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Refuting Ayn Rand’s “Immortal Robot” Argument – Article by G. Stolyarov II

Refuting Ayn Rand’s “Immortal Robot” Argument – Article by G. Stolyarov II

The New Renaissance HatG. Stolyarov II

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Here I refute an argument that has been leveled against proponents of indefinite human longevity from a surprising direction – those sympathetic to the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand. Some advocates of Ayn Rand’s philosophy believe that indefinite life would turn human beings into “immortal, indestructible robots” that, according to Ayn Rand, would have no genuine values. Both of these claims are false. Indefinite life would not turn humans into indestructible robots, nor would an indestructible robot with human abilities lack values or motivation for doing great things. In Ayn Rand’s own words, “Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.” (John Galt’s speech in For the New Intellectual, p. 135)

Rand’s “immortal robot” argument is found in “The Objectivist Ethics” (The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 15): “To make this point fully clear, try to imagine an immortal, indestructible robot, an entity which moves and acts, but which cannot be affected by anything, which cannot be changed in any respect, which cannot be damaged, injured or destroyed. Such an entity would not be able to have any values; it would have nothing to gain or to lose; it could not regard anything as for or against it, as serving or threatening its welfare, as fulfilling or frustrating its interests. It could have no interests and no goals.”

The “immortal robot” argument needs to be challenged because it originates from Ayn Rand, who otherwise espouses numerous rational ideas. I myself agree with most of the fundamental principles that Ayn Rand advocates. However, in some of her particular reasoning – at least, if applied to the wrong context – she can be off-target in such a way as to retard further progress. The often-leveled argument, derived by contemporary non-transhumanist Objectivists from the above-quoted passage, is that achieving indefinite longevity would turn human beings into Ayn Rand’s description of the “immortal, indestructible robot”.

In responding to Rand’s argument, several points can be made in relation to prolonging human life indefinitely and lifting the death sentence that hangs over all of us. First, at no point in time will human beings become the “immortal, indestructible robots” that Ayn Rand describes. The simple reason for this is that our existence is physical and contingent on certain physical prerequisites being fulfilled. The moment one of these physical prerequisites is lacking, our existence ceases. This will always be the case, even if we no longer have a necessary upper limit on our lifespans. For instance, biomedical advances that would greatly expand human lifespans – allowing periodic reversions to a more youthful biological state and therefore the possibility of an indefinite existence – would not turn humans into indestructible robots. There would still be the need to actively turn back biological processes of decay, and the active choice to pursue such treatments or not. People who live longer by successfully combating senescence could still get run over by a car or experience a plane crash. They would retain potential vulnerability to certain perils – such as death from accidents – although, as I have explained in “Life Extension and Risk Aversion”, they may be more diligent in seeking to greatly reduce the probability of such outcomes. If it is ever the case that death by senescence and the myriad diseases which kill many human beings today can be averted, then human beings will try to avert the other possibilities of death – for instance, by developing safer modes of transportation or engaging in fewer wars.

It is possible to significantly reduce the likelihood that one can be destroyed, without ever eliminating the theoretical potential of such destruction. Furthermore, because human beings have free will, they always have at least the hypothetical option of choosing to undermine the physical prerequisites of their own lives. In my view, no sane, rational being would actually choose to pursue that option, but the option is there nonetheless. For anybody who seeks to commit suicide by immediate or gradual means, or by refusing to take advantage of life-prolonging techniques once they become available, there is virtually nothing in the world that could prevent this, apart from rational persuasion (which may or may not be successful).

Even with indefinite longevity, human beings will always be vulnerable to some actual or hypothetical perils or poor choices. Moreover, when we manage to avoid one kind of peril, other kinds of perils may become more pressing as they come into the frame of awareness of longer-lived beings. If we do manage to live for hundreds of thousands of years, we will be far more subject to long-term geological changes and fluctuations of the Earth’s climate, such as the cycle of ice ages, whereas today humans do not live long enough to experience these massive shifts. Most of us today do not worry about the consequences of huge glaciers advancing over the continents, but humans who live for millennia will see this as a pressing problem for their own lifetimes. Likewise, the longer we live, the greater the likelihood that we will experience a global cataclysm, such as a supervolcano or an asteroid hitting the Earth. Human ingenuity and resources would need to be devoted toward confronting and even preventing these perils – a highly desirable outcome in general, since the perils exist irrespective of our individual lifespans, but most humans currently lack the long-term vision or orientation to combat them.

Moreover, the need to reject the “immortal robot” argument when discussing indefinite life extension does not stem solely from a desire to achieve philosophical correctness. Rather, we should recognize the potential for actually achieving meaningful, unprecedented longevity increases within our own lifetimes. For instance, the SENS Research Foundation is a nonprofit biogerontological research organization whose founder, Dr. Aubrey de Grey, has outlined an engineering-based approach to reversing the seven principal types of damage that accumulate in the human body with age. (SENS stands for “Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence”.) Dr. de Grey has stated that, with proper funding, there is approximately a 50 percent probability of these rejuvenation treatments being developed 20-25 years from now. (The 20-year figure is presented in this transcript from a recent NPR interview of Aubrey de Grey – quoted in “Discussing Science and Aging: Aubrey de Grey and Cynthia Kenyon at NPR” by Reason at FightAging.org.) The SENS Research Foundation is not the only entity pursuing radical life extension. Major commercial efforts toward research into reversing biological aging – such as Calico, created and funded by Google (now Alphabet, Inc.) – have been launched already. Thus, it is premature to conclude that death is a certainty for those who are alive today. Medical advances on the horizon could indeed turn many humans into beings who are still potentially vulnerable to death, but no longer subject to any upper limit on their lifespans.

It is therefore ill-advised to pin any ethical justifications for the ultimate value of human life to the current contingent situation, where it just so happens that human lifespans are finite because we have not achieved the level of technological advancement to overcome senescence yet. If such advances are achieved, common interpretations of the “immortal robot” argument and its derivative claims would suggest that life for human beings would transform from an ultimate value to some lesser value or to no value at all. This implication reveals a flaw in arguments that rely on the finitude of life and the inevitability of death. How is it that, by making life longer, healthier, and of higher quality (with less suffering due to the diseases of old age), humans would, in so doing, deprive life of its status as an ultimate value? If life is improved, it does not thereby lose a moral status that it previously possessed.

Yet another important recognition is that some animals have already attained negligible senescence. Their lifespans are de facto finite, but without a necessary upper limit. Suppose that evolution had taken a different course and rational beings had descended from tortoises rather than from primates. Then these rational beings would have negligible senescence without the need for medical intervention to achieve it. Would their lives thereby lack a type of value which the proponents of the “immortal robot” argument attribute to human lives today? Again, a conclusion of this sort illustrates a flaw in the underlying argument.

But suppose that a true immortal, indestructible robot could exist and be identical to human beings in every other respect. It would possess human biological processes and ways of thinking but be made of extremely strong materials that did not deteriorate or that automatically renewed themselves so as to rapidly, automatically repair any injury. Ayn Rand’s argument would still be mistaken. Even if death were not a possibility for such a being, it could still pursue and enjoy art, music, inventions, games – any activity that is appealing from the perspective of the senses, the intellect, or the general civilizing project of transforming chaos into order and transforming simpler orders into more complex ones.

The fear of death is not the sole motivator for human actions by far. Indeed, most great human accomplishments are a result of positive, not negative motivations. Rand acknowledged this when she wrote that “Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death.” At least in the short term, you do not need to do much to avoid death. You could just sit there, stay out of trouble, eat, drink, keep warm, sleep – and you survive to the next day. But that is not a full life, according to Rand. Obviously, one needs to avoid death to have a full life. Survival is necessary, but it is not sufficient. Many thinkers sympathetic to the Objectivist school, such as Edward Younkins, Tara Smith, Douglas Den Uyl, Douglas Rasmussen, Tibor Machan, George Reisman, and Lester Hunt, have extended this insight to conclude that survival is not enough; one should also pursue flourishing. (Younkins provides an excellent overview of this perspective in “Flourishing and Happiness in a Nutshell”.)

I concur fully with the goal of flourishing and recognize the existence of numerous positive motivations besides mere survival. For example, the desire to see oneself create something, to witness a product of one’s mind become embodied in the physical reality, is a powerful motivation indeed. One can furthermore seek to take esthetic pleasure from a particular object or activity. This does not require even a thought of death. Moreover, to appreciate certain kinds of patterns in existence, which are present in art, in technology, and even in games, does not require any thought of death. Many people play games, even if those games do not contribute anything to their survival. This does not mean, however, that doing so is irrational; rather, it is another creative way to channel the activities of the human mind. Via games, the human mind essentially creates its own field of endeavor, a rule system within which it operates. By operating within that rule system, the mind exercises its full potential, whereas just by sitting there and only doing what is absolutely necessary to survive, the mind would have missed some essential part of its functioning.

Creating art and music, undertaking scientific discoveries, envisioning new worlds – actual and fictional – does not rely on having to die in the future. None of these activities even rely on the threat of death. The immortal, indestructible robot, of course, might not engage in precisely the same activities as we do today. It would probably not need to worry about earning its next meal by working for somebody else, but it could still paint a painting, just because it would like to see its mental processes – in this scenario, processes greatly resembling our own – have some kind of external consequence and embodiment in the external reality. Such external embodiment is a vital component of flourishing.

Fear of death is not the sole motivator for human action, nor the sole prerequisite for value, as Ayn Rand acknowledged. There is more to life than that. Life is not merely about survival and should be about the pursuit of individual flourishing as well. Survival is a necessary prerequisite, but, once it is achieved, an individual is free to pursue higher-order values, such as self-actualization. The individual would only be further empowered in the quest for flourishing and self-actualization in a hypothetical environment where no threats to survival existed.

While we will never be true immortal robots, such immortal robots could nonetheless flourish and truly achieve life. As a result, the “immortal robot” argument fails on multiple counts and is not a valid challenge to indefinite life extension.

This essay may be freely reproduced using the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike International 4.0 License, which requires that credit be given to the author, G. Stolyarov II. Find out about Mr. Stolyarov here.

Implied Consent: A Play on the Sanctity of Human Life by G. Stolyarov II – Second Edition

Implied Consent: A Play on the Sanctity of Human Life by G. Stolyarov II – Second Edition

Implied Consent - A Play on the Sanctity of Human Life - Second Edition - by G. Stolyarov II

Implied Consent – A Play on the Sanctity of Human Life – Second Edition – by G. Stolyarov II

 

The 95-year-old self-made multi-billionaire Quintus Grummond collapses from heart failure and enters a state of brain death. Meanwhile, his son Oswald makes plans for his father to never again awaken. Oswald hires a shyster lawyer who attempts to legitimize Grummond’s termination by claiming that the multi-billionaire is no longer truly alive and that he has given Oswald “implied consent” to make decisions regarding his fate. This play depicts a battle over a principle: the question of whether anybody has the right to terminate an innocent individual’s life against his explicit wishes.

This is the Second Edition of Implied Consent, with original and freely downloadable cover art by Wendy Stolyarov. This play was originally written in December 2004 and January 2005; the First Edition was published in May 2007.

The Second Edition of Implied Consent is available in PDF, MOBI, and EPUB formats.

Download the PDF version.

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The Rational Argumentator welcomes your reviews of Implied Consent. You can submit them to TRA by sending them to gennadystolyarovii@yahoo.com. You are also encouraged to spread the word by reprinting the information on this page or your own comments concerning the book on other media outlets.

A Brief History of Western Liberalism – Article by Kyrel Zantonavitch

A Brief History of Western Liberalism – Article by Kyrel Zantonavitch

The New Renaissance Hat
Kyrel Zantonavitch
June 1, 2013
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This is a brief history of the philosophy and culture of liberalism. It describes a life-style and civilization which lifts human beings far above that of animals, chimpanzees, hominids, and even tribalist hunter-gatherers. Liberalism features man at his best. Liberals are clear-thinking and rational men: natural, sound, healthy, happy, uplifted, and heroic.

Liberalism is a fundamental category of philosophy and life-style – something broad and general. It constitutes a definitive concept – beyond which one cannot venture or improve – like life, happiness, greatness, transcendence, virtue, beauty, pleasure, thought, reality, existence, and the universe. Liberalism’s subsidiary concepts are also ultimate and final: rationality, egoism, and liberty.

In the story of mankind, first come bonobos, then semi-human Homo habilis, then primitive man Homo erectus, then highly advanced Neanderthals, then truly intelligent and impressive Cro-Magnons – who used their 100 IQs to exterminate their brutish competitors, invent sophisticated arrow technology, and make art such as those Venus statues and cave paintings.

By 9000 BC the last Ice Age ended, and humans immediately converted from hunter-gatherers to rancher-farmers. After domesticating multitudinous plants and animals, by 3300 BC human beings further cultivated them with irrigation on their new private property, backed by their revolutionary social institution called government. By 1700 BC men had well-established written laws, well-developed literature and art, easy personal transportation using horses, and elaborate international trade using sophisticated great ships.

All of this constituted impressive advances in humans’ quality of life; but none of it constituted philosophical or cultural liberalism.

Finally, by about 600 BC, the ancient Greeks created the indescribably magnificent phenomenon of Western liberalism. They invented rationality or “Greek reason” or syllogistic logic – or pure thought or epistemology. This is usually described as “the discovery of science and philosophy.”

But along with the stunning and wondrous epistemology of reason – naturally and inevitably and inherently – came the ethics of individualism, and the politics of freedom.

All of this can be fairly, accurately, and usefully denominated as the thought-system and life-style of Western liberalism – of liberal philosophy and culture, especially as exemplified by Aristotle, Epicurus, and Zeno the Stoic. These three theorists, ironically, were labelled by their intellectual opponents as “dogmatic.” This was not because these scientifically minded open debaters claimed to know everything based on faith, but because they claimed to know anything at all based on evidence and analysis.

By the 100s BC in Greece, the general ideology of liberalism was well-established in the middle and upper classes. Then the Romans conquered the Greeks and within a century made liberalism their own. They even advanced the noble ideas and ideals a bit, with such thinkers as Cicero, Lucretius, Virgil, Horace, and Aurelius.

But skepticism of reason ascended rapidly by the 200s AD, and with it came the decline of the greatest country in human history. The new phenomenon of monotheism began to dominate in the 300s AD, especially Christianity or “Plato for the masses.” By the middle of the 400s, the philosophy and culture of liberalism were dead, and so was Rome. A long, terrible Dark Age ensued.

This irrational, illiberal nightmare of Western civilization lasted for a millennium. The wretched and depraved philosophy of Jesus ruined everything.

But a bit of reason and hope came back into the world in the 1100s of northwest Europe with the mini-Renaissance. High-quality Greek thinkers were gradually reintroduced. Then came the 1300s and the Italian Renaissance.

By the 1500s a whole Europe-wide Renaissance began with France’s conquest of northern Italy. The French brought their reborn art and philosophy to everyone in the West. The beautiful general philosophy of liberalism ascended still higher while the ghastly evils of fundamentalist skepticism, Platonism, monotheism, and Christianity declined. The classical liberal era was brought about by radical and heroic innovators like Francis Bacon, John Locke, Voltaire, Adam Smith, and Thomas Jefferson.

The late 1700s Enlightenment and Age of Reason in Britain, France, Holland, and America featured liberalism at its height. But it was gradually and massively undermined by the irrational, nonsensical philosophers Bishop Berkeley, David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and Friedrich Hegel.

During and after the 1790s the French Revolution went astray and embraced ideological dogmatism, and self-sacrifice to the cause. It also converted itself into an early version of modern communism; as well as the false, evil, and illiberal ideologies of right-wing conservatism and left-wing progressivism. In the art world this was manifested by the slightly but definitely irrational Romantic movement of 1800-1850. Paintings started to turn ugly again.

Socialism and communism fairly quickly went into high gear after Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto of 1848. Religion also somewhat revived in the late 1800s. These two monstrous ideologies backed the moral ideal of self-destruction, or the “Judeo-Christian ethic,” or, even better, the “religio-socialist ethic.” The fin de siècle of the 1890s was the giddy, despairing, hopeless, lost end of a noble era in the West – a dynamic, heroic, rational, liberal era.

A practical, real-world, irrational, illiberal dystopia was achieved in the mid-1900s with Stalin, Hitler, and Mao. Later in the 1900s there were Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Ayatollah Khomeini, and countless other despots. Illiberalism reached a hellish trough around 1985.

Then came Ronald Reagan in America, Margaret Thatcher in Britain, Mikhail Gorbachev in Russia, and Deng Xiaoping in China. These four political semi-revolutionaries, in four leading nations, used their governments to change world culture in a liberal direction.

These liberal leaders emerged on the world scene because theory always precedes practice, and the theory of liberalism began to rise again – at least intellectually, and in certain recherché circles – around the early 1900s. It began anew with Austrian economic thinkers like Ludwig von Mises, Henry Hazlitt, and Friedrich Hayek. In addition to the dry, mechanical realm of economics, these three addressed the fields of politics and sociology – and even ethics and epistemology. They filled in many of the gaps, and corrected many of the weaknesses and failures, of Locke, Smith, and company.

The Austrians also attacked the communism, socialism, and progressivism of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson, among others. And they taught the fiery intellectual novelist Ayn Rand.

Rand converted from fiction to philosophy from the late 1950s to the late 1970s. She was by far the most liberal thinker in the history of man. She created the philosophy of Objectivism. Ayn Rand advanced human knowledge about as much as Bacon, Locke, Voltaire, Smith, and Jefferson combined.

Sadly, however, Rand undercut her liberal ideology with a heavy atmosphere and subtext of cultism and religiosity in her propaganda movement. This was understandable, considering how revolutionary and hated her philosophy was, but hardly rational or legitimate.

However, Rand died in 1982, and a highly rational and non-religious organization, organized around her discoveries, emerged in 1989. This brought the world Objectivism as a thought-system, not a belief-system; and Objectivism as a rational, benevolent, effective philosophy – not an irrational, malicious, weird cult.

There are currently three separate but related avant-garde liberal ideological movements: Austrian economics, libertarian politics, and Objectivist philosophy. All three are tiny but, based on historical intellectual standards, seemingly growing solidly.

Pure liberalism – a pure, clean, complete comprehension that reason was 100% right in epistemology, individualism was 100% right in ethics, and freedom was 100% right in politics – began in the early 21st century. Randroid illiberalism began to die out. A New Enlightenment is about to begin.

Kyrel Zantonavitch is the founder of The Liberal Institute  (http://www.liberalinstitute.com/) and a writer for Rebirth of Reason (http://www.rebirthofreason.com). He can be contacted at zantonavitch@gmail.com.

Objectivist Virtue Ethics in Business – Article by Edward W. Younkins

Objectivist Virtue Ethics in Business – Article by Edward W. Younkins

The New Renaissance Hat
Edward W. Younkins
April 24, 2012
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Virtuous actions can lead to the achievement of values. When one’s context is reduced to business, virtue theory contends that pursuing virtuous principles, strategies, and actions can result in firms realizing their values including their mission, purpose, profit potential, and other goals. Virtuous employees tend to carry out their roles in a competent manner that is congruent with the firm’s goals. Virtues are instrumental allowing a person to act to gain values. When business people conform to the Objectivist virtues, they increase the likelihood of achieving their values and goals. Virtue ethics stresses the importance of each individual employee being able to make contributions of value. Valid virtue concepts are required to describe what it means to be an excellent director, leader, manager, or employee. To be successful, a business needs to espouse a set of virtues that are reality-based, non-contradictory, integrated, and comprehensive.

Virtue theory holds that ethics is an inherent part of business and that it is necessary to integrate moral theory into management theory and practice. The role of the virtues in business is to direct and motivate behavior toward the success of the business. Strategic management and business ethics converge because each area has an explicit interest in the nature and goals of business. In business, the virtues facilitate successful management and cooperation and enable a company to attain its goals. The Randian virtues can provide a moral framework and integrating strategy to guide a business in achieving its goals.[1]

The virtues connect ethics to business positively and provide a sound logical foundation for business ethics. Given the laws of nature and of human nature, there exists a set of virtues that fit reality and that are most likely to lead to success and happiness in business. Ayn Rand’s Objectivist ethics specifically recognizes production as the central human value. In addition, the personal virtues that she advocated have a direct bearing on work: rationality, honesty, independence, justice, integrity, productiveness, and pride. These virtues can be used as guiding forces in a business career and in the management of a business. They define the excellent manager (or other employee) and provide the principles that a corporation should adopt with respect to investors, employees, customers, vendors, and others.

A case can be made that virtue ethics has priority over, and perhaps grounds, other competing ethical approaches to business. In most cases being virtuous will be sufficient for leading a morally decent life in the world of business. Virtue theory is more attractive, positive, unified, comprehensive, and practical than are traditional approaches to business ethics because it is concerned with the type of person that one should be rather than with rules that tell people how they ought to act. Virtue theory is concerned with the cultivation of character and provides a framework through which a person can lead a flourishing and happy life. Moral growth comes from choice rather than from conformity to rules or codes.

Traditional approaches to business ethics (i.e., deontology, consequentialism and codes of conduct) are viewed as formulaic, prescriptive, constraining forces that legislate the form of moral deliberation. Conventional approaches focus on a set of prohibitive principles or rules that tell people how they ought to act. Kantian and utilitarian act-oriented approaches concentrate only on the development of principles while neglecting the cultivation of an individual’s character. Neither deontic nor consequentialist judgments are apt to supply sufficient action guidance for resolving particular dilemmas. Virtue ethics should be viewed as a precondition of, and complement to, moral reasoning based on a deontological focus on one’s obligation to act and on a teleological focus on the consequences of an action. Virtue ethics is more fundamental, and in many cases, preempts the consideration and application of deontic and utilitarian rules. An emphasis on virtuous behavior is motivational because it depends upon a person’s ability to aspire to excellence through virtuous acts. Virtue ethics emphasizes the process of individual moral character development. Above all, virtue ethics is concerned with the flourishing and happiness of the human agent (Mintz 1996, 537-38; Arjoon 2000, 159-78; Whetstone 2001, 101-14).

Virtue theory provides a context in which strategies, plans, tactics, policies, and procedures can be developed to attain a business’s stated mission and other relevant values. Virtues can play a causal role in achieving economic success. Virtues-driven firms tend to maximize profits. However, acting virtuously does not always result in wealth creation because other factors can come into play. Despite such an occurrence, virtuous employees still can experience the internal rewards of pride, self-esteem, and the joy of knowing that they did their jobs well.

The achievement of a firm’s telos, mission, purpose, ultimate end, or ultimate value requires virtuous action on the part of the company’s employees. The ultimate value for a business is financial value. The purpose of a business is to maximize owner value over the long-term by selling goods and/or services. Most corporation mission statements explain this purpose explicitly, or at least implicitly. It is necessary to recognize a business’s distinctive purpose when organizing and integrating human effort into purposeful long-term activities. Purposeful behavior requires a single overarching valued objective function. In a corporation market price per share can be a surrogate for owner value. More specifically, the ultimate purpose of maximizing total long-term market value can provide a criterion for management decisions and choices among competing alternatives, Virtues are instrumental and support a firm’s overall telos.

To accomplish a corporation’s ultimate purpose requires the attainment of a number of goals within a business. It is possible look upon both a firm’s ultimate purpose and its goals as values that need to be achieved. Although technically a value is an object of goal-directed action, in general parlance, the terms, goals and values, are often used interchangeably. For our purposes, we can consider both the ultimate end of a corporation (i.e., the long-term maximization of firm value) and the goals that can lead to the ultimate end to be values.

Goals (sometimes referred to as objectives) are specific quantitative targets that a business needs to meet in a manner consistent with ethical principles in order to accomplish its purpose. Typical goal areas in a business include: profitability, sales, sales growth, return on investment (ROI), profit margin, cash flow, market share (or position), customer loyalty, productivity, efficiency, cost control, research and development, product leadership, employee development, employee attitudes, employee loyalty, expansion or contraction of product and service lines, reducing business risks, and so on. Each and every goal should be analyzed to determine the potential impact on firm value and whether or not they are contributing to the attainment of the firm’s target valuation. Goals whose achievement does not contribute to increasing shareholder value should be eliminated.

To succeed a business must have a superior vision and purpose to work toward and the strategic focus and direction of effort to achieve them. The Objectivist virtues can enable people to direct their actions toward the attainment of a company’s goals and values including the maximization of owner value. Virtuous actions can lead to better customer service, gains in productivity and efficiency, higher employee retention rates, reduction in employee absenteeism, improvement in employee morale, better communications both internally and externally, honest and reliable internal and external financial reporting, the flexibility necessary to adapt to market conditions, increased innovation and the more frequent and more timely launching of new products and services, higher sales and profits, sustainable competitive advantages, greater flourishing and happiness of the firm’s employees, and so on.

Virtuous behavior is required at all levels of a company from employees who realize that business is a natural and moral means by which they can satisfy their needs and attain their actualization as individual human persons. Virtuous employees are energetic, productive workers who: (1) focus on reality; (2) think objectively, rationally, and logically in applying relevant knowledge; (3) ask clear, pertinent, insightful questions and listen carefully; (4) search for facts in their total context before judging and evaluating business situations; (5) use time efficiently and effectively; (6) organize their lives and work toward accomplishing worthwhile endeavors; and (7) set value-producing goals and strive to accomplish them.

A virtuous employee begins by understanding what the facts are and does not evade the distinction between the real and the unreal. Evasion detaches a person from reality. Virtue begins with the effort to confront reality as it is. Given that there is no standardized algorithm for making business decisions, an employee needs to use his reason to make rational, logical decisions based on the facts of reality. One needs to apply conscious, prudent, rational judgments and choices in various business contexts in order to identify, execute, and implement profitable and ethical internal and external exchange transactions.

Much of morality in business falls under the rubric of honesty. Honesty means being in accord with reality. Honesty is basic to the structure of human relationships in virtually all contexts. Dishonesty is self-defeating because it involves being in conflict with realty. Morality in business involves objectively recognizing and dealing with customers, employees, creditors, stockholders, and others as autonomous rational individuals with their particular goals and desires. The trader principle should govern the course of all human interactions because voluntary value-for-value relationships are consonant with human nature.

Honesty is closely related to the virtue of justice. Justice, a form of faithfulness to reality, is the virtue of granting to each man that which he objectively deserves. Justice is the expression of man’s rationality in his dealings with other men and involves seeking and granting the earned. A trader, a man of justice, earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved. For example, a virtuous manager must make sure that customers get what they pay for. In addition, he needs to identify employees for what they accomplish and treat them accordingly. Employees should be objectively appraised and compensated based on their contribution toward achieving a firm’s mission, values, and goals. A virtuous manager will discriminate among all those that he deals with (i.e., customers, suppliers, workers, etc.) based on relevant qualities and personal merits such as ability, competency, performance, and character. He will not improperly discriminate based on irrelevant characteristics such as sex, race, nationality, and so on.[2]

Although individuals can learn from each other, the fact remains that each of us thinks and acts alone and is responsible for his own actions. Independence requires the acceptance of one’s intellectual responsibility for his own existence, requires that a man form his own judgments, and that he support himself by the work of his own mind. It is not a corporation’s fault if someone does not attain his goals. Each employee is responsible for his favorable or unfavorable outcomes in a business setting where responsibilities are defined by, and arise out of, his particular role. Of course, a goal may not be completely under one’s control. It may require interdependence with or on other employees who co-contribute to whether or not someone attains a goal. Positive change and innovation in a company are based on the creativity of logical independent thinkers. It is through such employees that a firm discovers and invents ways to improve the fiscal bottom line thereby increasing the firm’s market value.

Integrity is the refusal to permit a breach between thought and action. It means acting consistently with rational principles that will lead to success and happiness. In business, an employee’s rationally-made plans are integrated with his actions in order to bring values into existence. From more of a macro viewpoint, we could say that the integrity of a business is maintained if the purpose for which it was created is followed (i.e., the maximization of owner value).[3]

Productiveness, the virtue of creating material values, is the act of translating one’s thoughts and goals into reality. Productiveness comprises an important existential component of virtuousness and is a responsibility of every moral person. It involves a commitment to creating value and to being self-responsible for bringing what one needs and wants into existence. Workers in a business are committed to producing wealth and bringing about well-being by taking the actions required to achieve the firm’s mission. Profits are an indicator of productive work on the part of people who want to achieve, produce, and improve well-being. Because people differ with respect to their intelligence, talents, and circumstances, the moral issue becomes how a particular employee addresses his work given his facticity, including his potentialities and concrete circumstances. In a business, the Randian virtues (including productiveness) offer a set of principles for getting the most value from one’s work. Rand’s Objectivist ethics recognizes that individuals search for meaning and purpose in the various components of one’s life (i.e., one’s work life, love life, home life, social life, and so on). Each of these is an end-in-itself and a means to the end of one’s life in total. One’s life in total is an end-in-itself and an ultimate value.

Pride, also called moral ambitiousness, is a man’s commitment to achieving the best in his life thereby effecting his moral perfection. Pride is the reward we earn by living by the other six Objectivist virtues. A businessman’s drive for success is a result of his taking pride in the business portion of his life. Each employee needs to work in a way as to be able to be rightfully proud of what he has done. Work is needed not only for sustenance, but also for one’s psychological well-being—it can be viewed as a means by which a man can maintain an active mind, attain purposes, and follow a goal-directed path throughout his lifetime. Through work a man can achieve his highest potentials. Doing work well in accordance with the goals of a firm (which are aligned with the personal goals of the worker) can cause an employee to positively enhance his self-esteem.

Dr. Edward W. Younkins is Professor of Accountancy at Wheeling Jesuit University. He is the author of Capitalism and Commerce: Conceptual Foundations of Free Enterprise [Lexington Books, 2002]. Many of Dr. Younkins’s essays can be found online at his web page at www.quebecoislibre.org. You can contact Dr. Younkins at younkins@wju.edu.

 


[1] Ayn Rand’s Objectivist ethics is specifically related to business and business ethics in Kirkpatrick 1992; Greiner and Kinni 2001; and Hicks 2003.

[2] See Locke and Woiceshyn 1995 for an argument for honesty in business from the perspective of rational egoism.

[3] Paine 1994 provides an interesting perspective on how to manage for organizational integrity.

References

Arjoon, Surendra. (2000). Virtue theory as a dynamic theory of business. Journal of Business Ethics, no. 28: 159-78.

Greiner, Donna and Theodore Kinni. (2001). Ayn Rand and Business. New York: Texere.

Hicks, Stephen R.C. (2003). Ayn Rand and contemporary business ethics. Journal of Accounting: Ethics and Public Policy 3 (1) (Winter): 1-26.

———. (2009). What business ethics can learn from Entrepreneurship. Journal of Private Enterprise 24 (2): 49-57.

Kirkpatrick, Jerry. (1992). Ayn Rand’s objectivist ethics as the foundation for business ethics. In Business Ethics and Common Sense. Edited by Robert W. McGee. Westport: CT: Quorum Books 67-88.

Locke, Edwin A. (2001). and J. Woiceshyn. (1995). Why businessmen should be honest: The argument from rational egoism. Journal of Organizational Behavior 16: 405-14.

Mintz, Stephen M. (1996). Aristotelian virtue and business ethics education. Journal of Business Ethics, no. 15: 827-38.

Paine, Lynn Sharp. (1994). Managing for organizational integrity. Harvard Business Review 72 (March-April): 106-17.

Rand, Ayn.  (1964). Objectivist ethics. In The Virtue of Selfishness. New York: New American Library.

Whetstone, J. Thomas. (2001). How virtue fits within business ethics. Journal of Business Ethics, no. 33: 101-14.

Refuting Ayn Rand on War – Video by G. Stolyarov II

Refuting Ayn Rand on War – Video by G. Stolyarov II

Mr. Stolyarov directly responds to Ayn Rand’s statements regarding the morality of war and refutes her point by point. Mr. Stolyarov shows that war, because of the deaths of innocent civilians, is thoroughly anti-individualistic, and Ayn Rand’s position on war is inconsistent with the fundamental ethical principles of her philosophy of Objectivism.

References
Ayn Rand’s statements at the Ford Hall Forum
– Yaron Brook and Alex Epstein: “‘Just War Theory’ vs. American Self-Defense” –
The Brook/Epstein essay illustrates the kinds of atrocities one would have to embrace to take Ayn Rand’s arguments on the morality of war to their logical conclusion.