Effective Egoism
A pro-life morality demands self-interest
In ancient Greece, morality was seen as a guide to living well. Ethics was egoistic: morality was not a constraint on your self-interest but a blueprint for identifying your genuine interests—the values and virtues that lead to happiness.
Christianity turned the purpose of morality on its head. Morality became, not a guide to achieving your interests, but a nag scolding you to sacrifice your interests: serve God, serve your neighbor, serve your enemy.
The Enlightenment undermined religion’s authority as a guide to knowledge and social organization. But Enlightenment thinkers were unable to formulate a secular moral ideal. As religion’s influence waned, many worried that the “death of God” would unleash nihilism. Instead of throwing out religious morality, thinkers like the French philosopher Auguste Comte secularized it.
Comte named his secular “religion of humanity” altruism—literally, “other-ism.” A truly virtuous person, said Comte’s follower John Bridges, believes that “Our duty is to annihilate ourselves if need be for the service of Humanity.”
Ayn Rand called altruism a morality of death, and countered that “The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.” Embracing a pro-life morality means embracing self-interest as your moral goal.
Who benefits?
So far, in our quest for an objective morality, we’ve seen that values are what living organisms pursue to sustain their lives. Human beings don’t have to value our lives—that is a choice. But if we do choose to live, we need a pro-life moral code to teach us how to implement that choice. We need a pro-life moral code that includes values such as reason, purpose, and self-esteem, and virtues such as rationality, productiveness, justice, and pride.
Now we can complete the case for an objective morality by highlighting a crucial corollary of the foregoing: if your life is your ultimate value, then self-interest is a moral imperative.
To say that self-interest is a corollary of holding your life as your ultimate value is to say there’s no additional argument for egoism. Egoism stresses only this much: if you choose and achieve life-promoting values, there are no grounds for saying you should then throw them away. And yet that is precisely what altruism demands.
Altruism says that if you work to bring values into existence—if you grow food, if you earn money, if you build a billion dollar company, your moral obligation is give it up. For whom? For anyone who didn’t earn it. Why do they deserve it? Precisely because they didn’t earn it.
Altruism is a morality of injustice: if you exercise the virtues required to live, you become a servant of those who don’t. According to altruism, it is the meek, not the virtuous, who shall inherit the earth.
The self-interest straw man
People do not accept altruism because it offers compelling arguments. They accept it either because they want to be the ones collecting your sacrifices—or because they believe that the only alternative is the warped view of self-interest altruism has erected as a straw man.
Altruism equates your interests, not with reason, purpose, and self-esteem, but money, status, and power. To pursue your self-interest is to maximize these narrow interests without considering the impact of your actions on other people—or even the long-term impact on you.
No one really believes that unscrupulously piling up fame and cash is a desirable way to live. Most of us want our kids to be happy—we don’t teach them to become Kim Kardashian or Bernie Madoff. But the alternative to Kardashian and Madoff is not a selfless servant looking to be exploited by others—it’s to become an Effective Egoist.
What is Effective Egoism? The short version: an Effective Egoist dedicates himself to a pro-life moral ideal in order to achieve and enjoy his own life and happiness, neither sacrificing himself to others nor others to himself.
The symbols of Effective Egoism are not Kim Kardashian and Bernie Madoff but the intransigence of a Frederick Douglass and the curiosity of a Richard Feynman and the passion of a Steve Jobs and the courage of a Jackie Robinson and the adventurousness of an Ernest Shackleton and the independence of an Alexander Hamilton and the creative intelligence of a Maria Montessori and the ambition of a Jeff Bezos. It is, for those who have read Ayn Rand’s novels, Dagny Taggart, Howard Roark, Francisco D’Anconia, Hank Rearden, and John Galt.
Effective Egoism is not psychological egoism. Psychological egoism is the view that human beings always seek our own interests. Effective egoism is the moral theory that says human beings should seek our own interests—and that, all too often, we don’t.
Effective Egoism requires valuing other people. Your own life is your primary value, not your only value. Your interests in part consist of the interests of the people you care about: your friends, your lover, your children. Creating mutually fulfilling relationships with others and taking joy in their existence is a vital part of human flourishing.
Effective Egoism requires virtue. To say that egoism is a corollary of a pro-life moral code is to say that it cannot be severed from that moral code and treated as a primary. The person who is “out for himself” without the guidance of moral principles is not an egoist. He’s a pragmatist or a predator. And what he achieves is not his interests, but his own destruction.
Effective Egoism recognizes that human interests don’t clash. Human life doesn’t require sacrifice because we survive through thought and production. Even seeming conflicts, such as competition between businesses, are nested inside a wider context of shared interests: a shared interest in freedom. Human beings flourish through forming win/win alliances and mutually fulfilling relationships. Interests only “clash” when people desire the unearned and undeserved—but desiring the unearned and undeserved is not actually to your interest.
Summarizing the Argument
There is a secular morality of reason: Effective Egoism.
Values are what living organisms pursue to maintain their ultimate value: their life.
Human beings need a pro-life moral code if they choose to live.
A pro-life moral code is egoistic: it identifies the fundamental values and virtues that make up your genuine interests.
3 Fun Things
A Quote
“The moral purpose of a man’s life is the achievement of his own happiness. This does not mean that he is indifferent to all men, that human life is of no value to him and that he has no reason to help others in an emergency. But it does mean that he does not subordinate his life to the welfare of others, that he does not sacrifice himself to their needs, that the relief of their suffering is not his primary concern, that any help he gives is an exception, not a rule, an act of generosity, not of moral duty, that it is marginal and incidental—as disasters are marginal and incidental in the course of human existence—and that values, not disasters, are the goal, the first concern and the motive power of his life.”
—Ayn Rand, “The Ethics of Emergencies”
A Resource
Ayn Rand's Image of the Virtuous Egoist by Tara Smith. A delightful and clarifying explanation of what it means—and what it doesn’t mean—to pursue your rational self-interest.
A Tweet
Effective Egoism 101
The conception of earthly idealism I champion was defined by Ayn Rand. Here are three key works that summarize her perspective:
Faith and Force: Destroyers of the Modern World by Ayn Rand
Causality vs. Duty by Ayn Rand
The Objectivist Ethics by Ayn Rand
Don, it's beyond me how you managed to put these ideas out so powerfully and concisely. Thank you for showing another example of what's possible to write!
Good article, Don.
In paragraph 3, waned is misspelled.