QUORA: ‘What do people misunderstand about Ayn Rand's ideas?’

QUORA *: ‘What do people misunderstand about Ayn Rand's ideas?’

I posted this answer:

Plenty. But in my experience, the most misunderstood of Ayn Rand’s ideas is her moral philosophy. The Objectivist Ethics, as she calls it, promotes rational selfishness as the natural and proper ethical code for individuals to live by.

Rand’s ethics are not just misunderstood, though. It’s very often deliberately misrepresented by her ideological adversaries. Briefly, Rand rejected both altruism (properly understood as self-sacrifice to others) and the conventional understanding of selfishness (sacrifice of others to self). Rand proposes a third alternative--complete rejection of sacrifice and its corollary, profiteering on sacrifice, as a matter of principle. This is not a “middle ground.” The Objectivist Ethics, a core component of her philosophy of reason, Objectivism, upholds each individual’s moral right to pursue his own happiness, with its corollary The Trader Principle—dealing with others on mutually agreed, mutually beneficial, mutually self-interested terms, neither sacrificing self to others or others to self.

This is not strictly academic. Every individual needs the guidance of moral principles, and a person’s chosen morals have an integral effect on his life and how he thinks about himself; e.g. his self-esteem. Furthermore, a culture’s generally accepted moral principles ultimately determines a nation’s political direction, with profound implications for how we live as individuals and how we interact with one another.

For anyone interested in learning about Rand’s moral ideas, you can start with Rand’s essay The Objectivist Ethics, which opens her book The Virtue of Selfishness. There are several other good resources. You could get a brief overview by visiting The Ayn Rand Lexicon, specifically the posts on selfishness and altruism.  Others are Loving Life, the morality of self-interest and the facts that support it by Craig Biddle, Ayn Rand’s Normative Ethics, the virtuous egoist by Tara Smith, and In Defense of Selfishness: Why the Code of Self-Sacrifice is Unjust and Destructive by Peter Schwartz.

Related Reading:

The Fountainhead--Ayn Rand

Atlas Shrugged--Ayn Rand

Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand--Leonard Peikoff

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