Self-Interest

• Ethics
• In Rand's Words
• Explore

• “Man is an end in himself”

  Why does man need morality?

  The typical answer is that we must learn to deny our own interests and happiness in order to serve God or other people — and morality will teach us to do this.

  Rand’s answer is radically different. The purpose of morality, she argues, is to teach us what is in our self-interest, what produces happiness.

  “Man has,” she observes, “no automatic code of survival. . . . His senses do not tell him automatically what is good for him or evil, what will benefit his life or endanger it, what goals he should pursue and what means will achieve them, what values his life depends on, what course of action it requires.”

  This is what the science of ethics studies — and what Objectivism offers. “Man must choose his actions, values and goals,” she summarizes, “by the standard of that which is proper to man — in order to achieve, maintain, fulfill and enjoy that ultimate value, that end in itself, which is his own life.”

  

• “MAN IS AN END IN HIMSELF“

  Rand consciously saw herself as a moral radical and revolutionary, who challenges both the conventional damnation of selfishness as evil and the conventional glorification of altruism, the doctrine that man must live for others, as good.

  She argues that selfishness, properly understood, does not mean doing whatever you feel like doing or exploiting others, and that altruism does not mean benevolence or goodwill but the opposite.

  The Objectivist ethics holds that the actor must always be the beneficiary of his action and that man must act for his own rational self-interest. But his right to do so is derived from his nature as man and from the function of moral values in human life — and, therefore, is applicable only in the context of a rational, objectively demonstrated and validated code of moral principles which define and determine his actual self-interest. It is not a license “to do as he pleases” and it is not applicable to the altruists’ image of a “selfish” brute nor to any man motivated by irrational emotions, feelings, urges, wishes or whims.

  — Ayn Rand, “Introduction ,” The Virtue of Selfishness

  Ayn Rand on the Pursuit of Happiness

• “MAN IS AN END IN HIMSELF”

  Ethics, according to Rand, is a science. It studies the values you must achieve and the virtues you must practice to attain happiness.

  Crucial to this science is a concrete projection of the moral ideal, a vision of what you should be seeking to embody in your soul. “An exhaustive philosophical treatise defining moral values, with a long list of virtues to be practiced,” she writes, “will not do it; it will not convey what an ideal man would be like and how he would act . . . . There is no way to integrate such a sum without projecting an actual human figure — an integrated concretization that illuminates the theory and makes it intelligible.”

  Only art can do this. Rand’s stated goal as a fiction writer is the projection of an ideal man; her nonfiction is the theory behind that vision.

  To understand Rand’s new morality, therefore, you must explore both her novels and nonfiction, which these links will help you to do.

  Interview with
  Ayn Rand (1959) The Virtue of Selfishness Altruism The Fountainhead Moral Virtue Atlas Shrugged