“Through centuries of scourges and disasters, brought about by your code of morality, you have cried that your code had been broken, that the scourges were punishment for breaking it, that men were too weak and too selfish to spill all the blood it required. You damned man, you damned existence, you damned this earth, but never dared to question your code. . . . You went on crying that your code was noble, but human nature was not good enough (...) to practice it. And no one rose to ask the question: Good?—by what standard? (shrink)

Ayn Rand argued that “selfish” is the correct designation for a person living according to the Objectivist ethics and that selfishness is a virtue. The accuracy of this claim is examined along with the meaning of “selfish,” the wider implications for the Objectivist ethics, and ethics in general. Alternatives to the term are suggested.

A collection of essays argues that philosophy is an essential element of human life--a force that shapes human character and national culture and destiny--and offers the rational philosophy of Objectivism as an alternative.

In this third installment of his series on key, underappreciated ideas in Ayn Rand's epistemology, the author discusses the nature of differentiation and integration as the functional essence of consciousness and applies that insight to various cognitive and noncognitive processes of awareness, with a special emphasis on logic and illogic. He offers an extended analysis of the fallacies of “Frozen Abstraction” and “False Alternative,” as well as critiques of a long-standing Objectivist conflation of falsity and contradiction and a relatively more (...) recent Objectivist error, the fallacy of “genuine awareness.”. (shrink)

The author examines the canonical Objectivist model of free will and finds it wanting, amounting to a form of Agency—Indeterminism. Employing an Aristotelian Four Cause analysis, he explores the complementary roles of determinism and free will, as well as the conditional nature of necessity and contingency, in understanding how causality operates in the human realm. He proposes an integration of what he calls “value-determinism” and “conditional free will,” arguing that it amounts to a basic axiom of human choice and action, (...) and urges its acceptance in place of the Orthodox Objectivist view of free will. (shrink)

This bibliography constitutes the most extensive compilation of references on Nathaniel Branden yet published.

Ayn Rand is well known for advocating egoism, but the substance of that instruction is rarely understood. Far from representing the rejection of morality, selfishness, in Rand's view, actually demands the practice of a systematic code of ethics. This book explains the fundamental virtues that Rand considers vital for a person to achieve their objective well-being: rationality, honesty, independence, justice, integrity, productiveness, and pride. Tracing Rand's account of the value and harmony of human beings' rational interests, Smith examines what each (...) of these virtues consists of, why it is a virtue, and what it demands of people in practice. Along the way she addresses the status of several conventional virtues within Rand's theory, considering traits such as kindness, charity, generosity, temperance, courage, forgiveness, and humility. Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics thus offers an in-depth exploration of several specific virtues and an illuminating integration of these with the broader theory of egoism. (shrink)