s concept of the “fine” as an acceptable basis for ethics or for an account of reasons for action." (p.11)
"Life as an Ultimate Value.
Rand needs to explain how reason can give us our ends without relying on (either realist or Kantian) claims of intrinsic value, and how our rational ends can ground reasons for action, including moral reasons. She encapsulates her account as follows: “Life or death is man’s only fundamental alternative. To live is his basic act of choice. If he chooses to live, a rational ethics will tell him what principles of action are required to implement his choice. If he chooses not to live, nature will take its course” […]. Her ethics thus “holds [the requirements of] man’s life as the standard of value” and that “[m]an must [i.e., should] choose his actions, values and goals” by this standard “in order to achieve, maintain, fulfill and enjoy that ultimate value, that end in itself, which is his own life” […]. This account thus gives each person a substantively different but formally identical ultimate value—his own life. Similarly, it gives each person a substantively different but formally identical ultimate end or goal—to achieve, maintain, fulfill, and enjoy his life. Rand’s formulation of the ultimate end reflects her view of the complexity involved, for human beings as against other species, in valuing our lives. Plants and animals value their lives by acting to maintain them ; this is “valuing” in an extended sense of the term, in which one values X insofar as X’s attainment or preservation is the goal of one’s action. Rand considers this sense of the term applicable to all living things whether or not their goals have the form of conscious (or self-conscious) purposes […]. The more complex formulation of the ultimate end for humans suggests that a human being’s life is not a given but must be achieved before it can be maintained. Rand’s conception of the relation between (human) life and happiness is helpful in explicating this idea: “The maintenance of life and the pursuit of happiness are not two separate issues. . . . Existentially, the activity of pursuing rational goals is the activity of maintaining one’s life; psychologically, its result, reward and concomitant is an emotional state of happiness. It is by experiencing happiness that one lives one’s life, in any hour, year or the whole of it” . What is not given, in the case of humans, are the goals and values, the ongoing pursuit of which figures in this passage as the maintenance of life (and the source of happiness). The sense in which human life is an achievement, according to Rand, is that we must define and choose these goals and values for ourselves. It is these goals and values that constitute one’s life or, what comes to the same thing for Rand, that constitute the self. Presumably, this process of choosing values must be somewhat under way before it can become an object of reflection. To self-consciously value life, in that respect which involves achieving it, would then be to take explicit charge of the process—to actively and explicitly deliberate about one’s values and goals." (pp.11-12)
"The activity of pursuing rational goals—that is, goals one rationally desires— not only maintains one’s life but is also the means of achieving happiness, a term that in her usage includes both fulfillment and enjoyment." (p.13)
"If one needs values just in order to ϕ, then the requirements of ϕ-ing will (Rand argues) be the proper standard of value and ϕ itself will be the proper ultimate value. It will be “proper,” however, in the sense of being that which one has to gain by pursuing values. Suppose there is some outcome, ψ, in relation to which valuing makes no difference (e.g., a certain star’s burning out over a certain period of time). Then, Rand would argue, it would be senseless and unjustified to try to select values by reference to this outcome, since the requirements for its coming to pass would imply nothing about valuing and, by hypothesis, could be satisfied even if we had no values. By contrast, if one needs values (precisely) in order to ϕ, it would make sense to select values according to ϕ, since that is just what one stands to gain (or not) depending on the values one selected and the actions one took in the service of those values. According to Rand, that gives ϕ a rational claim to be the standard of value. But, crucially, in her view it does not yet give ϕ any rational claim on one’s actions. To put this differently, Rand argues that although one’s needing values (precisely) in order to ϕ makes ϕ normative for valuing, it does not make ϕ intrinsically normative." (p.14)
"She also makes a psychological claim: the issue of selecting values could not even arise for us—we couldn’t grasp it as an issue—if we had nothing at stake in it." (p.14)
"Rand’s view is that all the values that an organism needs are needed for the sake of maintaining its life or, what comes to the same thing, for the sake of itself—its own self-preservation. The organism’s self or life thus functions as its ultimate value in relation to which other values come into view as values." (p.16)
"Members of nonhuman species need values but not moral values." (p.17)
"She wants to argue not only that we cannot flourish or be happy without morality but that, in the long term, we cannot even survive." (p.18)
"Values of character, which I take to be moral values, are at the center of this passage. We need them, the passage tells us, both to enable us to sustain our lives and to make life worth living for us." (p.18)
"Free riders, those who merely imitate or expropriate the independent thought and work of others, put their long-term survival at risk: the imitator may select the wrong models; the exploiter, in the long run, hampers and destroys those on whose support he depends. In Rand’s view, however, free riding also carries a near-term (and lasting) psychological penalty. Free riding is a loweffort substitute for developing one’s own intellectual resources—one’s own ability to think and to create the sorts of values that our lives require, whether material values like food and shelter, spiritual values like art, intellectual values such as new scientific discoveries or job efficiencies, or others. […] The free rider cannot avoid psychological suffering, a sense of helplessness, and a sense that life offers him or her nothing worth living for, according to Rand." (p.21)
"For Rand, life is the goal of morality." (p.23)
"Rand’s argument for an ultimate value moves from the premise that we face the basic alternative of existence or non-existence to the conclusion that a person’s ultimate value should be his own life. By definition, an alternative presents one with two or more possible pathways, but the mere existence of multiple pathways does not usually settle the question of which one of them an agent ought to take; on the contrary, it usually raises this question, since the question could not arise if there were only one way to go. Yet Rand seems to treat the fundamentality of her basic alternative not as raising a question about what to seek but as settling this question. The fundamentality of the basic alternative is supposed to show that one’s own life is the proper ultimate value by which to evaluate other prospective values and courses of action. In other cases where we are presented with alternatives, a further step is required: we must find a criterion for selecting among our alternatives. But in this case, it seems, we are to proceed straight from the identification of the basic alternative to a decision in favor of one side of this alternative." (p.23)
"Rand’s inference from her basic alternative to one’s life as one’s ultimate value depends on a distinctive feature of the basic alternative, in contrast with other alternatives. Like any alternative, this one presents us with a slate (in this case, a pair) of possible outcomes. In the basic alternative, however, only one of the outcomes corresponds to a value, that is, to something that is a candidate for being valued. The candidate value is one’s life. On one side of the alternative, this value is sustained; on the other side, it isn’t. But there is no second value offered on this latter side of the alternative, only the absence both of value and valuer. There’s Nothing one passes up in valuing one’s life and thus no choice among possible values to be made. There is, in Rand’s view, a choice involved in valuing one’s life; this isn’t automatic, at least not once a person reaches the stage of being able to make self-conscious value choices. But the identification of the basic alternative enables us in Rand’s view to make a judgment straight away as to the ultimate value one should hold if one values anything at all." (p.24)
"Although ethics, for Rand, is egoistic—the moral virtues are delineated by reference to the requirements of the virtuous agent’s own life — Rand is not a psychological egoist. She does not hold that we are psychologically programmed to value our lives or strive to further them, and a person who values his life to some extent may not value his life as an end or as an ultimate end. Nor, as we have seen, does Rand defend a categorical requirement either of rationality or morality to value our lives (at all or as an ultimate end). On her view, valuing one’s life (and holding it as an ultimate value) is a choice, and all reasons for action, including moral reasons, arise in relation to the choice to value one’s life (the choice to live)." (p.25)
"It should be noted that Rand does not hold the standard form of “ethical egoism,” on which the maximal furtherance of the agent’s self-interest is taken as the criterion of moral rightness. Rand would have the same objection to this view as she has to its hedonistic analogue, the view that takes happiness as a moral criterion. Her objection to the latter is that morality is needed to define the requirements of happiness, that is, to define a rational code of values whose implementation can enable a person to achieve happiness." (note 18 p.25)
"On Rand’s view of the fundamental role of morality in enabling the creation and preservation of the broad range of other values one’s life depends on, moral reasons define the space of possibilities within which further rational deliberation about action can occur and in which other kinds of practical reasons can emerge. But the choice to live itself is not subject to moral deliberation; it precedes and sets the context for moral deliberation." (p.26)
"Returning to the issues of moral obligation, the case of Taggart is instructive in another way. Rand’s attitude toward him is not neutral, as it might be if she considered the choice to live to be non-evaluable and those who do not make this choice to be free of moral obligations." (p.28)
"Though he attempts to distinguish his view from the kind of “intrinsicism” that Rand would clearly have rejected, it is difficult to see what the distinction is. On Rasmussen’s view, one’s life has directive power because it is one’s ultimate good. Certainly, on Rasmussen’s view, this good is agent-relative in the sense that it is one’s own life rather than, say, life as such, that constitutes an agent’s good. But according to Rasmussen, this good is still prescribed for one as one’s telos, independently of one’s choices, by virtue of one’s nature as a living being […] It is therefore difficult to support the ascription of this kind of position to Rand, given her clear statement that prescriptions for action arise in relation to the choice to live." (p.30)
"My interpretation does not ascribe to Rand the view that the standards by which we should evaluate values and choices are chosen by us. They must of course be identified by us, but according to Rand it is facts about reality and human nature that make it the case that certain standards are the correct ones." (p.31)
"Why should one choose the means to any of one’s ends if none of those ends has directive power independent of one’s choices ?" (p.31)
"One comes to find life choiceworthy as a result of having sought out and achieved values within it. It is thus choiceworthy—to use that terminology—qua already chosen. Similarly, one chooses to live while already engaged in that process. In each case, one is ratifying—and making conscious, consistent, and comprehensive—one’s commitment to a value or an activity that one has already to some extent embraced in a less reflective way." (p.32)
-Darryl Wright, "Reasoning about Ends. Life as a Value in Ayn Rand’s Ethics", in Allan Gotthelf and James Lennox (eds), Metaethics, Egoism and Virtue: Studies in Ayn Rand's Normative Theory, Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies, University of Pittsburg Press, 2011, 188 pages, pp.32.
"I want to consider four well-known views about the rationality of ultimate ends from which Rand’s view can be distinguished. Historically, these views are associated with Hume, Moore, Kant, and Aristotle, respectively." (p.4)
"Rand here characterizes desires as having an underlying evaluative basis: we desire what we value, and the normative judgments underlying our values can be rational or irrational. The rationality or irrationality of our values ramifies up through the chain to the desires, goals, and interests that are founded on them. It will be rational (or irrational) to desire Something as an end insofar as it is rational (or irrational) to value it as an end. The problem with Humean views, from Rand’s perspective, is that they mistakenly treat our desires for our ends as primaries—as basic psychological phenomena (“original existences” —and thus erroneously conclude that desires are subjective responses immune to rational criticism." (pp.5-6)
"Intrinsic value theories, in the sense I mean, compose a wide class. They can be metaphysically realist, positing that intrinsic values exist or subsist independently of our thinking about them. But an intrinsic value theory need not be developed as a form of value realism; in a Kantian spirit, it might instead take the form of a theory of practical reasoning in which a commitment to certain intrinsic values is held to be a constitutive feature of rational agency. Kant, for instance, took it to be constitutive of rational agency to act only on maxims expressing respect for humanity as an end in itself […] Another axis of variation among these theories concerns the putative bearers of value, which might for instance be persons, actions, maxims, states of affairs, or natural or artificial objects such as mountains or artworks. What these theories have in common is the ascription—either as a realist claim or as a practical presupposition—of a form of normative value that grounds desire-independent reasons to act on behalf of whatever bears this value. For instance, if malnutrition and the suffering it causes are intrinsically bad, and proper nourishment for people is intrinsically good, then everyone has some (not necessarily conclusive) reason to divert resources to the relief of malnutrition, whatever their desires and whatever their personal connection to those affected." (p.6)
"If something is intrinsically valuable, its realization or protection is supposed to be normative for one’s actions whether or not one benefits in any way from that thing. Similarly, intrinsic values are supposed to be normative for one’s action independently of whether they serve one’s antecedently established purposes, and their value (qua intrinsic) is supposed to be independent of their being valued. Whereas Rand faults Humean theories for neglecting the evaluative basis of desires, she faults intrinsic value theories for neglecting the teleological basis of values, that is, their basis in the goals and purposes of living organisms." (p.7)
"Rand’s overall philosophy is Aristotelian in a number of significant ways. But she says little about Aristotle’s ethics, and what she says about the foundations of his ethics is quite critical." (p.9)
"On Aristotle’s view, a rational agent makes eudaimonia or living well his ultimate end and grasps that the fundamental constitutive requirement of living well is “activity of soul in accordance with virtue” […] Virtue, in turn, is partly intellectual and partly moral or character-related. The moral virtues are states of character that involve acting with a view to, and for the sake of, what is fine. The concept of the fine is central to Aristotle’s account of practical reasoning, for without it the concept of eudaimonia would lack rich enough content to yield any specific prescriptions for action ; we would be advised to seek to live well without a conception of what living well means.
But the concept of the fine seems to run into the same kind of problems as those which Rand finds in the concept of intrinsic value. Indeed, since recognition of the fine is supposed to be a stopping point in practical deliberation, it seems natural to construe fineness as a kind of intrinsic value [...] What is fine (say, to stand firm in this battle in this way at this time; or to enjoy this form of pleasure at this time to this extent) is so in itself. Further, although the fine is connected with eudaimonia and thus with benefits to the agent who does what is fine, the direction of this connection is the reverse of what Rand thinks it should be. For Rand, properly grounded value claims make the good of the agent the standard of what is of value to that agent. But for Aristotle, we do not discover what is fine by discovering what we have to do to live well; rather, we discover what we have to do to live well by discovering what is fine, and the fine itself is (he seems to think) intrinsically normative. It is in virtue of doing what is—independently—fine that we also live well. And it is as a result of our being able to flesh out our idea of living well, via a grasp of the fine, that the formally normative notion of “living well” becomes substantively normative, that is, capable of underwriting reasons to do one specific thing rather than another (rather than just whatever it might be that living well involves)." (p.10)
"Fineness is a property of intentional human actions; when we ask what is fine, we are asking what is a fine thing for a human being to do. It is plausible to think that, for Aristotle, the answer to this depends on facts about our human nature, since doing what is fine is a form of self-actualization (the criteria for which could hardly be independent of our human nature). Thus, perhaps fine human actions are only fine when they are the actions of human beings; the fine for another species of rational beings might look quite different due to their differences from us. This makes the fineness of fine actions both less intrinsic and more seemingly dependent on a prior conception of human flourishing.
But Aristotle’s view is at least ambiguous. Insofar as the fine is supposed to be an independent, intrinsically normative input into a conceptionof living well, Rand would reject Aristotle’s concept of the “fine” as an acceptable basis for ethics or for an account of reasons for action." (p.11)
"Life as an Ultimate Value.
Rand needs to explain how reason can give us our ends without relying on (either realist or Kantian) claims of intrinsic value, and how our rational ends can ground reasons for action, including moral reasons. She encapsulates her account as follows: “Life or death is man’s only fundamental alternative. To live is his basic act of choice. If he chooses to live, a rational ethics will tell him what principles of action are required to implement his choice. If he chooses not to live, nature will take its course” […]. Her ethics thus “holds [the requirements of] man’s life as the standard of value” and that “[m]an must [i.e., should] choose his actions, values and goals” by this standard “in order to achieve, maintain, fulfill and enjoy that ultimate value, that end in itself, which is his own life” […]. This account thus gives each person a substantively different but formally identical ultimate value—his own life. Similarly, it gives each person a substantively different but formally identical ultimate end or goal—to achieve, maintain, fulfill, and enjoy his life. Rand’s formulation of the ultimate end reflects her view of the complexity involved, for human beings as against other species, in valuing our lives. Plants and animals value their lives by acting to maintain them ; this is “valuing” in an extended sense of the term, in which one values X insofar as X’s attainment or preservation is the goal of one’s action. Rand considers this sense of the term applicable to all living things whether or not their goals have the form of conscious (or self-conscious) purposes […]. The more complex formulation of the ultimate end for humans suggests that a human being’s life is not a given but must be achieved before it can be maintained. Rand’s conception of the relation between (human) life and happiness is helpful in explicating this idea: “The maintenance of life and the pursuit of happiness are not two separate issues. . . . Existentially, the activity of pursuing rational goals is the activity of maintaining one’s life; psychologically, its result, reward and concomitant is an emotional state of happiness. It is by experiencing happiness that one lives one’s life, in any hour, year or the whole of it” . What is not given, in the case of humans, are the goals and values, the ongoing pursuit of which figures in this passage as the maintenance of life (and the source of happiness). The sense in which human life is an achievement, according to Rand, is that we must define and choose these goals and values for ourselves. It is these goals and values that constitute one’s life or, what comes to the same thing for Rand, that constitute the self. Presumably, this process of choosing values must be somewhat under way before it can become an object of reflection. To self-consciously value life, in that respect which involves achieving it, would then be to take explicit charge of the process—to actively and explicitly deliberate about one’s values and goals." (pp.11-12)
"The activity of pursuing rational goals—that is, goals one rationally desires— not only maintains one’s life but is also the means of achieving happiness, a term that in her usage includes both fulfillment and enjoyment." (p.13)
"If one needs values just in order to ϕ, then the requirements of ϕ-ing will (Rand argues) be the proper standard of value and ϕ itself will be the proper ultimate value. It will be “proper,” however, in the sense of being that which one has to gain by pursuing values. Suppose there is some outcome, ψ, in relation to which valuing makes no difference (e.g., a certain star’s burning out over a certain period of time). Then, Rand would argue, it would be senseless and unjustified to try to select values by reference to this outcome, since the requirements for its coming to pass would imply nothing about valuing and, by hypothesis, could be satisfied even if we had no values. By contrast, if one needs values (precisely) in order to ϕ, it would make sense to select values according to ϕ, since that is just what one stands to gain (or not) depending on the values one selected and the actions one took in the service of those values. According to Rand, that gives ϕ a rational claim to be the standard of value. But, crucially, in her view it does not yet give ϕ any rational claim on one’s actions. To put this differently, Rand argues that although one’s needing values (precisely) in order to ϕ makes ϕ normative for valuing, it does not make ϕ intrinsically normative." (p.14)
"She also makes a psychological claim: the issue of selecting values could not even arise for us—we couldn’t grasp it as an issue—if we had nothing at stake in it." (p.14)
"Rand’s view is that all the values that an organism needs are needed for the sake of maintaining its life or, what comes to the same thing, for the sake of itself—its own self-preservation. The organism’s self or life thus functions as its ultimate value in relation to which other values come into view as values." (p.16)
"Members of nonhuman species need values but not moral values." (p.17)
"She wants to argue not only that we cannot flourish or be happy without morality but that, in the long term, we cannot even survive." (p.18)
"Values of character, which I take to be moral values, are at the center of this passage. We need them, the passage tells us, both to enable us to sustain our lives and to make life worth living for us." (p.18)
"Free riders, those who merely imitate or expropriate the independent thought and work of others, put their long-term survival at risk: the imitator may select the wrong models; the exploiter, in the long run, hampers and destroys those on whose support he depends. In Rand’s view, however, free riding also carries a near-term (and lasting) psychological penalty. Free riding is a loweffort substitute for developing one’s own intellectual resources—one’s own ability to think and to create the sorts of values that our lives require, whether material values like food and shelter, spiritual values like art, intellectual values such as new scientific discoveries or job efficiencies, or others. […] The free rider cannot avoid psychological suffering, a sense of helplessness, and a sense that life offers him or her nothing worth living for, according to Rand." (p.21)
"For Rand, life is the goal of morality." (p.23)
"Rand’s argument for an ultimate value moves from the premise that we face the basic alternative of existence or non-existence to the conclusion that a person’s ultimate value should be his own life. By definition, an alternative presents one with two or more possible pathways, but the mere existence of multiple pathways does not usually settle the question of which one of them an agent ought to take; on the contrary, it usually raises this question, since the question could not arise if there were only one way to go. Yet Rand seems to treat the fundamentality of her basic alternative not as raising a question about what to seek but as settling this question. The fundamentality of the basic alternative is supposed to show that one’s own life is the proper ultimate value by which to evaluate other prospective values and courses of action. In other cases where we are presented with alternatives, a further step is required: we must find a criterion for selecting among our alternatives. But in this case, it seems, we are to proceed straight from the identification of the basic alternative to a decision in favor of one side of this alternative." (p.23)
"Rand’s inference from her basic alternative to one’s life as one’s ultimate value depends on a distinctive feature of the basic alternative, in contrast with other alternatives. Like any alternative, this one presents us with a slate (in this case, a pair) of possible outcomes. In the basic alternative, however, only one of the outcomes corresponds to a value, that is, to something that is a candidate for being valued. The candidate value is one’s life. On one side of the alternative, this value is sustained; on the other side, it isn’t. But there is no second value offered on this latter side of the alternative, only the absence both of value and valuer. There’s Nothing one passes up in valuing one’s life and thus no choice among possible values to be made. There is, in Rand’s view, a choice involved in valuing one’s life; this isn’t automatic, at least not once a person reaches the stage of being able to make self-conscious value choices. But the identification of the basic alternative enables us in Rand’s view to make a judgment straight away as to the ultimate value one should hold if one values anything at all." (p.24)
"Although ethics, for Rand, is egoistic—the moral virtues are delineated by reference to the requirements of the virtuous agent’s own life — Rand is not a psychological egoist. She does not hold that we are psychologically programmed to value our lives or strive to further them, and a person who values his life to some extent may not value his life as an end or as an ultimate end. Nor, as we have seen, does Rand defend a categorical requirement either of rationality or morality to value our lives (at all or as an ultimate end). On her view, valuing one’s life (and holding it as an ultimate value) is a choice, and all reasons for action, including moral reasons, arise in relation to the choice to value one’s life (the choice to live)." (p.25)
"It should be noted that Rand does not hold the standard form of “ethical egoism,” on which the maximal furtherance of the agent’s self-interest is taken as the criterion of moral rightness. Rand would have the same objection to this view as she has to its hedonistic analogue, the view that takes happiness as a moral criterion. Her objection to the latter is that morality is needed to define the requirements of happiness, that is, to define a rational code of values whose implementation can enable a person to achieve happiness." (note 18 p.25)
"On Rand’s view of the fundamental role of morality in enabling the creation and preservation of the broad range of other values one’s life depends on, moral reasons define the space of possibilities within which further rational deliberation about action can occur and in which other kinds of practical reasons can emerge. But the choice to live itself is not subject to moral deliberation; it precedes and sets the context for moral deliberation." (p.26)
"Returning to the issues of moral obligation, the case of Taggart is instructive in another way. Rand’s attitude toward him is not neutral, as it might be if she considered the choice to live to be non-evaluable and those who do not make this choice to be free of moral obligations." (p.28)
"Though he attempts to distinguish his view from the kind of “intrinsicism” that Rand would clearly have rejected, it is difficult to see what the distinction is. On Rasmussen’s view, one’s life has directive power because it is one’s ultimate good. Certainly, on Rasmussen’s view, this good is agent-relative in the sense that it is one’s own life rather than, say, life as such, that constitutes an agent’s good. But according to Rasmussen, this good is still prescribed for one as one’s telos, independently of one’s choices, by virtue of one’s nature as a living being […] It is therefore difficult to support the ascription of this kind of position to Rand, given her clear statement that prescriptions for action arise in relation to the choice to live." (p.30)
"My interpretation does not ascribe to Rand the view that the standards by which we should evaluate values and choices are chosen by us. They must of course be identified by us, but according to Rand it is facts about reality and human nature that make it the case that certain standards are the correct ones." (p.31)
"Why should one choose the means to any of one’s ends if none of those ends has directive power independent of one’s choices ?" (p.31)
"One comes to find life choiceworthy as a result of having sought out and achieved values within it. It is thus choiceworthy—to use that terminology—qua already chosen. Similarly, one chooses to live while already engaged in that process. In each case, one is ratifying—and making conscious, consistent, and comprehensive—one’s commitment to a value or an activity that one has already to some extent embraced in a less reflective way." (p.32)
-Darryl Wright, "Reasoning about Ends. Life as a Value in Ayn Rand’s Ethics", in Allan Gotthelf and James Lennox (eds), Metaethics, Egoism and Virtue: Studies in Ayn Rand's Normative Theory, Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies, University of Pittsburg Press, 2011, 188 pages, pp.32.
