The Effective Egoist Case for Freedom
It is striking, sad, and not at all surprising how little interest there is in celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The essential political value of the Declaration is freedom—and yet the concept of “freedom” is almost totally absent from today’s political debate.
Pick your issue: data centers, immigration, healthcare, foreign policy, climate, race, abortion, taxes, driverless cars, Social Security. Both political tribes will appeal to any value except freedom to make their case. Freedom is viewed as old fashioned, naive, or simply meaningless.
But “freedom” is not an empty concept. It has a definite meaning and it should guide our political thinking. A moral government exists to protect freedom. That is its only legitimate role, its only warrant for action.
But to speak of a “moral” government is to evoke the question: moral, by what standard? If what you support is some version of the Sermon on the Mount, then freedom is emphatically not a value. You do not need the freedom to live on your own terms and for the sake of your own happiness if your moral duty is to live as a selfless servant.
The only moral theory that can defend freedom as a political value is Effective Egoism. Egoism is typically thought to license the amoral exercise of power: I ought to do whatever I can get away with. In reality, egoism provides the only logical basis for peaceful coexistence. It is not a call to seek power, plunder, or prestige by any means necessary. It offers a demanding set of values and virtues, ones that require treating other human beings as ends in themselves. Politically, it entails a regime that safeguards the egoist way of life.
The morality of Effective Egoism tells us what constitutes the good—political freedom is the social state of affairs we require in order to pursue the good.
Effective Egoism 101
I have written at length about the meaning and justification of egoism, both in my essay “What Is Effective Egoism?” and in my book Effective Egoism. Here are the essentials.
Effective Egoism holds that the moral purpose of your life is the achievement of your own happiness. But you cannot achieve happiness by blindly pursuing your desires. Blind desires will clash with reality and clash with each other. Happiness requires seeking values that will genuinely nourish you and fit together harmoniously into a life. The purpose of morality is to identify those values and the virtues that make them possible.
A code of morality is a guide to living. Not a step-by-step instruction manual, but an abstract template of the human way of life. What it offers is not commandments but principles—principles that outline in broad terms the requirements of human survival.
For human beings, reason is our basic means of survival. We survive by using our mind to understand the world, to navigate our way through it, to produce the values our life requires. The fundamental virtue human life requires, therefore, is rationality: a full commitment to reason in thought and action. It is only by following reason that we can successfully conform to reality.
If conforming to reality by following reason is how we thrive, then vice consists of going to war with reality by evading the demands of reason. Intellectually, we go to war with reality whenever we embrace ideas without evidence and refuse to correct a contradiction. Existentially, we go to war with reality whenever we try to evade the law of causality—to seek effects without causes or to escape the effects of the causes we enact.
Similarly, all of our virtues have both an intellectual and an existential aspect. They tell us how to conform to reality in both thought and action. The virtue of independence counsels us to form our own judgments about the true and the good—and to live by the work of our own mind. The virtue of honesty counsels us not to engage in any form of pretense—and to never try to gain a value by faking reality. The virtue of justice counsels us to judge human beings (and human products) objectively—and to refuse to attempt any breach between cause and effect of their actions by granting to each what he deserves.
What do other people deserve from us? Above all, the recognition that any value they have to offer us depends on their pursuit of their own rational self-interest. Whether it’s knowledge, wealth, or companionship that we seek from others, the only way to get it is to make dealing with us to their interest by offering values in return. To benefit from others is to live by the trader principle: to gain rewards from others, we must offer them rewards in exchange. Whether it’s trading our money for groceries or the spiritual trade undergirding a life-long romantic bond, the only relationships that are to our interest are ones that are mutually fulfilling.
There are innumerable evils one person can commit against another. You can lie to a friend. Betray a spouse. Fire a good employee out of spite. Preach altruism. Such evils can be more traumatizing than a fist to the face. Yet they leave the victim intact. He is free to ignore you or part ways with you and go about his life. There is only one evil that doesn’t leave people free to go about their lives—that represents an intrusion that stops them from living according to their own judgment: the initiation of physical force.
The Evil of Force
The initiation of physical force means force exercised on someone without his consent. In the simplest cases, it consists of a direct attack on a person’s body—a punch, a kick, a choke—or physical confinement. In other cases, force is indirect, as with a threat. A threat has the same impact as the direct use of force: the aggressor obtains your compliance not by earning your consent—not by persuading you through a convincing argument or an appealing value—but by introducing the possibility of direct force. When he offers you a choice between your money or your life, you have a choice—but not the choice to go about your life without regard for the aggressor’s ultimatum.1 It’s in that sense that a threat is no different from being bludgeoned or bound.
It is obvious that the initiation of physical force conflicts with a person’s desires. You want to keep your money—the thief wants to take it for himself. You want to live—the serial killer wants you to die. But that is not unique to force. A publisher’s refusal to publish my book may conflict with my desire to have my book published. A storm may conflict with my desire to go to a concert. Force is evil, not fundamentally because it conflicts with the victim’s desires, but because it subverts his basic means of survival: his mind.
Force can subvert the mind in two distinctive ways. Direct force and threats prescribing or proscribing a concrete action (“your money or your life”) negate the victim’s mind—threats demanding obedience to an authority’s judgment (“Accept the Church’s interpretation of Scripture or be burned as a heretic”) paralyze the victim’s mind. To negate the mind is to make a person’s thought irrelevant to his action—to paralyze the mind is to prevent thought altogether.
Threats aimed at action don’t negate a person’s thinking across the board. You can think, for instance, about how to deal with the threat. What you can’t do, to the extent you are under the threat of force, is engage in the kind of thought process required to sustain a human life.
You know, for instance, that you have to work in order to support your life. You consider your skills, interests, and the opportunities in your area and decide to open a restaurant. You pay wages and set prices you judge will maximize your profits. But then a mobster shows up and says: pay me off or face the consequences. He is not simply doing something undesirable, like opening a competing restaurant across the street. A competitor introduces a new fact that you have to incorporate into your thinking in order to achieve your goals—a mafioso uses a gun to bypass your thinking and make your actions subservient to his will. You are no longer to work to support your life—you are to work to sustain his.2
Human life requires using reason in order to conform to reality in thought and action. Force presents you with the choice: if you conform to the demands of reality, you’ll face the wrath of the aggressor—if you conform to the will of the aggressor, you’ll face the wrath of reality.
A different kind of case emerges when you are ordered to obey an authority’s judgment, whether it’s a Pope declaring that a scientist cannot undermine the infallibility of the Bible or an FCC chairman declaring that an entertainer cannot engage in “indecent” speech or a Department of Justice official declaring that an entrepreneur cannot engage in “anti-competitive” practices. You can ignore their demands and think about what’s true, consequences be damned. You can shut off your mind and become a parrot repeating the party line. But to the extent you try to remain dedicated to seeking the truth by reason while also complying with the forcer, your mind will be paralyzed: you literally will not be able to think.
Mental paralysis is not a phenomenon unique to force. It can emerge whenever you hold a contradiction. You have an overwhelming to-do list and you don’t know where to start so you do nothing: in effect, you are telling yourself, “I have to do everything at once but I can’t do everything at once.” One common form of mental paralysis comes from accepting arbitrary ideas—ideas for which there is no evidence that you adopt purely on the basis of emotion. They are paralyzing precisely because their lack of evidence means there is nothing you can do with them cognitively. The contradiction at the root of the arbitrary is: “I need to go by reason” and “I want to embrace this idea that reason can’t justify.” To be paralyzed is to be unable to move forward in a cognitive task because any path that occurs to you leaves you with the conclusion, “I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t.” The only way to end the paralysis is to resolve the contradiction.
Force, however, is the only way other people can inflict mental paralysis on you. To follow reason is to follow your own judgment, so when an aggressor demands that you obey his judgment, he confronts you with a contradiction you cannot resolve (except by escaping the force): “I want to remain true to reality by following my own judgment” and “I have to conform to the judgment of the forcer, regardless of its connection to reality.” He is, in effect, imposing the arbitrary on you against your will.
Consider the case of Galileo. He was convinced that the Earth revolves around the Sun, but he knew that the Church held that certain passages in the Bible implied Earth was the motionless center of the universe—and that only the Church had the authority to interpret the Bible. Insofar as he tried to remain dedicated to the truth and to the notion that the Church was the exclusive and infallible interpreter of the Bible, he could not think. (In the end, he placed his own judgment above the Church’s, arguing that its interpretation of the Bible was wrong—and faced the consequences.)
Or take the case of an entrepreneur trying to function under antitrust laws. Antitrust law does not simply provide a list of forbidden acts. Many ordinary competitive practices—mergers, price cuts, exclusive contracts, product improvements, and price increases—may be either lawful or unlawful depending on whether regulators and courts regard them as legitimate competition or as attempts to monopolize a market. The business leader is paralyzed to the extent he aims to honor his goal of growing his business and to obey the government’s command not to “undermine competition.” (See the history of Microsoft.)3
These examples involve the forcer imposing ideas that are inherently arbitrary. But the same logic follows even in cases where the forcer is trying to impose his judgment in the name of true ideas. Suppose I ordered you at the point of a gun to be an Effective Egoist. This is an idea that you can follow by reason—but you cannot do so if I am the final arbiter of what counts as egoism. You are no longer able to operate on the principle of, “I will do what I judge best for my life.” You are forced to operate on the principle of what Don Watkins will judge best for your own life.
Whether an aggressor aims to dictate your actions or substitute his judgment for yours, the results are the same; force can achieve nothing but destruction—yours and the aggressor’s.
Rationality is the basic virtue human life requires. From the victim’s perspective, force is destructive because it is the only way others can impose irrationality on him. From the aggressor’s perspective, the choice to resort to force is the choice to reject reason. He is attempting to defy reality by gaining values from human beings while undermining and destroying their ability to create values. Human beings create values by using their mind—the aggressor negates and paralyzes their mind. Human beings create values to support their own life—the aggressor forces people to work for his benefit, not their own. His war against reality can succeed only in turning the rational and productive into his enemy, which is not a path to values but to paranoia, prison, or the morgue.
To the extent the initiation of force ever appears practical, it is only because of a default on the part of the good. You cannot stop a bullet with an argument. The only way to answer force is with force. To practice the virtue of rationality means forswearing the initiation of force—and responding to aggression with retaliatory force. But what happens when the rational and productive don’t answer force with force? What happens when they respond to aggression with appeasement? What happens when they reject justice in favor of mercy? What happens when they concede that others have the right to use force against them?
The basic result is that force proliferates and intensifies. This can create the illusion that force is efficacious, since thugs will rise to power and use the machinery of government to pilfer and destroy without legal consequences. But they rule over an increasingly impoverished society and enjoy an increasingly precarious existence as they try to fend off more cunning and ruthless competitors. In no case can the power thug (or any criminal) achieve the self-esteem that comes from living by rational principles and which is the indispensable precondition of happiness. There is no such thing as getting away with being irrational.
The initiation of physical force is a singular evil, and if human beings are to live together peacefully and profitably, then it is the initiation of physical force that they must renounce.
Individual Rights
Just as an individual needs moral principles to guide him in the pursuit of happiness, so a society needs principles to guide proper social organization. A society is a group of people living in a shared environment, interacting over time in diverse ways, predominantly with strangers rather than friends and family. The two great benefits of social existence are knowledge and trade. When human beings live together the division of labor dramatically expands our ability to learn and produce. But these benefits only exist to the extent that human beings succeed in achieving peaceful coexistence. To the extent that a society is ruled by force, it represents a threat to human life. It needs rules of social organization that secure peaceful coexistence.
Human beings cannot live together peacefully under anarchy—we cannot function when any individual or gang can unilaterally unleash force against us. We need governments vested with a monopoly on force to protect private individuals and empower them to settle disputes without resorting to blows. But governments themselves can initiate force. For most of human history, the only limitation on the government’s ability to initiate force was de facto, not de jure—a matter of capability and custom, not right.
The concept of a “right” goes back to Roman law, where it meant a lawful claim, entitlement, or sphere of action recognized by the legal order. The more modern notion of a right as a moral power or entitlement inhering in the individual arose in the medieval era, pioneered by thinkers such as William of Ockham. But it was only during the Enlightenment that individual rights came to be seen as the principle governing proper social organization.
The principle of individual rights holds that each individual has a right to exist for his own sake—to think and produce in support of his own life without interference from others. It represents the extension of morality into politics—not by imposing the good on the individual, but by restraining society from stopping the individual from seeking the good. If the purpose of morality is to provide a guide for living a human life, then the purpose of rights is to guide a society in the formation of its institutions and laws so that it is possible for each individual in society to live a human life.
Because life is our ultimate value, the right to life is our fundamental right. It is the right to take all those actions necessary for the support and furtherance of our life. All of our other rights are specifications of aspects of the right to life: the right to liberty is the right to live by our own independent judgment; the right to pursue happiness is the right to live for the sake of our own enjoyment, rather than as a sacrificial means to the well-being of others. And since human survival requires translating thought into action and meeting our material needs, the right to property exists as the necessary means of securing our ability to earn material values and use them to support and further our life.
A “right” in Ayn Rand’s definition “is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context.” We need the concept of “rights” because living together peacefully in society requires clarity about our sphere of freedom—the boundaries where we are free to take independent action without obtaining the consent of others. A society cannot secure peaceful coexistence merely by banning the initiation of force because, apart from clear-cut examples like an unprovoked punch to the face, it is only by first establishing an individual’s sphere of freedom that we can precisely identify what counts as the initiation of force.
Consider the case of property. Just as a squirrel transforms a nut into part of its life process by gathering it, storing it, and eventually eating it, so we transform the raw materials of nature into part of our life process through the acts of production and consumption. If we earn a car to aid our transportation needs, to steal that car is in a real sense to break our legs.4 But when does a material become ours and when precisely does someone intrude on our life by interfering with our use and disposal of it? Without the concept of rights, these boundaries are vague and ill-defined, opening the door to conflicts that imperil peaceful coexistence. When rights are clearly defined, by contrast, they demarcate the boundaries of lives, making possible a much wider scale of peaceful interaction: not simply to buy a car and leave it safely parked in our driveway, but to purchase a car on credit, or to invest in an auto company, or to earn a patent on a new automotive technology.
But whatever the scale and complexity of human interaction that rights protect, what remains true is that the only way to violate a person’s rights is through the initiation of force. Rights are positive in the sense that they are crafted in order to protect something good: the human way of life. But the only obligation they impose on others is negative: the obligation not to interfere with the exercise of your rights.
There is no right to money or a job or health care or an education—there can be no right to that which has to be produced by other human beings. To enforce such “rights” is to initiate force against other people in order to turn them into your servants. Rather than resolve conflicts, these “positive rights” or “welfare rights” or “economic rights” entrench conflicts. A genuine right, by contrast, is a right to action—it protects the freedom to live your own life by your own judgment, neither sacrificing yourself to others nor others to yourself. The right to property, for instance, guarantees you the freedom to earn property—it doesn’t guarantee you property that others have to produce. The right to free speech guarantees that others will not forcibly silence you—it doesn’t guarantee you a platform or an audience.
It is only the initiation of force that can violate rights. This includes indirect forms of force, such as threats or fraud. Fraud occurs when the transaction you consented to was not the one that actually took place. You agreed to buy Vitamin D supplements and what you received were sugar pills. That is no more an act of trade than if you gave the seller the money and he ran off without giving you anything in return.
Whether it is a punch to the gut, the menacing wave of a gun, or an act of fraud, only force can violate rights—and the initiation of force always violates rights. This includes any attempt to use force to achieve the good.
Morality is an abstract code that allows you to grasp mind-independent facts about human survival. But the good consists of the particular human life you choose to lead. You have to translate the broad principles of morality into the specific values that add up to your happiness. Just as knowing requires that you undergo the process of grasping a fact, so valuing requires that you undergo the process of adopting an end as part of the life you aim to build. A personal gym that you don’t use is not good for you, nor is a career you fall into because your parents pressured you. No concrete end can benefit you unless it is part of a total life process, which for a human being depends on selecting it rationally and using it rationally. It is only by selecting values that add up to a life and pursuing those values in a way that nurtures your life that your ends become good.
The good for human beings is not intrinsic—it is not about pursuing some ends that are inherently good for us apart from our rational judgment. Nor is the good subjective—the sheer act of wanting something does not mean that it will benefit us to gain it. The human good is objective: it consists of exercising a process of reason and pursuing those things we rationally evaluate as good for our lives—and that is not something that can be forced on another person.
You cannot force the good on someone for the same reason that you cannot force knowledge on them. Both the true and the good require each individual to exercise his own rational judgment. Can that judgment be mistaken? Of course. The reason we need a method for pursuing the true and the good is precisely because we aren’t omniscient and we aren’t infallible. But this applies as much to the person exercising force as to the person being forced. The authority seeking to dictate how to plan for retirement or what medications are safe to ingest or which foods are healthy or what choices lead to happiness can err as easily as his victim. There is no escaping the need for individual judgment. The only choice is whether to protect the individual’s right to live by his own judgment or to suppress it.
When the government leaves people free to make their own retirement decisions, or their own healthcare decisions, or their own lifestyle decisions, it does so not in the name of “the right to be irrational.” It does so in the name of the right to disagree about what’s rational. Each person must judge the true and the good for himself, at his own risk and for his own sake. The attempt to force the good on others can achieve only one thing: the destruction of independent thought. To enforce Newton is to silence Einstein. To enforce the consensus is to silence the innovators who see beyond the consensus.
Effective Egoism demands a political system organized around the principle of individual rights—and an Effective Egoist both demands that his rights be respected and is committed to respecting the rights of others. He respects their rights for the same reason he does not break their legs: respecting the rights of others is to his interests. His interests consist of living the life of a thinker and producer, and he gains values from other thinkers and producers through persuasion and trade. To violate the rights of others is to destroy the source of human values and to turn the facts of reality and the self-interest of other people into his enemy.
This does not mean there are no circumstances where an egoist will violate rights. If he’s lost in the wilderness and finds an uninhabited cabin, he may break in for shelter and food. But he will leave a note offering to make restitution and, above all, will accept whatever legal consequences are entailed from his rights violation. To respect rights is not fundamentally an issue of obsessively avoiding even the most trivial trespassers on the rights of others, but submitted to the rule of law. It’s to foreswear the life of a criminal and live the life of a trader.
Freedom
Freedom, in a political context, means freedom from the initiation of physical force. A society is free to the extent the government protects the individual’s rights from violation by aggressors—to the extent the government defaults on this responsibility or uses forces to violate rights, it is unfree.
Freedom is not an end in itself—it is the social condition necessary for moral existence, the condition that allows human beings to survive by safeguarding their ability to think, produce, and trade. This is because force, while not the only evil, is a special evil—it is the only way that others can stop us from using our minds to promote our life. Other evils leave us free to go our own way. It is force, and only force, that can intrude on our life against our will and render our own use of reason inefficacious.
But is force truly so distinctive? Can’t nature limit our freedom as much as other people, as when a flood traps us in our home or destroys our crops? And can’t other people limit our freedom without restoring force, as when speculators charge “predatory” prices in the aftermath of a flood?
There is a sense in which nature can limit our freedom. Freedom, in the broad sense, simply means that we can act “without hindrance or restraint.” But what we are interested in from a moral and political perspective is our ability to live by reason, and nature can’t limit that (apart from illness or physical damage that destroys our mental faculties).
Nature, rather, sets the context in which we reason. A flood is a fact of reality that we have to respond to by reason, whether that means figuring out a way to escape the flood, to rebuild after the flood, or to prevent future floods. No political system can prevent reality from limiting our choices—but it can protect our ability to deal with reality by reason through protecting our rights.
What, then, about the non-forcible actions of others? Doesn’t a speculator leave you as unable to feed yourself as a thief? Doesn’t a competitor threaten your business as much as a mobster? No.
In the case of the speculator, there is a radical difference between not being a help and being a hindrance. The speculator offers you a value in exchange, which you are free to reject. If you reject it, he’s left you no worse off than if he didn’t exist. If you can’t persuade him to offer you a lower price, then the only way to obtain what he’s offering is for you to reject the trader principle and initiate force against him.
In the case of the competitor, there is a radical difference between failing and being stopped from succeeding. No goal offers guaranteed success, least of all when that success depends on the choice of others to trade with you. You must earn their business by offering them the best deal. If you don’t or you can’t, then the only way to achieve “success” is to reject the trader principle and initiate force against your would-be competitors or your potential customers.
It is only force that can prevent you from using your mind to gain values. It is only force that can stop you from living a human life. And it is only by outlawing the initiation of physical force that a society safeguards the freedom needed to thrive.
This essay builds on Ayn Rand’s thinking about force, rights, and freedom, which she developed most fully in her books Atlas Shrugged, The Virtue of Selfishness, and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. I owe many of the points here to the secondary literature on Rand’s work, especially to Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, A Companion to Ayn Rand, and Foundations of a Free Society.
Contrast that with someone who seeks to obtain your consent through emotional manipulation. Someone who tries to guilt you into lending him money can threaten you with the alternative, “If you don’t help me out I’m going to lose my home.” But to the extent he doesn’t resort to force, you remain free to ignore his pleas and go about your life, unconcerned with whether he solves his financial woes.
He may allow you to keep some—even most—of your earnings, but only to the extent it serves his goals. Through his use of force, he is setting the terms and you’ve been made a tool for his aims. Allowing you to keep 90% of what you earn is not a recognition of your right to work for your own sake, but instead closer to a slaveowner’s willingness to let his victims eat.
Of course there’s a sense in which you have to obey an authority’s will even in cases of fully rational, objective laws: if you kill an intruder, for example, you don’t get the final say in whether your action was self-defense. But laws defining what constitutes legitimate self-defense are fact-based. They do not declare, “Do whatever the authorities happen to consider self-defense.” They lay out specific conditions in reality that distinguish the initiation of force from defensive force, and judges and juries are tasked with assessing whether your action met those conditions. An objective law, then, directs your judgment toward reality: the question is what the facts are and whether your actions conform to them. An arbitrary law directs your judgment toward an authority's evaluation: the question is not what is true, but what those in power will decide is permissible. In one case facts are the standard, even if you are subject to an authority’s evaluation of the facts—in another case, an authority’s will is the standard, unbound by facts.
I borrow this vivid analogy from Gregory Salmieri, “Selfish Regard for the Rights of Others,” in Foundations of a Free Society, 187.