Why Effective Egoists Struggle

A Tale of Two Ethics

Whenever we decide to develop our capability in a particular field, we face two questions: why and what? Why do I want to become a good baseball player—and what makes a baseball player good? Why do I want to become a good chef—and what makes a chef good? Why do I want to become a good salesperson—and what makes a salesperson good?

My “why” is rooted in what I want from life. I take on new challenges when they are a means to or component of my happiness. But the “what” is impersonal: it reflects certain facts about the field. A good baseball player is one who scores runs and gets outs. A good chef cooks tasty food. A good salesperson convinces prospects to buy.

At first glance, the same could be said about ethics. The only compelling to reason to be moral is that it serves our happiness—and what is moral is determined by impersonal facts about what makes someone a good man.

But take a second glance and things start to get complicated. What if what makes someone a “good man” runs counter to our happiness, as most moralists say? In that case, we might say, “To hell with morality.” But that’s not so easy. Most of us experience a profound desire to pursue the good because it is good. Morality seems to be something grander than a tool for getting what we want. It doesn’t seem like a recipe book that we can easily discard if we don’t happen to take an interest in cooking. It comes vested with an authority that demands our attention and our respect.

You might think that Effective Egoism resolves these difficulties. It says that a good man is precisely one who is devoted to his own happiness. And yet even an Effective Egoist can experience a tension in the way he views morality.

The more that we think of morality as a tool for getting what we want, the more we risk falling into subjectivism—morality becomes “a slave of the passions” and loses its grandeur and awesome motivational power. The more we focus on doing the good because it’s the good, the more we risk seeing ethics as a list of duties we must slavishly obey without regard for our own happiness.

Either approach makes us ineffective egoists, unable to reap the rewards of a pro-happiness morality.

The Ineffective Egoist

You’re a department head of a Silicon Valley tech company and the word comes down from the bosses: to help the organization hit its DEI targets, you need to prioritize hiring and promoting people based on skin color. And if you won’t, the organization will find someone who will.

You see this policy for what it is: racist and unjust. But you also worry you won’t find a job that will pay you nearly as much, and you’re already stretched thin paying your San Francisco rent and keeping your kids in private school.

The more you view morality as a tool for getting what you want, the more you’ll be led to tell yourself a story about how you don’t have an obligation to become a martyr. No organization is perfect, you think, and there are so many orders from above you disagree with. How is this any different than making your team work on project A when you personally think project B will better serve the company’s goals?

On the other hand, the more you view morality as something disconnected from what you want, the more you’ll be led to tell yourself a story about how you must disobey, protest, or quit—not because it’s vital to your happiness, but because it’s the right thing to do. You will be a martyr, and though part of you takes pride in your dedication to principle, another part of you resents the fact that you are leaving the company while those fortunate enough to have never read Don’s Substack can go on making lots of money working at an impactful company with a clear conscience.

Both approaches lead to a deep conflict: morality versus happiness. The subjectivist thinks he can have happiness without morality; the disciple of duty thinks he can have morality without happiness. Neither will come away with the only thing worth having: a self and a life that they love.

So what’s the solution?

Insight 1: Morality Helps Us Identify What’s Worth Wanting

King Midas wishes that everything he touches turns to gold—and starves to death as every morsel of food that touches his lips becomes expensive and inedible. The myth is seen as an indictment of greed and avarice. But the lesson is deeper: it’s damn easy to desire things that are bad for us. We cannot achieve happiness by satisfying whatever desires we happen to have. We need to think deeply and carefully about what desires are worth having.

In the conventional story, our self-interest consists of money, status, and power. An egoist, on this view, is someone who does whatever it takes to secure as much money, status, and power as possible.

But why think these values are valuable? What makes something genuinely valuable? Ultimately, the answer has to be: that they serve your happiness. And it takes precious little reflection to know that money, status, and power are at best weakly correlated with happiness—and that how you gain them makes all the difference in the world. (Just ask Sam Bankman-Fried.)

The true egoist is dedicated to getting what he wants—but he chooses his wants carefully and thoughtfully. What he wants is the best possible—values that genuinely further his life and add up to an undiluted joy in living. The mere fact he desires something is not proof it’s desirable. The question he asks is: why?

I want more money? Why? A good answer can’t be: to buy stuff. A good answer to that question will situate the desire for money into a larger picture of a life worth living.

For example, my own desire for money is rooted in my desire to do my work my way. I want to be able to choose work projects because they excite me, not because I need to pay the bills. I want to be able to take creative risks. I want to be able to pay other people to do time consuming tasks that would distract me from my work. Money is a value to me because it serves an overarching vision of a life centered around fulfilling work.

And notice that my “why” puts definite boundaries around how I’ll pursue money. It obviously rules out crime, but it also rules out choosing high paying work that I don’t want to do. The question I face is how to prosper doing what I love. Subordinating what I love to earn more money would be as pointless as selling my car to buy expensive rims.

There are also some wants that cannot withstand scrutiny at all. I desire power over others. Why? There is no answer to that question rooted in a life worth living. An honest answer will expose my insecurity and desire to gain self-esteem through superiority. But I cannot achieve self-esteem by giving people orders.

Morality is a tool for getting what you want—but the basic way it does this is by helping you project a life worth living. Effective Egoism identifies the basic structure of a human life: a thriving, joyful life is one rooted in reason, purpose, and self-esteem—a life centered around productive work, and filled with deep relationships, rewarding hobbies, and soul-nourishing art. It’s your job to choose the specific form your life will take, and to nurture and fulfill desires aligned with this vision.

Insight 2: The “Good” Means Good at Living

When I was thirteen, I become obsessed with rock music. I had never played an instrument, but I spent hours watching videos of guitar gods like Jimi Hendrix. I had no clue exactly what they were doing, but it was obvious they could do it well. Their hands moved effortlessly across the guitar’s fretboard and produced gripping, moving music.

When I started playing guitar, by contrast, my movements were slow, clumsy, awkward. And the sounds that emerged could hardly be called music. It took months of effort before I learned some basic chords and could strum a few songs.

Most crafts are like that. We can recognize them done expertly long before we can perform them expertly. I have never skied, but I can tell the difference between a professional skier and a newbie. I might not understand the intricacies of the art. I might not know why one Olympic skier earned a 9.0 while another scored an 8.7. But I can tell the difference between someone who moves gracefully down the mountain and someone who stumbles and falls.

The same is true of the art of living. Long before we have a sophisticated moral vocabulary, we can distinguish those who are living well from those who aren’t. We meet people who are self-assured, capable, successful—and we meet people who aren’t. People agonized by self-doubt. People seething with anger and bitterness. People whose lives are an utter mess.

And in addition to the people we meet, there are the characters we watch and read about. Stories bring into sharper focus the connection between a person’s choices, their character, and their life course. We see how Harry Potter’s courage and determination allow him to defeat an unstoppable opponent. We see how Rocky’s commitment and unbreakable will allow him to go the distance with the world’s best fighter. We see how Howard Roark’s independence and integrity lead to achievement and happiness, while Peter Keating’s desire for approval and conventional success lead to emptiness and self-destruction.

These observations provide the raw material for our moral concepts. “The good” is not some empty abstraction waiting to be filled in by moral philosophers. It has definite if imprecise content: to be good is to be good at living. We encounter people who know how to live well, and we feel admiration and are inspired to achieve what they’ve achieved: that is the source and meaning of our desire to seek the good because it’s good.

The Solution

Healthy moral development would help us make explicit and consistent what we grasp implicitly as a child. We’d be taught to identify in conceptual terms what it means to live well—what kind of choices and character lead to confidence, competence, and joy. We’d be given an ethical framework we could use to build a self and a life that we love.

Tragically, altruism cripples healthy moral development. It drives a wedge between “the good” and “good at living.” It splits the moral and the practical. “The good” is not an earthly ideal but an other-worldly ideal, and to be a good man is to give up worldly success and achievement. The “practical,” meanwhile, is defined without any consideration of what’s worth practicing. To be practical is to pursue whatever you desire—or whatever the people around you have decided is desirable.

Effective Egoism rejects any moral/practical dichotomy. The moral is the practical—not because it teaches you how to achieve whatever you happen to desire, but because it identifies what’s truly worth practicing—and the course of action that will allow you to practice it.

And so the Effective Egoist is not a subjectivist—he chooses his desires based on a thoughtful assessment of what is truly desirable. Nor is the Effective Egoist a dogmatist who does his duty because it’s his duty. His eyes are fixed on what he wants—wants that are deeply informed by morality.

Morality, for the Effective Egoist, is a tool for getting what he wants—and he wants to do the good because it’s good. Both perspectives on morality are right because they are two perspectives on the same issue: how to achieve the best possible for my life.

What do I want? The best possible for my life. What is the good? The best possible for my life.

The Ineffective Egoist, as we’ve seen, can’t help but see a hopeless tension between morality and happiness. He oscillates between dutifully adhering to his moral principles in a quest to be good—and then, in a frustrated act of self-assertion, rebelling and choosing to do what he wants, morality be damned.

The Effective Egoist will have none of that. He is told to hire and promote based on skin color? Rather than choose happiness without morality or morality without happiness, he will resolve the conflict. He will initiate a searching inquiry to decide whether he is genuinely being asked to act unjustly—and, if so, he will ask whether a job that requires him to act unjustly is a job worth having.

Morality is a powerful force in human life. This is why manipulators and power lusters have always sought to hijack morality and use it as an agent of control. By teaching us to sacrifice, these swindlers aim to collect our sacrifices. But it’s not enough simply to reject the morality of self-sacrifice. We need to approach morality in the right way—to see it as our blueprint for the ultimate craft: the craft of living. Only then can we use it to build an incredible life and a noble soul.

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

And if want the full case for egoism, you can buy my book Effective Egoism: An Individualist’s Guide to Pride, Purpose, and the Pursuit of Happiness.