By Simon Grey, on March 31st, 2011
As far as I can tell, we are left exactly where we were after that first essay. No altruism to be found. If you made a “sacrifice” it was, by direct virtue of your action, “worth it to you” (at the time of the action) or you would not have taken that action. It is really just that simple. (By the way, this does nothing the render the action more, or less noble, whichever the case may be in the eyes of an observer.) As a fellow anarchist buddy of mine puts it, “altruism is praxeologically impossible.” Agreed, still.
The basic argument is that the only way one would make a “sacrifice” is if one valued the results of one’s sacrifice to worth more than the costs of the sacrifice. More simply, altruism doesn’t exist because people only act if they believe they will profit. This is simply tautological reductionism based on Misesian rationality.
But this begs a question for Christians: If that which is considered altruistic is actually greed, then what is the spiritual value of giving?
Accepting the definitional impossibility of altruism, I would argue that giving still has spiritual value in that it still teaches sacrifice. Some people make sacrifices in order to afford nice cars; Christians make sacrifices in order to help others. And even if one truly does want to help another person, it doesn’t change the fact that there are opportunity costs, so there is always sacrifice in that sense as well.
Furthermore, there is virtue in in training one’s mind to value helping others over satisfying one’s personal desires. Even if helping others is inherently selfish, as the Austrian school of economics would define it, it is still virtuous to train one’s mind to desire to help others.
Thus, as a Christian who subscribes to Austrian economic analysis, I have little worries about the inherent spirituality of this tautological trick. Even if I am being self-interested by helping others, it doesn’t change the fact that a) I am helping others and b) doing so willingly. That’s what God demands of me, and that’s what I’m going to do.
By Winton Bates, on December 16th, 2009
People who are familiar with Ayn Rand’s writings may consider the answer to this question to be obvious. Rand made no secret of the fact that she regarded selfishness as a virtue. So, why ask the question?
Having recently read “Atlas Shrugged” properly for the first time (rather than skimming through it) the heroes, including John Galt, Hank Rearden and Dagny Taggart, did not seem to me to be selfish. By the end of the book they had chosen not to live their lives for the sake of others and not to ask others to live for their sake. But this did not make them selfish in the sense of being deficient in consideration for others. Hank Rearden left his mother without means of support when he went off to start a new life, but it would be difficult for anyone who was aware of the way she repaid the kindness he showed her to argue that he had acted selfishly towards her.
Rand’s view that selfishness is a virtue follows from a narrow definition of selfishness as “concern with one’s own interests” and of individual happiness as the moral purpose of life. In the words of John Galt: “Happiness is the state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values” (p 1014).
Galt explains: “Happiness is not to be achieved at the command of emotional whims. Happiness is not the satisfaction of whatever irrational wishes you might blindly attempt to indulge. Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy – a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but of using your minds fullest power, not the joy of faking reality, but of achieving values that are real, not the joy of a drunkard, but of a producer” (p 1022).
Rand’s narrow definition of selfishness enabled John Galt to say: “This much is true: the most selfish of all things is the independent mind that recognizes no authority higher than its own and no value higher than its judgement of truth” (p 1030).
Why did Ayn Rand adopt a narrow definition of selfishness? She could have avoided a lot of confusion by using another term, e.g. “ethical egoism”, to describe the virtuous concern for one’s own interests and accepting the popular usage of selfishness to describe unethical behaviour that involves pursuing one’s own interests at the expense of others. I suspect that Rand adopted a narrow definition of selfishness because she wanted to draw attention to her opposition to the view that self sacrifice is a virtue.
The view that self sacrifice is a virtue was clearly one of Rand’s main targets. In John Galt’s words: “If you wish to save the last of your dignity, do not call your best actions a ‘sacrifice’: that term brands you as immoral. If a mother buys food for her hungry child rather than a hat for herself, it is not a sacrifice: she values the child higher than the hat; but it is a sacrifice to the kind of mother whose higher value is the hat, who would prefer her child to starve and feeds him only from a sense of duty” (p 1029).
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