The Human Way of Life
Unlocking the riddle of human flourishing
An organism’s life is its ultimate value. But human beings have free will. We don’t automatically value our lives, and we don’t automatically know how to sustain them. If we choose to live, then we need the guidance of a pro-life moral code. An objective morality teaches us how to realize our only possible ultimate value: our life.
But this raises a vital question. If we don’t know automatically how to sustain our life, how do we discover it? Our physical and psychological needs are complex, multi-faceted, holistic, and long range. We can’t just look at a given choice and know whether it will promote or undercut our life. How does a pro-life moral code solve this problem?
How do we objectively derive the content of a pro-life moral code?
An Objective Moral Standard
Every organism has a way of life distinctive to its species—a way of life organized around the struggle for survival. This way of life allows scientists to explain and predict the structures and activities of an organism. The hawk circling my backyard has wings because flying is central to how a hawk secures its food.
A way of life also acts as a standard of value that allows us to assess things as good or bad for an organism. Breaking a wing is bad for the hawk because it makes it less capable of taking the life-promoting actions a hawk’s life requires.
What is the human way of life? Human beings survive by reason. We use our minds to understand the world and transform it through productive actions to meet our needs.
This is the ultimate meaning of the industrial revolution. The skyrocketing standard of living brought about by scientific breakthroughs and technological innovations demonstrated that reason is our basic means of survival.
In order to achieve the ultimate value of your life you need an abstract standard of value to guide your actions. Ayn Rand called that standard “man’s life”:
“Since reason is man’s basic means of survival, that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; that which negates, opposes or destroys it is the evil.” (Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics”)
The point is not that you should survive by reason rather than some other way. It’s that reason is how you survive—and so if life is your goal, you should live by reason because there is no other way to live. Even people who seem to get by irrationally have to count on the rationality of others: a nation of full-time thieves would have nothing to steal.
What It Means to Live by Reason
What does it mean to “live by reason”? Here’s what it doesn’t mean: emulate Star Trek’s Spock, and turn yourself into an emotionless utilitarian calculator.
A better symbol is the entrepreneur. An entrepreneur uses reason to project new and better ways of doing things. He formulates a vision of a future worth creating, and then actively works to build that future. He moves forward based on his own independent judgment, overcoming obstacles and ignoring the doubters. His goals aren’t small scale and conventional, but creative and ambitious.
To live by reason is not to pursue knowledge as end in itself, nor is it to become a cold, calculating machine. To live by reason is to actively pursue ambitious material and spiritual values—values such as a fulfilling career, self-esteem, romantic love, and soul-nourishing art. It’s to use reason to project a life that you want to live—your specific form of the human way of life—and to make that life real.
But to make it real, to achieve rational values, requires acting rationally. It requires cultivating rational virtues.
The Virtues of Reason
Pragmatism is impractical: you can’t foresee all of the consequences of your actions, and all-too-often choices that seem low-stakes and innocuous turn out to have major consequences you did not predict.
Virtues solve this problem. They are causal principles that identify the actions that lead to life-promoting values. They tell you which choices will lead to long-range achievement and success, and which will lead to long-range frustration and failure.
Because reason is your basic means of survival, your fundamental virtue is rationality: the virtue of using reason as your only guide to knowledge, values, and actions.
Every other virtue is an aspect of rationality: it specifies what it means to be rational in light of some specific fact about human nature. This includes virtues such as honesty, integrity, independence, productiveness, justice, and pride.
For example, the virtue of independence says that because reason is an individual faculty, you should live by your own judgment and by the work of your own mind.
Independence doesn’t mean that you ignore other people, refuse to learn from them, or refuse to cooperate with them. It means that because no one else can do your thinking and your living for you, you must take responsibility for your own thinking and life, recognizing that dependence in any form cripples your ability to thrive.
The life-or-death importance of independence isn’t obvious. Many people believe it’s safer to obey some authority rather than the judgment of their own mind. Many believe it’s easier to passively copy the routines laid down by others rather than discover how to do good work. Some seek to bypass the need to work altogether, mooching off of friends, relatives, or the state—or simply taking what they want from others by force.
But in all of these cases, the dependent is surrendering control over his life. He’s blindly placing himself at the mercy of others—of their ignorance, their irrationality, their generosity, their gullibility, their weakness. He’s made himself a passenger in a vehicle driven God knows where but God knows who.
Virtue is not its own reward. Virtue is a practical necessity: to act virtuously is to guarantee that you’ll achieve the values human life requires, over time and barring accidents. Vice, by contrast, guarantees failure, conflict, suffering, loss.
The Objectivity of Happiness
We’ve seen that the purpose of morality is objective: morality is a guide to achieving the ultimate value of your life. We’ve also seen that morality’s guidance is objective: human life has specific requirements rooted in our nature as rational beings.
But there is one further implication to draw attention to: happiness has objective requirements.
Today, happiness is seen as inherently subjective. But happiness simply is the psychological state of achieving your values, and it is only values aligned with a pro-life morality that can be fully realized.
A rational moral code gives you an integrated set of values and virtues that add up to a human life. Without such a code, you may achieve some of your values, but only at the frustration of others. You’ll be pulled in different directions, and it’s precisely this state of conflict that is the mark of unhappiness. Happiness is the state of unconflicted fulfillment.
The convergence of a pro-life morality and happiness is not some accidental bonus for pursuing your life as your ultimate value. Happiness is the emotional state of successful living. We don’t pursue happiness in order to live or pursue life in order to achieve happiness.
The pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of life. They are two perspectives on a single achievement. Happiness is how we experience the fact that life is an end in itself.
We’re nearly finished laying the foundations of earthly idealism. Next week we’ll look at one last foundational issue—an issue that will illuminate how radically different a morality of human flourishing is from religious morality and its secular variants. A pro-life morality, we’ll see, is egoistic: to live a moral life, you must pursue your self-interest.
3 Fun Things
A Quote
“The regular structures and activities of an organism, the intricate integration of its various parts, can all be explained by the act that they are conducive to the pursuit of the organism’s way of life. Way of life is a teleologically basic purpose of an organism, and it is what justifies teleological explanations and predictions of biological form and function in just the way that the goals of a rational agent underwrite the prediction and explanation of her actions. “
—D.M. Walsh, Organisms, Agency, and Evolution
A Resource
"The Distinctively Human Form of Life" by Gregory Salmieri. In this lecture, Greg describes the human way of life and draws out some of its moral and political implications.
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