There were about seven audience members, not including the panelists, but most of them participated actively in the discussion, which was sustained, astute and lively. Many of our regulars from past APA meetings did not attend either because they were in other sessions or because they were not able to make the conference. The attendees included several philosophy students who had not been any of our prior sessions, and some people who I haven’t met before.

The papers are now available at this link. to members and contributors of the society.

Out session is scheduled from Thursday, January 9th from 7pm to 10pm at the Sheraton New York Times Square Hotel. The specific room will be listed in the final conference program ad on the associated app.

The session will open with a new paper by Tara Smith (University of Texas, Austin) called “Reason Breathes: Notes on the Reason-Desire Relationship in Rational Egoism.” In it, Dr. Smith revisits the topic of desire, treated in chapter 1 of her 2024 book Egoism Without Permission, expanding on the role of reason in desiring and correcting some possible implications of her earlier treatment that she thinks are incorrect.

This will be followed by a paper by Steven Warden (University of St Andrews), "Value and Desire,” on the relationship between these two phenomena in reality and in Rand’s work.

I will serve as chair and short comment on the pair of papers. Then there will be time for discussion among the panelists and with the audience.

The papers, comment, and a report of the event will be circulated to Society members in the weeks after the event.

The first piece of news is that we have moved our web content and our communications to Substack. This message should be reaching you through that platform. If you were a contributor to the Society for AY 2023-24 or have paid your dues in AY 2024-25, we’ve set you up with a one-year subscription. After that you can contribute simply by re-subscribing annually to our Substack. If you had a recurring subscription to our previous website, this will be cancelled in the coming days so that no future payments are taken via that means.

The next two pieces of news concern our book series with the University of Pittsburgh Press. As of this summer, the series includes Tara Smith’s monograph, Egoism Without Permission. Here’s a description:

Ayn Rand controversially defended rational egoism, the idea that people should regard their own happiness as their highest goal. Given that numerous scholars in philosophy and psychology alike are examining the nature of human flourishing and an ethics of well-being, the time is ripe for a close examination of Rand’s theory. Egoism without Permission illuminates Rand’s thinking about how to practice egoism by exploring some of its crucial psychological dimensions. Tara Smith examines the dynamics among four partially subconscious factors in an individual’s well-being: a person’s foundational motivation for being concerned with morality; their attitude toward their desires; their independence; and their self-esteem. A clearer grasp of each, Smith argues, sheds light on the others, and a better understanding of the set, in turn, enriches our understanding of self-interest and its sensible pursuit. Smith then traces the implications for a broader understanding of what a person’s self-interest genuinely is, and, correspondingly, of what its pursuit through rational egoism involves. By highlighting these previously underexplored features of Rand’s conceptions of self-interest and egoism, Smith betters our understanding of how vital these psychological levers are to a person’s genuine flourishing.

Until now, the series had consisted of three multi-author collections of essays, each related to a different aspect of Rand’s thought. Further such volumes are planned (more on the next one later), and we’d intended for the series to consist exclusively of books of this sort. However, when the Press offered Tara a contract on her book, they suggested that we incorporate it into the series, pointing out that this would aid the promotion of all the relevant books. The Editorial Board agreed, and working with the press we’ve decided to split out series into two streams—edited volumes of the sort we’ve produced before, and single-author books like Tara’s. (You may notice that the visual design of her book has some features that connect it to the rest of the series and some that differentiate it, marking its status as the initial offering in a new sub-series.)

The next collection in the series is now scheduled to be released in the Fall of 2025. Edited by Jim Lennox and myself, it is titled Two Philosophers: Aristotle and Ayn Rand. The volume has been through peer review, and the contracts have been signed. Contributing authors are completing some (minor) revisions, and the completed manuscript will go to the press before the end of the calendar year. Since we did not have an ARS session in the 2023–24 academic year, we are releasing penultimate drafts of three chapters from the book to Society members and contributors whose dues are paid through that academic year. If you fall into either category, you should be able to access the papers now at the above link.

That brings me to my final piece of news, which is that we are holding a session on January 9th at 7:00pm in New York City at the Eastern Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association. The topic is Valuing and Desires, and the session will explore some of the themes raised in Tara Smith’s aforementioned book.

The speakers will be Steven John Warden, Tara Smith, and myself. Steven is a graduate student at the University of St. Andrews writing a dissertation on valuing. He also was the indexer for Egoism Without Permission, and he is currently visiting at the University of Texas, Austin, where he, Dr. Smith, and I have been regularly discussing values, desires, and related issues. The panel will be an occasion to continue this discussion in a more public and formal form.

My usual practice is to turn to the ‘Science and Technology’ and ‘Book Review’ sections first, and two reviews, in particular, caught my eye, one of John Gray’s Seven Types of Atheism (Nov. 10th) and one of Paul Collier’s The Future of Capitalism (Nov.3rd).

I have no idea if the same reviewer was responsible for both (their reviews are anonymous), but despite how different the ostensive topics of the books were, the reviews had identified a common philosophical tone: a deeply critical attitude toward the traditional philosophical defenses of their respective subjects (atheism and capitalism) combined with the absence of any sort of systematic, positive alternative.

This prompted the letter to the editor below, which they published in their November 24th issue. In fact, while I didn’t stress this, I am convinced that this absence was in both cases intentional: Gray and Collier are both ‘pragmatists’ who are skeptical of any principled, systematic answers to moral questions. Here is a link to this post that will take the reader to my LTE. (The link is to the entire LTE page of The Economist. You need to scroll down to the 4th letter, which they titled ‘In praise of individualism’.)

by James Lennox

This year our topic is the virtue of integrity, and the panel is built around a new paper by Carrie-Ann Biondi (Marymount Manhattan College) on “Being Integrated: A Labor of Self-Love.”

The paper will be followed by comments by Christian Miller (Wake Forest University) and me. As is typical for such sessions, Carrie-Ann will have the opportunity to respond to our comments, and plenty of time will be left for discussion with the audience.

I’m looking forward to the session. Rand had a distinctive perspective on the self and on the role of integrity in forming and sustaining a self. I know from conversations with Carrie Ann that she has much illuminating to say on Rand in general and on this subject in particular. Christian takes virtue and integrity in particular very seriously but comes at it from a wholly different philosophical perspective, so it will be fascinating to see what points of agreement and disagreement he raises. I expect that my own comments will focus on issues of Rand-interpretation or on connecting the themes Carrie-Ann raises to texts she doesn’t deal with directly.

As is the Society’s practice, members and contributors will have access to the paper and comments (and to Carrie-Ann’s responses) as soon as they are available. We hope that we will also see some of you at the session itself, though (as with all events at APA meetings), the session will only be open to people registered for the whole conference. I expect that will include most of our members who are in the greater New York area, but that it will not include many contributors.

I thought it might be useful to reproduce here the things I wrote to the reporter, both so that the parts he quoted are on record in English (rather than in Danish translation), and because I said more than he was able to quote, and some readers of this blog may find the other things I  said useful.

Rather than quoting his questions (which I assume I’d need his permission to do), I’m putting my comments under headings that reflect the gist of what I was responding to. I’ve also lightly edited a few sentences to fix grammatical errors. Here goes:

Re whether Rand would approve of the controversial tax practices:

Rand was very critical of those business people who she thought got rich not by productive achievement, but by using special government favors to plunder others.  The main villains in Atlas Shrugged are corrupt businessmen of this sort.

But the tax laws and regulations in most countries are so complex that it’s often hard to know who is plundering and who being plundered. And claiming whatever deductions or benefits are due one under existing law is a very different thing from defending or advocating for laws that unjustly advantage your business. So in order to morally judge the tax practices of the groups you mention or to speculate on how Rand would judge them, I’d need to know more than you’ve said in your email.

Re the objection to egoism that if all life has value one should pursue the interests of all living things, rather than just one’s own:

This objection presupposes that value is an intrinsic property that things have independent of their relation to any valuers. This “intrinsic theory of value” is one common view held in philosophy (e.g. G. E. Moore held it), but it is not the only theory. Rand rejected it. Values, on her view, are things that one acts to gain and keep (or create and sustain). So the concept of value  presupposes an entity capable of valuing and a purpose for which that entity acts to produce, obtain, or sustain it. Only living things are capable of valuing and their lives are the ultimate value to which their other values contribute in various ways.  Different things will be of value to different organisms. For example: if we think of a fish in a school of fish, the other fish in its school are of value to it, because they contribute to its life as companions, protection, mates, etc., but the fishermen who want to catch and eat the fish and the bacteria that make it sick are not of value to it, even though both the fisherman and the bacteria are alive.

Which things (living or otherwise) are of value to a given organism will depend on many factors, but most importantly on that organism’s nature. Human nature is such that other human beings (both certain specific other human beings and living in a human society) is of tremendous value to any rational individual, and such individuals will properly feel a generalized good will towards humankind as such. But this does not mean that a rational person will value others’ (much less all others’) interests as highly as he values his own. Nor does it mean that he will value every individual human being. I, for example, do not value Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, much less Kim Jung Il, at all.

Re whether egoism implies that one should hurting others when it is his interest to do so:

Rand’s ethical egoism doesn’t tell you to do whatever you think is in your interest, regardless of what that may be and what effects it may have on others. Rather, her view is that you need moral principles (based on human nature) to determine what is in your interest in the first place. She argues that an individual’s interests lie in living a rational and productive life in which one’s relationships with other people are to mutual advantage by mutual consent. Morality shows us that it is not in our interest to attempt to live by preying on other human beings. 

So if preying on others (steeling, raping, etc.) is what you mean by “hurting” others, then it’s wrong according to Rand’s egoism. That wrongness depends on one’s interests in the sense that it is wrong because it is bad for you. But it doesn’t depend on the details of you specific interests or circumstances or choices. Human nature is such they it is necessarily contrary to the rational interests of any human being to attempt to live in that way.

But of course there are lots of other cases in which it is morally permissible or even mandatory to “hurt” someone. For example, it’s wrong to remain in a romantic relationship that is making you miserable, even if your partner would be hurt by the breakup.

It is nice to see both that Rand is being included in projects on the history of philosophy, and that the editors of this project found someone knowledgeable about Rand to write the piece. This has not always been the case with pieces on Rand in reference volumes, but things have improved since the embarrassingly unprofessional entry on Rand in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy both have articles on Rand by authors who take her seriously and are well acquainted with the primary and secondary sources. Hicks is the author of the Internet Encyclopedia piece, and he has written insightfully in other contexts about Randand about various figures and movements in the history of philosophy, so he’s a good choice to author an article that situates Rand’s conception of self-interest relative to more familiar views in the history of philosophy.

The article is illuminating on the issue of how philosophers’ views of self-interest (and their evaluations of it) reflect deeper views of the self. And I think Hicks is right to draw connections between Rand’s position on these issues and Aristotle’s. However, I was disappointed to see nothing in the piece on what makes Rand distinct from Aristotle (or from the Aristotelian tradition). Despite its title, the article doesn’t read as a piece on Rand at all. Indeed, her name appears only in the following sentence:

Aristotle and Ayn Rand, in contrast to both positions above, have a positive view of self-interest based on a view of the self that is potential, but with objective physical and psychological needs and the capacity to develop itself in a way that self-responsibly and productively meets its needs.

This sentence begins the last of the article’s four paragraphs. The paragraph goes on to elaborate on the consequences for ethics of the views expressed in the first sentence, and it does so without differentiating Rand’s ethics from Aristotle’s. I can see why one might proceed this way, if one were mentioning Rand in an article about different schools of thought on self-interest. But in an article titled “Self-interest in Ayn Rand,” it creates the impression that she had nothing distinctive to say on the subject and that the only reason to take cognizance of her is that substituting her in for Aristotle on certain topics introduces a female voice (though one that’s not saying anything that hadn’t already been said by a man).

In fact, however, there is much in Rand’s writings about the self and self-interest that sets her apart from Aristotle and from other canonical thinkers. Rand is always focused on the individual human being, who has distinctive ideas and personal values that set him apart from others in his community and that may put him in conflict with them. She presents her moral philosophy in explicit contrast with moral codes that call for the individual to sacrifice his ideas and values to the demands of others. And, likewise, her political philosophy is formulated in explicit opposition to political philosophies that justify the sacrifice of individuals by the state. In this respect Rand has more in common with 19th Century individualists like Max Stirner and Friedrich Nietzsche than she does with Aristotle. This individualism is also characteristic of the Romantic movement in literature, which Rand saw herself as a part of. All of these individualistic thinkers extol emotions (and/or will) as the seat of individuality, whereas Rand identifies a person first and foremost with his reason. In this she agrees with Aristotle, but her view of reason includes elements that were absent or under-emphasized in Aristotle.

Whereas Aristotle’s discussions of reason’s role in life are impersonal in character, Rand held that an individual’s reasoning is the source of the personal values (e.g. his love of his job or romantic partner) that make his life meaningful to him. This is because, in her view, reason is an attribute of the individual and it does not function automatically. Each individual must initiate and sustain reasoning by choice, and must learn how to discover knowledge and to choose values that are based on facts and integrate into a self-sustaining life. To function in this manner by choice is to be objective in Rand’s sense of this term. I elaborated on this point in Chapter 6 of A Companion to Ayn Rand:

Only insofar as an individual chooses values in this way does he have a self‐interest at all. Values chosen subjectively, without regard for the requirements of human survival, will not form into a self‐sustaining whole; so rather than a coherent self‐interest that he can act to advance, the individual will have a motley assortment of conflicting desires. But neither can self-interest be intrinsic: there is an inexhaustible variety of possible combinations of values and activities that could cohere into a self‐sustaining human life, and there is nothing other than an individual’s choosing and pursuing one of these possibilities for himself that can make this particular life constitute his self‐interest and ultimate goal.

Rand’s view of objectivity (and of self-interest as objective) reflects her libertarian view of free will and her identification of the choice to think or not as the locus of freedom. This differentiates her from thinkers like Neitzsche, who was a determinist, and who wrote before the tensions between free will and determinism came sharply into focus. (Aristotle did stress the role of choice in the development of moral character, and the later Aristotelian, Alexander of Aphrodisias, did develop a libertarian account of freedom that is strikingly like Rand’s, but he did not develop, as she did, the view’s implications in epistemology, ethics, and politics, nor did he write much about the self or self-interest.)

I could go on, but I think I’ve said enough to indicate that there is much distinctive in Rand’s view of self-interest. Hicks was tasked with treating a complex issue in a very short article, so he had difficult decisions to make about what to include and omit. The article he came up with is thought-provoking, but given its title, I wish he had found a way to say something about Rand’s position per se rather than about a wider philosophical tradition to which she belongs.

Vilifying Rand without reading the detail, or demonising her without taking the trouble to refute her, is clearly the wrong approach.

I couldn’t agree more. In my introduction to A Companion to Ayn Rand, I wrote that

The scholarly study of Rand’s works was postponed by two generations of academics who found her vision appalling and thought or hoped that she was a passing fad, and that their students’ attraction to her was a youthful indiscretion. These hopes have been dashed.

As a philosopher who thinks that many of the most influential philosophers of the past and present have been deeply wrong and have had pernicious effects, I know something about the difficulties one faces when studying figures for whom one feels as Cleary and her audience do about Rand. I tried to communicate some of that perspective to both fans and critics of Rand in my introduction.

To take an author seriously means to read her, not with an eye toward confirming one’s prejudices (whether favorable or unfavorable), but simply with an eye to understanding what she thinks and why. If one finds her approach unfamiliar and difficult, it means working to overcome that. If one finds what she says implausible or unmotivated, it means taking the time to consider why it seems otherwise to her and to the readers who find her convincing – and it means giving thought to the question of whether it is you or she who is mistaken. By the same token, if she strikes you as obviously correct with respect to an issue where you know many people find her views counter-intuitive, it means working to identify the premises that you share with her and not with them, and then figuring out how to determine whether those premises are true.

Such an approach helps one learn from the thinkers one disagrees with most. There’s always the possibility that reading such thinkers will lead you to change your mind, but in the overwhelming majority of cases in which that doesn’t happen, pursuing the approach described above will at least help you to identify more deeply the nature of your disagreement, and it will push you to probe your reasons for your own positions.

I was sorry to see Cleary approach Rand differently in her Aeon piece. She takes for granted both that Rand’s philosophy comes from a place of cruelty and that it “should be easy to show what is wrong with her thinking.” And though she alludes to John Stuart Mill’s point that we can find elements of truth even in mistaken positions, I see little effort to find points of truth in Rand. She does urge her readers to look to the details of Rand’s work, but her own criticisms consist mostly of general assertions about Rand’s positions, and some of the few statements she quotes from Rand are taken out of context and given implausible construals.

Cleary’s first criticism is that “Rand victim-blames: if someone doesn’t have money or power, it’s her own fault.” But Cleary gives no examples of Rand blaming anyone for being poor or powerless. Nor does she acknowledge any of Rand’s portrayals of people who are poor or powerless through no fault of their own, any of her compassion for ambitious people trying to work their way out of such situations, or any of the anger she shows at injustices against such people. Think, for example, of Cherryl Brooks in Atlas Shrugged or of the protagonists of We The Living. Think of the many (often anonymous) characters in Atlas Shrugged whose unjust suffering under laws like Directive 10-289 is described. And think of her discussion of the plight of Soviet dissidents in pieces like “The Inexplicable Personal Alchemy.” There are some people (e.g. Cherryl Brooks’ parents) with little money or power whom Rand thinks are at fault for their circumstances—or for not struggling to improve them. But unless we conclude that none of us have any control at all over how our lives go, we will have to acknowledge that some people in some bad circumstances share some of the responsibility for their fate. Philosophers who disagree with Rand about whether some particular person is a victim, or about how just or unjust various societies are, would do well to discuss these issues directly, and we can hope that Cleary’s article will motivate some to look into this subject.

The one concrete Cleary points to that may be intended to be an example of victim-blaming in Rand is the controversial rape scene in The Fountainhead. But it’s an odd example both because the purported victim is a sympathetic character (rather than someone Rand blames for anything), and because she doesn’t see herself as a victim at all. Indeed, she exalts in the experience. This is part of what makes the scene so controversial. Here’s what Cleary has to say about the episode:

Howard Roark, the ‘hero’ of The Fountainhead, rapes the heroine Dominique Francon. A couple of awkward conversations about repairing a fireplace is, according to Rand, tantamount to Francon issuing Roark ‘an engraved invitation’ to rape her. The encounter is clearly nonconsensual – Francon genuinely resists and Roark unmistakably forces himself upon her – and yet Rand implies that rape survivors, not the rapists, are responsible. Might makes right and, as Roark states earlier in the novel, the point isn’t who is going to let him do whatever he wants: ‘The point is, who will stop me?’

A sympathetic portrayal of anything resembling a rape raises obvious concerns—ones that the intellectual and literary community is more sensitive to in 2018 than it was in 1943. So this scene deserves to be discussed and debated, and in my view, existing discussions of it by authors sympathetic to Rand are pat and too defensive. However, too often the scene is used as an attempt to dismiss Rand or to attribute views to her that she did not hold, which is what I think Cleary does in the passage I just quoted.

What happens in the relevant sequence from The Fountainhead? Dominique is a frustrated idealist with a Stoic-like determination to maintain her independence from the world by never allowing herself to desire anything in it. While in seclusion at her father’s estate, she notices Roark laboring at her father’s nearby granite quarry. Roark is an architect who has turned to grueling manual labor rather than work for clients who demand that he compromise his artistic integrity, and he is biding his time until he earns enough money to reestablish his practice or is sought out by the kind of client who appreciates his work. But Dominique doesn’t know any of this. She is taken with him at first sight, as he is with her. This begins an erotically charged adversarial relationship in which she struggles against her desire for him. She fetishizes his lowly station, and flaunts her position and its privileges. Roark, who doesn’t disguise his desire for her, makes it clear that he knows what she is doing and why. Her days become about resisting her desire to see him, and she realizes that she has lost her cherished freedom. For a time, she holes up in her house, but the house is “too safe” and she feels “a desire to underscore the safety by challenging it,” so she damages the marble fireplace in her bedroom and hires Roark to fix it. The job requires two visits. During the first, she makes a point to stand imperiously in the entrance way and then to stretch out on her bed. He ignores both poses, as he works. He makes clear (without saying explicitly) that he knows that the damage was intentional, and his comments on the stresses involved in the formation of marble are a metaphor for their relationship. When the time comes for the second visit, Roark sends another worker in his place. Dominique is furious; after days of struggle, she speeds to the quarry on horseback and, finding Roark nearby, asks why he didn’t come. He responds: “I didn’t think it would make any difference to you who came. Or did it, Miss Francon?” She whips him across the face with the branch she’s been using as a makeshift riding crop. It is after this that he comes to her house and takes her forcefully. She struggles against him, but doesn’t call for the help she knows is within earshot.

Is this rape, or consensual rough sex, or is it a case where the line is blurred? The novel makes clear that the encounter is a profound experience to both parties, that both want it, and that both know this. On the other hand, Roark could certainly have been prosecuted for rape had Dominique called for help and had he been stopped in the act. (This too is surely part of the power dynamic understood between them.) Dominique describes the act as rape to herself, but she cherishes the thought. The two characters carry on a clearly consensual but adversarial relationship throughout much of the rest of the novel, and they marry at the end, after Dominique has resolved the issues that made her despise the world. Every indication is given that this is a highly unusual encounter between unique personalities. So, even if Roark’s act is a rape, the scene is clearly not intended to imply that victims of rape are responsible for what happens to them. It is, rather, meant to be a startling dramatization of Dominique’s internal conflict and Roark’s role in it.

Nonetheless, rape is a heinous crime, which is horrifyingly common, and too often rapists or their apologists justify themselves by claiming that the victim was non-verbally asking for it. So it can be argued that the scene in The Fountainhead is insensitive, inappropriate, or irresponsible. On the other hand, many women report having rape fantasies, and rape scenes are common in romance novels, which are consumed by a predominantly female audience. There are good questions about how we should understand and evaluate such occurrences of rape in fantasy and fiction, and about whether such fantasy is a healthy expression of human sexuality or a self-perpetuating effect of a culture that victimizes women. However one answers these questions, and however one judges Rand’s artistic choices, it is clear that the point of The Fountainhead‘s rape scene was not (as Cleary claims) that “might makes right.” First of all, the plot arc of Gail Wynand in The Fountainhead amounts to a criticism of the approach to life embodied by that saying. Moreover, in later essays, Rand explicitly rejected the idea that might makes right, and she praised the “the American concept of ‘a government of laws and not of men,'” which, she wrote “is the means of subordinating ‘might’ to ‘right.'”

This brings us to the subject of Rand’s political philosophy. Here’s what Cleary has to say about it:

Rand champions self-sufficiency, attacks altruism, demonises public servants, and vilifies government regulations because they hinder individual freedom. Yet, she conveniently ignores the fact that many laws and government regulations promote freedom and flourishing.

This begs the question. When philosophers disagree about the propriety of a law, its proponents generally claim that it has such benefits as promoting freedom and flourishing, and its opponents deny this. So, even if one were debating an anarchist (which Rand certainly was not), it would not be sufficient to simply say that laws and government are needed for freedom and flourishing. One would need to show that they are and address any reasons the anarchist had for denying this. But, of course, Rand maintained that a certain sort of government with certain sorts of laws is needed to protect the rights each human being needs to live and prosper. Other sorts of laws, she argues, are wrong because they violate these rights.

Of course, Rand’s views on all of these points are controversial, and objections have been raised to some of these points and to the ethical foundations Rand provides for them. But instead of raising or linking to such objections, Cleary writes as though Rand had nothing to say on these issues. And she quotes her out of context to create this impression. For example, when she quotes a character from Atlas Shrugged saying that he owes no obligation to his fellow men, she ignores the rest of his sentence:

—except the obligation I owe to myself, to material objects and to all of existence: rationality. I deal with men as my nature and their demands: by means of reason. I seek or desire nothing from them except such relations as they care to enter of their own voluntary choice.

Rand’s theory of rights, mentioned earlier, is meant to demarcate the boundaries of individual lives in a social context, so as to make clear what sort of actions with respect to an individual would constitute an imposition on him, if taken without his consent. And this theory has the resources to deal with another of Cleary’s objections:

[Rand] assumes that we live in a world with unlimited resources and property that can be insulated from others. She ignores the fact that we share the Earth – we breathe the same air, swim in the same ocean, and drink from shared water sources.

But 19th Century American jurists and legislators used a conception of rights much like Rand’s to define rights to fluid resources like water and oil, which are not easily “insulated.” Rand references this tradition in an article about how to define property rights in the broadcast spectrum, where she notes that new technologies frequently give rise to the need to define new property rights. Perhaps some technologies that cause pollution may require the identification of new rights to atmospheric bandwidth. In any case, some anti-pollution laws could be more directly justified by reference to the damage the pollution does to people’s lives or property. And, though Rand was very critical of the early environmentalist movement, she allowed for the propriety of laws that “required industry to install anti-smog devices or burn a cleaner fuel” (Objectively Speaking, 213).

Cleary notes that some philosophers with political convictions in the vicinity of Rand’s support “some state control to protect people and their property from harm, force, fraud and theft,” but she thinks Rand cannot allow for this because she wrote that “There can be no compromise between freedom and government controls.” Taken out of context Rand’s sentence might be taken to mean that freedom and government are incompatible. But Rand argued that government is indispensable to freedom, so this cannot be what she meant here. What, then, does she mean by “government controls”? If one surveys the pieces where she uses such language, it is clear that she means mechanisms by which a government controls people’s lives (or, what amounts to the same thing, controls the economy), rather than freeing people from one another’s interference by properly defining and securing rights under a system of objective law. The government secures rights when it prosecutes people for force, fraud, and theft. By contrast, the FCC controls people when it issues broadcast licenses and dictates broadcast standards in ways that are not determined by reference to rights and that give officials in the executive branch wide discretion to determine the course of industries and of lives. I alluded earlier to the alternative form of governance Rand advocated for the broadcast spectrum: frequencies would be recognized as the property of the broadcasters who had pioneered their use, and the role of the executive branch of government would be to protect this property by prosecuting trespassers. The alternative between freedom and controls isn’t one between anarchy and government, but between two forms of governance.

Of course, there is much one might take issue with here. Can the distinction between these two types of governance be coherently maintained? Is it as absolute as Rand thought? Are all controls wrong, or are there spheres of human activity (perhaps those that pollute the environment) that must be governed by means of controls? All of these would be fruitful questions for critics of Rand to pursue.

Finally, Cleary accuses Rand of hypocrisy because she opposed social welfare programs but received social security and Medicare in her old age. We might add to this list of charges that, as a starving youth in Saint Petersburg, Rand ate the food rations allotted to her by the Soviet state. Unlike some others who have harped on Rand’s acceptance of these payments, Cleary acknowledges Rand’s argument that opponents of welfare state programs are entitled to claim the benefits due to them under these programs as partial recompense for the money seized from them to fund such programs. Here’s Cleary’s response:

The problem is not only the complexity of calculating how much government support one could rightly collect back from taxes paid – since, presumably, she also used roads, tap water, police protection, and a myriad of other things that the government provides. But it’s also in contradiction with her point that there can be no compromise between freedom and government. Moreover, it’s disingenuous to actively participate in, and benefit from, the very same system that she complained about under the guise of mooching back what was mooched from her. It might be selfish, but it’s not, as she claimed, moral.

This misses the force of Rand’s argument. The injustice she thinks is involved in a welfare system is not that recipients are paid, but that money is seized from opponents of the system against their will. These opponents are the victims, and the perpetrators are the advocates of the system (not the recipients, except those of them who are also advocates). The perpetrators have no moral right to anything they may receive under the system, but the victims do; for they would be compounding their own victimization if they refused to take what was due them under the system and thereby let all of the seized assets go to their victimizers. Thus they should take what they are due under the system, and regard it not as a benefit but as a partial recovery of what has been taken from them unjustly.

But suppose that Rand’s argument does not hold up. Why would this make Rand a hypocrite, rather than someone with a mistaken answer to the difficult question of how to function in the context of a social system that one judges to be unjust? And if we are considering Rand as a philosopher, shouldn’t we be more concerned with this sort of issue than with her personal character?

So much, then, for Cleary’s refutation of Rand. But presumably the point of her short article wasn’t so much to refute Rand as to motivate other philosophers to take up the project. I join her in encouraging them to do so. More generally, I encourage them to engage with her work. Philosophers interested in the task might consider making use of the Companion and the Ayn Rand Society‘s two books. All three books aim to facilitate intellectual engagement by bridging some of the gap between Rand’s work and the literature that is more familiar to most English-speaking philosophers.

The piece takes its title, “The Courage to Face a Lifetime,” from the famous boy-on-a-bicycle scene that begins Part IV of The Fountainhead. Rand later remarked that the scene expressed “my own desperate longing for the sight of human achievement” and that she was surprised that so many readers understood and responded to it (RM 164). Here is Professor Biondi’s apt summary of the scene:

A young man recently graduated from college rides his bicycle through the hills of Pennsylvania, wondering whether life is worth living and whether he should pursue his dream of being a composer. He longs to see others’ achievements as tangible products of their quest for happiness, if only to see that it’s possible. Suddenly, he is confronted with a newly finished summer home community that seems to spring organically from the sides of the hills. He notices a man perched on a boulder who serenely gazes over the beautiful homes in the valley below. After finding out that the man—Howard Roark—is the architect responsible for the scene before them, he thanks Roark and confidently rides off into his future armed with “the courage to face a lifetime.”

It is Roark’s architecture that has this powerful impact on the boy, and many readers have a similar experience with Rand’s novels; for as Biondi remarks, it is “unusual to encounter literature that embodies such benevolent, life-affirming values.” Rand’s commitment to such values and her ability to express them stems from her philosophy, Objectivism, which Biondi summarizes as follows:

Reality exists, we can know reality objectively through our senses and the use of reason, one’s own happiness is one’s highest moral purpose (egoism), limited government is justified only for the protection of individual rights, people should be free to trade the fruits of their work (capitalism), and the purpose of art is to project and experience in concrete form one’s vision of life.

Objectivism is an inextricable part of the the aesthetic power of Rand’s novels, and it is inspiring and empowering in its own right, as expounded by Rand and others in non-fiction essays. Biondi goes on to discusses several aspects of Objectivism in greater depth in the course of debunking four “oft-repeated myths about Rand’s views.” Her piece is worth reading and worth recommending—especially to young people curious about Rand’s ideas and the hostility with which they are often met.

Zwolinski leads off the debate by raising critical points about Rand’s ethical egoism, the consistency of her egoism with her theory of rights, and her view of property and value-creation. Zwolinski advanced several of these criticisms during his panel on Rand’s theory of rights at the April 2014 meeting of the ARS. His paper from this session will be featured in the forthcoming third volume of Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies, The Philosophy of Capitalism: Objectivism and Alternative Approaches, edited by Gregory Salmieri and Robert Mayhew. The book will also feature commentary on the issues raised in Zwolinski’s piece by Salmieri, Darryl Wright, and Onkar Ghate. Other authors featured will include Michael Huemer, Tara Smith, Peter Boettke, Robert Garmong, Lester Hunt, Tim Sandefur, Robert Tarr, and Steve Simpson.

Without weighing into this debate too much myself, I would like to make at least one observation about it and raise one question. The observation is of a similarity between the three lines of criticism that Zwolinski registers against Rand, even as the topics differ. Here are three excerpts from each topic, first on Rand’s argument for individual rights:

In the first three uses, Rand uses the term “right” to assert that certain actions are morally permissible (it’s not wrong to do them) or even obligatory (it would be wrong not to do them). […] Rand’s fourth usage of the word “right,” however, is significantly different. When she says that man “has a right” to live as a rational being, she is not merely saying that it is right for man to live as a rational being. She is saying that man has a right to live as a rational being. And these are two very different claims.

Next, on Rand’s theory of property rights:

The problem is that everything we produce is, ultimately, made out of raw materials that were not themselves produced by anybody. So even if it’s easy to justify why I should be morally entitled to the cake I’ve baked out of the flour and butter I owned, it’s not so easy to justify why I should be morally entitled to the patch of land I simply found and quickly put a fence around. In political philosophy, this is known as the problem of “original appropriation.”

Finally, on Rand’s theory of physical force:

Traditionally, libertarians and Objectivists have taken one of two broad approaches to defining “force.” One approach, which we can call the “moralized approach,” defines force in terms of an underlying theory of rights. The other approach, the “nonmoralized approach,” defines force in a way that makes no essential reference to rights or other moral terms. […] Adopting a moralized definition of force allows us to explain why the individual who steals someone’s car is initiating force, and why the landowner who enforces his property right isn’t. So, so far, so good. But the moralized approach to force comes with a serious drawback of its own. For if we define the initiation of force in terms of the violation of rights, then we cannot define the violation of rights in terms of the initiation of force, lest we be guilty of circular argument. In other words, if we say that force is just any activity that violates individual rights, we cannot turn around and then say that our rights are to be understood in terms of freedom from the initiation of force.

I think it’s interesting that each of these criticisms involves some kind of regress problem in which the regress must be halted by explaining how some property or relationship P can arise out of non-P facts. For instance, how do individual rights arise out of the fact that some actions are right or wrong? How does property arise out of material goods that are not already property? On the last question, I think it’s a bit more of a stretch, but in principle the same issue is at work. How do we define force in a way that avoids circular reference to further force? This amounts to: how can force be defined in terms of non-force?

I don’t mean to suggest that Zwolinski thinks that P can never, as a matter of principle, arise out of non-P, or that P can never be defined without reference to non-P. In fact he says there might be solutions available to the problems he’s raised (whether from Rand or others). However, I do wonder if it is significant that these problems all have roughly the same form. It strikes me that one would think that these problems require a special solution only when one approaches them from a kind of deductivist philosophical framework. But since we know that this was not Rand’s framework, would it perhaps be more more useful to interpret her views on these matters with more attention to her avowed inductivist methodology? In particular, it would be useful to reflect more on her oft-cited question about what facts of reality give rise to the need for a concept, whether the concept of “rights,” of “property,” or of “force.”

by Ben Bayer

Even so, Leiter has not always been dismissive of scholars of Rand. I hope, therefore, that in this same spirit of academic collegiality, he is open to linking to our reaction to Wolff’s piece.

Wolff notes the widely discussed fact that Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has at times claimed to have been influenced by Rand’s thinking on politics. [At other times Ryan has disavowed her in favor of more faith-friendly philosophers such as Aquinas.] Tongue firmly in cheek, Wolff feigns to “encourage you to delve more deeply into the corpus of her writings, so that you will gain insight into the sources of the power of Paul Ryan’s thought.” He offers his readers a sample from Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged, in which Galt describes Rand’s formula of the Law of Identity, “A is A.” Wolff responds:

And there it is: A is A. Who would be so foolish as to deny it? A is A. From there it is mere elaboration to derive the Republican health bill, “a task that is more an amusement than a labour,” as Kant says in the Preface to the First Edition of the Critique of Pure Reason.

I suspect that this post was, at least in part, Wolff blowing off steam over the AHCA. I can relate to his frustrations. It is both easy and entirely appropriate to have contempt for Paul Ryan and something far beneath contempt for Donald Trump. But I am confident that Rand would share those sentiments of disdain and disgust were she alive today.

Wolff does not seem to want to seriously critique Rand. He wants to tarnish her by association with Ryan and tarnish Ryan by association with a caricature of her. Apoplexy over the current “administration” is scarcely avoidable for any one with sense, but it in no way excuses shoddy thinking. The problem is that we diminish ourselves and the quality of our public discourse when we throw out intellectual standards for the cheap thrill of thrashing a straw man.

It’s fine for a philosopher to criticize Rand—or any other author—harshly, even if only so as to be justified in subsequently dismissing her works despite their popularity and influence. But philosophers who do this owe it to themselves to exercise the same kind of intellectual honesty and integrity that we would expect from any other scholar talking about any other philosopher. That would imply the following as bare minima:

1. Don’t judge the merits of her philosophy strictly or even primarily on the basis of the statements, actions, and policies of political figures who are said to be influenced by her. One has to prove that the politicians in question and their policies actually are influenced by a non-specious understanding of the philosophy/philosopher. Certainly one shouldn’t try to reconstruct what that philosopher’s views were based on what those politicians say or do! Wolff mentions the profundities of Marx and Hegel. Would he claim to understand or judge their philosophies based on the actions and pronouncements of Stalin and Mao? Of course not. The point is not to deny the influence of any of these philosophers, including Rand, on at least some of the leaders—good, bad, or monstrous—who claim to be inspired by them. If (and only if) you can show that that influence is more than the accidental result of the philosopher being misunderstood and misappropriated, then you can attribute some of the credit or blame to her for the policies that she inspired.

2. Don’t resort to cheap insults and insinuations. In the comments section on Wolff’s post, Warren Goldfarb (Harvard U.) wrote, “Of course no professional philosopher takes Rand seriously…” This is an appeal to authority or an ad hominem, both of which are beneath a distinguished logician such as Goldfarb. So is trading on anecdote rather than argument. The Objectivist students at MIT whom Goldfarb mentions as having regarded Quine as insufficiently “objective” may have been objecting to his radical holism and relativistic ontologies that can result therefrom (e.g. his infamous comparison of physical objects to the Homeric gods). That, incidentally, is a criticism of Quine which many professional philosophers have been party to. And in any case, since when did we judge a thinker based on what undergraduate admirers of her think or say?

3. Take some effort to know what you speak of. Wolff writes: “Rand, like all great philosophers, is known for a single core proposition from which she seeks to derive the particulars of her theories.” Rather few great philosophers try to derive their entire systems from a single core proposition. Rand certainly doesn’t. But if that were actually true about them and her, then you couldn’t say that she was in poor company. In fact, though, Rand does not try to deduce her substantive claims in ethics or politics from the laws of logic. She derided such deductivist approaches to knowledge as “Rationalistic,” in ‘honor’ of the Continental Rationalists whom she judged among the worst offenders in this regard. Anyway, Rand simply thinks that her metaphysical “axioms” are the most fundamental facts and that all specific facts are instances of the laws of identity and non-contradiction, such that it behooves us to always try to remember that things are what they are and not what they aren’t. “Who wouldn’t do that?!” you ask. Well, at the moment several prominent Republican politicians leap (or lurch) to mind.

Philosophers who want to know what Rand said and thought about the ‘axioms’ and their relations to the rest of knowledge and values and whether it was substantially different from Continental Rationalists (it was!) might be interested in my chapter on Rand’s metaphysics in the Blackwell Companion to Ayn Rand. Many will not be interested, which is fine; but those who do not take the time to learn about her positions would do themselves more credit if they then practiced a touch more of the Socratic wisdom and intellectual civility that they expect with regard to other authors. For example, they might restrict themselves to credible comments such as the following:

The Ryan health care bill seemed cruel to me insofar as it failed to adequately recognize and meet what I and many others consider a moral obligation that we have to help those in need. Maybe some of that comes from Ayn Rand, since she defended ethical egoism and criticized altruism and the social welfare state. I don’t know why she thought such things, and I don’t know what she would make of the AHCA specifically, but I regard the general sentiment (such as I understand it) as shocking, and find it hard to imagine that she could have had good arguments for it.

Admittedly, this is a less self-indulgent—and thus probably less cathartic—response. It’s not much of a political-intellectual shibboleth, either. But it is reasonable, intellectually responsible, and it could be a contribution to a mutually enlightening conversation in which philosophers more knowledgeable about Rand (whatever their opinions of her) might participate.

For instance, I would recognize that many Republicans do read or refer to Rand, and that she has influenced them. However, I also think that we need to distinguish between what Rand thought, in toto, from the parts of her thought that conservatives like to borrow piecemeal when it becomes convenient for them in their polemics against the left. (Don Watkins, at the Ayn Rand Institute, has a useful piece on how Rand’s influence on the right is exaggerated by some and minimized by others.)

Still, the current Republican agenda is nothing that Ayn Rand would agree with. Today’s GOP backs a system of crony capitalism and Christian religious infringement, not a laissez-faire system of free markets and free minds. Rather than pursuing thoughtful and responsible deregulation, they prefer back room deals with would-be oligarchs or simply creating chaos as a political strategy of “let’s break it and hope that the Democrats have to buy it.” Also, unlike today’s GOP, Rand wanted to eliminate rather than exacerbate the sources of pressure group warfare (including racism). Rand advocated the pursuit of self-interest and rejected the idea that the need of one person constitutes a moral claim on the values of another (in the absence of voluntarily created obligations between them). However, human self-interest for her was not the pursuit of whims by any means and at the expense of anyone else. She regarded justice as a crucial component of rationality and essential to human flourishing. In other words, Rand neither wanted the “haves” sacrificed to the “have-nots” nor the reverse. Absolutely no one benefits, in her view, from behaving or being treated either like a butcher or like a sacrificial lamb.

More than anything, though, Rand would be appalled by the propaganda-culture of “alternative facts” and the elevation of religious dogma within the Right today, no less than she was incensed by the anti-rational, relativistic, and social-constructivist themes of the New Left. Rand would whole-heartedly agree with the following lines from yesterday’s editorial in the LA Times (where she once had a column) “Our civilization is premised on the conviction that such a thing as truth exists, that it is knowable, that it is verifiable, that it exists independently of authority or popularity and that at some point — and preferably sooner rather than later—it will prevail.” (‘Why Trump Lies’, The Times Editorial Board, APRIL 3, 2017) This sentiment comes immeasurably closer to the actual meaning and the sociopolitical implications of Rand’s “A is A” than does a silly and specious deduction of Trumpcare from first principles such as Prof. Wolff attributes to her.

Philosophers more than anyone should be promoting the “epistemic hygiene” of our society. Here too we face an epidemic of obesity and preventable disease. So by all means, let’s speak our minds and vent our spleens, but let’s not lose ourselves in the process. Rationality and intellectual rigor themselves are currently under attack and someone needs to be setting a healthy example.

[My thanks to Ben Bayer and Greg Salmieri for significant help in revising this post.]

by Jason Rheins

Dr. Smith’s critics were Timothy Sandefur (of the Goldwater Institute), Onkar Ghate (of the Ayn Rand Institute), and Mark Graber (of the University of Maryland’s School of Law).

Mr. Sandefur’s comments took the form of a paper that raises a number of interesting questions about the nature of law and its relation to the language in which laws are expressed, and about how an ideally objective judge (as, for example, Judge Narragansett from Atlas Shrugged) would deal with a number of tricky issues of legal interpretation. Dr. Smith’s reply focused on the issue of the nature of law and its relation to language.

Dr. Ghate’s comments raised questions about the book’s subject matter and basic line of argument. Dr Smith focuses on judicial review in America’s legal system, which she regards as largely objective, and one of the questions Dr. Ghate raised was about what guidance her theory gives judges for dealing with the significant elements in this system that are non-objective (by her standards)—elements such as slavery at the time of America’s founding and the anti-trust laws and welfare state today. He also asked whether any of the theories of judicial review that Smith criticizes attempt to explain how judges should proceed in a less than objective system?

Dr. Graber, who spoke from a detailed outline, rather than a written paper, focused on the role in a legal system of the institutions designed to maintain or realize its principles. He asked what set of institutions would best realize the requirements of an objective legal system as Smith understands them, and suggested that some other forms of government may come nearer than the United States’. He also raised the question of whether protecting rights, which Dr. Smith argues is the basic purpose of an objective legal system, might require a welfare state to prevent exploitation.

Members and Contributors to the Ayn Rand Society can download Sandefur’s and Ghate’s comments, Graber’s outline, and Smith’s responses to all three, from the recent papers section of the Society’s website. They can also access papers from the last three years of ARS sessions. Readers who are interested in becoming members or contributors can do so at our membership and affiliaition page.

Here are a few excerpts from my response:

Kant coopted some of the Enlightenment’s language and used it to defend a purified form of the dogmas that had long been accepted as common sense but were newly under attack. In particular, by defining morality in contradistinction to prudence, Kant gave a new prominence to the idea that morality requires sacrifice. The “freedom” (or “autonomy”) he extols is not the Enlightenment’s freedom to conceive and pursue ambitious, life-affirming goals, nor is it the freedom to follow one’s whims. Rather, it is the ability to obey a morality the entire content of which Kant derives from the notion that there must be something for the sake of which one must be always ready to sacrifice the whole of one’s happiness. Though a softer face is often put on it by present-day Kantians, this point is crucial to his derivation of the first formulation of the categorical imperative.

It is this observation about the structure of Kant’s position, rather any concern about rigidity or heroic amounts of charity, that is the essence of Rand’s objection to Kantian ethics.[8] She recognized that Kantian ethics is flexible in many of the ways White describes, and she did not consider it a point in Kant’s favor. […]

By creating a gulf between morality and prudence, Kant undercut the moral basis for Lockean individual rights, and put in its place a moral framework that entails a different sort of society. Subsequent 19th- and early 20th-century liberals discovered much about the mechanisms of a market economy, and some of them did a great deal to extend freedom to women and racial minorities, but with regard to liberalism’s basic ideological orientation, I think the whole post-Kantian liberal tradition represents a series of steps away from a defense of genuine freedom.

Further responses to White will follow over the next few days from Stephen Hicks (Rockford University) and Roderick Long (Auburn University), both of whom have written knowledgeably about Rand. (For example: Hicks is the author of an excellent entry on her at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Long is co-author of the Rand entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which Ben Bayer posted about on this blog. Then there will be what promises to be an interesting discussion of Kant among the four of us.

• Gregory Salmieri (Anthem Foundation for Objectivist Scholarship/Rutgers University) on editing the volume with the late Allan Gotthelf, and on his contributions to the volume on ethics, especially on Rand’s conception of valuing and her defense of egoism:

• Adam Mossoff (George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School) on his contribution with Fred Miller (University of Arizona) on Rand’s view of rights and capitalism, with special emphasis on her view of intellectual property rights:

• Tara Smith (University of Texas) on her contribution on Rand’s view of objective law, with special emphasis on Smith’s own recent work on this topic:

• Jason Rheins (Loyola University Chicago) on Rand’s metaphysics, with special emphasis on the practical implications of this abstract branch of philosophy, and on the relationship between metaphysics and physics:

• Harry Binswanger (the Ayn Rand Institute) on Rand’s esthetics, including an interesting discussion of how studying philosphy of art helps increase one’s own appreciation for art:

On a related note, it’s worth mentioning one previous interview by the editor of the Companion which this blog has not yet publicized. Check out the Elucidations podcast (produced by grad students at the University of Chicago) interviewing Greg Salmieri about Rand’s ethics, her status as a radical philosopher, and her reception by academic philosophers.

In addition to his usual duties as a law professor, Mossoff co-founded the Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property, an academic center at Mason Law, dedicated to the scholarly analysis of intellectual property rights. Professor Mossoff recently filed an amicus brief on behalf of 13 law professors in a pending case before the Supreme Court, his fifth amicus brief that he filed in patent cases in the last seven months. We think Professor Mossoff is also probably the only person affiliated with the Society who has spoken at CPAC and and testified before both the U.S. Senate and the U.S House of Representatives.

Mossoff presented a paper on Ayn Rand’s theory of intellectual property at our meeting at the December 2009 APA; and he and Fred Miller (Philosophy, University of Arizona) together presented their paper “Ayn Rand’s Theory of Rights: An Exposition and Response to Critics” at the April 2014 ARS session at the San Diego APA (which will appear in the next volume of the Ayn Rand Society Philosphical Studies). Another paper on Rand’s theory of rights, also co-authored by Fred Miller, appears in the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Ayn Rand.

The watchdog.org piece gives a nice overview of Professor Mossoff’s contributions to both his academic field and to the contemporary policy debate. It also underscores how Mossoff sees his contributions as essentially applied philosophy:

He said that reading Ayn Rand at a young age, however, was an important influence on him, as were John Locke’s political theories on property – the same theories that influenced the Founding Fathers. While many tech geeks currently occupying academia have seemingly devoted their careers to furthering Silicon Valley’s agenda, Mossoff’s curiosity and inquisitive love of ideas lead him to study how theory applied to the real world.

Mossoff was also interviewed recently in the student publication The Undercurrent, where he touched on a similar theme, reminiscing on his path to a career in legal academia:

“I never did think I was going to go into academia originally,” explained Mossoff. “I thought, ‘philosophy’s interesting, and it’s something I do for fun, but at the end of the day it’s abstract, I want to be in the real world, on the ground, with business and capitalism, making a million dollars!’ But then I took a legal philosophy seminar as an undergraduate, and I was just blown away by it. I thought, ‘Wow, this is where the theoretical rubber hits the practical road! This is where people are asking deep questions about the application of those abstract ideas and principles.” […]

“I came to realize over that span of time that the legal philosophers, the people I enjoyed reading, and even the ones I disagreed with, they were all law professors. I realized that if I really wanted to continue to do what I wanted to do—to teach, and research and write, to think about making a case for intellectual property as a valid property right—I would need to do it in the field of law as opposed to philosophy. So I jumped ship, I went to law school, and I haven’t looked back since.”

Rather than saying more about my experience with the course (which is still in progress), I’d like to share another example of how I used another chapter (Part I, Chapter 6: “The Non-Commercial”) to discuss an important philosophical theme and relevant figures. I’m sure that when I first read this chapter more than 20 years ago, I would have realized the role of the chapter in heightening the drama between Rearden, Dagny, and Lillian. Who could forget the scene in which Dagny trades her diamond bracelet for Lillian’s bracelet made of Rearden metal? But I’m also sure, like many readers, I did not pay enough attention to the psychological undercurrent of the chapter, which touches on an important issue in moral psychology.

Chapter 6 opens with Hank Rearden, steel industrialist, agonizing over attending his anniversary party. Looking into a mirror, he recalls his wife’s efforts at inducing guilt over his love for his work, which he likens to membership in a “dark religion” (123). Rearden says to himself that he has a duty to serve his wife and to attend the party, but even still he can find no motivation to attend and he cannot feel the guilt his wife wants him to feel. This perplexes Rearden, because “throughout his life, whenever he became convinced that a course of action was right, the desire to follow it had come automatically” (126).

Why, if this generalization is true, does Rearden still does not feel any motivation to attend? My students suggest that perhaps he does not really think he has that duty. Perhaps they’re on to something. This opening scene sounds the first notes of a leitmotif that will arise numerous times throughout the chapter. Though I note that the chapter deals with a number of other important philosophical issues, it is very interesting to notice this chapter’s treatment of the relationship between reason and emotion.

In spite of his anxiety, Rearden forces himself to attend the party and after dodging a number of guests, he finds refuge at a window looking out over the countryside:

He stood, looking out. Far in the distance, the red glow of Rearden Steel moved in the sky. He watched it for a moment’s relief.

He turned to look at the drawing room. He had never liked his house; it had been Lillian’s choice. But tonight, the shifting colors of the evening dresses drowned out the appearance of the room and gave it an air of brilliant gaiety. He liked to see people being gay, even though he did not understand this particular manner of enjoyment.

He looked at the flowers, at the sparks of light on the crystal glasses, at the naked arms and shoulders of women. There was a cold wind outside, sweeping empty stretches of land. He saw the thin branches of a tree being twisted, like arms waving in an appeal for help. The tree stood against the glow of the mills.

He could not name his sudden emotion. He had no words to state its cause, its quality, its meaning. Some part of it was joy, but it was solemn like the act of baring one’s head—he did not know to whom (131).

Soon Rearden meets Francisco d’Anconia (for the first time), and Francisco proposes what Rearden has just been thinking:

“It’s a terrible night for any animal caught unprotected on that plain,” said Francisco d’Anconia. “This is when one should appreciate the meaning of being a man.”

“Funny. . . […] You told me what I was thinking just a while ago […] only I didn’t have the words for it.”

“Shall I tell you the rest of the words? […] You stood here and watched the storm with the greatest pride one can ever feel—because you are able to have summer flowers and half-naked women in your house on a night like this, in demonstration of your victory over that storm. And if it weren’t for you, most of those who are here would be left helpless at the mercy of that wind in the middle of some such plain” (140-141).

Francisco draws attention to the fact that Rearden’s feeling is not an accident. He’s been standing at a window, comparing the gay interior of his home to the stormy scene outside (which stands in further contrast to the warm glow of his mills). I mention to my students that Rearden is not the first to have felt such a feeling. Many poets and philosophers have experienced a variation on this feeling, often calling it “the sublime.” One famous theorist about the sublime, Edmund Burke, described it in 1757: “When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are, delightful, as we every day experience.”

Travelers often feel a kind of aesthetic pleasure when gaping at a vast desert or towering mountain. The Romantic poets confused it with a mystical, religious experience. But Burke is right that the pleasure is a function of distance, of one’s removal from the threat posed by natural forces. When the threat is still real, it is difficult to experience the pleasure. Puritan settlers in New England saw the wilderness as devilish. An early visitor to Pike’s Peak, now celebrated for its natural beauty, described it as “dreary” and “desolate.” What made Burke’s distance on such terrible things possible? The Romantic poets did not come to revere the terrible in nature as beautiful until after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Often they were themselves city dwellers who could appreciate the contrast between civilization and nature. Rearden’s version of this feeling is especially pronounced: unlike the ordinary city dweller who would take comfort in being separated by the window from the storm, Rearden has built the mills that made his house and this party possible. Francisco’s explanation suggests that the quasi-religious emotion Rearden is feeling does not involve baring his head to God or to nature, but to himself.

By having Francisco offer an explanation for Rearden’s feeling by reference to his thoughts, Rand is expressing a key point of her moral psychology, her view that emotions are “the automatic results of man’s value judgments integrated by his subconscious” (VOS, pg. 27). This view will come to play a key role in Rand’s views on mind-body integration, an even more central theme in Atlas Shrugged. But it is a view that stands in stark contrast to the views expressed by the intellectuals in attendance at Rearden’s party. Dr. Pritchett gives the standard romantic explanation of the feeling of the sublime, that man is “of no importance whatever in the vast scheme of the universe” (127). He says that reason is a “superstition” while instinct is our only guide to living (128).

Borrowing again from Greg Salmieri’s syllabus, I had also asked my students to read a selection from David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature. They notice that there is some similarity between Pritchett’s views of reason and Hume’s: for Hume, passion is an “original existence,” neither to be evaluated nor influenced by reason, and reason is (infamously) “the slave of the passions.” Reason can only discover means to the ends that are determined by raw passion. It cannot evaluate the ends: it cannot derive an “ought” from an “is.”

Appropriately, “The Non-Commercial” illustrates the consequences of taking Hume’s idea seriously, not just on a personal level but interpersonally: it shows the variety of ways in which Rearden’s reason is being made the slave of the unevaluated passions of others. Rearden’s thought and effort is shown as having made possible this house for his family and this party for the irrationalist intellectuals who swallow canapes as they bite the hand that feeds them. Even the remnant of the melody of Richard Halley’s Fourth Concerto has been exploited to give form to Mort Liddy’s’s pop score for Heaven’s In Your Backyard.

Francisco has drawn attention to how Rearden is carrying the burden of his family, whom Rearden himself describes as “miserable children.” He says he has approached Rearden “to give [him] the words [he] needs, for the time when [he’ll] need them,” just as he’s given Rearden the words to explain his feeling about the storm (141-142). Indeed, as we discovered at the beginning of the chapter, Rearden needs to understand the words behind his dedication to his work, and his inability to feel guilty about the same.

Rearden is probably the most psychologically complex character in Atlas Shrugged. We learn more at the end of this chapter about his view about his own sexual psychology. After encounters with women who accepted sex as only a “casual pleasure,” he had come to hate his sexual desire, thinking that it was “wholly physical, a desire, not of consciousness, but of matter […] [a] choice impervious to the will of his mind” (152). Rearden unwittingly shares Hume’s (and Plato’s) theory of the emotions: they are nothing but blind animal instincts to which he the rational man is nothing but a “slave.”

How, then, does the end of the chapter help challenge Rearden’s (and Hume’s) theory of the emotions? Rearden himself, at the beginning of the chapter, has noticed that he is usually motivated to do what he thinks is right. And then standing at the window, Francisco explains his feeling about the storm. The chapter even portrays one important way in which Rearden’s feelings change as his thinking changes. Students remember the end of the chapter, where he is once again standing at a window, wondering why Lillian had married him. He remembers that his desire for Lillian had died in the first week of their marriage, when he learned that she is not the woman she represented herself to be, someone who made his own feeling for his work visible to him (152-153). And after he has seen Dagny take the bracelet from Lillian at the party, his sexual psychology is refocused: until now he had still come to Lillian for sex, but now he is free of the desire completely and feels only revulsion for her (153).

As I’ve mentioned, there’s much more going on in this chapter. The chapter title (“The Non-Commercial”) casts light on the contrast between the allegedly non-spiritual commercialists (Rearden and Dagny) and the allegedly spiritual intellectuals and artists at the party. Paradoxically, the chapter presents the commercialists as having deep emotional lives, while the “non-commercialists” are superficial. Rearden views his work in religious terms (though he still sees it as a “dark” religion), he experiences quasi-religious emotions about his material success, and his sexual feelings become refocused on Dagny, who is able to appreciate, in a way Lillian cannot, the sentimental value of a Rearden metal bracelet, which is, as Onkar Ghate puts it, “a material symbol of a supreme spiritual accomplishment.” Of course everyone, whether a commercialist or a “non-commercialist,” has emotions. One thing that may distinguish the ones in this chapter is the extent to which they are willing to evaluate their emotions, a possibility this chapter helps us to examine.

by Ben Bayer

Though Cummins does not acknowledge the faults in her earlier piece or directly address the best criticisms of it, the new piece is a modest improvement. It quotes from a wider and more representative range of Rand’s writings, including some that show Rand’s appreciation of the value of society and cooperation—something that Cummins had ignored or denied in her earlier piece. Moreover, Cummins raises some points that fans of Rand may do well to consider, if they haven’t already. For example, to counter Rand’s view that socialism is necessarily destructive, Cummins observes that the countries that are regarded as most prosperous today “incorporate generous social programs with capitalist democracies.” (This issue has been addressed in various forms by Yaron Brook and Carl Svanburg at the Ayn Rand Institute, and by other anti-socialist authors, such as Peter Stein and Johan Norberg at the Cato Institute.)

However, Cummins still gets Rand wrong on a number of points, and I think she does so because she isn’t really interested in getting her right. This is a common problem when people write about those whom they regard as ideological enemies. They come at the enemy’s texts with a preconceived idea of what she thinks, why she thinks it, and how her view can be refuted; and then they look for passages that cohere with this, rather than approaching the texts with the question “What does this person think and why?” Cummins has Rand pigeon-holed as a thinker of a certain sort, who occupies a certain foolish position in a familiar debate about egoism and altruism, and she shows no interest in testing that hypothesis, or (better) in putting the hypothesis aside temporarily to see what emerges from a straightforward reading of the texts. This is a mistake we all have to work hard not to fall into when addressing authors whose views we regard as opposite to our own.

What does Cummins get wrong about Rand and what’s the evidence that she doesn’t care to get her right?

Notice how little attention Cummins pays to the issue of how Rand understands the terms “selfishness” and “altruism.” This is especially disappointing because readers had raised questions about this in connection with Cummins’s earlier piece, and because Rand often signals (including in a passage Cummins quotes) that she thinks that there is something misleading or distorted in the conventional understanding of these terms. Rand tells us what she means by “altruism” in a sentence (from her article “Faith and Force”) that immediately precedes a passage Cummins quotes. “Altruism” is the “moral code” that holds that:

[M]an has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his own existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest duty, virtue and value.

Cummins compares Rand’s view of altruism unfavorably to theories concerning “altruistic” behavior in non-human organisms, such as the “reciprocal altruism” discussed by Robert Trivers. But since Rand thinks of altruism as a moral theory, and (like many philosophers) thinks that morality applies only in the case of the freely willed actions of rational creatures, it’s clear that most of what is called “altruism” (reciprocal or otherwise) in biology is not the sort of thing that Rand could mean by that term.

Cummins is right that there is a parallel between the sorts of behaviors Trivers calls “reciprocal altruism” that exist even in non-human species and a kind of human interaction that Rand endorses—namely, dealing with others by voluntary interaction from which each party expects to benefit. But Trivers’ work does not relate to Rand’s view in the way that Cummins assumes.

There is a risk in any trade that one party will not hold up his end of the deal, thereby securing all of the benefits of the interaction and placing all of the costs on the other party. Cummins asserts that Rand’s reason for embracing selfishness is that Rand thought selfishness was “the best protection” against such exploitation. But Cummins doesn’t quote or cite any passages in which Rand reasons along these lines, and there are none to quote, because although Rand did think that altruism is exploitative, such breaches of contract are not the sort of exploitation she has primarily in mind; and, in any case, her opposition to altruism is not Rand’s central reason for being an egoist.

Cummins seems to think that both Rand’s egoism and her political views are based on her rejecting or being ignorant of the point that cooperative people can overcome the threat of exploiters by excluding people who have shown themselves to be exploiters “from subsequent cooperative ventures.” Cummins credits this point to Trivers, who mathematically modeled the effect of such exclusion in an evolutionary context, but the basic insight has been well known since prehistory, and Rand certainly didn’t disagree with it. On the contrary, Rand regarded justice as an essential virtue, because, by making and acting on rational moral judgments of others, we encourage virtue (including, but not limited to, honoring one’s agreements) and we discourage vice (including, but not limited to fraud) and minimize its impacts on us. Rand saw boycotts as an example of this principle, and the plot of Atlas Shrugged turns on a grand-scale example of it.

Cummins’ Rand, having failed to appreciate that exploiters could be punished by ostracism, concludes that “the primary role of the government [is] to arbitrate and enforce such contracts.” In fact the passage Cummins quotes to support this claim says only that interpreting and enforcing contracts is “one of the most important” functions of government, not its primary function; and it doesn’t give as a reason for this that the government is the only factor that plays any role in protecting people from bad deals. This is one area in which Rand’s view isn’t unconventional: like almost everyone else, Rand (as Cummins puts it) “expected government to play a role in maintaining fairness in market transactions.”

In an odd non sequitur, Cummins goes on to criticize Rand for endorsing laissez-faire capitalism—a system that Cummins holds responsible for, among other ills, the 2008 financial crisis. It should go without saying that the world financial system prior to the crash was not the “full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism” that Rand extolled. But it lacked a few regulations that some opponents of laissez-faire think should have in place, and many of these opponents think this lack contributed to the crisis. Some attribute the less-regulated character of the market to Alan Greenspan on whom Rand was a major influence. So, if the lack of the relevant regulations played a role in the crisis, a case could be made that Rand deserves part of the blame. But even supposing that Rand’s opposition to economic regulation was a costly mistake, how is it supposed to be related to her failure to recognize (as Trivers did) that organisms can reap the benefits of cooperation without the fear of endemic exploitation? If the point that we can effectively punish bad actors by refusing to deal with them is relevant to the issue of markets at all, isn’t it because it suggests that markets can be self-correcting, and therefore that they need little or no external government regulation?

Cummins goes on to cite additional criticisms of laissez-faire, to bemoan the alleged fact that “incarnations of John Galt continue to dominate economic policy” and to quote Elizabeth Warren to the effect that no one is solely responsible for his success. She concludes that even if some people do create fortunes on their own, they ought to share them because otherwise the masses may revolt and seize them and because “wealth must be distributed to keep the wheels of commerce turning.” Whatever merit there may be to any of these considerations, they are not arguments that Rand made some crucial error about human nature that’s led to economic collapse. They’re not real attempts on Cummins’ part to engage with a worldview contrary to her own. Instead, they’re presentations of her own reasons for opposing laissez-faire juxtaposed with indications that Rand held a contrary position. One can’t do everything in every piece, and there’s nothing wrong with a piece opposing laissez-faire that mentions a few of its advocates peripherally, without engaging with their arguments, but such a piece wouldn’t be about Rand, as Cummins’s purports to be.

Rand seems to be a pet peeve of Cummins’s recently. In another, overlapping blog post at Psychology Today, she argues that Rand is wrong on a number of issues: that people are born tabula rasa, that non-human animals cannot reason abstractly or transmit knowledge socially, that altruism leads inexorably to self-destruction, and that “the primary role of government is promoting laissez-faire capitalism.” There are good questions (all of which have been raised by others and some of which I may take up in another post) about whether some of Rand’s views about human nature are compatible with certain conclusions that many now take to have been established by cognitive psychology. But Cummins’s stated point in this article is to show how alleged errors in Rand’s theory of human nature account for her allegedly mistaken political views and for alleged failures that occur when her thought is put into practice. But Cummins shows no understanding of—and no real interest in—how the various views she criticizes actually relate in Rand’s thinking. What we see in Cummins’s musings on Rand is not a genuine attempt to diagnose the causes of some ghastly influence Rand has had on the world. These pieces, like much of what gets written about Rand, are just griping about a thinker that the author wishes would go away. It’s the same approach we find in the mocking video in which John Oliver wonders how Ayn Rand is “still a thing.”

Such pieces are vehicles through which those who find Rand distasteful can commiserate with one another and preen over their own erudition, without engaging people who think differently or contributing to any productive inquiry. Sure, there’s some combing through a few of Rand’s articles to find passages to gripe about, and there may even occasionally be decent arguments about stray points, but there isn’t any real intellectual engagement—no attempt to identify and evaluate the theses, arguments, and themes that so many readers find enlightening and inspiring in Rand’s works. The frequency of such gripes, especially in the last several years, attests to the enduring place Rand has earned in American thought. It is high time that those who find her ideas uncongenial accept this fact and begin treating her accordingly.

The classic treatment of the arbitrary in the Objectivist literature is Leonard Peikoff’s 1991 book Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (OPAR), which has a section (163–171) titled: “The Arbitrary as Neither True nor False.” Here’s an excerpt:

An arbitrary claim is not merely an unwarranted effusion. By demanding one’s consideration in defiance of all the requirements of reason, it becomes an affront to reason and to the science of epistemology. In the absence of evidence, there is no way to consider any idea, on any subject. There is no way to reach a cognitive verdict, favorable or otherwise, about a statement to which logic, knowledge, and reality are irrelevant. There is nothing the mind can do to or with such a phenomenon except sweep it aside.

An arbitrary idea must be given the exact treatment its nature demands. One must treat it as though nothing had been said. The reason is that, cognitively speaking, nothing has been said. One cannot allow into the realm of cognition something that repudiates every rule of that realm.

None of the concepts formed to describe human knowledge can be applied to the arbitrary; none of the classifications of epistemology can be usurped in its behalf. Since it has no relation to evidence, an arbitrary statement cannot be subsumed under concepts that identify different amounts of evidence; it cannot be described as “possible,” “probable,” or “certain.” (These concepts are discussed in the next section.) Similarly, such a statement cannot be subsumed under concepts that identify different relations between an idea and reality. An arbitrary statement is neither “true” nor ‘false.” (Peikoff, OPAR 164–165)

OPAR, which was published 9 years after Rand’s death, is not something Rand did or could have endorsed as a presentation of her own ideas, but the book is based on a 1976 lecture series by Peikoff that she endorsed as “the only authorized presentation of the entire theoretical structure of Objectivism, i.e., the only one that I know of my own knowledge to be fully accurate” (“A Last Survey” ARL 4:3 387). The material on the arbitrary can be found in lecture 6, which can be heard or read for free on the Ayn Rand Institute’s site. (The relevant portion begins at 30:30 in the MP3 file.) Here’s an excerpt:

Now, if you understand what we mean by the concept of truth and falsehood, you’ll see why the arbitrary is outside of either concept. Observe the differences. True and false are assessments within the field of human cognition. And they designate a relationship, positive or negative, correspondence or contradiction, a relationship between an idea and reality. The arbitrary, by contrast, is devoid of any relationship to reality at all. It is the wanton, the causeless, the baseless, and as such, it cannot be judged as true or false. It is devoid of any epistemological status. It is outside the realm of cognitive endeavor all together.

Rand was present at the lecture and answers a question on the arbitrary in the Q&A at the end, but the question she addresses does not deal specifically with the point that an arbitrary assertion is neither true nor false, which is the one aspect of Peikoff’s exposition of the view that is not explicit in any earlier Objectivist literature.

Peikoff (in the 1976 lecture) tells us that he “makes[s] a big issue” of the arbitrary, in order to repudiate “agnosticism”—the view that one must treat as possible any claim that one cannot positively disprove. We find points similar to Peikoff’s in Nathaniel Branden’s article on “Agnosticism” in the April 1963 issue of The Objectivist Newsletter:

In the pursuit of knowledge, there is no place for whims. Every claim, statement or proposition has to be based on the facts of reality; nothing may be claimed causelessly, groundlessly, arbitrarily.

Even a hypothesis has to have some factual basis, some factual evidence indicating that it might be true. A hypothesis based on nothing but a blind guess is not admissible into rational consideration.

Rand herself makes the point that rational hypotheses are based on evidence in “The Psychology of Psychologizing” (Voice of Reason 24) and The Art of Nonfiction (89). And Robert Efron, in his review of Hansel’s E.S.P.: A Scientific Evaluation (The Objectivist 6:3), says: “Any attempt to disprove an assertion for which no positive evidence is provided, sanctions the legitimacy of the unsupported assertion and the use which may be made of your failure to disprove that assertion.” Thus to make the attempt is “to invite an epistemological disaster.” But Branden’s 1963 presentation goes deeper than this point to explain why such assertions must be dismissed:

When a person makes an assertion for which no rational grounds are given, his statement is—epistemologically—without cognitive content. It is as though nothing had been said.

And this implies the point, which Peikoff would later make explicit, that arbitrary claims are neither true nor false. For if nothing has been said, there is nothing to be true or false.

Readers who are puzzled by this idea point to sentences that might be asserted arbitrarily but that they have no difficulty telling are true or false. (We can see examples of this in the comments.) But to respond that way is to think that the meaning of a proposition somehow resides intrinsically in the concatenation of sounds or marks by which it is expressed, and this is not the case. In both the 1976 lecture and in OPAR, Peikoff likens arbitrary claims to word-like sounds squawked by a parrot and writing-like marks that might be made by the wind. Either might produce a result that, if written or spoken by a person, could express knowledge, but considered simply as the effects of parrots or wind that they are, these effects express nothing at all. They have no content.

Peikoff’s example of the parrot squawks evokes Rand’s earlier uses of this same in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (1966) and “The Comprachicos” (1970):

Learning to speak does not consist of memorizing sounds—that is the process by which a parrot learns to “speak.” Learning consists of grasping meanings, i.e., of grasping the referents of words, the kinds of existents that words denote in reality. In this respect, the learning of words is an invaluable accelerator of a child’s cognitive development, but it is not a substitute for the process of concept-formation; nothing is. (ITOE 20)

An error of that kind [viz. holding that wider concepts have less cognitive content than narrower ones] is possible only on the basis of assuming that man learns concepts by memorizing their definitions, i.e., on the basis of studying the epistemology of a parrot. But that is not what we are here studying. To grasp a concept is to grasp and, in part, to retrace the process by which it was formed. To retrace that process is to grasp at least some of the units which it subsumes (and thus to link one’s understanding of the concept to the facts of reality). (ITOE 27)

Ideas, i.e., abstractions, have no reality to [a perceptual-level mentality]: abstractions involve the past and the future, as well as the present; nothing is fully real to him except the present. Concepts, in his mind, become percepts—percepts of people uttering sounds; and percepts end when the stimuli vanish. When he uses words, his mental operations are closer to those of a parrot than of a human being. In the strict sense of the word, he has not learned to speak. (“The Comprachicos” ROTP 77)

In all three passages, Rand makes the point that people often function with words in a manner that is essentially non-cognitive. In proper human cognition, words stand for concepts, which are vehicles of integration—a complex cognitive process that must be initiated and sustained. It is only insofar as they play their proper role in this process that words are meaningful at all. When and to the extent that a person fails to perform this process, cognition is replaced by a sort of aping or parroting, in which there is no genuine meaning and no genuine thoughts.

The difference between this sort of functioning and genuinely cognitive (or rational) functioning is a central idea in Rand’s thought. We can see it for example in The Fountainhead’s portrayal of secondhanders, in the idea that “an unfocused mind is not conscious” in “the sense of the word applicable to man” (VOS 22), and in Rand’s view that irrational people do not have values. (On this point, see especially my Chapter 3 in A Companion to Ayn Rand.) The idea that arbitrary assertions are not meaningful (and, therefore, that the alternative of truth vs. falsity does not apply to them) is just another application of this idea.

The idea also illustrates why Rand thought that a theory of concepts is central to epistemology. Whereas most philosophers treat the meaningfulness of propositions and concepts as something separate from and prior to the question of how we can know (or be justified in believing) that a proposition is true, Rand thought of the process of forming, maintaining, and applying concepts as the essential process by which we know the world. This is a rational, evidence-intensive process that is guided by epistemology. And it is only in connection with this process that propositions come about and are meaningful. (For more on this issue, see my “Conceptualization and Justification” in Concepts and Their Role In Knowledge, esp. 62–64.) Because of this, semantics cannot be separated from epistemology: violations of epistemic norms compromise the meaningfulness of one’s concepts and propositions, and to indulge in the arbitrary is to flout epistemology as such.

But this does not mean that arbitrary assertions will strike a listener (or the speaker) as mere noise. There are two reasons for this, both of which can be seen by the analogy to parrot squawkings. First, though the sounds a parrot emits do not stand for concepts in the parrot’s mind, as the words spoken by a rational person do, the sounds are evidently associated with various memories, images, feelings, and expectations, all of which prompt the parrot to make the relevant sounds in certain circumstances (e.g., in response to certain prompts) and not in others. Likewise for someone engaged in arbitrary speech (or in an arbitrary internal monologue). The process taking place in him is essentially different from the rational process on which Rand argues genuine thought depends, and so the words are not functioning as symbols of concepts, but the sounds may continue to be rich in associations, some of which may derive from the genuine (cognitive) meaning that the sounds convey when used rationally. Thus, when one indulges in the arbitrary, one’s utterances do not feel to one like nonsense—nor, however, do they feel like genuine cognition. Second, though arbitrary utterances and parrot squawkings are both meaningless in their own right, they may well be repetitions of statements that were meaningful when made by someone in some context, and often the sounds can prompt a hearer to reconstruct the context in which they were meaningful. When hearing an arbitrary assertion, we can generously supply the sort of cognitive context and types of reasons that it would presuppose if it were made as a rational judgment. However, if we do this, in the natural course of working with the judgment, we will find that we need to probe into these reasons, and we’ll soon find that they’re not really there and the claim becomes a sort of amorphous moving target.

One final point. Entertaining arbitrary assertions should not be confused with fantasizing. Fantasizing—the process of imagining situations and thinking about what would follow if they were the case—is a normal and necessary part of human mental life, which is made possible by cognition and can assist it. Concepts can be meaningfully used in this process (or else fiction would be impossible). But someone who is (properly) fantasizing does not regard the products of his imagination as real or present them to others as such. Such intrusions of fantasy into cognition would be cases of entertaining the arbitrary, and at the point that one does it one’s thinking is compromised and the meanings of one’s terms become progressively indeterminate. Things presented as counterexamples to the point that the arbitrary is meaningless are often simply fantasized scenarios, which, so long as they are treated as such, are non-arbitrary and wholly meaningful. To test the claim that they lose their meaning when asserted arbitrarily, you have to try to treat them as genuine hypotheses and to work with them as such. When one does, it quickly becomes indeterminate what they mean, and what follows from them.

To see what’s wrong with this line of reasoning, suppose that someone tells you that he is a “sexual liberationist” and asks if you are too. When you ask what that term means, he responds that a sexual liberationist is someone opposed to the criminalization of sex. “The term applies,” he goes on to say, “to anyone who thinks that all sex, or at least consensual sex, should be legal.” “At least consensual sex?” you ask, and a dialogue ensues.

“Yes, there are some sexual liberationists who believe that all sex should be legal, including molesting children, sex with people who are unconscious, and sex with unwilling people at gun point. Those are the radical sexual liberationists. Moderate sexual liberationists don’t go so far. They’re opposed to laws against premarital sex or sodomy, but they don’t oppose laws against rape. Despite this difference, both types are by definition sexual liberationists, because they both think that sex should be legal at least when it’s consensual.

“I think it’s high time that sexual liberationists look past these factional differences and work together to fight the prudish laws that are still on the books in many places. I’ve heard you object to sodomy laws and the like, so whatever you think about rape and pedophilia, you’re clearly a sexual liberationist. Would you like to join my sexual liberationist organization and fight with us for a future where we can all bed whomever we like without fear of prosecution?

“But there’s a huge difference,” you reply, “between a future in which I’m free to sleep with any consenting adult and one in which I’m ‘free’ to rape people and they’re ‘free’ to rape me!”

“I grant that there is a difference, and, though I lean towards the more radical form of sexual liberationism myself, I dither on the issue; sometimes I find myself thinking more along moderate lines. In any case, I’m firmly convinced that we need to move in the direction of sexual liberation and repeal as much mandatory prudery as possible.”

“But legalizing consensual sex between adults and legalizing rape aren’t movements ‘in the same direction’ at all. The former is a movement towards sexual freedom in that it gives the individual greater control over his own sex life; the latter is a movement away from sexual freedom in that it would empower others to have sex with him against his will.”

“That’s one of the arguments that moderate sexual liberationists often marshal against radicals, and I concede that it has some force. But there are also powerful arguments on the extremist side; for example, some argue that rape would be less common in a society in which it wasn’t against the law. There are few things I find more invigorating than a spirited argument with a fellow sexual liberationist such as yourself.”

“Please stop calling me that.”

“Why?”

“Because I think this idea that rape should (or even maybe should) be legalized is monstrous. It makes it clear that what you advocate isn’t anything that I can recognize as genuine sexual freedom, so I don’t want any part of your coalition.”

“I understand that you’re a proponent of the rape laws, and I respect that this is a significant difference between us, and that you feel strongly about it, but why would this make you deny the obvious truth that you’re a sexual liberationist. After all, by definition, anyone who opposes laws against sex at least when it’s consensual is a sexual liberationist, and you oppose laws against consensual sex, so you’re a sexual liberationist like me, whatever other points we may disagree on.”

There is no need and no excuse for the term “sexual liberationist,” as it is used by this interlocutor. The term is what Rand called a “package-deal” — a pseudo-concept that groups together items that are essentially opposite. It evades or trivializes the distinction between consensual and non-consensual relationships, without which the concept of “freedom” (sexual or otherwise) loses all meaning. The fact that one can produce a definition for “sexual liberationist” from which it can be deduced that the term applies to certain individuals does nothing to redeem the term. It does not show that the term represents a reasonable way of classifying positions (much less that any particular person or position is reasonably described by it).

The same points apply to the concept “libertarianism” which groups together anarchism with the view (held by Objectivists among others) that the sole proper function of the government is to protect individual rights. In so doing, the term distorts the latter view, re-conceiving it as a sort of neutered anarchism (often called “minarchism”).

Before anyone accuses me of attacking a straw man, let me acknowledge that most anarchist philosophers deplore rape and think that it should be fought by all the moral means available, and those anarchists who think (mistakenly, in my view) that a sort of rule of law is possible in the absence of government certainly view rape as something that should be illegal. So my point isn’t that legalizing rape is an anarchist position. My point is, rather, that the standard argument that Objectivists, anarchists, and sundry others are all libertarians has the same structure as the argument that you, rape-law abolitionists, and others are all “sexual liberationists.” Both arguments beg the question by insisting on a certain definition when what is at issue is whether the definiendum is a valid concept.

If the “sexual liberationist” wants to persuade you to accept his terminology, he cannot take it for granted that legalizing rape is anything like repealing laws against consensual sex acts; rather, he must attempt to show that there is some basis for grouping together the advocacy of these very different things.

Likewise, if someone wants to persuade us to classify anarchists and Objectivists (along with Von Mises, Nozick, and others) as “libertarians,” he needs to have something substantive to say about how the view that government has a specific proper function is of a piece with the view that government as such is immoral and should be dispensed with.

I’m not denying that there are significant philosophical affinities and historical relationships among many of the thinkers and views called “libertarian.” But I don’t see that there is any essential similarity between Rand’s position (to which I subscribe) and anarchism, and I deny that there is any legitimate concept that classifies these views together as a kind of political theory. However, my point here isn’t to show that there is no such concept, but to show why the burden of proof belongs to those who say there is.

For my part, the only cognitive value I see in the term “libertarian” is as a name for a loose movement. Central to the movement it names is an intertwining of incompatible views that has been caused by a series of confusions and sociological factors. In this respect, it is like the concepts “conservative” and “liberal,” as they’re used in contemporary American political discourse.

Addendum added 3/13/3016:

This piece is specifically about the propriety of having a concept “libertarian” that includes both anarchists and proponents of a rights-respecting government. How and whether proponents of rights-respecting government ought to interact with anarchists or with “libertarian” organizations that include anarchists and non-anarchists is a separate, but related question. I did not intend to address that question here, but since a few people asked me about it, I’ll just indicate my view. I think it’s akin to the question of how proponents of rights-respecting government should interact with “liberals” and with “conservatives.” Both of those concepts (as they’re understood today) are package-deals. “Liberalism” merges such positions as opposition to racism and defense of equality before the law with collectivism, and “conservativism” merges a respect for economic freedom with authoritarianism, religiosity, and tradition-worship. In both of these movements, I can think of people who are primarily motivated by the elements in the package that I think are correct. And, in all cases, I think the package has negative effects on their thinking, even about these positive elements. In some cases the effects are subtle, and I still think that the people are essentially on the right side of the issue. In other cases, I think the effects are more profound.

Thus whether a self-professed “liberal” or “conservative” or “libertarian” person or organization is an ally has to be determined separately with respect to each issue and each person (or organization). If a person or organization is not an ideological ally (either in general or on some issue), it means that one should not collaborate with them in advocacy. But this does not preclude there from being value to other forms of interaction. There can be great value in discussions, especially in public forums, between people whose ideas are fundamentally opposed. By bringing out the differences between the views, such exchanges can help both parties to clarify their own thinking, and they can help audience members to make up their minds between the alternative views. This point applies to anarchists no less (though also no more) than to Marxists or religionists. However, I think that one of the preconditions for such exchanges being productive is that one make clear that one regards the difference between the views as fundamental, rather than as minute disagreement among people whose views are essentially aligned. The term “libertarian,” as it is too often used, creates the latter impression with respect to the disagreement between anarchists and proponents of a right-protecting government. And for this reason, people who regard the difference as essential should not use the term in their own voice and without qualification.

It’s unfortunate that there isn’t a term that unambiguously identifies our political position, but this is a symptom of the state of contemporary political thought — including the tragic fact that the anti-statist movements of the 1960’s and `70’s were largely co-opted by religionists and anarchists. Given this fact, proponents of rights-protecting government need either to reclaim one of the old words (by insisting that statists are not truly liberals, or that theocrats are not truly conservatives or that anarchists are not truly libertarians), to coin a new term, or to make due for the time being with descriptive phrases like Rand’s “Radicals for capitalism.” (That phrase too is sometimes used by anarchists, but it’s so associated with Rand, who was so vocal in her opposition to anarchism, that I don’t think it’s a problem.)

First, the connection to Rand. In the following passage from Atlas Shrugged, Eddie Willers, assistant to Dagny Taggart, breaks the news that a government scientific agency has issued a warning about the safety of a metal that Dagny is using to build an important railroad line:

“They . . . You’d have to read it.” He pointed to the newspaper he had left on her desk. “They haven’t said that Rearden Metal is bad. They haven’t said that it’s unsafe. What they’ve done is . . .” His hands spread and dropped in a gesture of futility.

She saw at a glance what they had done. She saw the sentences: “It may be possible that after a period of heavy usage, a sudden fissure may appear, though the length of this period cannot be predicted. . . . The possibility of a molecular reaction, at present unknown, cannot be entirely discounted. . . . Although the tensile strength of the metal is obviously demonstrable, certain questions in regard to its behavior under unusual stress are not to be ruled out. . . . Although there is no evidence to support the contention that the use of the metal should be prohibited, a further study of its properties would be of value.”

“We can’t fight it. It can’t be answered,” Eddie was saying slowly. “We can’t demand a retraction. We can’t show them our tests or prove anything. They’ve said nothing. They haven’t said a thing that could be refuted and embarrass them professionally. It’s the job of a coward. You’d expect it from some con-man or blackmailer. But, Dagny! It’s the State Science Institute!” (pg. 174)

This is one of the first indications in Rand’s work of what would later become a distinctively Objectivist approach to a standard issue in logic, the burden of proof. Who has the burden of proof in a dispute? The person making the claim, or the person who would challenge it? The traditional answer in logic texts is that it is the one making the claim, and Rand agreed. But she added two important clarifications.

First, it is evidence that gives claims their cognitive content, such that without it, there is no claim to be assessed: such “arbitrary” claims are neither true nor false. Second, as a consequence, the burden of proof applies not only to claims asserted with certainty (e.g. “X is true”) but also to claims with weaker assertive force (e.g., “possibly X is true”). This is precisely the problem with the statement from the State Science Institute. Because it speaks of “possibilities” not supported by evidence, it hasn’t said anything that can be confirmed or refuted.

Arbitrary “maybes” of this sort are tools not only of the skeptics in epistemology but also of conspiracy theorists. So Rand’s view denying the cognitive status of such claims is an important part of her critique of contemporary philosophical methodology, and an important addition to a healthy ethics of belief.

To my knowledge, Rand never wrote at length on this topic in her nonfiction philosophical work. But she did comment on “arbitrary hypotheses” (“What if?” propositions without evidence) in the the workshops conducted on Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (see pg. 306 of the second edition appendix), calling the reliance on these hypotheses the “dead end of human epistemology,” and “a mind-destroyer.”

Rand’s students would later elaborate on the theory she passed down through oral tradition. An early statement of the theory is in Leonard Peikoff’s “Maybe You’re Wrong” (April 1981, The Objectivist Forum), but the locus classicus is Peikoff’s statement in Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (1991) describing the nature of arbitrary claims as neither true nor false and the contextual nature of certainty (pp. 163-181). Here’s a representative sample:

A conclusion is “possible” if there is some, but not much, evidence in favor of it, and nothing known that contradicts it. . . . There are countless gratuitous claims in regard to which one cannot cite any contradictory fact, because they are inherently detached from facts; this does not confer on such claims any cognitive status. For an idea to qualify as “possible,” there must be a certain amount of evidence that actually supports it. If there is no such evidence, the idea falls under a different concept: not “possible,” but “arbitrary.” (176)

I should also mention that very recently, Harry Binswanger has elaborated in detail on his understanding of the burden of proof in his recently published How We Know: Epistemology on an Objectivist Foundation (TOF Publications, 2014, pp. 279-292).

Now I’d like to briefly draw attention to surprising places where philosophers who likely did not know about Rand are starting to catch up with this distinctively Objectivist proposal.

Though they were some of the few to do it, Objectivists were not the only twentieth century philosophers to require evidence of possibility claims. In my research I’ve discovered that a number of mid-century ordinary language philosophers did as well. These include J.L. Austin in “Other Minds” and, more extensively, Norman Malcolm in his essay “The Verification Argument” (in Knowledge and Certainty, Cornell 1975). But few other philosophers seem to have paid attention to Austin and Malcolm on this point. One notable exception is the work of the late Jonathan Adler, whose book Belief’s Own Ethics (MIT Press, 2002) devotes an entire chapter to applying the burden of proof principle to “possibility.”

Very recently, philosophers working in both epistemology and semantics have come to realize that the question of what separates epistemic possibility from other types of modality deserves more attention. They recognize that it is not enough for a claim to be free of formal contradictions to count as epistemically possible; it must also bear a distinctive relationship to a body of knowledge. But they are vexed as to the nature of the relationship. Most who are party to the debate maintain that the relationship is merely negative: a claim is epistemically possible if it is not ruled out by what we know. The dispute is then over which body of knowledge and whose knowledge is to count. A representative sample of the current debate in semantics is to be found in Andy Egan and Brian Weatherson’s collection Epistemic Modality (Oxford, 2011).

Because I think many of the latest proposals fail to silence the skeptics and the conspiracy theorists, I was delighted to learn this past week of a forthcoming paper by Katrina Przyjemski in Topoi, “Strong Epistemic Possibility and Evidentiality.” While I don’t agree with everything in this paper, it is a major step forward in the debate. Notably, Przyjemski draws a parallel between the notion of epistemic possibility and moral/legal permissibility, noting that while the “orthodox” view of epistemic possibility is parallel to a recognized “weak” notion of permissibility (not being ruled out by a body of rules or law), there is no concept of epistemic possibility that is parallel to the recognized “strong” notion of permissibility (express support by the rules or law). Przyjemski goes on to point out that requiring positive evidential support solves various semantic puzzles.

In my own work, I have applied what I take to be a lesson of Ayn Rand’s theory of concepts, that concepts are not to be multiplied beyond necessity, to show why “strong” epistemic possibility is the only justifiable concept of epistemic possibility, whereas the “weak” version of the concept serves no legitimate cognitive purpose. My own paper on this issue, “A Positive Evidentialist Account of Epistemic Possibility” (non-Academia.edu version here) offers the “positive evidentialist” theory as the simplest solution to many of the same semantic puzzles about epistemic possibility discussed by Przyjemski, but also tries to claim a number of other theoretical advantages.

At present, my work does not yet touch on the question of why evidence is necessary for the cognitive content of possibility claims. I hope that if my paper is published, I can use this as a springboard for further exploration of that topic. I am already convinced that fruitful parallels can be drawn between this issue and the demarcation problem in the philosophy of science.

I have presented my paper at three different workshops now, but it has been rejected by a number of journals. It’s hard to know, especially when the journal editors do not give feedback, if this is because the paper still has obvious flaws, or because it is too unorthodox for them to take seriously (or both). The paper is under review now at a new journal, but it will still probably need more work, so I do welcome your feedback in the comments section below.

Tragically, Przyjemski died before finishing her dissertation on this topic under Kit Fine at NYU; her paper was published posthumously. Since Jonathan Adler died before his time as well, I feel like I’ve now lost two important potential allies. Even still, it is heartening to see that philosophers are starting to see the problems with a key methodological assumption that has, arguably, stultified progress in their discipline for decades if not centuries. Rand was an early critic of this methodology, and it is also nice to see her critique at least modestly vindicated.

by Ben Bayer