Objective Ethics

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TO ALL READERS,

I want to share something to peruse, study and give comments.


To challendge the basic premise, of any discipline, one must begin at the beginning, In ethics, one must begin by asking: WHAT ARE VALUES? Why does man need them?

"Value" is that which one acts to gain and/or keep. The concept "value" is not primary; it presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what? It presupposes an entity capable of acting to achieve a goal in face of an alternative. Where no alternative exist, no goals and no values are possible.

"There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or nonexistence--and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms. The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not: it depends on a specific course of action. Matter is indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to exist. It is only a living organism that faces a constant alternative: the issue of life or death. LIFE is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated actions. If an organism fails in that action, it dies; its chemical elemens remain, but its life goes out existence. It is only the concept of 'Life' that makes the concept of 'Value' possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.

Only a living entity can have goals or can originate them. And it is only a living organism that has the capacity for self-generated, goal-directed action. On the physical level, the functions of all living organisms, from the simplest to the most complex--from the nutritive function in the single cell of an amoeba to the blood circulation in the body of a man--are actions generated by the organism itself and directed to a single goal: the maintenance of the organism's life.

An organism's life depends on two factors: the material or fuel which it needs from the outside, from its physical background, and the action of its own body, the action of using that fuel properly. What standard determines what is proper in this context? The standard is the organism's life, or: that which is required for the organism's survival.

No choice is open to an organism in this issue: that which is required for its survival is determined by its nature, by the kind of entity it is. Many variations, many forms of adaptation to its background are possible to an organism, inlcuding the possibility of existing for a while in a crippled, disabled or diseased condition, but the fundamental alternative of its existence remains the same: if an organism fails in the basic functions required by its nature--if an amoeba's protoplasm stops assimilating food, or if a man's heart stops beating--the organism dies. In a fundamental sense, stillness is the antithesis of life. Life can be kept in existence only by constant process of self-sustaining action. The goal of that action, the ultimate value which, to be kept, must be gained through its every moment, is the organism's life.

Without an ultimate goal or end, there can be no lesser goals or means; a series of means going off into an infinite prgression toward a nonexistent end is a metaphysical and epistemological impossibility. It is only an ultimate goal, an end in itself, that makes the existence of values possible. Metaphysically, life is the only phenomenon that is an end in itself: a value gained and kept by a constant process of action. Epistemologically, the concept of "value" is genetically dependent upon and derived from the antecedent concept of "lfie." To speak of "value" as apart of "life" is worse than a contradiction in terms. "It is only the concept of 'Life' that makes the concept of 'Value' possible.

In answer to those who claim that no relation can be established between ultimate ends or values and the facts of reality, let me stress that the fact that living entities exist and function necessitate the existence of values and of an ultimate value which for any given living entity is its own life. Thus the validation of value judgement is to be achieved by reference to the facts of reality. The fact that a living entity is, determines what it ought to do.

Now in wlhat manner does a human being discover the concept of "value"? By what means does he first become aware of the issue of "good or evil" in its simplest form? By means of the physical sensation of pleasure or pain. Just as sensations are the first step of the development of a human consciousness in the realm of cognition, so they are its first step in the realm of evaluation.

The capacity to experience pleasure or pain is innate in a man's body; it is part of his nature, part of the kind of entity he is. He has no choice about it, and he has no choice about the standard taht determines what will make him experience the physical sensation of pleasure or of pain. What is the standard? His life.

The pleasure-pain mechanism in the body of man--and in the bodies of all the living organisms that possess the faculty of consciousness--serves as an automatic guardian of the organism's life. The physical sensation of pleasure is a signal indicating that the organism is pursuing the right course of action. The physical sensation of pain is a warning signal of danger, indicating that the organism is pursuing the wrong course of action, that something is impairing the proper functions of its body, which requires action to correct it.

Consciousness--for those living organisms which possess it--is the basic means of survival.

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Continuation:

The simpler organisms, such as plants, can survive by means of their automatic physical functions. The higher organisms, such as animals and man, cannot: their needs are more complex and the range of their actions is wider. The physical functions of their bodies can perform automatically only the task of using fuel, but cannot obtain that fuel. To obtain it, the higher organisms need the faculty of consciousness. A plant canobtainits food from the soil in which it grows. An animal has to hunt for it. Man has to produce it.

A plant has no choice of action; the goals it pursues are automatic an innate, determined byits nataure. Nourishment, water, sunlight are the values its nature has set it to seek. Its life is the standard of value directing its actions. There are alternatives in the conditions it encounters in its physical backgroun--such as heat or frost, drought or flood-- and there are certain actions which it is able to perform to combat adverse conditions, such as the ability of some plants to grow and crawl from under a rock to reach the sunlight. But whatever the conditions, there is no alternative in a plant's function: it acts automatically to further its life, it cannot act for its own destruction.

The range of actions required for the survival of the higher organisms is wider: it is proportionate to the range of their consciousness. The lower of the conscious species possess only the faculty of sensation, which is sufficient to direct their actions and provide for their needs. A sensation is produced by the automatic reaction of a sense organ to a stimulus from the outside world; it lasts for the duration of the immediate moment, as long as the stimulus lasts and no longer. Sensations are an automatic response, an automatic form of knowledge, which a consciousness can neither seek or evade. An organism that possesses only the faculty of sensation isguided by the pleasure-pain mechanism of the body, that is: by an automatic knowledge and an automatic code of values. Its life is the standard of value directing its actions. Within the range of action possible to it, it acts automatically to further its life and cannot act for its own destruction.

The higher organisms possess a much more potent from of consciousness: they possess the faculty of retaining sensations, which is the faculty of perception. A "perception" is a group of sensations automatically retained and integrated by the brain of a living organism, which gives it the ability to be aware, not of single stimuli, but of entities, of things. An animals is guided, not merely by immediate sensations but by percepts. Its actions are not single, discrete responses to a single, separate stimuli, but are directed by an integrated awareness of the perceptual reality confronting it. It is able to grasp the perceptual concretesimmediately present and it is able to form automatic perceptual associations, but it can go no further. It is able to learn certain skills to deal with specific situations, such as hunting or hiding, which the parents of the higher animals teach their youngs. But an animal has no choice in the knowledge and the skills that it acquires; it can only repeat them generation after generation. And an animal has no choice in the standard of value directing its actions: its senses provide it with an automatic code of values, an automatic knowledge of whta is good for it or evil, what benefits or endangers its life. An animal has o power to extend its knowledge or to evade it. In situations for which its knowledge is inadequate, it perishes--as, for instance, an animal that stands paralyzed on the track of a railroad in the path of a speeding train. But so long as it lives, an animal acts on its knowledge, with automatic safety and no power of choice; it cannot suspent its own consciousness--it cannot choose not to perceive--it cannot evade its own perceptions--it cannot ignore its own good, it cannot decide to choose the evil and act as its own destroyer.

Man has no automantic code survival. He has no automatic course of action, no automatic set of values. His senses do not tell him automatically what is good for him or evil, what will benefit his life or endanger it, what goals he should pursue and what means will achieve them, what values his life depends on, what course of action it requires. His own consciousness has to discover the answer to all these questions--but his consciousness will not function automatically. Man, the highest living species on this earth--the being whose consciousness has a limitless capacity for gaining knowledge--man is the only living entity born without any guarantee of remaining conscious at all. Man's particular distinction from all other living species is the fact that his consciousness is volitional.

Just as the automatic values directing the functions of a plant's body are sufficient for its survival, but are not sufficient for an animal's--so the automatic values provided by the sensory-perceptual mechanism of its consciousness are sufficient to guide an animal, but are not sufficient for man. Man's actions and survival rdquire the guidance of conceptual values derived from conceptual knowledge. But conceptual knowledge cannot be acquired automatically.

A "concept" is a mental integration of two or more perceptual concretes, which are isolated by a process of abstraction and united by means of a specific definition. Every word of man's language, with the exception of proper names, denotes a concept, an abstraction that stands for an unlimited number of concepts of a specific kind. It is by organizing his perceptual material into concepts, and his concepts into wider and still wider concepts that man is able to grasp and retain, to identify and integrate an unlimited amount of knowledge, a knowledge extending beyond the immediate perceptions of any given, immediate moment. Man's sense organs functions automatically; man's brain integrates his sense data into percepts automatically; but the process of integrating percepts into concepts--the process of abstraction and of concept-formation--is not automatic.

The process of concept-formation does not consist merely of garasping a few simple abstractions, such as "chair," "table,", "hot," "cold," and of learning to speak. It consist of a method using one's consciousness, best designated by the term "conceptualizing." It is not a passive state of registering random impressions. It is an actively sustained process of indentifying one's impressions in conceptual terms, of integrating every event and every observation into a conceptual context, of grasping relationship, differences, similarities in one's perceptual material and of abstracting them into new concepts, of drawing inferences, of making deductions, of reaching conclusions, of asking new questions and discovering new answers and expanding one's knowledge into an ever-growing sum. The faculty that directs this process, the faculty that works by means of concepts, is: REASON. The process is thinking.

Reason is the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man's senses. it is a faculty that man has to exercise by choice. Thinking is not an automatic function. In any hour and issue of his life, man is free to think or to evade that effort. Thinking requires a state full, focused awareness. The act of focusing one's consciousness is volitional. Man can focus his mind to a full, active, purposefully directed awareness of reality--or he can unfocus it and let himself drift in a semiconscious daze, merely reacting to any chance stimulus of the immediate moment, at the mercy of his undirected sensory-perceptual mechanism and of any random, associational connections it migh happen to make.

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When man unfocuses his mind, he may be said to be conscious in a subhuman sense of the word, since he experiences sensations and perceptions. But in the sense of the word applicable to man---in the sense of a consciousness which is aware of reality and able to deal with it, a conscousness able to direct the actions and provide for the survival of a human beinf---an unfocused mind is not conscious.

Psychologically, the choice "tothink or not" is the choice "to focus or not." Existentially, the choice "to focus or not" is the choice "to be conscious or not." Metaphysically, the choice "to be conscious or not" is the choice of life or death.

Consciousness---for those living organisms which possess it---is the basic means of survival. For men, the basic means of survival is reason. Man cannot survive, as animals do, by the guidance of mere percepts. A sensation of hunger will tell him that he needs food (if he has learned to idnetify it as "hunger"), but it will not tell him how to obtain his food and it will not tell him what food is good for him or poisonous. He cannot provide for his simplest physical nees without a process of thought. He needs a process of thought to discover how to plant and gros his food or how to make weapons for hunting. His percepts might lead him to a cave, if one is available---but to build the simplest shelter, he needs a process of thought. No percepts and no "instinct" will tell him how to light a fire, how to weave cloth, how to forge tools, how to make a wheel, how to make an airplane, how to perform an appendectomy, how to prodluce an electronic tube or a cyclotron or a box of matches. Yet his life depends on lsuch knowledge---and only a volitional act of his consciousness, a process of thought, can provide it.

But man's responsibility poes still further: a process of thought is not automatic nor "instinctive" nor involuntary--nor infallible. Man has to initiate it, to sustain it and to bear responsibility for "its results". He has to discover how totell what is true or false and how to correct his own errors; he has to discover how to validate his concepts, his conclusions, his knowledge; he has to discover the rules of thought, the laws of logic, to direct his thinking. Nature gives him no automatic guarantee of the efficiency of his mental effort.

Nothing is given to man on earth except a potential and the material on which to actualize it. The potential is a superlative machine: his consciousness; but it is a machine without a spark plug, the self-starter and the driver; he has to discover how to use it and he has to keep it in constant action. The material is the whole of the universe, with no limits set to the knowledge he can acquire and to the enjoyment of life he can achieve. But everything he needs or desires has to be learned, discovered and produced by him---by his own choice, by his own effort, by his own mind.

A being who does not know automatically what is true or false, cannot know automatically what is right or wrong, what is good for him or evil. Yet he needs that knowledge in order to live. He is not exempt from the laws of reality, he is a specific organism of a specific nature that requires specific actions to sustain his life. He cannot achieve his survival by arbitrary means nor by random motions nor by blind urges nor by chance nor by whim. That which his survival requires is set by his nature and is not open to his choice. Wha is open to his choice is only whether he will discover it or not, whether he will choose the right goals and values or not. He is free to make the wrong choice, but not free to suceed with it. He is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see. Knowledge, for any conscious organism, is the means of survival; to a living consciousness, every "is" implies an "ought". Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer---and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.

What, then, are the right goals for man to pursue? What are the values his survival requires? That is the question to be answered by the science of ethics. And this is why man needs a code of ethics.

Now you can assess the meaning of the doctrines which tell you that ethics is the province of the irrrational, that reason cannot guide man's life, that his goals and values should be chosen by vote or by whim---that ethics has nothing to do with reality, with existence, with one's practical actions and concerns---or that the goals of ethics is beyond the grave, that the dead need ethics, not the living.

Ethics is not a mystic fantasy---nor a social convention---nor a dispensable, subjective luxury, to be switched or discarded in any emergency. Ethics is an objective, metaphysical necessity of man's survival---not by the grace of the supernatural not of your neighbors nor of your wlhims, but by the grace of reality and the nature of life.

Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice---and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animals. Man has to be man--by choice; he has to hold his life as a value--by choice; he has to learn to sustain it--by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues--by choice. A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.

The standard of value of the Objectivist Ethics--the standard by which one judges what is good or evil---is man's life, or: that which is required for man's survival qua man.

Since reason is man's basic means of survival, that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; that which negates, opposes or destroys it is the evil.

Since everything man needs has to be discovered by his own mind and produced by his own effort, the two essentials of the method of survival proper to a rational being are: THINKING AND PRODUCTIVE WORK.

If some men do not choose to think, but survive by imitating and repeating, life trained animals, the routine of sounds and motions they learned from others, never making an effort to understand their own work, it still remains true that their survival is made possible possible only by those who did choose to think and to discover the motions they are repeating. The survival of such mental parasites depends on blind chance; their unfocused minds are unable to know whom to imitate, whose motions it is safe to follow. They are themen who march into the abys, trailing after any destroyer who promises them to assume the responsibility they evade: the responsibility of being conscious.

If some men attempt to survive by means of brute force or fraud, by looting, robbing, cheating or enslaving the men who produce, it still remains true that their survival is made possible only by their victims, only by the men who choose to think and to produce the goods which they, the looters, are seizing. Such looters are parasites incapable of survival, who exist by destroying those who are capable, those who are pursuing a course of action proper to man.

The men who attempt to survive, not lby means of reason, but by means of force, are attempting to survive by the method of animals. But just as animals would not be able to survive by attempting the method of plants, by rejecting locomotion and waiting for the soil to feed them--so men cannot survive by attempting the method of animals, by rejecting reason and counting on productive men to serve as their prey. Such looters may achieve their goals for the range of a moment, at the price of destruction: the destruction of their victims and their own. As evidence, I offer you any criminal or any dictatorship.

Man cannot survive, like an animals, by acting on the range of the moment. An animal's life consist of a series of separate cycles, repeated over and over again, such as the cycle of breeding its young, or of storing food for the winter; an animal's consciusness cannot integrate its entire lifespan; it can carry just so far, then the animals has to begin the cycle all over again, with no connection to the past. Man's life is a continuous whole: for good or evil, every day, year and decade of his life holds the sum of all the days behind him. He can alter his choices, he is free to change the direction of his course, he is even free in many cases, to atone for the consequences of his past---but he is not free to escape thellm, nor to live his life with impunity on the range of the moment, like an animal, playboy, or a thug. If he is to succeed at the task of survival, if his actions are not to be aimed at his own destruction, man has to choose his course, his goals, his values in the context and terms of a lifetime. No sensations, percepts, urges or "instinct" can do it; only a mind can.

Such is the meaning of the definition: that which is required for man's survival qua man. It does not mean the momentary or a merely physical survival. It does not mean the momentary physical survival of a mindless brute, waiting for another brute to crush his skull. It does not mean the momentary physical survival of a crawling aggregate of muscles who is willing to accept any terms, obey any thug and surrender any values, for the sake of what is known as "survival at any price," which may or may not last a week or a year. "Man's survival qua man" means the terms, method, conditions and goals required for the survival of a rational being through the whole of his lifespan---in all those aspects of existence whic are open to his choice.

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Man cannot survive as anything but man. He can abandon his means of survival, his mind, he can turn himself into a subhuman creature and he can turn his life into a brief span of agony--just as his body can exist for a while in the process of disintegration by disease. But he cannot succeed, as a subhuman, in achieving anthing but the subhuman--as the ugly horror of the antirational periods of mankind's history can demonstrate. Man has to be man by choice---and it is the task of ethics to teach him how to live like a man.

The objectivist ethics holds man's life as the standard of value---and his own life as the ethical purpose of every individual man.

The difference between "standard" and "purpose" in this context is as follows: a "standard" is an abstract principle that serves as a measurement or gauge to guide a man's choices in the achievement of a concrete, specific purpose. "That which is required for the survival of man qua man" is an abstract principle that applies to every individual man. The task of applying this principle to a concrete, specific purpose---the purpose of living a life proper to a rational being---belongs to every individual man, and the life he has to live is his own.

Man choose his actions, his values and goals by the standard of that which is proper to man---in order to achieve, maintain, fulfill and enjoy that ultimate value, that end in itself, which is his own life.

Value is taht which one acts to gain and/or keep---virtue is the act by which one gains and/or keeps it. The three cardinal values of the Objectivist ethics--the three values which, together, are the means to and the realization of one's ultimate value, one's own life---are: REASON, PURPOSE, SELF-ESTEEM, with their three corresponding virtues: Rationality, Productivity, Pride.

Productive work is the central purpose of a rational man's life, the central value that integrates and determines the hierarchy of all his other values. Reason is the source, the precondition of his productive work--pride is the result.

Rationality is man's basic virtue, the source of all his other virtues. Man's basic vice, the source of all his evils, is the act of unfocusing his mind, lthe suspension of his consciousness, which is not blindness, but the refusal to see, not ignorance, but the refusal to know. Irrationality is the rejection of man's means of survival and, therefore, a commitment to a course of blind destruction; that which is anti-mind, is anti-life.

The virtue of Rationality means the recognition and acceptance of reason as one's only source of knowledge, one's only judge of values and one's only guide to action. It means one's total commitment to a state of full, conscious awareness, to the maintenance of a full mental focus in all issues, in all choices, in all of one's waking hours. It means a commitment to the fullest perception of reality within one's power and to the constant, active expansion of one's perception, i.e., of one's knowledge. It means a commitment to the reality of one's own existence, i.e., to the principle that all of one's goals, values and actions take place in reality and, therefore, that one must never place any value or consideration whatsoever above one's perception of reality. It means a commitment to the principle that all of one's convictions, values, goals, desires and actions must be based on, derived from, chosen and validated by a process of though---as precise and scrupulous a process of thought, directed by as ruthlessly strict an application of logic, as one's fullest capacity permits. It means one's acceptance of the responsibility of forming one's own judgements and of living by the work of one's own mind (which is the virtue of Independence0. It means that one must never sacrifice one's convictions to the opinions or wishes of others (which is the virtue of Integrity)---that one must never attempt to fake reality in any manner (which is the virtue of honesty)---that one must never seek or garant the unearned and undeserved, neither in matter no in spirit (which is the virtue of Justice). It means that one must never desire effects without causes, and that one must never enact a cause without assuming full responsibility for its effects---that one must never act life a zombie, i.e., without knowing one's own purposes and motives---that one must never make any decisions, form any convictions or seek any values out of context, i.e., apart from or against the total, integrated sum of one's knowledge---and, above all, that one must never seek to get away with contradictions, It means the rejection of any form of mysticism, i.e., any claim to some nonsensory, nonrational, nondefinable, supernatural source of knowledge. It means a commitment to reason, not in sporadic fits or con selected issues or in special emergencies, but as a permanent way of life.

The virtue of Productiveness is the recognition of the fact that productive work is the process by which man's mind sustains his life, the process that sets man free of the necessity to adjust himself to his background, as all animals do, and gives him the power to adjust his background to himself. Productive work is the road of man's unlimited achievement and calls upon the highest attributes of his character: his creative ability, his ambitiousness, his sefl-assertiveness, his refusal to bear uncongested disasters, his dedication to the goal of reshaping the earth in the image of his values. "Productive work" does not mean the unfocused performance of the motions of some job. It means the consciously chosen pursuit of a productive career, in any line of rational endeavor, great or modest, on any level of ability. It is not the degree of a man's ability nor the scale of his work that is ethically relevant here, but the fullest and most purposeful use of his mind.

The virtue of Pride is the recognition of the fact "that as man must produce the physical values he needs to sustain his life, so he must acquire the values of character that make his life worth sustaining--that as man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul". The virute of Pride can best be described by the term: "moral ambitiousness." It means that one must earn the right to hold oneself as one's own highest value by achieving one's own moral perfection--which one achieve by never accepting any code of irrational virtues impossible to practice and by never failing to practice the virtues one knows to be rational--by never accepting an unearned guilt and never earning any, or, if one has earned it, never leaving it uncorrected--by never resigning oneself passively to any flaws in one's character---by never placing any concern, wish, fear, or mood of the moment above the reality of one's own self-esteem. And, above all, it means one's rejection of the role of a sacrificial animal, the rejection of any doctrine that preaches self-immolation as a moral virtue or duty.

The basic social principle of the Objectivist ethics is that just a life is an end in itself, so every living human being is an end in himself, not the means to the ends or welfare of others---and therefore, that man must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. To live for his own sake means that the achievement of his own happiness is man's highest moral purpose.

In psychological terms, the issue of man's survival does not confront his conscousness as an issue of "life or death," but as an issue of "happiness or suffering." Happiness is the successful state of life, suffering is the warning signal of failure, of death. Just as the pleasure-pain mechanism of man's body is an automatic indicator of his body's welfare or injury, a barometer of its basic alternative, life or death---so the emotional mechanism of man's consciousness is geared to perform the same function, as a barometer that registers the same alternative by means of two basic emotions: joy or suffering. Emotions are the automatic results of man's value judgments integrated by his subconscious; emotions are estimates of that which furthers man's values or threaten the,\m, that which is for him or against him---lightning calculators giving him the sum of his profit or loss.

But while the standard of value operating the physical pleasure-pain mechanism of man's body is automatic and innate, determined by the nature of his body--the standard of value operating his emotional mechanism, is not. Since man has no automatic knowledge, he can have no automatic values; since he has no innate ideas, he can have no innate value judgements.

Man is born with an emotional mechanism, just as he is born with a cognitive mechanism; but, at birth, both are "tabula rasa." It is man's cognitive faculty, his mind, that determines the CONTENT of both. Man's emotional mechanism is like an electronic computer, which his mind has to program---and the programming consist of the values his mind chooses.

But since the work of man's mind is not automatic, his values, like all his premises, are the product either of his thinking or of his evasions: man chooses his values by a conscious process of thought---or accepts them by default, by subconscious associations on faith, on someone's authority, by some form of social osmosis or blind imitation. Emotions are produced by man's premises, held consciously or subconsciously, explicitly or implicitly.

Man has no choice about his capacity to feel that something is good for him or evil, but what he will consider good or evil, what will give him joy or pain, what he will love or hate, desire or fear, depends on his standard of values. If he chooses irrational values, he switches his emotional mechanism from the role of his guardian to the role of his destroyers. The irrational is the impossible; it is that which contradicts the facts of reality; facts cannot be altered by a wish, but they can destry the wisher. If a man desire and pursues contradictions---if he wants his cake and eat it, too---he disintegrates his consciousness; he turns his inner life into a civil war of blind forces engaged in dark, incoherent, pointless, meaningless conflicts (ehich, incidentally, is the inner state of most people today.)

Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's value. If a man values productive work, his happiness is the measure of his success in the service of his life. But if a man values destruction, like sadist--or self-torture, like a masochist--or life beyond the grave, like a mystic---or mindless "kicks", like the driver of a hotrod car---his alleged happiness is the mesure of his success in the service of his own destruction. It must be added that the emotional state of all those irrationalists cannot be properly designated as happiness or even as pleasure: it is merely a moments's relief from their chronic state of terror.

Neither life nor happiness can be achieve by the pursuit of irrational whims. Just as man is free to attemp to survive by any random means, as a parasite, a moocher or a looter, but not free to succeed at it beyond the range of the moment---so he is free to seek his happiness in any irrational fraud, any whim, any delusion, any mindless escape from reality, but not free to succeed at it beyond the range of the moment nor to escape the consequences.

"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...Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but ratioanl values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions." -from Atlas Shrugged.

The maintenance of life and the pursuit of happiness are not two separate issues. To hold one's own life as one's ultimate value, and one's own happiness as one's highest purpose are two aspects of the same achievement. 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 taht one lives one's life, in any hour, year or the whole of it. And when one experiences the kind of pure happiness that is an end in itself---the kind that makes one think: "This is worth living for"--what one is greeting and affirming in emotional terms is the metaphysical fact that life is an end in itself.

But the relationship of cause to effect cannot be reversed. It is only by accepting "man's life" as one's primary and by pursuing the rational values it requires that one can achieve happiness---not by taking "happiness" as some undefined, irreducible primary and then attempting to live by its guidance. If you achieve that which is the good by a rational standard of value, it will necessarily make you happy; but that which makes you happy, by some undefined emotional standard of value, is not necessarily the good. To trake "whatever makes one happy" as a guide to action means: to be guided by nothing but one's emotional whims. Emotions are not tool of cognition; to be guided by whims--by desires whose source, nature and meaning one does not know---is to turn oneself into a blind robot, operated by unknowable demons (by one's stale evasions), a robot knocking its stagnant brains out against the walls of reality which it refuses to see.

This is the fallacy inherent in hedonism--in ayn variant of etical hedonism, personal or social, individual or collective. "Happiness" can properly be the purpose of ethics, but not the standard. The task of ethics is to define man's proper code values and thus to give him the means of achieving happiness. To declare, as the ethical hedonists od, that "the proper value is whatever gives you pleasure" is to declare that "the proper value is whatever you happen to value"---which is an act of intellectual and philosophical abdication, an act which merely proclaims the futility of ethics and invites all men to play it deuces wild.

The philosophers who attempted to devise an allegedly rational code of ethics gave mankind nothing but a choice of whims; the "selfish" pursuit of one's own whims (such as the ethics of Nietzche)---or "selfless" service to the whims of others (such as the ethics of Bentham, Mill, Comte and of all social hedonists, whether they allowed man to include his own whims among the millions of others or advised him to turn himself into a totally selfless "shmoo" that seeks to be eaten by others.

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When a "desire," regardless of its natures or cause, is taken as an ethical primary, and the gratification of any and all desires is taken as an ethical goal (such as the "the greatest happiness of the greatest number")---men have no choice but to hate, fear and fight one another, because their desires and their interests, will necessarily clash. If "desire" is the ethical standard, then one man's desire to produce and another man's desire to rob him ahve equal ethical validity; one man's desire to be free and another man's desire to enslave him have equal ethical validity; one man's desire to be loved and admired for his virtue and another man's desire for undeserved love and unearned admiration have equal ethical validity. And if the frustration of any desire constitute a sacrifice, then a man who owns an automobile and is robbed of it, is being sacrificed, but so is the man who wants or "aspires to" an automobile which the owner refuses to given him---and these two "sacrifice" have equal ethical status. If so, then man's only choice is to rob or be robbed, to destroy or be destroyed, to sacrifice others ot any desires of his own or to sacrifice himself to any desire of others; then man's only ethical alternative is to be a sadist or masochist.

The moral cannibalism of all hedonist and altruist doctrines lies in the premise that the happiness of one man necessitate the injury of another.

Today, most people hold this premis as an absolute not to be questioned. And when one speaks of man's right to exist for his own sake, for his own rational self-interest, most people assume automatically that this means his right to sacrifice others. such an assumptions is a confession of their own belief that to injure, enslave, rob or murder others is in man's self-interest--which he must selflessly renounce. The idea that man's self-interest can be served only by a nonsacrificial relationship with others has never occured to those humanitarian apostles of unselfishness, who proclaim their desire to achieve the brotherhood of men. And it will not occur to them, or to anyone, so long as the concept "rational" is omitted from the context of "values," "desires," "self-interest" and ethics.

The objectivist ethics proudly advocates and upholds rational selfishness--which means: the values required for man's survival qua man--which means: required for human survival--not the values produced by the desires, the emotions, the "aspirations," the feelings, the whims or the needs of irrational brutes, who have not outgrown the primordial practice of human sacrifices, have never discovered an industrial society and can conceive of no self-interest but that of grabbing the loot of the moment.

The Objectivist ethics holds that human good does not require human sacrifices and cannot be achieved by the sacrifice of anyone to anyone. It holds that the rational interest of men do not clash--that there is no conflict of interests among men who do not desire the unearned, who do not mkae sacrifices nor accept them, who deal with one another as traders, giving value for value.

The principle of trade is the only rational ethical principle for all human relationships, personal and social, private and public, spiritual and material. it is the principle of justice.

A trader is a man who earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved. He does not treat men as masters or slaves, but as independent equals. He deals with men by means of a free, voluntary, unforced, uncoerced exchange--an exchanged which benefits both parties bu their own independent judgment. A trader does ot expect to be paid for his defaults, only for his achievements. he does not switch to others the burden of his failures, and he does not mortgage his life into bondage to the failures of others.

In spiritutal issues--(by "spiritual" I mean: pertaining to man's consciousness")--the currency or medium of exchange is different, but the principle is the same. Love, friendship, respect, admiration, are the emotional response of one man to the virtues of another, the spiritual payment given in exchange for the personal, selfish pleasure which one man derives from the virtues of another man's character. Only a brute or an altruist would claim that the appreciation of another person's virtues is an act of selfishness, that as fas as one's own selfish interest and pleasure are concerned, it makes no difference whether one deals with a genius or a fool, whether one meets ahero or a thug, whether one marries an ideal woman or a slut. In spiritutal issues, a trader is a man who does not seek tobe love for his weaknesses or flaws, only for his vitues, and who does not grant his love to the weaknesses or the flaws of others, only to their virtues.

To love is to value. Only a rationally selfish man, a man of self-esteem, is capable of love---because he is the only man capable of holding firm, consistent, uncompromising, unbetrayed values. The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone.

It is only on the basis of rational selfishness--on the basis of justice--that men can be fit to live together in a free, peaceful, properous, benevolent, rational society.

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Can man derive any personal benefit from living in a human society? YES---If it as a human society. The two great vaues to be gained from social existence are: KNOWLEDGE and TRADE. Man is the only species that can transmit and expand his store of knowledge from generation to generation; the knowledge potentially avaible to man is greater than any one man could begin to acquire in his own lifespan; every man gains an incalculable benefit from the knowledge discovered by others. The second great benefit is the division of labor: it enables a man to devote his effort to a particular field of work and to trade with others who specialize in other fields. This form of cooperation allows all men who take part in it to achieve a greater knowledge, skill and productive return on their effort than they could achieve if each had to produce everything he needs, on a desert island or on a self-sustaining farm.

But these very benefit indicate, delimit and define what kind of men can be of value to one another and in what kind of societynly ratioanl, productive, independent man in a rational, productive, free society. Parasites, moochers, looters, brutes and thugs can be of no value to a human being---nor can he gain any benefit from living in a society geared to their needs, demanss and protections, a society that treats him as a sacrificial animal and penalizes him for his virtues in order to reward them for their vices, which means: a society based on the ethics of altruism. No society can be of value to man's life if the price is the surrender of his right to his life.

The basic political principle of the Objectivist ethics is no man may INITIATE the use of physical force against others. No man---or group or society or government--has the right to assume the role of a criminal and initiate the use of physical compulsion against any man. Men have the right to use physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. The ethical principle involved is simple clear-cut: it is the difference between murder and sefl-defense. A holdup man seesk to gain a value, wealth, by killing his victim; the victim does not grow richer by killing a holdup man. The principle is : no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force.

The only proper, moral purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence--to protect his right to his own life, to his own liberty, to his own property and to the pursuit of his own happiness. Without property rights, no other rights are possible.

...Every politcal system is based on and derived from a theory of ethics---and that the Objectivist ethics is the moral based needed by that politico-economic system which, today, is being destroyed all over the world, destroyed precisely for lack of a moral, philosophical defense and validation: the original American system, CAPITALISM. If it perishes, it will perish by default, undiscovered and unidentified: no other subject has ever been hidden by so many distortions, misconceptions and misrepresentations. Today, few people know what capitalism is, how it works and what was its actual history.

When I say "capitalism," I mean a full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism---with a separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the sma reasons as the separation of state and church. A pure system of capitalism has never yet existed, not even in America; various degrees of government control had been undercutting and distorting it from the start. Capitalism is not the system of the past; it is the system of the future--if manking is to have a future.

...I have presented the barest essentials of my system, but they are sufficient to indicate in what manner the Objectivist ehtics is the morality of life---as againts the three major schools of ethical theory, the mystics, the social, the subjective, which have brought the world to its present state and which represent the morality of death.

These three schools differ only in their method of approach, not in their content. In content, they are merely variantsof altruism, the ethical theroy which regards man as a sacrificial animal, which holds that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value. The difference occur only over the question of who is to be sacrificed to whom. Altruism holds detha as its ultimate goal and standard of value---and it is logical that renunciation, resignation, self-denial, and every other form of suffering, including self-destruction, are the virtues it advocates. And, logically, these are the only things that the practitioners of altruism ahve achieve and are achieving now.

Observe that these three schools of ethical theory are anti-life, not merely in content, but also in their method of approach.

The mystic theory of ehtics is explicitly based on the premise that the standard of value of man's ethics is se beyond the grave, by the laws or requirements of another, supernatural, dimension, that ehtics is impossible for man to practice, that it is unsuited for and opposed to man's life on earth, and that man must take the blame for it and suffer through the whole of his earthly existence, to atone for the guilt of being unable to practice the impracticable. The Dark Ages and the Middle Ages are the existential momunent to this theory of ethics.

The social theory of ethics substitutes "society" for God---and although it claims that its chief concern is life on earth, it is not the life of man, not the life an individual, but the life of a disembodied entity, the collective, which, in relation to every individual, consists of everybody except himself. As far as the individual is concerned, his ethical duty is to be the selfless, voiceless, rightless slave of any need, claim or damand asserted by others. the motto "dog eat dog"---which is not applicable to capitalism nor to dogs--is applicable to the social theory of ethics. the existential mounments to this theory are Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.

The subjectivist theory of ethics is, strictly speaking, not a theroy, but a negation of ethics. And more: it is a negation of reality, a negatin not merely of man's existence, but of all existence. Only the concept of a fluid, plastic, indeterminate, Heracliteans universe could permit anyone to think or to preach that man needs no objective principles of action--that reality gives him a blank check on values--that anything he cares to pick as the good or the evil, will do---that a man's whim is a valid moral standard, and that the only question is nhow to get away with it. The existential monument to this theory is the present state of our culture.

It is not men's immoraltiy thatis responsible for the collapse now threatening to destroythe civilized world, but the kind of moralities men hav been asked to practice. The responsibility belongs to the philosophers of altruism. The have no cause to be shocked by the spectacle of their own success, and no right damn human nature: men have obeyed them and have brought their moral ideals into full reality.

It is philosophy that sets men's goals and determines their course; it is only philosophy that can save them now. Today, the world is bacing a choice: if civilization is to survive, it is the altruist morality that men have to reject.

I will close with the words of John Galt, which I address, as he did, to all the moralists of altruism, past or present:

" You have been using fear as your weapon and have been bringing death to man as his punishment for rejecting your morality. We offer him life as his reward for accepting ours."

BY AYN RAND

[agta]

Matagal nang proven na maraming mali-mali mga ideas ni Ayn Rand. This man's ideas are not worth for even a moment. Actually, most often, he does not know what he is talking about.

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Matagal nang proven na maraming mali-mali mga ideas ni Ayn Rand. This man's ideas are not worth for even a moment. Actually, most often, he does not know what he is talking about.

There is only one thing clear: It is not accepted or do not understand it or do not want to understand. Specially, to those who do not accept REASON as the only means to knowledge. But there are people who wants to know, to identify, to discover, it is to them that it was intended to. It is to the glory of man and not to any mystical, uncomprehensible non existing being.


Read it again to know its meaning, its truth. It must not be accepted by faith. It must be accepted only by means of reasoning mind.

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read and study this article!

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NAIINTINDIHAN MO BA ANG ESSAY NA ITO? Read again with full reasoning mind. Can't you trust your mind to understand, to acquire knowledge?