Capitalist Solutions

A Philosophy of American Moral Dilemmas

Andrew Bernstein, Andrew Bernstein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351530101
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economía
• Subtopic: Teoría económica

The US is facing enormous challenges as it enters the second decade of the twenty-first century. Some of these major issues are environmentalism and its claim of global warming; the danger from terrorism generated by Islamic fundamentalism; and affordable, quality health care. Additionally, education in America remains an unresolved dilemma contributing to America's lack of economic competitiveness. Andrew Bernstein argues that the US government is pushing the nation toward socialism in its attempt to resolve America's problems. The government's increasing control of the banking industry, its massive bailouts of auto makers, and its proposal of emissions legislation are also examples of the expansion of government's power. Bernstein argues that whatever the intentions of the government, or its illusions about the workability of its proposals, morally upright and practical solutions can only come from moving to the opposite end of the political-economic spectrum: the establishment of laissez-faire capitalism. In Atlas Shrugged, and in her non-fiction works, Ayn Rand developed a systematic body of thought, a comprehensive philosophy she dubbed "Objectivism." This philosophy has been neglected by most professional intellectuals, but it is now beginning to be seriously studied in academic philosophy departments. Objectivism provides the moral and philosophic validation of the political-economic principles of individual rights and free markets. Analysis of today's gravest social and political issues within this philosophic framework, as undertaken by Bernstein in this volume, constitutes a unique way of identifying rational solutions to these pressing issues.

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The Relevant Principles Of Objectivism

A key original principle of Objectivism that will repeatedly emerge in this book is the identity of the moral and the practical. What is morally right is practically efficacious—and, conversely, what is morally wrong is practically disastrous.

The idea that only moral virtue leads to long-term practical success—and that evil, will, in the long run, accrue misery—opposes the dominant code of the modern world; which claims generally that callous exploitation of others is a necessary condition of practical success, while “selfless” virtue is too noble for this world, resulting in inevitable failure. The belief that “either you swim with the sharks or you’re eaten by them” is widely held in such fields as law, business, politics, and others. Leo Durocher’s cynical observation that “nice guys finish last” is, unfortunately, an accurate description of many people’s belief on this topic.

An equation of virtue and practical success—and of vice with abysmal failure? How is such an innovative theory supported? The answer to this question penetrates to the heart of moral philosophy.

The proper name of Rand’s moral code is: “rational egoism:” Ex-pressed briefly, this means that virtue is achieved by pursuing one’s self-interest—that which leads to personal happiness—in accordance with rational moral principles. The key to Rand’s version of rational egoism lies in understanding the nature of values, and the role they play in human life.

She defines values as: “that which one acts to gain and/or keep:” A value is always the object of an action—it is not a wish, a dream, or a fantasy. An individual’s values are those things or persons he considers preeminently worthy (or valuable); those things or persons that fill his life with meaning, passion, and purpose. Whether an individual values education, or a productive career in a specific field, or a particular man or woman, or his children, or a plethora of other possibilities, his values are those things or persons sufficiently important to him to impel him to goal-directed action.

The role of values in man’s life is an overarching theme in Rand’s fiction. In The Fountainhead, for example, its hero, the revolutionary architect, Howard Roark, is portrayed as so in love with his buildings that he literally cannot keep his hands off of them as they are under construction. The young Roark seeks mentoring from Henry Cameron, the world’s greatest living architect, but a bitter, aging curmudgeon. Cameron, recognizing the young man’s genius and integrity, becomes a father figure to the hero-worshipping Roark. The innovative young architect has a passionate love relationship with the tormented but brilliant and idealistic Dominique Francon, his eventual wife. He is more than friends—he is soul mates with the story’s tragic hero, Gail Wynand. Roark rescues the talented young sculptor, Steven Mallory, from bitter despair and incipient alcoholism, and the budding genius goes on to become both a major success, and, in effect, Roark’s kid brother.

The same is true in Atlas Shrugged, in which the two main narrators, Dagny Taggart, who superbly runs a transcontinental railroad—and Hank Rearden, the country’s ablest steel manufacturer and inventor of Rearden Metal, a new alloy vastly superior to steel—are each passionately in love with their careers, and with each other.

In both Rand’s great novels, and in her nonfiction work on ethical theory, The Virtue of Selfishness, she presents an integrated, impassioned theme: Values are the meaning of life.

To hold values dearly, to pursue them vigorously, and to never surrender them for any thing or anybody—this is what it means to be genuinely, properly selfish. This is what is truly egoistic, i.e., in the interest of the or self; this is the sole course to

But a proper egoism does not consist of a relentless pursuit of any urge or desire an individual experiences. Values, properly understood, are not whims.

What makes X a value? What makes something good? This is a question that moral philosophers have debated for at least two millennia. Rand posed the question in a new form. She asked, in effect: what is the fundamental fact of reality that gives rise to the entire phenomenon of valuing? Her answer was: it is only because living beings must attain certain ends to sustain their lives that values become both necessary and possible. In the absence of life, there are no values; no possibility of either good or evil.

A plant, for example, must gain sunlight, water, chemical nutrients from the soil in order to survive. These are its values; these are what are good for it. Such ends are objective; they are a matter of hard fact; they are not subject to whim or caprice; they are inalterably fixed by nature.

The same is true of animals. A lion, for example, must hunt in order to gain the meat its survival requires; without it, the beast perishes. The lion has no choice in this matter. Its values are set for it by nature.

Finally, human beings must grow food, construct dwellings, manufacture clothing, and cure disease. Their lives depend on it. To reach such achievements they must study agricultural science, architecture and engineering, biology, etc., and they must make the advances in philosophy, logic, and theoretical science that underlie such disciplines. Nature confronts man with a single, simple, pitiless alternative: cultivate the mind as a pre-condition to cultivate the soil—study, create, and grow—or die. Man, despite immeasurable intellectual advantages, is accorded no more choice by nature than any other organism. For him, as well, the alternative is stark: attain specific goals—or perish.

Fundamentally, there is a sole alternative in reality—existence or nonexistence; and it is faced exclusively by living beings. The sustained existence of inanimate matter does not require the satisfaction of conditions; matter simply is; it changes its forms ceaselessly, but it neither comes into nor goes out of existence. But life requires the attainment of certain ends. If an organism does not succeed in that endeavor, it perishes. Its material constituents endure—but its life is expunged. For example, the pulverizing of a rock and the pulverizing of a man are actions profoundly different in nature, in outcome, and in moral significance. The one merely changes its form—the other relinquishes its life.

Organic beings must reach specific goals in order to sustain their lives. It is because of this fundamental fact—and only because of it—that values come into existence. Values are that which nature requires of an organism to maintain its life. Rand states: “It is only the concept of ‘Life’ that makes the concept of ‘Value’ possible. It is only to a that can be or evil:”

Values are, therefore, grounded in fact; they are objective. It is reality—not society, or God, or an individual’s own whim that necessitate plants gain water and sunlight, lions gain meat, and that human beings grow crops, build homes and cities, and cure diseases. Such matters are no more open to choice than is gravity. These are unyielding facts of nature.

The good for an organism is that which supports its life. The evil is that which harms or destroys it. For man, therefore, the standard of good and evil, the measuring rod by reference to which right and wrong are judged, is: the requirements of human life. All that furthers man’s earthly life is the good; all that inimical to it, is the evil. Or, in another form: for man, the good is all that which promotes the life of a rational being; the evil all that which harms or destroys it.

Plants and animals automatically, inherently, and with no choice on their parts pursue the values that nature sets as a requirement to advance their lives. Plants cannot refuse to dig their roots into the soil—and hungry lions cannot eschew the hunt. Their instincts are not infallible and their knowledge is limited; when these prove inadequate, they perish. But as long as they are alive, they automatically pursue that which they sense as life-affirming, with no capacity to repudiate their interest and act as their own destroyers.

But because man is a rational being, he can understand moral principles and make moral choices. He can choose, for example, between nutritious food and poison—between education and ignorance—between individualism and bigotry—between productive work and parasitism off of honest men—between establishing a free society and imposing a dictatorship—between life-sustaining actions and those life-destroying.

Human beings do not automatically, intrinsically, nonvolitionally pursue that which advances their lives; they have the capacity to destroy themselves, to commit suicide in a multitude of forms—and quite often they do. They surrender their values to satisfy others—or they ingest toxic drugs—or they seek gain by deceitful conniving—or they vote for statist politicians—or in one of countless other modes sabotage their own lives and well-being.

Human beings must choose values, they must choose life, they must choose egoism.

It is a significant and immensely overlooked achievement to be an egoist—for it involves a scrupulous devotion to reality, to the survival re quirements of human nature, and to positive, life-affirming values.

To be an egoist is to form, cherish, pursue, and never sacrifice life-advancing values.

Observe that only individuals are alive; regarding human life, only individual human beings live or die; indeed, at a deeper level, only particulars or entities—individual things—exist. The logical conclusion is that value achievement is a individual, personal pursuit.

In The Fountainhead, Howard Roark makes the important point that just as there is no collective stomach to digest food, so there is no collective brain to think. Digesting, thinking, breathing, and all other processes of body and mind are uniquely individualistic activities. Similarly—among human beings—there is no collective life form to seek or to gain values. Consequently, the possibility of value pursuit—and its necessity—is, utterly and exceptionlessly, an individualistic function.

Therefore, Rand states: “Man [each man] must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself:” To live for his own sake means that the achievement of his own happiness is man’s highest moral purpose. Life is the standard of moral value, but his own happiness must be the purpose of each individual’s life.

The necessity of individual value achievement in everyday life should be manifest. For example, a man must gain the education he needs; hold a productive job and earn wealth; seek close, trustworthy friends; and gain the intimacy of a romantic relationship—a set of values warranting fulfilled life, and a full absence of which precludes bare survival.

Granted that values are the means and the meaning of life, how—by what method—are they to be gained? In Atlas Shrugged, Rand provides a comprehensive answer. The freethinking rational mind is the fundamental means by which human beings create values.

Nature endows every species with some distinctive attribute by which to seek survival. For example, birds have wings to fly, lions claws and fangs with which to rend their prey, antelopes sufficient foot speed to outrun lions, elephants great size, gorillas immense strength, and many animals possess fur to keep them warm, etc.

These other species survive by physicalistic means—by strength, size, speed, etc. But man is, compared to many species, physically frail and unprepossessing. He cannot fly or outrun lions or overmatch gorillas in physical strength; and he is unadorned with fur to protect him from blizzard or freezing blast. Nature endows him with but one superlative characteristic by means of which to flourish—his intelligence.

Every value that human life depends on is a product of the reasoning mind. Food, for example, must be grown, entailing knowledge of agricultural science and invention of agricultural technology. Medicines must be researched and developed, requiring knowledge of biological science. Houses must be erected, necessitating knowledge of architecture, engineering, mathematics. All of these values, and thousands more, require thinking, understanding, and reasoning.

This is as true of the intellectual/spiritual values that further men’s lives as it is of the material ones that do so. Whether it is Aristotle’s advances in logic, or Newton’s in theoretical science, or Edison’s in applied science—or Shakespeare’s achievements in literature, or Beethoven’s in music, or Michelangelo’s in sculpture, etc.—such creations are the product of genius, of the mind, of man’s rational faculty. In Atlas Shrugged, Richard Halley, a brilliant composer, states:

Whether it’s a symphony or a coal mine, all work is an act of creating and comes from the same source: from an inviolate capacity to see through one’s own eyes—which means: the capacity to perform a rational identification—which means: the capacity to see, to connect and to make what had not been seen, connected and made before. I…know what discipline, what effort, what tension of mind, what unrelenting strain upon one’s power of clarity are needed to produce a work of art.

Rationality is man’s survival instrument in the same literal sense that wings are a bird’s.

This principle holds as true at an everyday level as on the grand scale. For example, a student gains knowledge by means of thinking; an auto mechanic identifies an engine’s specific problem by means of thinking; a doctor diagnoses a patient’s ailment by means of thinking; even a pizza delivery boy finds an unfamiliar street by reading a map and thinking. Interpersonal and international disputes are resolved without relapse into screaming irrationality and/or violent aggression—when and to the extent they are—by means of good faith negotiation, which involves a commitment to reasoning by all parties. An individual identifies serious character flaws in the man or woman he/she loves deeply only by an unbreached devotion to truth, including painful ones, which involves not emoting but thinking.

If man’s life is the standard of the good, then that which sustains it—the reasoning mind—is a good without qualification.

No human characteristic is as selfish as an unbreached rationality—for it, above all, is responsible for the achievements, the creation of values, upon which human life depends.

Conversely, any repudiation of reason—any subordination of it to faith or feelings or supercilious authority—undermines man’s survival instrument, his engine of creating values, his fundamental means of sustaining life.

If the sustenance of human life is the standard of the good, then evil lies in the rejection of the means by which human life is sustained.

Irrationality in any form renders value creation impossible. This is true regardless to which consideration reason is subordinated. Contemporary Islamists and the medieval Church reject(ed) reason for faith. The National Socialists (Nazis) eschewed it in favor of visceral gut reactions, what they felt in their “blood and bowels:” The Communists paid lip service to science and reason, but, as philosophical materialists, denied the mind’s efficacy, even its existence, and upheld manual labor—often whip-driven slave labor—as the source of all value production. All of these institutions and/or political theories— regardless of secondary differences—share a fundamental trait in common: they are evil, because they reject man’s survival instrument. As a necessary consequence of such rejection, hundreds of millions did not survive, perishing (often by mass homicide) well before their times.

Human life requires production of values, not their destruction; creation of goods and services, not their plunder; rational thinking, not mindless brutality.

If human life is the standard of value, then productivity is a major —and often neglected—moral virtue. Every value human life re-quires—be it crops, computers, antibiotics, automobiles, apartment buildings, or one of a thousand others—must be produced by man’s effort. Human beings, unlike the higher animals, do not discover readymade in nature the values their lives require. Man cannot long survive, much less prosper, by picking berries off a bush, hunting wild beasts with spears, and huddling in dank caves. He must cultivate crops, domesticate livestock, construct homes and cities, research and develop medications, invent electric light, the automobile, the airplane, the telephone, the computer, the Internet, etc.

Because the advancement of human life is the good, the creation of those values required by man’s life forms the fundamental nature of a moral existence. Life-giving goods and services must be produced before they may be distributed—created before they may be given away. It is the creation of life-supporting values, not their charitable re-distribution that is the preeminently virtuous act; for production is the driving engine of human survival. Consequently, the great wealth creators of history—Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Sam Walton, Bill Gates et al., are, qua productive giants, moral paragons; for such businessmen solved the problems of material production which plagued human life for millennia, enabling living standards to rise from bare subsistence to the historically unprecedented prosperity of the modern capitalist nations. Justice requires honest men to finally repudiate the egregiously mistaken “Robber Baron” view of such men and to honor them for their achievements.

If the creation of values urged by rational egoism is the essence of the good, what of the moral codes that oppose it? Fundamentally, in the history of moral philosophy, and, therefore, prevalent in human there are two such codes.

The first is altruism, the theory holding that virtue lies in self-sacrifice, in selfless service to others, whether the family, society, the state, the race, the proletariat, the tribe, etc. Need, to an altruist, constitutes an unchallengeable claim on a productive man’s values; to the unending needs of others are sacrificed his effort, his achievements, his mind. “From each according to his ability;” stated Karl Marx, “to each according to his need:” Or as Rand succinctly explained altruism: “Whatever the value involved, it is your lack of it that gives you a claim to rewards:”

The second is the theory endorsing a phony egoism—the basically devious view that the...